Protesters shut down UK arms factories over Gaza war complicity
Press TV – March 20, 2024
In a display of solidarity with Palestinians, hundreds of workers and protesters have shut down arms factories across England and Scotland to condemn the UK’s complicity in the Israeli regime’s war of aggression in Gaza.
The factories, which produce components for F-35 fighter jets, are accused of shoring up the Israeli regime’s military offensive in Gaza.
Under the banner “Workers for a Free Palestine,” a diverse coalition of individuals from various unions and sectors including health, education, hospitality, academia, and the arts, launched the protests on Wednesday.
Activists aimed to disrupt the supply chain of arms to Israel and denounce the UK’s complicity in the ongoing genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza.
GE Aviation Systems in Cheltenham and Leonardo UK in Edinburgh were among the targeted sites where components for the F-35 jets are manufactured.
The protesters vowed to continue their protest actions for a month, demanding an immediate cessation of arms sales to Israel and advocating for a permanent ceasefire.
The decision to blockade the arms factories was prompted by Israel’s impending invasion of Rafah, which the United Nations and other international organizations have warned would have catastrophic consequences for Gaza’s population.
Unionists have called on workers across the UK to challenge their government’s military support for the Israeli regime.
“We’re demanding our government immediately halt arms supplies to Israel before it launches this offensive in Rafah using British-made bombs. But we are not waiting for this genocide-appeasing prime minister to act,” Zad, a union member, said in a press release.
This isn’t the first time such protests have occurred.
In December, similar blockades targeted four other arms factories across the UK. Despite assurances from the UK government that it hasn’t supplied lethal military equipment to Israel since October, evidence suggests otherwise.
Affidavits filed at the High Court revealed ongoing export licenses and pending applications for equipment likely to be used in offensive operations in Gaza.
Furthermore, the UK Ministry of Defence disclosed that Israeli warplanes have been permitted to take off from and land in the UK during the Gaza war, raising concerns about Britain’s involvement in facilitating Israeli atrocities.
Israel deploys army of bots to spread anti-UNRWA propaganda: Report
The Cradle | March 19, 2024
Israel is executing an online influence campaign using hundreds of fake social media accounts to advance “Israeli interests” among progressive western audiences, including US lawmakers, Haaretz reported on 19 March, citing an investigation by Israeli media watchdog group Fake Reporter.
The campaign is focused specifically on amplifying reports claiming the involvement of UNRWA workers in the 7 October attack on Israel. As The Cradle has reported previously, Israel provided no evidence for its claims, which were part of a campaign to compel western nations to cut funding to the agency. UNRWA plays a crucial role in delivering aid to Palestinians amid Israel’s campaign to impose famine in Gaza.
Researchers at Fake Reporter pinpointed three fake ‘news sites’ specifically created for the operation. The sites amplified reports copied from other real news outlets, such as CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Jerusalem Post, and The Times of Israel, which promoted Israel’s narrative about the war.
Hundreds of fake social media accounts then intensively promoted the “reports” from the specially-created websites and other news outlets.
The three websites at the center of the campaign were established before the war in Gaza but became active only after it began.
The fake social media accounts seemed to be ‘cyborgs,’ meaning they operate using a combination of artificial intelligence and real people with fake online personalities. The avatars claimed to portray average US citizens, including white, Jewish, and African–American ones.
The avatars were all created on the same date, used the same profile photos and naming conventions, and shared other characteristics that indicate they are all part of the same network, Fake Reporter found.
Over 500 fake accounts were opened for the campaign on Facebook, Instagram, and X.
Their avatars began to post messages about a wide array of topics, including the alleged lack of safety for Jewish Americans on college campuses, discrimination against Jewish students, and false allegations Hamas committed mass rape on 7 October.
At the end of January, after acquiring tens of thousands of followers, the fake accounts pivoted toward spreading Israel’s false allegations about UNRWA employees participating in the 7 October attack.
The avatars worked to inorganically amplify the ‘shocking’ and ‘disturbing’ allegations about UNRWA.
They responded to social media posts by US lawmakers, influencers, and prominent news outlets.
The campaign’s avatars targeted posts by African–American Democratic lawmakers, including Ritchie Torres, Cori Bush, and Jamal Bowman, who received the most such comments.
Haaretz noted that targeting Democratic African–American lawmakers seemed to be an attempt to counter the wave of support they have given to Palestinians amid Israel’s ongoing campaign of Genocide in Gaza.
Jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti beaten by guards
MEMO | March 19, 2024
Prominent Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti has been attacked with clubs by Israeli prison guards and suffered bleeding in his eye, Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed reported the Palestinian Commission for Detainees and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs and Barghouti’s family saying.
