Finnair Sparks Debate By Asking Passengers to Voluntarily Weigh Themselves Before Boarding

Finland’s national air carrier, Finnair, announced this week that they would ask passengers to voluntarily weigh themselves along with their luggage at the country’s main airport in Helsinki. The information collected will remain anonymous, and will be used to assist with the airline’s total cargo calculations.

Finnair currently uses estimates of people’s average weight to determine aircraft balance calculations. This information is essential to determining that the aircraft remains below the set maximum weight required for a safe takeoff 

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Government authorities require Finnair to update these estimates every five years, and Finnair says that it will use the information collected from volunteering passengers in February and April-May of this year to update its estimate.

“We record the total weight and background information of the customer and their carry-on baggage, but we do not ask for the name or booking number, for example. Only the customer service agent working at the measuring point can see the total weight, so you can participate in the study with peace of mind,” Satu Munnukka, Head of Ground Processes at Finnair, said in a statement.

Nevertheless, some have criticized the move from the airline, saying that collecting weight data on customers is dehumanizing.

In an appearance on U.K. television show Good Morning Britain, model Haley Hasselhoff commented on Finnair’s new system, raising concerns that although it’s voluntary now, it might become compulsory further down the line. She noted that being weighed at the airport could be “triggering” for some passengers, especially for anyone with an eating disorder, or in recovery from one. 

“I have had friends go to airlines and not know that there was a disclaimer that they were going to be weighed. That’s triggering” said Hasselhoff. 

Others have defended the move, saying that while the option of weighing oneself before a flight might make people uncomfortable, it is worth the slight discomfort if it helps ensure that passengers are safe. 

In contrast to Hasselhoff, broadcaster Neev Spencer said: “I think it is about operational efficiency… weighing yourself, whether you’re underweight or overweight, can be a good thing.”

source https://time.com/6693165/finnair-airline-passengers-voluntarily-weighed-safety-debate/

DJ Tiësto Explains Why He Has to Pull Out of Super Bowl Show

THE HAGUE — Dutch music producer DJ Tiësto has withdrawn from performing at Sunday’s Super Bowl due to an undisclosed family matter.

Tiësto, whose real name is Tijs Verwest, wrote on social media on Thursday he would miss the matchup between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs in Las Vegas as he needed to return home.

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“It was a tough decision to miss the game, but family always comes first,” the 55-year-old wrote on X.

Me and my team have been preparing something truly special for months, but a personal family emergency is forcing me to return home Sunday morning. It was a tough decision to miss the game, but family always comes first. Thank you to the @NFL for the collaboration and looking…

— Tiësto (@tiesto) February 8, 2024

The Grammy-winning musician was selected as the first ever in-game DJ, slotted to warm up the crowd before kickoff and throughout the game. Singer Usher will headline the halftime show while Reba McEntire will sing the national anthem.

Tiësto did not provide details about the emergency. He married model Annika Backes in 2019 and the couple have two children.

His performances scheduled for Friday evening in New York and Saturday evening in Las Vegas — where the Super Bowl is being held — have not been canceled, according to his website. Tiësto said in his message he will need to return home “on Sunday.”

The Dutchman has been repeatedly named as the world’s best DJ during his 40-year career. He previously performed at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens and at the Las Vegas Grand Prix.

American DJ Ryan Raddon, better known as Kaskade, will replace Tiësto during Sunday’s game. The Chicago native wrote on social media he was “beyond excited” for the opportunity.

The game, already usually the most-watched program in America, has seen even more attention this year, since Kansas City’s tight end Travis Kelce began dating pop star Taylor Swift. Swift is due to play in Tokyo on Saturday, but last week, the Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C., put out a statement reassuring fans the 34-year-old singer will make it to Nevada in time to see her beau play.

source https://time.com/6693186/dj-tiesto-cancels-super-bowl-show/

The Surreal True Story Behind the HBO True Crime Doc They Called Him Mostly Harmless

For about two years, both real detectives and amateur detectives tried to find out the real name of a Appalachian Trail hiker whose body was found in a tent in Florida. Hikers who met him along the way said he’d introduce himself as “Mostly Harmless” (though the exact origins of the nickname are unknown). Some knew him as “Denim,” like the jeans he was wearing.

