Canada’s top politicians were recently served a notice of intention to seek prosecution for aiding and abetting Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, National Revenue Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau and Justice Minister Arif Virani were warned they could be liable and face charges before the International Criminal Court for aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes.
During the past six weeks Israeli ministers have repeatedly expressed their genocidal intent towards what they’ve called “human animals” in Gaza. Israel has cut off water, food, fuel and electricity to the open-air prison and one minister even declared a desire to “eliminate everything” in the coastal strip of 2.2 million. Tens of thousands of houses, hospitals, Mosques, schools and other buildings have been destroyed. So far over 30,000 Palestinians have been injured and 14,000 killed, including 6,000 children. As the notice to Canadian ministers’ highlights, a director at the United Nations, Craig Mokhiber, called Israeli policy a “text-book case of genocide.”
Ottawa has enabled Israel’s bid to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from a small part of what’s left of their historic homeland. During a visit foreign minister Melanie Joly offered Canada’s approval for Israel’s genocidal siege and violence. In describing the meeting a week into its onslaught, Israel’s foreign minister Eli Cohen boasted, “We continue to mobilize the world for the fight against Hamas! I met today with Canada’s Foreign Minister Melanie Joly, who also came to support Israel.”
At a rhetorical level Trudeau has repeatedly supported Israel’s “right to defend itself” while defence minister Bill Blair declared that “Hamas has to be eliminated.” At the same time Canadian officials have largely refused to condemn Israel’s war crimes and have rebuffed calls for a ceasefire.
At the United Nations Canada abstained on a General Assembly resolution calling for “protection of civilians and upholding legal and humanitarian obligations.” It was backed by 120 countries.
Beyond the diplomatic sphere, Canada has offered more concrete assistance. After Hamas’ October 7 attack the Canadian Air Force flew 30 Israeli reservists back into the country. With flights evacuating Canadians from Tel Aviv to Athens, military aircraft transported Israeli reservists in the other direction.
Alongside assisting Israeli reservists to return, Canadian special forces were dispatched to Israel. The stated reason for the deployment of these soldiers is to assist the embassy with security and evacuations. That may be true. But the Canadians may have a more direct role in Gaza and — at a minimum — the deployment reflects Canada-Israel military co-operation.
Through the Five Eyes and NATO the Canadian military has significant ties with its Israeli counterparts. Bilaterally, Canada and Israel both have military attachés in each other’s countries and top military officials regularly visit each other. The Israeli Air Force trains in Canada and for 15 years Canadian troops training Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank have coordinated with their Israeli counterparts. Canada also has a “border management and security” agreement with Israel, even though the two countries do not share a border.
The Canada-Israel Industrial Research and Development Fund has pumped tens of millions of dollars into joint research ventures between the countries’ military companies. In recent years Canada has exported a little more than $20 million worth of arms to Israel annually (Canadian weapons makers sell many millions of dollars more in components to US firms that arm Israel.) But Canada is a signatory to the UN Arms Trade Treaty, which is designed to limit weapons from entering conflict zones and preventing their use by human rights violators.
As detailed in the notice of intention to prosecute, the Trudeau government has failed to fulfill its obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty and Canada’s Export and Import Permits Act despite repeated calls by the opposition NDP to end arms sales to Israel. The intention to prosecute also cites the government’s failure to stop illegal recruitment for the IDF or Canadian charities from unlawfully assisting Israel’s military.
Private organizations and Israeli officials have long recruited in Canada. Three years ago, a multi-faceted campaign was launched calling on the federal government to apply charges under the Foreign Enlistment Act against those “recruiting” or “inducing” Canadians to assist the Israeli military.
The government immediately sought to downplay the issue after they were delivered a formal complaint and an open letter signed by Noam Chomsky, Roger Waters, filmmaker Ken Loach, author Yann Martel and 150 others. Responding to a Le Devoir reporter’s question on the matter then Justice Minister David Lametti simply said, “it’s up to the police to investigate” any violation of an act that states “any person who, within Canada, recruits or otherwise induces any person or body of persons to enlist or to accept any commission or engagement in the armed forces of any foreign state or other armed forces operating in that state is guilty of an offence.”
The Trudeau government hasn’t simply downplayed illegal IDF recruitment. They’ve boosted it. In January 2020 the Canadian embassy in Tel Aviv hosted a pizza party to celebrate the 78 Canadians fighting in the Israeli military.
The government has also been indifferent to other illegal forms of support for the Israeli military. Many of the 200+ Canadian-based Israel-focused registered charities assist the Israeli military in contravention of Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) rules, which state that “increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of Canada’s armed forces is charitable, but supporting the armed forces of another country is not.”
The HESEG Foundation, Canadian Zionist Cultural Association (CZCA) and many other registered charities assist the IDF. But the CRA has been slow to apply its rules to Israel-focused charities.
The Trudeau government’s indifference to Canadian law has enabled Israeli impunity. Ditto for Ottawa’s indifference to international law. In 2020 Ottawa pressed the International Criminal Court to stop investigating Israeli war crimes. Their letter said it didn’t believe the ICC had jurisdiction over Palestine and implied Canada could sever its funding if the ICC pursued an investigation of Israeli crimes. In a similar move, three months ago Ottawa sought to block a World Court opinion on Palestine. Canada submitted a statement opposing an International Court of Justice advisory opinion called for by a UN General Assembly resolution titled “Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”.
