RT | March 12, 2022
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has reportedly advised Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to Russia’s proposals to end the ongoing bloody conflict in his country, according to Israeli media on Friday. Top officials in Kiev and Israel have denied the reports, however.
“If I were you, I would think about the lives of my people and take the offer,” the Jerusalem Post quoted Bennett as having told Zelensky on Tuesday during a phone call, citing an unnamed senior Ukrainian official.
“Bennett told us to surrender,” the official said, according to the Post, which added that Kiev apparently had “no intention” of agreeing to President Putin’s demands.
However, a top official in Bennett’s office quickly denied that any suggestion to surrender had been made, saying the Israeli PM “doesn’t intend to give Zelensky any recommendations or advice at any stage,” Axios reported. … Full article
RT | March 12, 2022
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has expressed his readiness for negotiations with Russia. He requested that the Israeli prime minister convene peace talks in Jerusalem.
“A group of Ukrainians and Russian representatives are discussing certain issues. They began talking about something, and not just throwing out ultimatums,” Zelensky said on Saturday, during a press conference with foreign media.
Kiev is of the view that any high-profile talks with Russia should be held on neutral territory, Zelensky said, naming Israel as a potential host for such negotiations.
“We spoke with [Israeli Prime Minister Naftali] Bennett, and I said that today it is not right [to hold] meetings in Russia, in Belarus. I’m not talking about technical meetings – I’m talking about leaders’ meetings. Do I think that Israel can be such a land, and Jerusalem? Yes, I think so. And I told him that,” Zelensky stated.
However, the president said, if the outcome was to be successful, his country would need certain “security guarantees” that the ongoing conflict was settled not only from the perspective of Russia, but also from that of the West. Israel could act as a guarantor in that respect, he suggested. … Full article
March 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Israel, Ukraine |
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The neocons and their allies might be making it happen
Well, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle and there is no easy way to encourage it to return. Thanks to a relentless flow of propaganda, the American public has become increasingly convinced that the United States “looks weak” and must stand up against Vladimir Putin. Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations is now calling for “regime change” in Russia while Senator Robert Wicker and Congressman Adam Kinzinger as well as several former Joint Chiefs of Staff generals are demanding that the United States establish a “no fly zone” over Ukraine, which would require US destruction of Russia’s air defense capabilities and shooting down of Russian planes among other measures. If that were to occur the war could quickly turn nuclear. Other media and government “experts” are speculating that Russian President Vladimir Putin is insane with much of the other disinformation coming from Russia haters like Bill Browder and former Ambassador Michael McFaul. But FOX news commentator Sean Hannity possibly wins the hate race, calling for the assassination of Putin because has he has “forfeited his right to live,” a view also shared by Senator Lindsey Graham.
Former GOP Vice President Mike Pence has called for anyone supporting Russia to be kicked out of the party which will no doubt produce a purge of members who are reluctant to go to war on behalf of foreign country and no ally Ukraine. Meanwhile a completely deranged Senator Mitt Romney has described anyone speaking up for Russia as “almost treasonous,” suggesting that Romney would benefit from looking up the definition of “treason” in the US Constitution. And the completely looney-tunes televangelist Pat Robertson is warning that Russia attacked Ukraine but the real target is Israel, which will result in a great war and Armageddon leading to the “End Times” when the world will end and all true believers will be raptured up to heaven.
But other more stable folks are making two basic arguments to justify the increasing engagement of Washington in the fighting. The first is the vague claim that what Ukraine versus Russia is all about is the maintenance of “freedom and democracy” in Europe. That is generally how President Joe Biden and other politicians describe it since it does not require any further explanation or discussion. The other argument is rather an elaboration of that, claiming that there was some kind of post-Second World War consensus that aggressive war to acquire someone else’s land should be condemned by all nations and steps should be taken to contain and repress any such activity. This led to the creation of the United Nations.
The problem is that neither justification for involving the US in a conflict where it is not actually threatened requires something more substantial given the danger of escalation of the fighting to the point where the world’s two leading nuclear powers would find themselves going head-to-head. And there is the little matter of history to reckon with, which tells us that not everything taking place can be reduced to such simplistic terms to justify taking action. The status quo in eastern Europe is a consequence of the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991-2 and, beyond that, of the configuration of the Russian Empire of the Tsars that preceded communism. Ukraine itself has had its borders adjusted numerous times.
Currently, the Ukrainian government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is seeking to broaden the conflict with Russia by attempting to join the European Union while also calling for weapons as well as direct military intervention from NATO. He has called for volunteers to join the fight as a “foreign legion” and has also contacted Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and suggested that Bennett persuade Putin to participate in peace talks in Jerusalem. There has also been a less conciliatory appeal to world Jewry to join in on the attack directed against Moscow’s economy. In a video circulated among Jewish international organizations Zelenskyy said “Don’t you see what is happening? That is why it is very important that millions of Jews around the world not remain silent right now. Nazism is born in silence.”
