Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Syrian FM: ‘Western leaders are little puppets of the Zionist enemy’

Al Mayadeen | March 10, 2024

Syrian Foreign and Expatriates Minister, Faisal Mekdad, emphasized that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide perpetrated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has killed over 12,000 children and 8,000 women, and completely destroyed the Gaza Strip.

In a statement on the ministry’s X account, Mikdad said “What European Union strategists say about building a world based on rules and regulations has faded. The murderer Netanyahu has not left any rule unbroken: International law, international humanitarian law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Charter, children’s rights, women’s rights, democracy, disarmament, and peace.”

He continued to say what is more dangerous than Netanyahu and his ruling “gang’s” crimes, is the support he received from many EU leaders and the blind trust Washington has given him.

“Everyone knows that much of what the European Union leaders did before and after was a form of clowning, hypocrisy, and lies, and their defense of Netanyahu’s crimes led to pulling the rug from under all of their feet and showed them as they really are, little puppets in the hands of Zionism and enemies of peoples’ rights and aspirations,” he said, slamming the West.

March 10, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gaza’s last remaining children relief fund razed in Israeli raid

Press TV – March 10, 2024

Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), an independent humanitarian organization, says its last remaining office in the Gaza Strip has been destroyed after Israeli military aircraft carried out a strike against a neighborhood in the besieged coastal territory.

On Saturday, PCRF in a post on X (formerly Twitter), shared pictures of a building reduced to rubble, as Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza enters its fifth month.

“PCRF’s last office in Gaza was destroyed by one of Israel’s air raids today. Two other offices were destroyed in previous months by Israeli air attacks as well.

“We are thankful that no one was killed or severely injured during these bombings,” the group said.

The PCRF was founded in 1991 by Steve Sosebee, who currently serves as the organization’s president.

According to its website, the non-governmental organization provides free medical care to thousands of injured and ill children annually who lack local access to care within the local healthcare system in Palestine and other countries in the West Asia region.

NGO worker killed in Israeli attack

Meanwhile, a Palestinian aid worker employed at a US charity has been killed in an Israeli attack on his shelter in the central Gaza Strip city of Deir al-Balah.

The non-governmental organization Anera – which helps refugees in Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon – said Mousa Shawwa was killed on Friday.

It said the bombing comes despite the fact that coordinates of Shawwa’s shelter had been provided to the Israeli military for the staff safety on several occasions, including just days before the attack.

Shawwa is the fifth member of a US humanitarian aid group killed in the war on Gaza, Anera added.

At least 30,960 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been confirmed killed and 72,524 others injured so far during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. The war began after Gaza-based resistance movements carried out Operation al-Aqsa Storm into the occupied territories on October 7, 2023.

The Israeli military campaign has devastated large swathes of Gaza and displaced a staggering 85 percent of the Strip’s 2.3 million population.

According to the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), more than 70 percent of civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip has been destroyed or severely damaged by intense Israeli attacks.

Israel has also imposed a “complete siege” on the coastal sliver, cutting off fuel, electricity, food, and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.

March 10, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

The hunger killing Gaza’s children has a clear cause that few are willing to name out loud

By Eva Bartlett | RT | March 10, 2024

Following the February 29 Israeli slaughter of at least 115 starving Palestinians lined up for food aid, there was little or no outrage by the same Western media which would have howled if the perpetrator were Russia or Syria.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, early morning on Thursday, February 29, Israeli forces opened fire on unarmed Palestinians waiting just southwest of Gaza City for desperately needed food aid. As a result, 115 civilians were killed and over 750 wounded.

Popular US commenter Judge Andrew Napolitano said in a recent interview with award-winning analyst Professor Jeffery Sachs, “Innocent Gaza civilians were lined up to receive flour and water from an aid truck, and more than 100 were slaughtered, mowed down, by Israeli troops. This has got to be one of the most reprehensible and public slaughterings that they’ve engaged in.”

The official Israeli version of events, unsurprisingly, puts the blame on the Palestinians themselves. The deaths and injuries were supposedly caused by a stampede, and the Israeli soldiers only fired when they felt they were endangered by the crowd. The BBC even cited one army lieutenant as saying that troops had “cautiously [tried] to disperse the mob with a few warning shots.” Mark Regev, a special adviser to the Israeli prime minister, went as far as to tell CNN that Israeli troops had not been involved directly in any way and that the gunfire had come from “Palestinian armed groups.”

Testimonies from survivors and doctors tell a different story, though, saying the majority of those treated after the incident had been shot by Israeli forces. Legacy media reports, however, use characteristically neutral wording when evidence starts to stack up against Israel. “112 dead in chaotic scenes as Israeli troops open fire near aid trucks, say Gaza officials,” a Guardian headline reads. Palestinians always seem to just “die,” not get killed, and Israeli troops seem to have just “opened fire” nearby. The skewed wording conventions persist even despite the attribution to Palestinian officials present in that same headline – officials like the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, which was quite clear in accusing Israel of perpetrating a ”massacre” as part of a “genocidal war.”

The article does eventually cite the acting Director of al-Awda hospital as saying most of the 161 casualties treated appeared to have been shot. The confusing headline was likely intentional, counting on most people not bothering to read the article in full.

In a report published on March 3, Euro-Med stated members of its field team were present at the time of the incident and “documented Israeli tanks firing heavily towards Palestinian civilians while trying to receive humanitarian aid.” The report goes on to cite Dr Jadallah Al-Shafi’i, head of nursing at Shifa, Gaza’s main hospital, saying, “paramedics and rescue workers were among the victims,” and that at Shifa “they observed dozens of dead and injured, hit by Israeli gunfire.”

The report also cites Dr Amjad Aliwa, an emergency specialist at Shifa who was also on site when Israel opened fire. According to Aliwa, the Israeli fire began, “as soon as the trucks arrived on Thursday at 4 am”

But the February 29 massacre, tragic as it is, is only a part of the current stage of Israel’s war on Gaza: the deliberate starvation of Palestinians. And like the massacre itself, the whole issue is being subjected to the hands-off wording treatment by establishment media.

On February 29, the New York Times published an article whose headline, “Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children,” suggests starvation is a mysterious malicious force with a will of its own, skirting the mention of the Israeli siege as its obvious cause.

Again, as with the Guardian article, a few paragraphs in, the NYT piece does state that the “hunger is a man-made catastrophe,” describing how Israeli forces prevent food delivery and how Israeli bombardments make aid distribution dangerous.

