Author Archives: Reid Mukai

Get this straight, Western media: Palestinians aren’t sub-human

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Dehumanisation of Palestinians is as central to Israel’s war strategy as the deadly missiles it wields

By Andrew Mitrovica

Source: Information Clearing House

A young child sits on his mother’s hip as she and others flee through the streets of the Gaza Strip amid Israeli strikes on October 9, 2023 [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]

Israel has waged war on Palestinians for decades.

That fact may come, I suspect, as a surprise to many people whose grasp of the world is shaped by their exclusive consumption of Western media.

The deep and lasting human consequences of Israel’s terrifying, perpetual war on Palestinians – prosecuted with indiscriminate cruelty by an occupying army and its de facto proxies, fanatical settler militias – have been plain for anyone willing or inclined to see, for generations.

Countless lives lost and maimed in body and spirit. Land and homes stolen. Livelihoods and ancient traditions destroyed. The exhausting cycle of having to rebuild, then watching all the promise and possibility turn, in an instant, to dust. The wholesale imprisonment of a people penned like cattle behind walls and barbed wire fences, where water and electricity, food and fuel, are switched on and off on a colonial power’s whim.

But, of course, much of the Western media won’t acknowledge these facts and outrages. That’s because many of the reporters and columnists now gripped by the latest eruption of murderous madness in Palestine and Israel have always interpreted events through a prism chiefly dictated by Israel – whether they are prepared to admit it or not.

In this myopic calculus, Israel is always the victim, never the perpetrator. Israel’s understanding of history matters; Palestinians’ reading not only of the past but of the present and the future too, does not count. And, perhaps most indecent of all, Israeli lives and deaths matter; Palestinian lives and deaths don’t.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, made this point in a quiet, but persuasive address he delivered on Sunday to that apparently powerless body.

“History,” he said, “begins for some media and politicians when Israelis are killed. Our people have endured one deadly year after another”.

Mansour recounted the repeated warnings he and other exasperated Palestinians have issued – time and again – of the potential “consequences of Israeli impunity and international inaction”.

He was not alone.

Human rights groups based in Jerusalem, London and New York have published report after report that establishes, as a matter of international law, that Israel has, for a long time, been guilty of apartheid – a state-sanctioned, systemic policy to impose ethnic supremacy over besieged Palestinians with brutal, grinding efficiency.

Implicit in those dense, meticulously chronicled studies was what amounted to a blazing flare intended to seize finally the flighty attention of complicit Western governments and media. Israel’s deliberate, organised oppression is not only unsustainable, it disfigures both the oppressor and the oppressed.  Ultimately, violence begets violence in round after round of horrific vengeance by both sides.

Predictably, the cautions were not heeded.

Instead, many Western news outlets either dismissed outright or used the familiar vocabulary of denial to obscure the blatant truth.

Others opted for wilful malpractice, preferring to devote time and resources to the death of a celebrity dog over the documented theft, deprivations and indignities endured by Palestinians – young and old.

At the core of this blindness is a shared doctrine that holds that a Palestinian is a disposable non-entity, an expendable by-product of Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself.

In this perverse construct, Palestinian civilians are not considered innocent casualties of war but remain largely responsible for their own deaths and desperate fates.

The result: Western columnists will defend Israel – without so much as a hint of doubt or equivocation – despite its demonstrable record of erasing Palestinians whenever it wants, wherever it wants, for whatever reason it wants.

The sad, human evidence abounds.

Mahmoud al-Saadi, an 18-year-old student, was erased by Israel while walking to school in the Jenin refugee camp last November.

Mohammad al-Tamimi, a two-and-a-half-year-old toddler was erased by Israel while he was sitting in his father’s car parked outside their home in Nabi Saleh, a village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, as he waited to go to a birthday party in June 2023.

Shireen Abu Akleh, a 51-year-old Palestinian-American journalist was erased by Israel while she was preparing to report on yet another raid in Jenin in May 2022.

Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, a 67-year-old Palestinian-Canadian physician, scholar and humanitarian, witnessed three of his daughters – Bessan, 21, Mayar, 15, Aya, 13 – and a niece, Noor, 17, being erased when Israeli tank shells shattered the family home in the Gaza Strip in January 2009.

Omar Abdulmajeed Asaad, a 78-year-old Palestinian-American retiree was erased by Israel while en route home to Jiljilya, a town a little northeast of Ramallah in the West Bank, after an evening playing cards with friends in January 2022. Soldiers marched Asaad to a nearby construction site and dumped him onto cold stone pavers. That’s where he died of a “stress-induced heart attack”. Alone.