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A new HBO documentary They Called Him Mostly Harmless, out Feb. 8, profiles the men and women on Facebook who volunteered their time to search for the mysterious man’s real identity. The documentary aggregates all of the information found about this person, and features interviews with the Internet sleuths and the hikers he socialized with on the Appalachian Trail, tracing how his real name, “Vance John Rodriguez,” was eventually identified.

Internet sleuths try to figure out the identity of “Mostly Harmless”

The hiker’s journey is believed to have started in April 2017, when he headed south on the Appalachian Trail from New York. He didn’t bring anything that would identify his real name, like a phone or credit card. Instead, hikers he met along the way identified him by the unusual belongings he carried with him: an overstuffed backpack and a notebook filled with code later discovered to be designed for the online programming game Screeps. He never gave out his real name. 

On July 23, 2018, two hikers came across his deceased body. A medical examiner could not determine a cause of death, so exactly how he died will never be known. The Collier County Sheriff’s office couldn’t find any identifying features like tattoos, and posted a sketch of his face on its Facebook page that was shared widely. People who had seen the hiker along the way sent in the photos they had taken of him.

In 2020, a Facebook group formed of users who spent their free time outside their day jobs searching for this hiker’s identity. The Facebook users helped keep sustained attention on the case, even when local law enforcement hit a wall. For example, a big breakthrough in the search came in July 2020 when members of the Facebook group worked with the company Othram, which uses genetics to help crack cold cases, to the Mostly Harmless case. Othram needed $5,000 to run a DNA analysis on the hiker’s bone, and in about a week, the Facebook users successfully came up with the money via crowdfunding.

Who was Vance John Rodriguez?

The results of the DNA analysis suggested he had roots in southern Louisiana, so Internet sleuths spread the news on any local Facebook groups they could. Thanks to their efforts, people who knew him in Baton Rouge saw the photos and contacted the Collier County Sheriff’s office with a name. Authorities made contact with his presumed family who provided a DNA sample, and the hiker’s DNA was a match.

Journalist Nicholas Thompson, who wrote a viral 2020 feature on the case for Wired and appears in the documentary, doubled down on researching the past of Vance John Rodriguez for a follow-up 2021 story and found that people who had been close to Rodriguez described him as a deeply troubled man. Women he dated described him as abusive, and an old roommate said he suffered from mental health issues. For example, Thompson learned in his reporting that Rodriguez had a massive scar on his stomach from a suicide attempt that he ended up surviving. An already sad story became even more grim.

The case may be resolved, but many missing persons cases are not. Beyond the Mostly Harmless case, more than 600,000 people go missing in the U.S. every year, and about 4,400 unidentified bodies are found every year, according to NamUs database. They Called Him Mostly Harmless director Patricia Gillespie hopes the movie will inspire viewers to not ignore information about missing persons. As she explained to TIME, “I really hope this film gets people interested in the issue of Jane and John Does and encourages them to share that missing persons flier or composite that they see online.”

source https://time.com/6692516/mostly-harmless-hbo-documentary-true-story/

Snoop Dogg Is Suing Walmart Over a Dispute Involving Cereal

Rapper Snoop Dogg, along with his business partner Master P, is suing Walmart and Post Consumer Brands, a cereal manufacturing company. The rapper is accusing them of intentionally sabotaging his brand “Snoop Cereal,” which was launched in 2022.

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When the cereal landed in Walmart last year, it was done so under the parent company Broadus Foods, which Master P said was the first ever black-owned cereal brand.

“This has been going on for over 100 years, that we’ve been consumers and never owners, so we’re changing that game,” Master P told Yahoo Finance Live.

But since then, Snoop Dogg and Master P say that fans have been struggling to find the cereals on Walmart’s shelves. Using anecdotal video evidence from fans, the pair are arguing that Walmart kept the cereal in stock rooms and away from store shelves in 20 different states. 