There is also more than a measure of hypocrisy in the Biden Administration taking the lead on punishing Russia for aggression. The United States has gone to war with a non-threatening Vietnam and has destroyed governments and engaged in completely illegal military occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya and Syria. It has assassinated senior officials from Iran. It has not been punished for any of those actions. Its ally Israel bombs Syria on nearly a daily basis, engages in assassinations, kills Palestinian children, and annexes Arab land that it has obtained by force on the Golan Heights and West Bank, dispossessing the original inhabitants. When that happens, the US Congress and White House look the other way. All the Israeli war crimes as well as those being carried out by the Saudis against Yemen’s Houthis have been endorsed by the successive Bush, Obama, Trump and now the Biden administrations.
Beyond that, Ukraine is no democracy. The nation’s current government came into power after the 2014 coup engineered by President Barack Obama’s State Department at an estimated cost of $5 billion. The regime change was driven by State Department Russophobe Victoria Nuland with a little help from international globalist George Soros. It removed the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych who was unfortunately for him a friend of Russia. Ukraine is reputedly both the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe, witness the Hunter Biden saga. Zelenskyy who is Jewish and claims to have holocaust victims in his family tree is a former comedian who won election in 2019. He replaced another Jewish president Petro Poroshenko, after being heavily funded and promoted by yet another fellow Jew and Ukraine’s richest oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who is also an Israeli citizen and lives in Israel. As an entertainer, one of Zelenskyy’s musical acts consisted of his playing a piano with his penis, suggesting that Ukrainian humor has some unique characteristics.
After the election of the post-coup new model Ukrainian government in 2014, opposition parties were declared illegal and some leaders were arrested for “treason,” the media was censored and the parliament outlawed Russian, the language of a third of the population, as an official language. Then the government declared war on the predominantly Russian Eastern provinces and, for past eight years, has killed 14,000 people.
I keep asking myself, why do Washington policymakers and the media who should know better give so much of a damn about Ukraine? It is of no strategic value to the United States and Russian demands were both reasonable and negotiable. So the claims that Ukraine’s defense is intended to keep Europe democratic and free is just so much window dressing to justify waging economic war on Russia. And, in any event, American hypocrisy is clearly visible regarding the Kremlin’s possible intention to annex a couple of heavily Russian Ukrainian regions. It is not in any way worse than what Israel has been doing in Jerusalem, on the West Bank and on the Golan Heights, all endorsed by successive US administrations. So what’s it all really about?
After considering the parallels with Israel, it then occurred to me that maybe there was the usual angle, meaning that it was all about “protecting” Jews, the argument that succeeds in Washington where all else fails and makes the Bidens, Blinkens, Pelosis and Schumers stand up and salute. Even a befuddled Donald Trump has seen the light and is now calling the Russian intervention a “holocaust” and is joking about false-flagging US F-22 fighter bombers as Chinese and “bombing the shit out of Russia.” The Jewish media is also showering Zelenskyy with praise, referring to him as a genuine “Jewish hero,” a modern Maccabee resisting oppression, a David versus Goliath. T-shirts bearing his image are being sold that read “Resisting tyrants since Pharaoh” while the Jewish community in New York City is raising millions of dollars for Ukrainian aid.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that a “2020 demographic survey estimated that besides a ‘core’ population of 43,000 Jews, around 200,000 Ukrainians are technically eligible for Israeli citizenship, meaning that they have identifiable Jewish ancestry. The European Jewish Congress says that number could be as high as 400,000.” If that is true, it is one of the largest Jewish communities in the world and it includes at least 8,000 Israelis, many of whom are trying to return to Israel. Other Ukrainian Jews are also fleeing the country.
Israel, with close ties to both nations through the Jewish diaspora, has been attempting to play both sides, offering support to Ukraine while also not condemning Russia. Its Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is increasingly playing the role of mediator between the two adversaries, having met with Putin and spoken several times with Zelenskyy. Jews, some of whom have Israeli citizenship, are, in fact, disproportionately represented among the so-called oligarchs in both countries, controlling key sectors of the respective economies. Several Russian Jewish oligarchs have already fled on their superyachts to ports providing non-extradition in an attempt to preserve their assets from US and European sanctions directed against Moscow’s economy.
So there appears to be a Jewish/Israeli story that is part and parcel of what is going on in Ukraine. It has long been recognized by many that a particular antipathy directed against Russia permeates the neocon world view. Most neocons are Jewish and a number of them are running the State Department while also holding high level positions elsewhere in the Biden Administration as well as in the foreign policy think tanks, including Haass at the influential Council on Foreign Relations. Likewise, the intensely Russophobic US and Western media and social networking sites are disproportionately Jewish in their ownership and staffing. As US-Russian negotiations leading up the current fighting were clearly designed to fail by the Biden Administration, one has to wonder if this war is largely a product of a long enduring ethno-religious hatred. I am speculating of course, but there is even some historical evidence to support such a view in the Iraq invasion and the hostility towards Iran, both of which have been and continue to be driven by Israeli interests, not those of the United States. Is Russia the enemy a similar contrivance? It has to be considered…
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.
March 8, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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Israeli authorities have seized dozens of cryptocurrency wallets from accounts allegedly affiliated with the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, in what they claim is a crackdown on funding to the group through digital means.
The seizure of around 30 wallets from 12 accounts was approved by Israeli Defence Minister, Benny Gantz, who said in a statement that “We continue to expand our tools to deal with terrorism, and with companies that supply it with an economic oxygen pipeline.”