As Professor Sachs stated, ”… Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. Starved! I’m not using an exaggeration, I’m talking literally starving a population. Israel is a criminal, is in non-stop, war crime, status now. I believe in genocidal status.”

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the February 29 massacre was not the first such incident, and likely not the last. A thread on Twitter/X outlines this, noting, ”Before yesterday’s “Flour Massacre”, the IDF has been shooting indiscriminately for WEEKS at starved Gazans awaiting aid trucks at the exact same spot, virtually every single day!”

The thread (warning: graphic images!), compiled by Gazan analyst and Euro-Med chief of communications Muhammad Shehada, gives examples of Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians every single day in the week prior to February 29.

You can bet that, were these Syrian or Russian soldiers firing on starving civilians, the outrage would be front page, 24/7, for weeks. Scratch that, they wouldn’t even have to do it – just a hint of an accusation would have been enough to get the presses going.

Starvation in Syria was another matter

The NYT article mentioned above notes that “Reports of death by starvation are difficult to verify from a distance.” But ‘verifying from a distance’ is precisely what the NYT and other Western media did repeatedly in Syria over the years.

In areas occupied by (then) al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam, and the other extremist terrorist gangs which the West and corporate media dubbed “rebels,” food aid was always taken by the respective terrorists and withheld from the civilian population, causing starvation in some districts. Madaya, to the west of Damascus, eastern Aleppo, and later eastern Ghouta were districts most loudly campaigned over in legacy media, providing covering fire for the broader US-led campaign to overthrow the Syrian government.

Backing the claims that the government was starving civilians were mostly “unnamed activists” or activists whose allegiance to Nusra, or even ISIS, was very overt.

As I would see and hear whenever one of these regions was liberated, ample food and medicine had been sent in, but civilians never saw it. Time and again, in eastern Aleppo, Madaya, al-Waer, eastern Ghouta, to name key areas, civilians complained that terrorist factions hoarded food and medicine, and if they sold it to the population, it was at extortionist prices people couldn’t afford.

In the old city of Homs in 2014, back then dubbed by legacy media as the “capital of the revolution,” starved residents I met told me the West’s precious “rebels” had stolen every morsel of food from them, stealing anything of value as well.

Yet, media headlines about these regions screamed about starvation, outright blaming the Syrian government, and were accompanied by disturbing images of emaciated civilians (some of which were not even from Syria) meant to evoke strong emotions among readers and viewers. The same media largely opts not to show you gaunt, starving, Palestinians in Gaza.

Tellingly, Syrian towns surrounded by terrorist forces, besieged, bombed, sniped and starved, got virtually no media coverage. It didn’t fit NATO’s narrative of “rebels”=good, Assad=bad.

But in Gaza the world watches in real time as Palestinians die from the ongoing, preventable, starvation.

Some days ago, the CEO of Medical aid for Palestinians, Melanie Ward, in an interview with CNN, named Israel as the cause of starvation in Gaza.

“It’s very simple: it’s because the Israeli military won’t let it in. We could end this starvation tomorrow very simply if they would just let us have access to people there. But it’s not being allowed. This is what they said [on October 9], ‘Nothing will go in’,” Ward said.

She described the starvation as “the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded. What that means is that children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen. And we could finish it tomorrow, we could save them all. But we’re not being able to.”

This is echoed by UNICEF. The press-release for its February 2024 report notes that 15.6 % (one in six children) under two years of age are “acutely malnourished” in Gaza’s north. “Of these, almost 3% suffer from severe wasting, the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, which puts young children at highest risk of medical complications and death unless they receive urgent treatment,” UNICEF notes.

Even worse, “since the data were collected in January, the situation is likely to be even graver today,” UNICEF warns, likewise noting the rapid increase of malnutrition is “dangerous and entirely preventable.”

Professor Sachs made an important point: “This will stop when the United States stops providing the munitions to Israel. It will not stop by any self control in Israel, there is none… They believe in ethnic cleansing or worse. And it is the United States which is the sole support… that is not stopping this slaughter.”

Air-dropping paltry amounts of food aid into Gaza is not the answer. It both legitimizes Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gaza and also makes those Palestinians who run toward the aid sitting ducks for the Israeli army to maim or kill. The only solution is to immediately open the borders and allow in the hundreds of aid trucks parked in Egypt. And end the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).

March 10, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Zionist Jews in Biden administration calling the shots on Israeli war on Gaza

By Ivan Kesic | Press TV | March 10, 2024

One of the key but underreported factors of the unwavering US support for the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza is the overwhelming presence of Zionist Jews in the Joe Biden administration.

These Zionist Jews exert enormous influence in the American power corridors and enjoy unconditional support from the US president who has on numerous occasions boasted of being a “Zionist” himself.

The presence and influence of Zionist Jews in the White House has always been a point of discussion, however, since the events of October 7, it has manifested itself in many ways.

Biden administration’s vetoes of ceasefire resolutions in the UN Security Council, which drew widespread condemnation from pro-Palestine groups, rekindled the debate about the Zionist influence.

Raising the issue of the dominance of Zionist Jews in the US administration and policy circles is often seen through the prism of “anti-Semitism” in the West, even though the same people paradoxically like to boast about the disproportionate number of Jews in other fields.

The Zionist Jewishness of Biden’s cabinet was pointed out recently by The Forward, a progressive media for a Jewish American audience, as well as the Israeli right-wing newspaper Times of Israel.

Being a Jew should not be seen as a problem, but those in the Biden administration have clearly exhibited the tendencies of Zionism – not only justifying the Israeli regime’s genocide in Gaza but also lobbying for more financial and military aid to the occupying regime.

There are also non-Jewish Zionists whose support is motivated by Christian Zionism or belonging to pro-Israel lobbies, a common case in the ranks of the Republican Party.

The problem lies in the fact that everyone in the Biden administration is a radical Zionist who will uncompromisingly justify Israeli war crimes, with slight disagreements over relatively minor issues, such as illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

In the American mainstream media, voting in the UN Security Council and supporting the genocidal destruction of Gaza is treated as common sense and a natural course of action.

Biden made no secret of his Zionist inclinations, uttering the words “I am a Zionist”. And he has proved it through numerous pro-Israeli activities in his decades-long political career.

One of them is the placement of Jewish Zionists in top positions in his administration, which at the beginning of 2021 evoked a popular joke on social networks that the West Wing would have a “minyan.”

The Hebrew term “minyan” means the minimum number of males (10) required to constitute a representative “community of Israel” for liturgical purposes.

