Category Archives: propaganda

In Gaza genocide, US defends Israel’s ‘aura of power’

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As South Africa accuses Israel of genocide, the Biden administration endorses Israel’s bid to sow “fear” in Gaza’s defenseless civilians.

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

Days after South Africa filed a motion to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, the Biden administration responded with indignation. The allegation, White House spokesperson John Kirby declared, is “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.”

South Africa’s 84-page submission is in fact exhaustive in its documentation of Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza and Israeli leaders’ open intention to carry it out. By contrast to this detailed intervention, Israel’s chief sponsor in Washington openly admits that it still refuses even minimal scrutiny of the extermination campaign that it is funding and arming.

Nearly three months into an Israeli assault that has relied on billions of dollars in US weaponry, the Biden administration has still “conducted no formal assessment of whether Israel is violating international humanitarian law,” Politico reports. While going out of its way to avoid this assessment, the Biden administration has gone around Congressional review to transfer $147.5 million in artillery shells and other gear to Israel – the second time it has invoked emergency powers to do so.

A senior administration official insists to Politico that there is nothing to worry about: “If you just look at what Israel is doing, they aren’t systematically targeting civilians.” Even if that were true, which it clearly is not, what is indisputable is that Israel is systematically killing civilians. As even President Biden blurted out last month, Israel is carrying out “indiscriminate bombing,” an unambiguous war crime. For this reason, the New York Times reports, when Biden offered that “not… scripted comment,” his blunder “sent aides scrambling to explain.”

How the White House is now scrambling to explain its view that Israel is not committing genocide or even violations of humanitarian law is even more revealing. According to Politico: “The U.S. came to that conclusion in part after looking at press reports and conversations with Israeli officials about their military operations.” Absent from the Biden administration’s list of source material is its own intelligence, which recently found that almost half of the munitions that Israel has dropped on Gaza have been indiscriminate “dumb” bombs that have predictably murdered countless civilians in their homes and shelters.

Instead, the US is only relying on “press reports” – but clearly not those documented in South Africa’s ICJ submission, which collects Israeli leaders’ genocidal rhetoric in nine pages of chilling detail (p. 59-67). That leaves “conversations with Israeli officials” – who, unsurprisingly, are not keen to admit that they are the 21st century’s worst war criminals.

Israel’s bombing campaign is accompanied by an unprecedented blockade that deprives Gaza of vital aid. According to Arif Husain, the chief economist at the United Nations World Food Program, “80% of the people [globally], or four out of five people, in famine or a catastrophic type of hunger are in Gaza right now.”

At the White House podium, Kirby said that he is “not aware of any kind of formal assessment being done by the United States government to analyze the compliance with international law by our partner Israel.” And given that Kirby has previously stated that the White House has “no red lines” when it comes to Israel’s conduct, that will remain the case. “We have not seen anything that would convince us that we need to take a different approach in terms of trying to help Israel defend itself,” he said.

But just as the US is fully aware that its partner Israel is committing genocide, the US is also aware that Israel’s professed “right to self-defense” against occupied territory has nothing to do with self-defense. Biden administration officials have admitted as much to one of their most reliable media mouthpiece since Oct. 7th, the New York Times. “The Americans say Israel’s forceful response… reflects the importance that it places on re-establishing deterrence against attacks from adversaries in the region,” the Times reported in November. “The Israeli military’s aura of power was shaken by the Oct. 7 attack, the officials say.”

To restore Israel’s shaken “aura of power,” therefore, the empathetic Americans have given Israel a free pass to slaughter more than 22,000 defenseless civilians, all while pushing the two million survivors into famine and desperation.

This imperative of “deterrence” – establishing a monopoly on violence against occupied Palestinians and regional neighbors – has guided Israeli strategy since its inception.

As a divisional military commander in 1967, future Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon voiced concern that Israel was losing its “deterrence capability,” which he defined as “our main weapon – the fear of us.”

In 1988, one month into the first Intifada, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin boasted that his policy of brutalizing demonstrating Palestinians was successfully employing Israel’s main weapon of fear. “The use of force, including beatings, undoubtedly has brought about the impact we wanted—strengthening the population’s fear of the Israel Defense Forces,” Rabin said.

When Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, a three-week long assault that killed 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, in the Gaza Strip, Israel wielded the same weapon. According the New York Times, Israeli officials were guided by a “larger concern”: that their “enemies are less afraid of it than they once were or should be.” Therefore, the Times reported, “Israeli leaders are calculating that a display of power in Gaza could fix that,” using slain Palestinians civilians to “re-establish Israeli deterrence.”

The same imperative applies to Israel’s current extermination campaign in Gaza. In calling for “a war of unprecedented magnitude” on Gaza, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett explained in October that “Israel’s future depends not on pity from the world, but on fear in the hearts of our enemies.”

In a new account of the Biden administration’s dealings with Israel, the New York Times again confirms that Israel seeks to preserve its monopoly on state terror. In Gaza, the Times explains, “strategically, Israel does not mind too much if the rest of the world thinks it is willing to go overboard with overwhelming force.” After all, Israel has spent more than a “half century… fostering the image of invincibility, an image shattered on Oct. 7. Israeli leaders want to reestablish the deterrence that was lost.”

Israel indeed need not mind that the world opposes its genocidal campaign when the world’s top superpower gives it free rein to “go overboard with overwhelming force” – the Times’ artful euphemism for state terror.

The White House continues to make this endorsement clear, even as it occasionally feigns concern about the civilian toll. According to the Times, “there is no serious discussion within the Biden administration about cutting Israel off or putting conditions on security aid.” The only “real debate” concerns “the language to use and how hard to push,” on marginal tactical issues. But no matter how many more civilians die, “no one inside is really pressing for a dramatic policy shift like suspending weapons supplies to Israel — if for no other reason than they understand the president is not willing to do so.”