To protect Israel from criticism the Trudeau government created a special envoy to combat antisemitism and formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is designed to marginalize those criticizing Palestinian dispossession. The Trudeau government also sued to block proper labels on wines from illegal settlements while expanding the Canada-Israel free trade agreement that grants duty free status to products produced in illegal West Bank settlements.
Since taking office in 2015 the Trudeau government has voted against nearly 100 UN resolutions, often supported by most of the world, upholding Palestinian rights. They’ve also repeatedly justified Israeli violence against Palestinians while mostly ignoring its brutal blockade of Gaza, demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and growing Jewish supremacy inside its 1948 borders.
The notice to prosecute was delivered by activists to the ministers’ offices in Toronto, Ottawa, Sherbrooke and Montreal. Subsequently the lawyers driving the initiative held a press conference to explain the legal process behind the notice of intention to seek prosecution. A few Canadian media reported on it, but it was widely covered in international pro-Palestinian outlets.
The notice of intention to seek prosecution concludes:
“In order to reduce the risk of further complicity, the Government of Canada must immediately take the following diplomatic and economic measures:
1. Call for a ceasefire to prevent further loss of life in Gaza;
2. Call for secure provision of meaningful humanitarian aid to Gaza;
3. Issue a public statement condemning Israel’s breaches of international law;
4. Insist that Israel fully comply with international law;
5. Cancel all Canadian permits for arms exports to Israel;
6. Prosecute those recruiting Canadian volunteers for Israel’s armed forces; and
7. Prevent Canadian charities from using donations to benefit Israel’s armed forces.”
The least Canadians should be able to expect of their government is adherence to international law.
December 3, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Canada, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
Leave a comment
And when will its political and media leaders be tried, condemned, and executed?
Even Israeli experts call it “a textbook case of genocide.” Those are the exact words of Raz Siegal, an Israeli historian and professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University. On October 16, Siegal told Democracy Now:
We have to understand that the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide from 1948 requires that we see special intent for genocide to happen. And to quote the convention, intent to destroy a group is defined as racial, ethnic, religious or national as such that is collectively, not just individuals. And this intent, as we just heard, is on full display by Israeli politicians and army officers since October 7th. We heard Israel’s president. It’s well-known what Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on October 9th declaring a complete siege on Gaza, cutting off water, food, fuel, stating that “We’re fighting human animals,” and we will react “accordingly.” He also said that “We will eliminate everything.” We know that Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari, for example, acknowledged wanton destruction and said explicitly, “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” So we’re seeing the special intent on full display.
And it isn’t just Israelis who are guilty. Leaders of Western countries have given the Gaza Holocaust their full backing. On Saturday, October 7, even as Israeli tanks, rockets, and helicopter gunships were mass-murdering hundreds of Israeli civilian prisoners alongside dozens of their Hamas captors, US President Joe Biden condemned as “unconscionable” the “appalling terrorist attacks” and encouraged what would become genocidal Israeli “retaliation.”
In reality, the Israelis, not Hamas, were the terrorists of October 7. The only mass slaughters of civilians that day were carried out by the Israeli Defense Forces. Hamas’s brave soldiers were under strict orders to attack Israeli military targets and try to capture military hostages, with the taking of civilian hostages being a secondary option or last resort. There were no Hamas orders to kill unarmed civilians, and surviving Israeli hostages speak of the kindness and generosity of their Hamas captors.
Zionist-owned Western media immediately began broadcasting outrageous lies deliberately designed to incite genocide. (Every media person responsible for those lies must some day be tried, convicted and executed.)
Zionist genocide propagandists raved deliriously about Hamas supposedly beheading 40 babies, baking babies in ovens, gouging eyes, mutilating breasts, cutting open naked women, raping women, mutilating dead bodies, spreading cyanide, and on and on. All lies. When Joe Biden endorsed the beheaded babies canard, claiming that he had seen the bodies, he sealed his fate as a self-incriminated genocide inciter who will be executed in the unlikely event that he lives long enough to face trial.
What really happened on October 7 was reasonably clear even then, and has since become undeniable. Hamas scored what Scott Ritter has called “the most successful military raid of this century:”
Hamas effectively neutralized Israel’s vaunted intelligence services, blinding them to the possibility of an attack of this scope and scale…(then) Hamas defeated those Israeli soldiers stationed along the barrier wall in a stand-up fight. Two battalions of the Golani Brigade were routed, as were elements of other vaunted IDF units.
Hamas struck the Headquarters of the Gaza Division, the local intelligence hub, and other major command and control facilities with brutal precision, turning what should have been a five-minute response time into many hours—more than enough time for Hamas to carry out one of its primary objectives—the taking of hostages. This they did with extreme proficiency, returning to Gaza with more than 230 Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Hamas fighters killed about 600 Israeli soldiers during the first 24 hours, a total that “included many of Israel’s most elite officers, including dozens of colonels and majors.” After Hamas repeatedly defeated the Israeli military in stand-up fights, and captured hundreds of Israeli prisoners, the Zionists panicked and invoked the Hannibal Directive, according to which heavy weaponry is used to eliminate both hostage takers and hostages. According to an Israeli Air Force officer who participated in the mass murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians along with their Hamas captors, top-level Zionist commanders ordered “mass Hannibal.” In other words, they deliberately ordered the mass slaughter of their own civilians by the hundreds in order to prevent them from becoming hostages and adding to Israel’s political problems. Had they not done so, Hamas would have returned to Gaza with as many as 700 prisoners, rather than the 250 that they actually got.