Biden’s initial lineup includes Anthony Blinken as Secretary of State, Merrick Garland as Attorney General, Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence, Ronald Klain as White House Chief of Staff, Rachel Levine as Assistant Secretary for Health, Alejandro Mayorkas as Secretary of Homeland Security, and Janet Yellen as Secretary of the Treasury.

One level down are David Cohen as Deputy CIA Director, Eric Lander as science and technology adviser, Ann Neuberger as Deputy National Security Adviser, and Wendy Sherman as Deputy Secretary of State.

In the meantime, Victoria Nuland took the position of Undersecretary of State for political affairs, Ed Siskel as White House counsel, and Klain was replaced by Jeff Zients as chief of staff.

Others appointed by Biden include Daniel Shapiro as a special liaison to Israel on Iran, Ned Price as spokesman for the Department of State, Jennifer Klein as executive director of the White House Gender Policy Council, as well as a large number of ambassadors.

The Zionist envoys include Michael Adler, David Cohen, Rahm Emanuel, Eric Garcetti, Mark Gitenstein, Amy Gutmann, Jonathan Kaplan, Yael Lempert, Alan Leventhal, Randi Levine, Jack Lew, Jack Markell, Constance Milstein, Marc Nathanson, Marc Ostfield, David Pressman, Daniel Rosenblum, and Marc Stanley, among others.

Blinken, the top American diplomat, comes from a Zionist family. His grandfather Maurice was one of the early American Zionists and the founder of the American Palestine Institute, in the years before the declaration of the Zionist entity.

His institute funded economists to prepare a report on the economic viability of such an entity and lobbied Washington to politically support its creation.

Following Blinken’s appointment as the top US diplomat, replacing Mike Pompeo, the Israeli media praised his and Biden’s close relations with Tel Aviv during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, noting their “lifelong support for Israel and its security.”

During the Obama administration, Blinken often justified Israeli aggressions in the region with the hackneyed phrase “the right to self-defense” and praised Trump for strengthening Israel’s regional alliances.

He was a close confidant of the Israeli ambassador to the US Ron Dermer who could call him in the middle of the night for pro-Israeli services, such as lobbying hard to have Israel’s Iron Dome air military system financed with American taxpayer money.

In his first days in office, he also made it known that the new Biden administration would support earlier Trump’s decision and keep the American embassy to the occupied territories in occupied al-Quds.

Last year, during the bickering between Biden and Netanyahu, Blinken pledged enduring US ties with Israel, seeing it as a far more important ally than NATO member Turkey.

As for Mayorkas, even the Israeli media boasted of his strong family ties to Tel Aviv and praised him for the data-sharing pact between the United States and the Zionist regime.

Even greater Zionist credit for intelligence sharing goes to CIA deputy chief David Cohen, whose career under Obama focused on sanctioning Israel’s enemies.

Thus, it is no surprise that Americans are bankrolling the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza while harping about ceasefire and aid airdrops to hoodwink the international community.

March 10, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Fearful Electioneering Turbo Charges Western Warmongering

Strategic Culture Foundation | March 8, 2024

Western states are facing an acute political crisis whereby their established governing parties and leaders are fighting for survival amid a grave loss in legitimacy in the eyes of their electorates.

In the United States, incumbent President Joe Biden is vying for reelection in November with historically lowest poll numbers ever for an occupant of the White House.

Meanwhile, across the European Union, governing parties and leaders are braced for a drubbing from parliamentary elections in June.

The roots of this unprecedented loss of legitimacy among Western political establishments are manifold. But surely one cause is the rank hypocrisy of Western leaders that has now been laid bare. How can political figures expect to have any moral authority when they are seen to be inveterate liars and shamelessly corrupt?

Western governments and their servile media lecture about “democracy”, “human rights” and upholding “law and order”. They claim to be motivated by such principles in their support of Ukraine against alleged Russian aggression. Yet these same governments are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza through their unwavering support for the Israeli regime.

Western leaders have been fatally exposed and compromised by the conflict in Ukraine and Gaza. The contradiction is terminal.

That’s not just because of the blatant double standards and duplicity. Western voters are increasingly disgusted by the relentless financial and military support funneled into Ukraine to prop up a scamming regime comprised of NeoNazi ideologues. Under Joe Biden and the incumbent European politicians, the West has flooded Ukraine with weapons and hundreds of billions of dollars in what is the biggest war racket ever.

This is while Western populations, workers, farmers, and businesses are hard-pressed with numerous social and economic burdens.

Western governing parties are rightly seen as elitist and serving powerful minority oligarchic interests such as the military-industrial-corporate-financial nexus. Their declared vows about democracy are a contemptible joke.

The war in Ukraine is increasingly understood by voters to be a disastrous proxy war of choice that was pushed by U.S. and Western imperial objectives to confront Russia.

Despite the squandering of public money to propagate the war, the U.S.-led NATO axis has lost its “great game”. The proxy war has devastated Ukraine, causing up to 500,000 military deaths in two years, as well as destabilizing the rest of Europe from increased migration, fiscal impact, deindustrialization, and the shattering of agricultural industries.

Western populations are furious with their political leaders for having inflicted such chaos and waste of resources – as well as wantonly provoking tensions in international relations with Russia. Western politicians have pushed the world to the brink of an all-out war between nuclear powers. All this crazed folly is based on utter lies and deception – as the horror of Gaza and Western complicity illustrates.

In this cauldron of electoral revolt, Western political leaders are only digging a deeper hole for their eventual collapse.

American President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address this week made a disingenuous pitch to voters. He portrayed the world as facing an existential crisis from Russian “tyranny” and simultaneously claimed the fate of US democracy was under threat from his election rival Donald Trump.

In a dangerous and desperate move, Biden is conflating Trump with alleged Russian aggression. The Democrat president is fighting for political survival against Republican presumptive nominee Trump primarily because Biden is so deeply unpopular among American citizens. To boost his election prospects, Biden is making out that the country is facing an “inflection point” that requires rejection of Trump because he is “bowing down” to Russia.

Trump and many within the Republican Party are opposed to continuing the proxy war in Ukraine, recognizing that it is futile.

Biden and the Democrats, who are more aligned with the U.S. foreign policy establishment, are therefore trying to make the election about an existential “defense of world democracy and peace”. Biden claimed in his State of the Union address that if the U.S. does not supply Ukraine with another $60 billion more in military aid then Russia will overrun the rest of Europe. Biden even invoked the memory of Roosevelt supposedly facing down Nazi Germany in 1941.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the same warmongering high-stakes ruse is being pushed by French President Emmanuel Macron. Macron is calling for the deployment of NATO ground troops in Ukraine to prevent a Russian victory and an alleged threat to the rest of Europe.