Israel undoubtedly appreciates Biden’s unwillingness to stop the genocide. As Israel’s former US ambassador Michael Oren explains, Israel was “dependent on the United States,” after Oct. 7th. “And that meant they have a say in things.” The White House’s main contribution, Oren adds, is that “Biden has not used the two most obvious tools available to him to force Israel’s hand, namely the flow of U.S. arms to Israel and the U.S. veto at the U.N. Security Council that protects Israel from international sanctions.” According to White House insiders, while Biden and Netanyahu “are not truly friends,” both “understand each other’s politics and their mutual dependence at this point.”

Biden and Netanyahu’s mutual dependence only means that Israel must occasionally temper its savagery to meet US public relations needs. According to Times, Netanyahu “agreed to let humanitarian aid into Gaza as a condition for Mr. Biden visiting” Israel after Oct. 7th. In other words, Netanyahu let a trickle of humanitarian aid into the besieged Gaza death camp solely for the political benefit that a Biden visit could offer him. The Times offers this revelation in passing without further comment. In the view of the Times and its Biden administration sources, it is perfectly reasonable for Israel to block vital supplies to Gaza just to extract a gesture of US political support for its extermination campaign there.

In a recent opinion article for The Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu described his “three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza” as follows: “Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized.”

But Netanyahu’s vision of “peace” is predicated on exterminating his Palestinian neighbors in Gaza. Along with its bombing campaign and starvation siege, Israeli officials have openly called for ethnic cleansing. “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration,” Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich recently told Israeli Army Radio. “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different.” According to The Times of Israel, Netanyahu has informed cabinet members that: “Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it.”

Any serious “prerequisite for peace” therefore requires the inverse of Netanyahu’s strategy: the Israeli government must be demilitarized and Israeli society must be deradicalized. The same applies for the Biden administration, which is so radicalized that it openly flaunts its support for what South Africa calls “the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza,” all to help defend Israel’s “aura of power.”

Apocalypse Now: The Government’s Use of Controlled Chaos to Maintain Power

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

Figure One: Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers…throw them into darkness for a few hours and then you just sit back and watch the pattern. 

Figure Two: And this pattern is always the same? 

Figure One: With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find…and it’s themselves. And all we need do is sit back…and watch…and let them destroy themselves. — “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Twilight Zone

Will 2024 be the year the Deep State’s exercise in controlled chaos finally gives way to an apocalyptic dismantling of our constitutional republic, or what’s left of it?

All the signs seem to point in this direction.

For years now, the government has been pushing us to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.

This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing corruption, the government’s alienation from its populace, and an economy that has much of the population struggling to get by—has manifested itself in the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today.

Why is the Deep State engineering this societal madness? What’s in it for the government?

What is playing out before us is a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps the populace fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of standing united in defense of our freedoms.

It’s not conspiratorial.

It’s a power play.

Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone, understood the dynamics behind this power play.

In the Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Serling imagined a world in which the powers-that-be carry out a social experiment to see how long it would take before the members of a small American neighborhood, frightened by a sudden loss of electric power and caught up in fears of the unknown, will transform into an irrational mob and turn on each other.

It doesn’t take long at all.

Likewise, in Netflix’s apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind (produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s studio), unexplained crises lead to a technological blackout that leaves the populace disconnected, disoriented, isolated, suspicious, and under attack from mysterious ailments and each other.

As one of Leave the World’s characters speculates, the culprit behind the escalating catastrophes, which range from WiFi outages and mysterious health ailments to cities under siege from rogue forces, may be the result of a military campaign intended to destabilize a nation by forcing people to turn against each other.

It’s really not so far-flung a scenario when you consider some of the many ways the government already has the ability to manufacture crises in order to sow fear, fuel hysteria, destabilize the nation and institute martial law.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture health crises. Long before COVID-19 locked down the nation, the U.S. government was creating lethal viruses and unleashing them on an unsuspecting public.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture civil unrest and political upheaval. Since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI has been using agent provocateurs to infiltrate activist groups in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” them.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture economic instability. As the national debt continues to rise upwards of $34 trillion, with little attempt by federal agencies to curtail spending, it stands as the single-most pressing threat to the economy.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture environmental disasters. Deployed in 1947, Project Cirrus, an early precursor to HAARP, the government’s weather-altering agency, attempted to disable a hurricane as it was moving out to sea. Instead of weakening the storm, however, the government steered it straight into Georgia, resulting in millions of dollars in damaged properties.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture communications blackouts. Internet and cell phone kill switches enable the government to shut down communications at a moment’s notice. It’s a practice that has been used before in the U.S. In 2005, cell service was disabled in four major New York tunnels (reportedly to avert potential bomb detonations via cell phone). In 2009, those attending President Obama’s inauguration had their cell signals blocked (again, same rationale). And in 2011, San Francisco commuters had their cell phone signals shut down (this time, to thwart any possible protests over a police shooting of a homeless man).

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture terrorist attacks. Indeed, the FBI has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture propaganda aimed at mind control and psychological warfare. Not long ago, the Pentagon was compelled to order a sweeping review of clandestine U.S. psychological warfare operations (psy ops) conducted through social media platforms. The investigation came in response to reports suggesting that the U.S. military had been creating bogus personas with AI-generated profile pictures and fictitious media sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to manipulate social media users. Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare (or psy ops) can take many forms: mind control experiments, behavioral nudging, propaganda. In fact, the CIA spent nearly $20 million on its MKULTRA program, reportedly as a means of programming people to carry out assassinations and, to a lesser degree, inducing anxieties and erasing memories, before it was supposedly shut down.

We must never forget that the government no longer exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.

Rather, “we the people” are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Think about it: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, trap and control us.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms.

