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New Israeli strikes kill dozens of Palestinians in Gaza as Netanyahu rejects ceasefire calls

Israeli bombardment on Gaza on November 12, 2023
Press TV – November 12, 2023

Relentless Israeli air and ground attacks have killed dozens of Palestinian civilians over the last few hours, as the Israeli regime’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has rejected mounting international calls for a ceasefire.

Rescue and civil defense teams retrieved the bodies of four civilians from the Hamdan family home in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City, which was targeted by an Israeli missile strike in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Israeli warplanes also targeted a house belonging to Abdullah al-Adini, a local Palestinian resident in the city of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, resulting in the murder of three civilians.

Separately, at least 10 civilians lost their lives and more than 20 others were injured in an Israeli airstrike targeting the Najjar family’s house east of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.

Meanwhile, three infants and five critically ill patients in the Shifa Medical Complex died Sunday morning due to oxygen shortage, while others are on the verge of death due to the continuous Israeli siege.

At least five infants died in less than 48 hours due to the cessation of medical services at the Shifa Complex.

Israeli tanks are currently stationed outside the maternity ward of the Shifa Complex, and that Israeli artillery have targeted the intensive care unit, resulting in multiple injuries.

Dozens of dead bodies remained across the compound and in its surroundings, and rescue teams have been unable to reach them for evacuation due to the intensity of the Israeli bombardment and gunfire targeting anyone moving.

The headquarters of the United Nations Development Programme in Gaza was also hit by Israeli airstrikes, leading to the death of five displaced persons and the injury of 15 others.

Gaza’s embattled hospitals face total collapse as bombardments continue and Israeli tanks and troops surround medical facilities, with patients and staff trapped inside.

In Gaza City, operations have been suspended at Al-Shifa Hospital after it completely ran out of fuel.

The Israeli military has repeatedly targeted this hospital and other medical facilities over the past five weeks.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently said that 20 hospitals in the Gaza Strip are now out of action, and the largest hospital in the Palestinian territory was that day coming under bombardment.

Netanyahu rejects growing international pressure over ceasefire

In a televised address on Saturday night, the Israeli prime minister rejected growing international calls for a ceasefire.

Netanyahu also rejected the idea that the Palestinian Authority (PA), which currently administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, would at some stage control Gaza.

He said that Israelis shouldn’t cave into any pressure from such statements or the protests taking place worldwide and said he would stand firm against the world if necessary.

So according to Netanyahu, the Israeli regime has its own agenda and will push it through regardless of what other countries say.

His primetime address came hours after Arab and Muslim leaders at a summit in Riyadh called for an immediate ceasefire as major hospitals in Gaza were on the front line of Israel’s ground offensive.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Palestinians are facing an unmatched genocidal war by the Israeli regime.

Abbas said Israeli actions in the besieged Gaza Strip and across the occupied territories amount to a clear violation of international and humanitarian law.

The president said Palestinians need international protection in the face of Israeli attacks including the desecration of Muslims’ holy sites. He also noted that Palestinians will not negotiate when it comes to their inalienable rights.

Erdogan calls for US to stop Israel’s attack

The United States must use its influence to halt Israel’s offensive in Gaza, Turkey’s leader says.

“The US should increase its pressure on Israel. The West should increase pressure on Israel… It’s vital for us to secure a ceasefire,” said Erdogan. “The most important country that needs to be involved is the United States, which has influence on Israel.”

Erdogan said the US must accept Gaza as Palestinian land. “We cannot agree with Biden if he approaches [the war] by seeing Gaza as the land of occupying settlers or Israel, rather than the land of the Palestinian people.”

Palestinians are enduring relentless bombing of civilian infrastructure including residential buildings, schools, medical facilities, everywhere in the besieged territory.

The total death toll from the war is now at over 11,000. The majority of victims are women and children. Hundreds of people are also missing under the rubble of bombed-out buildings.

According to reports, more than half of the housing units in Gaza were destroyed or damaged by the Israeli bombings.

November 12, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

An Epistle to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

By Edward J. Curtin, Jr. | Behind The Curtain | November 10, 2023 

Dear Bobby,

As you know, I have supported your bid for the presidency even before you declared last spring.  I have admired and believed in you for years, and when you entered the race I felt hope for the first time in decades that your non-violent impulses, honed by your tragic family history and a deep revulsion for our country’s imperial wars and violent history, would triumph and usher in a new era of peace.  Despite the naysayers who dismissed you from the start, I said Yes, that you would shock those who ridiculed and maligned you and that you would be the man to carry out President Kennedy’s American University speech and fulfill his and your father’s legacy of “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women” because “we all breathe the same air” and “we all cherish our children’s futures” and “we are all mortal.”

I suggested that you would heal the divide and not expand it.  Seeing you stumble on your way by throwing your full support to the Zionist leaders of Israel has been a body blow to me.  At first I thought it might be explained by your reaction to the false antisemitic accusations that were hurled your way once word emerged that you might enter the presidential race.  But as time went on it dawned on me that I was wrong and that you were in sync with the powerful Israel Lobby.  So now, I feel as if we are in the tenth round of fight for your soul’s compassion.  That you have not defended the children of Gaza and condemned their massacre by the thousands has shocked and sickened me.

As a scholar of religion and its intersection with politics, I have been meditating on current events.

Religion has for a very long time been used as a cover for slaughtering people and seizing their land. This is true for the United States and Israel. It is built into their theological underpinnings.  So it should not be at all surprising that the current Israeli massacre of Palestinians is fully supported by the U.S. government led by President Joseph Biden and by almost every presidential aspirant.  You, however, as a self-styled anti-war candidate are a great surprise to me, although I may be naïve and shouldn’t be since you gave your unequivocal support to the Israel government a month ago, following the October 7 Hamas-led incursion into Israel that killed innocent Israelis (many of whom were also probably killed by the IDF as Jonathan Cooke has reported).  Despite that, I still expected your conscience would surely prompt you to condemn what can only be described as genocide, the slaughter of the innocents in Gaza that is ongoing.

You have undermined your claim to “end the forever wars” and to defend children.  Why you have done (or not done) this is a question that so many of your supporters and former supporters are asking.  Only you can say.  Perhaps we might only know if you unequivocally condemned Israel’s actions and faced whatever might come your way as a result.  This is unlikely, I now realize, but one can still hope. I think it would take a spiritual miracle of moral courage, because of your claim that your historical analysis that you say is sincere and true that Israel now and always has been the just and innocent party and the Palestinians the evil ones. I find your analysis unbelievable and your silence as innocents are being slaughtered indefensible, even as I applaud so many of your other positions, as you know.  Everyone knows that running for the U.S. presidency creates strange bedfellows, but your touting of the Israeli propaganda in which you conflate the Palestinian people with Hamas to justify massacring civilians is beyond strange – it is immoral.

I know how much you respect Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and you no doubt have heard his words before.

“And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular – but one must take it simply because it is right.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.

Conscience calls to you, Bobby.  Be true to that voice within.  Politic as it may be, there is a heavy burden of guilt for abandoning the Palestinians to slaughter by silence.  King learned this when he saw those photos of the napalmed and dead Vietnamese children and was conscience-stricken to come to Riverside Church in New York to give his speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.”  You can do the same.  The pictures of dead Palestinian children, victims of U.S. support for Israeli bombs, are there to see.  Martin quoted your uncle, John, that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”  He said that we can no longer worship the God of hate and retribution.  He said, “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.”