The French head of state has become almost hysterical in recent weeks with war talk. He told other French political leaders this week that there would be “no limits” to France’s support for Ukraine against Russia.

What’s lying behind Macron’s belligerent rhetoric are his fears of political defeat from opposition parties in the forthcoming EU parliamentary elections. It is not just Macron who is anxious. All incumbent European leaders are dreading an expected widespread revolt by the electorate.

That is why the French president and his ruling-class ilk like European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are seeking to dominate the public narrative with war talk and the alleged danger of Russian expansionism.

The irony is that the more the Western establishments pursue militarism and war in Ukraine the worse their states become from economic mismanagement and the more their legitimacy sinks into the gutter. They are seen more and more as a warmongering clique that has not a shred of ethical concern because of their reckless warmongering in Ukraine and their despicable complicity in the genocide in Gaza.

Elections in Western states are over-rated. As the saying goes, if voting changed anything, it would have been banned years ago. The array of current opposition figures and parties facing incumbents is not going to deliver any solutions to the endemic problems of Western systemic failure. Nevertheless, the forthcoming U.S. presidential election and the European parliamentary ballots are shaping up to deliver grievous blows of repudiation to the political establishments.

To offset the political doomsday, charlatan Western leaders like Biden, Macron, Scholz, and Von der Leyen are doing their last-ditch best to talk up war with Russia and the “threat to democracy” as a way to burnish their electioneering efforts. But such cynicism is not turbocharging their prospects. It will backfire.

The U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine is facing a historic debacle from defeat. But that makes the desperate reaction by Western incumbents scurrying for political survival a dangerous time in the next few months.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

March 9, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Biden’s Offer for a 6-Week Pause in the Genocide in Gaza

By Steven Sahiounie | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 8, 2024

The Hamas delegation left Cairo on Thursday and will resume negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza next week. Time is running out before the Holy month of Ramadan begins. Hamas wants an end to the war, but the U.S. is looking only for a 6-week pause, and Israel is willing to allow a pause but resume the genocide afterward.

UN experts, many world leaders, humanitarian organizations, and millions of civilians across the U.S., UK, Europe, Africa, and Asia agree on one point: the only way to prevent or end famine in Gaza is an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Israel’s unrelenting attack on 2.3 million people in Gaza, day and night for almost five months, has killed over 30,700. If the bombs and bullets don’t kill them all, then starvation will.

U.S. President Joe Biden, the one man in the world who holds the keys to a ceasefire in Gaza, refuses to demand the Israelis end the war. Biden has finally come up with a weak deal to offer Hamas to stop the slaughtering, but just for six weeks, not permanently.

Hamas proposal in Cairo

Hamas representatives have been meeting in Cairo with Egyptian and Qatari negotiators. On Wednesday, March 6, Hamas said they were continuing their efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza even though Israel refused to participate in the negotiations.

Osama Hamdan, in Beirut, voiced the demands of the resistance group. They want a permanent end to Israeli attacks and the withdrawal of Israeli forces to allow the people to return to their homes. He stressed that a prisoner swap could only occur after a ceasefire.

Senior Hamas official Bassem Naim said Hamas had presented its draft deal and was awaiting a response from Israel, and that “the ball now is in the Americans’ court”.

The U.S. proposal at the UN

On March 5, Biden said a ceasefire deal was in the hands of Hamas. He was referring to the U.S. deal offered to Hamas, and he never mentioned or referred to the deal Hamas offered to Israel.

Biden’s deal offered a six-week ceasefire in exchange for the release of all Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Israel is willing to pause the slaughter and genocide in Gaza for a few weeks, but Netanyahu and his radical right-wing partners insist they will never stop the bombardment until Hamas is exterminated.

“It’s in the hands of Hamas right now. Israelis have been cooperating. There’s been a rational offer,” Biden told reporters.

Getting the Israeli hostages out has never been a priority for Netanyahu, but it has been for the families and friends of the hostages. They have been holding protests and marches ever since the conflict began. The families of the hostages expected their government to negotiate for their release, but Netanyahu’s war room ignored their pleas, in favor of revenge killings in Gaza.

From the very beginning of the conflict which broke out October 7, 2023,  He is willing to use the phrase ‘humanitarian pause’, and his current deal offered to Hamas is only a pause, with an exact timetable attached to resume the butchery which has killed mainly women and children.

The U.S. is promoting its ‘pause’ deal at the UN, even though the U.S. has vetoed every UN resolution aimed at peace in Gaza, with the most recent U.S. veto on February 20.

Netanyahu says IDF will remain in Gaza for 10 years

The Times of Israel reported recently that Netanyahu has planned for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to remain in a military occupation of Gaza for at least 10 years. This is opposed by the U.S., EU, UN, and most world leaders. Israel may agree to a pause, but a ceasefire and withdrawal is out of the question. This means the Palestinian people and their supporters will remain resisting occupation, which is guaranteed by the Geneva Convention.

The Flour Massacre

On February 29, at least 112 people were killed and 760 were injured when Israeli tanks opened heavy fire on Palestinian civilians attempting to collect flour to make bread near Gaza City.

The attack was investigated by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. The attack was captured on video in which gunshots and weapon fire were heard. The victims were examined and had gunshot injuries, the scene was strewn with blood on flour sacks and aid boxes, and survivors’ eyewitness testimony attested to the Israeli attack on starving Palestinians in search of food for their families. Many of the survivors stated they were shot in the back while running away from the scene.

Israel tried to blame the deaths and injuries on a stampede in the chaos of scrambling to get the flour. However, the aerial footage the IDF released of the scene proved there were IDF tanks present. The people running in the aerial footage were running from Israeli gunfire directed at them.

After the ‘Flour Massacre’ happened, the first response from the Biden White House, as parroted by CNN on the front lawn, was the Israeli version of events: people stampeded because of chaos while trying to get some food.

However, in the video accompanying the CNN report, sounds of weapons fire are heard over and over again.

Later, Christiane Amanpour of CNN reported on information relayed to her from trusted contacts on the ground in Gaza, humanitarian groups, that those killed at the ‘Flour Massacre’ had gunshot wounds. Amanpour has a career motto: don’t be neutral, be truthful.

“The attack came after Israel has denied humanitarian aid into Gaza City and northern Gaza for more than a month,” said the UN experts, who described “a pattern of Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians seeking aid”.

