The UK and the US are both sending military assistance to Israel to commit a calculated and deliberate act of genocide, which is already underway.
Over 500 children have been killed in Gaza in the last week and over 2,000 maimed, many with life changing injuries. Nobody can claim they do not know what is already happening or what is about to unfold. The cutting off of food and water to Gaza is a major international crime, which the western proponents of the “rules based order” universally refuse to condemn.
In both the UK and the US there can be no more stark illustration of the lack of any kind of meaningful democracy, than the fact that there is no major political party that opposes the genocide – despite massive public opposition.
The bought and paid for media and political class in the west are extremely nervous, throughout the western world. Now they have come to the final genocide for which zionism has always aimed, they face a good deal of popular resistance.
Throughout Europe there is a massive gap between the zionist unanimity of the politicians and the much greater understanding of the Palestinian situation among the general public. Tellingly the response by the zionist political class has been a wave of outright fascist suppression.
In France, Macron has made all pro-Palestinian demonstrations illegal, but as so often the French people are not standing for that kind of authoritarianism.
In the UK, the police have adopted the cowardly tactic of arresting a couple of individuals, one in Brighton and one in Manchester, for pro-Palestinian demonstration. Under Tony Blair’s notorious draconian “anti-terror” legislation, they could face up to 14 years in prison.
The young man in Manchester was arrested on the precise site of the famous “Peterloo massacre”, which generations of British people were taught at school was a terrible crime in breach of the rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Let the irony of that set in.
You can go out in the streets of the UK with an Israeli flag and yell that you want every Palestinian to be cleansed from Gaza. That is not illegal. If you say the Palestinians have a right to resist their genocide, that is illegal.
That appears to be a genuine analysis of the law in the UK, France and many other western countries.
That is intended to terrify all of us. It will not work.
The European Commission has been ferociously zionist and gung-ho for this Palestinian genocide. It displayed the Israeli flag on its Berlaymont headquarters. It has taken a side in the most ferocious way.
It is therefore deeply sinister that the European Commission is actively working to shut down pro-Palestinian information and comment on social media. The European Commission has written to all major social media organisations and is able to threaten them with massive fines if they do not remove information of which the European Union disapproves.
Following the terrorist attacks by Hamas against 🇮🇱, we have indications of X/Twitter being used to disseminate illegal content & disinformation in the EU.
Urgent letter to @elonmusk on #DSA obligations ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/avMm1LHq54
— Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) October 10, 2023
The notion is plainly nonsense that through the fog of war the European Commission – which is 100% parti pris – is qualified to say what information is true and what information is false, and what comment is legitimate.
Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner in charge of this operation, is a former chief executive of electronic companies – and defence contractors – Atos and Thomson. He has no genuine interest in freedom of speech, and is engaged in a process of silencing dissent for military aims, which is quite simply fascist.
We are witnessing almost all western governments deliberately facilitating massacre, ethnic cleansing and genocide. We are witnessing almost all western governments turning on their own people to crush dissent at that complicity in genocide.
This feels not so much like the week that western democracy died, as the week it was impossible any longer to deny that western democracy died some time ago.
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Note the sinister way of attribution vs non-attribution of the culprit in BBC headlines:
Children among dead after strike hits fleeing convoy on Gaza ‘safe’ route
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-middle-east-67108364
Oh a sudden strike you say, out of nowhere? By whom?
“Oh god, they’re here’: Hamas massacred captured on israeli mothers group-app
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67105618
Oh so now it is ok to attribute the culprit and also adding some emotional spin to it?
What did you expect? They can’t even say who nuked the Japs in 1945. So Israelis are “killed” but Palestinians “die”.
“They can’t even say who nuked the Japs in 1945.”
It was the Russians, wasn’t it?
Was this topic conveniently excluded from your school curriculum?
Who needs school when you have the MSM?
Jack, U.S. President George Bush today signed into law the American Service members Protection Act of 2002, which is intended to intimidate countries that ratify the treaty for the International Criminal Court (ICC). The new law authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the court, which is located in The Hague. This provision, dubbed the “Hague invasion clause,” has caused a strong reaction from U.S. allies around the world, particularly in the Netherlands. https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law
ICC judges can be refused entry to the US and I believe can have their bank accounts confiscated. So much for the ICC which will only prosecute small or medium-sized countries, minus Israel and other friends of the US of course. The hypocrisy is nauseating – how can they keep a straight face?
In order to by-pass the 1949 Charter and other counties veto, the US has invented the ‘Rules based order’.
and that “rules based order” the US uses to commit genocide is precisely why Russia, not wanting to be turned into a giant Gaza strip, chose to break out.
Pretzelattack, your comment helped me to put into words what had been swirling around in my head for a long time. Regarding the existing method of action in international relations, which I categorically do not like:
While the system of international relations implied that in each case international organizations must conduct an investigation and the UN must make its decision.
Now accusations are thrown and immediate “punishment” follows. That is, someone is usurping the functions of the prosecutor and of the executioner. And of the court press secretary, I mean controlled media.
That is, the international community is, in principle, excluded from the process; it is not assigned any other role than that of an observer. In addition, observers with a different opinion are either “gagged” or “removed from the courtroom.”
The law exists somewhere, in abstract form, but does not work here in reality.
Yes Tatyana, Chaiman Mao was unfortunately right when he said…Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun (Chinese: 枪杆子里面出政权) is a phrase which was coined by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. The phrase was originally used by Mao during an emergency meeting of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on 7 August 1927, at the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. The US and Israel have adopted the method and are applying it worldwide.
In other words this idea sounds ‘one can get more with a kind word and a gun, than with just a kind word’ (c) Al Capone
the US and Britain adopted that method long before Mao.
The idea is as old as history, or at least the concept. It certainly predates the invention of guns.
“The law exists somewhere, in abstract form, but does not work here in reality.”
International law only has meaning between those states that agree to abide by it. It is inter-national, not supra-national, i.e. between nations, not above nations. When you have nations that refuse to abide by it, it no longer applies to those nations, even if those nations have the ability to insist that others continue to abide by it. It is pointless to complain that the US, for instance is ignoring international law, because they have long ago given notice that they are not one of the nations that these laws are between. International law still exists, but is no longer universal, if it ever was.
Bayard
I believe UN SC and veto power was designed exactly to prevent any unilateral military action. To prevent wars.
I know the US undermined this structure exactly by using military power against other countries without UN resolution, like in Yugoslavia. Then, I recall the war on Iraq was performed under false pretext. Sure, other commenters may give more examples of US going to war with other countries without UNSC resolution.
The system doesn’t work, because there is no mechanism to punish such behaviour.
“The system doesn’t work, because there is no mechanism to punish such behaviour.”
There is no mechanism because international law was always international, not supranational. As soon as the nations in the UN stopped being united and some started to go their own way, the whole system stopped working. The UNSC only acted as a preventer of wars so long as all its members subscribed to the idea that they were bound by its decisions. Once one nation stopped agreeing to this, the council became just another talking shop, like the League of Nations before it.
So, we are back to dark times? Every country minds their own business, or, may unite with friends and build their own UN with blackjack and… and… women with a low degree of responsibility to society (c) Putin
“So, we are back to dark times?”
