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Israel’s skin bank raises ethical concerns on organ consent

Jordan News – November 17, 2023

GAZA – Israel possesses the world’s largest skin bank, a medical facility that stores human skin for later use in treating burns and skin cancers. This bank was established in 1986 under the supervision of the military medical sector of the occupying army, which provides its services internationally, especially to requests from Western countries.

Israeli occupation authorities been stealing organs from the bodies of dead Palestinian, a heinous criminal practice that has been revealed in several reports and through testimonies of Israeli doctors who participated in this gruesome practice, violating professional ethics and constituting a crime against humanity, Al-Ghad reported.

In contrast, this Israeli bank differs from other banks worldwide in that its supply of these vital organs does not come solely from voluntary donors. Instead, documented cases of stealing skin from the bodies of Palestinians have been recorded, individuals whose organs are also stolen.

There is compelling evidence of Israelis engaging in trafficking these stolen organs, making the entity the largest market for organs in the Middle East.

Where did Israel get this inventory from?

Expert in Israeli affairs Anas Abu Arqoub says, “The Israeli skin bank is the largest in the world, surpassing the American skin bank that was established 40 years before it, noting that Israel’s population is much smaller than the United States.”

Arqoub emphasizes that the theft of organs from Palestinian bodies is not just suspicions, stating, “Even the Israeli media acknowledges that it is an extraction process without the knowledge of the dead’s families.”

The reserve of human skin held by the Israeli occupation state, equivalent to 170 square meters, stored within the Israeli skin bank, confirms Arqoub’s account. The number is considered unreasonable since Israel ranks third in its population’s refusal to donate organs, attributed to Jewish religious beliefs.

Handing over Palestinian bodies to their families without organs!

The details of the story date back to 2001 when Swedish investigative journalist Donald Boström published an investigation exposing the theft of organs from the bodies of Palestinian martyrs and their trafficking by Israeli entities. This was the first time this crime was revealed to the international public.

Boström did not stop at this point but published another investigation on the same subject in 2009 in the pages of the Swedish magazine Aftonbladet. The investigation mentions that the Israeli Ministry of Health launched a national campaign to encourage organ donation in 1992. However, despite that, a significant gap persisted between the demand and the supply of donations.

Coinciding with that campaign, cases of the disappearance of several Palestinian youth began, only to return afterward in closed coffins. The Israeli authorities imposed on their families to bury them at night without funerals.

Boström says, “I was in the region at that time, and on several occasions, UN employees contacted me concerned about the developments. The individuals who contacted me said that organ theft certainly happened, but they were prevented from doing anything about it.”

These contacts prompted the journalist to delve further into the issue, so he went to interview the families of the dead who confirmed the theft of their sons’ organs before their killing. Among them was the son of the martyr Bilal Ahmed Ghannan, who was 19 years old when the Israeli army arrested him in the village of Um al-Tut in the West Bank in 1992. He returned with a body without internal organs, from the neck to below the abdomen.

The Israeli medical authorities did not deny the torture and theft of Bilal’s organs. At that time, the director of the Israeli Institute of Forensic Medicine, Chen Kugel, said that Bilal’s family could be right because they “took everything that could be taken from all the bodies that came to the Institute of Forensic Medicine,” without the family’s consent. His family did not receive any explanation, apology, or compensation for what happened.

Israeli confessions of organ theft from Palestinians

In a 2009 documentary on the issue, there are admissions from the former director of the Israeli Institute of Forensic Medicine, Yehuda Hiss, confirming the theft of organs from the bodies of Palestinian in the institute. Hiss stated, “We took corneas, skin, heart valves, and bones … Almost everything was done unofficially to a large extent… and permission was not sought from the families.”

In her study on dealing with the bodies of Palestinians at the Abu Kabir Forensic Medicine Center in Tel Aviv, published in a book titled “On Their Bodies,” anthropologist Meirav Feis stated that she witnessed “how they take organs from the bodies of Palestinians. In return, they leave the bodies of soldiers intact.”

The researcher added, “They take corneas, skin, and heart valves in a way that makes the absence of those organs unnoticed by non-specialists. They replace corneas with plastic bodies and remove the skin from the back so that the family does not see it. In addition, the bodies of the dead are used in medical schools in Israeli universities for research purposes.”

Feis said, “In the first intifada, the army effectively allowed the institute to extract organs from Palestinians under a military procedure that required dissecting the bodies of Palestinian prisoners. The autopsy procedure was accompanied by the removal of organs used by the Israeli skin bank, established in 1985 to treat burns suffered by Israeli soldiers.”

Trafficking in the organs of Palestinian casualties

Israel is one of the largest markets for trafficking in human organs in the world, and the largest in the Middle East. Media reports revealed that the Israeli entity is involved in killing Palestinians to steal their internal organs illegally and trade them within an illegal international network.

In 2009, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested an Israeli settler named Levy Izhak Rosenbaum. After investigating him, it was revealed that he played the role of a broker in organ-selling operations in the United States for the benefit of a criminal cell led by rabbis, politicians, and government officials in Israel.

Journalist Donald Boström, in his mentioned investigation, suggests a connection between this network and the theft of organs from Palestinian martyrs taking place in “Israel.” Boström said, “Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century were illegally purchased. The Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this activity but do nothing to stop it.”

In a report published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2016, Israel admitted to losing dozens of bodies of Palestinians. The newspaper quoted statements from sources in the Israeli judicial and security apparatuses about the loss of 121 bodies of Palestinians held by the occupation authorities since the 1990s.

Continued organ theft

Following the explosion of the organ theft scandal in 2009, the Israeli government tried to evade the proven charges against it. The spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Health at that time, Einav Shimron Greenboim, issued a statement saying, “The practice mentioned in the investigation is an old story that ended years ago.”

Doubts persist about the continuation of these unethical practices that violate human rights, as indicated by the Israeli authorities’ continued detention of dozens of bodies of Palestinian dead, justifying it as a punitive measure.

According to Abdel Nasser Farwana, the head of the Studies and Documentation Unit at the Palestinian Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs Commission, Israel still holds more than 370 bodies of Palestinian and Arab bodies who died in different circumstances and years apart. He added, “The list of these detained martyrs includes individuals who died from the 1970s until around 2023.”

February 23, 2024 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Despite coordination with Red Cross, Israel targets municipality vehicles

Palestinian Information Center – February 22, 2024

GAZA – Israeli occupation forces (IOF) targeted the Gaza Municipality parking once again, and destroyed what has remained of public service vehicles on Tuesday night.

The IOF had previously targeted the same place several times in an attempt to hinder the access to municipality services, as part of the Israeli genocidal war against the trapped people in the Gaza Strip since October 7.

The municipality said in a statement posted on its Facebook page on Wednesday that the IOF targeted the municipality’s cars despite being marked in coordination with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza.

The Gaza Municipality explained that its vehicles were given special marks that show the kind of service provided and the identities of its drivers to be distinguished and accordingly protected in times of emergency.

The statement added that the vehicles that were completely destroyed encompassed 3 road-repair bulldozers, an excavator used to repair water and sewage lines, a water pump and sewage suction truck, and a car used for administrative purposes, in addition to multiple damages to the garage and its facilities.