The wallets – reportedly owned by an exchange company named Al-Mutahadun in the Gaza Strip and having had an estimated value of tens of thousands of Israeli shekels – were confiscated in a joint operation by the Defence Ministry, police and military.
According to Israeli news outlets, the wallets were the result of Hamas’s efforts to acquire funds from international donors through the use of cryptocurrencies – an experimental project launched by the group around three years ago to help counter its financial troubles and circumvent the traditional banking system.
Al-Mutahadun is reportedly owned by the Shamlah family, prominent amongst the Hamas leadership, who Gantz said “assists the Hamas terror group, and especially its military wing, by transferring funds amounting to tens of millions of dollars a year.”
In 2020, Gantz authorised the seizure of $4 billion in funding allegedly transferred from Iran to Hamas and, last year, Israel claimed that it seized $121,000 sent to the group from members in Turkey.
While the Israeli reports cannot be verified, if true, then Tel Aviv’s seizure of the digital wallets signifies its advancing capability to counter alleged financial aid to Hamas in the form of cryptocurrencies – a commodity that has long been lauded by many as relatively safe from the reach of states and banking institutions. It was in July when the Israeli government launched its campaign to target crypto wallets it says is used by Hamas.
March 1, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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israel has been a good laboratory for covid intervention assessment. they are a small nation in one climate zone with a small population, good record keeping, a pretty honest set of health agencies, and modern healthcare system. they did lots of testing and they also pursued damn near every mitigation in the book from lockdowns to masking to mandating vaccines and vaccine passports. and unlike many places, they were extremely serious about compliance. they even have an very useful control group in palestine that did almost none of these things.
this provides an interesting opportunity to measure the efficacy of such interventions. at this point, it’s so well established that masking and distancing have no effect that we can more or less drop them from consideration and focus solely on vaccines. (to the extent they worked, they would drive apparent vaccine efficacy in israel anyhow).
and the two states have had remarkably similar overall outcomes and had near identical cumulative deaths per capita through 2021. however, it looks like this might be starting to diverge and this creates a useful comparison.
about three weeks ago, i left THIS POST with some questions:
we now have enough data to start to answer this.
the relative vaxx rates are very different and israel is over 50% boosted vs ~0 in palestine. so, if boosters are working, this is about as good a natural experiment setup as you could ask for.
cases are a problematic metric due to variance in testing rates (and we know vaccines do not stop cases) and palestine does not report hospital data. but we can compare deaths, so this is the figure i used.
OWID is the source for all data.
this series is striking. as has commonly been the case, palestine lagged israel by a couple weeks. (i suspect this is reporting lag, this data is day of report, not day of incidence).
assuming this peak holds, the palestine peak was 21% below winter seasonal peak last year. israel was up 13%. that’s a meaningful divergence and the israeli figure is deeply unexpected given a milder variant and 18 months of vulnerable cohort depletion.
this starts to hint at something being quite wrong and also starts to rule out “variant” as the source, because it did not drive that outcome in palestine.
it can be notoriously difficult to eyeball area under curve, so i have plotted cumulative deaths here:
as can be seen, israel had gone pancake flat in november 2021 through jan 2022. then it inflected severely. this is omicron which hit the levant in the second half of december 2021. clinically, you’d expect about a 24 day log to show up in deaths and this tends to jibe with the data i’ve seen all over the world.
it’s possible that boosters were having some effect in bending the curve, but to the extent that they did, it was either fleeting or rapidly inverted in the face of a new variant. (or both)
this becomes extremely easy to see when we zoom into 2022 and start a cumulative count from 1/1/2022.
there is a powerful inflection in israel that does not exist in palestine and israel has seen roughly twice the cumulative per capital death rate of palestine so far this year.
if boosters are effective in preventing deaths from omicron, it sure does not show up here.
this also lets us rule out “omicron” as a source of greater underlying virulence/fatality. if this were so, it would be manifest in both places. the fact that it is not doing so supports the idea that omicron is an OAS/hoskins effect evolution taking advantage of the narrow antigenic fixation generated by mRNA and adenovirus vaccines. it also seems to show that this advantage is NOT, as many claim, limited to cases. it seems to carry through to deaths as well.
we can also compare israel to itself and see how this highly vaccinated and boosted period compares to the prior year when vaccination was zero. from this data as well, we see strong support for the OAS hypothesis.
israel had been doing better. then omi came and everything changed.
(to remove the skew from widely varying sample rate driven by big shifts in testing levels, i have normalized all cases data to 10 tests per day per 1000 population though given the absurdity of calling a high Ct PCR+ a “case” even lacking symptoms, all case data is troublesome to assess, but we work with what we have, not with what we wish we had)
cases nearly tripled and hospitalizations nearly doubled. deaths rose 13%.
according to israeli authorities and hospitals, this was not driven by “the unvaxxed” but rather by the vaccinated. they seem to make up more than their share of severe outcomes though one must we wary of simpson’s paradoxes. (more HERE)
it might be possible to construct an argument whereby vaccine efficacy is claimed on any given infection (once you are sick, better to be vaxxed) but if that is, in aggregate, swamped by a rise in cases (and we know vaccines lead to more cases, not fewer) then this is still not much of an argument. having vaccines reduce risk of hospitalization per case by 50% but tripling case risk is still a 50% rise in overall hospitalization.