You too, Bobby, can break your silence, step up high and let your conscience also leave you no other choice but to condemn the genocide in Gaza.  As Martin said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”

You say you are making “a moral case for Israel” as the justified party in its seventy-five year long war with the Palestinians.  In doing so you have reneged on your campaign promise to emulate President John Kennedy, who would be appalled by your silence. Your website, Kennedy 24, declares that “[you] Kennedy will revive a lost thread of American foreign policy thinking, the one championed by his uncle, John F. Kennedy who, over his 1000 days in office, had become a firm anti-imperialist.”  In genuflecting to the Israel genocide while touting your connection to JFK and your father, Senator Robert Kennedy, you have in fact taken a position toward Israel diametrically opposed to theirs.  One could sense this coming when under pressure this past summer, you withdrew your support for Roger Waters, a strong Palestinian supporter who was falsely accused of being anti-Jewish, and you then allowed your “friend” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to say that Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, killed your father in 1968 when you knew that was a lie and was part of a sophisticated intelligence conspiracy to blame the patsy who was said to hate Israel.  To allow Shmuley to audaciously and heartlessly repeat a CIA trope about your father’s assassination was a telltale sign of worse to come.

For both the U.S. and Israel, the Bible has been used to cover up the crimes of their foundings.  They have analogous histories rooted in religious myths.  In both cases, the indigenous peoples were considered less than human – savages, infidels – or in the description of Palestinians by the current Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, “human animals.”  Such racist, dehumanizing language has been repeated time and again throughout the American and Israeli narratives used to justify their crimes against those they killed and whose land they stole.  The gloss of civilized hypocrisy has been unmasked by such language, just as it was when Hitler repeatedly called Jews “vermin.”  Irony aside, the Nazi rhetoric of denigration and racial superiority to justify exterminating Jewish people has been repeatedly mirrored by American and Israeli leaders, whether it was against the Original Free Peoples of North America, Vietnamese, Koreans, Iraqis, etc. or the Palestinians.  It is the master/slave mentality deeply rooted in U.S. and Israel history.

Bobby, you have said that you hope to be the second independent candidate to become president, the first being George Washington.  Yet Washington was a racist and slave owner who supported the extermination of the Indian natives so the white settlers could take their land.  He himself did so, speculating in Native lands together with most of the other prominent politicians from the early days of the Republic, including Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, Andrew Jackson, et al.  For the governors and legislators of the thirteen states it was also open sesame on the seizure of Indian land which required their slaughter in turn.

One can learn this in Peter P. d’Errico’s important recent book, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples, where he makes clear how U.S. law was used to codify such “legal” theft and killing.  Such federal law was, as d’Errico writes, a claim of unlimited U.S. power and not really law at all but the suspension of law as it granted the U.S. government complete authority over Native peoples, their lives, and their land.  Legal theft, in other words.  Like the English justification for their claim to their colonies – the “right of discovery” proclaimed in Henry VII’s commission to John Cabot: “to subdue and take possession of any lands unoccupied by any Christian Power” – a series of three Supreme Court rulings in the 1830s by Chief Justice John Marshall were based on the claim of “Christian discovery,” which in turn was based on a papal grant from Pope Alexander the Sixth in 1493 that gave to Christopher Columbus’s sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella, ownership of any land Columbus might discover.  This divine right required the killing and subjugation of non-Christian infidels and heathens who were considered brute animals, just as the Palestinians are today.

Similar justifications have been used by Zionists for the killing of Palestinians and the seizure of their land in the name of the Biblical Jewish God and his instructions to them.  This myth claims that God gave them the ancestral Palestinians’ land, therefore, like native peoples of North America who, according to the non-law U.S. Indian law, only had the right of occupancy, the Palestinians could be killed and dispossessed by the God-given rightful owners, which they were in 1948.  Netanyahu has made such claims many times, as have his predecessors.  He calls for a holy war of annihilation against the Palestinians, based on the Hebrew Bible.  This is widely known and has a long history in the Zionist propaganda narrative that has allowed for seventy-five years of killing and the systematic shrinking of Palestinian land to its pitiful size today.

It is interesting to note that the three primary countries that intersect in the use of religious justification for colonial and imperial policies are England, the U.S., and Israel – together with the Papacy and its May 4, 1493 bull Inter Caetera issued by Pope Alexander the Sixth to declare Christian discovery.  I mention this since I am an Irish-American Catholic, and it was the Irish uprising against the English colonial occupiers that has become a key inspiration for anti-colonial rebels throughout the twentieth century and beyond.  I have taken inspiration from my Irish ancestors.  This is your heritage also, Bobby, so it becomes even more surprising that you, even as you tout the American Revolutionary War rebel fighters against the English colonialists, would support the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians.  As a lawyer, you must be aware of Federal Indian Law and how it, like all law, is rooted in a metaphysics of being human; has presuppositions that are brought to the bar, and in the case of federal Indian law, a Christian nomos at odds with that of Native peoples’.

You surely know that the Israeli assault on Gaza is a massive war crime according to international law, and even within the moderate Catholic just war theory, is, by its distorted proportionality, evil and must be rejected as immoral and a terrible sin.  You claim to want to end all wars but support the ongoing slaughter of thousands upon thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, including so many children and women.  Nor have you said a word against Biden’s saber rattling with aircraft carriers, U.S. drones, and assistance for Israel’s bloodthirsty assault that raises the threat of a much wider war that could turn nuclear.

Yes, the question is why such silence, which you can break now.  I beg you to speak out.  You are a man of conscience.  MLK, Jr. speaks to us all still.

And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular – but one must take it simply because it is right.

Pax tibi,

Ed

November 12, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

#World4Palestine

Even draconian censorship can’t stop a growing global majority’s cheering for the Palestinian Resistance

BY KEVIN BARRETT | NOVEMBER 12, 2023

My career as a truth jihadi just reached a new milestone: One of my videos was censored by Rumble. Having a video removed by Rumble for being too controversial is quite an accomplishment. Like Col. Michael Aquino’s getting kicked out of the Church of Satan for being too evil, it’s definitely something to put on your resumé.

Why did Rumble wait this long to start censoring me? I’ve been saying things the censors don’t like, and inviting guests who say even more things they like even less, for the better part of two decades. I’ve been hard at work spreading all the true conspiracy theories, starting with 9/11 and JFK, as well as discussing the most interesting ones that might or might not be true. I have questioned the 2020 election results, explained why my family and I haven’t been vaccinated since the 1990s, blasphemed against the WHO’s pandemic guidelines, opined that COVID was obviously a bioweapon, and earned numerous awards for “anti-Semitism” from the ADL and B’nai Brith.

None of that bothered Rumble in the least. After all, it’s a free speech platform, right?

So what does it take to get banned from Rumble? Three simple words: “I support Hamas.”

As I wrote in my October 28 article “Why I Support Hamas and You Should Too”:

In this week’s False Flag Weekly News I outperformed Cat McGuire (for once) in saying things the ADL won’t like. Angered by the genocide of Gaza, I uttered many uncomplimentary and/or inflammatory remarks about the Chosen People and their Chosen State. But of all of the “oy vey” things I said, what the ADL will hate the most is my open declaration of support for Hamas.

And that, of course, is the most obvious reason to support Hamas: “They” really, really don’t want you to.

Ironically, “they” proved me right. The ADL spies paid by that multi-billion-dollar organization to watch all my stuff found the “here’s why I support Hamas” section of the video, transcribed it, leaned on Rumble, and got the video banned. (If you have a more plausible alternative narrative, feel free to post it in the comments section. You can still watch the video on Bitchute—for now, anyway.)