“At dozens of Walmarts all across America, everybody went and said, ‘Where is Snoop’s cereal?” Benjamin Crump, the lawyer for the two rappers, said at a news conference on Wednesday. 

Crump also says that the contract signed by the musicians required Snoop Dogg and Master P to buy back any unsold cereal. 

“That shelf space in any supermarket is worth millions and is very, very limited,” said Eugen Radcliff, general counsel for Broadus Foods during the news conference. 

“Post Consumer Brands was excited to partner with Broadus Foods and we made substantial investments in the business. We were equally disappointed that consumer demand did not meet expectations,” a representative from Post Consumer Brands [Post Foods] told TIME via email. 

TIME has reached out to Walmart for comment.

source https://time.com/6692740/snoop-dogg-suing-walmart-cereal-lawsuit/

A Historian’s Case for Protecting Even Offensive Speech on Campus

Disagreements over whether universities should curb the rhetoric of students protesting Israel’s military incursion into Gaza have been striking in their ferocity, and remain heated more than two months after the disastrous congressional hearing in which New York Representative Elise Stefanik pressed the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and MIT about whether calling for a campaign of “genocide” against Jews would violate their university’s policies against ‘bullying and harassment.” Caught between warring factions on campus and beyond and hamstrung by their schools’ seemingly contradictory speech and conduct policies, the presidents—two of whom have since resigned—offered only non-committal responses, to widespread dissatisfaction.

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Conflicts over the boundaries of acceptable speech on campus—or whether any such boundaries should even exist—are hardly new. Few could better attest to this or to the lessons they offer than the late C. Vann Woodward, one of America’s most distinguished historians, as well as one of its most ardent defenders of free speech. Woodward’s abiding conviction that “the results of free expression are to the general benefit in the long run, however unpleasant they may appear at the time,” should inform the thinking of administrators now weighing the intrinsic long-term rewards of guaranteeing free speech on their campuses against demands to protect students from hateful speech in the here and now.

Woodward began to earn his credentials as a champion of free speech in the early 1930s when he spoke out forcefully against police persecution of communist organizers in Atlanta.

Teaching at Johns Hopkins in the early 1950s he again weighed in to prevent the firing of his faculty colleague Owen Lattimore, after Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Lattimore of being a Soviet agent. Lattimore’s case fell into a general pattern dating back to the early days of the republic, in which people opposing the prevailing conservative majority were silenced, either through political repression, ostracism, or economic or social coercion.

Read More: The Dangers of Curtailing Free Speech on Campus

Yet, by the time Woodward arrived at Yale in 1962, most attempts to restrict speech on campuses were coming from the opposing ideological direction, as left-leaning students and faculty rallied to prevent dissenting voices on the right from being heard. Though he had been at Yale for scarcely a year, Woodward voiced his extreme displeasure in September 1963, when then acting president Kingman Brewster persuaded a student organization to rescind a speaking invitation to segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace.

By the end of the decade, the leftist speech police had moved on to muzzling supporters of the Vietnam War. In 1972, Woodward objected vigorously when student protestors formed a physical barrier to prevent former Vietnam commander General William Westmoreland from speaking at Yale. 

Two years later, he protested just as vehemently about students shouting down William A. Shockley, a black-inferiority proponent. 

Woodward’s outspokenness on such incidents made him a logical choice to chair a committee created by Brewster to craft what both agreed was a much-needed statement affirming Yale’s unwavering commitment to free speech.

The result was a new free speech policy, released in 1975, and better known on campus as the “Woodward Report.” The document made a forceful case for freedom of speech as an immutable principle by which any university worthy of the designation should abide, stressing “the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. . . . We value freedom of expression precisely because it provides a forum for the new, the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox.”

A university might well be “a special kind of small society,” the report’s authors conceded, but its “primary function is to discover and disseminate knowledge…. It cannot make its primary and dominant value the fostering of friendship, solidarity, harmony, civility, or mutual respect,” and remain true to its “central purpose.” Simply put, when there was a choice to be made, the “need to guarantee free expression” must take precedence over concern for “civility and mutual respect.”

