A New Standard By Which to Measure Infamy
Reality is just more collateral damage in the war on Gaza – and humanity (part II of a series)
(part I, on Israel’s experiments in televised genocide and the international community’s suicidally obsequious response, is here)
Helen of desTroy | December 12, 2023
With all eyes on the historically unprecedented bloodbath Israel is unleashing in Gaza, the transnational parasite class headquartered there is working overtime to accelerate the expansion—and criminalization—of “antisemitism” in the West, taking advantage of the geopolitical chaos they’ve unleashed to expand the sphere of attitudes and behaviors thus classifiable as rapidly as possible in the hope that even the most outrageous overreach will be perceived as the New Normal once the political atmosphere re-congeals. It’s a cynical gambit, but alarmingly likely to succeed, given their top-down control of the media and their previous success in both broadening the term’s definition beyond recognition and shoehorning that expanded definition into law (discussed at length elsewhere on this site) in both public and private life.
Smashing the Overton Window
When several dozen Harvard University campus organizations signed their names to an open letter stating “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame” for the October 7 Hamas raid, the risibly-named hasbara group Accuracy in Media targeted the students with billboard trucks featuring their photos alongside the text “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites,” deploying the trucks first on campus and later to students’ parents’ neighborhoods with the stated goal of turning them into unemployable pariahs. Included on the display was a website urging the reader to petition Harvard’s board of trustees to expel these “despicable, hateful students” and their organizations — all over a letter that contained no references to Jews and limited its criticism to the Israeli government. AIM president Adam Guillette nevertheless boasted of rigging Google search results for the targeted students’ names to prominently display the smear site, telling the New York Post that the letter-writers’ failure to “explicitly condemn Hamas” constituted overt antisemitism. Similar libel-on-wheels campaigns were inflicted on Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, the latter targeting university president Elizabeth Magill herself for having allowed the campus to host a literary event featuring Palestinian writers that one detractor bizarrely referred to as an “antisemitic Burning Man” — weeks before the raid.
The same campuses were simultaneously deluged with complaints — cc’ed to any media outlet within kvetching range – from wealthy, mostly Jewish donors (including Jeffrey Epstein’s benefactor Leslie Wexner in high moral dudgeon) demanding crackdowns on the imaginary plague of “antisemitism on campus,” up to and including the firing of professors over their advocacy for Palestine and the ouster of university presidents for allowing that advocacy to take place. The Anti-Defamation League and other hasbara groups backed by compromised toadies like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio framed college fixtures like Students for Justice in Palestine as literal terrorists starting pogroms in the cafeteria. Astroturfed “student groups” like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Israel Alliance” fostered this delusion, bending the ear of domesticated media with claims that students lying on the floor to protest the slaughter in Gaza in a classic “die-in” protest somehow posed a threat to the safety of Jewish students, in a sick echo of Israel’s own claims that flattening entire Palestinian neighborhoods is necessary for “self-defense.” That none of these episodes of antisemitic “intimidation” were ever recorded on the thousands of smartphones in their vicinity was immaterial — the media establishment knew which side of its challah was buttered. After students at both Harvard and Columbia Law Schools reportedly had job offers rescinded for signing onto their respective schools’ open letters in support of Gaza, over two dozen of the largest law firms in the US leaned into the supposedly antisemitic trope of “Jews control the legal system” and wrote a sternly-worded directive to the nation’s top law schools to crack down on the scourge of “antisemitic harassment” or risk none of their graduates ever working in the industry again. Collective punishment — it’s not just for Palestinians anymore.
Within weeks, UPenn, Harvard, and Columbia had all announced antisemitism “task forces,” complete with plans of action lifted directly from the Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, a self-righteous panderfest that sank without a ripple when it was unveiled earlier this year. Columbia suspended its chapters of SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace. Pro-Palestinian professors targeted by petitions backed by the hasbara machine were forced to eat their words to keep their jobs — and more than a few were forced out anyway. Several of the Harvard student groups that signed the fateful open letter issued public retractions in a panicked bid to save their employment prospects as a growing swarm of hedge funders and corporate CEOs demanded the school furnish them with the membership rosters of those groups to use as a “do-not-hire” blacklist, and the Harvard Law Review spiked a thoroughly-vetted article on Israel’s genocide in Gaza (a piece the journal had commissioned from a Palestinian doctoral candidate just weeks before) not because it contained factual errors, but because a majority of the journal’s 100 editors feared for their own career prospects.
The individuals whose lives are upended by this kind of socioeconomic terrorism are mere collateral damage in a campaign that is clearly aimed at all of academia, the Frankfurt School’s tried-and-true shortcut to the American collective consciousness. The targeted schools were selected for their potential to set a nationwide trend, as hedge fund parasite and UPenn donor Marc Rowan acknowledged in his demand that university president Liz Magill be fired for not immediately begging forgiveness for allowing a student group to host a Palestinian writers’ festival on campus two weeks before the Hamas raid, rather than their vulnerability to pressure campaigns. Harvard has more money in its endowment than over half the countries on Earth and could easily weather the storm if a few snowflake donors opted to skip their usual conspicuous displays of philanthropy this year, and the other two aren’t far behind. That students at 100 colleges staged a walkout for Gaza even after weeks of this treatment speaks to a massive shift in public opinion, and ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt can be heard freaking out about the “major generational problem” Israel faces with regard to Generation Z on a leaked phone call with fellow Lobby bigwigs obtained by Iranian media last month.
The genocidal cat may be out of the bag, but Big Parasite is determined to ram it back in, tie the bag back up, and drown it in the Dead Sea. It was thus not especially surprising when Susan Sarandon, already reviled among liberals for her refusal to ditch her principles to support Hillary Clinton in 2016, was fired by United Talent Agency for suggesting Jews lacked a monopoly on suffering during a speech she gave at a pro-Palestinian rally in New York, or when screenwriter Aaron Sorkin fired his agent, Maha Dakhil, for accusing Israel of genocide in an Instagram post, or even when Lebanese-born porn star Mia Khalifa lost her Playboy podcast over tweets expressing empathy with Palestinians. Everyone knows Jewish elites have called the shots in the US entertainment industry since its birth. But with control of academia seemingly slipping away, anything less than total ideological lockstep in Hollywood has become suddenly intolerable. The industry’s failure to issue a full-throated demand for bloody vengeance immediately following the Hamas raid, the New York Times declared breathlessly, was not just an outrage, but an antisemitic one. And Hollywood’s faithful didn’t stop at denouncing their colleagues — they unloaded on everyone from the establishment media editors who correctly reported Israel’s airstrike on the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, to the Writers’ Guild of America (which had just secured favorable contracts for its members after a months-long strike but hadn’t condemned Hamas fast enough), to the TikTok executives unable to inflate traffic for pro-Israel hashtags to the same level as pro-Palestine terms with the platform’s established censorship algorithms. By failing to suppress all pro-Palestine discourse, TikTok executives were enabling the next Holocaust, dozens of Jewish celebrities nearing their sell-by dates, including Amy Schumer, Sacha Baron Cohen and Sarah Silverman, informed two of the platform’s Jewish executives in a Zoom struggle-session that would have been hilarious if not for its real-world repercussions. Armed with cooked data from the ADL, which had conveniently begun counting all pro-Palestinian protests and uses of phrases like “from the river to the sea” in its already-skewed accounting of “antisemitic incidents,” the industry’s dregs literally demanded TikTok (and other social media platforms) give them a magic button to press to disappear the “hate” — which the executives promised to do to the best of their ability. Calls to shut TikTok down have predictably surged among Republican politicians, particularly primary candidates who seem to be campaigning harder for Israeli political office than any in the US. Nikki Haley claimed during last week’s debate that every half-hour of TikTok use made a person 17% more antisemitic, a howler that met with zero laughter from an audience obediently spooked by the platform’s power after Israeli operatives had astroturfed a campaign around Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” to frame TikTok as a hive of antisemitism seducing impressionable young minds to the dark side. If they could not dupe young Americans into supporting Israel as they had their parents, Big Parasite would have to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
cleanliness is antisemitic
Selling savagery
To ensure opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza becomes guaranteed career suicide, the Israeli Lobby must widen the exception it has already (and wildly unconstitutionally) carved out of the First Amendment for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to include pro-Palestinian speech of any kind. Congress did the heavy lifting earlier this month with a full-frontal assault on the dictionary, explicitly expanding the already bursting-at-the-seams concept of “antisemitism” to include anti-Zionism. Adopted unanimously save for lonely vertebrate Rep. Thomas Massie, the resolution bemoans a world in which protesters can “spew hateful and vile language amplifying antisemitic themes” in the US’ capital and “4 masked men” can tear an Israeli flag off the wall of a Philadelphia restaurant but is apparently OK with 150 Palestinian children being blown sky-high every day by American-made bombs dropped by Israel’s finest.
But while simply declaring anti-Zionism is antisemitism makes Big Parasite’s job manufacturing consent for its Gaza genocide much easier, it is as fundamentally incompatible with reality as declaring steel a vegetable or Israel a democracy. Jewish religious doctrine has no place for Zionism — Jews aren’t supposed to return to the Holy Land until the Messiah shows up, and most of them don’t recognize any past or current claimants to that title — but then most of Israel’s inhabitants aren’t particularly religious, and the ones that are wouldn’t be caught dead fighting for the IDF, details generally left out of stateside hagiographies of the “special relationship.”