The municipality reported a severe shortage in operating vehicles after repetitive Israeli targeting of the garage led to the destruction of about 95 vehicles of various types and sizes, in addition to the destruction of the maintenance workshop.

The Gaza Municipality called on the international community and human rights organizations to intervene urgently to improve the humanitarian conditions in the city, by the provision of fuel and electricity and the implementation of urgent projects that would enable the municipality to provide basic municipal services such as water, sanitation, and waste collection services.

Since the beginning of the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip in October last year, the IOF has been deliberately destroying the infrastructure, service facilities, water, and sewage networks, and preventing the arrival of fuel, causing health and environmental crises as a result of sewage overflow and waste accumulation in the streets.

February 22, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

China backs Palestinians’ right to ‘armed struggle’ against Israeli occupation

The Cradle | February 22, 2024

China expressed support for the right of Palestinians to engage in “armed struggle” against Israel, stressing this is not “terrorism” during the fourth day of hearings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a case against Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.

“In pursuit of the right to self-determination [the Palestinian people have the right to the] use of force to resist foreign oppression and to complete the establishment of the Palestinian state,” Ma Xinmin, a Chinese Foreign Ministry legal adviser, told the World Court on 22 February.

Citing examples of “various people [who] freed themselves from colonial rule” through armed resistance, Xinmin argued that acts of resistance against the Israeli occupation are “not terrorism” but a legitimate armed struggle and an “inalienable right.”

“Numerous other resolutions recognize the legitimacy of struggle by all available means, including armed struggle by people under colonial domination or foreign occupation to realize the right of self-determination,” the Chinese official said.

“Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed on multiple occasions that China calls for a comprehensive ceasefire and the early solution to the question of Palestine on the basis of a two-state solution through negotiation,” he added.

Xinmin took to the podium ahead of Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs, Reza Najafi, who highlighted Israel’s historic violations of Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

“The establishment of the Israeli regime was done through a violent process which involved the forcible displacement of native Palestinian people to create a majority Jewish colony in line with the Zionist movement,” Najafi said.

He also listed a series of ongoing violations by Tel Aviv, which include the prolonged occupation and manipulation of the demographic composition in the occupied Palestinian territories, the alteration of the character and status of Jerusalem, and the discriminatory measures and violations of the rights of Palestinian people to permanent sovereignty over their natural resources.

“The expansion of settlements, segregated roads and barriers as well as checkpoints has created a system of apartheid which is isolating Palestinian communities,” Najafi added before addressing the UN Security Council (UNSC) for their “inaction or insufficient action,” saying this was one of the “main causes of prolonged occupation of the Palestinians” and highlighting that the top UN body is “paralyzed due to the stalemate” caused by a “certain permanent member.”

“All the atrocities and crimes committed by the Israeli regime in the past almost eight years are a consequence of such inaction,” the Iranian official concluded.

The Iraqi representative to the ICJ, Hayder Shiya al-Barrak, took to the podium next and called on the ICJ to respect previous court orders against Israel, such as the provisions made after South Africa’s case to “stop the systematic killing machine against the Palestinian people.”

“We hope that the court’s commitment to justice will lead to additional decisions … affirming its dedication to ending the campaign of mass murder and preventing acts of genocide as well as policies of harassment, blockade, and starvation against the Palestinian people,” he said.

Barrak concluded his intervention by calling on the World Court to take decisions “that safeguard the lives of the Palestinian man, women, children, and elders, allowing them to enjoy a dignified and secure life where all human rights are achieved.”

February 22, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Buffer zone in Sinai: Is Sisi preparing to displace the Palestinians?

By Osama Gaweesh | MEMO | February 22, 2024

Over the past days, the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights has published three reports accompanied by videos and photos from the buffer zone in North Sinai, a few kilometres from the Egyptian border with the Gaza Strip and the Occupied Territories.

The issue began on 4 February, when the Egyptian army, accompanied by engineers from engineering companies contracted by the Abnaa Sinai Company, owned by the head of the Sinai Tribes Union, Ibrahim Al-Organi, moved loaders and vehicles to begin bulldozing and construction operations in a 13 kilometre-area inside the buffer zone, at an unusually rapid pace. The pictures also showed the construction of a huge seven-metre-high wall.

A day later, several Western websites, such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Reuters and AP published reports accompanied by satellite images, all confirming what the Sinai Foundation had stated. Everyone was looking for an answer to one question: Is Egypt preparing to receive the displaced Palestinians from the Gaza Strip in Sinai after Israel begins the military operation in the Palestinian Rafah?

The Egyptian regime did not wait long before issuing its response quickly, not once, but four times, with four different official narratives, and you can choose whichever you want from them.

The first narrative came from Major-General Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha, the Governor of North Sinai, on 15 February, when he spoke to the Saudi Al Arabiya website, saying that there is no intention to displace Palestinians to Sinai, and that the ongoing works in the buffer zone are nothing but committees from the governorate that are counting the numbers of homes that were demolished in this area during the war on terrorism to determine the appropriate compensation from the State to the people of Sinai who were displaced from their homes years ago.

The problem with this story is that the people of Rafah and Sheikh Zuweid have already been demonstrating for months to demand their return to their homes and land, which the Egyptian authorities have been refusing and even dealing with by using a strong security fist. The Egyptian authorities have been arresting the most prominent figures from the Sinai tribes who are demanding the right of return. So why did the Egyptian authorities suddenly and without warning decide to allow them to return and even compensate them?

The second narrative came from Diaa Rashwan, head of the State Information Service, who said in two phone interviews that Egypt has no intention of receiving the Palestinians and that the buffer zone has existed for years and there is nothing new about it, so why should Egypt establish a new buffer zone?

It is strange that Rashwan denied something that the Sinai Foundation did not mention, nor did Western press reports mention. No one claimed that Egypt was establishing a new buffer zone, and no one denied the existence of a buffer zone in the first place. Rather, they were talking about the strange construction that suddenly appeared in this area in coincidence with the Israeli military operation in Palestinian Rafah.

The third narrative came from Major-General Shousha, again, on 17 February, when he said in statements, also reported by the Saudi Al Arabiya website, that the Egyptian army is establishing a logistical area in that place to organise the waiting aid trucks and provide comfortable accommodation for the drivers of these trucks who have been waiting for months.

Major-General Shousha contradicted his first story with this second one, refuting and denying the first narrative. He also cast doubts on his credibility as an official source when he gave two different narratives, on two different days, to the same site. The question is why is the army establishing a logistical area after these trucks have been waiting for four months in front of the Rafah Crossing? What has changed?

What is more, the army put up a flimsy sign in front of that area reading “Logistical Area”, which Egyptian media outlets close to the regime were quick to broadcast this footage immediately to confirm the news and deny any talk or speculation about Egypt’s preparations to receive the Palestinians.

The fourth narrative came from Egyptian Foreign Minister, Sameh Shoukry, on the sidelines of his participation in the Munich Security Conference, where he said that Egypt has no intention of receiving the Palestinians and cannot allow the displacement of the Palestinian people from the Gaza Strip. He added that what is happening in the buffer border zone is nothing but maintenance work.