the aggregate data is possibly supportive of this claim outcome, but it’s far from certain either way.
but still, if the overall outcomes are worse post vaxx in the active arm but not in control, from a public health perspective do we really care why?
cases were trending MUCH lower. then that changed in a hurry.
zooming in makes it all the more clear.
even adjusted for testing, this is a massive surge in cases.
we see the same in hospitalization.
and see the crossover to worse outcomes in 2022 when we zoom in.
overall, they are 39% higher in aggregate YTD vs prior yr.
deaths have not yet caught up, but appear likely to do so.
taken as a whole, this is pretty damning of the booster programs.
israel saw a big spike in deaths that was not present in the palestine control group.
it saw a massive jump in cases, a big jump in hospitalizations, and is rapidly converging on deaths (which will lag the others by ~3-4 weeks).
there is just no way to spin this as a win. it looks like an own goal.
this was the known and knowable outcome of widespread inoculation with a leaky vaccine. it is, in fact, WHY we do not use leaky vaccines.
they will rapidly and inevitably select for escape or vaccine enhanced variants. and now it makes you worse and worst of all, locks you into a suboptimal antigenic response pattern that may keep you from EVER generating real sterilizing immunity. the truly nasty part of this may take years to really see.
omicron was not “bad luck” it was invoked consequence of ill conceived intervention. even assuming they ever worked as claimed (dubious) these vaccines were always going to fail because that’s what leaky vaccines do.
this was known and knowable. the drug companies that made them knew it. the regulatory agencies that approved them knew it. and many, many doctors, researchers and public health officials all over the world knew it. they were silenced, threatened, and attacked for it. and this is the bitter fruit of that harvest.
in the US, the data has been manipulated and misused so badly as to render it outright fraud. it becomes obvious when one compares the US data (which calls all “unknown or undetermined” patients “unvaxxed” and used the fact that the EPIC system is awful to create a false sense of VE) with a system that keeps good records as longtime gatopal™ HOLD2, newly on substack, has done here.
like so much of the rest of the covid response, we knew better than to do this, but it was done anyway.
and now, the US is lying about it while others are, at least, coming clean.
but this truth will be too vast to hide much longer, even behind these big lies.
and american health and regulatory agencies are going to have a great deal to answer for.
dr atlas (with whom many at rational ground, including even notorious internet felines, had the pleasure to collaborate) is correct in everything he says here except in his use of the world “almost.”
February 27, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Israel, Palestine, United States |
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Leading law firm Bindmans LLP has sent a formal letter of complaint to Facebook over its “anti-Palestinian bias.” Instructed by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), the London based firm demanded explanation for the “systematic” and “far-reaching” censorship of content and accounts related to Palestine.
The complaint was also sent to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of freedom of opinion and expression. It requests an urgent review of, and explanation for, the decisions made by Facebook, which was rebranded last October as Meta Inc, to suspend accounts and posts which are affiliated to Palestinian news agencies, commentators and journalists.
Monday’s letter of complaint to Facebook is the second in nine months sent by Bindmans LLP to the social media giant. A previous communication submitted in May 2021 was made on behalf of five journalists and news agencies in Palestine. Facebook is said to have interfered with their accounts and/or posts and was accused of breaching their fundamental right to freedom of expression as well as its own Corporate Human Rights Policy.
In the May 2021 complaint, the main questions posed by Bindmans LLP included whether the censorship decisions were carried out by an algorithm or by a person exercising their discretion, and details regarding Facebook’s policy in justifying their censorship decisions, in addition to steps taken by the company to resolve unfair censorship.
In its response to the letter, a month later, Facebook said that it had investigated the accounts referenced in the letter and, after further review, has restored content and/or accounts where applicable. Notably, no substantial answers were provided to any of the main questions cited in the original communication.
Despite the commitments made by Facebook in their letter sent in June 2021, the censorship remained, said ICJP in its press release detailing the content of the complaint. The centre is an independent organisation of lawyers, academics and politicians that work to promote and support Palestinian rights.
Monitoring group, Sada Social, which has been documenting the suspension of Palestinian content and accounts on Facebook, recorded in 2021 alone, hundreds of instances of inappropriate censorship of social media content in support of the rights of Palestinians. This censorship was exacerbated significantly during the last Israeli offensive on Gaza in May 2021.
The complaint reinstates the request that Meta/Facebook discloses and reviews its decision-making process, and explains why the accounts were closed, suspended or posts taken down, and whether in doing so an algorithm or human discretion was used.
February 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | Facebook, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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UK Publisher, Pearson, has given assurances that UK lobby groups supporting the State of Israel will no longer play a role in their editorial decision-making process in the soon to be released textbook covering the Middle East.
Pearson, a major international education company, which oversees national exams for 14- to 16-year-olds in the UK, came under the spotlight over two of its GCSE school textbooks, after revelations last year that they had been significantly altered following pressure from pro-Israel groups. GCSEs are the academic qualifications studied for by UK high school students to the age of 16.
Details of the extensive “biased” and “misleading” alterations were exposed by a report, by Professors John Chalcraft and James Dickins, Middle East specialists in History and in Arabic, respectively, and members of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP).
