Category Archives: Empire

Israel’s Final Solution for the Palestinians

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When Jewish extremists, fanatic Zionists, religious zealots, ultranationalists and crypto-fascists in the apartheid state of Israel say they want to wipe Gaza off the face of the earth, believe them.

Bad Moon Rising – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: Scheer Post

Icovered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin. 

Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.

Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar, Naftali Bennett, and Ayelet Shaked. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”

There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state.

“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.” 

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israel’s crypto-fascists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. These Jewish extremists, which make up the ruling coaltion government, are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians are dying daily. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Ammonites, massacred by the Israelites. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged. 

A leaked 10-page document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence dated Oct. 13, 2023 recommends the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. 

It is a grave mistake not to take the blood curdling calls for the wholesale eradication and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seriously. This rhetoric is not hyperbolic. It is a literal prescription. Netanyahu in a tweet, later removed, described the battle with Hamas as a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” 

These Jewish fanatics have begun their version of the final solution to the Palestinian problem. They dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza in the first two weeks of assault to obliterate at least 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. They have no intention of being detoured, even by Washington.

“It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign,” The New York Times reported.

“In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries,” the paper continued.

The goal is a “pure” Israel, cleansed of Palestinian contaminants. Gaza is to become a wasteland. The Palestinians in Gaza will be killed or forced into refugee camps over the border in Egypt. Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque – the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army – to be demolished. The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will be a Jewish version of Iran.

It is a short step to total Israeli control over Palestinian land. Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements, restricted military zones, closed highways and army compounds have seized over 60 percent of the West Bank, turning Palestinian towns and villages into ringed ghettos. There are over 65 laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those living in the occupied territories. The campaign of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, many by rogue Jewish militias, along with house and school demolitions and the seizure of remaining Palestinian land will explode. Over 133 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli army and Jewish settlers since the Oct. 7 incursion by Hamas and thousands of Palestinians have been rounded up by the Israeli military, beaten, humiliated and imprisoned.

Israel, at the same time, is turning on “Jewish traitors” who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the horrific violence of the state. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are already being targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be deported.

Fascists do not respect the sanctity of life. Human beings, even from their own tribe, are expendable to build their deranged utopia. The zealots in power in Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them. 

“Several new testimonies by Israeli witnesses to the October 7 Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel adds to growing evidence that the Israeli military killed its own citizens as they fought to neutralize Palestinian gunmen,” Max Blumenthal writes in The Grayzone.

Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, Blumenthal notes, set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. 

Escapa told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that as desperation began to set in, “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”

The newspaper reported that Israeli commanders were “compelled to request an aerial strike” against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza “in order to repulse the terrorists” who had seized control. That base housed Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers.

Israel, in 1986, instituted a military policy called the Hannibal Directive, apparently named for the Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be captured by the Romans, following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. The directive is designed to prevent Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands through the maximum use of force, even at the cost of killing the captured soldiers and civilians. 

The directive was executed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza known as Operation Protective Edge. Hamas fighters on Aug. 1, 2014 captured an Israeli officer, Lt. Hadar Goldin. In response, Israel dropped more than 2,000 bombs, missiles and shells on the area where he was being held. Goldin was killed along with over 100 Palestinian civilians. The directive was supposedly rescinded in 2016.

Gaza is the start. The West Bank is next.  

Israelis who cheer on the Palestinian nightmare will soon endure a nightmare of their own.

American State Propaganda: A Thought Experiment

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In a tyrannical dictatorship, the press is operated by employees of the government. In a Free Democracy™️, the press is operated by employees of the oligarchs who operate the government.

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

The New York Times has published another CIA press release disguised as news, this time aimed at whipping up paranoia toward anyone who criticizes the US proxy war in Ukraine.

The article is titled “Putin’s Next Target: U.S. Support for Ukraine, Officials Say”. Its author, Julian E Barnes, has written so many New York Times articles with headlines ending in the words “Officials Say” that we can safely assume the primary reason for his continued employment in that paper is because empire managers within the US government have designated him someone who can be trusted to print what they want printed. This designation would make him a reliable supplier of “scoops” (read: regurgitations of unevidenced government claims) for The New York Times.

“American officials said they are convinced that Mr. Putin intends to try to end U.S. and European support for Ukraine by using his spy agencies to push propaganda supporting pro-Russian political parties and by stoking conspiracy theories with new technologies,” Barnes writes.

Of course the report never gets any more specific than that, and of course the “American officials” Barnes cites promote their unevidenced assertions under cover of complete anonymity.