A who’s-who of controlled opposition has been deployed to sell Israel’s case for ethnic cleansing, led by purported free-speech crusaders from histrionic trainwreck Laura Loomer and Musk-anointed professional whiner Bari Weiss to conservative college blog CampusReform. The latter’s content transformed practically overnight on October 8 from criticism of woke damage and thought-policing in higher education to a baying chorus of self-righteous slopaganda-spewers suggesting those who oppose the IDF’s brutality should be not only deplatformed but personally harassed, many articles including lists of names of professors and even students whose only transgression was opposing the Israeli occupation. That such spiteful malingering brought this supposedly conservative outlet into ideological lockstep with professional Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Michael Rapaport, who not only conflated failure to condemn Hamas with antisemitism but threatened these newly-minted “antisemites” with the withdrawal of financial support from their projects, supposedly on behalf of a cabal of Jews who were “making a list” in order to punish the insufficiently-genocidal in the future, does not appear to bother anyone on the Right. Indeed, Rapaport has done a 180 and embraced the candidacy of the man he endearingly refers to as “Pig Dick” for president, thanks apparently to the latter’s unquestioned subservience to Israel, and his fellow grifters in the Trump camp have welcomed him as the prodigal son.
At the same time as the Right was extending its Big Tent to include anyone who could hold up an Israeli flag without shitting themselves, conservative influencers who strayed even slightly from the path dictated by Tel Aviv in the hours after Hamas’ incursion were publicly and messily sacrificed, no matter how enthusiastically they had deep-throated the Zionist cause in the past. Charlie Kirk, the founder of conservative campus group Turning Point who is regularly heckled at his own events for his slavish devotion for Israel, was publicly crucified as an antisemite for suggesting someone in Netanyahu’s government must have known about Hamas’ plans before October 7. Abandoned by the Zionist masters he’d relentlessly shilled at the cost of his early grassroots supporters, a suddenly-friendless Kirk began manically cucking to atone for his moment of doubt, even as those initial suspicions were completely validated by the news that Tel Aviv had not only had Hamas’ exact invasion plan in hand a year before October 7 but had ignored numerous warnings by IDF troops stationed at the Gaza border who observed Palestinian militants “rehearsing” the plan in the weeks preceding that invasion.
The most valuable horse in Netanyahu’s stable is billionaire troll Elon Musk, the self-appointed guru of “free speech absolutism” (now with more loopholes). Fresh off suing neoliberal-centrist smear merchant Media Matters over a ruinous outbreak of advertiser boycotts supposedly triggered by a manipulation of Twitter that forced ads to appear alongside neo-Nazi content, Musk simped his way across Israel earlier this month, dutifully parroting his hosts’ explanation that they were slaughtering the people of Gaza because Palestinians “think it’s OK to kill civilians” (the 18,000 civilians Israel has massacred in the space of two months having apparently been murdered only with extreme regret). He even repeated the claim that Palestinian hatred for Israelis must stem from antisemitic propaganda they’re taught as kids in school rather than the reality of living with those Israelis’ boots on their necks and spit in their eyes for generations. With regular condemnations from the Anti-Defamation League bolstering his anti-woke cred, Musk convinced millions of adoring fanboys that he had bought Twitter to return it to its mythical heyday as the Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party™ by occasionally tweeting into the tamer fringes of the Narrative — despite ratcheting up obedience to government censorship requests, putting a World Economic Forum lackey in the driver’s seat, and building a privatized social credit score system far worse than anything ever actually seen in China. The Israeli trip punctuated his latest redemption arc, which began when he questioned the legitimacy of Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians and really caught fire with an acknowledgment that “Jewish communities” aren’t huge fans of white people before our hero learned a Valuable Lesson about the legitimacy of genocide in the service of real estate acquisition. When he flipped off New York Times DealBook smarm-meister (and close personal Musk friend of 16 years) Andrew Ross Sorkin onstage after coming home, credulous dissidents across the West swooned.
The Lobby deliberately courts influencers with cross-partisan appeal like Musk, Democratic congresswoman-turned-Fox News pundit Tulsi Gabbard, and vaccine safety advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to create the false impression that a Zionist consensus supersedes all the usual sociopolitical divides. These assets are allowed to gain political traction with vocal, even eloquent opposition to the US’ Israel-fellating neocon foreign policy, and only once their antiwar or pro-First Amendment bona fides are firmly established are they ordered to “come out” as pro-Israel. Their most devoted followers will dutifully embrace their incongruous drift into warmongering and censorship, accepting cognitive dissonance as the cost of doing business (don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good! ) and even coaxing some skeptics into riding that sunk cost fallacy all the way into the pasture of Righteous Goyim. A thick folder of compromising material is kept by these assets’ handlers, capable of being deployed piecemeal to ensure that anyone who starts to get cold feet over duping their followers into embracing the violent racist death cult currently occupying Palestine can be persuaded to resume full obedience before they’ve passed the point of no return. Big Parasite loves a good ritual humiliation, and there’s nothing like dangling the tapes from those long-ago trips through the friendly skies on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express in front of a hungry reporter to make even an intelligent person spout the most aggressively ignorant Ziofascist thuggery this side of a Likud party meeting while flanked with obscene grifters like Shmuley Boteach, declaring with a straight face that the IDF is not only the most moral army in the world but does not — has never! — deliberately target(ed) civilians.
On the record advocating for Palestine? They can probably still use you, given how few people can stand by what Israel is doing in Gaza without becoming violently ill. Just publicly recant your ideological crimes, preferably with a pained look on your face, and start puking out cult dogma, as Musk did while Israeli President Isaac Herzog clapped like a seal during the former’s apology tour. Countless social media influencers have come forward since October 7 showing off emails from Israeli PR firms offering insulting sums in exchange for “sponsored” content, a poisoned hook that not only renders the entire pool of Israel/Palestine social media content questionable but allows Israel to claim plausible deniability regarding its own dismal performance in TikTok’s metrics — see, those dastardly Palestinians must be paying for their traffic, maybe we should ban TikTok after all! And when Israel can’t get their (wo)man, they are not above using AI to fake it. Model Bella Hadid, whose Palestinian father’s family lost their home in Safed during the 1948 Nakba when a Jewish refugee family from Europe to whom the Hadids had given shelter took over their home while the Hadids were away, was deepfaked into an apology video in which “she” recanted her past support for Palestine and embraced Israel, claiming to have “taken time to truly learn the historical context.”
October 7 is the new January 6
Big Parasite’s efforts to collapse any daylight between “free-speech” crusaders and Zionist zealots is a desperate bid to prevent any empathy from developing between its own victims in Palestine and in Washington — specifically those who’ve found themselves in social-credit purgatory, unable to board a plane or open a bank account due to attending the January 6, 2021 “Stop the Steal” protest. Despite similar experiences with over-the-top Orwellian surveillance and harassment by Big Brother and Big Tech for behavior which no reasonable person would define as crime, conservatives have been repeatedly lied to by Israel-affiliated “America First” sites like Breitbart and the Free Beacon that they have absolutely nothing in common with Palestinians and Palestine advocates who’ve been facing similar treatment from the US government for so long that an entire organization, Palestine Legal, arose to defend them in court. When hundreds of Jewish peace activists were arrested on Capitol Hill a week after the Hamas raid, J6 patron saint Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene accused her colleague and Congress’ sole Palestinian, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, of leading a “pro-Hamas insurrection,” demanding Tlaib be censured and the demonstrators receive the same harsh sentences as the Stop the Steal crowd. She justified her sudden embrace of the police-state tactics she’d railed against for the previous two years by offering up the stale hasbara nugget that to be pro-Palestinian was to support Hamas, citing the ADL — which has called Greene herself “somewhere between deranged and demented” — in her desperate reach to denounce Jewish Voice for Peace as an extremist group.
Similarly, when conservatives better known for fighting the Biden administration’s unconstitutional crackdown on social media had a chance to join hands across the aisle with liberal university presidents struggling to flex their own disused First Amendment rights against the Lobby’s McCarthyite demand for a loyalty oath during this month’s campus antisemitism hearing, they chose instead to join the neocons in piling on the Ivy League women. It wasn’t so much the universities’ insufficient bubble-wrapping of the Jewish Campus Experience™ that bothered what should have been natural allies, but not hiring “enough” conservative and/or pro-Trump faculty and for overdosing on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion kool-aid — claims that were at best irrelevant, at worst unproven, and made the questioners look like petty bullies trafficking in entitled male resentment.