In a statement, a group of UN special rapporteurs accused Israel of “intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October,” adding: “Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys.”

There is mounting evidence of famine in the Gaza Strip, and at least 14 similar incidents have been reported.

On Friday, March 1, the U.S. blocked a statement put forward by Algeria and backed by 15 UNSC members except the U.S. to condemn Israel for the killing of more than 100 Palestinians in the ‘Flour Massacre’. The U.S. claimed it was trying to verify how the people died in light of Israel’s denial of shooting the hungry people.

Biden doesn’t care about protests

Mitch Landrieu, national co-chair of the Biden-Harris campaign, was asked on CNN about Biden’s reaction to being taunted by protesters demanding a ceasefire immediately in Gaza.

Landrieu replied that Biden respects their right to freedom of speech, and “he has no problem with it.”

Biden and his administration, view the call for a ceasefire in Gaza as just an exercise in the right of freedom of speech as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Biden and his administration will gladly tolerate calls for a ceasefire because that is the right of every American.

However, the Biden administration misses the point. Millions of Americans are demanding an end to the slaughter in Gaza, carried out by the American weapons provided without any oversight or conditions by the U.S. State Department. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has faced resignations among his staff because of the unbridled flow of weapons to Israel, which have killed well over 30,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children as reported by the UN and humanitarian groups.

Blinken has the authority to hold up weapons transfers based on the State Department’s own rule, that no weapons can be sent to a country that may use them in war crimes, crimes against humanity, or in violation of humanitarian law. Blinken famously told Netanyahu, that he came to support Israel as a Jew. Blinken was not representing the rules and protocol of the U.S. State Department, but was instead representing his race, and his bloodline having been born of a Jewish mother. Blinken turned the secular system of the American government into a racist and sectarian system in one fell swoop.

The next big protest movement in the U.S. may well be a popular uprising against paying taxes. Americans may ask, “Why do I pay taxes, if Washington, DC. is throwing away money on wars I oppose?”

Gaza is starving

Deliberating starving people amounts to war crimes and genocide under international law. More than 15 children have died from malnutrition in Gaza. The deaths are due not only to hunger but also dehydration. The elderly and small children are very susceptible to dehydration which causes the major organs to shut down.

The humanitarian aid trucks sit parked and idle at the gate to Gaza. Israel has prevented aid from coming to over 2 million Palestinians. Biden has only to pick up a phone and order the gate to be open and the aid to flow in unimpeded, but instead, he has asked the air force to fly over Gaza and drop pallets of food.

Israel has blocked humanitarian supplies to Gaza. On January 26, the International Court of Justice recognized the plausibility of Israel committing genocide and ordered it to allow the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian services and aid to Palestinians. However, since the court’s ruling, the number of trucks Israel has allowed to enter Gaza has fallen to 57 a day – compared with an average of 147 a day before the ICJ ruling.

The hospitals are barely functioning with hundreds of wounded arriving each day, and now they are filling up with people in the last stages of starvation.

March 9, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘We Are the Masters of the House’: Israeli Channels Air Snuff Videos Featuring Systematic Torture of Palestinians

Mondoweiss | March 9, 2024

Over the past month, mainstream Israeli television channels have aired what can only be described as snuff films. They depict the systematic torture of Palestinians from Gaza in Israeli jails. Such videos have aired on at least three occasions — twice on Channel 14, and once on the public broadcaster, Channel 13. While Channel 14 is considered right-wing, so is about two-thirds of the Israeli public, and the more “mainstream” Channel 13 has shown no qualms about airing similar footage.

The broadcasts follow prison officials into detention centers to document the mistreatment of prisoners, which seems to be something that the officials — and apparently the viewers — find satisfying rather than revolting. The airing of these snuff films is a demonstration of societal sadism.

As Yumna Patel has recently reported, several rights groups have sounded the alarm over the widespread and systemic abuse that Palestinian prisoners face at the hands of the Israeli authorities. These groups’ calls have been unintentionally buttressed by Israeli soldiers’ unapologetic videos of themselves torturing or demeaning Palestinian detainees, which they boastfully post on social media. Now, it seems that the phenomenon has expanded to mainstream Israeli television.

The two aforementioned reports on Channel 14 (threads with subtitles can be found here and here) contained footage of actual interrogation sessions during which torture was used. The Channel 13 report did not, but it exposed some of the worst prison conditions to be broadcast to the public. These conditions include forcing prisoners to live in inhumane conditions and subjecting them to torture and harassment. Here’s the 11-minute video with translated subtitles.

‘The feeling is one of pride’

“Here, we see the cells in which the Nukhba terrorists are held,” the narrator says.

The “Nukhba” refers to elite Hamas-led fighters who carried out the October 7 attack. In the cell, viewers notice metal bunkbeds without mattresses, and instead of a toilet, there is just a hole in the floor. The room is almost completely dark throughout the day, and prisoners have their hands and legs chained together.

We hear attack dogs barking constantly as prisoners are made to kneel while bound and blindfolded, their heads touching the floor.

“This is how it should be,” a guard says. “This is how a Nukhba prisoner should be… what happened on October 7 will never return.”

In another scene, a guard shouts at prisoners as dogs continue to bark incessantly. “Heads down! Heads on the floor!” he yells.

“There are many prisoners here that I personally saw at the [October 7] events,” a prison official says, taking pride in humiliating them. “The difference is that this time, he is afraid, shaking, with his head on the floor…no Allahu Akbar, nothing. You won’t hear a squeak from him.”

“They have no mattresses,” says a warden shift commander. “They have nothing…we control them 100% — their food, their shackling, their sleep…[we] show them we are the masters of the house.” Even without knowing the background to that phrase, to hear him say it is chilling.

“Masters of the house” was the election slogan of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Jewish Power leader and current Minister of National Security. Ben-Gvir declared war on Palestinian prisoners long before October 7, and this has included shutting down bakeries that supply bread to prisoners — described by Ben-Gvir as an “indulgence” — and drastically limiting prisoners’ water use. So now it’s become much worse.

While one is tempted to believe that all prisoners here are “Nukhba” members, it turns out that many of them aren’t even suspected of that. Rather, they were rounded up in Gaza after October 7, during mass arrests in which hundreds of Gazan men were stripped and paraded in a most sadistic demonstration of power. The mass arrests also included hundreds of women, including pregnant women detained with their babies. Israeli security officials told Haaretz that by their own estimate, “only 10 to 15 percent of the hundreds of the semi-naked and bound Gazan men arrested in the Strip during the recent days are Hamas members or those who identified with the organization.”