Their eight-page report uncovered “dangerously misleading” changes to the books published by Pearson, titled “Conflict in the Middle East” and “The Middle East: Conflict, Crisis and Change”, both by author Hilary Brash, which are read by hundreds of thousands of GCSE students annually.
The alterations were made following intervention by the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD), working together with UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). Both are amongst the most vocal pro-Israeli groups in the UK.
Pearson finally withdrew the textbooks in June. The publisher confirmed earlier this month that it is partnering with specialist educational charity, Parallel Histories, to develop new educational materials on the topic.
Writing in the Times Higher Education recently, Chalcraft urged academics to keep an eye out for bias in school textbooks. Recounting what he called the “undue influence of pro-Israel groups on a history textbook”, Chalcraft stressed the value of engagement to avoid a similar interference in the future.
Commenting on the report Chalcraft co-authored with Dickins, he said that the modified textbook “read to [me] as though it had been reworked by lawyers acting as if for a client (Israel), rather than by historians acting to educate schoolchildren about a complex history”.
Equally problematic, warned Chalcraft, was the discovery “that the pro-Israeli lobby groups had been invited into the editorial process, and had collaborated with Pearson over many months”. He revealed that no pro-Palestinian groups had been invited to the table and that “something” had gone “dangerously wrong”.
Chalcraft said that he and Dickins had been reassured by Pearson that no lobby groups are involved in the production of new materials on the topic.
February 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Israel, Middle East, Palestine, UK, Zionism |
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Senior Hamas official Hisham Qasem has condemned Australia’s intention to designate his Movement as a terror group as “a reflection of blatant bias in favor of the Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people.”
In press remarks to Quds Press, Qasem said that “the Israeli occupation regime sees every opponent as a terrorist party, although it practices organized state terrorism day and night against the Palestinian people at home and abroad.”
“Hamas has never been hostile to any country of the world and only resisted the occupation inside the occupied Palestinian territory, which makes any terror designation by Australia ‘a step against logical reasoning’ and ‘without foundation.’ It is rather complete adoption of the occupation’s aggressive narrative,” the Hamas official underlined.
“The Australian step against the Movement will not change its conviction about upholding its path of resisting the occupation until it achieves its final goal of liberation and return,” he said, stressing that Hamas would never deviate from this path.
Flouting the fact that Hamas is a national liberation movement that resists an occupying power in accordance with international laws and resolutions, the Australian government has declared its intent to add the Hamas Movement to its list of terror groups.
Australia had previously listed the armed wing of Hamas, al-Qassam Brigades, as a terror group in 2003, but the new designation, which will come into effect in April, will blacklist the Movement in its entirety.
February 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Australia, Hamas, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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An unmanned Israeli navy vessel test fires missile off Ashkelon
The US Navy is examining the possibility of bolstering its joint operations in the Middle East with Israeli-made unmanned vessels, a US official told the Reuters news agency on Tuesday.
The report did not specify who would be operating the boats, but noted that additional Israeli military involvement in the Gulf region could anger Iran.
The unnamed official said the US military was examining a number of options, including using Israeli unmanned vessels during current Gulf exercises.
The Zionist entity is a participant in a massive US-led naval exercise focusing on unmanned naval systems and the use of artificial intelligence. The International Maritime Exercise, known by its acronym IMX, kicked off last month and is set to end on Thursday.
The Israeli navy has a fleet of unmanned ships that are used to complement its manned patrol boats around the occupied Palestinian coastal waters.
The Reuters report said the US was showing interest in Israeli-made surface drones that can be deployed in tandem with air and underwater UAVs.
“The Israelis are definitely vested in leveraging this technology,” the unnamed official said, adding that a US fleet commander had made a recent trip to Haifa to examine the surface drones.
The comments by the US official were made during a trip by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to Bahrain, the first official visit by an Israeli premier to the Gulf kingdom, Israeli media reported.
February 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Israel, Middle East, United States, Zionism |
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In 2017, the Trump administration announced its withdrawal from the UN Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), citing “mounting arrears at UNESCO, the need for fundamental reform in the organisation, and continuing anti-Israel bias at UNESCO.” A few hours later, Israel followed suit, with then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describing the organisation as “a theatre of the absurd.” The Israeli ambassador to the UN at the time, Danny Danon, opined, “Today is a new day at the UN where there is a price to pay for discrimination against Israel.” On 1 January 2019, the US and Israel officially left the organisation.
Last year, though, the US announced its intention to re-join UNESCO, “to counter Chinese influence or promote other US interests,” reported Reuters. The Jerusalem Post added that Israel has no intention of rejoining, although last year Foreign Minister Yair Lapid considered following in America’s footsteps, arguing that Israel’s absence from UNESCO had no effect on “anti-Israel bias”. He also admitted that Israel’s decision to quit UNESCO made it difficult to influence foreign policy.
To rejoin UNESCO, the US Congress would have to waive a bill that prevents Washington from funding international organisations which accept the Palestinian Authority as a full member. The US decision is said to have been influenced by UNESCO changing its approach towards Israel, while America is expected to counter any anti-Israel bias, following talks between Israeli and US officials.