Billed as a hearing on “college campus antisemitism,” the House Education and Workforce Committee’s sadistic four-hour interrogation of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT last week proved once again the impossibility of appeasing one’s way out of tyranny. Despite having cooperated promptly and exhaustively in reorienting their universities’ campus life around the fictional scourge of antisemitism after October 7, dropping everything to assemble a whole new layer of bureaucracy capable of protecting the Ivy League’s Jewish snowflakes from accidental contact with student activism, Claudine Gay (Harvard), Liz Magill (UPenn), and Sally Kornbluth (MIT) were bullied and harassed in the name of stopping antisemitic bullying and harassment by making speech the Lobby doesn’t like an actionable disciplinary offense. When none of the presidents cracked under the full gale force of Rep. Elise Stefanik’s pearl-clutching tantrum even after she revealed their universities would be turned inside out with Title VI investigations, a nasty little tactic capable of ripping a multi-million dollar hole in one’s institution, one of UPenn’s Jewish sugar daddies threatened to drill an even bigger hole in the school’s war chest if Magill was allowed to stay, claiming he had anonymously donated $100 million in options from his Stone Street Asset Management firm — and that those options could be yanked back the minute he felt the school was no longer representing his Values faithfully. Because the board didn’t want to play chicken with a $100 million gift — not when there was a nice responsible Jewish girl already standing by as vice-chair waiting to fill Magill’s uncooperative shoes — it was done.
Greenblatt was soon troping up a storm on CNN as he gloated about Magill’s demise, claiming he could have helped UPenn — they’d contacted him, after all, as had Harvard — but they just wouldn’t do what he wanted. This wishlist had somehow metastasized from establishing an antisemitism task force to ordering that task force to ‘solve’ antisemitism within a designated time frame, purging university curricula of references to Israeli apartheid, adopting a hate speech code prominently featuring the bloated-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness IHRA definition of antisemitism (long since rejected by its creator as unfit for purpose) to be centered within a revamped Diversity, Equity and Inclusion framework, and correspondingly stepped-up punishments meted out to students, professors, administrators, and even the university itself if a Jewish student felt momentarily uncomfortable. Meanwhile, for hesitating before stripping students of their rights, then apologizing for crimes they did not actually commit, these university presidents have been doubly condemned to eternal “Jewish media torture” (for some idea of what to expect, refer to the character assassination of British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn).
The aim of the elaborate and frankly absurd manipulations Big Parasite has visited upon the minds of the West over the last two months is to normalize the most severe punishments for the slightest deviation from total fealty to the Israeli line — not so much shifting the Overton window as throwing a cinderblock through it in an epistemological Kristallnacht while somewhere, Jonathan Greenblatt screams like a little girl. Such upheaval is deliberately, unmanageably chaotic to ensure it cannot be reversed without extreme difficulty. It is now supposedly normal to be blacklisted, to lose one’s job and to get suspended from school for uttering “free Palestine.” Being refused a hotel room — or one’s constitutional right against self-incrimination — because of perceived failure to adequately condemn events that transpired halfway around the world and have no bearing on one’s life is not only viewed as socially legitimate but expected. The popular pro-Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea” was alchemically transmuted in a matter of hours on October 7 into a terrorist threat meaning the genocide of all Jewish Israelis (when in reality Jews peacefully lived among the Arab population of Palestine when it stretched from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea before the 1948 Nakba), and merely uttering it on Twitter – or even using the word “decolonization” – is cause for suspension, courtesy of Elon “I pretended to sue the ADL so you’d let me hand over your biometrics to Israel” Musk. An entire Twitter account with accompanying website was created to cement a bogus equivalency between removing posters of Israeli hostages from the American walls they’ve been irrelevantly posted on and “Jew hate.” Such “hate” need not mention Israel or Jews at all — Starbucks sued its own employee union over their social media posts expressing solidarity with Gaza, and the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce launched a campaign against the popular cafe chain with the slogan, “Drinking a cup of Starbucks is drinking a cup of Jewish blood.” Wave a Palestinian flag at a protest? You might as well be heiling Hitler.
To make sure this avalanche of fraud stays put, Big Parasite has made a bold grab for the control room of the internet itself, consolidating what is already near-total control so as to prevent even the slightest pin-pricks of light from hitting the retinas of the populations they must keep in the dark to complete their atrocities unmolested. In October, the US Federal Communications Commission quietly passed a measure giving itself total control of the transmission of all content across US internet infrastructure in the name of upholding “equity,” leaning on an already legally-absurd concept in order to justify something so far outside the bounds of law it might as well have been written in feces on the walls of an asylum. The agency’s own commissioner, Brendan Carr, took to social media to warn Americans what was in the works, explaining that the plan “hands the Administrative State effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the country.” Just as the people of Gaza have been all but muzzled by Israel’s deliberate shutdown of electricity and internet and blockade of fuel deliveries to the enclave, so will Americans find that their words can no longer reach an audience — either inside the US or outside its borders — if the FCC thinks it might hurt an influential Jew’s feelings. This is not speculation — the ADL made the argument for targeting internet infrastructure to suppress wrongthink earlier this year, and especially after the Biden administration had its wrist slapped for playing Ministry of Truth at the platform level with the Missouri v Biden decision, it has become abundantly clear to Big Parasite that preventing the transmission of such material is a much more final solution than trying to prevent its publication.
Preemptive self-defense
By equating pro-Palestinian speech with the literal genocide of Jews, Big Parasite’s agents in the West are not just dismantling the last remaining safeguards against state-sponsored censorship — they are opening the door to monstrous acts of “preemptive self-defense,” a concept only the diseased minds running the Israeli government would ever have had the chutzpah to attempt in real life. Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked cited just such a rationale for killing Palestinian children, whom she memorably referred to as “little snakes” in 2015, while the IDF’s “one shot, two kills” t-shirt has become a critical artifact for understanding the Israeli mind. As a desperate Israel runs out of threadbare narratives to brandish in the hope of distracting from the abattoir it’s operating in Gaza, American dissidents risk losing quite a bit more than just their jobs when they challenge Bibi the butcher.
coming soon to a boardroom near you
Israel has made it clear: support for Palestinians is support for Hamas. Anyone found to be supporting Hamas is a terrorist. All terrorists must die. And by the way, we’re gonna send the IDF around to all your countries — if Mossad isn’t already there — to make sure we got them all. Oh, and the US Congress has decided anti-Zionism makes you a terrorist too. Sleep tight!
The line between character assassination and actual assassination has never been thinner, especially with Big Parasite’s control of AI — both through operational algorithms and the feeder material, which is sourced from Wikipedia or its even less reliable cousin Wikidata more often than you’d like to think. They do not need TikTok users’ approval or even consent to insert the most aesthetically and morally repugnant content directly into the collective consciousness, especially once Musk fanboys start lining up for their Neuralinks and find themselves completely unable to question why their thoughts are suddenly expressed with an Israeli accent (“the tewwowists are coming!”)
Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer chillingly predicted his own demise as the result of “Bari Weiss and her likes” in a tweet less than a month before Israel bombed his sister’s house last week, killing him and half a dozen family members. Below a screenshot of his inbox, which was overflowing with poorly-spelled death threats, was a tweet from the perennially-butthurt Weiss spotlighting him for joking about whether an Israeli baby supposedly found in an oven in the world’s least original atrocity propaganda recipe had been cooked “with or without baking powder.” Weiss, like Musk, Gabbard, Kennedy, and any of countless other controlled-oppo personalities, presents herself as a fierce foe of cancel culture while hypocritically embracing it against anyone opposed to the genocide of Gaza, to the point that she has apparently moved up to helping cancel them for real.
the next butthurt loser you mock online might be working for Peter Thiel
Weiss last week retweeted an ominous message from Palantir, the Orwellian “security” firm founded by billionaire technofascist Peter Thiel. The company, it said, had opened its arms to Jewish students pissed that their universities wouldn’t evict pro-Palestinian students from campus wholesale. Palantir has offered such wannabe-Kissingers positions in a secretive new initiative apparently targeting those universities — and potentially anyone else who gets in the way, since putting killing machines in the hands of insecure nerds with grudges is not exactly self-limiting — with “actions on the battlefield.”
Witnessing the rollout of this repressive control agenda should only spur dissidents to greater activity, as many are beginning to understand — at least on a subconscious level — that if Gaza and the West Bank fall, these predators will come knocking on our doors (and while Jonathan Greenblatt may look like Nosferatu, he does not have to be invited in). Thousands of artists, writers and performers have hit back against the effort to delete Palestine from the discourse as a pretext for deleting it from history, fully aware that the censorship campaign they are facing off against represents an existential threat precisely because of the heavy-handed unpersoning of so many of their peers. One day we may find ourselves “deplatformed” only to realize we have to pay a toll to reenter the real world — and it’s Worldcoin or no world for you.
The twin spirals of silence and complicity are already twisting into an epistemological barbed wire fence, completing the Total Demoralization project that has been underway since Zionism took its first breath and shouted that this planet was not big enough for the both of us. They are correct — it isn’t big enough at all — but it is not we who have to go.
Britain secretly sent 500 extra troops to Cyprus base being used to supply weapons to Israel
By Matt Kennard | Declassified UK | December 12, 2023
Britain secretly deployed 500 additional troops to its bases on Cyprus after Israel began bombing Gaza, it can be revealed.
The UK government has said previously that it deployed 1,000 troops to the East Mediterranean to support Israel but it did not reveal how these troops were distributed.
But in a letter to Alba MP Kenny MacAskill, seen by Declassified, defence minister James Heappey wrote that on 27 November half these troops were in Cyprus.
Britain now has “approximately 500 additional service personnel deployed to Cyprus,” Heappey wrote in a surprising admission.
