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Gideon Levy, even though I do not agree with everything he says, seems to be along with his collegue at Haaretz, Amira Hass, the only israelis that have not totally lost their mind:
Interview with veteran iraeli journalist Gideon Levy: Scenes of war shown in foreign media ‘not shown’ in Israel | Israel-Hamas war
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t_Knk7FWT8
Levy seems to be unknown though to the fact that the “scenes of war” from Gaza are not shown in western media either.
Israeli evilness seems to have no bottom, they once again, play by the rules Hitler used against jews!
Israel considers plan to resettle Palestinians in Africa – reports
“Congo will be willing to take in migrants, and we’re in talks with others,” the news website said, quoting the unnamed official. Last Monday, Netanyahu told a meeting of his Likud party that he is progressing with plans for the migration of Gazans but that “our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans.”
https://swentr.site/africa/590090-israeli-congo-gaza-resettle/
The Madagascar Plan was a plan proposed by the Nazi German government to forcibly relocate the Jewish population of Europe to the island of Madagascar. Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the German Foreign Office, proposed the idea in June 1940, shortly before the Fall of France. The proposal called for the handing over of control of Madagascar, then a French colony, to Germany as part of the eventual peace terms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan
Norman Finkelstein respond to this very argument:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I8Ht4fAKB8“Family of Key Case in New York Times October 7 Sexual Violence Report Renounces Story, Says Reporters Manipulated Them”
January 4, 2024A New York Times story claiming a pattern of gender-based violence on October 7 hinged on the story of Gal Abdush. But the Abdush family says there is no proof she was raped, and that Times reporters interviewed them under false pretenses.
“Genocide in Gaza”
John J. Mearsheimer
04.01.2024https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/genocide-in-gaza
“I am writing to flag a truly important document that should be widely circulated and read carefully by anyone interested in the ongoing Gaza War.
Specifically, I am referring to the 84-page “application” that South Africa filed with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 29 December 2023, accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.1 It maintains that Israel’s actions since the war began on 7 October 2023 “are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic … group in the Gaza Strip.” (1) That charge fits clearly under the definition of genocide in the Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory.”
Did US really lose the iraq war (to Iran)? I am posing the question after Iraq did not expel american diplomats, US soldiers/ closing down US military bases on iraqi soil even after US strike resistance leader the other day:
Two days after top Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri was assassinated in Beirut, the US military killed Mushtaq Taleb al-Saidi, known as Abu Taqwa, deputy head of operations in the paramilitary Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF).
https://www.instagram.com/middleeasteye/p/C1svruFKNq0/
Same with Lebanon that Israel attacked the other day, seems to be equally politically corrupt. Why are they not kicking americans out? Instead the americans have been granted to build a gigantic mini city/embassy in Lebanon.
A massive new US embassy complex in a tiny Middle East nation is raising eyebrows
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/12/middleeast/massive-us-embassy-middle-east-mime-intl/index.html
With corrupt “friends” like this, there is no wonder the slaughter of palestinians could go on decades after decades.
“The Chris Hedges Report with Israeli historian Ilan Pappé on Israel’s end game in Gaza and the future of the Israeli apartheid state”
45 min.“Israel’s War on Gaza Has Exposed the Conformism of the Western Media
By John Rees
As Israel wages war on the Palestinian people, Western media outlets have not delivered the sharp analysis that the situation demands. We badly need the kind of critical reporting that WikiLeaks supplied on the crimes of the “war on terror.”“(…)
In the midst of this journalistic drought, we feel all the more keenly the loss of Julian Assange’s voice and the material that WikiLeaks provided. Locked away for his fifth Christmas in the UK’s high-security Belmarsh prison, he is still awaiting a final court hearing in his long struggle against extradition to the United States where he could face sentences of up to 175 years under the 1917 US Espionage Act.WikiLeaks was not established until 2006, so it could not report directly on the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But the subsequent occupations of those countries were a different matter. Here the leaks that Assange published in some of the world’s leading print newspapers revealed in unprecedented detail the appalling, bloody reality of the way Western forces conducted themselves.
Those revelations did not create mass antiwar consciousness or directly influence the creation of the antiwar movement — both had existed since 2003. But they did vindicate antiwar politics and demolished the remaining reputations of those who had prosecuted the wars and occupations.