Twelve-year-old Hassan Abu al-Neil was erased by Israel on August 21, 2021 while standing on what remains of Palestinian soil in Gaza in defiance of the occupation.

The lethal ledger goes on and on and on.

In the awful days, weeks and potentially months ahead, a gallery of writers will, no doubt, stand rhetorically shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his appalling calls to impose a total blockade on Gaza and bludgeon it into a “deserted island” in the wake of Hamas’s ruthless onslaught.

Netanyahu’s chilling vow to, in effect, obliterate Gaza and his warning to the 2 million Palestinians who live in that thin strip of land to “get out” is the inevitable expression of apartheid, which is predicated on the dehumanisation of an entire people.

As Palestinian-American writer, Ra’fat Al-Dajani, has explained, the dehumanisation of Palestinians is based on two tenets widely held among Western media: “Palestinians are violent because of who they are –​ because of something intrinsic in their very nature and culture,” Dajani wrote, rather than “because of the oppression and violence of the Israeli occupation”. As a corollary to this, “since Palestinians lack basic standards of morality… the only way to interact with them is through the use of force, whether state-sponsored force by the Israeli security forces or non-state actors such as Israeli settlers. Force is the only language they understand.”

Both of these blasphemies have already been on display on Western cable news channels’ 24/7 loop and in opinion pages featuring the usual parade of Israeli-aligned officials and pundits.

In rebuttal, Mansour was obliged, remarkably, to state the obvious: “We [Palestinians] are not sub-humans. Let me repeat: We are not sub-humans. We will never accept a rhetoric that denigrates our humanity and reneges our rights. A rhetoric that ignores the occupation of our land and oppression of our people.”

Mansour defended the resistance as an understandable response to Israel’s longstanding war on Palestinians, saying: “Israel cannot wage a full-scale war on a nation, its people, its land, its holy sites and expect peace in exchange.”

In the end, the ambassador said, Palestinians, and Palestinians alone, will decide their destiny. “The Palestinian people will be free one day or another, one way or another,” Mansour said.

He is right.

Saturday Matinee: Final Cut

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REVIEW: “Final Cut” (2022)

By Keith Garlington

Source: Keith and the Movies

It’s hard to believe that it has been twelve years since French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius won his Best Director Academy Award for the Best Picture winning “The Artist”. While it has become somewhat fashionable in some circles to dismiss that brilliant 2011 film as unworthy, I still hold it in incredibly high regard as a delightful ode to a bygone cinematic era.

Hazanavicius’ latest film couldn’t be more different. “Final Cut” is a meta zombie comedy that is an open-armed tribute to cinema, a love letter to genre filmmaking, a celebration of creative collaboration, and just an all-around wacky piece of work. It’s a faithful remake of Shin’ichirô Ueda’s 2017 cult hit “One Cut of the Dead” but with its own French twist. It’s a consistently clever and routinely funny concoction that sees Hazanavicius and his all-in cast having the time of their lives.

Describing “Final Cut” to those who haven’t seen “One Cut of the Dead” is a bit of a challenge because the less you know going in the better. The film’s unorthodox structure plays a big part in making it such a fun experience. It’s a case of a filmmaker showing you one thing and then adding an entirely different perspective later on. I know that’s vague, but suffice it to say Hazanavicius has a field day playing with his audience’s expectations.

The spoiler-free gist of the story goes something like this. Romain Duris plays Rémi Bouillon, a frustrated filmmaker who signs on to direct a low-budget zombie short film for an upstart streaming platform that specializes in B-movies. But there’s a catch. The 30-minute single-take film is to be shot and streamed LIVE! It’s an unheard of undertaking but one the platform’s ownership has already pulled off in their home country of Japan. Now they want to do it in France.

Rémi is hesitant to take the job at first, seeing it as a doomed-to-fail project. But with the encouragement of his wife Nadia (Bérénice Bejo) and with hopes it will rekindle his relationship with his aspiring filmmaker daughter Romy (Simone Hazanavicius) he agrees.

Soon he’s on location dealing with a smug high-maintenance lead actor (Finnegan Oldfield), his inexperienced lead actress Ava (Matilda Lutz), a supporting actor who can’t stay off the bottle (Grégory Gadebois), and the demands of domineering producers who don’t prescribe to the notion of a director’s creative freedom.