Britain has two “Sovereign Base Areas” on Cyprus – known as Dhekelia in the east of the island and Akrotiri in the west – which are large, highly secretive military and intelligence installations comprising 3% of the island’s land area.
The major UK air base on Cyprus, RAF Akrotiri, has long been the staging post for British bombing campaigns in the Middle East, and sits 180 miles from Tel Aviv. The flight time is 40 minutes.
The extra UK troops takes the number of British military personnel deployed on the island to 2,717. The UK bases also host 273 British civil servants.
The US military has also had a base on British territory on Cyprus for nearly half a century, but its size was kept secret from the public before Declassified recently revealed that 129 US airmen are permanently deployed to RAF Akrotiri.
It is not known if additional US personnel have also been deployed to Britain’s Cyprus bases to help support Israel’s bombing of Gaza, as the British government refuses to make public any information about American activities on the UK territory.
Defence minister James Heappey also revealed in his letter that Britain has sent extra troops to Egypt, Israel and Lebanon, but he refused to say at what levels. “I have withheld specific numbers for these countries for operational security reasons,” he wrote.
The UK military personnel were said to be deployed “to support contingency planning and UK humanitarian aid efforts”.
The 500 extra UK troops deployed to Cyprus do not include British special forces, which operate completely outside of democratic oversight.
The Sun reported on 27 October that Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS), the army’s elite special force, was on “standby” in Cyprus to – it was claimed – rescue British hostages held captive by Hamas and Britons who are trapped in Gaza.
The UK military’s “D-Notice” committee, which seeks to stop the media publishing information it claims would damage national security, requested on 28 October all media editors to not publish information relating to SAS operations in Gaza.
There has been no further reporting on the SAS’s role in Gaza, while the UK military refuses to confirm or deny if the SAS has been on the ground in Gaza since Israel began bombing the territory.
It is unclear if the Cypriot government has been told of the SAS deployment—or the extra UK troops.
Declassified recently revealed that over 30 military transport flights, operated by the RAF, had flown from RAF Akrotiri to Tel Aviv since the bombing of Gaza began.
But Cypriot government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis told the Cyprus Mail he had received no information about the flights. The UK, meanwhile, denied it is sending “lethal aid” or “military equipment” to Israel from RAF Akrotiri.
Declassified then reported the US was using RAF Akrotiri to transfer weapons to Israel. Respected Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that over 40 US transport aircraft have flown to RAF Akrotiri carrying equipment, arms and forces.
The planes have been loaded with cargo from strategic depots belonging to the US and NATO in Europe, Haaretz reported, with around half the US flights said to be “delivering military aid”.
The Cypriot president Nikos Christodoulides was asked about the US deliveries in a press conference, and said: “There is no such information, our country cannot be used as a base for war operations”.
Kenny MacAskill, the MP who asked the questions in parliament, told Declassified: “We require openness and accountability about what is happening at Britain’s bases on Cyprus and the role they are playing in Israel’s criminal bombing of Gaza. 500 additional military personnel to Cyprus is a huge deployment given the large contingent already based there. What is their role?”
He added: “It’s 20 years since the UK was taken into a war in Iraq based on lies and deceit. That cost the lives of millions and still causes harm today as refugees and terrorism testify to. Iraq wasn’t in my name and neither are these actions. We need to be told what is being done by our government.”
Matt Kennard is chief investigator at Declassified UK. He was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Follow him on Twitter @kennardmatt
From Dallas to Gaza: Was JFK’s Assassination Instrumental is Strengthening Zionist Israel?
By Rick Sterling | Global Research | December 13, 2023
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 60 years ago. If he had lived and won a second term, the Israeli Palestinian conflict would have evolved differently. Possibly the path toward Israeli apartheid and genocide in Gaza could have been avoided.
In his short time in office, Kennedy changed US foreign policy in significant ways. As documented in the book “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it still matters”, JFK resisted the CIA and military industrial complex in the policies he set regarding the Third World and Soviet Union. The Vietnam War, assassination of Indonesia’s President Sukarno, and continued hostility to Cuba and the Soviet Union would not have happened had Kennedy lived and won a second term.
Less well known, Kennedy’s policies also challenged and opposed the military and political ambitions of Zionist Israel. At the time, Israel had only existed for thirteen years. It was still evolving and the course was not totally set. There was significant international resolve to find a compromise solution regarding Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Nakba. When Israel attacked Egypt and seized the Sinai peninsula in 1956, the Eisenhower administration demanded Israel withdraw from the captured territory. They complied.
At this time, in the early 1960’s, prominent Jewish voices criticized the racism and discrimination of the Israeli government. Israelis like Martin Buber assailed Ben-Gurion and noted that “At the inception of the state, complete equality with the Jewish citizens was promised to the Arab population.” Many influential Israelis realized their long term security and well-being depended on finding a just settlement with the indigenous Palestinian population.
In the United States, the Jewish community was divided and many were anti-Zionist. The American Council for Judaism was influential and anti-nationalist. The racist and militaristic character of Israel was not yet set in stone. Nor was American Jewish support for Israel. When Menachim Begin came to the United States in 1948 he was denounced by prominent Jewish leaders including Albert Einstein. They said Begin, who later became Israeli Prime Minister, was a “terrorist” who preached “an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority.” Many American Jews had mixed feelings and did not identify with Israel. Others supported Israel but on the basis of there being peace with the indigenous Palestinians.
There are four key areas where the Kennedy policy was substantially different from what followed after his death.
Kennedy Was Not Biased in Favor of Israel
The Kennedy administration sought good relations with both Israel and the Arab nations. Kennedy aimed to extend US influence throughout the Middle East, including with nations friendly with the Soviet Union and at odds with NATO partners.
JFK personally supported Arab and African nationalism. As a senator in 1957, he criticized the Eisenhower administration for supporting and sending weapons to France in their war against the Algerian independence movement. In a 9,000 word presentation to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he criticized “western imperialism” and called for the US to support Algerian independence. Algerian President Ben Bella, who France had tried to assassinate and considered far too radical by many in NATO, was given a huge and impressive welcome to the White House.
Kennedy changed the previous frosty relations with the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria) led by Gamal Abdel Nasser. For the first time, the US approved loans to them. Kennedy wrote respectful letters to the Arab presidents before he welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion to Washington. The Arab leaders could see the difference and responded with appreciation. Those who claim there was no difference with Kennedy ignore the fact that Egypt’s Nasser, Algeria’s Ben Bella and other nationalist leaders saw a big difference.
In 1960, when Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency, he spoke at the Zionists of America Convention. He made complimentary remarks about Israel but also expressed the need for friendship with all the people of the Middle East. He said the US should “act promptly and decisively against any nation in the Middle East which attacks its neighbor” and “The Middle East needs water, not war; tractors, not tanks; bread, not bombs.”
Kennedy frankly told the Zionists, “I cannot believe that Israel has any real desire to remain indefinitely a garrison state surrounded by fear and hate.” By maintaining objectivity and neutrality on the Israeli Arab conflict, Kennedy wanted to steer the Jewish Zionists away from the racist, militaristic and ultra-nationalistic impulses which have led to where we are today.
Kennedy Wanted the Zionist Lobby to Follow the Rules
The second difference in Kennedy’s policy is regarding Zionist lobbying on behalf of Israel. Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), organizations that promote or lobby on behalf of a foreign government are required to register and account for their finances and activities. Under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the Department of Justice (DOJ) instructed the American Zionist Council (AZC) to register as agents of a foreign country. AZC is the parent organization of the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC).
As documented in detail here, on 21 November 1962, the Assistant Attorney General wrote to them “the receipt of such funds from the American sections of the Jewish Agency for Israel constitutes the (American Zionist) Council an agent of a foreign principal… the Council’s registration is requested.”
The emergence of Israeli political influence was also scrutinized in the Senate. Under Senator William Fulbright, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings in May and August 1963. They revealed that tax free donations to the United Jewish Appeal, supposedly for humanitarian relief in Israel, were being channeled back to the US where the money was used for lobbying and Israeli public relations.
Attorneys for AZC stalled for time. On August 16, 1963, a DOJ analyst reviewed the case and concluded, “Department should insist on the immediate registration of the American Zionist Council under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”
On October 11 the DOJ demanded that AZC register and “Department expects a response from you within 72 hours.”
On October 17, a DOJ memorandum reports that attorneys for AZC pleaded for not being required to register as foreign agents. They offered to provide the required financial disclosures but that registering as a foreign agent “would be so publicized by the American Council on Judaism that it would eventually destroy the Zionist movement.” As indicated in this discussion, political zionism was not yet dominant in the American Jewish community and was actively opposed by the American Council on Judaism and other Jewish groups.
Kennedy Supported Palestinian Rights
A third difference is regarding Palestinian rights. Although he was only 44 when he became president, Kennedy had more international experience than most US presidents. In 1939 he spent two weeks in Palestine. In a lengthy letter to his father, he described the situation and difficulties. He wrote,
“The sympathy of the people on the spot seems to be with the Arabs. This is not only because the Jews have had, at least some of their leaders, an unfortunately arrogant, uncompromising attitude, but they feel that after all, the country has been Arabic for the last few hundred years … Palestine was hardly Britain’s to give away.”