Israel then used photos of the carnage that they themselves had inflicted—using helicopter gunships, tanks, and rockets—and blamed it on Hamas. Even a cursory look at the photos of the devastated kibbutz buildings, the blown-up buildings at the music festival, and the vast array of shredded automobiles makes it clear that most of the damage was done not by Hamas’s small arms fire, but by Israel’s heavy weaponry. Yet the shameless Zionists, mass-murderers of their own people, had the chutzpah to blame the courageous and ethical soldiers of Hamas for their own crimes!
The West Sparks the Genocide
By October 8 I could see, as could anyone else with eyes, that the images out of Israel showed that the Israelis, not Hamas, were responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths. The Biden Administration, and its CIA daily briefer, must have known the same thing, with even greater certainty and in greater detail. Yet instead of using its knowledge of the truth to restrain Israel’s murderous impulse towards Biblical-scale vengeance, Joe Biden went on television and bloviated about supposedly seeing 40 Israeli babies beheaded by Hamas.
Everything the almost-entirely-Jewish Biden Administration did was calculated to encourage Israel to launch a genocide. And every other Western leader went along, actively or passively, with the genocide plan.
Once the exterminationist carpet-bombing of Gaza was underway, and thousands of women and children murdered, did those Western leaders reverse course and demand that Israel stop? Of course not.
Anthony Blinken, who flew to Tel Aviv first, in the midst of the carpet-bombing, let slip that his pre-eminent loyalty was to the genocidal entity, announcing that he flew to Tel Aviv “not only as the United States Secretary of State but also as a Jew.” (Remove the words only and also from that sentence to understand its real meaning.)
Joe Biden flew to Tel Aviv to put his stamp of approval on the genocide. So did UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who described Hamas as “the new Nazis” according to Netanyahu. Second-tier Western powers like Austria and Czechoslovakia also sent their leaders to kiss Netanyahu’s reeking rump and endorse the Gaza Holocaust.
Why has the West’s entire leadership class been falling all over itself competing to see who can move to the head of the line of genocidal war criminals? Can’t they see that the global majority is appalled by the wholesale Zionist atrocities and sides with Palestine? Don’t they realize that the West is hastening its own demise, and ensuring the rise of a non-Western-led world order, by undermining its pretense of concern for international law and human rights?
Several possible reasons for the West’s unanimously-pro-genocide position have been proposed. Some say the West is incorrigibly racist and just doesn’t care about the deaths of brown people, especially Muslims. They add that the West’s undisputed hegemon, the USA, was founded on Old Testament style genocide, and that the formerly Protestant and now Jewish Bible-thumpers of Washington DC share Netanyahu’s vengeful lust for Biblical extermination of “Amalek” (meaning the designated racial enemies of the Jews and/or Americans).
Another potential explanation invokes realpolitik. The US imperial center increasingly dominates the West (the Ukraine war destruction of Nordstream emasculated Europe) but is losing ground elsewhere. Hamas’s crushing defeat of Israel on October 7 struck a powerful blow not only against Zionism, but against the whole Anglo-Zionist Empire. The Biden “minyan” (Jewish-Zionist cabinet) panicked and scrambled to endorse Israeli genocide, not out of sober calculation, but for the same reason that a rabid rat, when cornered, mindlessly lashes out. These people know that the days of the US empire, and the Zionist entity, are numbered, and it drives them crazy. They see that every day the rising countries, led by China, Russia, and Iran, become stronger, and the US and its European vassals grow weaker. Terrified, they realize that if war is to come, the sooner the better, because every day the West’s chances of winning recede. And then, even more terrified, they grasp that it is already too late. So they take out their frustration on the women and children of Gaza.
Another realpolitik-based explanation involves the possibility that US leaders, or at least the most extreme neocon faction, would welcome an all-out war with Iran and the Axis of Resistance—a war which every additional day of genocide brings closer. Even though such a war risks a civilization-imploding World War III, and would at minimum result in tens or hundreds of thousands of Israeli and American casualties, it might at least offer a distraction from looming US defeat in Ukraine. Additionally, a massive war in West Asia would reduce the region to chaos and set back China’s Belt-and-Road plan by a decade or two, thereby prolonging the US imperial illusion by maintaining it on life support for another few years. (China builds, the US destroys, so maximizing destruction prolongs the US imperial agony.)
But in the end, the best explanation for Western leaders’ pro-genocide position involves the role of the media. Allan Thompson’s (ed.) The Media and the Rwanda Genocide shows that more than half a million Rwandans were butchered in 1994, most hacked to death with machetes, primarily due to media incitement. By dominating the formation of public opinion, the Rwandan media, especially radio, created a pro-genocide bubble that took on a life of its own. Specifically, by spreading outrageous lies that dehumanized the target group, both broadcast and print media deliberately orchestrated the mass murder of as many as 700,000 people.