I don’t think the dark times have ever gone away. All that is happened is that the illusion of international social progress that was generated after WWII has faded and now we can see the raw machinery of power stripped of its casings and guard rails. You only have to look to see where the UN is headquartered to see that it was always intended to be a tool of US hegemony. If it had been intended to be genuinely international, it would have been in Geneva, or some tiny nation with no ideas about world domination. To have it in one of the imperial powers that form the permanent members of the UNSC is very much like marking your own homework.
I think the concept was to create “international community” that would consist of a vanguard that could be called “concert of democracy” or simply NATO (minus occasional internal opponents), and the rest that, in recognition of their limited mental capabilities, would defer and follow. If helpful, officials from vanguard countries would visit the retards in other countries to patiently explain why their hesitations or objections are simply products of sinister (e.g. Russian) disinformation.
Of course, that raises the question how the consensus within the vanguard is obtained, only some methods are easy to see.
It is not nescessary to intellectualise the concept. It is called might is right and it has been stated clearly by Carl Rove
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Moreover the doctrine is offered to Europe through NATO and to the rest of the world through other military and economic organisations to form ‘coalitions of the willing’ either you are with us or against us. All international organisations and treaties are meaningless in this context.
This is the reality of US hegemony, the US is a rogue state which will not work for all of humanity but for subjugation of all.
The SMO was the spark to start to reverse this but ultimately the only way for the rest of the world to succeed is an economic liberalisation and our only hope is the success of BRICS+ let us hope it works.
I guess in the past, the league of nations/UN seemed like a good idea and a way to progress away from mankind’s barbarity. Then it was corrupted.
BRICS+ is the new kid on the block and seems to offer a way forward out of the madness of USA hegemony. The question is how will they avoid corruption and deal with rogue nations, and can they survive without obvious enemies – do they need the evil USA ?
Without Slavery, Freedom is meaningless !
More on US threats to ICC, Bolton also said that any probe into alleged war crimes committed by U.S. service members and intelligence professionals during the war in Afghanistan would be “an utterly unfounded, unjustifiable investigation.”
“If the court comes after us, Israel or other U.S. allies, we will not sit quietly,” he warned.
The U.S. national security adviser said Washington was prepared to slap financial sanctions and criminal charges on ICC officials if they proceed against any Americans.
“We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system,” Bolton said.
“We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans,” he added.
An ICC prosecutor requested in November 2017 to open an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by the U.S. military in Afghanistan, especially over the abuse of detainees.
Bolton said neither Afghanistan nor any other government party to the ICC’s Rome Statute has requested an investigation. John Bolton is worse than any Mafia leader,
I’d call that contempt of court – except the ICC has never had the courage to stand up for international law anyway. It knows whose rules matter.
(Refers to Harry Law’s comment: October 14, 2023 at 15:36.)
Some terrible headlines from past hours from Al-Jazeera:
Two civilians killed in Israel shelling of Lebanese village: Mayor
Aid flights continue arriving in Egypt, with no where to go
Palestinian teen in West Bank succumbs to wounds
Palestinians rushed to Deir el-Balah hospital following Israeli air strike
UN aid chief says ‘humanity is failing’
To be frank, the best would if this Israel regime ceased to exist – not the people of course but the regime, let the UN move in with a peacekeeping army. The Israelis prove time and again that they are too rabid, too medieval, too supremacist and thus too dangerous to have their own nuclear-weapon–equipped nation.
—
A bit off topic but an important mental tip for all in these horrible times: when feeling mentally clogged, infuriated, angry, at loss, depression/anexiety/stress etc. write your thoughts down on paper or in a text document on the computer. Just let it flow. Write every feeling, thought you have about this issue. It is very therapeutic and calming for the mind.
Some links
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentID=4552&ContentTypeID=1
https://positivepsychology.com/benefits-of-journaling/
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/mental-health-benefits-of-journaling
I cannot believe, though I know it to be true, that the UK is complicit in the monstrous war crimes being committed against Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Yes, really!
The Royal Navy is sending two warships and the Royal Marines are sending a Company of Marines and the Royal Air Force is sending a P8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft to aid the Israeli war effort against the Palestinian captives attempting to escape by sea from what is actually the world’s largest concentration camp.
The British forces will be used as a maritime equivalent of an anvil against which the Israeli military will hammer two million civilians ruthlessly.
As if Britain didn’t already have enough guilt in facilitating the destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people!
One is at loss with words, I guess the same UK, US warships will be side by side with Israel when their navy fire missiles from the sea against Gaza in the coming hours:
Israel’s army says preparing operation by ‘air, sea and land’
Israel’s military has said it is “preparing to expand the attack” in Gaza, hinting at a long-expected land incursion of the enclave.
In a statement, the military said it was planning a wide range of offensive operation, including “coordinated attack from the air, sea and land”.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/10/13/israel-hamas-live-dozens-killed-while-fleeing-to-southern-gaza
Even someone like David Cameron had the courage to speak the truth some years ago:
David Cameron: Israeli blockade has turned Gaza Strip into a ‘prison camp’
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/jul/27/david-cameron-gaza-prison-camp
How did not only Tories but Labour go from that position to today, supporting cutting off water to civilians?
We ought to be fair to the Atlee government, and maybe Ernie Bevin in particular? The UK was in a totally no-win situation and so handed back control of Mandatory Palestine to the very new UN, that being the successor to the League of Nations that awarded mandates to the victors of WWI. Given the level of violence that had been suffered by the Jews of Europe in WWII, and the huge numbers of the same that were now displaced persons eager to emigrate to a new life, it’s difficult to see how the UK could have maintained a regime of detaining illegal entrants in camps on Cyprus, and even former KZ’s after returning them to Europe. Especially given that their incarceration and attempted extermination by the NAZI’s was a very fresh picture in the eyes of the world.
It’s worth remembering that despite Bibi’s claim of a few years ago that ‘We were never Terrorists’, that the history of the time shows that groups such as Irgun Zwai Leumi and the Stern Gang were very active terrorists indeed, even to the extent of assassinating the Swedish Folke Bernadotte, a man who might be considered to richly deserve the moniker of Peacemaker. Then there was the letter bomb campaign initiated here in the UK which led to anti-Jewish race riots after a Post Office worker, and the brother of a Mandate official were killed by the devices. And of course attempts on the life of Ernie Bevin.
Taking the events and world political climate of the time into account, it really is difficult to see what a cash strapped Britain could have done to prevent the escalation of violence that continues to this day.
alright.
But I am pretty sure had it not been Arabs whose land was taken but respectable rich white folks the story would have had an entirely different outcome. In fact the Zionist movement would have looked for a different place to settle with other poor bastards no colonialist power would care for.
One should keep in mind that the Zionist movement of the 19th century was a project by rich white Europeans. Whether Jewish or not was secondary to some extent.
One major cause was the influx of countless poor Jews from the East fleeing suppression and violence (not much different than today´s immigrants). Their arrival upset the nice order of rich central and West European metropoles.
Antisemitism flared up again after Jews had managed the once religious fervour and become part of the European nations, at least to some extent.
Then came the poor Jews who they didn´t much like anyway (poor, religious, uneducated, old-fashioned).
In fact before the 1930s many stated “it didn´t matter that we were Jews. We were Gemans, French, Italians, Austrians.”