“The American officials spoke on the condition their names not be reported so they could discuss sensitive intelligence,” Barnes writes.

The only named source cited in the article is a CIA veteran named Beth Sanner, who says that “Russia will not give up on disinformation campaigns,” but adds that “we don’t know what it is going to look like.”

And that’s really the whole article right there. Putin is going to be using his spy agencies to promote political parties and messages which support ending the practice of pouring billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine, but nobody knows what that will look like exactly, so we all have to just be sort of generally distrustful toward anyone who doesn’t think it’s a swell idea to perpetuate a horrific war with potentially world-ending consequences, because they might be part of an unspecified Russian influence operation.

We saw a similar report from CNN a few weeks ago, in which the public was warned that Russia’s FSB is working to convert westerners into mouthpieces for Russian propaganda using methods so sneaky and subtle that those westerners wouldn’t even know it’s happening. Again, details were extremely vague and the only obvious response to the information provided is for everyone to just get really paranoid toward anyone saying anything that doesn’t support current US foreign policy toward Russia.

As a thought experiment, imagine what it would look like if the CIA or some other agency wanted to advance US information interests by making the public distrustful of any people or information which go against US strategic objectives. Try to imagine some of the things they might say or do. 

Do you imagine it would look much different than what we’re seeing currently? Feeding trusted mainstream news reporters extremely vague stories about the Kremlin trying to deceive people into opposing the longstanding agendas of the US intelligence cartel, using online media and social subversion? Can you think of a more effective way to help shore up trust in your preferred narratives and sow distrust in narratives you do not prefer?

Here’s another one: imagine a state media outlet for a tyrannical dictatorship. Think about how its news stories are made, how it would often take orders from the government on what to report and what not to report, and how all its printing or broadcasting would always align with the information interests of that government.

Now ask yourself: in what material way is that reporting different from these CIA press releases we’re seeing from outlets like The New York Times and CNN? In both scenarios the government is feeding the media information it wants printed, and in both scenarios there will be consequences if the media don’t obey. In our hypothetical dictatorship those consequences might be more severe, but in our real life scenario the consequences are no less real. 

If Mr Barnes had refused to work on this story, he would have lost his “scoop” and it would have been given to someone else, perhaps at a competing outlet. If Barnes ceased uncritically reporting unevidenced assertions from anonymous government officials, his prominence in the mainstream media would quickly fizzle, and his career would dry up. If The New York Times ceased functioning as a reliable outlet for the credulous printing of unevidenced government claims, then the government agencies who’ve been elevating the paper to prominence with their artificial “scoops” can take those hot stories to another competing outlet and let them get the subscriptions and the glory.

In both scenarios, the government is able to get its propaganda messaging printed as hard news reporting. In one scenario the reporter reports what the government wants because they work for the government, in the other scenario the reporter reports what the government wants because that’s the only way to have a career in media outlets that are owned and controlled by the plutocrats who benefit from the political status quo the government is premised upon. The only major difference is that in our hypothetical dictatorship, the public probably knows it’s being fed propaganda, and is therefore more likely to take what they’re being told with a grain of salt.

In a tyrannical dictatorship, the press is operated by employees of the government. In a Free Democracy™️, the press is operated by employees of the oligarchs who operate the government. In both cases you’re getting state propaganda, but in one of them the propaganda is disguised as objective news reporting.

Exposing Truth And Lies In Gaza

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An analysis and collection of articles elaborating the reality of Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza

By Don Via Jr.

Source: The Free Thought Project

Ever since the outset of Israel’s genocidal onslaught against Gaza approximately one month ago corporate media has been awash with perspectives sympathetic to the Zionist cause. In fashion typical of the news media establishment parroting the talking points of the military industrial complex, acting as stenographers regurgitating pro war propaganda and maintaining the status quo of the western unipolar hegemony. With complete disregard to historical context, logical consistency, or pesky facts.

In layman’s terms, inverting the reality of the ongoing conflict to fit the agenda of imperialist psychopaths as per usual.

Rehashing much of the same talking points utilized at the outset of the US/ NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Ukraine good; Russia bad… Just swap out the blue and yellow profile pic flag emoji with the Star of David, rinse, and repeat. Israel good; Palestine bad. They’ve even managed to trudge up some of the old rhetoric from the George W Bush regime to once again help sell the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians. “There is no room for neutrality”. “You are either with us or you are with the terrorists”. George Bush in 2001 or Lior Hayat in 2023, what’s the difference? Either way the result is a 7000 pound bomb paid for with US taxpayer dollars dismembering Arab children for the crime of being born the wrong color in the wrong region.