Israel had opposed UNESCO’s designations of Palestinian heritage sites, which it described as erasing history and memory. Never mind that Israel is built upon the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the erasure of their collective memory and sites. Perhaps the biggest and most obvious erasure in Israeli memory is that the settler-colonial state did not exist prior to the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) and so neither Palestinians nor UNESCO can be faulted for designating Palestinian heritage sites which date from well before Israel was created as “Palestinian”.
Moreover, accusing UNESCO of anti-Israel bias follows no logic, given that UNESCO has recognised sites as pertaining to Israeli heritage, including Tel-Aviv’s “White City”, which means that the organisation has also legitimised Israel’s violent settler-colonial origins and existence. If Israel decides to follow Lapid’s suggestion, UNESCO is expected to increase the number of heritage sites attributed to Israel.
For now, the US is expected to pave the way for Israel’s return, hence the Israeli government’s insistence that it will not oppose the Biden administration’s decision to re-join the UN body. Meanwhile, Israel will seek to extort further concessions, all the while planning to return to the organisation and condescend to grace UNESCO with its presence, rather than a reappearance gloating at having colonised and appropriated more Palestinian land, history and memory.
This whole gimmicky process makes Israel’s accusations of international institutions harbouring “anti-Israel bias” collapse. All international institutions have legitimised Israel’s origins and existence, despite violations of international law and war crimes committed by Zionist paramilitary gangs prior to 1948, and in the uniforms of the “Israel Defence Forces” from then to the present day. The debacle of departing and hinting at returning is a ploy for colonial gain, and for such gain to be recognised by international resolutions and declarations. America’s return to UNESCO will thus work in Israel’s favour. It wouldn’t do so otherwise.
February 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Palestine, UNESCO, United States, Zionism |
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Since Israel and Bahrain both view Iran as a threat, they could team up and counter Tehran together, Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett said on his landmark visit to the Gulf monarchy.
“We will fight Iran and its followers in the region night and day. We will aid our friends in strengthening peace, security, and stability, whenever we are asked to do so,” Bennett pledged in an interview with the Bahraini state-linked Al-Ayyam outlet on Tuesday.
The PM blamed Tehran of striving to “destroy moderate states” in the Gulf region in order to replace them with “bloodthirsty terrorist groups.”
When asked about the possibility of creating an alliance to resist Iranian influence, which could include Israel, Bahrain, and some other Arab nations, he gave a positive response: “We all understand that we face the same challenges, so why not work together to tackle them?”
Bennet, who became the first Israeli prime minister ever to visit Bahrain, assured the journalists that “Israel is a strong and reliable country.”
The idea of such a block was first floated by Israeli general Tal Kelman last year. According to Kelman, who heads the IDF’s Strategy and Third Circle Directorate, “the moderate axis” of Israel, Bahrain, the UAE, Jordan, Egypt and others should resist “the radical axis” of Iran and what he called its “proxies” in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.
Israel and Bahrain normalized relations in late 2020 as part of the so-called Abraham Accords, a US-backed drive to improve ties between the Jewish state and some Arab countries after decades of strife.
Bahrain is a small island nation of around 1.5 million. The majority of its population is Shia Muslims, but the country is being run by a Sunni monarchy. The rulers in Manama have been concerned by Tehran’s activities as Iran, which is located less than 800 kilometers (497 miles) away, often faces accusations from its rivals of supporting Shia groups in other countries.
February 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Sanctions against Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Zionism |
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On February 9, Israel launched yet another series of strikes on targets near Damascus, which resulted in one Syrian killed and five injured, which has aggravated the threat of war between Syria and Israel.
According to the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), on February 9, four Israeli F-16s, without crossing the state border of Syria, launched another guided missile attack on facilities near Al-Kiswah, a village south of Damascus. One of the anti-aircraft missiles of the Syrian army exploded over the occupied Golan Heights, after which the IDF fired from the area occupied by Israeli troops in the Syrian Golan Heights ten surface-to-surface missiles at the positions of the Syrian air defense forces. Some missiles were brought down by Syrian air defenses. Nevertheless, the attack still caused significant damage to some buildings in the city of Qudsaya, destroying dozens of houses and cars. To repel the attack, Syrian troops utilized Russian-made air defense systems, which shot down eight missiles.
According to an IDF statement, in response to an intercepted missile fired from Syria into northern Israel, Israel attacked targets in Syria, including the “Syrian radar and anti-aircraft batteries that launched missiles at Israeli Air Force aircraft.” However, it is obvious that the missile chosen by the IDF as the reason for retaliation was the anti-aircraft missile that exploded in the air and was launched by Syrian air defenses as a measure of protection against earlier Israeli missile attacks launched from Lebanon.
In the message the Syrian Foreign Ministry sent to the UN Security Council regarding the aforementioned act of aggression by Tel Aviv, the Syrian government denounces the dangerous consequences the Israeli attacks on the SAR territory may have for stability in the Middle East and the entire world. “Syria reserves the right to use all legal means to respond to the treacherous strikes carried out by Israel on the outskirts of Damascus from Lebanese airspace and from the occupied Golan Heights,” the document says. The Syrian Foreign Ministry drew attention to the fact that “the United States, which patronizes Israel, encourages it to continue attacks and paralyzes possible measures by the UN Security Council to deter the aggressor, which undermines the prestige of the international community.”