“The leaks that Julian Assange published revealed in unprecedented detail the appalling, bloody reality of the way Western forces conducted themselves.”Let us just take one example of what we know of the Iraq War that would not be available if WikiLeaks had not released the Iraq War Logs, the largest leak in US military history. It is an absolutely basic fact, critical to how we judge military conflict: the number of dead.
Infamously, the US refused to count the Iraqi dead. It was left to organizations like Iraq Body Count to carefully attempt to estimate how many had lost their lives. The material WikiLeaks released added another fifteen thousand to the Iraq Body Count total, raising it to one hundred fifty thousand dead.
In the war on Gaza, Israel makes no attempt to record how many Palestinians it has killed and simultaneously dismisses as unreliable the figures given by the health authority in Gaza. Under Israeli pressure, much of the world’s mainstream media has taken to prefacing its reference to the figures released by the health authority with the words “the Hamas-run health authority.”
We would all be better informed about the most basic fact of war if WikiLeaks were able to publish the kind of material that they did after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
(…)”.“War on Gaza: Algerian footballer Youcef Atal convicted in France over Gaza post
Atal received eight-month suspended sentence for incitement to hatred, after reposting a video he says he didn’t watch”“Al Jazeera journalist Samir Sassi arrested in Tunis
Sassi was arrested after a raid on his family’s home on Wednesday night.”https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/4/al-jazeera-journalist-samir-sassi-arrested-in-tunis
good short summary re: number of killed during Oct. 7th
How Israel Leverages Genocide With Hamas ‘Massacres’
January 6, 2024
Gareth Porter reviews the Netanyahu government’s process of planting stories of nonexistent atrocities by Hamas on Oct. 7 with credulous foreign-news outlets and the Biden administration.https://consortiumnews.com/2024/01/06/how-israel-leverages-genocide-with-hamas-massacres/
“On Oct. 14, the IDF put out a “preliminary estimate” of 1,400 innocent civilians killed by Hamas in the attack, a figure that stood until Nov. 10, when the Israeli Foreign Ministry reduced the estimate of civilians “murdered in cold blood” to 1,200.
However, that figure, too, was shown to be seriously misleading when Israel’s Social Security Administration in mid-December released a complete list of those killed in the attack, with the circumstances of death of each.
That official document showed that 695 deaths were caused by the Hamas attack, of which 373 were Israeli security forces and 71 were Thai workers. Thus 322 of the Israeli dead were innocent civilians.”
(…)
“Most of the civilian deaths appear to have taken place at or near the grounds of the early morning music festival, where 260 bodies were found.
Hamas operatives sought to take people hostage as they fled from the grounds, but many of the victims were killed by firing from helicopters from troops who were unable to distinguish Hamas operatives from revelers.
No one knows how many were killed by each side but the 28 Israeli helicopters were firing rounds of 30-millimeter cannon mortars, without any intelligence to guide their shooting, certainly took a share of the human toll”
(…)
“It is also clear, however, that the Hamas offensive was poorly conceived and badly executed.”
Pro-palestinians must stop apologizing for just saying the truth about Israel, latest person to be villified as an anti-semite is blogger/influencer Constance Hall for making a harmless video ridiculing israeli racism:
Extraordinary backflip as mummy blogger deletes ‘tasteless’ video bagging out the Israeli Defence Force after intense backlash
Hall apologised for offending Jewish people
Video showed Hall pretending to be the IDFNot the best source for this topic but…
Meanwhile, israelis of course believe they are superior race to palestinians and mock them daily in viral videos:
Israelis mock Palestinian tragedy on TikTok
Israelis wearing headscarves with painted faces mock the hardships faced by Palestinians amidst the ongoing conflict. The videos include Israeli children singing along to a song mocking the displacement of Palestinians from their homes.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231204-israelis-mock-palestinian-tragedy-on-tiktok/
2 nice related panels via UK Column:
right now live
“Genocide and Empire: Examining 7 October and the Geopolitics of the War on Palestine”
Program
Note: The times indicated below are approximate.