As “Final Cut” shifts to the show’s production phase things get crazy and we gain an entirely new perspective on everything we’ve seen up to that point. Hazanavicius drenches his audience in blood, gore, and countless zombie horror tropes which is a big part of the fun. That said, it’s never the slightest bit tense or scary but neither does it try to be. It’s much more of a comedy, full of running gags, fun characters, an infectious B-movie charm, and a surprising level of warmth that I never expected.

Watch Final Cut on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/13547325

Israel is committing an epic war crime with US backing and arms

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Where is the U.S. peace movement and the U.S. public outrage?

Image Credit: AFP

By Dave Lindorff

Source: Nation of Change

When the U.S. was bombing levees and hospitals in North Vietnam, peasants in Laos and burning villages in South Vietnam, herding those not killed in the process into “strategic hamlets,” Americans took to the streets en masse, occupied the Pentagon mall, brought central Washington D.C. to a standstill, and broke into an FBI office stealing the records of Cointelpro disruption and spying and into a draft ward destroying the records of potential draftees.

When U.S. military “trainers” helped massacre and slaughter peasant guerrillas and their urban supporters fighting a brutal dictatorship in El Salvador, and the Pentagon was running a proxy war against the revolutionary government in Nicaragua, masses of Americans, even in the absence of a draft and of US deaths, rose to the occasion to massively oppose U.S. intervention in those countries’ internal conflicts.  Even in 2003 when America was preparing to invade Iraq, claiming it was making or hiding weapons of mass destruction, chemical or even nuclear, Americans in record numbers turnout out in Washington to oppose going to war. (It didn’t work, but at least they turned out to protest war.)

Now when America is basically bankrolling and arming Israel as it prepares to commit a massive war crime, collectively punishing and killing ordinary Palestinians trapped in the open-air prison of Gaza. When the Israeli ‘Defense’ Force (IDF)  is giving the 1.1 million Palestinians living in the northern 12-mile-long and 7-mile-wide half of the walled-off enclave 24 hours to relocate themselves to the southern half of the strip or face the full destructive force of an all-out  IDF air and ground attack and invasion of the north—an impossible challenge. When Israel has cut off all supplies of food, medicine, water (in a desert!), electricity, and oil for the enclaves on rickety power plant, already for a week, the protests by Americans have been anemic, and have largely been by specifically pro-Palestinian groups, not by what is left of the once large and broad peace movement.

It is a shameful moment. While a few left-leaning progressive Democratic members of Congress like Reps AOC and Ilhan Omar have denounced Israel’s war crime of collective punishment and U.S. support for it, there is actually more criticism of Israel and of U.S. military aid to that country coming from Republicans than Democrats, (though they aren’t talking about the war crimes, since Republicans favor those tactics in other circumstances). The truth is, one of the arguments being used by Democrats to convince House Republicans to get their shit together and elect a House speaker is so they can pass legislation in that chamber to allow the U.S. to give Israel (and Ukraine) even more military aid.

And still, no burgeoning, blooming peace movement.

The U.S. may not be technically at war, but the U.S. war machine is everywhere, on every continent, in every ocean, its military budget, way over $1 trillion a year when everything is counted, bigger than it was in constant dollars than at the height of the Vietnam War when 500.000 U.S. troops were in that country fighting, dying (and losing) a hot war. But its special forces, its arms merchants of death, and its military “trainers” are busy stirring up and supporting local conflicts and pouring oil on fires like those blazing in Ukraine, Yemen, Gaza, Syria, Niger, Haiti, and elsewhere, while also making trouble off the coast of China, on the Korean peninsula (where it still has troops based and has had since 1950, and in Eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea.

Where is the public anger? Where is the organized protest against this warmongering permanent government in Washington, D.C.?

Americans are mad at Washington to be sure, correctly perceiving that it is corrupt and rotten to the core They know it ignores popular calls for taxes on the rich, for a well funded Social Security system that will pay livable retirement benefits as promised to all retirees into the foreseeable future, instead of facing drastic cuts in a decade or sooner, a medical system that doesn’t drive us into bankruptcy when we get sick, that gives everyone access to care they can afford and doesn’t give mega profits to private insurers and hospital executives, good public schools for our kids, affordable public colleges, an end to debt enslavement, police who are social servants not fear-inspiring centurions, clean air and water, and action of preventing a climate emergency. But too many of us don’t grasp that none of those things that huge majorities of us want will happen as long as the leaders in Washington, almost all of them bought and owned by large corporate and financial interests and the rich, are enamored of weapons, wars and militarism.

We need a focused campaign to use all available means to educate the American public to a common-sense reality: you cannot have guns and butter. And you can’t eat guns.