Honestly, I do not know what kind of maintenance work is needed for the desert sands in the buffer zone and why the army is building a wall that is 7 metres high, if the goal is maintenance work. Is it a logistical area, an inventory of the homes of the displaced or maintenance for something we do not know about on the Egyptian border?

The conflicting Egyptian narratives all prove what the Sinai Human Rights Foundation and Western press reports have said: Egypt is preparing to receive the Palestinians in the buffer zone in a place similar to cantons.

What are cantons?

A canton is a security and military-governed space subject to strict measures that can be imagined as an open-air prison for a group of people and is considered self-governed by its residents under a larger regional authority.

These cantons depend on external communication channels to obtain aid and do not have sufficient resources to rely on themselves for living, as they are established as alternative plans that provide security control and are subject to a strict siege from the higher regional authorities.

The cantons are considered an easy way to get rid of ethnic groups indirectly, as the Israeli Occupation implemented them on some people in the West Bank who were trapped in the middle of the settlements. The displaced Syrians also suffered from remaining inside these cantons that belong to different ethnic forces.

Historically, there has been the Cantonal rebellion in Spain, the canton system in Switzerland and the apartheid regime imposed in South Africa to continually disperse and weaken the population.

If Egypt adopts the same policy and places the Palestinians in these cantons, this will raise a set of important questions. For example, who would be responsible for them: the Egyptian armed forces or the militias of the Sinai Tribes Union and its head, Ibrahim Al-Organi?

When will these Palestinians return to their land again, and who decides how, when and where they will return? Will it be the Egyptian regime or Israel?

The Egyptian regime possesses the power cards that enable it to stop the entire Israeli war on the Gaza Strip and prevent the displacement plan once and for all, but it has chosen a policy of statements and declarations that Israel disregards, and a policy that will not stop the flow of Palestinians into the cantons of the buffer zone in North Sinai.

February 22, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Conspiracy theorists’ threaten mainstream media, says Canadian PM

RT | February 21, 2024

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday blamed social media for preventing major news outlets from shaping public opinion the way they used to.

The Liberal Party leader took his message to the Conservative stronghold of Alberta, sitting down with radio host Ryan Jespersen for an exclusive 30-minute interview on his Real Talk podcast.

“There is out there a deliberate undermining of the mainstream media,” Trudeau said, answering a question towards the end of the interview. “There are the conspiracy theorists, there are the social media drivers who are trying to do everything they can to keep people in their little filter bubbles, to prevent people from actually agreeing on a common set of facts, the way CBC and CTV – when they were our only sources of news – used to project across the country, at least a common understanding of things.”

Earlier this month, Trudeau denounced the move by Bell Media to lay off many of its local journalists and sell 45 of its 103 regional radio stations, arguing that local journalism holds Canadian democracy together.

“There are massive changes that need to happen in our media landscape, and [the] government can try and create conditions and incentives for it to happen,” he told Jespersen on Wednesday.

“We’re putting money towards local independent media,” Trudeau added, having argued a moment earlier that such overt funding would compromise news outlets as mouthpieces of the government.

In June 2023, the Canadian parliament passed the Online News Act (ONA), under which search engines and social media platforms would have to compensate news outlets for posting their content. While Google has complied, Facebook is “choosing to be bad guys about this,” Trudeau told Jespersen. Meta has responded to ONA by blocking all news content by Canadian publishers on Facebook and Instagram.

Ultimately, it’s up to Canadians to declare they don’t want to accept the “encrapification of news,” Trudeau said, borrowing the phrase from British Columbia Premier David Eby.

Trudeau’s comments on the podcast also echoed those made by former US President Barack Obama in a May 2023 interview to CBS. Obama named “a divided media” as one of the things he was worried about, noting that the US once had “three TV stations … and people were getting a similar sense of what is true and what isn’t, what was real and what was not.”

“How do we return to that common conversation? How can we have a common set of facts?” the 44th US president wondered at the time.

February 22, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

The United States Vetoes Yet Another UN Humanitarian Ceasefire Over Gaza

Is a rival resolution from Washington another trick to protect Israel?

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 20, 2024

There have been several interesting developments relating to Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza and its people, but one might well question the motives of at least one of the principal players in the drama, namely Joe Biden’s United States government. Last Tuesday the United States, acting to protect Israel, vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution, arguing that it would “jeopardize” the ongoing negotiations between the two parties to release the Israeli hostages and it wouldn’t be “conducive to a sustainable peace and would instead empower Hamas.” Thirteen of the fifteen members of the Security Council supported the resolution, Britain abstained, and US alone voted against it. It was the third humanitarian resolution incorporating a ceasefire vetoed by Washington over Gaza, each of which was intended by the White House to give Israel a completely free hand to deal with the Palestinians.

The resolution had been proposed by Algeria and it called for an immediate ceasefire and the expediting of emergency humanitarian assistance to the in-peril Gazan population. The UN has been warning that a humanitarian catastrophe that could kill hundreds of thousands is about to take place if nothing is done to reverse what is being called a genocide due to the deliberate employing of famine and disease, not to mention the killing of more than 30,000 Palestinians by the Israeli military aided and abetted by the US. After the UN vote, the Algerian ambassador to the UN said Washington’s lone opposing vote should be understood as “approval of starvation as a means of war against hundreds of thousands of Palestinians” and “ it “implies an endorsement of the brutal violence and collective punishment inflicted upon” those Palestinians in Gaza.” The Algerian resolution also came at a time when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague is beginning its separate review of whether Israel has used the past month to mitigate or cancel its genocidal acts in Gaza

Opinion polls suggest that most Americans oppose what Israel and Washington are doing, but they have little ability to influence choices made by Congress and the White House, which are overwhelming inclined to defer to Israeli points of view due to the fact that they have been bought by the powerful Zionist Lobby in the US. Nota bene one of the biggest sellouts to Israel of all time, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who, with impeccable timing given both the Algerian proposal and the ICJ review, stated last week that Israel has not used any weapons provided by the United States in its military action against Gaza. She said “There’s nothing that we have sent since Oct. 7 that has contributed to this brutality. In the longer run, they are in a dangerous neighborhood.” That is, of course a complete lie, as the Biden Administration has carried out hundreds of airlifts of “emergency” weapons to the Jewish state, to include the 2,000 pound bunker buster bombs whose use against hospitals and other large buildings has been well-attested to by some of the eyewitness journalists, medical doctors and UN officials who have managed to avoid being targeted and assassinated by Israel.

What followed on the Monday announcement by US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield about the impending Algerian veto surprised many who were watching developments. The media were informed that Washington would be presenting its own rival Security Council draft resolution that would call for a temporary ceasefire and which also would advise Israel against launching a ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza over Ramadan, which starts on March 10th, due to the fact that more than a million Gazans are trapped in the region with, quite probably, nowhere to go. The resolution calls for a “viable plan” for protecting civilians in Rafah, whatever that is supposed to mean, which Israel will presumably ignore, and it includes no sanctions if Israel refuses to comply. The US indicated that its draft document would be discussed in the UN over the next several weeks or more and might be subject to considerable editing, but it set no time table for initiating the temporary ceasefire apart from “as soon as practicable,” which is where a warning flag went up for me and others.