In comments that are still true, Kennedy remarks how the Jewish residents are divided between “strongly Orthodox Jewish group, unwilling to make any compromise” and a “liberal Jewish element composed of the younger group who fear these reactionaries”. His analysis is sympathetic to both Jewish and Arab peoples and addresses the difficulty but necessity to find a compromise solution.
In the early 1960’s, the US State Department was not locked in to a biased acceptance or approval of Israeli policies. The US supported UN Resolution 194 resolving (in paragraph 11) that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” This has become known as the “right of return”.
On November 21, 1963, the day before Kennedy’s assassination, the NY Times has two news stories which exemplify the discord between Washington and Tel Aviv. A report from the United Nations is titled “Israel Dissents as U.N. Group Backs U.S. on Arab Refugees”. It begins,
“A United States resolution calling for continued efforts to resolve the predicament of the Palestinian Arab refugees was approved tonight 83 to 1… Israel cast the single negative vote… The issue centers on a 1948 resolution whose key section, paragraph 11, concerns the future of the Arabs who were displaced from their homes by the Palestine conflict. They have been living in the lands bordering Israel … The revised United States text calls on the Palestine Conciliation Commission to ‘continue its efforts for the implementation of Paragraph 11’.”
The second NYT story is titled “U.S. Stand Angers Israel”. It reports from Jerusalem that “Premier Levi Eshkol expressed extreme distaste today for the United States’ position in the Palestine refugee debate… Israel’s anger was conveyed ‘in the strongest terms’ to the US Ambassador … The Israeli Government is upset about the American resolution before the UN Political Committee and by American maneuvers over the issue.” Israel was angered and objecting because the Kennedy administration was trying to resolve the Palestinian refugee situation including the right of return.
Kennedy Tried to Stop the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program
The fourth and biggest contention between Kennedy and the Israeli leadership was regarding their developing nuclear weapons. This issue was kept so secret that crucial documents and letters have only been released in recent years.
President Kennedy was a strong advocate for stopping nuclear proliferation. After the 1962 Cuba missile crisis, he realized how easy it would be to intentionally or accidentally trigger a catastrophic nuclear war. If nuclear weapons were allowed to spread to more countries, the risks of global catastrophe would be all the greater. It was also predicted that if Israel acquired nuclear weapons capability, they would become more aggressive and less likely to reach a compromise agreement regarding Palestinian refugees.
When intelligence indicated that Israel might be trying to build a nuclear weapon at Dimona in 1962, Kennedy was determined to find out if this was true, and if so to stop it. This caused an intense diplomatic confrontation between JFK and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. The proof of this has recently been revealed in the exchange of letters between President Kennedy and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and his successor Levy Eshkol. They are all labeled “Top Secret” or “Eyes Only”.
It is important to see the sequence and some details to understand how intense this showdown was. These communications are all from 1963. (Note to reader: skip ahead to the next section if you become tired of the detail in the following exchanges.)
In March the US State Department instructed the US Ambassador to inform the government of Israel (GOI) that for “compelling reasons” the “USG seeks GOI assent to semi-annual repeat semi-annual visits to Dimona, perhaps May and November, with full access to all parts and instruments in the facility, by qualified US scientists.”
On April 19 the State Department instructed the US Ambassador to Israel to “press” for an “affirmative reply” to the earlier request for semi-annual inspections of Dimona.
On April 26, Israeli PM Ben Gurion replied to President Kennedy. He evaded the issue of nuclear facility inspections and instead expressed his concern regarding a recent proclamation from Egypt, Syria and Iraq. He compared Egyptian President Nasser to Germany’s Hitler.
On May 4 JFK responded to Ben Gurion’s concerns and underscored the US commitment to Israel and peace in the Middle East. He told the Israeli leader he is much less worried about an “early Arab attack” than the “successful development of advanced offensive systems”.
On May 8, a Special National Intelligence Estimate concluded, “Israel intends at least to put itself in a position to be able to produce a limited number of weapons” and that “unless deterred by outside pressure [the Israelis] will attempt to produce a weapon sometime in the next several years.” The analysis predicted that if Israelis had the bomb it would “encourage them to be bolder in their use of the conventional resources both diplomatic and military in their confrontation with the Arabs.”
On May 10, US State Department sent an “Eyes Only Ambassador” telegram to the US Ambassador to Israel. The ambassador was instructed to remind the Israeli leadership that they have previously agreed to the bi-annual inspections. The telegram also says Israeli concerns about Arab development of a nuclear bomb “are not valid” because there is nothing comparable to the “advanced Israeli program.”
The tensions between the Kennedy administration and Tel Aviv caused the Israel lobby to escalate pressure on the White House. This is revealed in a May 11 TOP SECRET State Department memo regarding “White House Concern with Arab-Israeli Matters”. It begins,
“In recent weeks, as you are aware, it has become increasingly clear that the White House is under steadily mounting domestic political pressure to adopt a foreign policy in the Near East more consonant with Israeli desires. The Israelis are determined to use the period between now and the 1964 Presidential election to secure a closer, more public security relationship with the Unites States, notably through a public security guarantee and a cooler, more antagonistic relationship beween the United States and the UAR [United Arab Repubic].”
Source
This is a highly interesting memo showing Israeli influence in US foreign policy and electoral politics. It further shows Kennedy’s effort to mitigate this influence while standing firm on the goal to stop nuclear proliferation.
On May 12, 1963 Ben Gurion wrote another long letter to President Kennedy. Again evading the US request, Ben Gurion gives a distorted history including the claim that Palestinian refugees left Palestine “at the demand of Arab leaders”. He again compares Nasser to Hitler and suggests the danger of a new Holocaust.
He says, “Mr, President, my people have the right to exist … and this existence is in danger.”
Source
On May 19, Kennedy responded to Ben Gurion emphasizing the importance he placed on not allowing the spread of nuclear weapons.
“We are concerned with the disturbing effects on world stability which would accompany the development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel.”
Kennedy underscores the “deep commitment to the security of Israel” but says the commitment and support “would be seriously jeopardized” if the US is unable to obtain reliable information about “Israel’s efforts in the nuclear field.”
On May 27, Ben Gurion responded to Kennedy saying that the nuclear reactor at Dimona “will be devoted exclusively to peaceful purposes”. He counters Kennedy’s request for bi-annual visits starting in June by suggesting annual visits “such as have already taken place” starting at the end of the year. The condition is significant because the previous “visit” to Dimona was restricted in time and space.
The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center as viewed from a Corona satellite in the late 1960s (Public Domain)
On June 15, Kennedy wrote to Ben Gurion after he had received a scientific evaluation of the minimum requirements for a nuclear site inspection, After welcoming Ben Gurion’s assurances that Dimona will only be devoted to peaceful purposes, Kennedy issued a polite ultimatum. “If Israel’s purposes are to be clear to world beyond reasonable doubt, I believe the schedule which would best serve our common purpose would be a visit early this summer, another visit in June 1964, thereafter at intervals of six months.” He specifies that the “visit” must include access to all areas and “sufficient time be allotted for thorough examination.”
On June 16, the US Embassy in Israel reported that Ben Gurion resigned as Israel’s Prime Minister. This was a huge surprise; the explanation was that it was for “personal reasons”. It is likely that Ben-Gurion knew the contents of the forthcoming letter from Washington (received at the embassy the day before). The impact of his resignation was to stall for time. US Ambassador Barbour suggested waiting until the “cabinet problem is worked out” before sending JFK’s near ultimatum to the next Prime Minister.
Kennedy did not wait long. On July 4, he wrote to new Israeli Prime Minister Levy Eshkol. After congratulating Eshkol on becoming new Prime Minister, he goes straight to the point “concerning American visits to Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona.” Kennedy says, “I regret having to add to your burdens to soon after your assumption of office, but …” He then goes on to request inspections as was requested in the letter to Ben-Gurion and that “support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized” if this is not done.
On July 17, Eshkol wrote to Kennedy that he needed to study the issue more before responding to Kennedy’s request for visits to Dimona. US Ambassador Barbour added that Eshkol verbally conveyed that he was “surprised” at Kennedy’s statement that US commitment to Israel might be jeopardized. Indicating Israeli defiance, Eshkol told the US Ambassador “Israel would do what it had to do for its national security and to safeguard its sovereign rights.”
On August 19, Eshkol wrote to Kennedy re-iterating the “peaceful purpose” of Dimona and ignoring the request for a summer inspection. He proposed the inspection take place “toward the end of 1963”.
On August 26, Kennedy wrote to Eshkol accepting the visit at year end but emphasizing it needs to be done “when the reactor’s core is being loaded and before internal radiation hazards have developed.” Kennedy set these conditions because they were essential for determining whether the facility could be used for developing a nuclear weapon.
On September 16, State Department prepared a Memorandum of Conversation with a counselor from the British Embassy. There was joint concern but agreement that Dimona would be visited and inspected “prior to the activation of the reactor.”