This is exactly what mainstream Western media have done in their incitement of the Gaza genocide. The aforementioned lies about beheaded and roasted babies, gouged eyeballs and broken pelvises, and other gory inventions from the fecund sado-masochistic Zionist imagination were deliberately deployed to provoke real mass murders and maimings of Palestinians.
By enthusiastically participating in the Gaza genocide, the West, starting with its media and political elites, has completely discredited itself in the eyes of the world. The era of Western hegemony is coming to an end. The majority of the Earth’s population can now see that anything, absolutely anything, would be better than allowing these genocidal monsters to continue to dominate this planet.
The war criminals have sealed their own so-called civilization’s fate, and condemned their own souls to eternal hellfire. I hope to live long enough, insha’allah, to see them all, every last one of them, dragged to Beijing or Moscow or Tehran and tried for their crimes against humanity and led to the gallows.
Crescent International © 1438 AH. All Rights Reserved.
December 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
Leave a comment
The Mossad is preparing to assassinate Hamas leaders around the world once the war between Palestinian resistance forces in Gaza and Israel winds down, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on 1 December.
“With orders from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s top spy agencies are working on plans to hunt down Hamas leaders living in Lebanon, Turkiye, and Qatar,” the report reads.
“I have instructed the Mossad to act against the heads of Hamas wherever they are,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a nationwide address on 22 November.
In the same address, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that the Hamas leaders are living on “borrowed time.”
“They are marked for death,” Gallant continued. “The struggle is worldwide, both the terrorists in Gaza and those who fly in expensive planes.”
Usually, Tel Aviv keeps talks of these assassination attempts secret. However, since 7 October, Tel Aviv has thrown caution to the wind in most cases and voiced its view of taking out resistance leaders openly.
“Israel is already working to kill or capture Hamas leaders inside Gaza,” officials told the WSJ. “The question now for Israeli leaders isn’t about whether to try to kill Hamas leaders elsewhere in the world, but where—and how.”
Some Israeli officials wanted to launch an immediate hunt on Khaled Mashaal and other Hamas leaders who live abroad, citing anger over footage of Mashaal and other Hamas officials, including political chief Ismail Haniyeh, celebrating the start of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation.
Former Mossad director Efraim Halevy said that the plan to pursue Hamas officials internationally is “a desire to exact revenge, not a desire to achieve a strategic aim,” adding that such a plan is “far-fetched.”
Amos Yadlin, a retired Israeli general, said, “All the Hamas leaders, all those who participated in the attack, who planned the attack, who ordered the attack, should be brought to justice or eliminated […] It’s the right policy.”
The Mossad has a legacy of international assassinations, dating back to the 1950s with the assassination of the head of Egypt’s Military Intelligence on Israel, Mustafa Hafez, who urged then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser to form a commando brigade that would conduct cross-border attacks on Israel.
On 12 July 1956, Israel assassinated Hafez with an explosive device hidden in an envelope.
The intelligence agency also murdered Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh on 28 November 2020, who had been on Mossad’s hit list since 2009.
According to Ronen Bergman’s Rise and Kill First, Israel has conducted more than 2,700 targeted assassinations since the second World War.
December 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Hamas, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
Leave a comment
GAZA – The Gaza Media Office (GMO) called, in a press conference held on Friday, on Arab and Muslim states to urgently establish field hospitals in the Gaza Strip to save “tens of thousands of injured people”.
The GMO also renewed calls to the UN refugee agency (UNRWA) to resume operations in the central and northern Gaza governorates.
Assistance that reached the Gaza Strip during the ceasefire does not exceed one percent of its needs, the GMO pointed out.
The GMO held the international community, especially Washington, fully responsible for the war.
The Israeli army intensively resumed its attacks across the Gaza Strip early on Friday after the end of the humanitarian pause, causing hundreds of causalities among the Palestinians.
At least 109 Palestinians were killed and many others injured as Israel resumed striking various areas in the Gaza Strip following the end of the pause, said the Health Ministry in Gaza.
December 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
Leave a comment
Palestinian doctors in the Gaza Strip have said in a report that they were detained, interrogated and used as “human shields” during Israel’s violent raids on hospitals and medical facilities in the besieged territory.
Several doctors and surgeons were cited in a report by the UK-based news website Middle East Eye on Friday that the occupying regime’s forces used them as “hostages” when they invaded the al-Shifa Hospital during the weeks-long Israeli siege and bombardment of the largest medical complex in Gaza.
The doctors said the Israeli troops detained Mohammed Abu Silmiya, head of al-Shifa Hospital, along with more than 20 other medical personnel from Gaza.
Silmiya was reported to have been in custody and interrogated twice by Israeli officers inside the al-Shifa Hospital.
Marwan Abu Saada, head of the surgery department at al-Shifa Hospital, said, “For several days, Israeli aircraft kept bombing different buildings and departments of the hospital. Quadcopters were shooting directly at people, including patients and displaced persons. People were killed inside the hospital.”
“They besieged the hospital for five days before they stormed its departments. They kept us [in certain areas] and threatened us [with being targeted]. When they stormed the ground stores, they used us [doctors] as human shields to enter and search them. They found the technical maintenance employees there and interrogated them, before they detained them.”