Commentators eagerly embraced the Woodward Report as a definitive blueprint for resolving —or at least containing—one of the most perennially divisive issues confronting campus administrators. Some students and faculty were not so sure, including a dissenting member of Woodward’s committee who foresaw such an absolutist stance on free speech as giving tacit license for persecution and harassment of “small and powerless minorities” on campus.   

His concern seemed to be well-placed in the 1980s when bulletin boards at Yale used by gay student organizations were routinely vandalized. By 1983, the problem had grown severe enough to spur a campus-wide research project aimed at collecting “accounts of verbal and physical harassment” of gay and lesbian students.

Matters seemed to come to a head in 1986 when undergraduate Wayne Dick posted flyers that mocked “Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days” by announcing “Bestiality Awareness Days.” University administrators quickly charged Dick with violating Yale’s policy against “harassment or intimidation of members of the university community on the basis of their sexual orientation” and a campus executive committee placed him on two years’ probation. Dick, however, insisted that his actions fell under the protections guaranteed in the Woodward Report. 

Though Woodward had been retired for 10 years, he drew heavily on the enormous clout he still enjoyed on campus in order to get Dick’s probation lifted. In his mind, Dick’s actions did not constitute “harassment” because he had not advocated “violence or intimidation” at any point. “Certainly I don’t agree with his ideas,” Woodward explained, “but they all come under the protection of free speech.” 

If anything, Woodward became more adamant on this point as he grew older, but the weight of opinion was already shifting against him at Yale and elsewhere. As administrators made boosting diversity on campus an increasingly urgent institutional priority, efforts to attract and retain more minority students and faculty ushered in policies aimed at making them feel at ease.

Read More: What the State of the American South a Half-Century Ago Revealed About the Whole Country’s Future

With schools such as Wisconsin and Michigan leading the way at the end of the 1980s, hundreds of colleges and universities implemented speech codes and other provisions aimed at preventing the intimidation and persecution of minorities on campus. The courts would strike down speech codes at a number of public universities as violations of the First Amendment. Still, be the school public or private, including both Harvard and Penn, wherever these attempts to limit speech survived, they did so in an uneasy, even paradoxical coexistence with policies that either explicitly or implicitly invoked the First Amendment, which strictly forbids any abridgment of the freedom of speech.

Proponents of speech codes were looking to shelter minorities from the abuse of free speech protections by others. There was little apparent concern that these protections might also be weaponized by one student minority against another. 

Yet that is the precisely the issue now at hand on a number of American campuses. Both the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli factions constitute minorities within the student bodies at these embattled institutions. Supporters of a Palestinian state have become more vocal and insistent since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, with some of their rhetoric featuring the kind of resentment and rage historically associated with religious or cultural nationalism.

In turn, although the share of Americans who support Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza has fallen off a bit in recent weeks, it still includes a sizable portion of the academic donor class. Their demands to censor critics of Israel’s military response have introduced another facet to the free speech debate. The rapidly escalating endowment arms race makes it difficult to limit donors’ involvement in university affairs, especially when gifts come not simply with specific strings but powerful emotions attached. As the recent outcry from Penn donors suggests, the Israel-Hamas war has brought a new sense of urgency to the longstanding debate over what universities “owe” their benefactors.

There is another differentiating element to the war over words now engulfing our universities. The assaults on free speech that Woodward sought to repulse largely emanated from one end of the political spectrum or the other. By contrast, the impetus for today’s conflicts seems to be coming, both on and off campus, from several directions at the same time. 

These contemporary clashes over campus speech policies reflect the powerful and complex forces that have dramatically altered the landscape of American higher education since Woodward’s death in 1999. That period has been marked by a growing inclination to challenge the primacy long accorded to free speech at our universities. There is all the more reason, then, to harken back to Woodward’s position on such challenges, particularly his warning that succumbing to pressures to restrict speech on campus, would do grave harm to the intellectual health of a university. Whether today’s college administrators can tune out the anger and shouting of the current moment long enough to consider this counsel, however, remains to be seen.

James C. Cobb is Spalding distinguished professor of history emeritus at the University of Georgia. His most recent book is C. Vann Woodward, America’s Historian (2022).