Initially, Israel planned to launch two strikes simultaneously on February 9 – one on the outskirts of Damascus, and the other on Latakia. However, after encountering two Su-35s scrambled in response, the IAF fighters flew back without attacking the Syrian port. At the same time, almost all of the missiles allegedly aimed at Iranian facilities in the Rif Dimashq Governorate were shot down by Russian-made Syrian air defense systems. The attack was carried out from Lebanese airspace, which is another gross violation of international law.
Israeli Air Force regularly strikes targets in Syria without entering the airspace of the Arab Republic, and mainly operates from the airspace of Lebanon – in violation of international norms, or from the Mediterranean Sea. Since 2013, the IDF has been carrying out hundreds of airstrikes on the territory of a neighboring country primarily targeting pro-Iranian forces in the SAR. This year, there have already been two such attacks by Israel. The first one was took place on January 31 at targets near Damascus, namely Hezbollah facilities and warehouses in the vicinity of Al-Qutayfah. In 2021, there were 55 attacks:
– 3 missile strikes in December (on December 7, 16 and 28, mainly in the area of the port of Latakia, one Syrian soldier was killed, and significant damage was caused). It is noteworthy that on December 28, not for the first time, two F-16s of the Israeli Air Force launched four guided missiles at facilities on the territory of the port of Latakia without crossing the Syrian border (from the Mediterranean Sea). The Syrian air defense forces did not engage in a battle to repel the IAF raid on the port of Latakia, since a landing Russian Air Force transport plane could be in the affected area;
– 4 missile strikes in November (on November 3, 8, 17 and 28, mainly on targets near the city of Homs, which resulted in four people killed, including two civilians, several people wounded and significant material damage);
– 4 missile strikes in October (on October 8, 13, 25 and 30, strikes were carried out on the outskirts of Damascus, the outskirts of al-Ba’ath and the village of Al-Krum in the Quneitra Governorate in southern Syria, and the city of Abu Kamal, as a result of which more than ten Hezbollah militants and a Syrian soldier were killed, and significant damage was caused);
– 3 missile strikes in September (on September 3, 14 and 27, South from the village of Mayadin in the Deir ez-Zor Governorate in Eastern Syria, near the Iraqi border, with many people being wounded);
– 2 missile strikes in August (on August 17 and 19); 3 missile attacks from May to July (on May 5, June 8 and July 19); 9 missile strikes from January to April, with dozens of people dead and wounded;
– 39 missile attacks and air raids were carried out in 2020.
Israel explains its attacks with the desire to prevent modern weapons from falling into the hands of it enemies. Enemy No. 1 in this regard is the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, which is fighting on the side of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and is controlled by Tehran. After the first Israeli airstrikes, Moscow invited all interested parties to meet and talk about disentangling their interests in order to avoid armed conflicts and civilian casualties. However, these calls of Russia have not been heeded.
Israel, despite repeated statements by official Syrian authorities to the UN, continues regular airstrikes on Syrian civilian targets, using, among other things, provocative air attacks by its fighters “under the cover” of civilian aircraft. Thus, in addition to the attack of December 28, on the night of October 13, 2021, four IAF F-16s once again entered the Syrian airspace in the area of the US-occupied Al-Tanf zone in the Homs Governorate and, under the cover of civilian aircraft flying at the same time, carried out an airstrike on a phosphate ore processing plant in the Palmyra area. It is noteworthy that this is not the first time such air attacks have been carried out from the area of the US-occupied zone in the Homs Governorate, which clearly indicates the coordinated actions of the IAF with the US military.
Such provocative tactics of the Israeli Air Force can lead to a serious aggravation of the situation, and it will by the IAF’s fault if the Syrian air defenses in their anti-missile actions shoot down a civilian aircraft of any country, under whose cover Tel Aviv carries out its airstrikes. And such an incident has already occurred in 2018 when Israeli planes bombed Syria from the air zone where the Russian reconnaissance plane was located, and the Syrian air defense shot down this plane by mistake. Russian service members were killed and a big scandal broke out, which was extinguished, and an armed conflict with Israel prevented, only thanks to complex diplomatic efforts.
The Syrian leadership has repeatedly demanded that the UN Security Council put pressure on Israel to stop attacks on the territory of the republic, since such actions violate its sovereignty and lead to increasing tensions in the region. The Syrian Foreign Ministry has previously repeatedly stated that the republic can use “all legal means” to respond to Israeli airstrikes on the Syrian territory. Therefore, by continuing such provocative attacks, Israel is openly tempting its fate, which could turn into a serious armed conflict at any time.
February 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, War Crimes | Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Russia, Syria |
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A succession of events in recent weeks all point to the inescapable fact that nearly 75 years of Israel’s painstaking efforts to hide the truth about its origins and its racist apartheid regime are failing miserably. The world is finally waking up, and Israel is losing ground quicker than it is able to gain new supporters or whitewash its past and ongoing crimes.