After the Assassination of JFK on November 22
After Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) became president, US mideast policy changed significantly. From the start, LBJ told an Israeli diplomat, “You have lost a very great friend. But you have found a better one.” The Israeli publication Haaretz says, “Historians generally regard Johnson as the president most uniformly friendly to Israel.” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs writes “Lyndon Johnson Was First to Align U.S. Policy with Israel’s Policies” and “Up to Johnson’s presidency, no administration had been as completely pro-Israel and anti-Arab as his.”
On the crucial issue of Dimona inspection, the Israelis ignored JFK’s condition and the reactor went critical on December 26. When the inspection occurred three weeks later, they could not inspect the areas that had been irradiated. A handwritten comment on the report says, “We were supposed to see this first!” We do not know what would have happened it JFK had been in the White House but given the intensity of his effort, and deep convictions regarding the dangers of nuclear proliferation, it would not have been ignored as it was under LBJ.
Under LBJ, relations with Egypt deteriorated. The US stopped providing direct assistance loans and grants to Egypt. The US became increasingly antagonistic to President Nasser, as desired by the Israel lobby.
US support for a resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue decreased and then stopped.
The Department of Justice efforts to require the American Zionist Council to register as foreign agents became increasingly weak until they were dropped under LBJ’s new Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. The sequence of exchanges includes:
On December 11, 1963, the AZC attorney wrote to the DOJ saying, “Our client is not prepared to register as an agent of a foreign government.” Instead, he proposed to provide “voluntarily” the required financial information.
In January and February 1964, there were more exchange between AZC and the DOJ. AZC expressed concern because the American Council on Judaism publicly said that AZC was acting as “propaganda agents for the state of Israel and that the Jewish Agency was being used as a conduit for funds for the Zionist organization in the United States.”
In summer 1964 Nicholas Katzenbach becomes Attorney General. Negotiations continued. DOJ staff noted that AZC was “stalling” and not providing acceptable information despite the increasingly special and favorable treatment. In spring of 1965 the DOJ accepted that AZC was NOT required to register as foreign agent. Their financial information was kept in a unique expandable folder. In November 1967 the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) applied for a federal tax exemption. The US Treasury Department granted it, backdated to 1953.
Increasingly Aggressive and Uncompromising Zionist Israel
The successful development of nuclear weapons added to Israel’s aggressive actions and unwillingness to resolve the Palestinian refugee crisis.
With intelligence information provided by Washington, Israel made a surprise attack on Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967. The “Six Day war” was a crucial turning point in middle east history. Israel quickly defeated the unprepared combined armies. In the West, public perception of Israel changed overnight. The mythology of Israeli military (and general) superiority was created. Among the American Jewish population, doubts and concerns about Israel evaporated and support skyrocketed.
Israeli leaders arrogance and deceit is exemplified by the attack on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War. The communications navy vessel was monitoring the air waves in the eastern Mediterranean when it was attacked by Israeli aircraft and boats. Thirty four US sailors were killed and 172 injured. Amazingly , the ship managed to stay afloat. The plan was evidently to sink the ship, blame it on Egypt and consolidate US support and hostility to Egypt and the Soviet Union.
Lyndon Johnson over-ruled the calls for help from the vessel, saying “I will not have my ally embarrassed.”
The deadly incident was covered up for decades.
We do not know for sure what might have happened had JFK not been assassinated. It is possible that Israel would have been stopped from acquiring the bomb. Without that, they may not have had the audacity to launch the 1967 attacks on their neighbors, seizing the Golan, West Bank and Gaza Strip. If the Zionist lobby had been required to register as foreign agents, their influence would have been moderated. Perhaps Israel could have found a reasonable accommodation with Palestinians in one or two states.
Instead, Israel hardened into an apartheid regime committing increasingly outrageous massacres. As Kennedy warned in 1960, Israel has become a “garrison state” surrounded by “hate and fear”. The assassination of John F Kennedy insured Zionist control of Israel, suffering for Palestinians and permanent instability.
*
Rick Sterling is an independent journalist based in the San Franciso Bay Area of California. He can be reached at rsterling1@protonmail.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Copyright © Rick Sterling, Global Research, 2023
Penn Students’ Lawsuit Shows Campus Antisemitism Uproar Is A Manufactured Crisis
Vast majority of “incidents” are merely expressions of unwelcome political views
By Brian McGlinchey | Stark Realities | December 12, 2023
Saturday’s resignation of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill came after months of controversy — and a viral-video grilling of Magill in a congressional hearing — over allegations the school has become a hotbed of antisemitism.
While those allegations have been given widespread credence, a Stark Realities analysis of dozens of claimed antisemitic incidents at Penn finds that, apart from a small handful of cases, the great majority are merely instances in which Penn students, professors and guest speakers engage in political expression that proponents of the State of Israel strongly disagree with.
Conveniently, a catalogue of supposed examples of anti-Jew bigotry at Penn is laid out in a federal lawsuit filed last week against the school by two Jewish students who allege it “has transformed itself into an incubation lab for virulent anti-Jewish hatred, harassment, and discrimination.” In the suit, dual American-Israeli citizen Eyal Yakoby and American Jordan Davis seek “substantial damages in an amount to be determined at trial.”
For those wanting to look beyond what’s been said about Penn by grandstanding politicians, click-seeking news outlets and sensationalist social media posters, the 84-page complaint is a valuable resource. Unlike the sloppy court of public opinion, real courts demand a detailed presentation of specific allegations.
However, scrutiny of the Penn complaint — prepared by Philadelphia lawyer and Penn law grad Eric Shore and New York City law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres — confirms the campaign against the Philadelphia school is just the latest component a broader, long-running drive to censor political expression that’s critical of the State of Israel and sympathetic to Palestinians.
In support of that drive, conservatives who’d previously and rightfully bashed campus viewpoint censorship and crackdowns on flexibly-defined “hate speech” are among the most vocal advocates of installing a new censorship regime to keep students “safe” from anti-Israel rhetoric.
Objective readers of the complaint will quickly note a number of red flags, starting with strident, vitriolic language referring to “rabidly antisemitic professors” and “Jew-hating” speakers who “spew antisemitic venom” by “bellowing into bullhorns to express their hatred for Israel.”
However, the complaint’s foremost flaw is its repeated assumption that various political concepts, views and slogans promoted by critics of Israel are inherently antisemitic or genocidal. This kind of attack isn’t unique to the Penn complaint; it’s constantly used by Israel’s advocates to silence the opposition. Among the forbidden ideas:
- Anti-Zionism. A philosophy embraced by many Jews, anti-Zionism opposes the idea of a Jewish nation-state. Opposing the concept of such a Jewish state doesn’t automatically make someone a bigot any more than opposing a white state or a Christian state does. The Chavurah, a progressive Jewish group at Penn, recently rejected this charge, saying that “continual conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-semitism undermines any chance for productive dialogue at Penn concerning Israel.”
- Questioning Israel’s “right to exist.” No country has a right to exist. Countries are mere political arrangements. There’s nothing inherently bigoted about campaigning for a different political order between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The State of Israel has no more “right to exist” than did the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia, or does North Korea or the United States.
- “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” As I wrote last month, “while any slogan will mean different things to different people, this one has been used for decades by Palestinians seeking the same liberties as Israeli Jews throughout the entire territory ruled by the State of Israel.” For most, it’s a call for the State of Israel to be replaced by a new governing arrangement. While some may be reasonably concerned about how that would play out, the idea isn’t inherently genocidal or antisemitic.
- The Palestinian “right of return.” This concept argues that Palestinians displaced by the 1948 creation of Israel should be allowed to return to their homes. It isn’t inherently embedded with bigotry, as the complaint suggests. Indeed, its advocates would argue the concept is a counter to Israeli ethnocentrism.
- “Singling out” Israel for criticism. This preposterous standard, routinely advanced by Zionists, suggests that it’s antisemitic to criticize policies of the Israeli government if you don’t simultaneously criticize other governments guilty of the same sins.
- Calling Israel an “apartheid state.” A great many Jews say Israel satisfies the definition of apartheid — for starters, Hebrew University Holocaust professor Amos Goldberg, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo and Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
- Accusing Israel of genocide. While the suit is filled with accusations of genocidal intent on the part of pro-Palestinian activists, the plaintiffs would have us assume it’s antisemitic to argue that Israel’s bombardment of civilian areas in Gaza and displacement of Palestinians amounts to genocide.
- Urging boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. In another display of double-standards, Israel’s backers cheer on economic warfare against Iran, but the BDS movement — which aims to achieve better treatment of Palestinians by using similar economic tactics — is supposedly a bigoted enterprise.
The most controversial term, “intifada,” has been chanted by pro-Palestinian protesters at Penn and around the world. Roughly translating to English as “shaking off,” intifada refers to an uprising against Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians have engaged in two previous intifadas. While the tactics included suicide bombings targeting civilians, Palestinians also engaged in peaceful protests, rioting, and attacks on Israeli government targets ranging from mere stone-throwing to deadly rocket attacks.
“It is not a term against Jews, it is a term against the Israeli government,” said Glenn Greenwald last week on his show, System Update. “Just like you’re allowed to say ‘I think we should bomb Iran’ or go to war in Iraq or ‘flatten Gaza,’ people are allowed to say, allowed to opine…in the United States of America, that the repression by the Israeli government has become sufficiently severe that an uprising or even violence against the State of Israel is warranted.”