The resolution gives Israel considerable freedom of action without any bothersome timetable to worry about and “temporary” means it can resume military action when it wishes to do so and there is no threat of possible punishment if Israel does decide to invade Rafah and kills another 30,000 Palestinians while doing so. It is well known in Washington circles that follow foreign policy and Biden’s wars that the US doesn’t make any moves on the Middle East without complete prior consultation with the Israelis. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has even participated in Israeli War Cabinet meetings. Against those weak but positive moves spelled out in the resolution, there is the fact that Netanyahu and his political allies, long opposed to a two-state solution, have recently repeatedly rejected proposals for any Palestinian sovereign entity which means that the intention is to destroy and/or annex Gaza. Israel is in fact using its formidable lobby and international press/narrative control to work assiduously to isolate the Palestinians by blocking any recognition by individual countries or as a full member at the UN. The greatest effort is inevitably being directed at working to keep the United States under control. Both Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan carefully coordinate every step the administration takes with the Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs and former ambassador to Washington Ron Dermer who reports directly to Netanyahu.

Nor is there any hint in what is included in the upcoming US resolution regarding what Biden and Netanyahu might seek to do afterwards to end the conflict. In fact, Netanyahu has indicated that he is quite willing to expand the fighting as his government has moved to restrict access to Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan on “security grounds,” hardly a conciliatory move, while also widening the conflict with Hezbollah by an airstrike deep into Lebanon. Nevertheless, nearly everyone, except Israel and its US lobby, agrees that both justice and political realities demand that some kind of genuine Palestinian state should be allowed to develop if the ancient land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is ever to find peace. Predictably, the problem is in the details, not to mention that Israel’s current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly insisted that no such an entity will ever be allowed to exist to challenge Israeli political and military supremacy in the region. And, for the moment, Netanyahu has the force majeure and both the active and passive support from the United States that he needs to enforce his writ over nearly all the occupied and under siege territory that he clearly sees as Eretz or Greater Israel.

Given the reality of who is capable of doing what to whom, the United States is perhaps hesitantly taking the lead on proposing something like a revived two-state solution to the problem, as originally envisioned in the UN partition that created Israel in 1948 as well as in the Oslo Accords of 1993, even though most Middle East experts have long asserted that such a formula can no longer succeed or even be attempted. Given the horrors taking place in Gaza, there is inevitably some interest in resuscitating a political formula that has already failed, largely because the existing Palestinian Authority (PA) has long since lost its legitimacy in the eyes of its most important audience, the Palestinian people. Any suggestion that a unity government for Palestinians combining the PA and Hamas is somehow viable is therefore delusional. Both Washington and Jerusalem know that, so one might consider that talk of some kind of empowered and enabled government for Palestinians is at best notional.

To be sure, the proposals that have been leaked in one form or another appear to be a way for the United States to save face and give some Palestinians a token voice while also funding and supplying weapons to Israel to enable and even advance the crushing of the Gazans and increasingly also of the West Bank Palestinians by the Netanyahu regime. Leading extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in the Israeli government have made no attempt to conceal their desire to expel the Palestinians from the historic Palestine, killing them as necessary if they resist or attempt any “intifada” type uprising such as occurred in Gaza in October.

The United States and some Europeans are recognizing that a Palestinian state with what amounts to full sovereignty will not be allowed due to Israeli resistance and willingness to militarily destroy any such entity, but some leaders are nevertheless hoping to create some sort of “semi-sovereign” disarmed Palestinian government that will be entirely subservient to Israel in every way that matters. As a model, it would function similarly to how Israel currently retains and sometimes holds back the excise and other taxes due to the rump Palestinian Authority governing entity in Ramallah, making it a “subcontractor of the Israeli occupation,” that is completely surrounded and dominated by Israel.

Biden’s impending Gaza proposal also has a domestic political aspect. With Israel’s slaughter of Gazans still continuing, a situation that is enabled by Washington’s unflinching support of Israeli behavior, serious problems as the US is an active participant in a genocide are beginning to surface as the war spreads throughout the Middle East. One presumes that Blinken has finally decided that something must be done to salvage the international reputation of the United States while also undoing damage to Joe Biden’s electoral prospects as American voters increasingly are disgusted by the images of dead and tortured Palestinians that flash on national television screens nightly.

Aware that Netanyahu wants the war to continue until total victory to include opposition to the development of any Palestinian government entity, Blinken has reportedly asked the State Department to conduct a review and “present policy options on possible US and international recognition of a Palestinian state after the war in Gaza” if presumably it does end and is not completely annexed by the Jewish state. Netanyahu, for his part is also reading the political tea leaves that show his popularity is sharply declining. He counters that by repeating claims that Israel is winning what will be a long war completely destroying Hamas and, to show that he is serious, he has recently rejected a serious Hamas proposal for a ceasefire followed by prisoner and hostage exchanges and talks to resolve the conflict.

So the United States’ UN security Council resolution to advance some kind of peace process between Israel and the Palestinians might be much ado about nothing, just a way to buy time and to help Biden transform himself and his administration to make it look like they are interested in peace and reconciliation when they are really acting on behalf of Israel. As usual, the reality is in the details and we will soon enough know what the US president and his advisers have been up to and what they expect to achieve beyond the dissemination of the characteristic bipartisan lies and evasions that have constituted US foreign policy since 9/11.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

February 21, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Trampling on a Symbol of Liberty

By James Bovard | Future of Freedom | February 21, 2024

Last August, 12-year-old Jaiden Rodriguez was kicked out of a public-school classroom in Colorado Springs after school officials decreed that the Gadsden flag patch on his backpack was “disruptive to the classroom environment.” Those Colorado officials didn’t know the meaning of “disruptive.”

Thanks to savvy, thoughtful retorts by Jaiden’s mother in a video showdown at the school, the incident spurred a fierce backlash around America. Less than a week later, the school district raised the white flag on its assault on the Gadsden flag.

The flag’s real history

That flag, with its yellow background and coiled rattlesnake, helped rally Americans to vanquish the British Army and Navy almost 250 years ago. As the Encyclopedia Brittanica noted, “The rattlesnake symbol originated in the 1754 political cartoon “Join, or Die” published in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. The cartoon, which depicted the colonies divided as segments of a cut-up snake, exhorted the colonists to unite in the face of the French and Indian War (1754–63). The symbol was later used to represent unity during the Revolutionary War.” The flag became one of the most iconic symbols of the American Revolution, venerated far and wide until recent years.