As a  Vietnam War Era war resister and protester I’m disgusted. How can we U.S. Americans be accepting that almost all the income tax we pay each year (including income taxes on our Social Security benefits for gods’ sakes!) goes straight to funding the Pentagon and America’s endless wars and proxy wars, with the rest of federal government operations being funded using borrowed money– loans that we the taxpayers have to then pay five percent or more  in interest on every year. In the end it’s all because of the military budgets.

Get it?

It’s time to take that to the streets.

A good place to start would be demanding that the U.S. stop propping up the intransigent, apartheid, fake democracy of Israel and demand that it stop its collective punishment of 2.3 million Gazan Palestinians. For once, the U.S. should try to solve an international crisis by taking action to de-escalate conflict instead of pouring oil on the fire by mindlessly offering more weapons and ammunition.

If that approach works there, our troglodyte leaders should try the same thing with the Ukraine/Russia conflict.

“This is genocide. This is a war crime,” a Palestinian Red Crescent Society representative said.

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Wounded Palestinians wait for treatment at the al-Shifa hospital following Israeli airstrikes, in Gaza City, central Gaza Strip, Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023. (AP Photo/Abed Khaled)

By Diego Ramos

Source: ScheerPost.com

An Israeli airstrike on the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City has killed more than 500 people, according to Palestinian health authorities and journalists on the ground.

According to Al Jazeera journalist Maram Humaid, a spokesman for the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported an initial estimate of 200-300 casualties. The health ministry has updated estimates to 500 people killed.

Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting for Al Jazeera from Khan Younis in southern Gaza, detailed that the bombing on the hospital courtyard came without warning and has caused significant damage to the building, which continues to provide medical services.

“This hospital contains hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians injured during the continuing Israeli attacks on the besieged enclave.

It is crowded with civilians. Just at this moment, hundreds of wounded people have reached the hospital. The area is full of residential buildings.

This is a true massacre that has taken place,” Azzoum reports.

Journalist Younis Tirawi spoke to people in the hospital, who described seeing thousands of people taking shelter, thinking the hospital was a safe haven.

Tirawi also reported a statement from Donald Binder, the undersecretary to the Heads of Churches in Jerusalem, who warned against Israeli airstrikes two days prior to the Oct. 17 bombing. Binder noted the severe damage done to the ultrasound and mammography sections of the hospital and pleaded for anyone with influence in the Israeli government to call off any future strikes.

Journalist Dan Cohen posted a phone conversation with Dr. Mohamad Ziara from Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, as it prepares to receive casualties and injured civilians from the al-Ahli attack:

Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defense, said, “The massacre at al-Ahli Arab Hospital is unprecedented in our history. While we’ve witnessed tragedies in past wars and days, what took place tonight is tantamount to a genocide.”

Representative from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, Nebal Farsakh, echoed the sentiment stating to Al Jazeera:

“Those who were in front of the hospital were forced to leave their homes under the evacuation order. They can’t even afford to evacuate to the south. There’s complete destruction of the infrastructure and transportation,” she said. “They are forced t[o] evacuate themselves under continuous bombardment. The only available [refuge] is a hospital, so they’re thinking that they would be in a safe place.

“This is genocide. This is a war crime,” she said.

The Powder Keg in the Middle East has Exploded: What Israel’s War on Gaza Means for the Rest of the World

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman,

Source: Silent Crow News

A new war in the Gaza Strip should not be a surprise to anyone who understands what the Palestinians have been going through for the last 75 years.  Many people in the West, in particularly those in the United States and the European Union are shocked and very angry with the attack on Israeli territory by Hamas.  The US mainstream media obviously has a biased view with mostly pro-Israel viewpoints on Israel’s latest conflict in Gaza especially with FOX news who so far, has not invited a Palestinian or Muslim analyst or academic to explain to its audience what led up to this recent attack in the first place.  However, I do believe that Israeli intelligence namely, Mossad knew what was about to take place so that they can move forward to “wipe Gaza off the map” which has been a long-time strategy for Israeli hardliners. Why do I believe Israel allowed it to happen? because the Gaza Strip is one of the most surveilled areas on the planet, therefore Israeli intelligence had to know beforehand that sooner or later, something was going to happen.

Despite what is happening in Gaza, there is one important fact that needs to be told, its not just about Palestine because if Israel gets its way in this war, it will begin targeting other Arab states including Lebanon and Syria which fits into what Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist wrote in ‘A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties’ suggesting that Israel must “become an imperial regional power” and that it “must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states.” 