Introduction
6:00 to 6:05 pm GMT
Dr. Piers RobinsonGenocide and Self-Defense under International Law
6:05 to 6:35 pm GMT
Professor Richard FalkOil, Canals and Trade Routes: Economic Factors Underlying the Ongoing Genocide
6:35 to 7:05 pm GMT
Professor Atif KubursiIdentifying Structural Deep Events and State Crimes Against Democracy in Real Time
7:05 to 7:25 pm GMT
Kevin RyanHegemonic Panic: 7 October as a Deep Event
7:25 to 7:55 pm GMT
Dr. Aaron GoodContaining Escalation: How the Resistance axis is sabotaging US intent to escalate the conflict beyond Palestine
7:55 to 8:15 pm GMT
Vanessa BeeleyPanel Discussion
8:15 to 9:00 pm GMT
Moderated by Dr. Piers Robinson“Annual David Ray Griffin Lecture, held on December 3, 2023”
with Richard Falk, Daniele Ganser, Elizabeth Wooworth, Piers Robinson
Gaza and arts
“Can the Palestinian Belong to a Universal History?
Yazan Khalili on how German media used a smear campaign to disrupt the exhibition documenta.
Ben Ratskoff
July 28, 2022https://jewishcurrents.org/can-the-palestinian-belong-to-a-universal-history
A few images from pictures in question:
click button in the top for images 1-9https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/466628.kunst-aus-gaza-verleumdete-kunst.html
Has there ever been a regime that so callously like Israel that not only go after journalists themselves and murder them but go after the families of the journalists and bomb them??
Video:Journalist @WaelDahdouh
biding farewell to yet another member of his family. This time, it’s his son Hamza, a #journalist too. Number of journalists killed by #Israel in #Gaza surpasses 109 in 3 months!https://twitter.com/ZainaErhaim/status/1743959365168542096
Unfathomable cruelty, what the heck is wrong with Israel, they are now without a doubt right beside the nazis in their brutalization and their crimes against humanity!
And what the heck is wrong with the world watching this sick, perverted killing go on and even in some cases support what Israel is doing!?—
Also
How come money from wealthy, pro-israeli jews living in the west are not to be confiscated while wealthly pro-russia russians living in the west had their money frozen from the west?Take the pro-israel and close friend of Netanyahu, Alan Dershowitz, he have a wealth of some 25 million dollars.
Money that should be confiscared and used to build up Gaza.The following link is to Simplicius’ substack post:
Update on Palestine: IDF Claims Gaza City Victory
He links to a number of Israeli and American political figures, including Nicky Haley, contorting to justify what Israel is doing. I came across Simplicius on Moon of Alabama blog where he posted frequently.
“Israel Seen as Even More Likely to Launch War with Lebanon as Fate of ICJ Suit Uncertain Due to China and Russia Doubts”
Israel Seen as Even More Likely to Launch War with Lebanon as Fate of ICJ Suit Uncertain Due to China and Russia Doubts (Naked Capitalism)
(p.s. How long can RU CHIN ignore the view on this matter by many of their supporters? Or is it a simple quid-pro-quo with the US on the back of Palestinians: we give you Gaza, you leave Taiwan alone? I don’t think so.)
Yves Smith intro:
“Events have gotten ahead of my drafting. I planned to launch at the customary before 7 AM East Coast time, when news is breaking that Israel is indeed attacking Lebanon, even as Tony Blinken was set to visit today…..as you will see below, to talk Israel out of this sort of thing. So unless the latest salvo can be depicted as proportionate to the strike on Mount Hermon (more on that soon), we may be seeing the start of an Israel war with Lebanon:”
An exchange there in the comments section, following above text:
“Yves Smith:
Putin was one of the few people that Netanyahu was able to call outside the US and EU after October 7. There are also (or perhaps were, a lot may have left) Russian Jews who went to Israel, so Russia has complicated interests. Putin and Russian diplomats have been very careful not to use the G word or even (at least as far as I have seen) accuse Israel even of ethnic cleansing.And what does embarrassment get you? As the wags say, that plus 25 cents buys a subway token. The US has already been “embarrassed” by having to veto a series of Security Council resolutions calling for a cease-fire. And pray tell what difference has that made?
Russia winning versus Ukraine will destabilize US hegemony. Israel losing territory versus Lebanon will weaken US hegemony if that were to happen. The US being unable to contain the Houthis and shipping disruptions will weaken US hegemony. An ICJ ruling will not. The ICJ has no enforcement authority. It takes further action by the Security Council to achieve that…and the US will veto. Or other action, like economic sanctions….which we know does not work. The Houthi attempt at a blockade is about as effective as you can get in that vein.