Barghouti, 64, who is a member of the Central Committee of Fatah, is being subjected to isolation, torture and humiliation, said his wife, Fadwa Barghouti.
Fadwa explained that her husband’s life and the lives of other prominent prisoners are in great danger, adding that the Israeli prison administration “deliberately brutalises them in order to break their morale.”
“Marwan was subjected to continuous attacks, which we learned of on 6 and 12 March [through lawyers], which caused bleeding in one of his eyes, while the prison’s repressive forces constantly threatened him,” she added, explaining that he had been relocated five times during the last three months, and each time he was assaulted and his prison conditions were tightened.
In four prisons he was put in solitary confinement, she said, warning of a “real war” being waged against Palestinians prisoners and their leaders, which hurts their morale.
For its part, the Free Marwan Barghouti and All Palestinian Political Prisoners campaign said in a statement that lawyers who had visited Megiddo Prison learned of the brutal attack on Barghouti and other prominent prisoners by the prison’s special repression units, adding that many of them had been placed in solitary confinement.
The campaign said it had contacted a number of international figures, including diplomats, parliamentarians and human rights institutions, as well as leaders of the Fatah movement and the National and Islamic Action factions, calling on them to provide protection to the Palestinian people including political prisoners in Israeli jails.
Barghouti was arrested in 2002 and later sentenced to five life terms on charges of “killing and injuring Israelis.”
In parallel with the onslaught on the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians, Israel has increased raids and arrests in the occupied West Bank, arresting more than 7,000 people, alongside a campaign of harassment against prisoners in Israeli jails, resulting in the deaths of at least 13 prisoners since 7 October 2023.
Children among dozens executed by Israeli troops following Al-Shifa raid
Photo credit: QNN
The Cradle | March 19, 2024
Israeli forces executed dozens of people and detained almost 200 during its latest assault on Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, the Government Media Office in the Gaza Strip announced on 19 March.
Among the dozens executed were children, the media office said in a statement on Tuesday.
“The Israeli occupation committed a bloody massacre, executing 50 citizens and arresting nearly 200 others in the Shifa Medical Complex and its surrounding in Gaza City,” the statement read.
“We also received field information about … a number of children among those executed, as well as civilians, the sick, and the displaced,” it added. Some of the facilities inside the hospital were also torched by the Israeli army, according to the statement.
According to the Gaza media office, at least 250 Palestinians have been killed so far in the current Israeli assault on Al-Shifa Hospital, which began during the early hours of Monday and remains ongoing.
The Israeli army said on Tuesday that it killed “dozens of terrorists” in Al-Shifa Hospital, adding that it will “continue large-scale operations in the hospital.”
Israeli forces launched a massive operation in and around the hospital at around 2:00 am on 18 March. Israeli bombardment of the hospital killed dozens of Palestinians in the first hours of the attack.
Medical teams were unable to treat the wounded, and Israeli forces fired at anyone who approached the windows of the hospital, medical sources told WAFA news agency.
Clashes between the army and several resistance factions raged around the vicinity of the hospital as the Israeli incursion was commencing.
The attack on Al-Shifa Hospital came hours after Hamas’ Qassam Brigades revealed the details of a sniping operation that targeted and killed an officer in the elite Israeli Shaldag Unit who was behind Israel’s November raid of the medical facility.
During the assault on 18 March, Israeli troops assassinated Brigadier General Fayeq al-Mabhouh, the director of police in the Gaza Strip – who was in charge of facilitating the entry of much-needed humanitarian aid into north Gaza.
Since the start of the war, Israel has alleged that Hamas operates a command center underneath Al-Shifa Hospital.
This is the second assault on Al-Shifa since November, when Israeli troops stormed the facility, arrested dozens, evacuated the hospital at gunpoint, and turned it into a detention center.
There’s no protection from genocide in the colonial framework of international law
Palestinian children wait to get water amid clean water and food crisis due to Israeli attacks and imposed blockade in Rafah, Gaza on March 16, 2024. [Yasser Qudaih – Anadolu Agency]
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | March 19, 2024
The entire Palestinian population in Gaza has been declared “acutely food insecure” by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. “The famine threshold for household acute food insecurity has already been far exceeded,” explained the IPC.
Very belatedly, the EU’s Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell has declared that Israel is provoking famine in Gaza, and that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. What happens now that Borrell has spoken? Palestinians spoke out long before this catastrophe, remember, and — quite intentionally — not a single EU diplomat listened.