“Intifida” played a key role in last week’s Capitol Hill grilling of then-Penn president Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay and MIT president Sally Kornbluth by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik.
[…]
Finally, in what may be the complaint’s “jump the shark” moment, the plaintiffs accuse Penn of discriminating against Jews “by intentionally reducing its Jewish enrollment.” Jews represent about 2.4% of the US population, but occupy 16% of Penn’s prized enrollment slots.
The complaint decries the fact that the Jewish share has fallen from about a third of students in 2000, a trend they say the school has “intentionally engineered.” The plaintiffs don’t specify which non-Jewish populations are now over-represented at Jews’ expense. – Full article
Biden regime has no plans to restrict military aid to Israel, officials say
Press TV – December 13, 2023
US officials have revealed that the administration of President Joe Biden has no plans to withhold military aid from Israel despite the aggravating humanitarian situation caused by the regime’s relentless military campaign in Palestine’s Gaza.
The CNN quoted officials as saying on Wednesday that there will be no changes to US positions on the transfer of weapons and munitions to Israel despite growing calls by Democratic lawmakers and human rights organizations for Washington to stop its open support for Israel until the regime commits to a ceasefire or at least to measures that can protect civilians amid the Gaza war.
A US official said that Washington would rely on Israel’s assessment of whether its attacks on civilians in Gaza are proportional and legal rather than independently evaluating Israeli strikes on civilians that it deems unlawful and concerning.
A congressional source also said that the State Department had failed to provide any assurances to lawmakers that the Biden administration would monitor how Israel would use a consignment of tank ammunition that was recently supplied to the Israeli regime without congressional consent.
The State Department transmitted an emergency declaration to US lawmakers late on Friday notifying them of the sale of thousands of tank munitions to Israel, a move that had been done without observing the standard 20-day period that congressional committees normally have to review such sales.
Democratic lawmakers have called on Biden to stop supplying military aid to Israel as the regime goes on with its indiscriminate attacks on civilians in Gaza.
That comes as Biden said this week that he has had tough conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Israel’s military campaign but did not threaten to cut off aid and said his administration will do nothing other than protect Israel.
“We’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing,” said Biden while addressing Democratic donors in Washington.
More than 18,600 people have been killed in Gaza as a result of the Israeli attacks that started on October 7, the day on which the Palestinian resistance group Hamas launched a major operation into the occupied territories near Gaza, killing some 1,200 Israeli settlers and military forces.
Israeli military abducts Gaza hospital director after he decries siege
Press TV – December 12, 2023
The Israeli military has abducted the director of a main hospital in the northern Gaza Strip after he decried the occupying regime’s days-long siege of the facility and its draconian and deadly repercussions.
Ahmed al-Kahlout, head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the city of Beit Lahiya, was arrested and taken to an “unknown destination outside the hospital,” Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Tuesday.
The hospital has been under siege by Israeli tanks for the past four days. Earlier on Tuesday, health officials reported that Israeli forces had stormed the hospital, rounding up Palestinian men for interrogation.
Before his abduction, Kahlout had strongly criticized the siege laid on the hospital, saying it had caused the situation at the facility to become “very difficult.”
“No electricity, water, or food at the hospital,” Kahlout had bemoaned, and noted that “three children at the hospital lost their lives in the last three days due to a shortage of oxygen.”
“Israeli drones target anyone entering or leaving the hospital,” he had also said, announcing that the Israeli military had shelled the facility’s maternity ward and water system, forcing the staff to rely on groundwater.
The Israeli military was sustaining its siege and attacks on the hospital, while the facility was accommodating “65 injuries, including 12 children in intensive care, six children with serious injuries, and 3,000 displaced people,” the hospital director had said.
The remarks came amid an ongoing war by the Israeli regime against the entire Gaza, which Tel Aviv began on October 7 in response to an operation staged by the coastal sliver’s resistance groups.
Nearly 18,500 people have been killed in Gaza as a result of the Israeli attacks, most of them women and children.
Also on Tuesday, the UN said only 13 out of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip were partially functional as Israeli occupation forces were targeting medical centers and staff amid heavy bombardment of the besieged territory.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a report that the services provided to patients at operational hospitals were “limited” as the facilities had run out of bed capacity.
Euro-Med Monitor: “In Gaza, Israel’s Army Replicates the Crimes Committed by Zionist Gangs in 1948”
IMEMC | December 12, 2023
An urgent international investigation must be opened into horrific crimes committed by the Israeli army during its land incursions into the Gaza Strip, including field executions, torture, and rape threats, said Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, citing testimonies collected from newly-released civilians.
Euro-Med Monitor said that Israeli army forces are reenacting the same crimes committed by Zionist gangs during the 1948 Nakba, which resulted in the collective displacement of Palestinians.
These crimes include premeditated murder, setting fire to Palestinian homes and properties, torture, and insulting and humiliating detained civilians.
The human rights organisation highlighted the Israeli forces’ brutal storming of civilian homes in crowded residential neighbourhoods during the ongoing genocide.
Members of Israel’s military terrorized and beat residents, plus arrested hundreds of them, including women, children, and sick people.
According to testimonies gathered by Euro-Med Monitor from several detainees who were newly released, the Israeli forces took the detainees from their homes, stripped them naked, and attacked them with machine guns, electric cables, and cold water.
Sixteen-year-old Muhammad Mahmoud Aslim told the Euro-Med team that the Israeli forces stormed his family’s home in Al-Shuja’iya neighbourhood, east of Gaza City, after they were trapped for an entire week without food and water.
He stated that over the past few days, Israeli forces killed everyone in his neighbourhood who tried to leave their home, including Aslim’s brother.
Israeli forces later stormed his family’s house, said Aslim, and destroyed its contents with heavy gunfire. His family members were gathered naked and handcuffed before being violently assaulted and beaten.
Aslim still does not know what happened to his mother and sisters, who were captured and kidnapped by the Israeli army.
The Euro-Med Monitor team has gathered statements and testimonies about Israeli special forces raiding refugee centres in Gaza City and its northern areas, which housed thousands of displaced Palestinians.
These raids have involved the execution of young men who were shot with live ammunition at point-blank range.
Displaced people at the Cairo School, which houses hundreds of displaced people west of Gaza City, told Euro-Med Monitor’s team that several civilian cars carrying Israeli special forces stormed the school yard on Friday December 8, killing and wounding a number of unarmed young men.
According to the testimonies, the Israeli special forces ordered all of the men in the school to quickly gather and line up opposite them. Four of the men were executed, and the others were arrested after a brief interrogation.
Muhammad Abu Mustafa said that three individuals—two from the Abdul Ghafour and Abu Zaid families and one from his own family—were shot and killed by Israeli snipers after they went to assist a neighbour in Al-Shuja’iya neighbourhood. The victims were left bleeding to death.
Similar violations were reported on Saturday by other internally displaced people at the UNRWA-run Khalifa Bin Zayed School, in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahia.
They reported that the Israeli forces arrested dozens of men and minors in the school. The detainees were stripped of their clothes, bound, and taken to another location, where they were interrogated and tortured. Some of them were released, while the rest were kept in custody.
One of the released men, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said that they were ordered to take off their clothes after being handcuffed and blindfolded.
They were then put in trucks and taken to the seashore, where they were kept shackled for about 19 hours.
According to the young man, they were subjected to insults, severe beatings, threats of being shot in the head, and had numbers written on their hands. They were also deprived of drinking water for many hours.
Upon their release, they were transferred naked to Salah al-Din Street, south of Gaza City, where the soldiers ordered them to walk on foot towards the central areas of the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli random arrests also targeted a young disabled man who suffers from hemiplegia.
The young man had been displaced from Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood in Gaza City to a relative’s apartment in the city centre before he and his brother were arrested; their fate remains unknown.
Ms. M.Z., a resident of Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood who was displaced to Shuhada Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, in the southern part of the Strip, said that an Israeli soldier pointed his gun at her head and threatened to kill her even though she had told him she was five months pregnant.
The soldier ordered her to take off her clothes and threatened to rape her.
As it continues to document testimonies from victims of the Israeli army’s crimes and random arrests, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor renewed its call for an urgent international investigation into Israel’s violations and crimes against civilians, and called on the United Nations to assume its responsibilities and provide a safe passage for the displaced to use to evacuate.
Israel is required by international humanitarian law to take all reasonable steps to prevent harm civilians and to guarantee their safe shelter.
The Geneva-based rights organization emphasized, however, that civilians who choose to stay in areas designated for evacuation do not forfeit their protection, and cannot be singled out or targeted for any reason.
Iran: EU sanctions others, looks the other way on Gaza genocide, ethnic cleansing
Press TV – December 12, 2023
Iran has denounced the EU’s recent sanctions on its defense industry over “baseless” allegations of drone delivery to Russia, slamming the block for turning a blind eye on Israel’s “genocide” unfolding in the Gaza Strip.
In a statement on Tuesday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan’ani “strongly condemned” European Council’s “destructive actions” and imposing sanctions against 6 persons and 5 entities involved in Iran’s development and production of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).
“The desperate efforts of some malicious actors with political motives in order to use the inefficient sanctions and spread of false information only create more self-made obstacles in the path of relations between the Islamic Republic and Europe and prove ineffective,” he said.