First, there were the revelations about Tantura, a peaceful Palestinian village whose inhabitants were mostly exterminated by Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade on 23 May, 1948. Like many other massacres committed against unarmed Palestinians over the years, the Tantura massacre was mostly remembered by the village’s few survivors, ordinary Palestinians and Palestinian historians. The mere attempt in 1998 by Israeli graduate student Theodore Katz to shed light on that bloody event ignited a legal, media and academic war, forcing him to retract his findings.
In a recent social media post, Professor Ilan Pappé revealed why, in 2007, he had to resign his position at Haifa University. “One of my ‘crimes’,” wrote Pappé, “was insisting that there was a massacre in the village of Tantura in 1948 as was exposed by MA student, Teddy Katz.”
Now, some Alexandroni Brigade veterans have finally confessed to the crimes in Tantura.
“They silenced it. It mustn’t be told, it could cause a whole scandal. I don’t want to talk about it, but it happened.” These were the words of Moshe Diamant, a former member of the Alexandroni Brigade who, with other veterans, revealed in the documentary “Tantura” by Alon Schwarz, the gory details of the horrific crimes that were committed in the Palestinian village.
An officer “killed one Arab after another” with his pistol, said former soldier Micha Vitkon. “They put them into a barrel and shot them in the barrel. I remember the blood in the barrel,” explained another. “I was a murderer. I didn’t take prisoners,” admitted Amitzur Cohen.
Hundreds of Palestinians were killed in Tantura in cold blood. They were buried in mass graves, the largest of which is believed to be under a car park at the Dor Beach, to which Israeli families flock daily.
The Tantura massacre is arguably the most glaring representation of “hidden” Israeli criminality on the occupation state’s roll call of shame. However, this is not the story of Tantura alone. The massacre in the village is representative of something much bigger, of ethnic cleansing on a huge scale, forceful evictions and mass killings. Thankfully, the truth is now being unearthed and exposed.
In another example, the Israeli army launched a full-scale military operation in 1951 to ethnically cleanse Palestinian Bedouins from the Naqab Desert. The tragic scenes of entire communities being uprooted from their ancestral homes were justified by Israel with the usual cliché that the terrible deed was carried out for “security reasons”.
In 1953, Israel passed the so-called Land Acquisition Law, which allowed the occupation state to seize the land of the Palestinians who had been forced out of their homes. By then, Israel had unlawfully expropriated 247,000 dunams of land in the Naqab, with 66,000 remaining “unutilised”. The remaining land is currently the epicentre of an ongoing saga involving Palestinian Bedouin communities in Israel and the Israeli government, which makes ludicrous claims that the land is “essential” for Israel’s “development needs”.
Extensive research conducted by Professor Gadi Algazi points to Israel’s narrative in the Naqab being a complete fabrication. According to numerous newly-revealed documents, Moshe Dayan, then the head of the Israeli army’s Southern Command, was central to an Israeli government and military ploy to evict the Bedouin population and to “revoke their rights as landowners”, under the conveniently created Israeli law, which allowed the government to “lease” the land as if it was its own.
“There was an organised transfer of Bedouin citizens from the north-western Negev eastward to barren areas, with the goal of taking over their lands,” Algazi told Haaretz. “They carried out this operation using a mix of threats, violence, bribery and fraud.”
The entire scheme was organised in such a way as to facilitate the claim that the Palestinians had moved “voluntarily”, despite their legendary resistance and “the stubbornness with which they tried to hold onto their land, even at the cost of hunger and thirst, not to mention the army’s threats and violence.”
Furthermore, a newly-released volume by French historian Vincent Lemire has entirely dismissed the official Israeli version of how the Moroccan Quarter in Jerusalem was demolished in June 1967. Although Palestinian and Arab historians have long argued that the destruction of the neighbourhood — 135 homes, two mosques and more — was done as per the order of the Israeli government through the then Jewish Mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, Israel has just as long denied that version. According to the official Israeli account, the demolition of the neighbourhood was carried out by “15 private Jewish contractors [who] destroyed the neighbourhood to make space for the Western Wall plaza.”
In an interview with Agence France-Presse (AFP), Lemire said that his book offers “definitive, written proof on the pre-meditation, planning and coordination of this operation,” and that includes official meetings between Kollek, the commander of the Israeli army and other top government officials.
The story continues with more heartbreaking revelations as a well-integrated version of the truth exposing long-hidden or denied facts. The days of Israel getting away with these crimes seem to be behind us. For the third time in a little over twelve months, a major human rights organisation, on this occasion Amnesty International, has condemned Israeli apartheid.
Amnesty’s report, “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: A Look into Decades of Oppression and Domination”, is 280 pages of damning evidence of Israel’s racism and apartheid. It does not shy away from connecting Israel’s violent present with its equally bloody past, nor does it borrow from Israel’s deceptive language and self-serving division of Palestinians into disconnected communities, each with a different claim and a different status. For Amnesty, as was the case with Human Rights Watch’s report in April last year, Israeli injustices against the Palestinians must be recognised and duly condemned in their entirety.
“Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony,” wrote Amnesty, “while minimising the number of Palestinians and restricting their rights.” This could only happen through mass killing, ethnic cleansing and genocide, from Tantura to the Naqab, to the Moroccan Quarter, the Gaza Strip and Sheikh Jarrah. The Israeli roll call of shame is long.
February 8, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