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/6555716/campus-free-speech-codes-history/

7 Kansas City Chiefs to Know Who Are Not Travis Kelce or Patrick Mahomes

Yes, yes, Travis Kelce might be the best tight end of all time. He also co-hosts, with his brother, an enormously popular podcast.

And not sure if you’ve heard, but he’s dating a certain notable pop star. 

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Also, Patrick Mahomes might end up the GOAT of football. A Kansas City Chiefs win on Feb. 11 would give him a third Super Bowl title, joining Tom Brady (7), Joe Montana (4), Terry Bradshaw (4), and Troy Aikman (3) as the only starting quarterbacks to win three or more titles. He’s only 28, with plenty of time to collect more hardware.

But Super Bowls are built on much more than a single QB/TE combo, no matter how excellent. Sure, Brady had Gronk (that would be Rob Gronkowski, pickleball enthusiast). But he also had solid wide receivers, a strong offensive line, and a defense—orchestrated by Bill Belichick’s innovative brain—to help along the way. Similarly, the Chiefs have a band of Pro Bowlers, and other talented players, fueling their success. 

Here are seven Kansas City Chiefs, not named Kelce or Mahomes, who may make waves against the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LXIII in Las Vegas.

Chris Jones, defensive tackle

Jones has made five straight Pro Bowls, and for the second consecutive year, he’s AP First-Team All-Pro. The 2016 second-round draft pick from Mississippi State—Jones grew up in Houston, Miss., population 3,505—missed the first game of this season as he held out for a long-term deal with the team. The sides did not reach an agreement, so Jones signed a one-year, $19.5 million contract that also included a host of incentive targets, most of which he’s already hit. His teammates mobbed him when he recorded a sack against the Los Angeles Chargers, in the otherwise meaningless last game of the regular season. The sack earned him a $1.25 million bonus for recording at least 10 on the season. Jones should secure his multiyear riches this offseason—from the Chiefs or another team.

Give him credit for a cool X handle — @StoneColdJones. And check out his spot-on Cris Collinsworth impression. 

Read More: Soda and Cigarettes: Behind-the-Scenes Photos of the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl I

Harrison Butker, kicker

The unflappable Butker is perfect this postseason: he’s 7 for 7 on both field goals and extra points. He’s gone 95 for 97 on kicks this season, making 40 of 42 field goals and converting all 45 of his extra points. He’s emerged as a crucial, dependable weapon in the KC attack.

Butker grew up in Atlanta with soccer as his primary sport. He took up football his sophomore year in high school. Before that, he barely watched the game. He has the tuba to thank for his career. When he was a freshman in high school, a senior and fellow tuba player asked Butker, during their symphonic-band class, if he wanted to replace him as the team’s kicker the next season. 

Isiah Pacheco, running back

While San Francisco QB Brock Purdy is famous for his “Mr. Irrelevant” status—he was taken with the last overall pick, No. 262, in the 2022 NFL Draft—another late-round selection from that year could star in the Super Bowl: Chiefs running back Isiah Pacheco, who went 251st overall, out of Rutgers. (Pacheco hails from South Jersey.) While KC’s receiving corps struggled at times to hold on to the football this season, Pacheco was a consistent force, running for 935 yards, and seven scores. His hard, almost violent running style has inspired a host of memes and comments. “Pacheco run like he bite people,” wrote Dallas Cowboys defensive back Jourdan Lewis on X.

Read More: The History of the Super Bowl

Marquez Valdes-Scantling, wide receiver

During the regular season, the Chiefs led the NFL in dropped passes, with 44. Fans took out plenty of frustration on Valdes-Scantling, who dropped a late go-ahead touchdown pass against the Philadelphia Eagles during a November loss—and other balls throughout the year. Despite making $11 million this season, Valdes-Scantling caught only 21 balls, for 315 yards and one TD. But he’s fixed his issues in the playoffs, having made two 30-plus-yard catches in second-half touchdown drives in KC’s 27-24 divisional-round win over the Buffalo Bills. His 32-yard grab, while falling backward, on third down late in the AFC championship game against the Baltimore Ravens iced the victory. “Sometimes that ball looks big, sometimes it looks small,” said his coach, Andy Reid, last week. “And he worked through that.”