Where did the Gadsden flag go wrong? Tea Party activists waved the “Don’t Tread on Me” banner during anti-Obama protests. According to the liberal media, regardless of Obama’s oppressive, intrusive policies, any opposition to his presidency was automatically racist. Thus, the Gadsden flag was irrevocably tainted by association.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission added fuel to this fire:

On January 8, 2014, a U.S. Postal Service maintenance mechanic in Denver, Colorado filed a complaint of discrimination based on race (African American) and reprisal for prior EEO activity when: (1) beginning in the fall of 2013, a coworker repeatedly wore a cap to work with an insignia of a flag with a rattlesnake ready to strike and slogan “Don’t Tread on Me,” (2) the coworker continued to wear the cap after management had assured Complainant that they would tell the coworker not to, and (3) on September 2, 2013, a coworker photographed him on the work room floor without Complainant’s consent. According to the federal sector process, that complaint was filed with the employing agency — the U.S. Postal Service.

On January 29, 2014, the U.S. Postal Service dismissed the complaint for failure to state a cognizable claim of discrimination. On June 20, 2014, the EEOC Office of Federal Operations reversed the agency’s dismissal, determining that Complainant had raised a cognizable claim of harassment, and ordered the agency to investigate the claim…. The U.S. Postal Service argued that the previous decision clearly erred because the Gadsden Flag and its slogan do not have any racial connotations.

But the EEOC insisted that the flag could justify a harassment complaint. The EEOC decreed that

while the Gadsden Flag originated in a non-racial context, it has since been “interpreted to convey racially-tinged messages in some contexts,”… Importantly, the Commission did not find that the Gadsden Flag in fact is a racist symbol. Rather, the Commission found only that the complaint met the legal standard to state a claim under Title VII, and therefore should have been investigated by the agency rather than dismissed.

The EEOC has a long history of knuckle-headed decrees, including its 2012 ruling that made it a federal crime not to hire ex-convicts. (The chief of the EEOC repeatedly publicly denounced my articles in the 1990s, but I don’t hold a grudge.)

The EEOC’s prattle was “close enough for government work” for commentators to howl that the Gadsden flag had been condemned by federal civil-rights watchdogs.

The flag ain’t woke 

The Gadsden flag was further vilified by the New York Times–spurred 1619 campaign to paint the American Revolution as a vast conspiracy to perpetuate slavery. This notion is popular with journalists who have never read a book that was published before 2010. Denouncing the Founders as racists absolves wokesters from having to learn anything about the “slavery by Parliament” that Britain sought to impose — the mass confiscation of firearms and other private property, the sweeping censorship, the total destruction of privacy, and the suppression of jury trials.

The Colorado Springs school district declared that the flag was an “unacceptable symbol” linked to “white-supremacy.” It further claimed that the Gadsden flag had its “origins with slavery” because it was designed in 1775 by a South Carolinian who owned slaves. By the same standard, the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights could all be condemned since Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason were slaveowners. Do the wokesters want to condemn and expunge all of American history prior to the creation of the LGBT rainbow flag?

The Colorado hubbub occurred because many school officials and students are even more ignorant of American history than freshmen members of Congress. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor groused in 2014 that fewer than 20 percent of high-school seniors “can say what the Declaration of Independence is, and it’s right there in the title.” Americans’ ignorance of history helps explain their docility nowadays.

The Massachusetts colonists rebelled after the British agents received “writs of assistance” that allowed them to search any colonist’s property. Modern Americans submit passively to endless government intrusions at the airport, online, and on the nation’s highways and sidewalks. Virginia revolted in part because King George imposed a two-pence tax on the sale of a pound of tea; Americans today are complacent while Congress imposes billions of dollars of retroactive taxes — even on people who have already died. Connecticut rebelled in part because the British were undermining the independence of judges; nowadays, federal agencies have the power to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury in suits against private citizens. New Hampshire revolted in part because King George claimed that he automatically owned every Pine Tree in the Colonies; modern Americans are largely complacent when the federal government asserts a right to control every acre of private land that is wet for more a few weeks each year.

Many astute Americans are mystified at the retroactive demonization of this cherished symbol of liberty. Olivia Rondeau, co-host of a Foundation for Economic Education online program, scoffed, “No one ever told my black family that the Gadsden flag was racist. I grew up seeing it around the house all the time. 2023 is something else.”

The Colorado ruckus was popular with pundits who know only enough history to hiss and boo on cue. Two months before the Colorado uproar, the Washington Post published a piece headlined: “The disgraced Confederate history of the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag.” Since a Confederate ship had hoisted that flag in 1861, that meant that the flag was forever damned. And anyone who showed or countenanced that flag was collectively guilty for all the crimes of American history.

But the Gadsden flag became increasingly vilified even before the Tea Party protests. The real objection by officialdom is to the flag’s message: “Don’t Tread on Me.”

That flag got swept up in the vilification of dissent after the 9/11 attacks. The Department of Homeland Security warned local law-enforcement agencies in 2003 to keep an eye on anyone who “expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government.” DHS pushed to treat the Gadsen flag practically as a terrorist warning signal. DHS-funded Fusion Centers attached the “extremist” or potential terrorist tag to the individuals and groups displaying the Gadsden flag — as well as to individuals who assert a “right to keep and bear arms,” individuals “rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority” (like many Founding Fathers did), people who were “reverent of individual liberty,” and anyone with a “Know Your Rights or Lose Them” bumper sticker.

Law-enforcement agencies have come a long way since targeting Deadhead stickers on Cadillacs in the 1970s. The FBI Domestic Terrorism Symbols Guide included the Gadsden flag as one of the “commonly referenced historical imagery or quotes” used by violent militia extremists. Maybe the feds should formally announce that “distrust of government” is now a hate crime?

Jaiden, an honor roll student, watched wide-eyed as his mother lured the school official to become a nationwide laughingstock. The mother justified Jaiden’s patch: “The Founding Fathers stood up for what they believed against unjust laws, and this is unjust.”

The school official glowered: “I am here to enforce the policy that was provided by the district” after repeating the vexing phrase: “Don’t tread on me.” Did Jaiden threaten the public-school system’s divine right to tread on students and scorn parents’ values?

A victory for free speech 

Connor Boyack, president of the Libertas Institute in Utah, helped publicize the case. After the school conceded, he declared on Twitter: “Let this be a lesson — document your encounters w/ government employees. Had Jaiden’s mom not recorded the video, this wouldn’t have got nearly the attention that it did.” Jaiden was a reader of the Tuttle Twins — the pro-freedom series written by Boyack.

Permitting wokesters to turn the Gadsden flag into the moral equivalent of the Nazi swastika will only encourage more demolitions of American heritage. Will a Babylon Bee headline prove prophetic?: “FBI Seizes Jaiden’s Backpack in Predawn Raid.” Colorado’s liberal governor Jared Polis sought to end the lunacy when he endorsed the Gadsden flag for providing an “iconic warning to Britain or any government not to violate the liberties of Americans.”

The school board backed down but with a huge caveat: Jaiden could express his values only as long as no school staffer or student caterwauled. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) objected, “So long as the school district maintains that Jaiden may wear the Gadsden flag patch only if no student or staff member complains, this controversy is not over.” FIRE warned the school district: “The First Amendment does not allow the ‘heckler’s veto’ as envisioned by the district’s assistant superintendent, where anybody can suppress a student’s speech or viewpoint simply by objecting to it.” The heckler’s veto is especially perilous when domineering government officials are seeking any pretext to suppress whom they please.