Countless war heroes from WWI who were stripped of their medals by the Nazis bear witness of that.
German writer Heinrich Heine e.g. for a considerable time in his life didn´t care about his Jewish identity. This changed only later in his life.
So there is a considerable history of modern life style, thinking and contradiction there to be reckoned with for any discussion of the origins and development of Zionism.
The Ashkenazim Jews who founded Zionism made their claims on the basis of Jewish history, so I doubt very much that they’d have been happy with either Madagascar as postulated by the moustache man, or even the actual Jewish republic that was set up by Uncle Joe.
Immediately after the war Great Britain (as it was then) had a great deal of interest in maintaining good relations with the Arab nations. Remember this was a time when Egypt was still a client State of Britain under King Farouk, and much of the remainder of Arabia was ruled by monarchs placed on their thrones by the British after the Revolt in the Desert, T E Lawrence and all that.
It may have been hoped that a combination of Arab nations would combine against the State of Israel, but in the event the Arabs couldn’t get any solid coalition together, and the Jewish groups ran riot inflicting the Nakba. That’s a theme that has continued until the present, Arab disunity.
Clip from the film Lawrence of Arabia, fine actors, but largely fiction. A good demonstration however.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gMt1PBC5BU
yes, you´re right of course, I have simplified and omitted certain aspects of this complex issue, but I believe that one is often being overlooked.
Know “Awrence” rather well. Still holding up. Even if its a colonialist narrative (Arab chivalry ´n stuff & “you will stay a little people”) . But: they dared to touch the homosexual aspect (which is not important so much but since it was still the 1960s and him being an icon and all that).
p.s. Brit director Ridley Scott a big admirer I believe quoted “Lawrence” in his “Alien” sci-fi franchise installment “Prometheus”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPjmDiJyzSE
The British had their own problems with the indigenous population of Palestine in 1938, even the BBC admit that- see: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63145992. British troops running amok… Also, how was it the Zionists got all the fertile area when it came to partition?
Pete,
The Zionists had a winning hand immediately after WWII inasmuch as most of humanity wants to be sympathetic to groups who have demonstrably suffered great misfortune. That of course with regard to present circumstances is a sword with two edges. The ‘World’ will not allow Israel to turn an eye-for-an-eye, into a hundred eyes for one of theirs.
Israel can only get away with their version of ‘Endloesung’ by doing it over many decades if not centuries.
Is it possible that the British ships will suffer a similar fate to that of the USS Liberty, blame it on Iran and away we go!
The UK flag should be flown upside down. The Zionists have clearly taken over.
The Russian ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, spoke more sense on the matter than anything I’ve heard from our western leaders. In calling for immediate progress towards a two-state solution. What is it coming to when the EU, US and govts are so out of step with their populations – who overwhelmingly want a two-state solution – that Russia speaks for us?
Western leaders are accomplices to occupation and part of something akin to a conspiracy of silence about Israel’s real aim which is obviously continued expansionism. Most know full well Netanyahu et al have no intention of giving up land for peace and they also know Netanyahu is a thoroughly disreputable individual.
Just to add.
Nebenzya called for an immediate ceasefire and then progress on two-states.
Why, oh why can’t western politicians call for the same? By not calling for a ceasefire they’re actually giving a green light to whatever monstrosity Netanyahu has planned. Such calls may not stop Netanyahu, but they’d raise the stakes for him in respect to potential war crimes.
“The UK flag should be flown upside down”.
But experience suggests that hardly anyone would notice.
The Union flag in front of the DoubleTree hotel at Edinburgh airport has been upside down for many weeks.
I’ve pointed this out to the receptionists and reminded them that flying one’s national flag inverted is an internationally recognised distress signal, but it’s still inverted.
Beat me to it, Tom. I don’t get up that early on the Sabbath – or any other day. By the way, in case you haven’t seen it, I’ve replied to your query about UK natural gas supply on the first page of the comments.
Thanks, LA. Appreciated!
The dis-united kingdom’s state propaganda machine deserves this and more.
“Today, Palestine Action sprayed the BBC’s Headquarters with blood red paint, in response to its recent coverage of Palestine, which has been complicit in manufacturing consent for the occupation’s genocide of Palestinians.”
https://www.palestineaction.org/bbc-action/
Is the EU beginning to sense a wake up call? Five days ago they sanctioned the oppressed Palestinians – no more aid; today they are immediately tripling the aid they give to them.
https://nitter.net/RnaudBertrand/status/1713222198545301950#m
Reading online comments, there appears to be a huge backlash aimed at Ursula von der Leyen. There are calls for her to be sacked.
I didn’t think the EU ban on Gaza aid would last long. Indeed there’ve been big demos today in Paris and London, in spite of them being banned, including waving the Palestinian flag. The bans didn’t make the slightest difference. The demos went ahead anyway. And they will get stronger if Israel goes ahead with their ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip.
Well, let’s be real, the idea of money aid is to influence the people getting the aid, not to actually help them. If EU would cut their aid, China or Russia would step in.
“Well, let’s be real, the idea of money aid is to influence the people getting the aid, not to actually help them”
Also monetary aid can only be in the currency of the country giving the aid, which currency can only be spent in the donor country, so, effectively, it’s the government of the donor country drumming up business for the industry of the donor country.
the 4 quadrants of political provenance (via Moon of Alabama):
https://www.moonofalabama.org/17i/chineseview.jpg
I wouldn´t take the image completely serious but in its simplification naturally there is considerable truth.
Like in any good political cartoon.
This Way for the Genocide, Ladies and Gentlemen
by Chris Hedges
https://open.substack.com/pub/chrishedges/p/this-way-for-the-genocide-ladies?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Well there we have it, as we said here all along.
Israel may be on verge of ‘mass ethnic cleansing’ of Palestinians in Gaza, UN expert warns
And she added: “Israel has already carried out mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the fog of war.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-gaza-palestinians-un-invasion-b2429855.html
But who knows, perhaps we can get Keir Stürmer on record saying that Israel even have the right to commit ethnic cleansing?
Or will he call to defund the UN now?
I was at the Glasgow demo today. The speakers spoke passionately. The anger among many in the crowd palpable. Once the ground invasion begins who knows how much that anger will multiply. There were about 5k there. If it gets ugly, and it will, I have no doubt that number will multiply and flag waving and chanting will not be enough to vent the anger. This is going nowhere good. Our leaders are miscalculating with their unwavering support of Israel.
comparing to Germany 5K is a lot.
But naturally Germans will always have a special place in their heart for Israeli colonialism.
In instances like these it turns out that a decolonisation period like in GB or FRA would have taught Germans some dark truth about their country regardless of Holocaust studies.
The colonial history still takes place. The Holocaust is a closed matter. So Germans to find their guilt turn to the past. Believing that they bear no responsibility for the ghastly state of things NOW.
Millions of people were killed and tortured before the Holocaust, at the same time, and after.
But that to understand and put into proper context (without the fear of making themselves culpable once more) is a long shot task.
Article here on von der Leyen’s “unacceptable bias” : https://www.politico.eu/article/von-der-leyen-visit-israel-gaza-hamas-conflict-bias/
Nathalie Loiseau, a senior French MEP who chairs the security and defence committee wrote on X:
“Madame von der Leyen … You are forgetting an important message: Israel must respect international humanitarian law…I don’t understand what the President of the European Commission has to do with the foreign policy of the EU, which she is not in charge of.”
thx
Why I wonder do Israeli officials (like US personnel) almost exclusively and by design have to behave like total idiots?
Every single time.
I have never heard a single one of them possibly criticizing their own government. I mean 99%.
Regardless of what Tel Aviv has been doing or blurting.
If Netanyahu were to say Martians have just landed on his lawn they would clap to that too.
“Jonathan Rosenzweig, the deputy chief of mission at Israel’s mission to the EU, criticized concerns about a common EU position, describing them as “absurd” while “more than 1,300 innocent civilians were butchered, raped, beheaded, burnt and kidnapped.” He added: “You need to recalibrate your moral compass.”
(“beheaded”, I assume he needs to recalibrate his facts to say the least)
AG, have you considered “money”?
“AG, have you considered “money”?”
There is also the threat of losing, not only their jobs, but also what small grip they have on the levers of power and the company of the others that do and the pleasant consciousness of being one of that company.
Yes, to a great extent money and power are freely interchangeable.
sure hierarchy and obedience are powerful as they guarantee money and career.
But I mean in fact all levels of it. Not just diplomats in the Embassy network.
I mean the various cultural centers e.g. in Germany representing Jews given that they are affiliated with the German state.
University scholars working on Jewish studies.
Spokespeople of everything connected with Holocaust memorials and memory which of course around here is considerable.
Any mayor of any town with a Jewish community (which are tiny after all most of them were killed or left Europe).
But likewise in France, Eastern Europe – perhaps some British NGOs are in fact more progressive than in Germany. Here, like there is a lid on it.
Don´t forget we have special laws on antisemitism which are decades old.
The problem is that now you see that the entire legal concept of dividing opinions into good and bad ones is philosophical nonsense.
No way you can seriously justify them if you take for granted some basics of civil rights, universal equality and freedom achieved in the last 200 years – given that the separation of deed and speech is being upheld as in our legal tradition is usually the case.
Which is why antisemitism laws were introduced specifically.
They alter the rules of these otherwise universal and unquestionable liberties.
Eventually you will otherwise have a system where courts will have to decide over every single public politicial statement that is not representing the government´s view.
The ramifications of this entire Israel discourse are huge if you take them seriously on the normative level.
And people feel it (You dont need a frickin PhD for that, actually thats more of an obstacle) and start opposing. Its absolutely elementary and touches the deepest human needs.
In 2018 UN warned that by 2020 Gaza will become unliveable, in part because of sparse water resources, the same resources Israel now have cut.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/uns-warning-that-gaza-will-not-be-a-liveable-place-by-2020-has-been-realised/
Thus when Israel cut the water flow, they knew exactly that it will hurt people living there. This is not only warcrimes, it is pathologically calculating. It is sadistically evil.
On the water situation in Gaza tonight:
Philippe Lazzarini, Unrwa’s commissioner general, said that the enclave was running out of water due to a lack of fuel to run its water system.
“It has become a matter of life and death. It is a must; fuel needs to be delivered now into Gaza to make water available for 2 million people,” Lazzarini said.
“Fuel is the only way for people to have safe drinking water. If not, people will start dying of severe dehydration, among them young children, the elderly and women. Water is now the last remaining lifeline. I appeal for the siege on humanitarian assistance to be lifted now.”
And Starmer and Sunak are in a competition to see who can grovel the most before self-appointed British Jewish community leaders. Has there ever been a pair of party leaders more unsuited to high office than these two shallow rogues? And where the fcuk is Ed Davey, hiding behind the sofa?
How do you define terrorism?
In the United States of America, terrorism is defined in Title 22 Chapter 38, of the U.S. Code as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents”.
Just watched a news report and Israel are firing howitzer M107 high explosive shells on the off chance of hitting some unknown target anything up to 18.5 km away. The only difference between Hamas and the IDF is the fact the IDF get to hide behind their uniforms and expensive US-provided military hardware. There’s no accuracy or care involved. No other civilised country would fire like that into a densely populated area, hiding behind the stated aim of eradicating terrorists. It can only be described as indiscriminate murder, a war crime, and yes by any definition, terrorism.
Exactly! All talk about Palestinians committing terrorism, if terrorism is the problem, then certainly Israel have a worse record than the palestinians.
Norman Finkelstein spoke about this on “Democracy Now” some years ago:
Norman Finkelstein vs Josh Block of AIPAC 2/2: https://youtu.be/NgDGJDZQ50w?t=433
Transcript here: https://www.democracynow.org/2006/6/29/aipac_v_norman_finkelstein_a_debate
Some of the talk around the upcoming incursion from Israeli politicians is bloodcurdling.
Thick smoke could complicate any Israeli ground offensive, resulting in lots of misunderstandings or so-called friendly fire incidents. I’d be surprised if Hamas haven’t planned for this very scenario and have all sorts of unpleasant surprises waiting.
There are some 35,000 + Hamas fighters in Gaza, according to reports. Israel may lose thousands of soldiers going door to door, attempting to eliminate them all. I don’t see how Israel emerges from this potentially messy intervention with the moral high ground, or strengthened, either at home or internationally. And that’s without some unpredictable development, such as Hezbollah opening up a new front from the north. The last ground incursion there ended painfully for Israel.
The big trick. Danny Ayalon revealing plans for the displaced.
n.b. at the 16:25 mark.
https://youtu.be/UgoUq69NZ30?t=993
hope the link ok.
Aha! The only important word in that definition is “subnational”. Demonstrating that the people who wrote the definition are well aware that national governments are, to all intents and purposes, the only serious terrorist organisations in the world.
Of course there are many “subnational” groups that use violence and aim at spreading terror – but they kill less than 1% of the number who are killed, maimed, bereaved and made homeless by governments.
Is there an abused becoming the abuser thing going on? No psychologist.
They use some warped justification that asserts the disproportionate nature of the response is to deter others in the region. And the UK newspapers & politicians are cheering this one-sided bludgeoning on to its horrific conclusion:
IDF to strike from air, land and sea. – Independent
Unleashing a multi-billion, high tech war machine against some of the poorest people on the planet who are armed only with makeshift weapons, have no air defences and nowhere safe to shelter. Hope the Israelis and their allies feel really proud of themselves.
I think it’s more a matter of people, who want to get their way and don’t care what happens to others, copying the methods that they think worked best in the past.
There is, Chic McGregor, plus the fact that the fraudulent crook in charge was running from justice and regularly castigated for it by voters; they demand his resignation and ask for him to be prosecuted.
The flight forward into all-out war will not only wreck its economy, send oil prices sky high due to the international fragility in the ME, but it will also put an end to citizens’ security and the lie that only a strong Israel can look after its people.
It is a fact that this almighty military is being used to attack and destroy those who lived and looked after Palestine, their culture and their history.
They steal land and have no declared borders, a clear definition of a rogue unhinged state that is doing to Palestinians what once was done to them.
That the EU is rotten at the top was to be expected, supporting Ukraine’s right sector and Asov fascists, whilst pulling their tails in over NS2 terrorism on German territory, stumm, dumm and acquiescing.
Whilst morally bankrupt western leaders fall over themselves to support Israel’s proposed war crimes and crimes against humanity and send or promise them weapons to do so, Russia and China call for restraint, mediation and intervention by the UN.
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has called for the UN to intervene and for a just resolution of the historical causes of the current conflagration:
“There is no shortage of injustices in the world, but the injustice to Palestine has dragged on for over half a century. The sufferings that plagued generations must not continue. The answer to the question is the two-state solution and an independent State of Palestine. This is how Palestine and Israel could coexist in peace and how the Arabs and Jews could live in harmony. Only when the two-state solution is fully implemented can the Middle East truly enjoy peace and Israel enjoy lasting security. ”
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/wjb_663304/wjbz_663308/activities_663312/202310/t20231014_11160987.html
Meanwhile Putin has compared Israel’s siege of Gaza to the ‘siege of Leningrad:
“Putin said Israel had been subjected to “an attack unprecedented in its cruelty” by Hamas militants, but was responding with cruel methods of its own.
He said there had been calls even in the United States for a blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on a par with “the siege of Leningrad during World War Two”.
“In my view it is unacceptable,” Putin told reporters at a summit in Kyrgyzstan. “More than 2 million people live there. Far from all of them support Hamas by the way, far from all. But all of them have to suffer, including women and children. Of course it’s hard for anyone to agree with this.””
https://www.reuters.com/world/putin-israeli-ground-operation-gaza-will-result-civilian-losses-2023-10-13/
And Russia’s Representative to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, has submitted to it a draft resolution for a ceasefire:
https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-news-hamas-war-10-13-23/h_e043af4eee00bba9dd2c9fa3d836e18f
eye witness account from Gaza in “The Nation”
by Ahmed Abu Artema, who is a Gaza-based writer and was one of the organizers of the Great March of Return.
14/10/23
“The situation gets darker and bleaker by the hour. I may not be able to send any more updates; with a massive ground invasion imminent, our connection to the outside world may be completely severed.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/gaza-is-dying-dispatch-bombing/
“Israel cut off water, food supplies, and electricity…
As of this writing, Israel has killed nearly 2,300 Palestinians since Saturday, including at least 580 children and 351 women. But we have nowhere to run or hide…
When I first saw the videos of the wall being breached last Saturday, I thought I must be dreaming.
I’ve fantasized for years about breaking free of the cage that Israel has put us in and, once on the other side, going to my native village of Ramle, from which my grandparents were violently forced out in 1948 during Israel’s establishment and made refugees in the southern Gaza Strip. In fact, those fantasies of returning to my homeland are what fueled my participation in organizing the Great March of Return in 2018.”
“When asked by journalists if I justify Hamas’s killing of civilians once they breached the wall, my reaction is twofold.
First, no, I don’t justify killing civilians and noncombatants.
But then I wonder why, if I am asked to account for the violence perpetrated by Hamas, Israelis are not routinely asked to account for how their military responded to the Great March of Return.”
“despite the fact that this was the largest unarmed mass popular movement that we had seen in Palestine in my generation, Israel’s snipers killed over 200 of us, including 46 children, gravely wounding many thousands more.
One Israeli soldier bragged to the media about how many people he had shot in the knee.”
Tell this Keir Starmer and friends.
career zionist bootlicker Mehdi Hasan suspended by MSNBC for mentioning the massacre of Gazans.
Hasan repeatedly smeared Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as antisemitic. two weeks ago he did a segment condemning twitter for not removing everything the ADL deems antisemitic. (ie anything mildly critical of apartheid Israel).
Two other MSNBC anchors of Islamic background have also been suspended, zoot. It looks like Rachel Madcow’s employers’ mask is not so much slipping, as being torn off, thrown in the gutter and washed down a storm drain:
https://www.tbsnews.net/hamas-israel-war/msnbc-suspends-three-muslim-anchors-amid-hamas-israel-conflict-719002
wow, yeah he has been a bootlicker par excellence for his whole career. ironic.
I agree with Ian Welsh, https://www.ianwelsh.net/i-try-to-avoid-the-word-genocide/ – it is too early to talk of genocide, so far it is ethnic cleansing. Genocide begins when they get after all Palestinians.
Of course not, genocide it is:
Genocide in the dictionary:
the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
—
More concrete:
1 A mental element: the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”; and
2 A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively: i.e causing death or seriously and/or huge harm to the ethnic group itself.
Read more here:
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
Nothing is going to get in the way of Israel’s Final Solution.
And in this Israel is supported lock stock and barrel by the US -UK axis. It is as simple as that. And they are empowered to make it happen, and it will, and is happening. Israel is going to eradicate itself of Palestinians.
But if it can happen over there, no one should be under any illusion that it couldn’t happen here…….1840s Ireland, million dead, two million displaced overseas, and against a back cloth where the UK said there was nothing it could do whilst it exported corn and other food crops from Ireland to England.
West have gone completely mad.
We have warcrimes galore – obvious to anyone, an occupied people now in dire humanitarian crisis now endure ethnic cleansing and genocide and we have the biggest western forces lining up their warships around the perpetrator, protecting him, not allowing any mllitary/humanitarian intervention or even help to stop the killing on top of that we had US travelling around the arab world making sure no diplomatic efforts are triggered to stop the carnage!
We heard for almost 2 years now that Ukraine have the right to get any help from the outside they need, when palestinians call for such help, it is forbidden to help!? It is even forbidden to show support as a civilian in the western world? Compare that with the Ukraine-flag waving and Slava Ukraini!-condoleances??
In principle, Hezbhollah, Iran, Syria have all the legal right to use force or any other measure to help the palestinians, but their help is framed as a threat now?! This is beyond Orwell.
And nations like Russia (like BRICS, African union, Arab states) is complicit too, doing nothing even on the diplomatic front, this could be a great chance to get back to what west have done to Russia past years but as usual Russia is way to slow to understand that.
Just months ago Hamas reps. visited Moscow, to no avail today obviously:
Hamas sent high-level delegation to Moscow at Russia’s invitation
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230316-hamas-sent-high-level-delegation-to-moscow-at-russias-invitation/
“This is beyond Orwell”.
I agree so much that I cannot resist adding this cartoon (with apologies, if due, to the moderators).
https://dailysceptic.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/ORWELLSURPRISE300-1024×976.jpg
Just change the book title to “2023”.
Criminalising dissent even to genocide gives fluorescent lie to all those claims that their support for Ukraine was based on freedom and democracy.
The rest of the world saw that as obvious bullshit from the start. Now the penny will begin to drop for large sections of their own populations. They are the worst of the worst and don’t seem to care anymore how obvious it is.
From my friend, Issac Saul, a voice of reason and humanity.
“ People ask me all the time if I am “pro-Israel” because I am a Jew who has lived in Israel, and my answer is that being “pro-Israel” or being “pro-Palestine” or being a “Zionist” does not properly capture the nuance of thought most people do or should have about this issue. It certainly doesn’t capture mine.
I have a lot to say. I’ve spent the last 72 hours writing, texting, and talking to Israelis, Jews, Muslims, and Palestinians. Much of my reaction is going to piss off people on “both sides,” but I am exhausted and hurting and I do not think there is any way to discuss this situation without being radically honest about my views. So I’m going to try to say what I believe to be true the best I can.
Let me start with this: It could have been me.
That’s a hard thought to shake when watching the videos out of Israel — the concert goers fleeing across an empty expanse, the hostages being paraded through the streets, the people shot in the head at bus stops or in their cars. I went to those parties in the desert, I rubbed shoulders with Israelis and Arabs and Jews and Muslims, I could have easily accepted an invitation to some concert near Sderot and gone without a care, only to be indiscriminately slaughtered. Or, perhaps worse, taken hostage and tortured.
I don’t believe Hamas is killing Israelis to liberate themselves, nor do I believe they are doing it to make peace. They’re doing this because they represent the devil on the shoulder of every oppressed Palestinian who has lost someone in this conflict. They’re doing it because they want vengeance. They are evening the score, and acting on the worst of our human impulses, to respond to blood with blood — an inclination that is easy to give in to after what their people have endured. It should not be hard to understand their logic — it is only hard to accept that humans are capable of being driven to this. Not defending Hamas is a very low bar to clear. Please clear it.
It’s not possible to recap the entire 5,000 year history of people fighting over this strip of land in one newsletter. There are plenty of easily accessible places you can learn about it if you want to (and, by the way, many of you should — far too many people speak on this issue with an obscene amount of ignorance, loads of arrogance, and a narrow historical lens focused on the last few decades). But I’ll briefly highlight a few things that are important to me.
In my opinion, the Jewish people have a legitimate historical claim to the land of Israel. Jews had already been expelled and returned and expelled again a half dozen times before the rise of the Muslim and Arab rule of the Ottoman Empire. Of course it’s messy because we Jews and Arabs and Muslims are all cousins and descendents of the same Canaanites. But Arabs won the land centuries ago the same way Israel and Jews won it in the 20th century: Through conflict and war. The British defeated the Ottoman Empire and then came the Balfour Declaration, which amounted to the British granting the area to the Jewish people, a promise they’d later try to renege on — all before the wars that have defined the region since 1948.
That historical moment in the late 1940s was unique. After World War II, with many Arab and Muslim states already in existence, and after six million Jews were slaughtered, the global community felt it was important to grant the Jewish people a homeland. In a more logical or just world that homeland would have been in Europe as a kind of reparation for what the Nazis and others before them had done to the Jews, or perhaps in the Americas — like Alaska — or somewhere else. But the Jews wanted Israel, the British had taken to the Zionist movement, the British had conquered the Ottoman Empire which handed them control of the land, and America and Europe didn’t want the Jews. As a result, we got Israel.
The Arab states had already rejected a partitioned Israel repeatedly before World War II and rejected it again after the Holocaust and the end of the war. They did not want to give up even a little bit of their land to a bunch of Jewish interlopers who were granted it all of a sudden by British interlopers who had arrived a hundred years prior. Who could blame them? It had been centuries since Jews lived there in large numbers, and now they wanted to return in waves as secularized Europeans. Many of us would probably react the same way. So, just as humans have done forever, they fought. The many existing Arab states turned against the burgeoning new Jewish state. One side won and one side lost. This is the brutal and broken and violent world we live in, but it is what created the global world order we have now.
Are Israelis and British people “colonizers” because of this 20th century history? Sure. But that view flattens thousands of years of history and conflict, and the context of World War I and World War II. I don’t view Israelis and Brits as colonizers any more than the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Romans or the Mongols or the Egyptians or the Ottomans who all battled over the same strip of land from as early as 800 years before Jesus’s time until now. The Jews who founded Israel just happened to have won the last big battle for it.
You can’t speak about this issue in a vacuum. You can’t pretend that it wasn’t just 60 years ago when Israel was surrounded on all sides by Arab states who wanted to wipe them off the face of the planet. Despite the balance of power shifting this century, that threat is still a reality. And you can’t talk about that without remembering the only reason the Jews were in Israel in the first place was that they’d spent the previous centuries fleeing a bunch of Europeans who also wanted to wipe them off the face of the planet. And then Hitler showed up.
American partisans have a narrow view of this history, and an Americentric lens that is infuriating to witness. As Lee Fang perfectly put it, “Hamas would absolutely execute the ACAB lefties cheering on horrific violence against Israelis if they lived in Gaza & U.S. right-wingers blindly cheering on Israeli subjugation of Palestinians would rebel twice as violently if Americans were subjected to similar occupation.”
And yet, many Americans only view modern Israel as the “powerful” one in this dynamic. Which is true — they obviously are. It isn’t a fair fight and it hasn’t been for decades because Israel’s government is rich and resourceful, has the backing of the United States and most of Europe, and has an incredibly powerful military. At the same time, Israeli leadership has made technological and military advancements that have further tipped those scales — all while the Israeli government has helped create a resource-thin open air prison of two million Arabs in Gaza.
Conversely, Palestinians are devoid of any real unified leadership, and the Arab world is now divided on the issue of Palestine. Israel is unwilling to give the people in Gaza and the West Bank more than an inch of freedom to live. These are largely the refugees and descendents of the refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars that Israel won. And you can’t keep two million people in the condition that those in the Gaza strip live in and not expect events like this.
I’m sorry to say that while the blood on the ground is fresh. The Israelis who were killed in this attack largely have nothing to do with those conditions other than being born at a time when Israel and Jews have the upper hand in this conflict. Some of the victims weren’t even Israeli — they were just tourists. This is why we describe them as “innocent” and why Hamas has only reaffirmed that they are a brutal terror organization with this attack — an organization that I hope is quickly toppled, for the sake of both the Palestinian people and the Israelis. But as someone with a deep love for Israel, with friends in danger and people I know still missing, it breaks my heart to say it but I’m saying it again because it remains perhaps the most salient point of context in a tangled mess full of centuries of context:
You cannot keep two million people living in the conditions people in Gaza are living in and expect peace.
You can’t. And you shouldn’t. Their environment is antithetical to the human condition. Violent rebellion is guaranteed. Guaranteed. As sure as the sun rising.
And the cycle of violence seems locked in to self-perpetuate, because both sides see a score to settle:
1) Israel has already responded with a vengeance, and they will continue to. Their desire for violence is not unlike Hamas’s — it’s just as much about blood for blood as any legitimate security measure. Israel will “have every right to respond with force.” Toppling Hamas — a group, by the way, Israel erred in supporting — will now be the objective, and civilian death will be seen as necessary collateral damage. But Israel will also do a bunch of things they don’t have a right to. They will flatten apartment buildings and kill civilians and children and many in the global community will probably cheer them on while they do it. They have already stopped the flow of water, electricity, and food to two million people, and killed dozens of civilians in their retaliatory bombings. We should never accept this, never lose sight that this horror is being inflicted on human beings. As the group B’Tselem said, “There is no justification for such crimes, whether they are committed as part of a struggle for freedom from oppression or cited as part of a war against terror.” I mourn for the innocents of Palestine just as I do for the innocents in Israel. As of late, many, many more have died on their side than Israel’s. And many more Palestinians are likely to die in this spate of violence, too.
Unfortunately, most people in the West only pay attention to this story when Hamas or a Palestinian in Gaza or the West Bank commits an act of violence. Palestinian citizens die regularly at the hands of the Israeli military and their plight goes largely unnoticed until they respond with violence of their own. Israel had already killed an estimated 250 Palestinians, including 47 children, this year alone. And that is just in the West Bank.
2) Every single time Israel kills someone in the name of self-defense they create a handful of new radicalized extremists who will feel justified in wanting to take an Israeli life in retribution sometime in the future. Half of Gaza’s two million people are under the age of 19 — they know little besides Hamas rule (since 2006), Israeli occupation, blockades, and rockets falling from the sky. The suffering of these innocent children born into this reality is incomprehensible to me. They will suffer more now because of Hamas’s actions and Israel’s response, all through no fault of their own.
There is no way out of this pattern until one side exercises restraint or leaders on both sides find a new solution. Israelis will tell you that if Palestinians put their guns down then the war would end, but if Israel put their guns down they’d be wiped off the planet. I don’t have a crystal ball and can’t tell you what is true. But what I am certain of is that every time Israel kills more innocents they engender more rage and hatred and recruit more Palestinians and Arabs to the cause against them. There is no disputing this.
So, why did this happen now?
I’m not sure how to answer that question except to say it was bound to happen eventually. It was a massive policy and intelligence failure and Netanyahu should pay the price politically — he is a failed leader. Iran probably helped organize the attack and the money freed up by the Biden administration’s prisoner swap probably didn’t help the situation, either. Israel’s increasingly extremist government and settlers provoking Palestinians certainly didn’t help. Nor has going to the Al-Aqsa mosque and desecrating it. Nor do blockades and bombings and indiscriminate subjugation of a whole people. Nor does refusing to talk to non-terrorist leaders in Palestine. Nor does illegally continuing to expand and steal what is left of Palestinian land, as many Jews and Israelis have been doing in the 21st century despite cries from the global community to stop. A violent response was predictable — in fact, plenty of people did predict it.
Israel is forever stuffing these people into tinier and tinier boxes with fewer and fewer resources. But if you want to blame Israeli leaders for continuing to expand and settle land that does not belong to them (as I do), then you should also spare some blame for Palestinian leaders for repeatedly not accepting a partitioned Israel during the 20th century that could have led to peace (as I do).
Please also remember this: Hamas is still an extremist group. The Palestinian people do not have a government or leaders who legitimately represent their interests, and it sure as hell isn’t Hamas. Will some Palestinians cheer and clap at the dead, or spit on them as they are paraded through Gaza? Yes they will. And they have. Many will also mourn because they loathe Hamas and know this will only make things worse. This is no different than how some Americans cheer at the dead in every single war we’ve ever fought. It’s no different than the Israelis who set up lawn chairs to watch their government bomb Palestine and cheer them on, too. This doesn’t mean Palestinians or Israelis or Americans are evil — it means some of them are giving in to their violent impulses, and their zealous feelings of righteous vengeance.
Solutions, you ask? I can’t say I have any. If you came here for that, I’m sorry. The two-state solution looks dead to me. A three-state solution makes some sense but feels out of the view of all the people who matter and could make it happen. I wish a one-state solution felt realistic — a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate, is a version of Israel that I would adore. But it seems less and less realistic with every new act of violence.
Am I pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? I have no idea.
I’m pro-not-killing-civilians.
I’m pro-not-trapping-millions-of-people-in-open-air-prisons.
I’m pro-not-shooting-grandmas-in-the-back-of-the-head.
I’m pro-not-flattening-apartment-complexes.
I’m pro-not-raping-women-and-taking-hostages.
I’m pro-not-unjustly-imprisoning-people-without-due-process.
I’m pro-freedom and pro-peace and pro- all the things we never see in this conflict anymore.
Whatever this is, I want none of it.”
Full article here: https://www.readtangle.com/israel-attacks-hamas-palestine-war/
A voice in the wind that elides the issue in this article. Washington and Europe are sanctioning the mass starvation and bombing of one of the most vulnerable communities on earth. US and European politicians all know Netanyahu and his fascist cabinet are explicitly genocidal yet are facilitating him both materially and with a blanket MSM propaganda blitz. What I wonder is your friend’s attitude as a American to the Democratic party, an organisation that has supported wholehearedly the dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians for 75 years and today denies apartheid and enables their genocide?
“The two-state solution looks dead to me”.
That isn’t really a decisive political argument. As Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say, “[W]hen you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.
If everything else is literally impossible, then two-state it must be. Although in human affairs it’s rarely possible to say that anything is entirely impossible.
Just as long as what is really meant isn’t, “Well, this looks difficult and troublesome, and it would annoy our pals, and might be against our interests… so let’s not bother”.
Re: ‘Israel has already responded with a vengeance, and they will continue to.’
I don’t want anyone to think I make a habit of this but, as it’s the Sabbath in Christendom, I’ve been dipping into the Old Testament Pentateuch – or the ‘Torah’ as it’s known in Hebrew – and recalled what the Lord, the God of Moses, thinks about revenge. According to Deuteronomy 32:35, He thinks this:
‘To Me belongeth vengeance and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time’*
Something for some of our more English irony-deficient Jewish friends to ponder perhaps?
* (Old) King James Version obvs
Also from the Old Testament, but possibly relevant to Israel today:
“The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”.
Shibboleth
“It’s not possible to recap the entire 5,000 year history of people fighting over this strip of land in one newsletter.”
“Are Israelis and British people “colonizers” because of this 20th century history?”
As the writer quite rightly says it is impossible to make up all the arguments for either side in one newsletter but it is also important not to make sweeping ahistorical statements and pretend that they are facts. There has not been 5,000 years history of Arab Jewish fights and in fact the Arabs and other indigenous peoples in that part of the world have all been equal victims to many invaders and colonizers and last of these were the the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire. The friction between the ‘Arabs’ and ‘Jews’ only started in the twentieth century and developed because of the rise of a Zionist movement to which many Jews were opposed. Most of the persecution of Jews was done by the same Europeans who are now cheerleading the Zionist state. In many Arab contrast there was no ‘anti-Semitism’ until after 1948 and 1956.
The essence of what the author bases most of his argument on is that the Jews are a single ‘nation’ or people, the same argument that the Zionists make to then pretend that they speak for all Jews. In turn it has now become politically difficult to attack Zionism and its resultant colonialism as such attacks are equated with anti-Semitism. We know that this sweeping statement does not represent realities because Jews are not genetically homogenous, nor for that matter are Arabs and many other self-identifying groups within nations.
But even if we accept this claim then we have also to look at the implication of what it means to grant these ‘people’ exclusive rights to a homeland which is already occupied. The author seems to imply that the simple answer is to accept the facts on the ground, that these colonizers have the rights because de-facto they are now the winners. It therefore follows that they have the right to expropriate the recent population living in Palestine as they have already been living there through conquest even though this conquest was quite a long time ago. This is the same logic that Netanyahu and all the extremists now ruling in Israel adopt.
The Listening Post also makes some good points about media coverage and dissenting/consenting positions, providing ‘the crucial context’ in a sober reflection:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-post/2023/10/14/the-crucial-context-of-israels-war-on-gaza
Israel have already killed more chlldren than Russia in Ukraine:
According to Euro-Med Monitor documentation, at least 2,370 Palestinians have been killed, including 721 children and 390 women.
https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israel-kills-14-palestinians-every-hour-its-brutal-attack-gaza-israel-dropped-equivalent-quarter-nuclear-bomb-enar
500 children killed during Russian invasion of Ukraine
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/08/13/7415366/
But no condemnation of Israel by the west.