Yet in this inverted reality that they facilitate where weapons manufacturers continue to make a killing off of senseless killing somehow the moral fabric of our society has deteriorated so far, our apathy so exorbitant, that it is actually a point of contention whether or not it is ethical to carpet bomb a concentration camp full of kids.

Of course the sad reality is this is nothing new when it comes to the nature of American exceptionalism, or the indifference of many around the world as a whole. Whether it be turning a blind eye to the carpet bombing of children in Gaza today, or those in Iraq twenty years ago, or the instantaneous incineration of whole cities á la Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or even casual dismissal of the mass genocide of over one hundred million indigenous peoples that precipitated the founding of our empire over two centuries ago. So long as people can be lulled into the comfortable ignorance of being insulated from the real world consequences of their governments actions, all is well.

This is partially the consequence of a civilization indoctrinated, psychologically subdued as casualties in the ever intensifying information war. Completely desensitized from the horrific monstrosity that is warfare; the obliteration of our fellow humans, particularly grizzly under the circumstances of false pretenses as established by neocolonialist ambitions.

Keep them dissociated with bread and circus while pundits promulgate empty talking points like it were a football game and let them keep pretending as if their impassivity doesn’t beget atrocity. Meanwhile Israeli officials continue to openly espouse the desire to wipe every Palestinian off the map, man, woman, and child, up to and including with the use of nuclear bombs in an effort to conquer the enclave.

Up to this point upwards of 9,000 civilians have been killed, over half of which are women and children. According to UNICEF Gaza has essentially become a child graveyard.

The sheer unbridled brutality has reached such a scale that even some who are typically in lockstep with the status quo of the war machine have spoken in opposition against it. Even CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and the UK’s Piers Morgan, both notorious war apologists in their own right, have shown brief glimpses of empathy in the face of Israel’s brazen mass murder of innocents.

Despite this there are still those, politicians, pundits, and regular people alike, seemingly divorced from their humanity encouraging this ruthless slaughter to continue. There is still no shortage of propaganda pieces deliberately disseminating misinformation to the average reader in an attempt to sway their sympathies in favor of the occupying apartheid colony.

Most common sense individuals by now understand that western media reporting on foreign policy has about as much reliability as a serial rapist put in charge of safeguarding a battered women’s shelter. Yes, that analogy is crude. But far from being an exaggeration.

So amidst this corporate deluge of disinformation I saw it fit to compose a compilation of essential reporting on the subject matter to help readers grasp a better understanding of the reality of the conflict. The following is an assortment of articles delineating those pertinent facts.

The final piece mentioned in that listing should be read after all else and considered with particular import. It is okay to admit when we are wrong about things. We live in a time when topics have become so overly polarized, positions so deeply tribal, that the mere concept of considering an opposing perspective, much less coming to the acceptance that perhaps we don’t know everything is literally repulsive to many. That is a behavior that we have to unlearn.

Life is about growing, our learning as a thinking species never ceases. Especially when our institutions of learning and education are so hopelessly co-opted to perpetuate the kind of thinking distinctly designed to benefit the ruling class, it is our responsibility to come to terms with the fact that often the notions that were instilled in us as facts were in actuality carefully curated half-truths, and sometimes even blatant lies, intended to manipulate our opinion on a subject and craft a worldview that doesn’t fall out of line with the status quo. It is our responsibility to unlearn the fallacies, so that we can begin to learn the truth.

Truth and liberty go hand in hand. One cannot exist without the other. If one claims to be an advocate of truth they must then in turn also become an advocate of liberty, and vice versa. Liberty is not selective, it is universal. It is an irreconcilable inconsistency to advocate for the liberty of some but not others. Frankly put you are either for the freedom of all people, or you are not for freedom. That includes the Palestinian people; the native Arab inhabitants of a strip of land that has been under illegal occupation and subjugation for more than a century. If you care about truth that is a fact that simply cannot be ignored. If you advocate liberty, it must include the liberation of Palestine.

“Drop a Nuclear Bomb on Gaza”: Israeli Minister Says Using Nukes on Gaza an Option

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Amichai Eliyahu, an Israeli Heritage Minister has admitted to the world that Israel has nuclear weapons ready to be used on the Palestinians.  The Times of Israel reported that “Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said Sunday that one of Israel’s options in the war against Hamas was to drop a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip, in comments that were quickly disavowed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also suspended the minister from cabinet meetings.” 

Surely, Netanyahu is angry with Eliyahu’s comments since the Israeli government never confirmed nor denied that they have nuclear weapons, so Eliyahu got himself suspended.