Back to the Channel 13 coverage, viewers can hear the nonstop blasting of the Zionist anthem, Am Israel Hai (“the people of Israel live”).

“The prison authorities claim that it is meant to boost the morale of the staff,” the narrator declares. “But it is clear that this is another part of the psychological warfare against the prisoners.”

Torture, in other words.

It’s hard to imagine the depths to which Israeli society has sunk. The official tells the Channel 13 reporter that “the feeling is one of pride.”

The reason such sadism has become formalized as a matter of policy is because this is what the Israeli public demands. The Israeli Democracy Institute released a survey last week showing that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis oppose “the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents at this time,” even if “via international bodies that are not linked to Hamas or to UNRWA.” For right-wing voters, the opposition to aid jumps from 68% to 80%.

This is not Israel’s Abu Ghraib moment, because when Abu Ghraib was revealed, most Americans were revolted. Israeli society, on the other hand, is thirsting for genocide. No wonder they consume such videos as entertainment on mainstream TV.

March 9, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

UNRWA staffers tortured by Israeli troops to falsely admit ‘Hamas links’

The Cradle | March 9, 2024

An unpublished report from UNRWA said some of its employees released from Israeli detention were tortured into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the 7 October attacks, Reuters reported on 9 March.

The testimonies are contained in a report by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reviewed by Reuters and dated February 2024.

“Agency staff members have been subject to threats and coercion by the Israeli authorities while in detention and pressured to make false statements against the Agency, including that the Agency has affiliations with Hamas and that UNRWA staff members took part in the 7 October 2023 atrocities,” the report says.

The report included allegations of abuse and torture in Israeli detention, including severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members.

Though waterboarding is widely viewed as torture by human rights groups, the Reuters report described Israeli actions only as “coercion” and “pressure” to force detained Palestinians to make false statements.

In addition to describing the torture of UNRWA employees, the report stated that Israel has subjected Palestinian detainees more broadly to beatings, humiliation, threats, dog attacks, and sexual violence. Some detainees have also died after Israel denied them medical treatment, the report added.

UNRWA communications director Juliette Touma said the agency planned to hand the information in the 11-page, unpublished report to human rights investigators at UN agencies and outside rights groups.

“When the war comes to an end there needs to be a series of inquiries to look into all violations of human rights,” she said.

Amid the torture and medical neglect, 27 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since the start of the war on 7 October.

Israel has accused UNRWA employees of participation in the 7 October Hamas attack on Israeli settlements and military bases. Israel provided no evidence for the claim, but 16 countries, including the US, paused $450 million in UNRWA funding in response, throwing its aid operations into crisis just as starvation was beginning to grip Gaza.

Israel’s campaign against UNRWA is part of a broader campaign started years ago to dismantle the agency, which helps keep the hope of Palestinian refugees returning to their stolen lands and homes in what is now Israel alive.

March 9, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

The special military operation, Avdeyevka, and Gaza

By Yuriy Zinin – New Eastern Outlook – 09.03.2024 

The name Avdeyevka, which is known to few in the Arab world, has featured prominently in the Middle Eastern media in recent weeks. Media commentators have examined the battle to liberate this city, its significance, and discussed the opinions of political analysts and observers on the future course of military operations in the conflict, including its international impact.

A number of military observers quoted in the media have referred to this event as “a turning point in the course of the war,” similar in significance to the conquest of Bakhmut by Russian forces last year, with both cities being of similar strategic and symbolic value.

For example, Rizk Al-Hawalda, a retired brigadier general and military expert from Jordan, believes that the capture of Avdeyevka will allow Russian forces to further strengthen their position in Ukraine, and increase their combat capability to defend the territories under their control.  For the Ukrainian forces, however, the capture means that their ability to retake what they have lost has been thwarted, leaving them to face the fact that this land has now become Russian territory, and that this loss is irreversible.

Other authors believe that the capture of this city will allow Russian forces to control the space around Donetsk and create logistical corridors to expand the scope of their operations.

The Egyptian Al Qahera News edition sees the capture of Avdeyevka as an “important victory” achieved by Russian troops just before the second anniversary of the start of the special military operation. They outnumber the enemy on the battlefield, both in terms of troop numbers and equipment, giving them an advantage when attacking Ukrainian formations, which are short on weapons and soldiers amid cracks in the West’s military support for Kiev.

These changes are also evident in the range of media responses from the Middle East. In general, they adopt a balanced tone when discussing the results of fighting after two years of the special military operation, and the political and economic consequences of the combat.

For example, the influential Saudi newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat opines that Washington and its allies have miscalculated. It is referring to the West’s imposition of anti-Russian sanctions, its attempts to undermine Russia’s economy, deprive it of revenues from hydrocarbon exports, and isolate it in the international arena, etc.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculations, it suggests, are based on common sense and are absolutely correct. He has carefully avoided the traps laid out for him and been able, with skill and step by step, to dismantle the economic blockade declared against his country, and the authors also admire the undeniable victories of Russian troops on the military frontlines.

A number of other Arab publications take a similar line. A review of the events in Ukraine, as they see it, teaches a number of lessons. One is that a state’s policy should not be based on promises of support from outside, and should be founded first and foremost on its own interests. Now, the West’s promises of support have failed.  The former media rhetoric that Ukraine is bulwark for Europe is on the wane.

Europeans are suffering from interruptions to the supply of Russian gas, supply chain disruption, inflation and interest rate hikes, etc. The European countries see resolving their own economic crises as their priority, and do not wish to suffer because of Ukraine. In short, the credibility of the Western coalition supporting Ukraine has fallen, and, as the present author notes, it looks as if Ukraine will have to go into the third year of the war alone.

Significantly, such assessments are increasingly being reflected in public opinion in the Middle East. Recently, Akhbar Al Aan, a leading news platform in Dubai (UAE) conducted a poll among its readers about Western military aid for Ukraine. To the question: would this help rescue Kiev, 85% of respondents answered “no” and just 15% answered “yes”.

Today, a number of political observers in the Middle East are drawing parallels between the conflict in Ukraine and the war in Gaza and reaching their own conclusions. In particular, they note the similarity of behavior styles of the leaders of the two countries: Volodymyr Zelensky and Benjamin Netanyahu. They conclude that both are characterized by a pathological desire to deny reality and are stubbornly following their chosen courses, despite the obvious failures of their strategies….