What’s more, the statistics seemed to have influenced US Secretary of State Antony Blinken enough to make a statement acknowledging the famine as having affected all Palestinians in Gaza. “This only underscores both the urgency, the imperative, of making this [humanitarian aid] the priority,” Blinken said during a press conference in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. “We need more, we need it to be sustained, and we need it to be a priority if we’re going to effectively address the needs of people.” Of the US halting its weapons exports to Israel, or joining forces to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza, not a single syllable, never mind word, was uttered.
Israel’s response, of course, was to weaponise starvation even further. As Al Jazeera reported yesterday, the settler-colonial state asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to refrain from issuing emergency orders as requested by South Africa, describing these as “an abuse of procedures”. South Africa’s legal recourse of 6 March, declared Israel’s lawyers, is “wholly unfounded in fact and law, morally repugnant, and represents an abuse both of the Genocide Convention and of the court itself.”
And there you have it in a nutshell: Israel’s twisted logic. The slightest measures to prevent genocide are “morally repugnant.” That tells you all you need to know about Israeli morality. It is probably only a matter of time before the apartheid state deems genocide to be in accordance with international law as long as it suits its own colonial interests.
Israel’s intention is for famine to work as a weapon of genocide.
It blocks and hinders the entry of humanitarian aid, and its illegal settlers block the border crossing to prevent aid trucks getting past. Israel does nothing to stop this. The meagre amount allowed through was weaponised as a death trap, as Israeli soldiers massacred Palestinians for merely attempting to take some food home. This morning, Israel killed Major Raed Al-Banna and his family in an air strike. Al-Banna was involved in taking humanitarian aid into northern Gaza.
On the sidelines of its massacres, Israel has told the ICJ that it “has real concern for the humanitarian situation and innocent lives, as demonstrated by the actions it has and is taking,” with reference to Gaza.
It beggars belief that Israel’s quest for normalising all of its actions has reached such a level of contempt for international laws and conventions that it is allowed to waste the court’s time by lying so blatantly. The international community’s complacency, as if its only power rests in waiting for statistical updates to include in their speeches, is equally horrendous.
The genocide in Gaza is exposing all that is wrong with the colonial concept of human rights and international law, both of which only exist as foundations to protect the violators and collaborators. There is clearly no protection from genocide for its victims in the colonial framework of international law.
Dissecting the ultra-Zionist cult Chabad and its complicity in genocide in Gaza
By David Miller | Press TV | March 18, 2024
In December last year, in the town of Beit Hanun in northern Gaza, a Jewish religious outpost was established in a partially destroyed building. It was described as the ‘first Chabad House’ in the besieged, war-ravaged Palestinian territory.
Chabad is an ultra-orthodox Jewish cult. It has many adherents in the genocidal Israeli occupation forces. Many of them wear Chabad patches on their uniforms. Here is a Zionist tank flying the distinctive Chabad flag in Gaza.
In addition, there are also Chabad Rabbis attached to the Israeli occupation forces. One notes that the genocide is actually about “rooting out evil”. Here two Chabad Rabbis erected the Jewish religious symbol, the Menorah, in Gaza.
But what is Chabad? It styles itself as a friendly outgoing Jewish movement dedicated to helping Jews reconnect with Judaism. However, in reality, it is a supremacist, hate-mongering Zionist cult.
In the past it was anti-Zionist, but back then, even as far back as 1929, its adherents in Al Khalil (or Hebron as it is called by Zionists) were involved in spying on the Palestinians for the Haganah terror militia as well as storing weapons for them.
Chabad is now so ultra-Zionist that it called in December for Gaza to be recolonized with Jewish settlers. Worse, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, its adherents believe – as laid out in the Tanya, Chabad’s key religious text – gentiles have only animal souls, not human souls.
In January, the Tanya was printed out by the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza. This supremacism is carried over into its attitude to the Palestinians.
Followers of a Chabad Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh are known as the ‘hilltop youth’. Two of his followers wrote the hugely controversial King Torah, which was also recommended by Ginsburg.
The book states that it is permissible to kill Palestinian children, including babies.
“There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”
Ginsburg was even detained by police over his promotion of the book.
It’s not just words. Ginsburg’s followers in the so-called ‘Hilltop Youth’ are said by the Zionist intelligence agency Shin Bet to be responsible for most ‘price tag’ revenge attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
In 1988, Israeli regime premier Benjamin Netanyahu famously met with the leader of Chabad in New York where the notorious Zionist cult has its global headquarters.
Netanyahu has maintained a strong relationship with Chabad ever since. Here he is seen addressing them at an event in 2014.