Eliyahu was asked in an interview with Radio Kol Berama “whether an atomic bomb should be dropped on the enclave” and he responded with “This is one of the possibilities.”

Eliyahu is a far-right politician who rejects humanitarian aid into Gaza by saying that “we wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid,” and that “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza.”  He also advocates efforts to retake the Gaza Strip and rebuild Israeli settlements before his government decided to unilaterally withdrew in 2005. Eliyahu was also asked about what would happen to the Palestinian population in the aftermath and he said that “They can go to Ireland or deserts; the monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves.”

Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, a Moroccan-born Israeli citizen, a former nuclear technician exposed Israel’s nuclear weapons factory located in the Negev Desert, not far from the city of Dimona to The Sunday Times of London in 1986.  Vanunu was drugged and kidnapped by Mossad agents while in Rome and spent more than 11 years out of 18-year prison sentence in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison.

In 2005, The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) published ‘The Release of Mordechai Vanunu and U.S. Complicity in the Development of Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal’ which revealed an important fact that Vanunu’s revelations about how Israel’s nuclear program is “offensive in nature”:

A former strategic analyst at the Rand Corporation observed that Vanunu’s revelations about Israel ’s nuclear program demonstrated that: “Its scale and nature was clearly designed for threatening and if necessary, launching first-use of nuclear weapons against conventional forces.” Prior to Vanunu’s revelations, many suspected that Israel ’s nuclear program was limited to tactical nuclear artillery and naval shells

Mordechai Vanunu exposed Israel’s nuclear weapons program so he is considered a traitor but to Vanunu’s own observation, he sees it differently, “Five million Jews are regarding me as a traitor, but six billion people around the world think me as a hero and a good man who bring the message to all the human beings that we should survive and prevent the use of nuclear weapons and to prevent the nuclear preparations and to prevent nuclear war in the future.” 

Israel says that Iran is building a nuclear weapons program which Tehran has repeatedly denied, but it is Israel who has been exposed for having an arsenal of nuclear weapons ready to be used against the Muslim world. 

The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Seymour M. Hersch wrote, ‘The Sampson Option; Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and America’s Foreign Policy’ and concluded that “America’s policy toward the Israeli arsenal, as we have seen in this book, was not just one of benign neglect: it was a conscious policy of ignoring reality.”   Hersch warned about Israel’s nuclear capabilities including the production of low-yield neutron warheads to exporting nuclear technology:

By the mid-1980s, the technicians at Dimona had manufactured hundreds of low-yield neutron warheads capable of destroying large numbers of enemy troops with minimal property damage. The size and sophistication of Israel’s arsenal allows men such as Ariel Sharon to dream of redrawing the map of the Middle East aided by the implicit threat of nuclear force. Israel also has been an exporter of nuclear technology and has collaborated on nuclear weapons research with other nations, including South Africa.

In September 1988, Israel launched its first satellite into orbit, bringing it a huge step closer to intercontinental missiles and a satellite intelligence capability—no more Jonathan Pollards would be needed to steal America’s secrets. Scientists at Z Division concluded that the rocket booster that launched the Israeli satellite produced enough thrust to deliver a small nuclear war- head to a target more than six thousand miles away.  Israeli physicists are still at the cutting edge in weapons technology and involved, as are their American and Soviet counterparts, in intensive research into nuclear bomb-pumped X-ray lasers, hydrodynamics, and radiation transport—the next generation of weaponry.

None of this has ever been discussed in the open in Israel, or in the Knesset. Meanwhile, Israeli field commanders have accepted nuclear artillery shells and land mines as battlefield necessities: another means to an end

So, would the Israelis be willing to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran? There is no doubt that Russia and other world powers including China would not allow Israel to hit Iran with a nuclear bomb.  

If Israel decided to use a nuclear weapon anywhere in the Middle East, it would unite all Muslims against Israel and that is something Tel Aviv and Washington is not prepared for.      

Hersch concluded that “the basic target of Israel’s nuclear arsenal has been and will continue to be its Arab neighbors. Should war break out in the Middle East again and should the Syrians and the Egyptians break through again as they did in 1973 or should any Arab nation fire missiles again at Israel, as Iraq did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability. Never again. The Samson Option is no longer the only nuclear option available to Israel.” 

Will the Hamas-Israel Conflict Spin Out of Control?

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

According to Iran’s PressTV, the Iranian defense minister announced that the US “will be hit hard” it Israel’s war on Gaza does not halt.  It is unclear why the defense minister’s target is the US and not Israel.  By US he probably means US bases in Syria and Iraq.  