Ironically, students would face no official pushback if they came to school wearing t-shirts and backpacks decorated with the logo of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (despite its crimes at Ruby Ridge and Waco), the Drug Enforcement Administration (despite DEA’s persecution of peaceful citizens), the National Security Agency (despite its preemptive destruction of privacy online and beyond), the Centers for Disease Control (despite their falsehoods and fear-mongering during the Covid pandemic), the Food and Drug Administration (despite the shenanigans it used to give full approval to dubious Covid vaccines), the Transportation Security Administration (despite their endless molesting of hapless travelers), the Department of Homeland Security (despite its secret censorship regimes seeking to suppress dissent), and even the Internal Revenue Service — which has wrongfully pilfered legions of Americans.

The Gadsden flag will be needed as long as government officials keep trying to trample Americans’ rights and liberties. None of the pundits who condemned that flag have offered any evidence that politicians nowadays are less perfidious than they were 250 years ago.

February 21, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

How I established anti-Zionist views should be protected under UK law

By David Miller | Press TV | February 20, 2024

In a landmark judgement on February 5, the Bristol Employment Tribunal handed down its decision that I had been wrongfully dismissed from my position as Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol.

In addition, the court found that the reasons given by the university for sacking me – that some Zionist students had been offended or claimed to feel ‘unsafe’ – were untrue.

The court determined instead that I had been dismissed for my anti-Zionist views.

And in the most significant element of the case, the court also ruled  – for the first time in the UK – that anti-Zionist views as set out by me in court filings are protected as a philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010.

The judgment stated:

The claimant succeeds in claims of direct discrimination because of his philosophical belief contrary to section 13 Equality Act 2010.

It went on:

The claimant’s anti-Zionist beliefs qualified as a philosophical belief and as a protected characteristic pursuant to section 10 Equality Act 2010 at the material times.

What this means is both that anti-Zionist views are declared by the court not to be racist and that they are “worthy of respect in a democratic society”, which is the language used in the Equality Act.

What was the anti-Zionist position I espoused and the court endorsed as protected?

First, I defined Zionism in a neutral way as an ideology that holds that a state for Jewish people ought to be established and maintained in the territory that formerly comprised the British Mandate of Palestine.

Zionists, of course, agree with this ideology. But, as the judgement put it:

[The Claimant’s] belief that Zionism (as he defines it) is inherently racist, imperialistic and colonial is based on the claimant’s analysis that it “necessarily calls for the displacement and disenfranchisement of non-Jews in favor of Jews, and it is therefore ideologically bound to lead to the practices of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide in pursuit of territorial control and expansion.”

The Employment Tribunal accepted that these ideas reached the level of coherence and cogency required of protected philosophical belief.

Among the specific statements made by me, for which I was sacked, were:

“The enemy we face here is Zionism and the imperial policies of the Israeli state”;

“It’s not just a question of being allowed to say, ‘Zionism’s bad’ or ‘Zionism’s racism’ – which, of course, we should be allowed to say because it is. But it’s not just a question of that; it’s a question of how we defeat the ideology of Zionism in practice.”; and

“Zionism is and always has been a racist, violent, imperialist ideology premised on ethnic cleansing. It is an endemically anti-Arab and Islamophobic ideology. It has no place in any society”.

These views are now to be regarded as protected anti-Zionist statements with no connection to anti-Semitism.

As the judgment stated:

“The Claimant explained, in his witness statement, that his opposition to Zionism is not opposition to the idea of Jewish self-determination or of a preponderantly Jewish state existing in the world, but rather, as he defines it, to the exclusive realization of Jewish rights to self-determination within a land that is home to a very substantial non-Jewish population.”

The case therefore establishes a very important precedent that will surely be relied upon and built upon in future employment cases.

And it declares to employers everywhere – that no matter how loudly Zionists scream and shout – it is not permissible to sack anti-Zionists for their views, which are henceforth protected in law.

Furthermore, the judgment drives a coach and horses through the long-promoted Zionist talking point that anti-Zionism is the “new antisemitism”.

This is a view that underpins the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism, which must now be put to serious question.

I hope and believe that in the future this will be seen as a turning point in the battle to end the racist and genocidal ideology of Zionism.

But how did I win this case? A key element was that the witnesses provided by the University of Bristol did not support the case the university was making.

Indeed they fatally undermined it.

The concessions made by the University of Bristol witnesses were firstly by Professor George Banting, a retired Dean of the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences.

Under cross-examination, he was shown the university policy on investigations which emphasizes getting to the truth and testing evidence.

He was then taken through example after example where he admitted he had not properly taken into account the evidence that I and my team had submitted and he admitted that he had, in effect, treated the evidence from the Zionist student activists credulously, even though there was plenty of evidence that they had provided contradictory or false evidence.

Banting caused some amusement in court when toward the end of his testimony he disclosed that he was something of an anti-Zionist himself:

“I would be more aligned with the position that Professor Miller puts forward in terms of Zionism being a racist ideology and settler colonialism.”

Similar admissions were made by Professor Jane Norman the Dean of Health Sciences at Bristol. She admitted that she lacked knowledge of the Zionist movement and of sociology, subjects where she acknowledged I was more knowledgeable than she was.

She had claimed in her letter of dismissal that the Union of Jewish Students was simply a faith society and thus by inference not Zionist – a case that stretched credulity, but which also indicated her partiality.

She also reluctantly admitted that she had not properly analyzed the contending evidence in the case in her written decision to sack me. Norman has subsequently been promoted to the second top job at the University of Nottingham.

These concessions were enough to show that I had been wrongly dismissed.

As the judgment put it: “The claimant succeeds in his claim for unfair dismissal pursuant to section 98 Employment Rights Act 1996”

But both Banting and Norman also conceded other points that fatally compromised the university case.  The university and specifically Professor Norman had claimed that the reason I had been sacked was because Zionist students had been offended or felt ‘unsafe’ as a result of hearing my anti-Zionist views.

But they both confirmed under cross-examination by the British Palestinian barrister Zac Sammour that the key reason that I was sacked was precisely because of the anti-Zionist content of my views and not my comments about Zionist student groups.

This was enough to show that I had been dismissed specifically for my anti-Zionist views.

But the most dramatic moment was when the university’s Deputy Principal Professor Judith Squires took the stand. Squires is a professor of political theory by background, so should be more familiar with the issues under discussion.

She has been prominent at the University of Bristol in its responses to the Black Lives Matter movement and the call for divestment in relation to slavery.

She can be seen here delivering a speech in which she calls for the “eradication” of racism, a position which, as I said at the tribunal, I wholeheartedly endorse. As the most senior witness from the university she, of all people, had to support the overall university case that my views were not “worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

And Squires did from the outset, but immediately after she was asked if she thought that my views were views ‘akin to Nazism’. She seemed confused by the question as if she had not realized that affirming the university case entailed this position.

But she eventually agreed. At that moment she was lost.

My barrister proceeded to demonstrate that by asking about a hypothetical case where Anglo-Saxons in Britain forced 75 percent of non-Anglo-Saxons to leave and go and live in Cornwall or Wales, then denied the remaining 25% rights in jobs, education and voting, would that be racist? “Yes”, said Professor Squires.