He added that the Israeli forces took several doctors with them while moving from one department to another and searching the different offices and rooms of al-Shifa Hospital.
“We felt that we were hostages, used to [protect] Israeli soldiers. They took me and Dr Abu Silmiya and interrogated us. They did not use violence with me or Dr. Abu Silmiya. But they interrogated Dr. Abu Silmiya twice,” Abu Saada continued.
The doctor said Israeli forces questioned him and Abu Silmiya about the presence of any members of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas or hostages in the hospital’s offices or if there was any activity being conducted by Hamas in al-Shifa.
“We said no because we have never seen any Hamas members there. They besieged us in the hospital for five days, and on the eve of the truce, I returned home, and patients and some medical staff members were evacuated to the south,” Abu Saada said.
Fadel Naim, a doctor who had witnessed the Israeli attacks, was cited by the Middle East Eye as saying that Israeli forces interrogated the doctors to gain information about the Palestinian resistance groups.
“Many doctors and healthcare professionals have been interrogated and detained,” Naim said.
“Every Palestinian is subject to detention, but they detain doctors in particular thinking that they would get information that might prove their allegations about the resistance. They interrogate them to get information and details about other people.”
Naim added that since the beginning of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, he had witnessed or heard of many doctors getting killed or wounded.
“Many of our colleagues were directly killed. Every day, we hear the name of another doctor who was killed. Many of the doctors who were once our students were also killed or detained,” he said.
Israel waged its war on Gaza on October 7 after Hamas launched an operation against the occupied territories on that day in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
Tel Aviv also blocked water, food, and electricity to Gaza, plunging the coastal strip into a humanitarian crisis.
More than 15,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed in the Israeli strikes.
December 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
Leave a comment

Make no mistake. Israel has committed massive crimes in Gaza and in the West Bank against the Palestinians. When will the thousands killed get justice? Or are we all supposed to just go on with our lives and pretend that it’s all the pursuit of “the right of self-defense?” Who are these IDF snipers who anonymously shoot children, and no one is even curious to know who these killers are? Is this the way of war now, according to the “international rules based order” that we should be so proud of in the West, which is supposedly the hallmark of our “civilization?”
A day of reckoning will come. There are good men and women who are wokring to make that a reality.
And what are we to make of our politcal class that utters not a peep about the slaughter that Netanyahu is doing, but who earlier could not get the ICC to issue an arrest warrant for President Putin fast enough, because Putin was assumed to have “kidnapped” Ukrainian orphans that they might have a decent life in Russia. But Netanyahu can kill as many children as he wants, since that is not a crime according to the “rule of law,” so the “jurists” at the ICC stay busy identifying “Russian crimes” that might be spotted at the backs of their cereal boxes.
Kurt Tucholsky was paraphrasing a French joke when he observed that “the death of one person: that’s a catastrophe. One hundred thousand dead: that’s a statistic!”
What Israel has done for over a month in Gaza is now a matter of statistics, for they have killed over 15,000 so far, more than 4000 of them children. It is the Palestinian Holocaust, because there are many more thousands buried under all those pancaked buildings where people once lived. And now that the Israeli assault continues, many thousands more will die.
Given these grim statistics, it becomes more and more important to remember the one person, rather than mention in passing the vast number of the now faceless thousands dead.
One such person was Elham Farah, a Christian Palestinian, living in Gaza, where she had taught music all her life. She was 84 years old and was the daughter of the Palestinian poet, Hannah Farah.
On November 12, 2023, an Israeli sniper shot her in the leg, as she came out of the Holy Family Church in Gaza City, where she had been sheltering to escape the bombing. She wanted to make sure that her home had not been hit. A sniper was waiting who are trained to shoot in the leg.
Those inside the church tried to rescue her, as she cried out for help, but people were afraid of Israeli snipers who long have had a reputation for being merciless. Elham Farah bled to death over several days. No one came to help her because of the sniping. She had just survived the bombing of Saint Porphyrios, the 850-year-old church in Gaza, which took the lives of 18 other Christians. Is such a death for a gentle old lady acceptable to those who see themselves as “civilized?” And why no one even knows about the crimes of Israeli snipers is unimaginable.
The hell unleashed by the Herod of our time in the Holy Land escapes the mind’s ability to describe horror—to see little children torn apart by bombs, dropped by pilots in their sophisticated flying machines is beyond the reach of words…
Then Herod perceiving that he was deluded by the wise men, was exceeding angry: and sending killed all the menchildren that were in Bethlehem, and in all the borders thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.
Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremias the prophet, saying:
A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not (Matthew 2:16-18).
“Rama” or “Ramah” is the name of several Palestinian towns, and “Rachel” stands in for all mothers whose children have been slaughtered by the powerful. Such killing was “righteous revenge” because the Hamas razzia of October 7th was fabricated as brutal, with beheaded babies and babies in ovens, when it was the IDF that did most of the slaughter of Israelis that day. Why the need to lie by Israel? The full truth about what really happened on October 7th is now coming out: Hamas killed IDF soldiers in combat. It was not a “terrorist” attack:
Thus on October 7th:
- The IDF killed anything that moved;
- Many Israeli captives were still alive, two days after October 7;
- Israelis were killed by the IDF with heavy shelling of houses and cars;
- Most of the civilian deaths happened because of the IDF;
- It was a razzia by Hamas because most of the captives taken were IDF officers.