“I support Hamas” is not a radical or fringe view. It is almost certainly the view of the global majority. Here in the Arab world (400 million people) at least 399 million are perpetually glued to their proverbial chairs awaiting with proverbially bated breath the next statement from Abu Obaida, spokesman of Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, and leaping up from those chairs to wildly cheer every time Hamas releases a new video of its fighters bravely blowing up an Israeli tank.

The Abu Obaida phenomenon is rather astounding. Five weeks ago he was an obscure figure. Today, he’s better known, and far more popular, than Che Guevara ever was. (Even at the height of his posthumous popularity, there were plenty of Spanish-speaking folks who didn’t like Che and what he represented; whereas today, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone among the world’s two billion Muslims with anything bad to say about Abu Obaida.)

So why are we not allowed to say what billions of people around the world think—even on Rumble, the “radical free speech” platform? The answer, of course, is that censorship is the last resort of powerful people who know they can’t win an honest debate. If “they” allowed us to debate whether or not we ought to support Hamas, it would quickly become clear that there are no good reasons not to, and plenty of excellent reasons to back the entire Palestinian Resistance including its current flagship franchise.

Don’t take my word for it. Read my 2600-word article “Why I Support Hamas, and You Should Too” and then scroll through the 440+ comments. Not one of those comments offers even the slightest pretense of a coherent and detailed rebuttal, or even a link to one. Instead, the only substantive reason not to support Hamas that anyone could come up with was that “it might be illegal” (it isn’t, at least in the US) and “it could ruin your career” (if your career requires cowardice, get another career).

The upshot is that there is really only one reason that Westerners who know the basics of who invaded and ethnically cleansed whom in Palestine don’t support Hamas: They are terrified of pushback from rich, powerful Zionist Jews. What they fail to recognize is that if you are afraid to entertain an idea because it might displease the powerful, you have no business involving yourself in the world of ideas in the first place.

Draconian Media Censorship Backfiring?

If they’re removing pro-Palestine videos on Rumble, you can imagine what all of the mainstream not-so-free-speech platforms are doing. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. Al-Jazeera reports:

At the end of last week, Thomas Maddens, a filmmaker and activist based in Belgium, noticed something strange. A video about Palestine that he posted to TikTok with the word “genocide” suddenly stopped getting engagement on the platform after an initial spike.

“I thought I would have got millions of views,” Maddens told Al Jazeera, “but the engagement had stopped.”

Maddens is one of the hundreds of social media users who are accusing the world’s largest social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and TikTok – of censoring accounts or actively reducing the reach of pro-Palestine content, a practice known as shadowbanning.

Authors, activists, journalists, filmmakers and regular users around the world have said posts containing hashtags like “FreePalestine” and “IStandWithPalestine” as well as messages expressing support for civilian Palestinians killed by Israeli forces are being hidden by the platforms.

Since the above-referenced article was published on October 24, the censorship, like the genocide of Gaza, has gotten increasingly worse. Yet in spite of social media censorship, or maybe because of it, a gargantuan grassroots pro-Palestine movement has sprung up all over the world. Millions of people, maybe tens of millions, have been hitting the streets to support the Palestinian genocide victims—including, implicitly, the ones who choose to fight back. You can see pictures from some of those demonstrations between the 22’ and 24’ mark in the above-posted False Flag Weekly News video.

How did all those millions of people figure out that the Palestinian Resistance is right, and the Zionists wrong (not to mention evil), despite the blanket of censorship imposed by the Zionist billionaires who control most of the world’s media, including social media? It seems that the censorship, like the concentration camp wall around Gaza, has backfired. Rather than keeping people penned up and docile, it has angered them to the point that they are motivated to break through the wall and try to defeat their tormentors. The flood of pro-Palestine content on social media can’t be contained by even a billion-dollar outfit like the ADL that can hire people, and unleash AI programs, to run around sticking their fingers in the exponentially-increasing holes in the dike.

The on-the-ground journalists in Gaza are being murdered by the Israelis at an average rate of one journalist per day (with some seeing their entire families targeted and murdered, as Wael Al Dahdouh did).

Yet new journalists keep springing up to replace the murdered ones, just as new Resistance fighters arise to avenge those martyred by the Zionists. The images of the Gaza genocide they are capturing, while heavily censored by Zio-media genocide-enablers, are leaking through the blockade fast enough to awaken an ever-increasing number of people around the world. And every time someone discovers not only the horror of the #GazaGenocide, but also the censorship that itself constitutes a crime against humanity, that individual is likely to grow doubly enraged. Pretty soon that person will join the billions cheering the brave and brilliant military exploits of the underdogs.

Once you learn that the Zionists have been lying about everything—the “beheaded babies” and “attacks on civilians,” the actual facts about who really used tanks, rockets, and helicopter gunships to kill hundreds of Israeli civilians on October 7, and of course the larger context of the ongoing genocide of Palestine, there is no going back.

We are experiencing a tectonic shift to a #World4Palestine.

Rumble link Bitchute link

November 12, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

California school suspends student for saying ‘Free Palestine’

Press TV – November 12, 2023

A US school has suspended a student for his pro-Palestine remarks amid the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip by Israeli occupant forces.

The school in Newport Beach, southern California, which has a history of scandals, suspended the 7th-grade Palestinian student for his remarks to a schoolmate that included the words “Free Palestine.”

Corona del Mar High School (CdM) officials and social media posts cited by US media on Saturday reported that the student was suspended for allegedly violating school codes prohibiting students from harassing and threatening other students amid increasing hate crimes.

A spokesperson for the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, which owns CdM, confirmed the suspension of the student but declined to provide any details.

“While we cannot share specifics of the situation, due to student privacy, we assure you that appropriate action was taken based on the facts of what occurred,” Annette Franco wrote in a statement.

“We value students’ freedom of speech, but we will not tolerate hateful speech in our schools, especially not hate speech that incites others to engage in this negative behavior.”

The family of the student, who has been suspended for three days, could not be reached for comments.

However, a woman named ‘Zeina’ who claimed to be the student’s aunt, posted details about the incident with a photo of the suspension letter written by Jacob Haley, the principal at Corona Del Mar Middle and High School on Instagram.

In the post, she explained how her 13-year-old nephew had been called a “terrorist” by a female student.

Zeina said that her nephew had responded by saying to her several times, “Free Palestine.”

She also pointed out that the recent incident was not the first time that her nephew had been harassed by kids in school.

“Two weeks ago [he] was threatened with hate and racism comments by two Israeli students,” she wrote in her post. “The Israeli students told him to go back to your country which is [Palestine] and started laughing, saying oh too bad you don’t have a country it’s getting bombed.”

Zeina said her sister had reported the incident to the principal who told her he would speak to the two boys and that neither of them got suspended.

She also posted a video and photos of a book about the Israeli entity that had been placed on Haley’s desk, noting that it was biased.

In the suspension letter, Haley accused the student of allegedly violating two education codes that prohibit students from harassing and threatening other students.

“The incident that caused this suspension follows: [the student] said threatening remarks to a young lady in class. He said ‘Free Palestine’,” the suspension letter signed by Haley and posted by Zeina on Instagram reads.

CdM, a combination of a middle school (7th and 8th grades) and a high school (9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grades), has been cited by US media for the school administration’s involvement in several scandals involving sexism and academic dishonesty.

The California school incident takes place as the Israeli regime forces have been relentlessly killing, bombing, and shelling defenseless Palestinians in the besieged Gaza strip for almost 40 days, cut off completely from water, food, medicine, and power.