And he went on if no non-Anglo-Saxon could return, but any Anglo-Saxon, anywhere in the world, could come and live in Britain. Would that be racist? “Yes” And, the barrister went on would it be wrong for a Professor to say that Anglo-Saxonism is racism? And that it should be opposed?  “No”, said Professor Squires.

The University of Bristol, in other words, undermined and eventually destroyed its own case in court.

David Miller is the producer and co-host of Press TV’s weekly Palestine Declassified show. He was sacked from Bristol University in October 2021 over his Palestine advocacy. 

February 20, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Jailed Without Charge: Layan Kayed, West Bank student jailed for campus activism

By Humaira Ahad | Press TV | February 20, 2024

On the morning of June 7, 2023, Layan Kayed was sleeping peacefully in her room when Israeli soldiers appeared out of nowhere and ferociously banged on the door of her house in the occupied West Bank.

In a frightened state, Kayed’s father rushed through the gateway as the heavily armed regime soldiers stormed inside the house, seizing all the electronic gadgets and arresting the 26-year-old Kayed.

Kayed, a master’s student at the Birzeit University in occupied West Bank, had been an anti-occupation activist for years. She was first arrested in 2020 when she spent 16 months in different Israeli jails.

During her recent arrest, the young Palestinian activist was subjected to brutal custodial interrogation and was prevented from meeting her lawyer, according to reports.

In a message to her family during her first detention facility, Kayed said her relationship with prison is “that of a constant attempt to tame us and alienate us.”

In 2020, Kayed was arrested while crossing Za’tara military checkpoint, south of the city of Nablus. The Israeli soldiers handcuffed her, shackled her legs, and made her sit in an open area for hours.

She was later transferred to Hasharon prison of the Israeli regime.

The regime snatched from her the right to celebrate an important day of her life. She was arrested just before receiving her bachelor’s degree certificate.

“I was arrested at one of the checkpoints that separates my home from Birzeit University while I was in the family car with my mother on my way to the university to accept my (Bachelor of Arts) certificate,” the young Palestinian student was quoted as saying.

“After my arrest, I was left outdoors at the Zaatara Israeli military checkpoint for eleven hours, handcuffed and shackled. I was subjected to sexual insults, constant swearing, and verbal abuse from the Israeli male criminal inmates, under the watch of the Israeli guards who did not intervene.”

After her release from prison following her first arrest, Kayed narrated the inhumane treatment she was subjected to in Israeli prisons, similar to what other Palestinians have narrated over the years.

“One never received any sunshine and was fully monitored by security cameras around the clock.”

Kayed was kept in a cell with cameras fixed all around the room, violating the privacy of the young woman. She was not even provided a jail uniform and had to borrow clothes from an inmate.

The toilet she was forced to use was without a ceiling and a door, the Palestinian activist said.

On March 3, 2021, Ofer military court sentenced her to 16 months in prison in addition to a fine of 6,000 shekels. In the ruling, the military judge cited a previous ruling by the military appeals tribunal which stated that student wings of organizations deemed unlawful should not be underestimated, referring to the prosecution of students who belong to university unions, as they constitute a threat to “security”.

The Palestinian rights campaigner believes that the issue of Palestine is not just limited to Palestine but has worldwide reverberations.

“As a Palestinian people, we are facing the Zionist entity, which is organically linked to all imperialist interests in the region and the world. This means that the conflict with the Zionist project is not limited to the land of Palestine,” Kayed was quoted as saying.

The student bodies in Palestine have been advocating the total boycott of the apartheid regime.

Layan Kayed during an event at her university before her arrest. (X)

“In addition to boycotting Israel in all respects…, and launching pressure campaigns on governments and their pro-Israel policies, such as arms sales, trade exchange, or policies that adopt the Israeli discourse, we see that fighting injustice and oppression anywhere is part of our struggle against Israel,” she said.

“Israel actively contributes to supporting oppression around the world. Israel is a laboratory for weapons, surveillance, and military technologies, which it exports to oppressive governments around the world,” the student activist maintains.

In 2021, following Kayed’s first arrest, the UN working group on arbitrary detention said that the young Palestinian woman’s arrest was arbitrary, highlighting that it lacked a legal basis, and was carried out in breach of international human rights law.

The case was referred to the special rapporteur on violence against women and the working group on discrimination against women and girls.

Arbitrary detention is a form of administrative detention that is being used as one of the key tools by the regime to oppress Palestinians. Since October 7, Israel has dangerously increased its use of arbitrary detention across the occupied West Bank.

While Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank are subjected to civilian law, Palestinians have to face military laws. Military courts of Israel prosecute Palestinian children as young as 12.

As per the figures given by Military Court Watch, an NGO that monitors the treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli jails, 95 percent of military court cases result in convictions.

February 20, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Settlers burn through West Bank village under army protection

(Photo credit: AFP)
The Cradle | February 20, 2024

Israeli settlers rampaged through the occupied West Bank village of Burqa, northwest of Nablus, on the evening of 19 February, attacking homes and destroying vehicles under the protection and coordination of the Israeli military. 

Settlers threw Molotov cocktails at several Palestinian homes as Israeli troops shut down all main roads to the village. 

Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that Israeli troops “did nothing to stop the colonists’ attack,” adding that Israeli forces used large amounts of tear gas and prevented ambulances from reaching the wounded. 

Earlier on Monday, Israeli settlers, with the help of troops, fenced off a tract of Palestinian-owned land south of Jerusalem with barbed wire to occupy it. 

Settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has surged to all-time highs under Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. It has escalated even further since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the Gaza war. 

Palestinians have been subject to increasing levels of forced displacement since the war began. 

Since October, over 1,000 people – including hundreds of children – have been forced by settlers and Israeli army soldiers to abandon their homes, according to the UN.

Additionally, more settlers are being armed. Thousands of weapons have been handed out to settlers in the occupied West Bank under an initiative sponsored by the Israeli National Security Ministry. 

According to Israeli watchdog NGO Peace Now, Israeli settlers established a record-breaking 26 outposts in the occupied West Bank in 2023. The report correlates the rise in unlawful settlement construction with the Jewish supremacist policies of the Israeli government.

Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law. 

Nonetheless, the Don’t Buy Into Occupation (DBIO) civil society organization highlighted in December that European financial institutions have provided billions of dollars to support settlement construction in the occupied West Bank over the past few years. 

February 20, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

The ‘two-state solution’ is a distraction; the problem is Zionism

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | February 20, 2024

The problem in Palestine-Israel is not the absence of a Palestinian state, but Zionism. What is the use of a Palestinian state, if the racist, exclusivist ideology of Zionism continues to define Israel, and impose that definition on the Palestinians?

This ideology calls for the racial purity and dominance of Jews in Palestine, at the expense of the native inhabitants of the land, of course. To achieve this, millions of Palestinians have had to be forced into exile, and hundreds of thousands needed to be killed, wounded or incarcerated. Neither two states nor even one state is possible if Zionism is not entirely defeated: not revamped, not “fixed”, but eradicated.