Add this puzzle to the growing collection.  For example, if Iran and Hezbollah are behind Hamas’ October 7 attack, why wasn’t Hamas provided with air defense capability against what everyone had to know would be massive Israeli bombing of Gaza?  Why did Russia provide Syria with the S-300 air defense system and prevent Syria from using it against Israeli and US aircraft that attack Syrian territory?

I explained that the October 7 attack on Israel has the Biden regime’s neoconservatives and Netanyahu’s fingers all over it–https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/10/30/the-israeli-hamas-conflict-is-a-continuation-of-the-9-11-plot/ .  It is not only Palestine that is Netanhayu’s goal, but also Greater Israel which runs according to Zionists from the Nile to the Euphrates. The intent is to draw into the conflict Iran and Syria so that the neoconservatives can reopen the wars in the Middle East against Hezbollah’s suppliers.  Without weapons and money from Iran and Syria, Hezbollah would not be able to prevent Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. I doubt that Biden understands this.  Most likely the neoconservatives in the government told him that having a strong US military presence on the scene would keep things from getting out of hand. Many Americans think that the president knows everything and is in control, but the fact is that he only knows what his officials tell him, and the neoconservatives have their own agenda.

That the intent is to widen the conflict is supported by the enormous quantities of weapons, troops and air power that the US is assembling in the area. This concentration supplemented with German and French troops, according to media reports, go far beyond what is needed to subdue Hamas.  The official explanation for this concentration of Western military resources is to protect Israel from Hezbollah and Iran.  Adding to the collection of puzzles, if Israel is so vulnerable from attacking Gaza, why would Israel risk it.  It makes no sense to risk defeat for the sake of revenge.  Israel must have known in advance that US forces would instantly be on the scene.  How did Israel know that if October 7 was a surprise?

Putin and it seems Biden have realized that if Iran and Hezbollah are enticed into the conflict a wider regional conflict will emerge that could result in World War III.  Putin has been restraining the Muslims and Biden has tried to restrain Netanyahu. If Putin succeeds, the neoconservatives and Netanyahu will likely initiate a false flag attack on Israel and blame Hezbollah, and the neoconservatives who run the Biden regime will use the false flag attack to widen the war.

Certainly Americans and Europeans are getting no help from their governments or media in understanding that Putin is doing his best to save them from a world war.  Instead, hate continues to pour out against Putin.  

Putin cannot prevent a false flag attack.  By performing the statesman’s role while the other side agitates for war, Putin is repeating his mistake with the Minsk Agreement.  He held to his hopes for this agreement despite clear evidence that the US and NATO were building a massive Ukrainian army to subdue the two break-away Donbas republics.  The result was a costly war.  Now by restraining the Muslims, Putin is denying Muslims the initiative and handing the initiative to the US neoconservatives and Netanyahu.  It is a paradox that by doing the right thing Putin is likely contributing to the widening of the conflict. 

As Western governments and media are focused solely on Hamas’ atrocities, no one can think clearly about what is really going on.  Republicans and some Christian evangelicals find themselves in company with neoconservatives demanding war.  Protesters in Europe against Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of civilians are branded anti-semitic and domestic terrorists.  ( See: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/11/05/tyranny-now-rules-in-great-britain/ ) In the US even Jewish protesters against Israel’s war crimes are called anti-semitic “self-hating Jews.”  

It seems no reasonable humane voice can find a hearing.  In other words, there is no constraint on the conflict spinning out of control. 

Gaza Ceasefire?

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Netanyahu and his settler fanatics will never agree to stop killing Palestinians.

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics

Hundreds of thousands of people in America, Europe, and the Middle East are in the streets protesting against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. They demand a ceasefire now.

Yes, calling for a ceasefire is helpful, but it will not accomplish much. Israel will not stop killing Palestinians and Washington will continue to support the ethno-religious settler fanatics in Palestine in response to the outsized influence of the Israeli lobby. Call it “J Street,” the “Jewish Street” that commands much of USG foreign policy.

Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip, and its raids, home demolitions, and murder of activists and journalists in the West Bank and Jerusalem, will not suddenly come to a halt in response to growing protests.

If you believe this, you know nothing about Zionism. Israel will continue stampeding two million Palestinians into South Gaza and eventually through the Rafah Crossing into the empty desert of the Egyptian Sinai.

This has been the plan for decades. It’s not a secret.

Israel is a terrorist state. It was founded and governed by terrorists. David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak, Yitzhak Rabin, and yes, Golda Meir, were all terrorists.