Creed Humphrey, center

Is there a better name for an offensive lineman? You’d be hard-pressed to find one. Humphrey, who’s in his third year in the NFL out of the University of Oklahoma, anchors a line that did not allow a single quarterback pressure in KC’s postseason win over Buffalo. (Six Oklahoma alums, by the way, are playing in the Super Bowl, the most of any school.) Humphrey grew up in Shawnee, Okla., which honored its hometown hero after last year’s Super Bowl win with “Creed Humphrey Day.” At 6’4”, 302 lbs., Humphrey’s also been an imposing presence. “He’s country-fed, corn-fed,” a former OU teammate, Jonathan Alvarez, told the Tulsa World back in 2018. “I’m like, ‘Wow, I wonder what he ate growing up?'”

Rashee Rice, wide receiver

Rice’s Kansas City neighbors threw the rookie a charming Super Bowl send-off, lining the streets and waving signs and flags as he drove away, en route to his plane ride to Vegas. He finished the regular season with rookie franchise records for receptions (79) and touchdowns (seven). He finished the Wild Card playoff round against Miami with 130 yards, a rookie playoff record for the Chiefs, and a touchdown on eight catches. “Rashee Rice out here looking like Jerry,” the NFL on CBS X account tweeted as Rice beat the Cincinnati Bengals defense for a long gain. (In case you were wondering, there’s no relation.)

Nick Bolton, linebacker

Bolton set a franchise tackles record in the 2022 season, with 180, and his return from a wrist injury in December bolstered the team’s defensive unit, one of the youngest in the league. During the Bills playoff game, the mics caught Bolton imploring KC’s special teams to be aware of a fake punt in the fourth quarter. “Hey, watch the fake! Watch the fake! Earmuffs! Earmuffs! Earmuffs!” (Earmuffs is an instruction not to listen to the play-call cadence, which can be used to draw the defense offsides.) Indeed, the Bills snapped the ball to Damar Hamlin in the punt formation. The Chiefs stuffed Hamlin short of the first down, and held on for the win.

source https://time.com/6691910/kansas-city-chiefs-players-super-bowl-2024/

Iran’s Proxies Aren’t Really Proxies

U.S. airstrikes against 85 targets in Iraq and Syria on Friday and Houthi positions in Yemen on Saturday marked the “beginning, not the end of our response” to a drone attack late last month that killed three American troops in Jordan, national security advisor Jake Sullivan told NBC on Sunday. The top Biden Administration official also refused to rule out airstrikes on Iranian soil.

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Yet the retaliatory strikes are destined to fail, not least because the Biden Administration appears to not grasp an obvious fact: the various and mostly Shia militant groups that make up the Axis of Resistance are far from simply being Iranian proxies that operate at the whim of Iran’s diktat. The support that Iran gives these groups—typically weapons, and advice on how to use them—doesn’t translate into the kind of power and control sponsors typically have over their proxies. Iran’s ambassador to the U.N., Amir Saied Iravani, made that case recently to NBC—saying that while Iran arms and funds its allies (except the Houthis), “We are not directing them. We are not commanding them. We have a common consultation with each other.” Iravani described Iran’s relationship with these actors as a “defense pact,” likening it to NATO.

Read More: Why the American Public Is More War-Weary Than Ever

As with most defensive alliances, each Axis member maintains a large margin of autonomy. Take, for example, Hezbollah, the most powerful non-state actor in the Axis. The late Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general, Hossein Hamedani, wrote in his memoirs that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was “in charge of all the policies of the resistance axis in Syria” following its intervention in the country’s civil war in 2013. Hamas, a Sunni group, has always maintained its autonomy from Iran, at one point even defecting from the Axis over its opposition to the Assad regime in Syria, which was backed by the alliance. (Some reports suggest that Hamas carried out the Oct. 7 attack without Iran’s consent or knowledge.) For their part, the Houthis showcased their independence early on, when they took over the Yemeni capital of Sanaa in 2014, disregarding Iran’s advice at the time. Meanwhile, Kataeb Hezbollah, the Popular Mobilization Forces’s (PMF) most powerful group, recently suspended its military operations against U.S. forces in Iraq because of pressure from the Iraqi government. The fact that other PMF groups have continued targeting U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria demonstrates the independent decision-making of these actors, even those within the same organization.