As Palestinians are being killed in unprecedentedly large numbers in Gaza, western politicians are waking up to the necessity of a viable, independent Palestinian state. But why now? After all, it was these very politicians and their governments that either defended the Zionist state or remained silent as Israel thwarted every possibility of peaceful co-existence with the Palestinians. Theirs is not a moral awakening, but a distraction, to appear — at least before their own people — to be proactive, while Israel is systematically destroying the Palestinian people.

The Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza is “the first genocide in the history of humanity that is [being] livestreamed on television,” said former UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness. The genocide is worsening now that Palestinians are starting to die from starvation, while an even larger number are dying from disease and polluted water, aside, of course, from those being blown up or shot and killed by Israel.

For the likes of Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron to talk about the British government’s recognition of a Palestinian state as “absolutely vital” for “long-term peace” is bewildering, to say the least. Those struggling to survive daily are hardly concerned about yet more empty western promises and “recognition”.

The genocide underway in Gaza tells us that the issue is not merely political, but also ideological.

And, while western leaders speak of “long-term peace”, Israel entrenches its system of violence and apartheid. “There cannot be a situation in which children and women approach us from the wall,” said Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on 12 February. “Anyone… must receive a bullet.”

In Gaza, the violence is far more sickening. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported on the same day that “groups of ten to twenty Israeli civilians at a time were permitted to watch and laugh while filming Palestinian prisoners and detainees in their underwear” as they were tortured and abused by Israeli soldiers.

There can be no rational political justification for any of this. All of it — the language of genocide, the genocide itself and the threats of committing a greater genocide — is rooted, not in a rational political theory, but in Zionism.

The problem keeps getting worse because we refuse to address it head-on. In fact, many are doing the exact opposite. For example, western governments have passed — or are passing — laws equating criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism. Even Facebook wants to ban the use of the term “Zionist” if it is used in a context that is critical of Israel.

When Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu threatened, on 5 November, to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, he was condemned by many merely for his inappropriate language, not the act itself. Yes, some Israeli officials also criticised Eliyahu, but only for damaging Israel’s international reputation.

The Israeli minister, however, was not simply talking out of anger. He meant it, because Israel’s behaviour in Gaza since then has demonstrated that such willingness to kill Palestinians en masse actually exists. Zionists are ready to do anything for their ideology to survive, and that survival is wholly dependent on the erasure of the perceived enemy; not “erasure” in an intellectual, political or even cultural sense, but the actual physical destruction of the Palestinians.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine, known as the 1948 Nakba, was a serious attempt at achieving that goal. But since the “enemy”, the Palestinian nation, survived and continues to resist and demand its collective rights, the ethnic cleansing of them is today back on the mainstream Israeli political agenda.

This ongoing Gaza war is, to date, the most serious attempt to destroy the Palestinian people. This is why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government want to carry on with the killing and destruction. They want to continue the slaughter, and thus the extermination of the Palestinians, because they are fully aware that this is an historic opportunity to finish the job that previous Zionist leaders did not complete 75 years ago.

Indeed, Israel perceives the ongoing offensive as going beyond the geographic confines of the tiny Gaza Strip. It is a war on Palestinians everywhere. If Israel succeeds in subduing Gaza, it will turn immediately to the West Bank, then to the 2.1 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens.

It is important to recall that, before the current war, the Israeli incitement against Palestinians was focused mostly on the West Bank, with the declared aim of annexing over a third of that occupied region, at least. There was also a major official Israeli campaign to curtail the rights of Palestinian Arabs inside Israel and incite hatred against them. This campaign is rooted in history but has become far more apparent following the Unity Intifada (uprising) of May 2021.

It was then that Israel realized that the “division” of the Palestinians was largely political, and that, as a nation, they remain strongly connected. That is why Ben-Gvir lobbied, even before he was given a ministerial position in December 2022, to have a National Guard tasked with “restoring governance where needed”. If Gaza falls, all Palestinians in the rest of Palestine will become the new target for Israeli violence, ethnic cleansing and, if necessary, genocide.

Reducing all of these issues to that of finding creative political solutions that would merely sell false hopes to the Palestinian people is not only ignorant, or devious, but also a diversion from the real problem: Israel’s ideology of Zionism.

This, like all racist colonial ideologies, operates with a zero-tolerance approach to its relationship with the natives of colonised land: Zionism and Zionists must dominate through ethnic cleansing and genocide. For “long-term peace” to take place, this pernicious ideology must be consigned to the history books.

READ ALSO: Gaza women, girls being strip searched, raped by male Israel soldiers, UN warns

February 20, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Protect the First Amendment: Impeach Joe Biden!

By Ron Paul | The Libertarian Institute | February 20, 2024

Protecting democracy and the Constitution from Donald Trump and the “MAGA extremists” is a major theme of President [Joe] Biden’s reelection campaign. As is often the case in American politics, President Biden is just as, if not more, guilty of posing an “existential threat” to the Constitution as those he smears as “extremists.” For example, President Biden and members of his administration have waged a campaign to undermine the First Amendment by “encouraging” companies to suppress the expression of “unapproved” views online.

The latest example of the administration trying to get a private internet company to censor Americans may be the most outrageous of all. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan recently released a series of emails between Biden administration officials and Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer. The government officials wanted Amazon to remove from its online catalog books containing “misinformation” regarding the safety and effectiveness of covid vaccines, meaning anything questioning the government’s pro-vaccine propaganda.

While Amazon did try to push back some against the administration, it did remove at least one “anti-vaccine” book from its online catalog. Amazon also manipulated its search results to make sure books expressing skepticism of vaccines were buried under books touting the pro-vaccine line. The company probably hoped that by “burying” these “dissident” books Amazon could make the administration happy without actually removing all books that question the covid vaccines. The company also promised the administration that it would expand use of a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) warning for books promoting “anti-vaccine” narratives.

Some libertarians say that Amazon should not be criticized for its decisions. These libertarians point out that, as a private company, Amazon has the right to decide what books to sell and also has the right to decide to make it difficult to find books expressing viewpoints the company finds dangerous or distasteful. This is true but ignores one important fact: Amazon’s decision to suppress books critical of covid vaccines was not done to attract consumers who would not shop at a site that sells “anti-vaccine propaganda” or “conspiracy theories.” Instead, Amazon acted at the behest of government officials who were seeking to prohibit Americans from accessing alternative views.

Amazon may have been eager to cooperate with the government to avoid being subjected to antitrust litigation. At the very time the administration was demanding Amazon suppress covid dissidents, President Biden was preparing to appoint Lina Khan, an advocate for antitrust litigation against Amazon, to lead the Federal Trade Commission.

It is clear that the U.S. government has been a major spreader of covid disinformation, while those challenging the government’s pro-mask, pro-vax, and pro-lockdown propaganda have been the truth-tellers. Covid is an example of why protecting the First Amendment is vital to protecting not just liberty, but also our prosperity and health.

Congress should prioritize its investigation into the Biden administration’s efforts to silence Americans because of their views. Congress should then impeach all high-level federal officials, including President Biden, who took action to violate Americans’ First Amendment rights.

February 20, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

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