The strategy according to Yinon is that “the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation.”  Although this was written in the 1980’s, all of it is absurd and unrealistic.  Israeli hardliners and Americans especially those in the US bible belt are hoping for a Greater Israel, but that will never happen, the resistance will become stronger throughout the Middle East as more Israeli fighter jets continues to bomb Gaza day after day.  Several Middle Eastern countries and resistance groups have been prepared for the next big war with Israel and the US including Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, Kataib Hezbollah and other factions in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. 

Government officials, military top brass and intelligence agencies from the US, and NATO know that it will be long and bloody war since Israel is going full force in efforts to take more land in Gaza thus creating more Palestinian refugees in the process. Yinon said create “small states” that will be easier to dominate just like they did in Palestine, they split the territories by turning the Gaza Strip into an open air prison, and at the same-time they created a separate territory in the West Bank, both areas are militarily dominated by Israel Defense Forces (IDF). 

However, for Israel, time is not on their side.  They know that the US is in financial trouble with $33 trillion in debt, so I am sure that many Israeli economists know that without the US and its financial assistance, Israel will not last since they depend on almost every penny that the US government gives them.

In the meantime, Israel is trying to somehow get the US involved in the war. For the Israelis, that’s nothing new.  Remember when Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu claimed to the US congress in 2002 that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons?  “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons,” he continued “Once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons,” I would say that Netanyahu was successful in getting the US in a war with Iraq.  Or how about the time when Israel attacked the USS Liberty in 1967 in the Mediterranean sea during the Six-Day War which was meant as a false flag operation to bring in the US in its war against Egypt and the rest of the Middle East.

The war on Palestine was the first step in creating an imperial Israel.  On July 9th, 1947, Rabbi Fischmann, a member of the Jewish Agency declared at a U.N. Special Committee of Enquiry that Israel needs to expand “from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.” It is also important to note that Israel has another important reason for expansion which one of them being the obvious and that is to ultimately control the natural resources including oil and gas throughout the Middle East.  When it comes to Big Oil, Washington and the Pentagon share similar goals with Israel when it comes to natural resources in the region. 

Oil Resources & Facilities in Kurdish Regions of Iraq

Since the Gulf war in the early 1990s, Washington and the Pentagon along with Kurdish leadership tried to create a ‘Free Kurdistan‘ that included areas of Iraq, Iran, Syria and even Turkey to dominant the potential energy markets.  In other words, the US establishment and Israel benefit in numerous ways by Balkanizing the Middle East thus making it easier to control the oil and gas fields.

So for the US-Israel partnership, it’s not only ideological, it’s also about the economic benefits of Zionist expansion that not only benefits Big Oil, it benefits the US arms industry since Israel will need a steady supply of weapons for a very long time to maintain control over a Balkanized Middle East and that’s always a plus for the establishment.  So, it is fair to say that Israel needs the US military and its financial aid just as much as the US and its Big oil enterprises need Israel to continue its illegal occupation.

Meanwhile worldwide protests have taken place as the war hawks, neocons, special interest groups (AIPAC) in Washington and their media mouthpieces are already pushing for US military to ultimately attack Iran. 

The US military is already sending its naval ships to the Eastern Mediterranean in show of support to Israel according to Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III:

I have directed the movement of the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to the Eastern Mediterranean. This includes the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Normandy (CG 60), as well as the Arleigh-Burke-class guided missile destroyers USS Thomas Hudner (DDG 116), USS Ramage (DDG 61), USS Carney (DDG 64), and USS Roosevelt (DDG 80). We have also taken steps to augment U.S. Air Force F-35, F-15, F-16, and A-10 fighter aircraft squadrons in the region. The U.S. maintains ready forces globally to further reinforce this deterrence posture if required

US ships in the Mediterranean sea? seems like déjà vu, but the point here is that the US will most likely get involved despite losing almost every major war they started since the end of World War II. It is assured that they will face a heavy onslaught of firepower from Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, resistance groups from Iraq that can target US bases and assets, even Yemen can get involved in some capacity.  

Russia and China are watching events very closely as their countries are also facing Western aggression on various levels including the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine and if the US and its close allies in the Asia Pacific are foolish enough, they will to start another proxy war in Taiwan.

This is the big war in the Middle East that many of us have been fearing and it seems unstoppable as tensions have dramatically escalated in such a short period of time. 

Russia and China can sure try to mediate a peace agreement or a ceasefire, but that seems impossible given how Israel sees the necessity and the long-term benefits of seizing more Palestinian territory with close to half of the Gaza strip in its sights and that’s their next step, stripping land away from the Palestinians piece by piece. 