More From TIME

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Whether it’s Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, or other Axis groups, each also perform key governance functions as quasi-states and are specific to their local communities and countries. As with other popular social movements, these hybrid actors cannot cater to Iran’s preferences at the expense of their publics. It just so happens that the main source of these groups’ legitimacy stems from their armed resistance roles within their own countries—and those goals often overlap, though not always, with Iran’s strategic interests.

The origins of the various members within the Axis can be traced back to security voids left by their respective states. In Gaza, Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades arose as a response to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s participation in the Oslo peace accords in 1993 that failed to deliver a Palestinian state. The Lebanese Armed Forces were historically powerless against multiple Israeli invasions, which gave birth to Hezbollah in 1982. In Yemen, the Houthis filled the power vacuum left during the post-Arab Spring transitional phase that lasted from 2013 to 2014. Iraq’s PMF emerged in response to the Iraqi Armed Forces’s loss of the key cities of Mosul and Fallujah to the Islamic State in 2014. 

So when the U.S.,Israel, or anyone else targets these groups and their territories, this revives their raison d’etre and shores up their resistance credentials. This was most recently seen in Gaza by a doubling of support from 22% to 43% for Hamas, according to a December poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. In Yemen, the Houthis’s elevated legitimacy was demonstrated by the defection of a number of militias backed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Both countries entered Yemen’s civil war against the Houthis, but militias they backed have now sided with the Houthis on account of their attacks in the Red Sea aimed at blocking ships from sailing to Israel. Hezbollah has also experienced a similar surge in popular support since it opened a “solidarity front” with Gaza against Israel on Oct. 8, rallying even many Sunnis who had previously opposed the Lebanese Shia group. Likewise, PMF groups received a major boost of legitimacy in the wake of the U.S. strikes on Iraq on Friday that killed several of their forces, with the Iraqi government announcing a three-day mourning period for the “martyrs.”

Read More: Biden’s Gaza Strategy Is an Illogical Disaster

Nor can the Axis be wished away. Both Hezbollah and the PMF enjoy state representation in their respective parliaments and governments, and their armed wings are granted legal cover by the state. Hamas, after winning elections in 2006 deemed fair by the E.U., formed a government that was subsequently ousted by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007. Hamas then seized control of Gaza and established itself as the de facto government that has administered the Strip since. Meanwhile, Yemen’s Houthis aren’t just the de facto government that rule over the majority of the country, but they have also become the de facto state after taking control of the Yemeni armed forces in late 2014. Given the absence of viable state alternatives to these actors, waging military campaigns against them only recreates the political and security conditions that gave rise to them in the first place.

The Palestinian cause has long constituted not just a central ideological pillar, but a core group and national interest, for each of the Axis members. Hezbollah has defined a ceasefire in Gaza as serving Lebanon’s national interest by preventing Israel from expanding its war into Lebanon. The U.S.’s backing of Israel’s war on Gaza has also prompted the Houthis and PMF to identify Yemen and Iraq’s national interests with Palestinians. Although PMF groups were attacking U.S. bases and convoys before this conflict, the war in Gaza has given them added impetus to expel U.S. troops from Iraq and Syria. For their part, the Houthis are poised to gain a significantly strengthened negotiating position concerning Yemen’s future in their talks with Saudi Arabia and the U.S. as a result of their participation in this conflict.

Claiming that these deeply rooted, quasi-state actors are simply Iranian stooges sets the groundwork for a disastrous U.S. strategy in response to them. Instead of demanding that Iran rein in its “proxies,” the U.S. should start by reining in Israel, if it is indeed keen on preventing a widening of this war.

source https://time.com/6692282/iran-doesnt-have-proxies/