Another reason for Russia largely avoiding the topic is Russia was also accuses of sufficiently indiscriminate attacks in the Chechen wars, including the second when Putin was president, so as to amount to collective punishment. See for instance:
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9780429318986-5/case-study-cornelia-klocker
Reply ↓
Polar Socialist:
The few studies (those are few and a far between)- (Posner & de Figueiredo, 2004)
- Judicial Independence and Impartiality: A Preliminary Inquiry (Weiss, 1987) in International Court of Justice at a Crossroads, pp.123-154, ed. Lori Fisler Damrosch (1987)
I could find of the bias of ICJ judges have found that while the judges do tend to favor the country that “sponsored” them to the court, they do not otherwise vote according to any political or regional alignments or alliances.
Not saying these old studies have any predictive power in today’s world, but they do provide some room for speculation that the judges in this case may not vote according to their national government’s interest, but more along the consensus of the court.
Reply ↓
Yves Smith
That would be lovely and would seem to be a big oversight by Finkelstein if so. But he sees the court as pretty politicized.”Israel assassinate another senior leader, this time in Lebanon Hezbollah
Israel assassinates Hezbollah commander in southern Lebanon
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2024/01/08/717839/Israel-Hezbollah-commander-Lebanon-Tawil
And Israel deliver new threats:
Israel war minister threatens to turn Lebanon into Gaza amid rising tensions
Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran etc need to step up their game, if Israel could go on assassinte arabs and iranians everywhere, the “resistance” crew must utilize the same methods against israeli reps.
Wow this is so stupid on so many levels:
The one time pacifist Green party now boast about selling weapons. To…. Saudiarabia! And all for the benefit of Israel!
Germany u-turns on Saudi jet deal
Berlin had previously blocked the sale of Eurofighter jets to Riyadh over the war in YemenBaerbock said that providing Saudi Arabia with the jets would make a <b>“key contribution” to Israel’s security</b>, presumably by deterring Saudi Arabia and Israel’s chief geopolitical rival, Iran.
https://swentr.site/news/590287-germany-fighter-jets-saudi/
Remember that this is the Saudiarabia that are complicit in the Yemen war that caused perhaps 500’000 deaths, the same pathetic Saudiarabia that cannot lift a finger to help palestinians. Such nasty corrupt leaders!
JACOBIN on Harvard/Palestine affair
“Claudine Gay Fought Palestine Solidarity at Every Turn”
By Katie Francis, Magdalena Rojas, Mira Sydow
Former university presidents Elizabeth Magill and Claudine Gay were no friends of Palestine. In fact, they suppressed free speech and equated solidarity efforts with antisemitism.
how surprising:
” Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows
A quantitative analysis shows major newspapers skewed their coverage toward Israeli narratives in the first six weeks of the assault on Gaza.”
https://theintercept.com/2024/01/09/newspapers-israel-palestine-bias-new-york-times/
“The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza showed a consistent bias against Palestinians, according to an Intercept analysis of major media coverage.
The print media outlets, which play an influential role in shaping U.S. views of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, paid little attention to the unprecedented impact of Israel’s siege and bombing campaign on both children and journalists in the Gaza Strip.
Major U.S. newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7. Pro-Palestinian activists have accused major publications of pro-Israel bias, with the New York Times seeing protests Opens in a new tabat its headquarters in Manhattan for its coverage of Gaza –– an accusation supported by our analysis.”
end:
“The result is that the three major papers rarely gave Palestinians humanizing coverage. Despite this asymmetry, polls show shifting sympathy toward Palestinians and away from Israel among DemocratsOpens in a new tab, with massive generational splits driven, in part, by a stark difference in news sources. By and large, young people are being informedOpens in a new tab of the conflict from TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, and older Americans are getting their news from print media and cable news.
Biased coverage in major newspapers and mainstream television news is impacting general perceptions of the war and directing viewers toward a warped view of the conflict. This has led to pro-Israel punditsOpens in a new tab andOpens in a new tab politiciansOpens in a new tab blaming pro-Palestinian views on social media “misinformation.”
Analysis of both print media and cable news, however, make it clear that, if any cohort of media consumers is getting a slanted picture, it’s those who get their news from established mass media in the U.S.”
Moon of Alabama:
“Sanitizing Language While The War Escalates”
on how US media are censoring via deceptive vocabularyThe fraudlent behavior by Israel is really something for the books, first they declare that everyone in Gaza is responsible and a legitimate target over and over again, then they bomb everyone… and then still have the audacity to claim that claims of them carrying out genocidal acts are…preposterous?!