The international community, in general, Arabs and Muslims, in particular, has expressed outrage over the ongoing genocide of the Gazans by the occupant forces, calling for an immediate ceasefire in the blockaded Palestinian territory.

November 12, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

President Bashar al-Assad speech on Gaza

Syriana Analysis | November 11, 2023

President al-Assad: Gaza has never just been a cause… Palestine is the Cause, and Gaza is the embodiment of its essence.

View at Odysee

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November 12, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Video, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel Will Lose. Here’s Why.

Western media are getting it wrong, just like in Ukraine

BY KEVIN BARRETT | NOVEMBER 8, 2023

Ever since February 2022, Western mainstream media has been telling us that Russia cannot possibly win its war in Ukraine. Zelensky, with his hundreds of billions of dollars’ backing from the West, would surely prevail. Russia has always been taking unbearably heavy losses. Putin is always about to keel over dead. A fresh shipment of US wonder-weapons will turn the tide. A crushing Ukrainian victory is always at hand.

Because they could not imagine Ukraine losing, Western pundits could not see that it was losing. They missed the fact that from the moment the non-Western world majority refused to accept US sanctions on Russia, it was effectively over. Virtually the entire war has been fought under the shadow of an inevitable Russian victory. It has always been just a matter of time.

Might a similar situation prevail in the war for Palestine? The non-Western world majority has turned sharply against Israel—even more sharply than it turned against the US in its war on Russia through Ukraine. Yet Western media continue to manufacture and inhabit a bubble completely divorced from moral and strategic reality. They can’t even imagine Israel being in the wrong, even though it obviously is. They can’t imagine Hamas being noble and chivalrous fighters, and Israelis being cowardly child-killing terrorists, though such is obviously the case. They can’t acknowledge that the vast majority of the world disagrees with them for very good reasons, not because of “anti-Semitism.” And above all they can’t imagine that Israel, despite (or because of) its genocidal assault on civilians, is losing the war.

Just as you had to read “pro-Russian” sources (like Col. Douglas MacGregor) to get the truth about the war in Ukraine, you need to stay abreast of the pro-Resistance global majority view to get an accurate picture of the war for Palestine. To that end, check out my quick, Google-translate-assisted rendition of an enlightening article published yesterday by Al-Jazeera.

–Kevin Barrett

The shock that produced the predicament… Israel between an “image of victory” and defeat

Zuhair Hamdani and Talal Mushati for Al-Jazeera

Israeli leaders are preparing a tense and frustrated Israeli public for unforeseen surprises in their war on Gaza, by talking about a long, costly, and cruel war. The high expectations they have set for their war will be difficult to achieve, lacking as they do a clear military or political plan.

Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevy says, “We are waging a war with a cruel enemy, and this war has a painful and heavy price,” while Defense Minister Benny Gantz sums up the difficulty of the ground war: “The images coming from the ground battle are painful, and our tears are falling when we see our soldiers falling.”

The Israeli leadership has launched its war on Gaza at a time when it has the confidence of only 27% of the Israeli public, while only about 51% trust the Israeli army. Added to this are the burdens of 250,000 people seeking refuge from the Gaza region and the northern areas near Lebanon, as well as the more than 240 Israelis held prisoner by the resistance in Gaza.

Accordingly, for Israel, this war is not like previous wars. Israel is suffering huge daily losses and erosion of resources, including soldiers, equipment, time, money, and legitimacy (internal and external support). The cost will continue to rise as the war lengthens or expands.

Maariv newspaper comments on the conditions of the ground war taking place on the outskirts of Gaza, saying, “The resistance forces are very far from being broken. Despite the liquidations and assassinations, Hamas is succeeding in most cases in maintaining an organized method of fighting, based mainly on tunnel fighting, exiting from hiding places, and launching missiles at our armoured vehicles.”

Two overriding factors drive the fierce Israeli war on Gaza: the shock of the resounding military defeat and the security and intelligence failure that resulted from the Palestinian resistance’s launch of Operation “Al-Aqsa Storm” on October 7; and the predicament of the huge number of prisoners being held by the Al-Qassam Brigades and other Palestinian factions. Therefore, military action revolves around these two goals.

Under the psychological  influence of the “Black Saturday” events, the Israelis went directly to the ultimate goal of any war, which is “to destroy the enemy.” This was a high ceiling that they probably knew, by virtue of previous experience, could not be achieved. It cannot happen except at a price they could not afford to pay.

In this context, Defense Minister Yoav Galant said, “There is no place for Hamas in Gaza. At the end of our battle, there will be no Hamas.” That is an unrealistic goal based on past experience and the current realities on the ground.

Considering previous wars including 2008 and 2014, we find that “destroying Hamas” was always a basic goal that was never achievable. There is no reason to believe that it will be achievable this time, especially since the movement is now much stronger, with much deeper roots in the Gaza Strip, than before. Its military defenses and arsenal have been strengthened to the point of being difficult to penetrate, and in the end it is not a state or a regular army that can announce its surrender, but rather an extended popular resistance movement in the path of a protracted Palestinian struggle.

The war that Israel does not want

If war consists of combat operations that require mobilizing the resources and capabilities of the state to carry out a specific military campaign in order to implement military and political objectives, ranging from moving a front to achieving tactical successes and imposing certain conditions or carrying out a decisive battle that breaks the will of the “enemy,” then it requires an agreed-upon leadership that enjoys a degree of consensus. It requires a military apparatus that is trained, equipped, and at least minimally psychologically mobilized for combat; an appropriate confrontation plan; and a unified, cohesive internal political and social front directed toward that goal.

It also requires an economic mobilization that comprehends the circumstances and course of the war and its surprises, and an understanding or supportive international and regional front. Victory is difficult to achieve if any or all of these conditions are absent, especially in the case of long battles that require continuous mobilization. The results are also linked to the enemy’s reaction, the extent of its strength, and the tactics it chooses.

Was Israel ready?

In terms of military capabilities, Israel always seems prepared for war on several fronts. But technical military capabilities and weapons alone do not resolve wars, especially if they are not the kind of lighting wars that Israel favors. In practice Israel suffers from significant defects in almost all of the above-mentioned ingredients for winning a war.

At the leadership level: There is no agreed-upon leadership in Israel that enjoys consensus or the necessary charisma. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as polls show, is extremely unpopular. In a recent Israeli public opinion survey conducted by the Israeli newspaper Maariv, it was found that only 27% of Israelis support his political survival, and his political and military decisions are not accepted and are subject to widespread criticism. The course of the war has also proven that he is indecisive and does not have a clear and convincing plan for military or political action.

Netanyahu also refuses to accept responsibility for the security failure on October 7, which exposed him to severe internal criticism. Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, for example, warned that Netanyahu’s attempts to evade responsibility and blame the security establishment, thereby weakening the Israeli army, amounted to “crossing red lines.”

The Home Front: The home front appears to have disintegrated. Israelis are living in a state of severe division at the partisan, popular and political levels. Especially controversial is how to deal with the issue of prisoners held by the resistance, in light of the dangers of a ground war and the major losses it would entail.

Netanyahu and the extremist members of his government stand accused of dividing Israeli society. The leader of the opposition Labor Party, Merav Michaeli, has charged the Prime Minister with “fighting the army and the people of Israel.” The issue of prisoners held by the resistance has also sparked internal divisions, especially after Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu called for bombing Gaza with a nuclear weapon, saying, “What does hostage mean? In war, the price is paid. Why are the lives of hostages more precious than the lives of soldiers?” This was considered by Israelis to be “an abandonment by the government of its commitment to returning the hostages.”