It’s telling that in Leave the World Behind, before disaster strikes, the main characters—on their way to a family vacation—are utterly oblivious, connected to their electronic devices and insulated from each other and the world around them. Adding to the disconnect, the family’s teen daughter, Rose, is fixated on binge-watching episodes of Friends, even as the world falls apart around them. As TV critic Jen Chaney explains, the sitcom’s presence in the story “underlines how human beings crave escapism at the expense of embracing the actual present, a different way of ‘leaving the world behind.’”

We’re in a similar escapist bubble, suffering from a “crisis of the now,” which keeps us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.

Professor Jacques Ellul studied this phenomenon of overwhelming news, short memories and the use of propaganda to advance hidden agendas. “One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones,” wrote Ellul.

“Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man’s capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandists, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks.”

Yet in addition to being distracted by our electronic devices and diverted by bread-and-circus entertainment spectacles, we are also being polarized by political theater, which aims to keep us divided and at war with each other.

This is the underlying cautionary tale of Leave the World Behind and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”: we are being manipulated by forces beyond our control.

A popular meme circulating a while back described it this way:

“If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government has never stopped shaking the jar.

News That the U.S. Regime Blocks From the Public

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

First of all, the U.S. regime blocks from the public the scientifically proven fact that America IS a regime — a dictatorship — instead of a democracy (just click onto the link there in order to get to the evidence on that fact).

Of course, all of the evidence that there was a U.S. coup in February 2014 in Ukraine, and that Ukraine has been controlled by the U.S. regime ever since, is likewise hidden from the public.

For example, there is no mention of this fact in an 18 December 2023 Washington Post ‘news’-report that headlined “Listening devices found in office of Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny”, though the fact that a power-struggle is now taking place within that U.S. colony (‘ally’) is crucially important to understanding what’s happening there; and, so, that WP ‘news’-story blocks truthful understanding of what is going on. (That ‘news’-story even fails to mention, or even hint, that what is going on is a power-struggle within Ukraine’s government; and, then, it is even so bold as to speculate that this spying upon Ukraine’s General Zaluzhny was done “possibly by Russian special services,” and the WP provided zero evidence for that extremely unlikely alternative explanation.)

Here is a 26-minute-long video discussion of these events which comes from a non-regime news-source and provides the necessary context in order to understand what’s actually happening to Ukraine’s government now — and it makes clear that a ferocious power-struggle is now going on within the government of Ukraine. Here is a different presentation — an article instead of a video — that likewise is from a non-Establishment news-site that’s not censored. Both the video and the article offer facts that the billionaires want the public not to know: that Ukraine’s government is now falling apart.

Similarly, the fact that (as I documented on 17 December 2023) “Polls Show Americans Wildly Deceived About Gaza War” is blocked from the public, by the U.S. regime (which censorship actually explains WHY “Polls Show Americans Wildly Deceived About Gaza War”).

What happens when a public are so extremely deceived, as this? How is it even POSSIBLE for such a nation to BE a democracy? IS it possible?

Americans were blatantly lied-to by our Government and by its ‘news’-media (both Republican and Democratic) in the lead-up to our invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2003, which ‘news’ not only failed to expose and contradict the regime’s lies about “Saddam’s WMD” which were provably lies even at the time they were being reported; and, yet, despite the Government’s and media’s having lied in order to produce popular support to perpetrate that atrocity, Americans continue, even to this day, to subscribe to these same lying ‘news’-media, a full twenty years after the fact. First, the lies were reported as-if they were instead truths; then when the falsehoods could no longer be denied to have been falsehoods, ‘intelligence errors’ were said to have caused the falsehoods; but never was the truth published: that both the Government and its ‘news’-media had intentionally deceived their public in order to carry-out the U.S. empire’s program as being the result of a ‘democracy’ — not as it actually was: the result of a dictatorship. It is a dictatorship by and for an ‘elite’ who consist of the richest 1% (and mainly by the richest 0.1%) of the richest 1% of the American public, an aristocracy of extreme wealth.

America’s aristocrats do not themselves and directly do the censoring-out of the key facts, but, instead, their corporations carefully hire (and, when dissatisfied, demote or fire) the employees and agents who do this dirty-work of deceiving the public, on their behalf. This is the way that the empire — and ANY empire — functions.

It has become not merely the norm but the rule within the U.S. empire, and it is yet another historical example of the solidly established fact that censorship is essential to any dictatorship and toxic to any democracy.

2023 – The Year the World Saw the U.S. Emperor as Naked… and Grotesque

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Seeing the naked truth is usually the first step before we can go on to realize the truth of beauty and decency. We might hope that the world is taking that first step.

By SCF Editorial

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

American President Joe Biden likes to talk about “inflexion points” when he is lecturing about world affairs and the supposed superiority of the United States. This year is indeed an inflexion point.

It was the year that the entire world saw the truly hideous and criminal nature of U.S. power.

Washington’s fuelling of the futile conflict in Ukraine and the despicable slaughter in Gaza is a wake-up call for the entire world. The United States stands barefaced and grotesque as the primary purveyor of war. There can be no doubt about that. For many it is shocking, scandalous and frightening.

Tragically, it seems, for the world, every year’s end is an occasion to witness and lament conflicts, wars and suffering over the preceding 12 months. Often the causes of wars and suffering are seemingly unfathomable.

However, this year seems to be unique. The year ends with a horrendous massacre in Gaza that is unprecedented and perpetrated by Israel with the full support of the United States. The scale of deliberate mass killing in Gaza makes it a genocide. The fact that this abomination is occurring at Christmas time when the world is supposed to celebrate the divine birth of Jesus Christ – the Prince of Peace – in the very place where he was born some 2,000 years ago makes the abomination all the more profane and damning.

What is particularly wretched is that the heinous destruction of children is happening in full view of the world. There is no remorse or pretence. It is full-blown premeditated murder done with cruelty and sickening impunity.

Virtually the whole world is horrified by the devastating, relentless violence and absolute violation of international law. The butchery by the Israeli regime cannot in any way be rationalized by the previous attack on Israel by Palestinian militants on October 7. Those killings by Hamas have been cynically used as a pretext for the subsequent and ongoing annihilation of Palestinian civilians.