Together these terrorists—who are rarely called terrorists in the West—ethnically cleansed nearly a million Palestinians. Some of them were members of terrorist groups before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Others, for instance, Yigal Allon, participated in death squads (“Special Night Squads”) that murdered Palestinians “without compunction,” while the current prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, oversaw the mass murder of Palestinian mothers and children with the Zionist pogroms “Cast Lead,” “Pillar of Defense,” and “Protective Edge.”

Begin, the sixth prime minister of Israel described the massacre of Palestinians as “a splendid act of conquest.” He led the terror organization Irgun. It slaughtered Arabs, Brits, and other Jews. Irgun bombed the King David Hotel, killing almost a hundred people.

The ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza and the West Bank has remained consistent. In 1953, future Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon blew up 42 houses and killed more than 60 residents in the Arab village of Qibya.

In the 1970s, he was tasked with “pacifying” Gaza. The IDF blew up houses, bulldozed tracts of land in refugee camps, imprisoned thousands, and imposed collective punishment.

“There is no Zionism, colonization, or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands,” Sharon said.

The current Netanyahu government consists of racist fanatics. Itamar Ben-Gvir leads Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power). He is Israel’s National Security Minister. His convictions for inciting racism and supporting terrorism did not prevent him from holding office.

The Religious Zionism faction is led by Bezalel Smotrich, the government’s current Minister of Finance and adjunct Minister in the Ministry of Defense. He is a settler from Kedumim in the occupied West Bank. He calls for Palestinian villages to be “erased” and has proudly called himself a “fascist homophobe.”

On February 26, when Zionist settlers torched the Palestinian village of Huwwara—killing one Palestinian and injuring 100 others—Smotrich complained. He said the village should have been “wiped out.”

Ramzy Baroud writes for The Jordan Times:

In Israel’s right-wing parties, racism is an important prerequisite to succeed in politics.  In fact, this is precisely how Itamar Ben-Gvir rose from being a youth leader of the extremist Kach Party to becoming the country’s national security minister. Now, both characters, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, hold the keys to the fate of many Palestinian communities, and both are eager to expand illegal Jewish settlements, regardless of the illegality of such action and the bloodbath resulting from it.

There are virtually thousands of other instances of Zionist violence against largely nonviolent Palestinians and their supporters.

“Our report reveals the true extent of Israel’s apartheid regime,” Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, said last year.

Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights. We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid. The international community has an obligation to act.

Millions of ordinary people, outraged by the Zionist invasion and slaughter, have filled the streets in America, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the UK, Spain, Australia, Canada, Greece, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Japan, Tunisia, Ghana, and Indonesia (the latter with the largest Muslim population in the world).

None of these protests or the weak demands by the European Union to “pause” the terror bombing of Gaza will halt Israel’s long-anticipated final ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

For Netanyahu’s settler-colonial government, all those sickened and outraged by the Zionist bloodbath are nothing more than antisemites, Jew-haters, and Hamas supporters. Protests are irrelevant, as Israel will continue murdering people with USG-provided bombs until forced to stop.

The governments of the US, UK, and Europe will not move to stop the mass murder of Palestinian Arabs. The growing protests, a few violent, will not prevent the Zionist campaign to kill and remove Palestinians considered human animals, drugged cockroaches in a bottle, and beasts on two legs.

The only paramilitaries capable of confronting the “Zionist Entity” are Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran provides anti-Zionist rhetoric and support for Hezbollah, but it will not enter the war unless USG-Israel threatens its security and existence.

It is well-known Israel has a bounty of nukes. The Zionist “Samson Option” threatens to nuke Arab nations and even capitals in Europe if it is forced to act like a civilized nation. This and the USG armada parked near Cyprus in the Mediterranean have given pause to neighboring nations as their populations rally to join the fight against Israel.

Sad to say, there will be no ceasefire, not so long as Israel is governed by racist ethno-religious fanatics. They will continue murdering people until they are stopped by their own people or an outside force.

The Grim Prospects of US Proxies: Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan

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By Brian Berletic

Source: New Eastern Outlook

As Russia’s special military operation (SMO) approaches two years of intense fighting, having parried Ukraine’s “spring counteroffensive” and with the initiative shifting to Russian forces, Western capitals are now admitting they are reaching the limits to remaining support for Kiev.

During the Ukrainian offensive alone, the Western media has admitted Ukrainian forces have suffered catastrophic losses in both manpower and material. The Ukrainian economy has all but been replaced by heavy subsidies from the United States, Europe, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Ukrainian infrastructure including its power grid and ports have suffered severe damage the collective West is unable to repair in a timely manner.