And in the West, we have the war enthusiasts, eagerly cheering on Netanyahu and his ilk to kill more, to kill without compunction, for there will be no red lines drawn, because Israel is for “civilization,” because that is how you fight wars, by killing as many babies as you can with bombs.
Perhaps in the months or even years ahead, there will come a time for a “Nuremberg Trial” for the murderers that are now in power in Israel—and for the IDF soldiers snipers who shot down Elham Farah and the two liitle Christian Palestinian boys, and also for the many “journalists” and “scholars” who justified and whitewashed the crimes against humnaity now permanently recorded for the world to see. Remember, they did hang Julius Streicher, even though he perosnally had killed no one.
December 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
Leave a comment

It says a lot about former secretary of state and presumed presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton that she’s a member of the Henry Kissinger Fan Club. Progressives who despised George W. Bush might want to examine any warm, fuzzy feelings they harbor for Clinton.
She has made no effort to hide her admiration for Kissinger and his geopolitical views. Now she lays it all out clearly in a Washington Post review of his latest book, World Order.
Clinton acknowledges differences with Kissinger, but apparently these do not keep her from saying that “his analysis … largely fits with the broad strategy behind the Obama administration’s effort over the past six years to build a global architecture of security and cooperation for the 21st century.”
Beware of politicians and courtiers who issue solemn declarations about building global architectures. To them the rest of us are mere “pieces upon a chess-board.” Security and cooperation are always the announced ends, yet the ostensible beneficiaries usually come to grief. Look where such poseurs have been most active: the Middle East, North Africa, Ukraine. As they say about lawyers, if we didn’t have so-called statesmen, we wouldn’t need them.
If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect some pseudonymous writer of having fun with irony in this review. Behold:
President Obama explained the overarching challenge we faced in his Nobel lecture in December 2009. After World War II, he said, “America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace…”
Keep the peace — if you don’t count the mass atrocity that was the Vietnam War, the U.S.-sponsored Israeli oppression of Palestinians, and various massacres carried out by U.S.-backed “leaders” in such places as Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), East Timor, Chile, and elsewhere.
One Henry Kissinger had a hand in all these crimes, by the way. Strangely, Clinton doesn’t mention them. (See Christopher Hitchens’s devastating two-part indictment here and here, later turned into The Trial of Henry Kissinger.)
America, at its best, is a problem-solving nation.
Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya are only the latest examples of problems America solved during Madam Secretary’s tenure, building on the glorious successes of George W. Bush’s team. Henry the K is no doubt flattered by the homage.
Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state. He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels.
Now things make sense. That Hillary Clinton thought Kissinger — Henry Kissinger — a worthy advisor is something we should all know as 2016 looms.
What comes through clearly in this new book is a conviction that we, and President Obama, share: a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order.
There really is no viable alternative. No other nation can bring together the necessary coalitions and provide the necessary capabilities to meet today’s complex global threats. But this leadership is not a birthright; it is a responsibility that must be assumed with determination and humility by each generation.
It takes chutzpah to write humility even remotely in connection with Kissinger. And if the U.S. empire is indispensable to justice and liberalism — and where are these, exactly? — we are in trouble. The record is not encouraging. Kissingerian “realism” creates global threats.
The things that make us who we are as a nation — our diverse and open society, our devotion to human rights and democratic values — give us a singular advantage in building a future in which the forces of freedom and cooperation prevail over those of division, dictatorship and destruction.
Devotion to human rights and democratic values — as shown in Egypt, where Clinton stuck by another friend, Hosni Mubarak, against a popular uprising. The woman has some friends!
“Any system of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just — not only by leaders, but also by citizens,” he writes.
The suggestion that Kissinger cares what ordinary citizens anywhere think is ridiculous. What he cares about is states, which he puts in one of two categories: those that buckle under to the Indispensable Empire and those that do not.
Henry, er, Hillary in 2016? You might want to rethink that.
December 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, Middle East, United States |
Leave a comment

The most notorious and hawkish America’s former top diplomat, known more for his war crimes and export of imperialism than diplomacy, died on Thursday. He was 100.
Henry Kissinger, a key architect of America’s Cold War foreign policy during the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, breathed his last at his home in Kent, Connecticut.
While in the United States, he is often lauded for bringing about rapprochement with China, around the world, he is known as an infamous war criminal with blood of millions of people on his hands.
It is estimated that the victims of his blatant war crimes number from several hundred thousand to several million, from Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, East Timor, Palestine, South Africa, to Vietnam.
In 1973, quite scandalously, he was handed a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire deal in the Vietnam War, although the earlier flare-up and spread of the devastating war to neighboring Cambodia was entirely his handiwork.
In the eight years that he was the US Secretary of State, Kissinger shaped America’s interventionist foreign policy, which later became a benchmark for his successors to export American hegemony and imperialism around the world.
Christopher Hitchens, the author of The Trial of Henry Kissinger, in his 2001 book called for the former top US diplomat to be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit murders, kidnappings and torture across the world.
“The US could either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else,” wrote Hitchens.
What are Kissinger’s main crimes?