This genocide could not happen without the crucial support of the United States for the Israeli regime. Financially, militarily and diplomatically, Washington is sponsoring the horror in Gaza as well as the Occupied West Bank.

This week saw the U.S. once again obstructing calls at the United Nations for a ceasefire and the urgent supply of humanitarian aid to more than two million people. The World Food Program has declared a catastrophic famine in the coastal enclave after more than 70 days of bombing and blockade by the Israeli regime. More than 20,000 people – mainly women and children – have been slaughtered with up to 7,000 more missing, presumably dead. Israeli troops are carrying out mass executions of terrified and traumatized human beings, according to UN rights monitors.

The United States is arming Israel to the hilt and enabling it. U.S. President Joe Biden has pointedly refused to join international demands for a ceasefire. The United Nations has voted by an overwhelming majority for a cessation of the violence. Washington has repeatedly rejected the world’s pleas because the Biden administration is obscenely amplifying Israeli lies and distortions. “Unwavering, unshakable support” is how the White House arrogantly boasts about it without a hint of shame that it is self-indicting.

Tens of thousands of tonnes of munitions have been flown to Israel to carry out “indiscriminate bombing” (Biden’s own admission). One-tonne bunker-buster bombs have been dropped deliberately on refugee camps and hospitals. And still, the Pentagon shamelessly refuses to impose any red lines on the use of its munitions.

This genocide has Israeli fingers on the triggers but it is ultimately an American-sponsored genocide. Based on Nuremberg principles, Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu would be both in the dock, accompanied by Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lloyd Austin and their counterparts in Tel Aviv.

If there were previous international doubts about Washington’s systematic criminality, the whole world knows for certain now.

Significantly, too, American citizens are also repulsed by the barbarity and the fact that their government is an accomplice in a historic crime against humanity. Polls show that Biden is one of the most unpopular presidents ever, and his culpability for the genocide in Gaza is a primary reason for the widespread disgust, especially among younger Americans.

As things stand, there is a fair chance that 81-year-old incumbent Democrat will lose the presidential election in 2024 – less than 11 months away. Not that any of the Republican contenders are qualitatively better. American politics are in a crisis of chaos.

But this is not just about Biden or other individual U.S. politicians. The United States government and much of the corporate-controlled media stand full square behind Israel’s crimes. That has always been the case since the Israeli state was formed in 1948 through Washington’s skulduggery at the newly established United Nations, together with the old colonial power, Britain – the author of the infamous and treacherous Balfour Declaration that instigated Zionist dispossession of the indigenous people in the Holy Land, or what London called its Palestinian Mandate.

Decades of duplicity and dissembling as a peace broker in the Middle East have been blown away by the horrendous massacre that has culminated at the end of 2023. Israel is carrying out a Final Solution that is comparable to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. The Zionist regime has cynically used the Holocaust against Jews as a cover for its genocide against Palestinians. And many decent Jews around the world, including Holocaust survivors, are rightly mortified by the depraved association exploited by the Zionist regime.

What is happening in Gaza may be seen as a shocking revelation for the world of historic proportions. It is an eye-opener of the violence and lawlessness that the U.S. emperor has been systematically engaged in since it became the dominant world power almost a century ago. Following the Second World War and the defeat of European fascism – largely by the Soviet Union – the United States has taken up the fascist mantle, albeit unspoken and disguised with pretensions claims of democratic virtue. No other nation has waged as many wars and conflicts over the past eight decades as the U.S. The death toll from American imperialism runs to tens of millions of people with victims on every continent.

The conflict that erupted in Ukraine in February 2022 is another manifestation of Washington’s imperialist machinations. That war is approaching its third year and shows no sign of ending because the U.S. continues to weaponize the Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, a regime that Washington and its European NATO allies installed in 2014 through a coup d’état. The hostilities in Ukraine – the biggest in Europe since the Second World War – were fomented by the United States as a proxy war to defeat Russia. The war could have been avoided if the U.S. and its European vassals had negotiated a diplomatic solution to NATO’s expansionist threat to Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin did not want a war in Ukraine. Respected American commentators like John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs and Scott Ritter have all confirmed with extensive analysis that Washington and its European allies are primarily responsible for creating the conflict – one that has cost the lives of as many as 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers and the displacement of 10 million civilians across Europe. Nearly $200 billion in Western public money has been wasted so far. Biden and the European Union want to donate another $100 billion to prolong this futile war.

America’s wars were always officially rationalized with some seeming plausible cause or mission. In the early decades of the Cold War, Washington claimed to be defending the “Free World” against Communist aggression in Korea, Vietnam, Africa and Latin America. When the Cold War supposedly ended in 1990-91 after the collapse of the Soviet Union due to its internal political problems, we then saw a spate of U.S. wars around the world against drugs, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and – most absurdly – defense of human rights.

The latest war in Ukraine is purportedly to defend democracy and sovereignty (of a Nazi Waffen SS-adulating regime in Kiev installed by the CIA!).

Nonetheless, the genocide in Gaza is the culmination, the final act. This is where all the history of U.S. crimes and fraudulence as a “noble exceptional democratic leader” finally comes unstuck.

It is an infernal climax for a global power, arguably the world’s first and last imperialist global hegemon. The whole of humanity can now see that all the American rhetoric and vanity is nothing but an ugly lie. The emperor is naked in all his crimes. The blood of children on his hands, his mouth drooling with lies. It was always so, but now universally evident.

One might ask, where do we go from here? Despite the abominable cruelty, suffering and misery, one can still hope that humanity will eventually find a way to live in peaceful coexistence. By respecting all those who abide by international law and basic moral precepts. Arguably, most of humanity is willing and capable of living in peace.

But to achieve that peace there must be no illusions and lies. There must be accountability and genuine atonement.