The dehumanization is total, the first step for the execution of a genocide.
Why are media call this a war? There is no war. There are no rockets going from Gaza, It is a one-sided bombardment, a grandscale massacre by Israel.
It is of course easy to sit here and claim this but the palestinians living inside of Israel should rise up and initiate huge protestst movement – an intifada – to trigger peace efforts moving toward a two state solution, Israel should not get away with this Nakba 2.0 which is now very likely unfortunately.
Berlin, new protest attempt this time with 50 (!) people, stopped by police after 30 min.
media mostly: eye witness stories or relatives of victims of Hamas attacks / the evil guy who planned the Hamas attacks / why Israel attempts to make peace with its Arab neighbours ignoring Palestinians has failed / attack or smearing of Jews in Germany as part of a dangerous ideology / if criticism of Israels bombing Gaza its always de-personalized. As if there is no question about this, its “unfortunate”, yes a human rights issue, but the bottom-line even there is evident
Welcome to our world
p.s. same with French media I guess: Bernard Henri-Levy the clown of clowns with a guest article for German paper: first sentence “I am writing to you from Israel”.
Yeah right.
Only thing missing “This is an ugly planet, this is a bug planet” (from the movie war satire “Starship Troopers”, 1998)
These restrictions achieve precisely the opposite result to that intended by increasing hatred. Protest is an important democratic release valve.
I’ve always thought the same about heavy restrictions on free speech. The views don’t change, merely the ability to express them openly and freely is stymied. Eventually a consensus will develop that the rules are oppressive rather than conducive to peaceful coexistence. And that bottled up anger will express itself in acts of violence against the oppressor.
AG You see a bug hole, YOU NUKE IT.
Until surrounding countries go nuclear and either choose to invade or nuke you.
“Starship Troopers” don’t care about the damage Goose, they live only to kill “Bugs” – a Death Cult thinly disguised as a military organisation, their apologists say they fight an “alien species”
“This is for all you new people: I only have one rule. Everyone fights. No one quits. You don’t do your job, I’ll shoot you. Do you get me?”
Lieutenant Rasczak,:Starship Troopers (1997)
Aptly the Rasczak character is played by the actor called Ironside.
It was1 997 as you say. However it came to our movie theatres a year later.
Quote by Michael Ironside:
“[on being typecast as a villain] I use the analogy that if you hit an old lady on screen with a shovel and kill her and somebody makes money from that moment, then they really don’t want you to step out from that parameter. They don’t want you to do anything but hit more old ladies with shovels and if that’s the trunk that I have to build my tree from, that’s fine.”
In his previous post, Mr Murray told us Hamas’s genocidal acts are excusable and justifiable; he now tells us Israel’s are neither. Genocide is ok as long as Jews stay on the receiving end. That someone as sophisticated as Mr Murray could adopt such a view tells us something about the darkness in which the subliminal hatred of Jews flows, and the reason there are no hands in which they could leave their fate but their own.
Whilst regretable, killing several hundred Israelis is not genocide by any stretch of perverse thinking, casualties of war is a more accurate definition.
Some may believe that ‘even 1 million Arabs “are not worth a Jewish fingernail.”[1] ‘, however, the UN definition of genocide rather closely matches Israels actions !
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-28-mn-28250-story.html
As one expected, media reports now have it that when Hamas broke through their intent was to take hostages and raise awareness of the situation they are living in, but in the breakthrough there were alot of other civilian palestinians that tagged along, it was these that commited civilian attacks, not so much Hamas.
Every real but also alleged crimes commited by palestinians past days are wholly filtrated by Israel before they reach the western media.
“We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”
K Marx
IMO. We need to be careful of media reports on these events, as we are well aware most media outlets are infiltrated by the zioninsts and their apologists. Blaming palestinian civilians enables the zionists to portray all Palestinians as terrorists and thus justify, in their eyes, their genocide.
plus ça change?
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=the+eastern+world+it+is+exploding#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:2040c5d8,vid:Hdr93x2gqg0,st:0
I fill in with two songs too:
Pro-palestinian american/irish artist Everlast:
Everlast – Stone In My Hand
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn5YB0-fMlI
And canadian artist Bruce Cockburn
Bruce Cockburn – If I Had A Rocket Launcher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9HFjErMMlA
“Hamas wants to turn this conflict into a larger Arab-Israeli war or even one between the Muslim world and the rest of the world,” says British Foreign Secretary Cleverly.
Don’t know what factual evidence he has for holding that opinion. But were it the case is it any different from Zelensky’s obvious desire to bring Nato into a direct confrontation with Russia? I ‘m sure the Palestinians would prefer a ceasefire and a two-state solution over the prospect of a wider war. Slippery, corrupt British ministers and biased officials who demonise them, and act as apologists for occupation, aren’t helpful either.
Cleverly holds that opinion because that is what his paymasters demand – and he’s not clever or honest enough to hold any other opinion.
No nominative determinism there, then.
Blitzkrieg seems to be straight out of the Nazi playbook for the softening up of the population of Gaza prior to a ground war. But wouldn’t there be a more humane way than the denial of water and other of life’s necessities to exterminate an undesired ethnic minority from Israel’s midst – the building of concentration camps perhaps?
Chuck Schumer : While in Tel Aviv today, our delegation was rushed to a shelter to wait out rockets sent by Hamas.
Strange how every western delegation arriving in Tel Aviv has to do the same:
European Union’s (EU) President Ursula von der Leyen, who is in Tel Aviv, entered a protected shelter on Friday as air-raid sirens sounded.
Foreign Secretary James Cleverly runs for cover when air raid sirens sound.
Now the same for the US delegation.
Either Hamas has a near inexhaustible supply of Gaza workshop made med-long range rockets or the Israelis are playing games with western politicians.
Hardly the Blitz spirit is it ? More the cowardly dog running with its tail between its legs – another example of the spineless curs who infest our governments.
Hamas at least have the decency to wait until these delegations have landed safely. /S 😉
Goose
It is the same fakery Ukraine used!
German president accused of staging Ukraine bomb shelter incident
Frank-Walter Steinmeier may have been used as a propaganda film actor, it’s been alleged
https://swentr.site/news/565664-german-president-bunker-staged/
Or the even more obviously propaganda timed air-siren that just started exactly when Biden and Zelensky took their walk outside.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wgfJ-tQrU
Shades of Hilary Clinton.
American political personalities do seem to relish the actual opportunity to ‘Rush’ to shelter whilst visiting conflict areas. Trouble is that 99% of the claims are fiction. Remember the false claims of Madame Clinton of landing under fire whilst visiting the Former Yugoslavia, and the other of Schumer’s stripe that claimed to have been under fire in Da Nang several years after the Vietnam conflict had ended. Clearly its a common ‘Trope’ amongst US lawgivers.
As for No So Cleverly, his being a half colonel in the reserve of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, should have made him well aware that the chances of actually being near the impact of Hamas rocketry was on a par with being struck by lightning ? No excuse for him scurrying to cover.