One of his most notorious roles was in Cambodia, where he masterminded the expansion of the Vietnam War through a secret bombing campaign in 1969 and ground invasions by US forces for years.
The US is believed to have rained down more than 540,000 tonnes of bombs in a campaign called Operation Menu that was executed without the backing or knowledge of the US Congress.
The deadly military adventure caused an eight-year civil war between the Cambodian government and the Khmer Rouge regime, which led to the killing of around 275,000–310,000 people and displaced millions of others.
In declassified cables in 1970, Kissinger was heard conveying this message to his deputy Alexander Haig after speaking to Nixon: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia… It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?”
Author and TV personality Anthony Bourdain, after visiting Cambodia, wrote in his 2011 book A Cook’s Tour: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands”.
“Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
He also played an instrumental role in the massacre of the East Timorese people by the Indonesian forces in the mid-1970s.
Kissinger and President Ford, during a meeting with the Indonesian dictator Suharto in December 1975, gave him instructions to invade East Timor, which triggered a civil war that left at least 200,000 people dead, according to 2001 declassified documents.
In Chile, Kissinger worked behind the scenes to destabilize and undermine the government of Salvador Allende who was seen as a threat to US hegemony in South America at a time when all other Latin American countries had US-installed military dictatorships.
Less than three years into Allende’s rule, amid skyrocketing inflation and massive strikes that were orchestrated by the CIA, a US-engineered coup led by General Augusto Pinochet toppled the democratically-elected government.
A Chilean government report later revealed that over 40,000 people were killed, tortured, or imprisoned during Pinochet’s murderous regime at the behest of the US government and Kissinger.
In Argentina, Kissinger militarily backed junta leader General Jorge Rafael Videla after he toppled the democratically-elected government of President Isabel Perón in March 1976, according to declassified cables.
These actions led to the Dirty War between 1976 and 1983, where Argentina’s military junta killed between 10,000 and 30,000 people. Many of them were subjected to enforced disappearances.
Kissinger was also involved in Bangladesh, previously known as East Pakistan, where he and Nixon backed the genocide of people by West Pakistan.
Following his death on Thursday, Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen said Kissinger backed the Pakistani military regime during the 1971 war and failed to apologize to the people of Bangladesh for his actions.
Kissinger was also responsible for consolidating the US vassal dictatorship in Iran in the 1970s, which had long-lasting unwanted consequences for Washington.
What role did Kissinger play in Iran?
Kissinger’s political opportunism is particularly evident in the example of relations with Iran, which American diplomacy under his leadership saw, in the words of Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, as a “milking cow.”
In the 1970s, accompanying then-US President Nixon, he traveled to Tehran and initiated massive military deals on the export of arms worth billions of dollars to Iran.
In his eyes, the best solution for Iran was a rigid military dictatorship that would spend massively on American weapons and other expensive products, and at the same time play the role of a US proxy against the regional countries that refused to lean toward Washington.
Such an attitude was formed partly as a consequence of the defeat in the Vietnam War, which is why the American authorities did not like the idea of repeating the same scenario in West Asia, with huge American casualties.
In 1975, when he held the position of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, Kissinger was the key man in signing a $15 billion deal that included $6.4 billion for the purchase of eight US nuclear reactors.
The Shah’s regime then planned to build a total of twenty nuclear power plants with the import of enriched uranium, for which Washington and its allies showed great enthusiasm, seeing it as a lucrative opportunity for their companies.
These treaties collapsed four years later due to mass popular discontent with the West-backed dictatorship and the success of the Islamic Revolution, the prospect of which Kissinger understandably dreaded.
He was among the loudest proponents of providing asylum to the deposed Shah, arguing that it was America’s “moral obligation.”
On the aggression of the Baathist Iraqi regime on Iran, he said “It’s a pity they both can’t lose.”
Three decades later, when Iran announced the continuation of the development of a civilian nuclear program, this time with its own technology and without multibillion-dollar contracts with American and Western companies, Kissinger turned the tables.
In an opinion piece for the Washington Post in 2005, Kissinger wrote that “for a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources.”
This radical switch once again confirmed that Americans have an essential problem with the technological prowess and progress of independent countries because they believe only the US has the right to a monopoly of advanced technologies.
In the 2000s, Kissinger became an advocate of American interventionism in West Asia and met regularly with then-US President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to advise them on the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
The collapse of American imperial ambitions in Iraq and other countries of the region culminated in his intensified anti-Iranian rhetoric.
In 2014, when Iraq and Syria were under the grip of Takfiri terrorism, he stated that “Iran is a bigger problem than Daesh,” arguing that the latter’s fall would open the door to Tehran’s alleged “imperial agendas.”
In addition to giving unequivocal support to anti-Iranian terrorism, he also strongly opposed the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers, clinched during the presidency of Barack Obama.
He maintained the same stance after Obama’s megalomaniac successor Donald Trump scrapped the deal, saying any attempts to reinstall the deal are “extremely dangerous.”
December 1, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Iran, Latin America, Middle East, United States |
Leave a comment
The sole recruitment company for the UK branch of Israel’s largest weapons company, Elbit Systems, has ended its association with the company, Palestine Action has said.