These are the forces – supported and aided by the United States and the United Kingdom – unleashed as part of the genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza.
In December, it was revealed that a Chabad group in the UK was fundraising to support the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has already claimed the lives of more than 31,700 Palestinians, 70 percent of them children and women, since October 7.
Rabbi Aryeh Sufrin of Chabad claimed back in October that the Hamas resistance movement is “worse than ISIS (Daesh)” in full conformity with Zionist entity talking points. He also disclosed that his son is a British recruit to the occupation forces and was in occupied Palestine at the time.
The Chabad appeal read “Vital equipment needed by the IDF… Funds raised will go directly to equipment needed by Aron DovSufrin’s reserve unit, up in the North of Israel, and Support Units.”
Aron DovShufrin is of course the son of the Rabbi, serving actively in the genocidal occupation forces.
Chabad-Lubavitch is an ultra-orthodox Hasidic sect that also happens to be a Zionist supremacist and genocidal cult. It originates in Liubavichi in Russia near the border with Belarus and is a global movement with more than 5,000 offices in over 100 countries and in all 50 states of the US.
The cult even has offices in seemingly unlikely places such as China, Belarus, Tunisia, Morocco and Venezuela.
It has prominent supporters in many places. For example, the new Argentinian president Javier Milei is a Chabad devotee. Donald Trump donated to Chabad, though not as much as his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who played a pivotal role in the normalization of the Zionist entity.
Obviously, Chabad has been highly organized in Ukraine and its followers were amongst those recruited to the Nazi Azov Battalion, which it is important to recall, was co-founded by a former member of the Israel occupation forces.
Press TV’s flagship weekly show Palestine Declassified previously reported how Ukrainian Jewish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky bankrolled Chabad in Ukraine as well as the Nazi Azov and Aidar battalions.
Back in the UK, there are around one hundred Chabad groups or offices. It flies under the radar and is widely regarded as well-meaning if a little eccentric.
In reality, it is an extremist group that is building support for genocide in the UK.
Ironically, the Community Security Trust has aided Chabad – giving them security advice after an edition of Palestine Declassified exposed some of their activities.
The CST has ‘educating about extremism‘ as one of its charitable objectives, but it is unwilling to educate us on the extremism of Chabad.
There is a very good reason for that. Gerald Ronson, who created and runs the CST, is himself a Zionist extremist and has been supporting Chabad for more than half a century.
Here he is in 2013 as a guest of honor at one of their events.
Zionist extremists are widely scattered across the UK and form a mutually supportive network. This is a key element of the justification and support for genocide in Gaza.
David Miller is the producer and co-host of Press TV’s weekly Palestine Declassified show. He was sacked from Bristol University in October 2021 over his Palestine advocacy.
Stop sending weapons to Ukraine: Russian diplomat responds to Macron’s ceasefire plan
TASS | March 17, 2024
MOSCOW – French President Emmanuel Macron should stop sending weapons to Kiev and propose a ceasefire agreement to parties to the Middle East conflict, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told TASS.
Commenting on the latest initiative by the French leader who said he would ask Russia to observe a ceasefire in Ukraine during the Paris Olympics, the Russian diplomat said: “I come forward with a proposal in response to Macron’s: stop supplying weapons being used to kill [civilians] and also stop sponsoring terrorism.” “I also suggest that Macron come up with a similar proposal to the parties to the Middle East conflict. A lot probably depends on what France says there,” Zakharova maintained.
Earlier, Macron told an interviewer during a Ukrainian telethon that France will ask Russia to observe a ceasefire for the duration of the Olympic Games in Paris. When asked to comment on the potential participation of Russian athletes as neutrals, he said that, as the host country, France is sending a message of peace as it follows decisions made by the International Olympic Committee.
The West in Decline – John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
The Duran | March 16, 2024
The West in Decline – John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
ALEXANDER: https://www.youtube.com/AlexanderMercourisReal
ALEX: https://www.youtube.com/alexchristoforou
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Secret document reveals plans for civil war in Lebanon, Israeli false flags, and invasion
By Randi Nord | Geopolitics Alert | April 5, 2019
Beirut – During his visit with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Lebanese President Michael Aoun reportedly received a US-Israeli document detailing plans for creating a civil war in Lebanon with covert false flag operations and possible Israeli invasion.
Although the source of the document is Israeli and created in partnership with Washington, no one knows who presented it to Aoun. The Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed, initially reported the document on Lebanese TV and a video on its website. Geopolitics Alert translated the report for this article. … continue
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