Ukraine’s territory has shrunk. Four oblasts, Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson are now considered by Moscow as part of the Russian Federation. Crimea had already joined the Russian Federation following a referendum conducted in 2014 after the US-backed overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government.

In fact, from 2014 onward, Ukraine’s sovereignty had been stripped away, with the resulting client regime installed into power by the US answering to Washington at the expense of Ukraine’s best interests. To say Ukraine’s status as a viable nation state hangs in the balance because of this arrangement would not be an understatement.

Ukraine, as a US proxy, has suffered irreversible losses economically, politically, socially, and militarily. In a wider sense, Europe is also politically captured, led by the European Union bureaucracy who, like the Ukrainian government, serves Washington’s interests entirely at the expense of Europe’s collective interests.

Germany stands out as a particularly poignant example, having ignored the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, imposing sanctions on Russia to restrict any remaining hydrocarbons required by Germany’s industry and public, beginning a process of recession and deindustrialization.

Europe’s wider economy is suffering from similar setbacks, setbacks that cannot be offset by alternatives such as US liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) moved by ship across the Atlantic Ocean which will always be more expensive than Russian hydrocarbons piped in directly to Europe.

The price of subordination to the United States is in reality the existential threat the US claims Russia poses to Europe in fiction.

It should be noted that the US had long-planned to use Ukraine as a proxy to overextend Russia. Laid out in a 2019 policy paper published by the US government and arms industry-funded think tank, RAND Corporation, titled, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” US policymakers would recommend providing lethal aid to Ukraine to draw Russia into the ongoing conflict between Kiev and militants in eastern Ukraine. The idea was to “increase the costs to Russia, in both blood and treasure,” as it dealt with the conflict between Kiev and eastern Ukraine along its borders.

The paper also noted, however, the strategy posed a high risk to Ukraine. Such a move, the paper warned, might:

…come at a significant cost to Ukraine and to U.S. prestige and credibility. This could produce disproportionately large Ukrainian casualties, territorial losses, and refugee flows. It might even lead Ukraine into a disadvantageous peace. 

Despite these acknowledged risks, the United States pressed ahead with the plan anyway. Today, we see that fears expressed by US policymakers proposing this strategy have been fully realized, if not entirely surpassed.

Taiwan is Next… 

As Ukraine is destroyed by a US-engineered proxy war against Russia, with members of the US Congress vowing to fight Russia to the “last Ukrainian,” a similar arrangement is being used to organize the Chinese island province of Taiwan as a heavily US-armed proxy against the rest of China.

Just as was the case with Ukraine, US policymakers acknowledge the existential threat Taiwan faces in its role as a US proxy.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), likewise funded by the US government and arms manufacturers, published a 2023 paper titled, “The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan.” In it, policymakers acknowledge that during any fighting between a US-backed Taiwan administration and the rest of China, heavy damage would be inflicted on the island.

The paper notes that any infrastructure the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) does not destroy in the fighting, because of its possible use to the PLA, the US itself would target and destroy it:

Ports and airfields enable the use of more varied ships and aircraft to accelerate the transport of troops ashore. The United States may attack these facilities to deny their use after Chinese capture. 

Beyond infrastructure useful to Chinese military forces, US policymakers have also explored the possibility of destroying economically useful infrastructure on Taiwan. An October 2022 Bloomberg article titled, “Taiwan Tensions Spark New Round of US War-Gaming on Risk to TSMC,” would report:

Contingency planning for a potential assault on Taiwan has been stepped up after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to people familiar with the Biden administration’s deliberations. The scenarios attach heightened strategic significance to the island’s cutting-edge chip industry, led by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. In the worst case, they say, the US would consider evacuating Taiwan’s highly skilled chip engineers.

The article also stated:

At the extreme end of the spectrum, some advocate the US make clear to China that it would destroy TSMC facilities if the island was occupied, in an attempt to deter military action or, ultimately, deprive Beijing of the production plants. Such a “scorched-earth strategy” scenario was raised in a paper by two academics that appeared in the November 2021 issue of the US Army War College Quarterly.

CSIS’ paper would analyze the possible outcome of a conflict between China and the US-backed administration on Taiwan, surmising:

In most scenarios, the United States/Taiwan/Japan defeated a conventional amphibious invasion by China and maintained an autonomous Taiwan. However, this defense came at high cost. The United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of servicemembers. Taiwan saw its economy devastated. Further, the high losses damaged the U.S. global position for many years. 