Genocide lawsuit against Israel ‘preposterous’ – president
Isaac Herzog has condemned the case launched by South Africa in the Haguehttps://swentr.site/news/590367-genocide-lawsuit-israel-preposterous/
This is the same Herzog that just days after 7th of october declared publicly that there are no innocent people in Gaza:
Video https://twitter.com/ProfSunnySingh/status/1713216833770180667
The israeli society is wicked. Full stop!
a prime example for the German mindset is this article on antisemitism and culture by Raphael Gross, director of the DHM – the big Deutsches Historisches Museum – German Historical Museum in Berlin.
“Raphael Gross: Culture is part of the anti-Semitism problem
Berlin is debating an anti-Semitism clause. A precise statement from DHM boss Raphael Gross about the background of anti-Semitism in culture.
Raphael Gross”
Berliner Zeitung, 9/1/24– This is ever more important as news have come up that Berlin regional cultural funding will in future be only granted in connection with a signed confirmation clause on antisemitism, without which the said artists won’t get any money (and most likely will end up on an unofficial black list, a I privately would assume.) –
I would like to quote Mr. Gross’ 4 points here. Take notice of #3 and #4 highlighted.
“Four points
1. Anti-Semitism is often perpetuated within the culture itself. This is why anti-Semitism can spread quickly in crisis situations. Therefore, the rise of anti-Semitism is a warning sign. It usually flourishes at a time when the guilty in a society are quickly labeled – whenever this seems easier than solving real problems.
2. We have to think about different forms of violence and learn to differentiate. This also includes understanding the differences between anti-Semitism and racism . Both are forms of violence that, in conjunction with emotions and ideologies, attempt to justify social inequality. Nevertheless, anti-Semitism and racism are different and can be combated differently.
3. After the Shoah, a post-heroic remembrance began in Germany against strong resistance: the so-called culture of remembrance. Empathy with victims of historical violence is a central achievement of post-war history. With regard to the Middle East , however, we now recognize that Jewish victims do not count in various contexts and that the experience of violence by Palestinian civilians is exploited.
4. On the other hand, the outrage over colonial crimes is misused and directed against Israel as an alleged colonial state. The term “genocide” is expanded to such an extent that the Shoah appears as just one crime among many and is relativized. This instrumentalization of postcolonial outrage for anti-Semitism has now become a cultural code that is widespread around the world. How around 1900 the connection between nationalism and anti-Semitism was one. And this new code threatens to become a kind of cultural ticket. In my view, it would be important to think about how we can address this politically on a global level. What forms can be developed, especially in the international cultural and academic area, in order to be educationally active here. This also includes exchanges with Israeli cultural institutions.
“These statements are simply outrageous considering the undisputable record of crimes against humanity of the Israeli government over several decades. Repeated over and over again not only by the major NGOs outside Israel and within. But also by the international judicial bodies.
Such statement is incomprehensible. I don’t want to get into the questionable notion of antisemitism taking a “special” place considering the crimes committed in 500 years of colonialism and slavery by the West.
I am a big friend of differentiations. But never to the cost of utter neglect. What I do not understand is the reason.
I doubt that the DHM as an institution is backed by powerful pro-Israel businesses and billionaires since unlike the US German culture is a prerogative of the state.
So nobody would force Gross to completely neglect the historic record of atrocities. Does he not know? Or does he fear the truth?
This is serious. Even if it will be forgotten in 2 weeks. But most shifts towards the worse are silent.
important announcement:
Norman Finkelstein (who has for now ended his Substack presence and is back at his former homepage)
and Mouin Rabbani in a 4-part podcast on the South African case1st part today 8 pm EST:
Connections Podcast Episode 85
South Africa Charges Israel with Genocide at the ICJ
A 4-Part SeriesMouin Rabbani Interviews Norman Finkelstein
Wednesday, 10 January | 8:00 PM EST: Preview
Thursday, 11 January | 8:00 PM EST: South Africa Presents
Friday, 12 January | 8:00 PM EST: Israel Presents
Saturday, 13 January | 8:00 PM EST: Summary and Next StepsThe excellent frm law prof. Marjorie Cohn on the court case:
“Israel Is Terrified the World Court Will Decide It’s Committing Genocide
South Africa, a party to the Genocide Convention, charged Israel with genocide in the International Court of Justice.”January 6, 2024