U.S. imperial power is damned. There’s no going back or reform. The capitalist economic system – evolved as oligarchic fascism and its two-party puppet show – driving imperialist barbarism must be called out and overturned. Biden is doomed, and Trump and so on are just more false prophets.

Seeing the naked truth is usually the first step before we can go on to realize the truth of beauty and decency. We might hope – for the sake of peace and ending much of the suffering – that the world is taking that first step.

Why is the media ignoring evidence of Israel’s own actions on 7 October?

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The BBC and others keep revisiting Hamas crimes that day, but fail to report on growing evidence that Israel killed its own citizens, often in grotesque fashion

By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

Barely a day has passed since the 7 October attack by Hamas when the western media has not revisited those events, often to reveal what it claims are new details of astonishing atrocities carried out by the Palestinian group.

These disclosures have served to sustain public indignation in the West, and kept Palestinian solidarity activists on the back foot. 

In turn, the outrage has smoothed Israel’s path as it has levelled vast swaths of Gaza; killed more than 18,700 Palestinians, most of them women and children; and denied the enclave’s population of 2.3 million access to food, water and fuel. 

Critically, it has also made it far easier for western governments to throw their weight behind Israel – and arm it – even as Israeli leaders have repeatedly engaged in genocidal talk and carried out ethnic cleansing operations.

Israel’s intense bombing campaigns have herded nearly two million Palestinians into a small section of Gaza, pressed up against its short border with Egypt, while starvation and fatal disease start to take their toll.

Many of the claims about 7 October have been shocking beyond belief, such as stories that Hamas beheaded 40 babies, baked another in an oven, carried out mass, systematic rapes, and cut a foetus from its mother’s womb.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken even described in graphic detail – and wholly falsely – a Hamas attack on an Israeli family: “The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.”

Little evidence

Atrocities were undoubtedly committed that day by Hamas and other gunmen in Israel, as groups like Human Rights Watch have been documenting.

They have continued to occur in Gaza every day since, not least through Israel’s continuing and relentless bombing of civilians, and through Hamas’ refusal to free the remaining Israeli hostages without an exchange of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. 

But in respect of the more shocking allegations against Hamas promoted by the western media – which have bolstered the case for Israel’s two-month rampage in Gaza – often little or no evidence has been forthcoming beyond claims made by Israeli officials and highly partisan and unreliable first responders.

Last week the BBC and others led again with stories of systematic Hamas mass rapes on 7 October. Efforts by the United Nations to investigate these claims are being obstructed by Israel.

Nonetheless, once more, coverage of the growing devastation in Gaza was sidelined. 

Media readiness to re-examine 7 October long after those events took place has operated within strict limits, however. Only claims that support Israel’s narrative about what happened that day are being aired. 

A growing body of evidence suggesting a far more complex reality, one that paints Israel’s own actions in a far more troubling light, is being ignored or suppressed.

This deeply dishonest approach from the western media indicates that they are not, as they declare, fearlessly pursuing the truth. Rather, they are regurgitating talking points being fed to them by Israel. 

That is not only unconscionable – particularly given Israel’s long track record of promoting lies, both small and large – but it violates all basic journalistic codes.

What did Hamas have to gain from expending so much energy and ammunition on horror-show theatrics rather than its plan to seize hostages?

For many western leaders and journalists, it appears no rational answer is needed. Hamas – and possibly all Palestinians – are simply barbarians for whom murdering Israelis, Jews or maybe all non-Muslims comes as second nature.

But for those whose minds are less bent by racist assumptions, an alternative picture of events has been steadily cohering, prompted by the testimonies of Israeli survivors and officials, as well as reporting from the Israeli media. Much of the evidence has been collected by the independent journalist Max Blumenthal and the Electronic Intifada website.

Because they contradict Israel’s official story, these testimonies have been studiously ignored by the western media. 

Burned alive

Surprisingly, the person whose statements have most confounded the official narrative is Mark Regev, the spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In an interview on MSNBC on 16 November, Regev noted that Israel had reduced the official death toll by 200 after its investigations had shown that the charred remains it had counted included not just Israelis but Hamas fighters too. The fighters, burned alive, had been too disfigured to easily identify.

Regev told MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan: “There were actually bodies that were so badly burned we thought they were ours. In the end, apparently, they were Hamas terrorists.”

There was an obvious problem with Regev’s disclosure that went unchallenged by the MSNBC interviewer, and has been ignored by the media since. How did so many Hamas fighters end up burned – and in exactly the same locations as Israelis, meaning their remains could not be identified separately for many weeks?

Did Hamas fighters carry out some strange ritual, self-immolating in cars and homes alongside their hostages? And if so, why?

There is a likely explanation, confirmed by an Israeli survivor of the 7 October events, as well as by a security guard, and a variety of military personnel. But these accounts starkly undermine the official narrative.

Shelled by Israel

Yasmin Porat, who fled the Nova festival and ended up hiding in Be’eri, was one of the few to survive that day. Her partner, Tal Katz, was killed. 

She has repeatedly explained to the Israeli media what happened. 

According to Porat’s account to Kan radio on 15 November, the Hamas fighters in Be’eri barricaded themselves into a house with a group of a dozen or so Israeli hostages – either planning to use them as human shields or as bargaining chips for an exit.

The Israeli military, however, was in no mood for bargaining. Porat escaped only because one of the Hamas fighters vacated the house early on, using her as a human shield, before giving himself up. 

Porat describes Israeli soldiers engaging in a four-hour firefight with the Hamas gunmen, despite the presence of Israeli civilians. But not all of the hostages were killed in the crossfire. Israel ended the clash with an Israeli tank firing two shells into the house. 

In Porat’s account, when she asked why this had been done, “they explained to me that it was to break the walls, in order to help purify the house”.

The only other survivor, Hadas Dagan, who was lying face down on the lawn in front of the house during the firefight, reported to Porat what happened after the two shells hit the house. Dagan saw both of their partners lying near her, killed by shrapnel from the explosions. 