Military front: The events of “Al-Aqsa Flood”, especially the first six hours of October 7, demonstrated that the Israeli army suffers from severe deficiencies, as do its many security services. Now the daily losses it is suffering in its ongoing ground operation have made it the object of suspicion within Israeli society, which was relying upon it to maintain an aura of safety and stability.

Economic situation: The Israeli economic situation is at its worst, with major sectors such as tourism paralyzed, travel declining, and the agricultural sector suffering damage. With the mobilization of about 360,000 reserve soldiers, most of them suddenly removed from the labor force, and the evacuation of about 250,000 settlers, the economy is witnessing a severe labor shortage in various fields. Israel recently announced that the last three weeks of war have cost about 7 billion dollars, without taking into account the direct and indirect damages. While this damage may cost about 3 billion dollars per month, preliminary estimates show that the war on Gaza will cost Israel’s budget 200 billion shekels ($51 billion), or about 10% of the gross domestic product, and as the war continues for a long period, the Israeli economy may be crippled according to Israeli estimates.

Diplomatic front: After last October 7, Western countries that were historically biased towards Israel rushed to support it, but this support quickly began to erode due to the impact of Israeli crimes and doubts about the ability of the Israeli army to resolve the war. Many countries condemned Israel or cut off their diplomatic relations with it (Colombia, Bolivia), while other countries recalled their ambassadors (Chile, Jordan, Bahrain, Turkey, Honduras…) Ever-increasing global popular pressure is pushing governments to take boycott measures, exposing Israel to isolation that has begun to worsen.

US Support for Israel Eroding?

In contrast to the direct support at the beginning, the administration of President Joe Biden began to re-assess its absolute support for Netanyahu for fear that things would spiral into a wider regional war. Washington fears the crazy scenarios that Netanyahu may create in an attempt to save his future at America expense.

After about a month, the Americans realized that the only constant in the Israeli plan was the use of massive destructive force targeting civilians and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. It seemed Netanyahu was waiting for a solution to save himself from a harsh predicament in the sands of Gaza—and waiting for the illusion of the resistance’s surrender that wasn’t going to happen. They began to have doubts about Israel’s management of the war and its results.

CNN has indicated that US President Joe Biden and senior US administration officials have warned Israel that support is eroding as global anger intensifies over the extent of human suffering resulting from its crimes in Gaza.

What’s happening in the field?

Over the course of about a month of war, it does not appear that Israel has achieved any serious gains on the ground. Contradictory statements indicate confusion about how to manage the battle and set final goals in the face of severe resistance. The shock of the mismanaged October 7 battle, and the psychological scars it left on the entire Israeli military establishment, still haunt the course of the war.

This psychological atmosphere also looms over the soldiers, as they realize that their return from the sands of Gaza would require a miracle. They recall the experiences of their colleagues and their bitter memories of the 2014 war as they witness the elite of the Givati Brigade drowning in the sands of Gaza in a battle that is still in its infancy. In effect, the Israeli army advanced a few meters into open lands in the northern Gaza Strip and lost 30 soldiers—according to reports—meaning that it is possible that hundreds of soldiers would be lost if the army advanced a few kilometers, amid a complex network of tunnels and fortifications, minefields, snipers, explosive devices, and hand-to-hand combat in the streets facing the unlimited fighting will of the resistance.

Since Israel does not have a clear plan for the war, it has inclined toward slow, calculated progress inside Gaza. Thus, achieving the dubious final goal may take a long period and unbearably heavy losses. In the meantime, important military or political transformations may occur that will ravage the entire plan.

In its current operations, Israel is losing up to 5 soldiers every day on the outskirts of Gaza without a clear and effective military advance. Nahum Barnea, the Israeli journalist in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, says, “A war of attrition on the outskirts of Gaza is the last thing the Israelis want to experience.”

Israeli military officials realize that it is impossible to liberate the prisoners militarily, but they are proceeding nonetheless under political pressure, despite the fact that the families of the prisoners, as well as the countries that have nationals among the prisoners, want an exchange deal. Netanyahu believes that such a deal would be a final acknowledgment of defeat and a victory for Hamas and the Palestinian resistance.

The cohesion of the resistance and the Israeli non-plan

Israeli public opinion fears that the war will be lost on two or more fronts, by failing to liberate or release the prisoners (about 60 of them have already been killed in Israeli raids) and by failure to dismantle the capabilities of the Hamas movement and the Palestinian resistance. Worse, a large number of soldiers will be killed, perhaps in the hundreds.

In contrast to the Israeli non-plan, following the painful military blow directed at Israel on the morning of October 7, the plan of Hamas and the resistance seems clear: stop the war, carry out a comprehensive prisoner exchange, and lift the siege of Gaza. The resistance is waging a war of attrition on the Israeli army, inflicting ever-increasing daily losses, and appears prepared for a long war to erode the elements of Israeli power.

Time is not on Israel’s side, as it loses more money, men, and legitimacy, its internal crisis worsens, and the pressures and doubts surrounding it increase, with the possibility of the situation exploding regionally. Instead it is on the side of the Palestinian resistance, which believes that all of these internal and external military and political pressures will ultimately make Israel yield and accept its terms.

In that case, the war would not only end with the defeat of Netanyahu, but also with the defeat of the far-right government and its racist program. Israeli society has increasingly rejected this government’s policies at all levels, and the war has proven that it cannot impose surrender on the Palestinian people despite the tragedies caused by Israeli crimes in Gaza, whose repercussions have made the international community wary and inclined to reject Israeli narratives.

Netanyahu’s predicament

The international community has begun to realize that the campaign launched by Benjamin Netanyahu on Gaza is nothing more than a series of horrific daily massacres against civilians that has not achieved any significant military breakthrough. The prognosis: Israel will be forced to submit to defeat under internal and external pressures. Already serious movements have begun from the international community to stop the war in the wake of the horror of ongoing Israeli massacres.

Nadav Eyal asserts in his article in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the Israeli army cannot be satisfied with the “image of victory” in its war on Gaza, and that the era of the policy of “mowing the grass” (reducing threats to an acceptable level) has ended. Instead, Israel needs a “real victory.” But this leaves Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a deeply distressing predicament

The main dilemma concerns Netanyahu himself, who does not want to come down from the heights of the tree into which he scrambled on the morning of October 7. He realizes that he is finished politically (due to Al-Aqsa Storm) yet dreams of a resurrection linked to the results of his campaign in Gaza.

Netanyahu and his war cabinet are acting impulsively under the influence of the shock of October 7, without a clear military plan for the war, which is mainly being fought as a mindless emotional reaction to the well-prepared resistance in Gaza. Israel lacks a clear plan to liberate or recover the prisoners, or to confront the huge and ever-escalating international protests, to the point that Netanyahu began addressing Israeli soldiers in Gaza with quotes from the Bible, telling them to “remember what Amalek did to you.” (Amalek represents the height of evil in Jewish tradition.) Netanyahu has used the Amalek reference more than once to motivate the Israeli army in its war against Gaza.

Netanyahu is accumulating losses on all fronts, trying to write off “Black Saturday,” ignoring that his leadership does not enjoy popular acceptance, and pretending not to notice Israel’s broken army, eroding economy, undermined international reputation, disintegrated home front, large daily military losses, and the United Nations’ condemnation of his crimes.

November 11, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Video | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Violent Pro-Israel Counter-Protesters Clash With Police At Palestine Solidarity March In London

RT | November 11, 2023

At least 300,000 people marched in the British capital on Saturday demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. London Metropolitan Police reported at least 126 arrests amid clashes with counter protesters in which nice officers were injured.

The largely peaceful crowds were chanting “free Palestine”, “ceasefire now” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as they marched through the streets of London. The largest to date demonstration coincided with the annual Armistice Day commemorations.

Ahead of the pro-Palestinian march, a group of right-wing protesters, mainly consisting of football hooligans from across the UK, arrived in central London on a pretense of protecting monuments, but “were already intoxicated, aggressive and clearly looking for confrontation,” assistant commissioner Matt Twist said in a statement.

The violent crowd, chanting “you’re not English any more” hailed abuses at the officers, who were protecting the Cenotaph and preventing them from confronting the pro-Palestinian activists.

“Nine officers were injured during the day, two requiring hospital treatment with a fractured elbow and a suspected dislocated hip. Those officers were injured on Whitehall as they prevented a violent crowd getting to the Cenotaph while a remembrance service was taking place,” police said, adding that “the extreme violence from the right wing protestors towards the police today was extraordinary and deeply concerning.”

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) march, which the organizers themselves estimated to be at least 500,000 strong, “did not see the sort of physical violence carried out by the right wing,” according to police, although a fringe group of some 150 masked people was intercepted while firing fireworks. Several arrests were made “after some of the fireworks struck officers in the face,” police said.

The unrest follows the debate earlier this week whether the pro-Palenstian protest should be permitted on Armistice day, that is traditionally observed in the UK by a two-minute silence during the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th marking the end of WWI in 1918.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman was accused of fuelling the tensions by branding pro-Palestinian demonstrations as “hate marches,” while accusing the police of bias for letting the rally go ahead.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan said that the clashes were “encouraged and emboldened” by senior politicians “like the Home Secretary” and were a “direct result” of her words.

The Prime Minister, Rich Sunak condemned the violence and hatred from both sides and called for the nations “to come together” to remember “those who fought and died for our freedom.”

November 11, 2023 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism, Video, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli army shoots whoever tries to leave Al-Shifa Hospital: Doctor tells Anadolu

MEMO | November 11, 2023

A doctor at the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City said on Saturday that the Israeli army opens fire on those who want to flee the hospital, Anadolu reports.

The Israeli army has surrounded the hospital area and they are “not even a meter away, they are at the door,” Fadia Malhis, a gynecologist at the hospital, told an Anadolu correspondent in frequently interrupted phone conversations.

“They shoot anyone who wants to go out of the hospital. If anyone moves between units, they shoot them. There are many martyrs in the yard in front of the emergency room, the situation is very bad and dangerous, it is indescribable,” she said.

“It is like a prison without water, electricity, or food. There were more than 100 martyrs in the garden. They opened fire at those who tried to bury the martyrs in the hospital yard. The hospital garden is full of martyrs. Some tried to escape from the hospital, and they also killed them. They fired at me too,” she added.

Citing a power outage in the hospital and underlining the deteriorating condition of infants in the incubators in the intensive care unit, she said: “There are 60 babies in the intensive care unit, 39 of them are intubated, one baby died in the afternoon. These (infants) will die one after the other.”

She called for immediate action to cease hostilities around the hospital, saying: “Please, save us, stop this war, otherwise we will die. There are dead people everywhere. Save us, the situation is very bad.”

November 11, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Turkiye halts energy projects with Israel in the absence of a ceasefire: Minister

MEMO | November 8, 2023

Turkiye will not discuss any energy-related projects with Israel without a ceasefire in Gaza, as it would be disrespectful to Palestinians who are experiencing great brutality, a senior official said late Tuesday, local Turkish media outlets reports.

According to the report, Energy and Natural Resources Minister, Alparslan Bayraktar, told a private broadcaster that “in such an atmosphere, in an environment of such great brutality, human drama, it would be disrespectful to humanity, to our humanity, to our siblings there (in Palestine) to talk about any project.”

“The only thing we will talk about at this time is how we can meet Gaza’s electricity, water and food needs. This could happen. That would be the only project,” he said.

Israel has launched air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip following a cross-border attack by the Resistance group, Hamas, on 7 October.

Pointing out that life has stopped in the region after the Gaza attacks, Bayraktar said: “After the great brutality and cruelty experienced there, the only project we can talk about right now is how we can get Gaza’s electricity back on its feet again.”

“We have sent generators. They are waiting at the Rafah border crossing,” he added.

“We are considering how we can contribute there with floating power plants and mobile power plants, which we call power ships,” the Minister said, reiterating it is impossible to talk about anything without a ceasefire.

November 11, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Israel Exception to Free Speech

Israel’s stranglehold on American foreign policy must be identified and eliminated

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 10, 2023

Last Tuesday there took place a disgraceful display of visceral malignancy in the United States House of Representatives Chamber in the south wing of the Capitol building. The House, long characterized by its aversion to truth, justice and what was once the American way, has been corrupted by special interests who have effectively bought an overwhelming majority of legislators, to include the leadership of the two major political parties. In the area of foreign policy, as well as a spill-over into many domestic and constitutional issues, there is no more powerful lobby than that of the state of Israel, and its power was on full display on Tuesday afternoon when Representative Rashida Tlaib was censured for the crime of being of Palestinian ancestry and speaking up against the ongoing genocide of her people by the Jewish state. Nearly all Republicans voted to condemn her together with a considerable number of her fellow Democrats.

On the following day, the White House added its own condemnation of Tlaib, referring specifically to the phrase “from the river to the sea” used by her, a slogan conveniently regarded by some like the fanatical Zionist Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as an Arab rallying cry for the eradication of Israel. ADL’s ghastly director Jonathan Greenblatt inevitably equates use of the phrase with “antisemitism” and ADL insists that “’From the River to the Sea’ is a Hamas call to annihilate Israel” while also “claiming [that] it is a rally of coexistence [which] gives cover to terror.” Tlaib, for her part, was resurrecting a memory of the Palestine that once was, and she has asserted that the slogan is “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate.” Pro-Palestinian protesters do also use the slogan as a plea for their long-delayed nationhood, but groups like ADL prefer to claim that the activity provides “material support for Hamas,” and, as Hamas is a US listed terrorist group, that equates to aiding terrorists. Tlaib had also particularly angered the White House through her recently posted online video that accused President Biden of supporting genocide in the Gaza Strip, a seemingly undisputable assertion.

One might argue that even Congressmen are protected by the First Amendment right to free speech, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that the Bill of Rights does not apply when Israel is concerned, either in the halls of Congress or on college campuses, where Palestinian groups are being harassed and banned. The Tlaib censure vote can be seen as part of the bipartisan effort to protect the state of Israel from any and all criticism. Rashida Tlaib broke no law, did not threaten anyone, nor did she call for the destruction of any nation, yet she was excoriated by a series of her comrade-speakers in the House for something akin to a crime against humanity due to her turning against what was repeatedly described as one of America’s closest allies, a best friend and the only democracy in the Middle East, all of which are lies. Israel is no ally, which would require a certain reciprocity, a word that apparently does not exist in Hebrew. And in the current crisis Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demonstrated that he will not be moved by US interests to mitigate the slaughter no matter how much Blinken-Biden suck up to him to make him budge. And as for the claim of democracy, Israel only grants citizenship with full rights to Jews, hardly a democratic measure. Apparently, cutting off the massive amounts of US aid, including the current $14.5 billion to pay for exterminating the Palestinians, is not even on the table. Israel will always get its pound of flesh and will call all the shots in its relationship with Washington.

Tlaib’s comments are in the context of a White House that believes it is free to send bombs to Israel to slaughter Palestinian children — without even revealing how many plane loads of weapons have been delivered or are on their way. And then there are members of Congress like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who are free to advocate a “total war” against what he calls “the most extremist population on Earth,” i.e. the Palestinians. But verbal criticism of what is clearly a genocide and a massive violation of international law that has the US government as an accessory in a war crime is impermissible and there are even concerns that the Tlaib censure could become the foundation for a criminalization of any criticism of Israel under the assumption that all critics are ipso facto antisemites and the comments themselves amount to a “hate crime.”

Consider for a moment the precedents to Tlaib’s disgrace who are still in office untouched by any procedural steps to define what are acceptable rights of legislators. Beyond Senator Lindsey Graham’s unchallenged invitation to a mass murder, there is Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey whose apparent tendency to accept bribes has been a particularly lurid tale in part because much of the loot consisted of $480,000 in cash stuffed into jacket pockets, closets and in a safe, along with 13 gold bars, two of them marked as 1 Kilogram in weight to the value of more than $100,000. Both men are still walking around free of censure!

Israel’s love of the United States is only skin deep, if it is as much as that. Recall for a moment the comments by Israeli prime ministers on the nature of the relationship. Consider Ariel Sharon’s 2001 comment: “Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it… I don’t care what the American people think, I own the congress!” Or Netanyahu’s famous quip also in 2001: “America is a thing you can move very easily!” So that is what “America’s best friend’s” leadership actually thinks about the United States and its people! It is a cash cow to be milked and otherwise exploited for political cover before being disposed of when its usefulness is gone.

Sharon also famously said “I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian, I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him.” It squares the circle on why the Gazans erupted in rage on October 7th. Palestine was one nation from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea when Israel was founded in 1948. Since that time, Israel has been ethnically cleansing the Palestinians for three quarters of a century, has stolen and plundered their land, has replaced or eradicated hundreds of villages, has besieged Gaza for nearly 2 decades, and has engaged in mass starvation and now in genocidal mass killing. In the fighting preceding Israel’s independence, three quarters of a million Palestinians were driven from their homes and sent into refugee camps by Israeli militias, together with tens of thousands who were killed outright. Now the refugee camps in Gaza are being bombed together with churches, hospitals, schools and apartment blocks and we have only just learned that some Israeli officials are considering using one of their nuclear bombs to completely wipe out Gaza. It is surprising that the Palestinians have shown as much restraint as they have.

Given the damage that a corrupting Israel has done to America’s political system, it is important to ask what good the relationship with Israel has done for the average American whose tax dollars support the Zionist enterprise together with its plan to remove the Palestinians. The answer is that nothing good has come out of the so-called alliance, which has cost the US $260 billion in direct aid adjusted for inflation since 1946. Plus there is the large sum of $14.5 billion more recently approved and pending currently as some kind of war fund to enable Netanyahu to crush the Palestinians. Israel regularly gets $3.8 billion yearly in direct aid from the US Treasury, a gift from Barack Obama, that is more than what goes to all other countries combined. And there is also more-or-less “off the books” considerable additional money from special and joint military projects, dubious charities and state level development boards that bring the total up to roughly $10 billion per year, which does not include the billions in financial aid that are in reality bribes paid to Egypt and Jordan to maintain peace with the Jewish state. The handout from Uncle Sam helps make Israel a very wealthy country which can afford to give its Jewish citizens free health care and college education as well as subsidized housing.

And being joined at the hip to the Jewish state has a considerable downside, requiring the use of the US United Nations veto at regular intervals to protect the client state as well as involvement in unneeded wars in places like Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Libya with Iran coming up next. Nor has Israel hesitated to kill Americans when it felt that the US was not fully supportive of its interests and the White House is so constrained by its “alliance” that it has essentially covered up the crimes against its own citizens. Last year’s sniper killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, which produced only a whimper from the Jewish dominated State Department, plus acceptance of Israeli lies about the incident, is a prime example. And then there is the killing of 34 sailors and the injuring of 172 more on the USS Liberty in international waters on June 8th 1967. The US Navy largely unarmed intelligence ship was monitoring the ongoing fighting with Egypt when it was attacked by Israeli planes and torpedo boats. Efforts to send US aircraft carrier warplanes to assist the ship were called back by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who also orchestrated a cover-up exonerating Israel from blame. One hopes he and his Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara are now burning in hell.

The US government is so averse to challenging Israel that many believe that there are other unrevealed influences at play, possibly to include the Jeffrey Epstein/Mossad pedophile sex trafficking caper. It has long been true that candidates for high office in the US are approached by agents of the Zionist lobby and coerced into signing a pledge to support Israel. In return, the candidates who accept receive substantial political contributions and positive media. If they say “no” they are frequently targeted for defeat and go the way of Cynthia McKinney, Charles Percy, William Fulbright, Pete McCloskey and Paul Findley.

Congressman James Traficant of Ohio was perhaps the most aggressive voice in Congress in the 1980s and 1990s in expressing a critique of Israel’s power. He was inevitably controversial and was eventually imprisoned for seven years on a corruption charge that many subsequently considered to be a government set up. He had argued, among other things, that “Israel has a powerful stranglehold on the American government” explaining how Israel was “controlling much of our foreign policy” and “influencing much of our domestic policy.” He claimed quite plausibly that former Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz, working for Israel, had “manipulated” President George W. Bush into the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

Traficant maintained in the 1990s that “We’re conducting the expansionist policy of Israel and everybody’s afraid to say it. They control much of the media, they control much of the commerce of the country, and they control powerfully both bodies of the Congress. They own the Congress.” If Traficant were still with us, he would be astonished to see how Jewish influence has actually increased, with 35 states having some rules or legislation punishing advocates of boycotts of Israel and bills currently before congress authorizing automatic war against Iran and even the expulsion of Palestinians from the US. The State Department has an ambassador who monitors so-called antisemitism and the White House has recently declared a war against what it describes as “surging antisemitism.”

Currently, everyone opposing the US engagement with Israel in its extermination of the Arab population in the area it controls is being labeled an anti-semite and speaking up for the Palestinians is becoming a good way to get kicked out of university and unemployed. Israel’s friends are busy compiling lists of students who support the Palestinians and are working on schemes to circulate their names to deny them jobs once they graduate. Rashida Tlaib is only the latest affront to the dignity and common sense of the US Constitution but she is certainly not going to be the last victim of the Jewish lobby, which must be labeled for what it is, made to register as the agent of the Israeli apartheid state, and excluded from unilaterally making the policies that all of us Americans have to pay the price for in the Middle East.

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

November 10, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Arab-Iran amity is a geopolitical reality

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | NOVEMBER 9, 2023 

The forthcoming first visit by Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi to Saudi Arabia on November 13 marks a milestone in the rapprochement between the two countries mediated by China in March. The relationship is fast acquiring a qualitatively new level of solidarity in the context of the Palestine-Israel conflict. 

This marks a shift in the tectonic plates in regional politics, which has long been dominated by the United States but no longer so. The latest China-UAE initiative on Monday to promote a ceasefire in Gaza was rounded off with an extraordinary spectacle of diplomacy at the UN headquarters in New York as the two countries’ envoys read out together a joint statement to the media. The US was nowhere to be seen. 

The events since October 7 make it abundantly clear that the US attempts to integrate Israel into its Muslim neighbourhood on its terms is a pipe dream — ie., unless and until Israel is willing to turn its sword into plowshares. The ferocity of the Israeli revenge attacks on the people of Gaza — “animals” —  smacks of racism and genocide.  

Iran knew all along the bestiality of the Zionist regime. Saudi Arabia too must be in a chastened mood following the wake-up call that it must first and foremost learn to live in its region. 

Raisi is heading for Saudi Arabia against the backdrop of a historic shift in the power dynamic. King Salman invited Raisi to speak on Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza at a special summit of Arab states, which he is hosting in Riyadh. This signifies a profound Saudi realisation that even its willingness to be involved in the Abraham Accords under American persuasion has alienated the Arab public.  

There is a fallacy in the western discourse about a Russia-China-Iran axis in West Asia. This is a nonsensical misinterpretation. A consistent three-fold foreign policy principle that Iran pursued right from the Islamic Revolution in 1979 is that, one, its strategic autonomy is sacred; two, the countries of the region must take their destiny into their own hands and solve regional issues themselves without involving extra-regional powers, and, three, foster Muslim unity howsoever long and winding that road might seem. 

This principle had severe limitations due to force of circumstances — principally, in the conditions engendered by the colonial policy of divide and rule pursued by the US. Circumstances were even deliberately engineered, such as the Iraq-Iran war, where the US encouraged the regional states to collaborate with Saddam Hussein to launch an aggression against Iran to stymie the Islamic revolution in its infancy. 

Another painful episode was the Syrian conflict. There, again, the US actively canvassed among regional states for a regime change in Damascus with the ultimate objective of targeting Iran by using the terrorist groups that Washington incubated in Occupied Iraq. 

In Syria, the US brilliantly succeeded in pitting the regional states against each other and the result is plain to see in the ruins of what used to be the throbbing heart of Islamic civilisation . At the peak of the conflict, several western intelligence agencies were freely operating in Syria assisting the terrorist groups to rampage the country whose cardinal sin was that, like Iran, it too consistently put primacy on its strategic autonomy and independent foreign policies through the cold war and post-cold war eras alike. 

Suffice to say, the US and Israel met with great success in fragmenting the Muslim Middle East by exaggerating the threat perceptions and convincing several Gulf Arab states that they faced direct threats or even attacks by Iranian proxies, as well as alleged Iranian support for dissident movements.

Of course, the US capitalised on it by selling huge volumes of weapons and more importantly, to finesse the petrodollar as a key pillar of the western banking system. As for Israel, it directly benefitted from demonising Iran in order to draw attention away from the Palestine issue, which has all along been the core issue in the Middle East crisis.

Suffice to say, the rollout of the Iran-Saudi-China agreement has reduced the hostility that existed between Riyadh and Tehran for the better part of the recent decades. Both countries sought to build on the momentum generated by the success of the secret Beijing talks with regard to their commitment to non-interference. It must be noted, however, that the relations between Gulf Arab countries and Iran had already improved significantly over the last two years.  

What western analysts miss is that the wealthy Gulf states are fed up with their subaltern life as sidekicks of the US. They want to prioritise their national life in directions they choose and with partners who respect them, eschewing any zero-sum mindset, unlike in the Cold War era, for reasons of ideology or power dynamic. 

That is why, the Biden Administration cannot accept that the Saudis today work with Russia on the OPEC+ platform to fulfil their commitment to extra voluntary oil supply cuts, while also negotiating with the US on nuclear technology, and at the same time moving on the diplomatic track with Beijing to douse the fire set ablaze in the Levant a month ago from spreading to the rest of the West Asian region. 

Evidently, the Saudis are no longer rolling with pleasure at the prospect of a US-Iran confrontation. On the other hand, Saudis and Iranians have a shared concern that their new thinking with primacy on development will dissipate unless there is regional stability and security.

Thus, it is sheer naïveté on the part of Washington to bracket Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran as one grouping — as Blinken did during his latest visit to Tel Aviv on Monday — and juxtapose it with the rest of the region. The canard that Hezbollah and Hamas are “terrorist” movements is about to be exposed. Truth be told, how are they any different from Sinn Féin, which was historically associated with the IRA?  

Such naïveté underlines the absurd US-Israeli-Indian venture to create a West Asian QUAD 2 (“I2U2”), which today looks laughable — or the quixotic plot hatched in New Delhi recently during the G20 summit to get the Saudis on board the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor project, with the fond hope that it “integrates” Israel and creates business for Haifa Port, isolates Iran and Turkey, rubbishes Russia-led International North-South Corridor and shows the middle finger to Beijing’s Belt and Road. Whereas, life is real. 

Taking all things into account, it is the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s regional tour to Israel and his summit with a select group of Arab states in Amman over the last weekend that has turned into a defining moment in the Gaza crisis.

The Arab foreign ministers point blank refused to buy into any of the invidious proposals put forward by Blinken with malicious intentions to preserve Jewish interests —  “humanitarian pause” instead of ceasefire; refugee camps for the people from Gaza escaping from Israel’s horrific, brutal attacks that would be funded with Arab money but would eventually lead to Jewish settlements in Gaza; contours of a post-war arrangement for Gaza that will leave the debris to be handled by the Palestinian Authority and reconstruction to be financed by the Gulf states while Israel continues to dominate it in the all-important security sphere; preventing Iran from going to the rescue of Hezbollah and Hamas as they are put into Israeli meat grinders of American make. 

It was rank hypocrisy. The Arab foreign ministers spoke up in one voice to articulate their counter proposal to Blinken’s — immediate ceasefire. President Biden seems to see the writing on the wall, finally — although,  intrinsically, he continues to be the world’s number one Zionist, as someone once called him, and his motivations are largely borne out of his own political survival as the 2024 election draws closer. 

Be that as it may, the high probability is that it is now a matter of time before the global community insists on stopping the Israeli apartheid state in its tracks. For, when Muslim countries unite, they call the shots in the emerging multipolar world order. Their demand that a settlement of the Palestine problem brooks no further delay has gained resonance, including in the Western Hemisphere. 

November 10, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital in Gaza becomes inoperable following Israeli attack

MEMO | November 10, 2023

The Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital in western Gaza City was rendered inoperative on Friday due to Israeli attacks, leading to the tragic death of a child because of oxygen deprivation, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported.

The hospital was targeted twice, its Director, Mustafa Al-Kalhalut, said, Anadolu Agency reports.

“One attack targeted the hospital’s gate and the other was directed at the departments in the hospital” the Director said in a release, adding that “the hospital suffered great damage and the patients were left without oxygen resulting in the death of one child.”

Al-Kalhalut highlighted that the power supply to life-sustaining equipment in the Intensive Care Unit, which housed several children, was also severed. As a result, the hospital has been unable to offer any services beyond the Intensive Care Unit, where eight patients were currently receiving treatment.

“No one could reach the hospital and ambulances on the road were also targeted,” the Palestinian doctor said.

The Director appealed to the Red Cross and international bodies for urgent assistance to rescue the staff and patients of Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital.

Almost all hospitals in the besieged Gaza Strip came under Israeli attacks and airstrikes in the last 24 hours, including Al-Shifa, which saw at least four rounds of Israeli airstrikes in the same period.

Israel has launched relentless air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip – including hospitals, residences, and houses of worship – since a cross-border attack by the Palestinian resistance group Hamas on 7 October.

At least 11,078 Palestinians have been killed, including 4,506 children and 3,027 women. The Israeli death toll, meanwhile, is nearly 1,600, according to official figures.

November 10, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

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