The direct-action group said iO Associates announced its decision to sever ties with Elbit on 29 November. The recruitment company had been a target of months of disruptions by anti-apartheid activists who sought to “impede their ability to recruit roles for Israel’s war machine,” Palestine Action said today.
iO Associates recruited the engineers, software developers and finance staff for Elbit Systems around the UK. Elbit is the largest weapons supplier to the Israeli occupation military, providing the vast majority of its drones, munitions, surveillance gear and parts for its tanks, jets and precision missiles. From Britain specifically, it manufactures parts for Israel’s drones, tank parts and more.
As part of efforts to drive iO Associates to cut ties with Elbit, activists stormed and occupied its Manchester office on 1 September and again on the 7th October. Activists painted iO offices red on 9 October in London, Reading and Manchester. They were forced to vacate their Manchester offices from 11 October, after the premises were also stormed by the Youth Front For Palestine, and then finally targeted in Edinburgh twice, on the 11 and 17 October.
Staff members also resigned as a result of the company’s arms trade partnership, staff told Palestine Action.
iO Associates did not reply to MEMO’s request for comment.
December 1, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, UK |
Leave a comment

GAZA – The Hamas Movement said in a statement issued Friday that the Israeli occupation bore responsibility for the end of the truce for rejecting terms to free more hostages and extend it.
The Movement pointed out that Israel refused an offer to release more captives and the dead bodies of an Israeli family killed in Israeli air strikes.
“We offered to hand over the bodies of the Bibas family, release their father so that he can participate in their burial, and hand over two Israeli captives,” the group said in a statement.
Israel refused “all these offers because it had made a prior decision to resume its criminal aggression against the Gaza Strip,” it added.
Hamas held the US administration and its president, Biden, fully responsible for the continuation of Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip after its absolute support and the green light it gave it following its Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s visit to Israel.
The group also stressed that the Palestinian people and resistance led by Al-Qassam Brigades are steadfast.
December 1, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, War Crimes | Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
Leave a comment

Tom Hurndall was volunteering at a refugee camp in Gaza when he was shot by an Israeli sniper in the Gaza Strip in 2003.
Father of a British student killed by Israeli soldiers has urged the occupying regime to change its “unethical and inhuman” military tactics, warning Tel Aviv that it will lose support from the West by continuing such policies.
Anthony Hurndall, whose 22-year-old son was killed by Israeli snipers in 2004, denounced Israel’s “fundamentally unethical and inhuman attitudes,” in an interview with The Times published on Wednesday.
Tom Hurndall, who was a photography student, a volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and an activist against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper in the Gaza Strip in April 2003 and lost his life in January 2004 after spending some nine months in a coma.
He was shot when he was assisting Palestinian children caught in the crossfire in the impoverished Palestinian enclave.
Soroka Hospital’s medical staff initially claimed that the critical injuries to his head were caused by a baseball bat but an investigation later revealed that the staff had removed bullet fragments from Tom’s brain before making up the baseball bat story.
When the fabricated account was refuted, Tel Aviv claimed that the young photographer was allegedly carrying a weapon and was a gunman.
“The investigation further revealed that, as standard practice,” the Israeli military “routinely falsely misrepresent civilians and children as militants, or as armed, and fabricate accounts of events as a pretext for their killing,” Hurndall, who is director of the Center for Justice, told The Times.
“These claims appear similar to the claims that” the Israeli military is “currently making to justify their bombing, missile and other attacks on civilian targets and hospitals in Gaza. It was the view of those in diplomatic circles, expressed to us at the time, that” the Israeli military “appeared to consider themselves immune from accountability and free to misrepresent innocent civilians as legitimate military targets and to target them, as a form of intimidation or collective punishment,” he added.
Hurndall denounced the narrative portrayed by the media and the governments in the West as “one-sided” that ignores the facts.
“If Israel does not change fundamentally unethical and inhuman attitudes and policies and stop committing war crimes, it will build up even greater resistance from the Palestinian people and lose the sympathy and support of the West,” he stressed.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
According to the Gaza-based health ministry, over 15,000 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children, were killed in Israeli strikes, during the 49 days of war. Many more dead are feared to be under the rubble.
November 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, UK, Zionism |
Leave a comment
A video has revealed a new crime committed by the Israeli occupation army, after it forced medical staff of Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital in Gaza without the five premature Palestinian babies who were being cared for.
The five infants were found “dead and in a state of decomposition” in Al-Nasr Hospital after being alone for three weeks, in what may amount to a horrific execution and a crime against humanity.
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor quoted the hospital Director, Dr Mustafa Al-Kahlot, as saying that he had sent an appeal to international organisations, including the Red Cross, to save the lives of the babies, but “he did not receive any response.”
Al-Kahlot stated that he informed the Israeli occupation army officer, who warned them of the final evacuation, of the condition of the five children on respirators and that they could not be transferred, and he informed him that he was aware of this and would deal with it.
Due to the lack of response and lack of specialist equipment to preserve their lives during the evacuation, the doctors were forced to leave them inside the hospital with the Israeli officer’s promise to care for them. The children were left to die, quietly and alone.
Doctor Mona Youssef described how the hospital had been subjected to artillery and gunfire attacks several times before medical teams were forced to evacuate the premises with their patients on 10 November. The hospital had, by then, been surrounded by Israeli military vehicles.
November 29, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Zionism |
Leave a comment