A 12-year-old girl, Liel Hatsroni, who had been screaming inside the house throughout the firefight, also fell silent. 

Hatsroni and her aunt, Ayalan, were both incinerated. It took weeks to identify their bodies.

Notably, Liel Hatsroni’s charred remains have been one of the emotive pieces of evidence cited by Israel for accusing Hamas of killing and burning Israelis.

In reporting the deaths of Liel, her aunt, her twin brother and her grandfather, the Israeli news website Ynet stated that Hamas fighters “murdered them all. Afterwards, they set the house alight”.

Confused pilots

Porat’s testimony is far from the only source showing that Israel is likely to have been responsible for a significant proportion of the civilian deaths that day – and for the burned bodies. 

The security coordinator at Be’eri, Tuval Escapa, effectively confirmed Porat’s account to the Haaretz newspaper. He said: “Commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”

The burnt-out cars at the Nova festival and their occupants appear to have suffered a similar fate. Worried that Hamas gunmen were fleeing the area with hostages in cars, it seems, helicopter pilots were told to open fire, incinerating the cars and all the occupants.

There is a likely explanation for this. The Israeli army has long had a secret protocol – known as the Hannibal directive – in which soldiers are instructed to kill any captured comrades to avoid their being taken hostage. It is less clear how this directive applies to Israeli civilians, though it appears to have been used in the past. 

The goal is to prevent Israel from facing demands to release prisoners.

In at least one case, an Israeli military official, Col Nof Erez, has stated that “the Hannibal directive was apparently applied”. He called the Israeli air strikes on 7 October “a mass Hannibal”.

Haaretz has reported that police investigators concluded that “an IDF combat helicopter that arrived at the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants”.

In a video released by the Israeli military, Apache helicopters are shown randomly firing missiles at cars leaving the area, presumably on the assumption that they contained Hamas fighters trying to smuggle hostages back into Gaza.

The Ynet news website cited an Israeli air force assessment of its two dozen attack helicopters in the skies above the Nova festival: “It was very difficult to distinguish between terrorists and [Israeli] soldiers or civilians.” Nonetheless, pilots were instructed “to shoot at everything they see in the area of the fence” with Gaza.

“Only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow their attacks and carefully choose the targets,” the outlet reported.

Another Israeli publication, Mako, noted that “there was almost no intelligence to assist in making fateful decisions”, adding that the pilots “emptied the ‘belly of the helicopter’ in minutes, flew to re-arm and returned to the air, again and again”.

In another Mako report, the commander of an Apache unit is quoted stating: “Shooting at people in our territory – this is something I never thought I would do.” Another pilot recalled of the attack: “I find myself in a dilemma as to what to shoot at.” 

Secrets to the grave

Quite extraordinarily, in reporting the devastation of ravaged houses and burnt and crumpled cars, reporters have completely ignored the visual evidence staring them in the face, and simply amplified the official Israeli narrative.

There are plenty of more-than-obvious questions no one is asking – and for which no answers are ever likely to be forthcoming.

How did Hamas wreak such widescale and intense devastation when its fighters’ own videos show them mostly bearing light arms? 

Were those carrying basic RPGs capable of accurately tracking and hitting hundreds of fast-moving vehicles fleeing the festival – and doing so from ground level? 

Video footage from Hamas body-cams shows cars leaving the Nova festival with both gunmen and hostages inside. Why would Hamas risk incinerating its own people?

Given Hamas’ keenness to film its triumphs, why is there no footage of such actions? And why would Hamas waste its most prized ammunition on random attacks on cars rather than save it for the far more difficult task of attacking Israeli military bases?

Israel appears not to be interested in investigating the burnt-out cars and wrecked homes, possibly because it already knows the answers and fears that others may one day find out the truth too.

With religious organisations demanding that the cars be hurriedly buried to preserve the sanctity of the dead, the metal skeletons will take their secrets to the grave.

Grotesque fables

What seems certain from this growing body of evidence – and from the trail of visual clues – is that on 7 October many Israeli civilians were killed either in the crossfire of gun battles between Israel and Hamas or by Israeli military directives to stop Hamas fighters returning to Gaza and taking hostages with them. 

This week, an Israeli commentator in the Haaretz newspaper called the testimonies “earth-shattering”, and added: “Was the Hannibal directive applied to civilians? An investigation and public debate need to happen now, no matter how difficult they are.” 

But as the army has made clear, it has no intention to investigate when its whole genocidal campaign against Gaza is premised on lurid claims that appear to bear a limited relationship to reality. 

None of that justifies Hamas’ atrocities, especially the killing and taking hostage of civilians. But it does paint a very different picture of that day’s events.

Remember, Israel and its supporters have sought to compare the Hamas attack on 7 October with the Nazi Holocaust. They have concocted grotesque fables to present Palestinians as bloodthirsty savages deserving of any fate that befalls them. 

And those fables have served as the basis for western indulgence and sympathy for Israel as it has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. 

The truth is it would have been much harder for western governments to sell Israel’s rampage in Gaza to their publics had Hamas’ crimes been seen, sadly, as all too typical of modern militarised confrontations in which civilians become collateral damage. 

What western governments and institutions should have done is demand an independent investigation to clarify the extent of Hamas atrocities that day rather than echo Israeli officials who wanted an excuse to trash Gaza and drive its inhabitants into neighbouring Sinai.

The western media’s performance has been even more dismal – and dangerous. It professes to be a watchdog on power. But it has repeatedly amplified the Israeli occupier’s evidence-free claims, peddled libels against Palestinians with little or no scrutiny, and actively suppressed evidence challenging Israel’s official narrative.

For that reason alone, western journalists are entirely complicit in the crimes against humanity currently being perpetrated in Gaza – crimes being committed right now, not two months ago.

The Death of Israel

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Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception.

Birth of a New Nation – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized. It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted. 