The bottom line is that the US is at $33 trillion in debt with a US dollar reserve currency that is not so popular as before, so how long can the US establishment keep up its military and economic support to Israel?  No one knows for sure, but it is clear that the US and the European establishment is committed to Israel’s security, even if it means bankrupting its own citizens. 

Who are the Real Terrorists in the Palestine Story?

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By Stuart Littlewood

Source: Dissident Voice

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more sickening speech from a world leader than Biden’s following Hamas’s attack on Israel, the tormentor of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. His crass ignorance, prejudice and subservience to a criminal, apartheid regime, while utterly indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinian people, sets a new low among Western administrations.

Biden says that the United States “stands with the people of Israel in the face of these terrorist assaults. Israel has the right to defend itself and its people, full stop. There’s never a justification for terrorist attacks and my administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.’’ He added that the people of Israel were “under attack, orchestrated by a terrorist organisation… The United States stands with Israel. We will not ever fail to have their back. We’ll make sure that they have the help their citizens need and they can continue to defend themselves.”

And Israel’s faithful stooges in the UK and Europe are in perfect harmony:

  • UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: “Shocked by this morning’s attacks by Hamas terrorists… Israel has an absolute right to defend itself.”
  • UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly: “The UK will always support Israel’s right to defend itself.”
  • Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey: “Liberal Democrats fully condemn Hamas. This terrorism must cease. Israel has a right to defend itself.”
  • UK Labour Party leader Keir Starmer: “No justification for this act of terror… perpetrated by those who seek to undermine any chance for future peace in the region.”
  • Head of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen: The attack was “terrorism in its most despicable form… Israel has the right to defend itself against such heinous attacks”.

But who are the real “despicable” terrorists?

The US’s own definition of terrorism fits Israel itself perfectly. Under Section 3 of Executive Order 13224 “Blocking Property and prohibiting Transactions with Persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support Terrorism”, the term “terrorism” means an activity that:
(i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and
(ii) appears to be intended:

  • to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
  • to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
  • to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking.

This instrument, signed on 23 September 2001 by George W. Bush, is used to outlaw and crush any organisation, individual or country the US doesn’t like. And the Israeli regime’s “amoral thugs”, as one British MP branded them, have plainly been terrorising Palestinian civilians for decades. Biden is one very confused bunny.

As for the other stooges, their position is demolished by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), said to be the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organisation in the world. “We’re organising a grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of US Jews into solidarity with Palestinian freedom struggle,” they say on their website. Here’s an extract from their statement on the hostilities.

The Israeli government may have just declared war, but its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago. Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence. Reality is shaped by when you start the clock.

For the past year, the most racist, fundamentalist, far-right government in Israeli history has ruthlessly escalated its military occupation over Palestinians in the name of Jewish supremacy with violent expulsions and home demolitions, mass killings, military raids on refugee camps, unrelenting siege and daily humiliation. In recent weeks, Israeli forces repeatedly stormed the holiest Muslim sites in Jerusalem.

For 16 years, the Israeli government has suffocated Palestinians in Gaza under a draconian air, sea and land military blockade, imprisoning and starving two million people and denying them medical aid. The Israeli government routinely massacres Palestinians in Gaza; ten-year-olds who live in Gaza have already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives.

For 75 years, the Israeli government has maintained a military occupation over Palestinians, operating an apartheid regime. Palestinian children are dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. Palestinians homes are torched by mobs of Israeli settlers, or destroyed by the Israeli army. Entire Palestinian villages are forced to flee, abandoning the homes and orchards and land that were in their family for generations.

The bloodshed of today and the past 75 years traces back directly to US complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation. The US government consistently enables Israeli violence and bears blame for this moment. The unchecked military funding, diplomatic cover, and billions of dollars of private money flowing from the US enables and empowers Israel’s apartheid regime.

Meanwhile, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP)’s team on the ground in Gaza have a close-up view of the situation. They say they “are releasing all of our pre-positioned stocks, worth $570,000 USD (approximately £465,000), to ensure hospitals and emergency responders have the supplies they need to cope with an unprecedented influx of casualties”.

Supplies provided by MAP include essential drugs and disposables, laboratory reagents and support for Gaza’s blood bank services. Even before this latest escalation Gaza’s beleaguered health system was struggling, with 48 per cent of essential medicines and 26 per cent of medical disposables unavailable or in critically short supply. Today, the Ministry of Health in Gaza is calling for blood donations for the influx of casualties. Melanie Ward, MAP’s chief executive, says: “We are deeply concerned about the potential for substantial loss of civilian life in the coming days. Gaza’s healthcare services are woefully under-equipped to respond to this emergency, and MAP’s support is needed now more than ever. We call on the international community to take urgent steps to protect civilian life and infrastructure from attack, and to launch immediate humanitarian relief efforts to ensure that health services have the resources they need to save lives and respond to casualties.”