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky showed no sympathy for the Palestinian victims of the war in Gaza. He did not hesitate for a second, but supported the Israeli war machine, Akhbar Al Aan claims.

Other authors criticize the “blindness” of those countries that oppose Russia’s “invasion” of Ukraine but are unable to see what Israel has been doing in the Gaza Strip since October 2023.

In their view, one of the lessons of the Gaza conflict involves the issue of trust in the West. It promotes and continues to proclaim its values and principles as universal, applying to all people regardless of religion, race or nationality. But these trumpeted values have not been applied in Gaza.

Many political observers share this view. The disillusionment with Western values that has emerged in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Gaza Strip has left a deep wound in the hearts and minds of Arab elites who had placed their hopes in an engagement with Western civilization. This will push the Arab nations’ Islamic civilization, and the civilization of the Global South in general, further away from the West, Arab media commentators predict.

Yuri Zinin, senior researcher at the Center for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO).

March 9, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli rabbi calls for genocide of all Palestinians in Gaza

Al Mayadeen | March 8, 2024

The mass killing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip “is permissible according to the halakhic principles,” the head of a Jewish religious school in occupied Yafa, Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, stated according to Israeli news website Ynet.

A recording of the extremist’s answers to questions on the Gaza Strip was published a few hours ago on YouTube and is available for the public.

Halakha or Jewish Law, which also translates to “the way to behave or act,” is held as divine law among Orthodox Jews such as Mali, who called for the extermination of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

When asked about what should be done to infants and the elderly, Mali simply answered, “The same.”

Mali founded the religious school Shirat Moshe and has called upon his students to strictly follow the orders of the Israeli occupation forces, saying that if IOF soldiers do not kill Palestinians, then Palestinians will kill them. It is worth noting that Shirat Moshe students serve in the IOF, despite other schools of Orthodox Judaism refusing military service.

The extremist stressed that the main principle of the war on Gaza is that “no soul remains alive,” urging Israelis to carry on the genocide against Palestinians.

March 8, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Western soldiers and spies flip off Lebanon’s sovereignty

By Radwan Mortada | The Cradle | March 7, 2024

Among West Asian countries, few face the brunt of foreign intelligence meddling as Lebanon does. Its sovereignty is routinely disregarded by intelligence services from abroad, who operate within its borders with brazen impunity. In some cases, foreign militaries have even sought unrestricted access to the country.

These clandestine activities not only violate Lebanese law but also undermine its national security. The recent incursion of Dutch special forces into Beirut’s southern suburb, a stronghold of Hezbollah, is the latest such incident.

Under the guise of evacuating Dutch nationals, these foreign militants were armed with military-grade weapons, ammunition, and equipment without coordination with Lebanese authorities, demonstrating a level of freedom not permitted even in their own country.

Spying for Israel 

Last week, the Beirut Military Court convicted Russian national Yuri Rinatovich Chaykin of espionage, sentencing him to eight years behind bars for spying on behalf of Israel. Chaykin’s expertise in lock picking led him to make an attempted breach into a secret facility belonging to Hezbollah, only to be thwarted by surveillance cameras.

His arrest at Beirut Airport while trying to leave the country unveiled a web of espionage activities, including the collection of sensitive intelligence and reconnaissance missions conducted on behalf of Israel.

During his interrogation, Chaykin admitted that he worked for Israeli intelligence and that he repeatedly visited Lebanon with his wife and child, whom he used as a cover for his activities. He also admitted to collecting information and data in the southern suburbs and south Lebanon at the request of his Israeli handlers, who provided him with maps of Hezbollah facilities and asked him to photograph them.

Chaykin’s conviction marks a notable precedent, as Lebanon has long been considered a playground for foreign intelligence services seeking to gather crucial information about Hezbollah. Often entering the country as tourists, journalists, or diplomats, these operatives typically enjoy diplomatic immunity and are shielded from accountability by their respective governments, evading significant consequences for their actions.

‘Tourists’ and diplomats as tools 

Among these is an Italian ‘tourist’ recruited by Israeli intelligence. His first task was to photograph an obituary paper hanging on the wall of a church in the predominantly Christian Jounieh area, east of Beirut.

At first glance, this may seem like a trivial mission, but his Israeli operators were likely seeking to ensure that their agent was actually in Lebanon. His second assignment was to monitor a warehouse on the airport road in the southern suburb near a football field belonging to the Al-Ahed Sports Club affiliated with Hezbollah. It was the same site Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu falsely claimed at the UN General Assembly in September 2018 that Hezbollah had established a factory for manufacturing precision missiles.

The Italian ‘tourist’ surveilled the location by taxi and was able to photograph it using a miniature camera attached to a fishing rod so as not to arouse the driver’s suspicions when he stuck it out of the car window. He asked the driver to pass by the site several times so that he could take as many pictures as possible from different directions.

The Italian operative’s next mission was to make contact with an arms dealer in the town of Brital, situated in the Bekaa region of eastern Lebanon, to procure a grenade launcher. This mission included orchestrating a plan to bomb the warehouse before hastily fleeing to Beirut airport for departure.

But the ‘tourist’s’ inquiries about his arms dealer contact aroused suspicions in the taxi driver, who decided to alert Hezbollah-affiliated security personnel. The Italian spy was swiftly apprehended, but the Lebanese military judiciary, under pressure from the Italian embassy, handed a lenient sentence to the spy.

In a separate incident last month, Hezbollah’s security service intercepted a Spanish diplomat in the Al-Kafaat area of the southern Beirut suburbs, who was caught photographing a street on his mobile phone.

Upon being transferred to the Lebanese General Security Service, the Spaniard claimed he was lost and had been trying to send the pictures to his embassy colleagues to arrange a pickup. Despite possessing a diplomatic passport, he refused to grant investigators access to his phone. The embassy’s intervention secured his release from Lebanese authorities without scrutiny of the phone’s contents.

‘Evacuation plans’

Last week, the Lebanese “Al-Mahatta” YouTube channel revealed that Hezbollah security forces arrested six armed Dutchmen in the Bir al-Abd area of Beirut’s southern suburb. It was discovered that the Dutchmen were special forces and were allegedly in the midst of a security operation simulating the evacuation of Dutch citizens and diplomats – in a Hezbollah-controlled area.

Hezbollah interrogated the six foreign militants for 24 hours before transferring custody the next day to Lebanese Army Intelligence officers. During their questioning, the men admitted to being Dutch ‘soldiers’ operating under orders from their Ministry of Foreign Affairs and were training to evacuate two employees of the Dutch embassy who lived in the southern suburb.