But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy. 

Palestinian blood and suffering — 10 times the number of children have been killed in Gaza as in two years of war in Ukraine — will pave the road to Israel’s oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have their revenge. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will find its allies among other despotic regimes. Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining attribute, which is why the most retrograde white supremists in the U.S. and Europe, including philo-semites such as John Hagee, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently back Israel. The vaunted fight against anti-Semitism is a thinly disguised celebration of White Power.

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity. 

When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the Empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured. 

All Israel has left is escalating violence, including torture, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship and during Britain’s conflict in Northern Ireland. But in the long term it is suicidal.

“You might say that the battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” the British historian Alistair Horne observed, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”

The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas fighters into heroes in the Muslim world and the Global South. Israel may wipe out the Hamas leadership. But the past — and current — assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance. The siege and genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation of deeply traumatized and enraged young men and women whose families have been killed and whose communities have been obliterated. They are prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. Israel has sent the stock of its adversary into the stratosphere.

Israel was at war with itself before Oct. 7. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. Its religious bigots and fanatics, currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity since the attacks is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protestors from decrying the government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian “human animals,” when eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by Jewish apostates and traitors. The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured. A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability that is exploited by those seeking the destruction of civil society.

Israel was far down this road on Oct. 7 when it promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish settlements to bar applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” 

Many of Israel’s best educated and young have left the country to places like Canada, Australia and the U.K., with as many as one million moving to the United States. Even Germany has seen an influx of around 20,000 Israelis in the first two decades of this century. Around 470,000 Israelis have left the country since Oct. 7. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are attacked as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system is an indoctrination machine for the military.

The Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its occupation of the Palestinians, it would give rise to a corrupt Rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Israel,” he said, “would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”

The global mystique of the U.S., after two decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East and the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, is as contaminated as its Israeli ally. The Biden administration, in its fervor to unconditionally support Israel and appease the powerful Israel lobby, has bypassed the congressional review process with the Department of State to approve the transfer of 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition to Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale.” At the same time he has cynically called on Israel to minimize civilian casualties.

Israel has no intention of minimizing civilian casualties. It has already killed 18,800 Palestinians, 0.82 percent of the Gazan population — the equivalent of around 2.7 million Americans. Another 51,000 have been wounded. Half of Gaza’s population is starving, according to the U.N. All Palestinian institutions and services that sustain life — hospitals (only 11 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are still “partially functioning”), water treatment plants, power grids, sewer systems, housing, schools, government buildings, cultural centers, telecommunications systems, mosques, churches, U.N. food distribution points — have been destroyed. Israel has assassinated at least 80 Palestinian journalists alongside dozens of their family members and over 130 U.N. aid workers along with members of their families. Civilian casualties are the point. This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against the Palestinians. The objective is to kill or remove 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza. 

The shooting dead of three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces with their shirts off, waving a white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew is not only tragic, but a glimpse of Israel’s rules of engagement in Gaza. These rules are — kill anything that moves.

As the retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland, who formerly headed the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, “[T]he State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in…Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” he wrote. Major General Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.” 

Settler colonial states that endure, including the United States, exterminate through diseases and violence nearly the entirety of their indigenous populations. Infectious diseases brought by the colonizers to the Americas, such as smallpox, killed an estimated 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America. By 1600 less than a tenth of the original population remained. Israel cannot kill on this scale, with nearly 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation and another 9 million in the diaspora.

The Biden presidency, which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate, is tethered to Israel’s genocide. It will try to distance itself rhetorically, but at the same time it will funnel the billions of dollars of weapons demanded by Israel — including $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the $3.8 billion in annual aid — to “finish the job.” It is a full partner in Israel’s genocide project.

Israel is a pariah state. This was publically on display on Dec. 12 when 153 member states at the U.N. General Assembly voted for a ceasefire, with only 10 — including the U.S. and Israel — opposed and 23 abstaining. Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza means there will be no peace. There will be no two state solution. Apartheid and genocide will define Israel. This presages a long, long conflict, one the Jewish State cannot ultimately win.

‘Sacrificial Lamb’: US Troops in Syria and Iraq is a Colonial-Style Occupation Ready to Sacrifice Their Lives for Israel in a Future Middle East Conflict

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

The Yemen News Agency (SABA) reported that “A U.S. military official has revealed that U.S. and coalition forces have been subjected to at least 97 attacks in Iraq and Syria since Oct. 17 until Wednesday.”  A US official confirmed “that the attacks came at 45 attacks in Iraq, in addition to 52 attacks in Syria.”  In a statement provided by the Islamic Resistance, it said that “the targeting of the US occupation base in al-Shadadi comes in response to the crimes of the enemy in the Gaza Strip.”  The Iraqis and Syrians are legitimately angry that Israel is getting away with genocide in Gaza and that the US government still has troops occupying their lands.  Since the war in Iraq began, the US and its allies including Israel has brought more death and destruction to the Middle East and Africa including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Palestine. 

They see US troops as occupiers just like the Israelis who have been occupying Palestinian land since 1948, so why is the mainstream media surprised that there has been an increase of attacks since the October 7th incident between Hamas and Israel.  The US government has violated international laws and even their own constitution by allowing US troops to remain in Syria. In Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter“ All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” The US government’s own constitution states that “The Congress shall have Power . . .] To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.”  Since Washington’s political establishment is beholden to Israel’s agenda, it decided to illegally occupy Syria when war criminal and former US President, Barack Obama declared that Syrian President, Bashar al Assad had lost his legitimacy and that he “must go.” Since then, the US congress still has not declared war, so why are US troops still in Syria? 

Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad never invited US troops to help fight the “Islamic State” known as ISIS, besides it was the US and Israel who funded and armed the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations in the first place.  So, fighting so-called “terrorism” was not the intended goal. 