Kan’ani said the EU talks about international law and the United Nations Charter, while it is “practically turning a blind eye on Israel’s war crimes” and violation human rights and international humanitarian laws.
He further criticized EU for not making any tangible efforts to stop Israel’s “unquestionable genocide and ethnic cleansing” against the “oppressed Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”
Kan’ani also reaffirmed the Islamic Republic’s supports for efforts aimed at finding a solution to the Ukraine military conflict through peaceful means.
Tehran says it reserves the right to retaliate after the European Union imposed new sanctions against Iran in connection with the allegation, he concluded.
The European Union and the US have long accused Iran of supplying drones to Russia for use in Ukraine.
The Council’s sanctions, announced on Monday, imposed restrictive measures against the Shahed drone-maker Shakad Sanat Asmari, its CEO, deputy CEO and chief scientist.
The other companies hit were the Baharestan Kish Company, Saad Sazeh Faraz Sharif, the Sarmad Electronic Sepahan Company and the Kimia Part Sivan Company.
The US has also imposed similar sanctions on a number of entities and individuals based in Iran and other countries, accusing them of supporting Tehran’s drone development.
Iran has repeatedly rejected the West’s claim, saying it has not sold any weapons to Russia for the the war against Ukraine, and asked the West to offer evidence for the allegation.
Canadian mayor backs Israel’s actions no matter how many children die
RT | December 12, 2023
The mayor of the Montreal suburb of Hampstead Jeremy Levi has said that, regardless of the number of children’s lives taken, he would continue to support Israel in its ongoing offensive in Gaza.
More than 18,200 people have so far died in the nine-week bombardment of Gaza, health officials in the besieged enclave said on Monday, as Israel’s retaliatory campaign in response to Hamas’ October 7 cross-border attack continues at pace. Israeli officials say that 1,147 of its citizens were killed in the October assault, while another 240 were seized as hostages.
But as international condemnation of Israel’s siege of Gaza swells, Levi – who was elected last year to govern the predominantly Jewish Hampstead community – has said that Israel’s military offensive must continue until “good” prevails over “evil.”
“I’m not calling for a ceasefire,” Levi said in a video posted to social media on Monday by Yves Engler, a vocal critic of Israel. “I want the hostages home, but I’m not calling for a ceasefire.”
The mayor added about the increasing death toll in Gaza, particularly deaths of children: “I would never support [the killing of children], it’s terrible. But Israel has to do whatever they have to do to protect the security of their own people.”
The Palestinian ministry of health has said that about 70% of those killed in the enclave since Israel’s offensive began are women and children under the age of 18. United Nations humanitarian officials said late last month that about 160 children are being killed each day in Gaza, or one child every ten minutes.
UNICEF spokesman James Elder added to reporters in Geneva in November that conditions are deteriorating further, and forecasted a deepening humanitarian crisis “if youngsters continue to have restricted access to water and sanitation in Gaza.”
“Hamas must be eradicated completely,” Levi continued in his video clip. “[The collateral death toll] is terrible, but there is no other way. My heart goes out to all the innocent people who have suffered great loss in this tragedy, but good needs to prevail over evil.”
Asked if he would continue to support Israel if 100,000 children were killed, Levi said: “You can give me all sorts of numbers, my answer is going to be the same: Israel needs to eradicate Hamas.”
Last month, Levi imposed a bylaw in the Hampstead community which would see anyone who tore down a poster of missing Israeli citizens fined CAN$1,000 – with the money being donated directly to Israel.
Israeli regime turning to Western mercenary groups to back its war on Gaza
By Reza Javadi | Press TV | December 12, 2023
Apart from the lavish military aid offered by the United States and Europe, the Israeli military is turning to Western mercenary groups in its genocidal war against the Gaza Strip.
In a recent interview with Spanish newspaper El Mundo, Pedro Diaz Flores, a notorious Spanish mercenary, revealed that the Israeli regime is recruiting Private Military Companies (PMCs) to achieve its interests in the besieged territory.
He revealed that “many” mercenary groups have joined Israel’s army, which pays them “very well.”
“So I came for the economy, for money. They pay very well, they offer good equipment and the work is calm. It is 3,900 euros [$4,187] per week, complementary missions aside,” Flores said.
Flores, who fought alongside neo-Nazis in Ukraine, spoke of his group’s assistance to Israeli forces.
“We only provide security support to arms convoys or the troops of the Israeli armed forces that are in the Gaza Strip,” Flores said, confirming the presence of PMCs in Gaza.
“We are in charge of the security of the checkpoints and access control on the borders of Gaza and Jordan. There are many PMCs here and they share the work. Traditionally they have guarded border terminals between Eliat and Aqaba.”
According to the images posted by a leading American PMC, Forward Observations Group (FOG), the American PMCs seem to be active in the occupied Palestinian territories aiding the Israeli regime.
On their social media accounts, FOG posted numerous images and stories showing its recruits in Palestine, surrounded by a large cache of weapons and sporting combat gear.
Wearing the American flag on their uniforms, the mercenaries’ social media accounts show that they are stationed alongside the Gaza border in the occupied territories.
In a YouTube video posted back in January, the group revealed its presence on the frontlines of the Ukraine war, assisting the Ukrainian forces in their war against Russian forces.
On its social media channels and website, FOG has advertised its gear through its training videos.
The founder of FOG is US mercenary and ex-US paratrooper, Derrick Bales, who has taken heat for his association with Vadim Lapaev, a member of the far-right Azov Battalion in Ukraine.
Bales, the former US infantry soldier who also served in Afghanistan, apologized but downplayed the radical aspects of those Ukrainian fighters.
Lapaev was quoted as saying by Vice News that he regretted his past association with neo-Nazis.
Apart from unconventional forces, the US has deployed more than 15,000 military troops to the occupied territories since the regime launched its fresh aggression against Palestinians on October 7.
Deployments disclosed by the Pentagon back in October also include two US aircraft carriers and their associated escort ships, in addition to the repositioning of an amphibious task force made up of about 4,000 US Marines and sailors.
The task force of sailors and Marines embarked aboard the USS Bataan and two other warships, includes an infantry battalion of about 900 combat personnel, F-35B fighter jets, armored vehicles and other weapons.
Apart from billions of dollars of military aid to the Israeli regime, the US military still continues to ship weapons and has pledged to provide more missile interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome military system, small-diameter bombs and other GPS-guided weapons, Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman confirmed recently.
In this regard, the US is covertly providing 2,000-pound “bunker-busting” bombs to Israel’s air force to be used against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
According to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), some 100 of the BLU-109 bombs – designed to penetrate hardened surfaces to reach underground targets such as military bunkers – have been sent to Tel Aviv.
The bombs, which carry a warhead weighing more than 900 kilograms, are capable of penetrating hardened structures such as concrete before exploding, causing heavy casualties.
The covert arms transfers are being reported when the US claims that it is urging Israel to limit civilian casualties in its military campaign in Gaza. However, the US-provided weapons have been the main cause of high civilian casualties across Gaza.
According to US officials, an airstrike that hit the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza in the initial days of the war that killed over 100 people was conducted using US-provided bombs.
According to another latest report, phosphorus shells used by Israeli forces in an October attack on a Lebanese village were also provided by the US.
The revelation came after US officials expressed “concern” over the regime’s use of white phosphorous, which human rights campaigners say should be investigated as a war crime.
Meanwhile, some Russian news agencies and several experts have reported about mercenaries leaving Ukrainian soil and heading to the occupied territories to aid the regime forces against the Palestinian resistance movement.
“Assistance and attention to Kiev are noticeably decreasing due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which cannot but worry the Ukrainian authorities,” a Russian news agency posted on Telegram.
“The transfer of Foreign Legion fighters to participate in the war on the side of the Israel Defense Forces can greatly affect the morale of the Ukrainian Armed Forces,” wrote another X account.
“Is the West ready to close the Ukraine project and devote all its attention to a new conflict in the Middle East?”
In this regard, the deployment of mercenaries in Gaza raises questions about accountability and the role of the international community, as it exacerbates the suffering of Palestinians.
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Woolsey Fire started at Santa Susana Field Lab — where “radioactive materials released were never accurately measured”
By John Laforge | CounterPunch | November 30, 2018
In my Nov. 16 column, I reported on potential radiation risks posed by California’s Woolsey wildfire having burned over parts or all of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory—south of Simi Valley, Calif., 30 miles outside Los Angeles—site of at least four partial or total nuclear reactor meltdowns.
The field laboratory operated 10 experimental reactors and conducted rocket engine tests. In his 2014 book Atomic Accidents, researcher James Mahaffey writes, “The cores in four experimental reactors on site … melted.” Reactor core melts always result in the release of large amounts of radioactive gases and particles. Clean up of the deeply contaminated site has not been conducted in spite of a 2010 agreement.
Los Angeles’s KABC-7 TV reported Nov. 13 that the Santa Susana lab site “appears to be the origin of the Woolsey Fire” which has torched over 96,000 acres. Southern Calif. Public Radio said, “According to Cal Fire, the Woolsey Fire started on the afternoon of Thursday, Nov. 8 … on the Santa Susana site.” … continue
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