Despite receiving this information about unlawful activities conducted on Lebanese territory by armed foreigners, a Lebanese military judge released the Dutchmen that same day. Had it not been for the insistence of Army Intelligence officers on obtaining their statements, the militants likely would have spent a mere ten hours under interrogation.

Notably, the Dutch embassy in Beirut and its foreign ministry did not issue a formal apology, and Lebanese authorities did not release any official statement denouncing the violation. Such complacency only serves to embolden illegal foreign military missions that flout Lebanese law – and sovereignty – with impunity.

Evacuation planning has been a concern for foreign embassies in Lebanon since the Al-Aqsa Flood operation on 7 October set off widespread military confrontations within West Asia, with a notable escalation along Lebanon’s border with Israel, where hundreds have been killed in heavy clashes.

Foreign embassies have mobilized equipment, weapons, and special forces ostensibly to facilitate the evacuation of their nationals and diplomats in the event of escalated conflict. This was purportedly the case with the Dutch soldiers, as noted by the Dutch daily De Telegraaf.

The US, British, Dutch, and Canadian embassies, among others, have been at the forefront of these special forces arrangements, but doubts persist about the actual objectives of their military missions, particularly given the unwavering support of these nations to Israel’s expanding war against Lebanon and its ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Moreover, as in past evacuations – and as these very same embassies frequently notify their citizens in Lebanon – nationals are expected to make their own way to exit ports and airports in the event of an evacuation.

Vulnerabilities in Lebanon’s security apparatus

On 5 January, Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar cited Lebanese military sources saying that British intelligence services are using dozens of watchtowers on the Lebanese–Syrian border – which the UK helped establish during the Syrian war – to collect information about cross-border weapons transfers to the Lebanese resistance.

The sources said the British were providing Lebanese soldiers in the watchtowers with photographs of Syrian, Iranian, and Russian weapons suspected of being transported into Lebanon so that they could identify and seize them.

Earlier this year, Al-Akhbar also reported that Lebanese Army Intelligence refused to grant a former British officer, now part of a CNN team, an entry permit to southern Lebanon on suspicion of collecting information about the military activities of Hezbollah and the Hamas movement.

The newspaper alleges that Officer “Wayne G” had previously been part of the British military team charged with training the four land border regiments of the Lebanese Army before moving to Ukraine as part of a CNN-affiliated unit where he worked closely alongside Ukrainian forces.

After the events of 7 October, “Wayne G” joined the CNN team in Beirut. Al Akhbar further noted that the former British officer had also tried to obtain a permit to enter southern Lebanon through the BBC team in Beirut.

The absence of robust, official Lebanese measures and judicial rulings that would significantly deter espionage and military activity of individuals recruited by Israel, whether local or foreign, except in rare instances, leaves Lebanon vulnerable to multi-source intelligence breaches targeting the nation’s resistance.

These ramifications extend beyond Hezbollah: British and other foreign intelligence agencies have spent years infiltrating Lebanon’s various intelligence, security, and telecommunications apparatus, posing a threat to the country’s national security and endangering the lives of its citizens.

March 8, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Biden’s pier for Gaza is a hollow gesture that will change almost nothing

By Jonathan Cook | March 8, 2024

A few observations on President Biden’s building of a “temporary pier” – or what his officials are grandly calling a “port” – to get aid into Gaza:

1. Though no one is mentioning it, Biden is actually violating Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza with his plan. Gaza doesn’t have a sea port, or an airport, because Israel, its occupier, has long banned it from having either.

Israel barred anything getting into Gaza that didn’t come through the land crossings it controls. Israel stopped international aid flotillas, often violently, from reaching Gaza to bring in medicine. The blockade also created a captive market for Israel’s own poor-quality goods, like damaged fruit and veg, and allowed Israel to skim off money at the land crossings that should have gone to the Palestinians in fees and duties.

2. It will take many weeks for the US to build this pier off-shore and get it up and running. Why the delay? Because every western capital, including the United States, has supported the blockade for the past 17 years.

The siege of Gaza caused gradual malnutrition among the enclave’s children, rather than the current rapid starvation. By helping Israel inflict collective punishment on Gaza for all those years, the US and Europe were complicit in a gross and enduring violation of international law, even before the current genocide.

With his pier, Biden isn’t reversing that long-standing collusion in a crime against humanity. He has stressed it will be temporary. In other words, it will be back to business as usual in Gaza afterwards: any children who survive will once again be allowed to starve in slow-motion, at a rate that doesn’t register with the establishment media and put pressure on Washington to be seen to be doing something.

3. Biden could get aid into Gaza much faster than by building a pier, if he wanted to. He could simply insist that Israel let aid trucks through the land crossings, and threaten it with serious repercussions should it fail to comply. He could threaten to withhold the US bombs he is sending to kill more children in Gaza. Or he could threaten to cut off the billions in military aid Washington sends to Israel every year. Or he could threaten to refuse to cast a US veto to protect Israel from diplomatic fallout at the United Nations. He could do any of that and more, but he chooses not to.

4. Even after Biden buys Israel a few more weeks to further aggressively starve Palestinians in Gaza, while we wait for his temporary pier to be completed, nothing may actually change in practice. Israel will still get to carry out the same checks it currently does at the land crossings but instead in Lanarca, Cyprus, where the aid will be loaded on to ships. In other words, Israel will still be able to create the same interminable hold-ups using “security concerns” as the pretext.

5. Biden isn’t changing course – temporarily – because he suddenly cares about the people, or even the children, of Gaza. They have been suffering in their open-air prison, to varying degrees, for decades. If he had cared, he would have done something to end that suffering after he became president. If he had done something then, October 7 might never have happened, and all those lives lost on both sides – lives continuing to be lost on the Palestinian side every few minutes – might have been saved.

And if he really cared, he wouldn’t have helped Israel in its efforts to destroy UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinians and a vital lifeline for Gaza, by freezing its funding, based on unevidenced claims against the agency by Israel.

No, Biden doesn’t care about Palestinian suffering, or about the fact that, while he’s been busy eating ice cream, many, many tens of thousands of children have been murdered, maimed or orphaned – and the rest starved. He cares about the polls. His timetable for helping Palestinians is being strictly dictated by the schedule of the presidential election. He needs to look like Gaza’s saviour when Democrats are deciding who they are voting for.

He and the Democratic party are betting voters are dumb enough to fall for this charade. Please don’t prove them right.

March 8, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »