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Hezbollah says Israel using UN troops as ‘human shields’ in south Lebanon

The Cradle | October 8, 2024

Hezbollah has ordered its fighters not to attack Israeli forces who established a forward operating base behind UN peacekeeping troops (UNIFIL) near a Lebanese border village, effectively using them as human shields.

“The Israeli enemy is attempting to use UNIFIL forces as human shields to cover its failure to advance toward the village, especially after its repeated and unsuccessful attempts to advance toward Maroun al-Ras and the loss of dozens of its soldiers, both killed and wounded,” a statement issued by the Islamic resistance movement on 7 October said.

“The operations room of the Islamic Resistance instructed the fighters to hold back and not engage with the movement to protect the lives of international soldiers,” the statement added.

The day before, UNIFIL had warned Israel’s operations near their position at Maroun al-Ras were an “extremely dangerous development.”

“It is unacceptable to compromise the safety of UN peacekeepers carrying out their Security Council-mandated tasks,” UNIFIL stated while reminding all actors in the conflict of their obligations to protect UN personnel and property.

On Saturday, UNIFIL said it remained in all positions near the border despite what it said was an Israeli request to “relocate.”

In response to the peacekeepers’ refusal, US foreign policy advisor Matthew Brodsky suggested in a post on X, “Israel should carpet bomb Irish area, then drop Napalm on it.”

Hezbollah fighters are resisting an Israeli ground invasion that began last week.

On Monday, Hezbollah fighters attacked a gathering of Israeli forces in Maroun al-Ras with rockets, while the Israeli army said it had deployed a third division to participate in ground operations in Lebanon.

Israel’s ground maneuvers follow its intensified bombing campaign of Lebanon that began on 23 September. Israel has bombed targets in south Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Beirut, killing more than 1,110 people since then. The widespread bombing of civilian homes has left over one million people internally displaced.

Hezbollah released a statement on Monday, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, saying it and the Lebanese people have paid a “heavy price” for its decision to enter the battle against Israel and open a support front for Gaza.

“The enemy continues its crimes and aggression without limits, but we are confident, if Allah wills, in our resistance’s ability to repel the aggression, and in our great and resistant people to endure and hold out until this calamity is lifted,” the statement affirmed.

October 8, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Washington spent at least $23bn in one year to assist Israel: Report

The Cradle | October 8, 2024

The US government spent at least $22.76 billion between 7 October 2023 and 30 September 2024 to support Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and fuel the raging regional war, according to a report published by Brown University’s Costs of War project.

Since the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood by Hamas one year ago, Washington provided Israel with $17.9 billion in military aid alone, the highest amount in the two countries’ histories, adjusted for inflation. Nevertheless, the report highlights that “this figure represents only a partial picture of total US support for the Israeli [army] over that time period.”

A large portion of Washington’s “security assistance” for Israel consists of munitions, from artillery shells to 2,000-pound bombs that have been dropped over residential areas in Gaza and Lebanon.

“The weapons have come through a variety of channels, including existing US stocks, including the multi-billion dollar WRSA-I stocks located in Israel, commercial sales approved by the State Department, Foreign Military Sales (FMS) approved by State and negotiated and brokered by the Pentagon, Foreign Military Financing (FMF), which provides grants for the purchase of US defense articles and services, and the Excess Defense Articles (EDA) program, which provides used systems no longer needed by US forces for free or at a steep discount,” the Costs of War report details.

However, Washington has worked to obscure “the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering,” in particular, by making sure that over 100 arms deals signed with Tel Aviv over the past year did not exceed the threshold that would have required reporting them to Congress: “$14 million for major defense equipment and $50 million for defense articles and services, ranging from weapons systems to equipment maintenance and military training.”

Based on publicly available information cited by the researchers, the $17.9 billion figure is divided as follows: $4 billion to replenish Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defense systems; $1.2 billion for the Iron Beam defense system; $3.5 billion for the procurement of advanced weapons systems, defense articles, and defense services through the FMF program; $1 billion to enhance the production and development of artillery and critical munitions; $4.4 billion to replenish defense articles and defense services provided to Israel from US stocks; finally, the total figure also includes Israel’s usual annual military aid installment of $3.8 billion.

The amount surpasses what Washington spent during the 1973 Arab–Israeli war and is about four times the amount Israel received in the 1980s during its war with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon, its 15-year occupation of Lebanon, and the 2006 war with Hezbollah.

“Israel receives favorable financing arrangements related to US military aid. For example, US aid is provided on a ‘cash flow’ basis, which means that Israel is able to finance multi-year purchases from the US based on future commitments before the funds have been officially appropriated by Congress … Unlike any other country in the world, Israel is allowed to spend 25% of its routine annual military aid from the United States on its own arms industry,” the report highlights.

Since October 2023, the US has spent an additional $4.86 billion funding its illegal war against Yemen and its failed efforts to protect western trade interests in the Red Sea and beyond. This figure includes $2.4 billion approved by Congress in April for “military operations in the broader region to respond to attacks over the next year,” another $2.4 billion in operation costs for “additional Aircraft Carrier Strike Groups and additional actions against [Yemen],” and between $50 to $70 million in additional combat pay for troops.

“There are an estimated 40,000 American personnel stationed in the region, (including personnel on ships, aircraft, and bases) (compared with 34,000 prior to October 7, 2023). This number rose to 50,000 in early August 2024, when Secretary Austin ordered a second carrier strike group to the area after Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran,” the report states.

By June, the US navy estimated it had fired $1 billion worth of munitions to confront Yemeni attacks. Furthermore, the Yemeni armed forces have downed at least 11 US MQ-9 Reaper drones over the country. With each costing $30 million, Sanaa has handed Washington at least $330 million in losses.

Finally, the Costs of War investigation reveals that western arms dealers are the ones reaping the benefits of Washington’s unchecked spending to support Israel’s genocidal war, chief among them Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, and other equipment producers such as Caterpillar.

October 8, 2024 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Why is the ‘liberal’ media peddling the vilest genocide apologism?

A phalanx of the UK’s most influential journalists brought this odious article to print, decrying as a ‘blood libel’ the reporting of Israel’s killing of thousands of children in Gaza
By Jonathan Cook | October 6, 2024

I can’t put this strongly enough. Howard Jacobson’s article in today’s Observer newspaper may be one the vilest pieces of journalism published in Britain in living memory, arguing that any reporting of Israel’s documented slaughter of many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza is a “blood libel” and antisemitic. It is pure genocide apologism.

But far worse is the fact that the Guardian Media Group signed off his column. This isn’t the work of one Zionist loon. A whole army of journalists brought it to print.

And note: Jacobson, odious as he is, isn’t responsible for the choice of photo. That is entirely down to the Observer newsroom.

I worked at both the Guardian and the Observer, its Sunday sister paper, for many years. The comment editor, the photo editor, the revise sub-editor, the Observer’s chief editor and all the section heads would have approved not only Jacobson’s text but that photo too.

What on earth did they all imagine that “illustrative” photo of a blood-smeared doll suggested?

  • That the many thousands of children blown to pieces by Israeli bombs are a fiction.
  • That all the children decomposing under rubble are made up.
  • That all the unidentified children buried in Gaza’s sands are a lie.
  • That all the children dying of epidemics like polio or starving to death from Israel’s aid blockade are an invention.

That any single journalist imagined for a moment that this was an acceptable article or photo in the midst of a genocide is astounding enough.

But that a whole phalanx of the most influential and “liberal” journalists in the country backed it without a second thought tells us something about the depraved culture that passes for journalism in the western establishment media.

These elite journalists are completely divorced from reality. They have no moral core, they live and work as fanatical ideologues for western supremacism. They are as racist as their forebears who cheerled Britain’s subjugation and colonisation of the rest of the globe.

There is no hope of ever having a healthy world as long as these war-mongers and genocide apologists are allowed to remain in charge of shaping our consciousness.

October 7, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , | 3 Comments

66-yr-old Palestinian beaten, killed by Israeli occupation forces

MEMO | October 7, 2024

Sixty-six-year-old Palestinian activist, Ziad Abu Ehlayyel, was killed after being brutally beaten by Israeli occupation forces during a raid on his home in the occupied West Bank town of Dura, south-west of Hebron.

According to security sources, Israeli forces stormed Abu Ehlayyel’s home this morning and violently assaulted him until he lost consciousness. Despite being rushed to Dura Hospital, medical staff were unable to save him and he was pronounced dead due to the extent of his injuries.

Abu Ehlayyel was a respected community figure who had been subjected to multiple assaults by Israeli occupation forces during past raids into the town.

Quds News Network shared an archival video showing Abu Ehlayyel confronting Israeli soldiers, pleading with them to stop firing at Palestinian children. In the footage, he can be heard saying: “We don’t want you to shoot anyone, we don’t want you to kill anyone; this is a nonviolent procession, why do you keep shooting at them? Why don’t you stop your settlers from attacking us?”

Tensions have been running high across the occupied West Bank amid a brutal Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 41,900 Palestinians, mostly women and children, since 7 October last year.

Today marks one year since the Israeli offensive began, leaving over 97,300 wounded and more than 10,000 people still missing, presumed dead under the rubble.

In the occupied West Bank, the violence has also escalated. Since 7 October 2023, at least 742 Palestinians have been killed, more than 6,200 injured and over 11,100 others detained in the occupied territory, according to Palestinian figures.

The Israeli escalation follows a landmark opinion by the International Court of Justice last July that declared Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land unlawful and demanded the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

October 7, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture, Video | , , , , | 1 Comment

The Anniversary of October 7th

Twelve Months That May Have Doomed Both Israel and Global Jewish Power

By Ron Unz • Unz Review • October 7, 2024

Today marks the one year anniversary of the remarkably successful Hamas raid on Israel, in which some 1,500 lightly-armed Islamic militants from Gaza so greatly humiliated the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his country’s entire national security establishment. The consequences of these last twelve months have been enormous, not merely for the Jewish State and the rest of the Middle East, but also for America and the entire world.

For many fatal diseases the cause of death is less the result of the infection itself than that of the defensive immune system, whose massive over-reaction destroys vital tissue, killing the entire organism. And I think that the Hamas raid of October 7, 2023 and the Israeli response may eventually be seen in this light.

Some 1,200 Israelis died that day, probably many or most of them killed by their own country’s panic-stricken and trigger-happy IDF forces, whose Apache helicopters were ordered to blast anything that moved. Although such losses were hardly insignificant in a Jewish population of some 7.2 million and the national humiliation was enormous, if the Israeli government had merely been content to launch a few weeks of punitive bombing attacks against Gaza and then grudgingly accept an exchange of prisoners with its Hamas adversaries, I doubt the results would have been too serious.

Israel had held many thousands of Palestinians without charges or trial and often under brutal conditions, so releasing these in exchange for the 200-odd Israelis Hamas had carried back to Gaza would have meant a huge loss of face for the Jewish State, but hardly a threat to the country’s survival. The Israelis could have merely fired a few of their complacent and incompetent local military commanders and strengthened their Gaza defenses, and matters would have probably gone on much like before.

Israel had been riding high at that point, on the very verge of accomplishing its decades-long project of fully normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Arab state. Israel’s close friends totally dominated the Biden Administration and Donald Trump promised to do even more for that country if he somehow managed to regain the White House. The country had just celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding, and its international strategic position seemed better than it had been in many years, so it could have easily taken its Hamas debacle in stride.

But after the events of the last twelve months, I tend to doubt that the country will survive much longer in anything like its existing form, and its collapse may also take down with it the entire political structure of organized Jewry worldwide, which today so heavily dominates both America and much of the rest of the world. While Israel may face very serious risks from the major regional war its government seeks to ignite, I think the greatest threat to its existence comes from the massive distribution of devastating information that has taken place during this last year.

If the Israeli government had cut its losses and exchanged prisoners with Hamas, the country might have been humiliated but Netanyahu would have been utterly destroyed. So partly because of his own desperate political situation, he reacted in very different fashion, unleashing massive, relentless attacks against Gaza’s helpless couple of million civilians, clearly hoping to save his own political skin by using the Hamas raid as an excuse to kill or expel all the Palestinians in that enclave and afterwards in the West Bank. This would have allowed him to establish his name in history as Israel’s second founding father, finally creating the Greater Israel that all of his predecessors had failed to achieve. This bold project was certainly spurred on by the small extremist political parties upon whom the political survival of his government depended, whose ideological leadership regarded those territories as their God-given heritage under the fierce version of the religious Judaism that they followed.

Unfortunately for Netanyahu’s plans, despite all his massive bombing attacks, Gaza’s Palestinians refused to leave, perhaps remembering how their parents or grand-parents had previously been expelled by Zionist militants in 1948 from their homes in Haifa and other cities of what became Israel, as I had discussed in a long December article:

Moreover, despite massive financial lures, over-populated Egypt was adamant that it would not accept a couple of million displaced Gazans, who would likely become a source of social instability and future border clashes with Israel. So with the Gazans refusing to leave and the Egyptians refusing to take them, this left little choice but for the Israelis to keep bombing them in hopes they might change their minds, perhaps further assisted by the pressure of famine as the entrance of food supplies to the besieged enclave was blocked by mobs of angry Israelis.

Hamas and its determined fighters were hidden in their heavily-fortified network of tunnels and during the year that followed IDF troops had little success in rooting them out, suffering continuing casualties along the way and freeing only a tiny number of the Israelis held prisoner.

Angry, frustrated armies naturally tend to take revenge against the entire civilian population of their enemies, and in an August article I’d summarized the unspeakable war crimes that IDF troops were regularly committing against helpless Palestinian civilians, with some of these incidents finally starting to receive coverage in mainstream American media outlets.

According to American physicians interviewed by Politico Magazine and CBS News Sunday Morning, Israeli military snipers have regularly been executing Palestinian toddlers with precisely aimed shots to the head and the heart; indeed, for many years Israelis have proudly marketed tee-shirts boasting of their success in killing pregnant women and children. An article in the New York Times also reported that IDF forces have seized and tortured to death leading Palestinian surgeons and other medical doctors, with some of the survivors describing the horrific torments they endured at the hands of their brutal Israeli captors.

All of these barbaric atrocities have been justified and encouraged by the sweeping public statements of top Israeli leaders. For example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly identified the Palestinians with the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew god commanded must be exterminated down to the last newborn baby. Just a few days ago, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that it would be “just and moral” for Israel to totally exterminate all two million Palestinians in Gaza, but he emphasized that world public opinion was currently preventing his government from taking that important step.

Although this officially-stated Israeli goal of eradicating all Palestinian men, women, and children has not yet been achieved, more than ten months of bombs, bullets, and famine have made significant progress in that direction. The Lancet is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals and a few weeks ago it published a short piece conservatively estimating that relentless Israeli attacks and the complete destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure may be responsible for nearly 200,000 civilian deaths, a figure many times larger than any previous total mentioned in the media.

The massive, ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians together with these widespread, explicit public statements by top Israeli leaders led the esteemed jurists of the International Court of Justice to issue a series of near-unanimous rulings that Israel appeared to be undertaking a campaign of genocide against Gaza’s Palestinians. By late July even the notoriously pro-Israel editors of the English-language Wikipedia had finally endorsed the same conclusion.

In addition to these ongoing massacres, many thousands of Palestinian civilian captives have been seized, none of whom have ever been tried or convicted of anything. But with Israeli prison space overflowing, National Security Minister Itomar Ben-Gvir proposed summarily executing all of them by shooting each one in the head, thereby freeing up their prison space for new waves of captives.

Although the militaries of many countries have occasionally committed massacres or atrocities during wartime, sometimes even with the silent approval of their political leadership, it seems quite unusual to have the latter publicly endorse and advocate such policies, and no similar examples from recent centuries come to mind. I don’t doubt that if television journalists had interviewed Genghis Khan while he was ravaging all of Eurasia with his Mongol hordes, he might have casually made such statements, but I’d always assumed that standards of acceptable international behavior had considerably changed over the last thousand years.

When top leaders regularly issue such wholesale sanguinary declarations, some of their more enthusiastic subordinates may naturally decide to partly implement those same goals on a retail basis. These horrible recent Israeli atrocities merely continued the pattern from earlier this year, which had often been documented on social media by Israelis themselves, eager to emphasize the terrible punishment they were successfully inflicting upon their hated Palestinian foes. As I wrote a few months ago:

Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Mobs of Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found bound and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.

I also suggested that the near-stranglehold that pro-Israel Jews had gradually gained across American society, especially including politics, academia, and media, was having very fateful consequences. For example, Netanyahu’s deliberate slaughter of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Gazan civilians actually prompted his recent invitation to address a joint session of Congress for an unprecedented fourth time, with his bombastic speech interrupted by 58 standing ovations, coming at a rate of more than once each minute.

Meanwhile, American students had been heavily indoctrinated for generations with an absolute horror of genocide, war crimes, Apartheid, and racial oppression. But when they reacted against full American government support for the worst example of these seen anywhere in the world in many decades, their peaceful protests at elite colleges were brutally suppressed by harsh police crackdowns. This problem arose because their moral instructors had failed to properly emphasize that all those sweeping prohibitions actually included the key exclusionary phrase “except when committed by Jews”…

In one of the highest-profile and most grotesque recent incidents, Israeli doctors reported that a Palestinian captive had been severely injured after being brutally gang-raped and sodomized by nine IDF soldiers. Israeli military leaders have been facing the threat of arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court, so they decided to demonstrate their adherence to international law by having the soldiers arrested and tried, but a huge, violent mob of Jewish activists invaded the army base to free them, and the government later ordered them released. Israeli TV has widely broadcast footage of Palestinian prisoners being raped and sodomized by IDF soldiers, with claims that these brutal scenes were sometimes even live-streamed for the edification of gleeful Israeli political leaders…

Mike Whitney had summarized much of the shocking early evidence in late July when the story first broke in the Israeli media and a more recent article by journalist Jonathan Cook collected together a great deal of the background information. Cook noted that according to human and legal rights groups, Israeli soldiers and police have a very long history of raping and sexually assaulting Palestinians, including children, and such behavior has been endorsed by the country’s highest religious authorities:

In 2016, for example, the Israeli military appointed Colonel Eyal Karim as its chief rabbi, even after he had declared Palestinians to be “animals” and had approved the rape of Palestinian women in the interest of boosting soldiers’ morale.

I’ve always been interested in the Middle East conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and I’m sure that I’ve followed it much more closely than the vast majority of people. But over the last twelve months I’ve probably devoted more attention to the topic than I had during the previous fifty years combined, and I’d expect that the same may be true for all but those who have long specialized in the subject. Billions around the world who had previously remained totally unaware or had only known of the Palestinians in the vaguest terms have now watched scenes of enormous suffering displayed on their smartphones.

In past decades all of these horrific Israeli crimes might have remained hidden away, kept from the sight of the American public and the rest of the world by the staunchly pro-Israel gatekeepers of the Western mainstream media. But the existence of the Internet drastically changed the informational landscape, especially the relatively uncensored social media platforms of TikTok and Elon Musk’s Twitter, which allowed the rapid dissemination of shocking images. Meanwhile, YouTube channels such as those of Judge Andrew Napolitano gradually brought together a critical mass of highly-credentialed academics, national security experts, and journalists who could share their analysis of events with large audiences around the world.

Two of Napolitano’s regular guests are Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate, earnest young Jewish progressives who run the Grayzonea webzine and YouTube channel of their own. I noted their lengthy discussion of how the pro-Israel donor class had recently crushed any political dissent within the Democratic Party, despite the overwhelming views of its voter base.

In that same livestream, Blumenthal and Maté also focused on the methods used to keep American elected officials in line on this issue, noting that a few days ago Zionist billionaires spent an almost unprecedented $8 million to defeat Rep. Cori Bush in her own Democratic primary, angry that the black progressive member of “the squad” had called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Just a few weeks earlier, roughly twice as much money had been spent by similar individuals for very similar reasons to successfully eliminate her close political ally Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

Those two primary races were by far the most expensive in American history, and in their aftermath most members of Congress must surely realize that they only remain in office at the sufferance of AIPAC and its ideological allies. Although leading progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced the role of big money in those primary races, she was obviously too fearful of pro-Israel donors to even mention whose big money had been involved. The Grayzone editors were far more candid and accurately characterized the dollars as being deployed by “the foreign agents of an Apartheid state.”

Both Blumenthal and Mate had long focused on the plight of the Palestinians, and a couple of years ago I’d read Goliath, the former’s fine 2013 book reporting his personal experiences during his visit to the region.

But despite their previous coverage of the conflict, I do not think that either of them had ever imagined the horrors currently being inflicted upon the suffering Palestinians, nor the total slavish support for Israel expressed by the entire Biden Administration. These developments had ideological consequences and in May I’d described some ironic statements they had made in an earlier podcast:

This massive suppression of all political opposition to Zionism through a mixture of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means has hardly escaped the notice of various outraged critics. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are young Jewish progressives very sharply critical of Israel and its current attack on Gaza, and in their most recent livestream video a day or two before that Congressional vote, they agreed that Zionists were the greatest threat to American freedom and that our country was “under political occupation” by the Israel Lobby.”

They may or may not have been aware that their angry denunciation closely paralleled one of the most notorious Far Right phrases of the last half-century, which condemned America’s existing political system as nothing more than ZOG, a “Zionist Occupation Government.” Over time, obvious factual reality gradually becomes apparent regardless of ideological predispositions.

By August, I noticed that incendiary term had actually been explicitly used in their most recent podcast:

That particular article of mine proved quite popular so it’s possible that my remarks may have directly or indirectly found their way to those individuals. Whether or not that was the case, in their current podcast they mentioned that although they’d always dismissed “ZOG” as some ridiculously antisemitic expression, recent events had demonstrated its reality, and Americans were obviously now living in “one nation under ZOG.” I think this marked an important step forward in their understanding of our world.

Soon afterward, their Grayzone channel was temporarily banned from YouTube, and when it returned a week later, the two hosts nervously joked about the acronym they must carefully avoid uttering, using several rhyming words to enlighten their audience. I suspect that just like them, many other thoughtful Americans have recently begun entertaining ideas that they would have never previously considered possible.

Nearly all of us, members of the media included, live our lives in the media-bubbles that constitute our understanding of the world. When real-life events puncture such a bubble, we are forced to take stock and reassess our view of reality.

Those two young journalists were deeply concerned about America’s current situation, in which so much of the basic democratic system they always assumed seemed to be lost, with political control of our country now being exercised by obvious agents of a ruthless and bloodthirsty foreign power.

Yet oddly enough, although America’s current political predicament might have alarmed some knowledgeable individuals from the first half of the last century, it might not have greatly surprised them. Five or six years ago I read a fascinating book by Prof. Joseph Bendersky, an academic historian specializing in Holocaust Studies and the history of Nazi Germany. As I wrote at the time:

Bendersky devoted ten full years of research to his book, exhaustively mining the archives of American Military Intelligence as well as the personal papers and correspondence of more than 100 senior military figures and intelligence officers. The “Jewish Threat” runs over 500 pages, including some 1350 footnotes, with the listed archival sources alone occupying seven full pages. His subtitle is “Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army” and he makes an extremely compelling case that during the first half of the twentieth century and even afterward, the top ranks of the U.S. military and especially Military Intelligence heavily subscribed to notions that today would be universally dismissed as “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”

Put simply, U.S. military leaders in those decades widely believed that the world faced a direct threat from organized Jewry, which had seized control of Russia and similarly sought to subvert and gain mastery over America and the rest of Western civilization.

In these military circles, there was an overwhelming belief that powerful Jewish elements had financed and led Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, and were organizing similar Communist movements elsewhere aimed at destroying all existing Gentile elites and imposing Jewish supremacy throughout America and the rest of the Western world. While some of these Communist leaders were “idealists,” many of the Jewish participants were cynical opportunists, seeking to use their gullible followers to destroy their ethnic rivals and thereby gain wealth and supreme power. Although Intelligence officers gradually came to doubt that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an authentic document, most believed that the notorious work provided a reasonably accurate description of the strategic plans of the Jewish leadership for subverting America and the rest of the world and establishing Jewish rule.

Although Bendersky’s claims are certainly extraordinary ones, he provides an enormous wealth of compelling evidence to support them, quoting or summarizing thousands of declassified Intelligence files, and further supporting his case by drawing from the personal correspondence of many of the officers involved. He conclusively demonstrates that during the very same years that Henry Ford was publishing his controversial series The International Jew, similar ideas, but with a much sharper edge, were ubiquitous within our own Intelligence community. Indeed, whereas Ford mostly focused upon Jewish dishonesty, malfeasance, and corruption, our Military Intelligence professionals viewed organized Jewry as a deadly threat to American society and Western civilization in general. Hence the title of Bendersky’s book.

Let us take a step back and place Bendersky’s findings in their proper context. We must recognize that during much of the era covered by his research, U.S. Military Intelligence constituted nearly the entirety of America’s national security apparatus—being the equivalent of a combined CIA, NSA, and FBI—and was responsible for both international and domestic security, although the latter portfolio had gradually been assumed by J. Edgar Hoover’s own expanding organization by the end of the 1920s.

Bendersky’s years of diligent research demonstrate that for decades these experienced professionals—and many of their top commanding generals—were firmly convinced that major elements of the organized Jewish community were ruthlessly plotting to seize power in America, destroy all our traditional Constitutional liberties, and ultimately gain mastery over the entire world.

I have never believed in the existence of UFOs as alien spacecraft, always dismissing such notions as ridiculous nonsense. But suppose declassified government documents revealed that for decades nearly all of our top Air Force officers had been absolutely convinced of the reality of UFOs. Could I continue my insouciant refusal to even consider such possibilities? At the very least, those revelations would force me to sharply reassess the likely credibility of other individuals who had made similar claims during that same period.

Israel’s leaders may be confident that they can successfully estimate the risks of a military conflict with Hezbollah or Iran, and their calculations might be correct. But I think that the greater danger they face comes in the widening ripples of knowledge that their brutal actions have now spread across much of the American population and the rest of the world.

During the last few months the Israelis have unleashed an unprecedented wave of assassinations against the leaders of their regional adversaries, making absolutely no pretense of respecting national sovereignty, diplomatic immunity, or the basic laws of warfare. In one of the earliest examples, they used a missile-strike to kill the chief Hamas peace negotiator in his Beirut office and later employed similar means to assassinate the Hamas political chief who had replaced him at the negotiating table. That latter assassination took place in Tehran while he was attending the inauguration of the new Iranian president, whose own predecessor had died together with Iran’s finance minister in a highly-suspicious helicopter crash. A few months earlier another Israeli missile-strike had destroyed part of Iran’s embassy compound in Syria, killing several important Iranian generals. An apparent Israeli false-flag attack had killed a dozen Druze children playing soccer in the occupied Golan Heights, and Netanyahu’s government then used that atrocity as an excuse to assassinate a top Hezbollah military official in Beirut.

In September, this campaign of Israeli assassinations massively escalated, as many thousands of booby-trapped electronic pagers and other devices were used to kill or severely maim enormous numbers of Lebanese civilians who were associated with Hezbollah. This was soon followed by the use of some eighty-odd huge bunker-buster bombs to level an entire city block of southern Beirut, successfully assassinating the longtime leader of that organization, whose successor was similarly killed a few days ago under a wave of equally large bombs in that same city. Israeli leaders have regularly declared that they feel free to kill anyone, anywhere in the world whom they consider hostile to their national interests.

The obvious immediate intent of this wave of Israeli assassinations was to provoke Iran into the sort of military retaliation that could bring in a compliant America to destroy that powerful regional rival. Iran’s large retaliatory missile-strike of a few days ago may lead to this result. But whether or not it does, the Israeli assassinations may have other consequences, perhaps far more damaging to the future of the Jewish State.

Although the successful killing of those enemy leaders may have enhanced Israel’s reputation for the ruthless effectiveness of its intelligence services and achieved the tactical result of at least temporarily weakening their opposing organizations, I think there are great strategic risks in undertaking so many high-profile assassinations in such a short period of time. More and more outside observers have probably now become aware of crucial historical matters, long concealed or de-emphasized by our overwhelmingly pro-Israel mainstream media. The reality is that the State of Israel and its Zionist predecessor organizations have a record of bold assassinations almost totally unrivaled in world history. As I originally wrote in 2018:

Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same.

A very useful source for much of this material, though hardly a complete one, is Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman’s fully authorized 2018 history of Mossad assassinations, which runs 750 pages and served as the starting point for my own very lengthy January 2020 analysis of the same subject.

As I described its contents:

The sheer quantity of such foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable, with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York Times suggesting that the Israeli total over the last half-century or so seemed far greater than that of any other nation. I might even go farther: if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel’s body-count greatly exceeded the combined total for that of all other major countries in the world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have seen discussed in newspaper articles might fit comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman’s extremely long book.

As a very useful supplement to Bergman’s magisterial work, I’d strongly recommend State of Terror, published in 2016 by Thomas Suarez, which I only finally read a couple of weeks ago. Most of the author’s material was based upon declassified British government documents as well as the major newspaper archives of the period he covers, and he provides an enormous wealth of information not available elsewhere.

Although his primary focus was Zionist terrorism, political assassinations are a closely related topic, and he discussed many of these as well. As an example, he explained how the Zionists pioneered the technology of deadly letter-bombs, ruthlessly lacing these with cyanide to increase their effectiveness, and employing them to target a very long list of their perceived enemies, notably including all of Britain’s senior political leaders and America’s president, though those latter efforts proved unsuccessful. Suarez demonstrated that all of Israel’s early leaders were supporters of these policies, and they continued running that country for decades, even into the 1990s.

Suarez’s book is long out of print and used copies on Amazon are exorbitantly priced, but fortunately it is also available on Archive.org, including in PDF and ePub⬇ formats, and I would highly recommend it to those who seek to deepen their understanding of Israel’s creation.

Our word “assassin” comes from the Ismaili sect founded almost a thousand years ago that for nearly two centuries terrorized the entire Middle East with its successful killings of important Muslim and Christian leaders. But with the possible exception of that one non-state organization, I am not aware of any other political entity during the last two thousand years whose record of major political assassinations remotely approaches that of the Israeli state and its Zionist predecessor groups.

For obvious reasons, Bergman’s book had avoided discussing many of the high-profile killings of American or pro-Western leaders that can probably be attributed to Zionist or Israeli forces, notably that of James Forrestal, America’s first secretary of defense and the leading public opponent of Israel’s creation.

American presidents have hardly been immune to such attacks, with repeated Zionist attempts made on the life of President Truman and Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky revealing the plot to assassinate President George H.W. Bush.

Max Blumenthal grew up in elite Democratic circles in DC, with his father Sydney being a prominent former journalist and influential political operative very close to Hillary Clinton. Presumably based upon the personal knowledge he had picked up in such circles, in a podcast earlier this year he flatly declared that President Barack Obama was extremely fearful that the Israelis might try to assassinate him for his Middle East peacemaking efforts, something I’d occasionally suspected but had never previously heard stated by any knowledgeable insider.

But the highest-profile example of all would certainly be the case of the Kennedy brothers. Our president and his younger brother had made vigorous efforts to block Israel’s nuclear weapons development program and break the power of the growing Israel Lobby by forcing its main organization to register as a foreign agent, and there exists very strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the Israeli Mossad played a central role in eliminating them. I’ve discussed that issue at considerable length and would also strongly recommend the 2018 article by French researcher Laurent Guyénot or his more recent short book, which very helpfully summarizes the evidence and can be easily read within just a day or two.

Many patriotic Americans may take in stride the Israeli killing of foreign leaders whom our dishonest pro-Israel media has often falsely portrayed as enemies of the United States. But if those same individuals come to believe that the Israelis have also had a very long record of killing our own American leaders in order to subvert our political system and gain control of our country, the reaction might be far more serious. For decades, such ideas and the supporting evidence have been entirely confined to only the most marginal and isolated of conspiratorial circles, but there now seem quite a few indications that recent events may have propelled them into much more mainstream venues.

Consider Anya Parampil, another young journalist who has spent many years focused on Palestinian issues. Married to Max Blumenthal, she works with him at the Grayzone, and in her many video appearances there and on Napolitano’s channel, I’ve never seen any sign of her support for implausible conspiratorial beliefs. Instead, she has always struck me as someone of very mainstream if strongly progressive views on public policy matters.

Yet in a remarkable half-hour interview last week, she explicitly described Israel as America’s “greatest enemy,” expressing outrage that her country seemed to have lost its political sovereignty to the agents of that murderous foreign state. She went on to suggest that the crucial turning point in our national subjugation had probably come with the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, whose vigorous efforts to prevent Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons had been suddenly ended by his violent death. She also noted that his brother Robert had led the efforts to severely curtail the power of the Israel Lobby, and he too had soon died by an assassin’s hand. I think that her very self-confident public statements on such extremely controversial matters may represent a bellwether, indicating that many of those same ideas are now rapidly but quietly circulating within important mainstream segments of the American population.

Video Link

The JFK Assassination might easily rank as the single most famous incident of the twentieth century and it has been the subject of countless books, articles, and documentaries.

Those Americans who conclude that the Israeli Mossad played a central role in that killing, successfully subverting our entire political system, will naturally consider the implications of that revelation. If a matter of such gigantic magnitude could remain almost totally concealed for more than six decades, they may begin to grow very suspicious about the true nature of other major events as well.

The most obvious and important of these would be the 9/11 Attacks, which killed thousands of Americans. Pro-Israel elements within our national government immediately used these as an excuse to launch a series of wars that destroyed most of Israel’s leading regional rivals, wars that cost our country thousands of additional lives and many trillions of dollars, while killing or displacing millions of Muslim civilians.

As I’ve discussed at considerable length, Israel’s record of international terrorism, quite often of the false-flag variety, is just as unmatched as its record of assassinations, with an Israeli Prime Minister even publicly boasting that he had been the founding father of terrorism across the world.

One of history’s largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. There are strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad agents began a series of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq’s thousand-year-old Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state. In 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty, intending to leave no survivors, killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and the Israelis withdrew.

The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.

Once the circumstances of those 2001 terrorist attacks are carefully considered, the evidence that the Israeli Mossad once again played the central role seems extremely strong, even stronger than the case for Mossad’s role in the killing of the Kennedys several decades earlier. No other organization around the world possessed anything like the same set of skills and experience in carrying out such a massive operation, and the FBI quickly rounded up some 200 Mossad agents, many of whom had been located in the immediate vicinity of the destruction and were behaving in very suspicious ways, including five who were caught red-handed, gleefully celebrating the successful attack on the WTC towers.

Although it has been almost totally ignored for more than two decades by our fervently pro-Israel mainstream media, 9/11 researchers have amassed an enormous quantity of compelling evidence implicating Israel and its domestic American collaborators. Much of that evidence has been summarized in a number of our major articles:

  • Israel Did 9/11
    Wyatt Peterson • The Unz Review • September 12, 2024 • 13,300 Words
  • 9/11 Was an Israeli Job
    How America was neoconned into World War IV
    Laurent Guyénot • The Unz Review • September 10, 2018 • 8,500 Words

The greatest terrorist attack in the history of the world took place on 9/11 and it was the worst hostile blow our nation has ever endured. As the true facts of what actually happened on that fateful day quietly circulate in the wake of Israel’s very high-profile assaults on other Middle Eastern countries, I think that the existential risks that country faces may become far greater than anything associated with retaliatory strikes from Iranian ballistic or hypersonic missiles.

Related Reading:

October 7, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Pro-Palestine students occupy University of Manchester campus in protest against ties with Israel

MEMO | October 6, 2024

Pro-Palestine students at the University of Manchester have occupied part of its campus in protest against the institution’s complicity with Israel and its ongoing occupation of Gaza and the Palestinian territories.

In a press release by Manchester Leftist Action, a coalition of left-wing student activists from universities across Manchester, it announced that “As part of students’ actions against the senior leadership of their academic institutions that have been ignoring the demands to cut ties [with Israel], on Friday 04 October, students occupied the Samuel Alexander building” at the University of Manchester’s campus.

The move was taken amid the university’s hosting of the THE World Academic Summit, set to take place from Monday 7 October to Wednesday 9 October, of which senior academics and leadership figures from across the country and the world will reportedly attend.

Iterating the students’ stance “against British complicity and in honour of Palestinian martyrs” killed throughout Israel’s ongoing invasion and occupation of the besieged Gaza Strip, the press release announced a mass demonstration on the Sumit’s opening day, expected to be joined by community members and students from across the UK.

‘Gaza encampments symbolise a rising tide of global support for Palestinian liberation’

According to the press release, the students “are protesting the University of Manchester’s deep complicity in Israeli crimes, working with BAE systems who produce parts of the F35 fighter jets used to bomb civilians in Gaza and partnering with Hebrew University of Jerusalem which is built on illegally occupied land, and Tel Aviv University which produced the Dahiya doctrine – the military strategy that calls for the destruction of civilian infrastructure such as schools and hospitals”.

A spokesman for the students further stressed that “we cannot stay silent while our counterparts in Gaza have no universities to go to. Last year, students were at the forefront of global solidarity with Palestine, and we continue with the same spirit of defiance this year.”

They added that the pro-Palestinian students “begin this academic year relentless as ever in our pursuit of justice. The University’s shameful ties to a settler-colonial regime must end on our watch, and this is the minimum we could do for the Palestinian people that have been enduring Zionist violence for over 76 years”.

The demands toward the University of Manchester which the press release outlined consisted of cutting ties with Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ending the partnership with BAE Systems, adopting a policy ensuring all research is ethical and does not contribute towards the arms trade, and guaranteeing that no disciplinary actions will be taken against students.

October 6, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Gaza: Israeli army kills another journalist, raising the toll to 175 martyrs

Palestinian Information Center – October 6, 2024

GAZA – Another Palestinian journalist was killed in an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza, bringing the death toll of martyred media workers since last October 7, 2023 to 175, Gaza’s Government Media Office (GMO) said on Sunday.

In a statement, GMO identified the new slain journalist as Hasan Hamad, who works for Media Town, saying he was martyred following an Israeli airstrike on his house in Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.

GMO strongly denounced the targeting, killing, and assassination of Palestinian journalists by the Israeli occupation forces, calling on the international community and its organizations to “deter the occupation and prosecute it at international courts for its ongoing crimes.”

October 6, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Why Israel Can’t Win

Endgame: Masada 2.0

By Kevin Barrett | October 6, 2024

“Israel” is quite proficient at killing people. In less than a year they have killed 40,000 civilians in Gaza, and last week killed 2,000 more in Lebanon. Unofficial estimates of the real death toll in Gaza, as opposed to the officially recovered, counted, and identified bodies, exceed 200,000.

As they slaughter vast numbers of women and children under the flimsiest excuses, the Zionists also kill the political and diplomatic leaders with whom wiser leaders would be negotiating. They apparently have not considered that for each civilian they kill, dozens of furious survivors and onlookers become long-term anti-Zionist combatants-in-waiting. And they don’t seem to realize that martyring political and diplomatic leaders gives fighters added incentive to up their game, and leaves them no option but to do so. That’s why, in the wake of the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, Israel’s attempted invasion of Lebanon has been shockingly (to the Zionists) unsuccessful.

Randomly murdering tens of thousands of civilians, or assassinating a handful of leaders, superficially looks like tactical success. Richie Allen seemed to think that Israel’s terrorist attack on non-combatants associated with Hezbollah via exploding pagers was an impressive achievement.* As I told him, just about anybody who really wants to randomly murder that number of people, or more, can do so if they so choose. The fact that Israeli leaders employed such an elaborate Rube Goldberg scheme to mass murder noncombatants—to counterproductive strategic effect—reveals the Israelis as psychopathic idiots and shameless war criminals, not geniuses.

The appearance of tactical success achieved by Israel’s pointless murders conceals a colossal strategic failure. The root of that failure is simple: Netanyahu has no idea what he is trying to achieve, other than keep the war going so he can stay in office and out of prison. His extremist coalition parters, Smotrich and Ben Gvir, do have a vision—“exterminate Amalek”—but since this is 2024, not the Bronze Age, that isn’t going to happen. Israel can kill a small fraction of today’s “Amalek” but for every Amalek they kill, ten or a hundred more will spring up. Long before Israel killed even 5% of its current Amalek enemies it would have transformed most of the world’s 8 billion non-Jews into a new, even more angry and determined Amalek.

Netanyahu’s official war aims in Gaza are (1) eliminate Hamas, and (2) use military force to bring back the Israeli hostages alive. Both are obviously impossible, as Israel’s military and intelligence leaders have reiterated. Hamas is just a current name for Islamic resistance to Zionist genocide, and that resistance is an idea that can’t be eliminated by military means. And military attempts to snatch back hostages will almost always lead to the deaths of those hostages.

Since he has set impossible war aims, and has no realistic ones, Netanyahu is bogged down in a war on Gaza that he, and Israel, will inevitably lose. And now he is making an even worse mistake by invading Lebanon and stepping into an even bigger quagmire. Once again, Netanyahu has declared goals that cannot be realized: (1) Defeat Hezbollah, which like Hamas is simply the local form of Islamic resistance to genocide, an idea that cannot be defeated militarily, and (2) Change the military equation so that Zionist settlers can return to the occupied northern territories. But unlike in 2006, when Hezbollah defeated Israel with only a tiny fraction of the arsenal and army it now possesses, the Lebanese anti-terror group now has long-range rockets that can hit those northern territories from anywhere in Lebanon (and from parts of Syria and Iraq for that matter). Obviously there is no evident military path to enabling the northern settlers to return.

Endgame: Masada 2.0

Since the officially-declared vision of what Israeli “victory” would look like is impossible, while a conventional military defeat of “Israel” also seems unlikely due to the Zionists’ advantage in heavy weapons, how can this war possibly end? The most likely ending will involve some form of Masada 2.0. The original Masada, which of course is a myth not a historical reality, involved a civil war in which fanatical Jews were slaughtered by even more fanatical Jews, who then committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans.

Masada 2.0 will similarly pit Jewish fanatics (the remnants of Labor Zionists) against even loonier ultra-fanatics (Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and the rest of the messianic-millenarian maniacs). The moment of truth will come when Israelis collectively wake up and realize that Israel is bogged down in two hopeless quagmires, and that Netanyahu’s stated war aims are a pipe dream: The Israeli captives will never be brought back alive by military means, Hamas is still around and will remain so, Hezbollah can keep raining missiles on “Israel” indefinitely, and the settlers won’t return to the north without a peace agreement that would amount to an Israeli surrender (given the impossible declared war aims).

At this point the Zionists capable of rational strategic thinking will come into conflict with those who are not so capable—the Smotriches and Ben-Gvirs who imagine that if they only commit enough abominations their messiah will magically appear to save them. The strategic Zionists will see and accept the inevitability of a strategic retreat, while the messianic-millenarian lunatics will see that as a betrayal of all that is holy. The “sane Zionists” (I know that’s an oxymoron) will recognize that Israel’s only path to long-term existence as a “Jewish state” would be to somehow revive the two-state solution involving withdrawal from 1967-occupied territories. But the messianic-millenarian fanatics and the half-million settlers on those territories, like the ultras in the Masada legend, would rather die than compromise. When push comes to shove, and Netanyahu is finally scapegoated and sacrificed for his war failures, open fighting is likely to break out between the two factions. It may involve targeted assassinations, as happened to Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Mob violence, possibly on a grand scale, is another possibility.

If the strategic Zionists win, and the war ends with at least the illusion of an Israeli return to “normalcy” featuring a promised and apparently viable path to a Palestinian state including all of the 1967-occupied land with East Jerusalem as its capital, more than a few of the millenarian lunatics may very well commit mass suicide, whether by their own hands or in a “suicide by cop” scenario when they are removed from the Occupied Territories by the IDF. And thus Masada 2.0 would take the “mass suicide rather than surrender” motif from myth into history.

If the messianic-millenarian lunatics win again, as they did with their assassination of Rabin in 1995, “Israel” will descend into chaos. Frenzied mobs will go berserk, awaiting their Messiah to lead them to ultimate victory over the gentiles. Almost all competent Israelis will have long since left, while the ten-children-per-family ultra-religious Zionists who don’t know how to do anything except bake unleavened bread and sit around all day chanting the Torah and poring over the Talmud will be all that remains. Economic collapse and political chaos will ensue. Military defense against the world’s two billion Muslims, who will never forgive or forget the Zionist genocide, will become impossible, especially as the US empire’s influence recedes. Ultimately the Holy Land will be absorbed back into the Islamic world.

The above assessment may sound partisan, given my sympathies for the Islamic resistance. But my prognosis is widely shared by well-informed people across the ideological spectrum. Indeed, I have merely spelled out the unspoken parts of what the well-informed segment of the world’s Zionist leadership knows all-too-well. Thomas Friedman, who calls Netanyahu “the worst leader not only in Israeli history, but in Jewish history” has been bemoaning the current Israeli leadership’s colossal strategic failures since last October. And Friedman is not an outlier. He represents the views of Zionist leaders, both in “Israel” and the West, who have thought things through.

So why are the majority of Zionists, including most of the Zionist-dominated media, reflexively supporting Netanyahu’s doomed non-strategy? Mainly because most of them are not as well-informed as Thomas Friedman. Zionists, whose partisanship has infused media and decision-making circles, inhabit a propaganda bubble that bears little relation to reality. High on their own supply, they almost involuntarily cheer for Israel whenever they see it under attack, drooling and growling on command like a pack of Pavlov’s dogs. Like their millenarian-messianic fanatic counterparts, secular Zionists are blinded by tribal loyalty. They are very good at not seeing things they don’t want to see.

When Israel implodes into Masada 2.0, the collective blindness of the larger Jewish tribe, not just its most extreme fanatics, will be the reason.


*Richie Allen: Hasn’t Hezbollah been severely dented, and maybe that’s putting it mildly, after this daring and brazen series of attacks against its leaders with the booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies?… I mean, that was an incredible coup that by the Israelis, love them or hate them. It’s kind of to be admired really how they pulled that off.

Kevin Barrett: Well, that’s certainly not the view from Lebanon or anywhere else in the region, including here in Morocco. Israel slaughtered a whole lot of civilians. Those pagers were not used by military people. Those pagers were only used by the civilian wing of Hezbollah. It’s the equivalent of targeting the post office and the welfare department and the hospital bureaucracy in the UK. It’s like if they blew up the pagers of the National Health Service in the UK and the UK post office. It didn’t even touch the military. It didn’t scratch the military wing of Hezbollah. Now, that said, the bombings have. But first, let’s be clear that this pager attack and radio attack was a mass murder of civilians and among the worst acts of terrorism in the history of the world…

You’re listening to Kevin Barrett just briefly on the pager. So let’s just say you’re right then, that it had little or no impact on the military wing of Hezbollah. It’s still an incredibly brave, not brave at all, it’s cowardly. It’s an incredibly brazen thing to do, Kevin, and a bit of a coup for Mossad, right?…

Richie, that’s ridiculous. “Brazen,” and you’re admiring it! I mean, if I wanted to kill a few thousand Americans, I could do it very, very easily. I know how to poison water supplies if I want to. I mean, it’s not very hard. It’s easy to kill a lot of civilians.

That’s all Israel did, right? I mean, their people have been poisoning people’s wells for thousands of years. And this is just more well poisoning and meaningless, non-strategic slaughter of civilians. It’s moronic. One individual like me or anybody else could kill that many civilians if we were enough of a jerk to want to, like those Zionists are.

October 6, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

BBC interview with Hamas deputy chief is a case study in state propaganda

By Jonathan Cook | October 4, 2024

The BBC no longer bothers to hide the fact that its news service acts as nothing more than the British state’s willing propaganda channel.

Last night on the News at Ten, Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen secured a rare interview with Hamas’s deputy political chief, Khalil al-Hayya.

Anchor Clive Myrie introduced the segment by warning: “Many will find his comments abhorrent.” But the only person making abhorrent assertions was Myrie himself, observing that, in the interview, the Hamas leader “claims the Palestinian people have faced violence at the hands of Israel for several decades”.

No, Clive. The world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, as well as every major human rights organisation, has concluded that Israel’s belligerent military occupation of the Palestinians’ territory is illegal and violent – not as a claim, but as an indisputable fact.

Israel’s refusal to recognise a Palestinian state and allow Palestinians self-determination; Israel’s building of hundreds of illegal settlements on Palestinian land and the transfer of Israeli Jews, often militia groups, into those settlements; Israel’s 17-year siege of Gaza; and Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinian people to force them to submit to these indignities, are all forms of structural violence. Again, that is not a claim. It is how international law judges what Israel has done and is doing.

Next, Myrie required Bowen to justify at length why the BBC was allowing a Hamas political leader – not a military leader – to be given air time. Note, al-Hayya’s boss, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated by Israel while he was involved in negotiations to bring about a ceasefire. Like some kind of gangster, Israel murdered the man on the other side of the table it was supposed to be talking to.

The BBC provided none of that as context, of course, for its interview. It was too busy placating Israel and the British government by issuing apologies and warnings before it offered a rare insight into Hamas’ side of the story.

So what did al-Hayya say that was so “abhorrent”? Here are the main points al-Hayya raised in the interview – you can listen to his precise wording via this link – under Bowen’s mainly hostile questioning:

1. Hamas launched its attack on October 7 because the world had forgotten about Gaza even as Israel was slowly strangling the tiny territory to death through its 17-year siege. Hamas wanted to put Gaza back on the international community’s radar, and had decided it could do so only through military action.

2. Hamas fighters had been told not to target Israeli civilians on October 7, only Israeli occupation soldiers. Hamas does not endorse harming civilians. However, there were failings by individuals in sticking to that plan.

3. Israel, not Hamas, is the party responsible for destroying Gaza as evidenced through its bombardments of schools, shelters and hospitals. Hamas’ killing of 1,200 people could not be used to justify Israel killing more than 50,000 people in Gaza. Israel is “motivated by the lust to destroy”.

4. The accusation that Hamas uses the people of Gaza as “human shields” is not true. “They [Israel] destroyed mosques on the heads of their owners when there were no fighters. They destroyed houses and high-rise buildings when no one was in them… It is all Israeli propaganda.”

5. Netanyahu is the one obstructing a ceasefire. Even if Hamas surrendered today, Gaza’s next generation would take up the struggle because the Palestinian people want their freedom and have a legitimate right to resist the occupation. “People need to understand that Israel wants to burn the whole region.”

6. The Palestinians need a state and self-determination, and the Palestinian refugees a right to return to their homeland, if the region is ever to calm down.

7. It is Israel trying to eliminate the Palestinian people, not the Palestinians destroying Israel. “Give us our rights, give us a fully sovereign Palestinian state… Israel does not recognise a one-state solution or a two-state solution. Israel rejects it all.”

8. [Responding to a question about whether he considers himself a terrorist] “I’m seeking freedom and defending my people. To the occupation, we are all terrorists – the leaders, the women and the children. You heard what Israeli leaders called us: we are all animals.”

Now, one can debate whether al-Hayya’s statements are accurate or truthful, or whether he is being sincere. But nothing at all he says here can be viewed as “abhorrent” – unless you are shilling for Israel. He deplores attacks on civilians, he accuses Israel of bringing about Gaza’s destruction, he blames Netanyahu for blocking a ceasefire, and he appears to be ready to settle for a two-state solution, though he doesn’t believe Israel will agree to it.

In fact, his comments are far, far more moderate and far less inflammatory than statements regularly made by Netanyahu and most of the Israeli political and military leadership. Netanyahu, remember, is being sought by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, while the country he leads is on trial for what its sister court, the ICJ, considers a “plausible genocide” Netanyahu has incited and overseen. Not that the BBC ever mentions either fact.

And yet the state broadcaster never prefaces remarks from Netanyahu or other Israeli leaders – such as the self-declared fascist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich – with any kind of warning, let alone one that many viewers may find their remarks “abhorrent”.

And while we are at it, if al-Hayya’s remarks are the yardstick, how was Keir Starmer’s comment that Israel had a right to deprive Palestinian civilians of food, water and fuel – that is, to collectively punish them by starving them to death – not also deemed “abhorrent” by the BBC?

What becomes ever harder to deny is that the BBC isn’t reporting what is happening in the Middle East. It is aggressively framing it in such a way as to present Israel as the victim of events, and thereby assist it in carrying out a genocide in Gaza and beginning a second slaughter in Lebanon.

October 5, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | 3 Comments

‘Crimes beyond comprehension’: US doctors recount horrors of Israeli war on Gaza

Press TV – October 5, 2024

A group of 99 American physicians, who volunteered to work in Gaza, rejected Israeli allegations of military activity in the territory’s hospitals, calling on the Biden administration to immediately halt all military, economic, and diplomatic support for the Tel Aviv regime.

In a letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the volunteers, who collectively dedicated 254 weeks to Gaza’s healthcare facilities, recounted dire humanitarian conditions amid ongoing Israeli offensives, describing their experiences as witnessing “crimes beyond comprehension.”

“We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian military activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities,” they stated in the letter.

Previously, Hamas had dismissed Israeli claims regarding the al-Shifa hospital, once the largest medical facility in Gaza.

Izzat al-Rishq, a member of the political bureau of Hamas, stated that the Israeli allegations that the Gaza-based resistance group is using the hospital for military purposes lack credibility.

The physicians called attention to Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system, stating that their colleagues were targeted with “torture, disappearance, and murder” in the besieged area.

The letter detailed the suffering faced by Gazan women and children in hospitals, highlighting severe malnutrition and a critical shortage of medical supplies.

The doctors referenced a July study from the medical journal Lancet that said the death toll in Gaza has already surpassed 118,000, marking more than 5% of its population.

“Every day I saw babies die. They had been born healthy. Their mothers were so malnourished that they could not breastfeed, and we lacked formula or clean water to feed them, so they starved,” Asma Taha, a pediatric nurse practitioner, recounted.

“Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many,” Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic and hand surgeon, reflected in the letter.

The doctors condemned “Israel’s continued, repeated” displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, particularly children, into areas devoid of basic necessities like water and sanitation, calling it “absolutely shocking.”

“It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year, is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities,” they said.

The doctors urged the Biden administration to support an international arms embargo on Israel until a permanent ceasefire is established.

They also requested a meeting with Biden and Harris to discuss their observations and advocate for a fundamental shift in American policy regarding West Asia.

Additionally, the signatories reiterated their earlier calls from their July 25 letter, including reopening the Rafah crossing to allow humanitarian aid, including water and medical supplies, into Gaza.

“Every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets,” they said.

Israel has killed at least 41,825 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in Gaza since October 2023.

The Israeli war machine ignited its genocidal campaign by targeting helpless Palestinians trapped in the coastal territory.

It was after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas conducted surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against the Palestinians.

October 5, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , , , | 4 Comments

The Pentagon requests $1.2bn to continue Red Sea mission

MEMO | October 5, 2024

Bloomberg revealed on Friday that two documents related to the US Department of Defence, or the Pentagon’s budget, submitted to the defence committees in Congress, confirmed the need to spend $1.2 billion on its operations in the Red Sea to continue confronting Iran and the Yemeni Houthi militia.

The document stated that the Pentagon will spend: “About $1.2 billion to maintain ships deployed as part of operations in the Red Sea and to replenish stocks of missiles fired to repel attacks by Iran and its proxies.”

The agency added: “The spending, detailed in two Sept. 6 budget documents submitted to congressional defence committees and posted online, helps shine a light on the cost of maintaining a stepped-up presence in the region, as well as shooting down drones and missiles deployed by Iran and one of its proxies, the Houthi rebels in Yemen.”

“About $190 million will be spent on the restock of the sea-launched RTX Corp. Standard Missile-3 Block 1B and about $8.5 million will go for more heat-seeking air-to-air AIM-X Sidewinder missiles, according to the documents,” reported Bloomberg.

The article also added that the bulk of the Pentagon’s projected spending for a year’s worth of operations in the Middle East is $300 million for unplanned maintenance on the USS Bataan amphibious assault ship and ships in the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, which conducted operations in the Red Sea, the Pentagon confirmed in the documents.

One of the documents states: “The spending is linked to costs incurred by the DoD within the US Central Command region in responding to the situation in Israel or to hostile actions in the region as a direct result of the situation in Israel.”

Each Standard Missile-3 Block IB costs between $9 and $10 million.

“Two Navy destroyers this week fired about 12 Standard Missiles in defending Israel from another wave of Iranian assaults on Tuesday, according to a Navy official who declined to disclose the exact models and asked not to be identified discussing non-public information. That means this week’s US assistance likely cost about $120 million,” disclosed Bloomberg.

The documents also reveal requests for $276 million for additional SM-6 Standard Missiles and $57.3 million for Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Another $6.7 million is earmarked for the Enhanced Sea Sparrow self-defence missile. All of those weapons are made by RTX.

The Pentagon will also spend $25 million on Boeing Co. Jdam-GPS guidance kits and $7.4 million for its Small Diameter Bomb. An additional $25 million will go to “increase manufacturing sources” for the Standard Missile to support the Pentagon response to what it calls “the situation in Israel”.

Another $20 million will be spent on additional BAE Systems PLC laser-guided Advance Precision Kill Weapon System rockets.

The report noted: “The request includes $26.4 million to replace RTX Coyote Block 2 drone interceptors expended since October 2023 in support of DoD’s response to the situation in Israel.”

October 5, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

West Asian crisis prompts Biden to break ice with Putin

By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | October 5, 2024

The US president Joe Biden sprang a surprise during a press gaggle with reporters outside the White House on Thursday when he essentially didn’t rule out a potential meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at the upcoming summits of the Group of 20 or the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. Biden sort of signalled, ‘Barkis is willing.’ As he put it, “I doubt that Putin will show up.” 

As these White House gaggles generally go, Biden deliberately chose to respond to the TASS correspondent who asked the question, who of course knew that Biden knew that a trip by Putin to the Western Hemisphere to attend the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on November 18-19 is under active consideration in the Kremlin.

Biden and Putin have a lot to talk about but what adds up is that Biden signalled his interest in a conversation just a day after the massive Iranian missile strike against Israel, which came as a bolt from the blue and dramatically upended the legacy of his presidency. 

Don’t be surprised if the Middle East crisis dominates a Biden-Putin summit in Rio de Janeiro — that is, if such a meeting takes place. The Ukraine war is coasting inexorably toward a Russian victory. Biden’s interest lies in making sure somehow that Ukraine’s capitulation — and NATO’s humiliation — get carried over to January 20. But Putin must cooperate. This is one thing.  

Meanwhile, what causes sleepless nights for Biden is the situation in the Middle East, which may cascade uncontrollably toward a regional war. Here, Putin is not the problem but can be the solution. This needs some explaining. 

To be sure, policy differences have arisen between Biden and Netanyahu which is only to be expected given their sense of priorities respectively as politicians. It may seem the current crisis in the US-Israeli relationship is rather severe but how much of it is for the optics or, how little of it is for real is the moot point. Certainly, even a transition from war to a new diplomatic order is currently not in the cards. 

However, the US and Israel are also joined at the hips. There is no question that Biden is allowing seamless assistance to flow to Israel in its war effort and for keeping its economy afloat. And the US is blocking all moves in the UN Security Council calling for a ceasefire, which means that peacemaking efforts cannot even begin. 

Iran’s missile attack on Israel, in this context, needs to be put in perspective. Rather than an act of belligerence, it can be seen as a coercive measure to force Israel to abandon its ground operation in Lebanon. President Masoud Pezeshkian has disclosed that Iran exercised utmost restraint so far to stop Israeli atrocities only because of pleas by Western leaders that negotiations leading to a potential ceasefire in Gaza were at a crucial stage. But the West didn’t keep its promise leaving Iran no option but to act. 

Passivity or inaction in the face of Israel’s relentless rampage against the Palestinian population aimed at ethnic cleansing created a distressing situation for Iran as the saviour of oppressed Muslims. Besides, Iran’s entire strategy of deterrence came under challenge too. 

Biden is today like a cat on a hot tin roof. A Middle Eastern war is the last thing he wants. But he has no control over Netanyahu who is already plotting the next move on the escalation ladder. As for Iran, its sense of exasperation over western perfidy and moral bankruptcy is palpable. The US’ credibility has suffered a severe beating all across the West Asian region. 

Enter Putin. On the Middle Eastern chessboard, Russia’s role assumes great importance. Russia-Iran relations touch an unprecedented level today. Russian statements have become highly critical of Israel in recent years. Russia has openly kept contacts with the groups constituting the Axis of Resistance. 

Russian diplomacy is moving with a ‘big picture’ in mind to bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the centre stage of international politics. In the past year, security consultations between Moscow and Tehran notably intensified. Some reports have appeared about Russia transferring advanced military equipment to strengthen Iran’s air defence capabilities. 

Significantly, Russia was the only country that Iran informed in advance about its missile strike against Israel. According to the well-known US podcast Judge Napolitano: Judging Freedom (below),  the Russian naval fleet in the East Mediterranean downed 13 Israeli missiles last week near Lebanon. 

Apparently, a frantic Netanyahu has been trying to reach Putin on phone for the past few days but the call is yet to materialise. On the diplomatic track too, Russia has underscored the highest importance it attaches to the relations with Iran. 

Clearly, the US senses the imperative to engage with Russia. What may be acceptable can be proportional strikes by the two West Asian protagonists, couched in carefully calibrated media campaigns. For example, targeted attacks on individual military installations, which would save face for Israel and avoid a major war — it’s a preferable scenario for Iran too, because it avoids unnecessary risks and preserves the trump cards for a game that promises to be long drawn out. 

In the final analysis, what matters is the US-Israeli intentions. The Financial Times cited Israeli sources to the effect that the game plan is to inflict maximum damage to Iran’s economy so as to trigger the latent ‘protest potential’ of Iranian society. The Israeli hope is apparently that a credible regime change agenda will find resonance in Washington and attract US intervention. 

Anyway, Biden’s move to engage with Putin suggests that a US military intervention is to be ruled out. On the other hand, the historic Russian—Iranian security pact, which is expected to be signed during the forthcoming BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, on October 20-22, gives Iran vastly more strategic depth to negotiate with the West.

Russia’s own interest lies in boosting Iran’s defence capability and pressing ahead with broad-based bilateral cooperation anchored on the economic agenda in the conditions under sanctions while on a parallel track advancing Iran’s integration into Moscow’s Greater Eurasia project. In short, Russia is uniquely placed today as a stakeholder in a stable and predictable Iran at peace with itself and the region. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told reporters in Moscow Thursday, “We are in the closest contact with Iran on the current situation. We share a wonderful experience of cooperation in various fields. I think this is the moment when our relations are particularly important.” By the way, President Pezeshkian received the visiting  Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail Mishustin on Monday, September 30 in Tehran just hours ahead of the launch of the Iranian ballistic missiles against Israel.   

At a meeting of the UN Security Council dedicated to West Asian developments, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzya stated on Wednesday, “As part of its mandate to maintain international peace and security, the UN Security Council must compel Israel to immediately cease hostilities. You and I also should make every effort to create conditions for a political and diplomatic settlement. In this context, we take note of Tehran’s signal that it is not willing to whip up confrontation any further.” 

Interestingly, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov lost no time to pick up the threads of Biden’s remark on a meeting with Putin. He said on Friday, “There have been no talks on this issue and as of today, at this moment, there are no prerequisites for it. However, the president has repeatedly stated that he remained open for all contacts.” 

October 5, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Video, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | 1 Comment