MAP is also committed to bearing witness to the injustices caused by occupation, displacement and conflict. “We speak out in the UK and internationally, and ensure Palestinian voices are heard at the highest levels, to press for the political and social barriers to Palestinian health and dignity to be addressed.”

Self-defence? Really?

And what about this mantra-like claim that Israel, the aggressor and illegal occupier, has a right to defend itself? The West Bank, East Jerusalem (including the Old City) and Gaza are regarded as Palestinian territory under international law and by the United Nations. So what are Israel’s occupation army and armed settlers doing there?

The word “settler” is much too nice. I call these armed thugs “squatters”. They are transferred illegally onto Palestinian territory by the Israeli government to establish “facts on the ground” in the hope of eventually annexing and acquiring the territory for itself. That’s why Israel has never declared its borders – it intends to keep expanding until it has stolen all of the Holy Land.

This of course is a violation of occupation law and a war crime on the part of the individuals involved. And it is a violation of Israel’s legal obligation to respect the sovereignty of another state and a violation of Israel’s legal obligation to respect the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people; also a violation of Israel’s obligations regarding international law on the use of force. Ending these violations calls for the removal of the squatters and their squats from occupied land and an immediate end to Israel’s exercise of control, including its use of military force, over the Palestinians’ territory. It is nonsense to suggest that Israel has any right to defend its nationals when misbehaving and committing war crimes on somebody else’s territory.

The UK government is complicit in these crimes, having created the problem in the first place back in 1916/17 (Balfour’s infamous declaration and promise to the Zionists) and even today refuses to sanction Israel’s murderous behaviour and racist policies. As we so often see demonstrated, all our political parties have brainwashed elements within their ruling elite that are obedient to the Israel lobby.

Know your terrorist

Furthermore, there’s nothing anyone can teach Israelis about terrorism. They wrote the manual. If you don’t believe it, read their Dalet Plan, or ‘Plan D’. This was the Zionists’ blueprint for the violent and bloody takeover of the Palestinian homeland – some call it the Palestinian holocaust – drawn up in early 1948 by the Jewish underground militia, the Haganah, at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, then boss of the Jewish Agency.

Plan D anticipated the British mandate government’s withdrawal and the Zionists’ declaration of Israeli statehood, and plotted the ethnic cleansing that was to follow. Here is a chilling extract setting out guidelines for besieging, occupying and controlling Arab cities:

1. By isolating them from transportation arteries by laying mines, blowing up bridges, and a system of fixed ambushes.
2. If necessary, by occupying high points which overlook transportation arteries leading to enemy cities, and the fortification of our units in these positions.
3. By disrupting vital services, such as electricity, water, and fuel, or by using economic resources available to us, or by sabotage.
4. By launching a naval operation against the cities that can receive supplies by sea, in order to destroy the vessels carrying the provisions, as well as by carrying out acts of sabotage against harbour facilities.

It is one of the vilest documents in history and shows why so many people question Israel’s legitimacy. Jewish terror gangs committed a massacre at Deir Yassin to set the tone and “soften up” the Arabs for expulsion. More atrocities followed the declaration of Israeli statehood on 14 May 1948. Some 750,000 Palestinians were put to flight as Israel’s forces obliterated hundreds of Arab town and villages. The village on which Sderot now stands was one of these. It was designate an Arab town in the UN Partition Plan but that made no difference. To this day its inhabitants have been denied the right to return and received no compensation. Thirty four massacres are said to have been committed in pursuit of the Jewish nation’s racist and territorial ambitions, which immediately overran the generous borders gifted to the Zionists in the Partition Plan.

Biden, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Waiting for an Apocalypse

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Method, Method, what do you want from me?  You know that I have eaten of the fruit of the unconscious.”  – Jules Laforgue, Moralités légendaires

The other day my wife attended an event at a well-appointed home in town where men in dark suits stood around to provide a sense of security that no harm would come to the visitors, even though the angel of death had visited this house on previous occasions, for it was a funeral home, well-steeped in boxing people up for the journey to the underworld.  So to call it a “home” is really a misnomer; that might sound cozy, but it is really a way station for the dead.  A layover.