In other words, even under the best-case scenario, following a US-backed defeat of any Chinese military operation aimed at reunification, the US would nonetheless have suffered heavy losses in terms of its military while Taiwan would have suffered catastrophic losses both militarily and economically.

Like Ukraine, Taiwan, in its capacity as a US proxy, would be destroyed.

Israel Will Not Be Spared Either 

US policy papers are also abounding with strategies employing Israel as an eager military proxy in the Middle East. Israel is elected to strike at nations across the region with impunity, freeing Washington of the political, military, economic, and diplomatic baggage of carrying out such military operations itself.

Of course, such military operations expose Israel to the same dangers that have threatened Ukraine’s self-preservation and threaten to undermine Taiwan’s.

With the US having demonstrated a fundamental inability to sponsor and win proxy wars against peer and near-peer adversaries in both Ukraine and Taiwan, there is little reason to believe that an already overstretched US military industrial base could somehow give Israel the ability to wage and win protracted proxy war in the Middle East.

Such a proxy war has already unfolded from 2011 onward both in Syria and Yemen with little success. Israel has already played a role in Syria, carrying out missile strikes across the country in an attempt to provoke Syria into a wider conflict.

Syria and its allies Iran and Russia have only strengthened their positions in the region and are driving a fundamental transformation across the Middle East. Even long-time US allies like Saudi Arabia and Turkey find themselves gradually divesting from a US-led regional order to one that better fits with the wider trend toward global multipolarism.

This has left the US and its remaining proxies in the region more isolated and vulnerable than ever. The US itself finds its own troops illegally occupying eastern Syria in an increasingly precarious position.

Israel, in many ways, finds itself likewise isolated. Should it lend itself to a major US proxy war more directly, it may find itself in a similar position as Ukraine – locked in intense, protracted combat with its US allies unable to provide the arms and ammunition necessary to win.

Unlike either Ukraine or Taiwan, Israel is believed to be in possession of between scores to hundreds of nuclear weapons. While Israel will thus never face the same sort of defeat Ukraine faces, a protracted military conflict will leave Israel exhausted economically and isolated diplomatically. Its Arab neighbors will move on with the multipolar world while Israel exhausts itself fighting to reassert US-led unipolarism.

Because of the deliberate, premeditated manner in which the US uses and then disposes of its proxies around the globe, there is little reason to believe it will spare Israel. While Israel has several advantages over other US proxies in terms of its economy, military capabilities, and diplomatic connections, these advantages will only prevent Israel’s use and disposal by US foreign policy if there is a conscious decision to pivot with the rest of the region away from US subordination and toward regional and global multipolarism.

More Lethal “Aid” for Israel

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Can’t the Israelis Pay for their Own Bullets, Bombs, and Missiles?

What U.S. “aid” to Israel produces: Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza after a bombing that killed dozens 11/1/23

By W.J. Astore

Source: Bracing Views

Apparently the top priority in the U.S. Congress is sending more “aid” to Israel, most of it lethal. It’s more important than health care for Americans, aid for the poor and disadvantaged, or even aid to U.S. schools and cities. Basically, it’s more important than anything.

Why is this? What elevates sending more bullets, bombs, and missiles to Israel above all other matters in the U.S. government? How does this make any sense?

Last time I checked, Israel is a modern country with healthy finances and is capable of buying this “aid” if it really needed to. Why is the U.S. taxpayer footing the bill for more munitions to kill innocent people in Gaza? I don’t want my money going to ethnic cleansing and more death; do you?

Most Americans, roughly two-thirds, support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Our voices are simply ignored by “our” government, which of course shows us that “our” government truly isn’t ours. The owners and donors, the oligarchs, have their own priorities, and they are not ours.

In a note to accompany an article with Medea Benjamin at Common Dreams, Nicolas Davies notes that:

The US media have failed to inform the public how isolated the US is in its support for the massacre taking place in Gaza. 120 countries voted for an immediate ceasefire in the UN General Assembly, while only 12 small countries voted with the US and Israel to oppose the resolution. US and Israeli leaders are not just out of touch with the rest of the world, but with their own people. Only 29% of Israelis wanted a full-scale invasion of Gaza, while 66% of Americans wanted a ceasefire – and that included 80% of Democrats.

Not only that, but new House Speaker Mike Johnson has decided to connect $14.3 billion in aid to Israel to an identical reduction in the budget of the IRS! He wants to cripple the ability of the IRS to go after tax cheats in America while giving a huge handout to America’s weapons makers in the cause of “defending” Israel.

You know the saying about death and taxes being the most certain things we face in life? Obviously in America selling death trumps collecting taxes.