Mistakenly thinking that she was attending a traditional wake and the dead person’s corpse would be there in a coffin, I suggested that she check out the casket and, if she liked its wood and the softness of its velvet liner, to inquire whether they had any sales going on, especially if they had a buy-one-get-one-free sale like the local supermarket often has for English muffins and other goodies.

I think she forgot to ask, but she did tell me that the elderly woman who died had been cremated weeks ago and that her ashes were in a box on a table.  Boxes, ah, little boxes.

***

I have long wondered why so many people are enchanted by sunsets, why they travel to see them and gasp in wonder that the sun disappears and night comes on.  Colorful yes, but not as glorious as the sunrise, the rosy-fingered dawn of every new day.  Why celebrate the death of the day and our journey into the underworld of sleep and the cave of dreams rather than the dawn of our awakening and new life.  Jokes aside, morbidity is not life-affirming.  The true apocalypse – Greek apokalyptein, uncover, disclose, reveal – is every dawn’s epiphany when we can dream while awake and create.

***

In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses there is the story of Cupid and Psyche, the former being a male god and the latter a female human.  Psyche, who has lost her lover Cupid but wants him back, is tricked by the goddess Aphrodite who challenges her, if she wants Cupid back, to take the dangerous journey to the underworld to retrieve a box of beauty cream.  Psyche goes and gets the box but is tempted to open it since it would enhance her already beautiful human appearance.  When she does, she falls into a deathlike sleep.  It’s an old story, forever new.  Switch the sexes if you wish.  Take 200 vitamin pills a day as many billionaires and other assorted crazies do intent on becoming immortal gods.  Good luck.  Get uploaded or downloaded into a computer, whichever it is, and live forever.  Maybe watch the sun set or perchance wake up.  And although Psyche is given a Hollywood ending when she is saved by Zeus and made immortal with the other gods in Olympus, that’s just an old movie.  We live by facts these days, not myths.  Ah, boxes.

***

The Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel
I am just a poor boy, though my story’s
seldom told
I have squandered my resistance for a
pocketful of mumbles
Such as promises
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest, hmm

***

Children love boxes within which they often hide their collections for safekeeping.  Give a child a box with a lid and it will be filled in no time.  Filled with little things that symbolize for children the vast infinity of secret space that is their hold on time.  Children are born poets and philosophers who over time are usually dulled by adults around them from whom they learn to hide their secrets and the questions these secrets raise.  The secrets often fester and die, only to live on in repressed lives.  I knew a man who collected cigar boxes.  They were everywhere in his house when he died.  Most were empty.  His wife outdid him with her collection of empty boxes: shoe boxes, jewelry boxes, every kind of box imaginable.  All empty.  Were they waiting to be filled?  With what?  Secrets? Another woman I knew had a box with an envelope inside marked, “My Father’s Magic Envelope – AKA Miracles.”  It was empty.  She pictured herself as a boxer in a sketch she drew, a child without a face with boxing gloves.  I can only guess at the secrets she was fighting to remember or forget. The experimental method is based on repetition, but so too is trauma.  Internment is not just for the dead.

***

Boxed in, boxed up, housed, enclosed. trapped, contained, caged , enveloped, bounded, penned, corralled, trapped: calling from my cell for help?  The screen lights up with a concatenation of phantom images that seize the mind, what the Greeks called eidolon.

***

Let’s forget about Pandora’s box, which was actually a jar in the original story.  Its last content being hope.  I once knew a girl named Hope.  She was very seductive. But I sensed she was trouble and escaped when she started to open up about her secrets.  I wasn’t very curious, just afraid.  So long, Hope, “it’s time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.”  Thanks, Leonard.

***

There are countless political analyses of what drives the United States’ ruling forces in their systematic, brutal, and remorseless wars of aggression around the world.  The perpetual effort to expand an empire originally built on the blood of indigenous people.  The refusal to live in peace within national boundaries.  The pushing of NATO expansion up to Russia’s borders.  It seems insane, which of course it is.  But what is behind such madness?  The secret may be quite simple.  Again the ancient Greeks come to mind as Roberto Calasso writes in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, quoting the historian Jacob Burckhardt, when he wrote of the secret of war-loving Sparta: “But the power of Sparta seems to have come into being almost entirely for itself and for its own self-assertion, and its constant pathos was the enslavement of subject peoples and the extension of its own dominion as an end unto itself.”  Power as an end in itself.  Realizing this is apocalyptic in the revelatory sense, for it opens the box on the secret nihilism of the U.S. ruling elites.

***

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am waiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

– Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “I Am Waiting,”
for jazz accompaniment