The US is in Syria to play a significant part of a future war against the Syrian and Iraqi governments and the rest of the Middle East including the resistance on behalf of Israel.  The other reason that US troops are still in Syria is what the former US President Donald Trump had admitted publicly, to “Take the Oil.”    

There are about 900 US troops, including an unspecified number of private contractors and US Special Forces who have been deployed to Syria’s northeastern oil fields including Al-Tanf in the south blocking the Syrian government’s energy supplies. 

The pretext of fighting terrorism is pure propaganda.  The US-NATO Alliance, Israel, and to an extent, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, all played a significant role against Syria that began in 2011 that killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians thus turning millions more into refugees in the process.  It is internationally known that it was mainly the Russian military, Iranian-backed militias who played a major role in the defeat of ISIS.  One of the main reasons that the US is still in Syria is ‘Regime Change’ since it was Washington’s bi-partisan bureaucrats who allocated billions of dollars’ worth of arms to ISIS since the war began. It is well known that members of ISIS are mostly veterans from Al Qaeda and other linked terrorist organizations from Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones from around the world.

US Troops in Syria and Iraq are Open Targets, Seen as Illegitimate

The corporate mainstream media reports daily on US occupation troops in Syria and Iraq being open targets by various resistance groups since Israel declared war on Hamas.  Al Mayadeen recently had a report based on numerous attacks on US bases in Syria, ‘Iraqi Resistance targets three US occupation bases in Syria ‘reported on several attacks on US bases in Syria and “confirmed that the US occupation military base in the Conoco gas field north of Deir Ezzor in Syria was targeted twice in less than an hour.”  It was also confirmed that “US forces at the al-Shadadi base in Syria was also targeted” and that the Islamic Resistance in Iraq announced in a statement that it targeted the Tanf occupation base and another occupation base in the Rukban camp using drones and achieved direct hits.” The resistance said that “the drones directly hit their targets in the two American bases.”  

The attacks have become a regular occurrence since Israel declared war on Gaza which means war on everyone who is Palestinian.  “Hashem al-Kindi, the head of the Naba Strategic Studies Group, told Al Mayadeen that “the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has carried out more than 70 strikes on American bases, and the escalation is ongoing” adding that “the Resistance in Iraq “used new weapons with long ranges, and it will also escalate by targeting Israel,” confirming that it “can push the confrontation to ranges unknown to the enemy.” 

The Iraqi resistance considers “US occupation bases in Syria and Iraq as legitimate targets” since the US supports Israel unconditionally including its genocide of the Palestinian people.  “On a similar note, the Pentagon said in a statement that the rate of attacks carried out against US personnel in Iraq and Syria has increased by 45% in the past three weeks.” 

FOX News, CNN Ignores Illegal US Occupation and Promotes a War Against Iran

The US mainstream media reports daily on how US troops are being targeted by “Iranian proxies.”  A report by the Zionist-run FOX News, ‘US military bases in Iraq, Syria attacked again, bringing total to at least 90 since Oct. 17’ blames Iran who is Washington’s and Israel’s main adversary in the Middle East, “Iran holds considerable sway in Iraq, and a coalition of Iran-backed groups brought Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani to power in October 2022. At the same time, there are some 2,000 U.S. troops in Iraq under an agreement with Baghdad, mainly to counter the militant Islamic State group.”  In another article by FOX News from May 26, 2023, ‘Iran regime close to getting nuclear bomb, but what’s the holdup?’, that “Iran has moved dangerously close to enriching weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb, but the regime has not yet crossed the critical threshold of declaring it has built an atomic weapon.”  

Fox News reached out to Lisa Daftari, an Iran expert and editor-in-chief of the Foreign Desk and said that “If there is reason to believe that there are a number of retardants that have put a pause in their weapons development, they’d relate back to targeted attacks by the U.S. and Israel, who clearly are very much concerned about stopping the mullahs” she continued “Israel has reportedly conducted at least two dozen targeted operations on Iran’s regime in the last 15 or so years, including drone attacks, cyberattacks, if you recall Stuxnet and assassinations of key players in Iran’s nuclear program.” 

Jason Brodsky, policy director of the U.S.-based United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), was also interviewed by FOX News and said that “I think Iran’s leadership to date has calculated the costs of doing so would outweigh the benefits at this juncture — mainly a destructive attack which targets its entire nuclear infrastructure,” he said that Iran’s leadership is emboldened and will cross international red lines, “But my concern is that calculus risks changing as the U.S. and Europe’s non-response to Iran’s nuclear escalation over the last two years — for example 60% enrichment and production of uranium metal — has emboldened Tehran’s leadership to continue testing international red lines.”  The article mentions that “The United States military and Israel Defense Forces launched a joint drill, Juniper Falcon, in February. The IDF’s website stated, “The exercise tested collective U.S.-Israel readiness and strengthened the interoperability between the two militaries,” the IDF stated on its website after the drill.” 

An article from CNN published on December 8th follows the same line, ‘Iran-backed militia vows more attacks after US Embassy in Iraq comes under fire’ said that “On Friday morning local time, a multi-mortar attack was launched against the US Embassy compound in Iraq, a US official told CNN. There were no injuries or infrastructure damage reported. Hours later, US and coalition forces came under attack three more times – once in Syria, and twice in Iraq – in a mix of rocket and drone attacks.”  The article mentions a man by the name of Abu Alaa al-Walae who is the commander of the Iraqi Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada and said that he “did not claim responsibility for the attacks but said later Friday that they “reject talk about stopping or easing operations as long as Zionist crimes continue in Gaza and the American occupation continues in Iraq.” 

Syrian and Iraqi resistance groups do not need permission from Iran to attack US bases who are illegally occupying their territories to supposedly fight terrorists, it’s all a lie.  They know that the US troops who are in Syria and Iraq are there to counter Israel’s enemies once a major war breaks out.  Stealing the oil and controlling the political landscape is a bonus for Washington and its Big Oil conglomerates.

Washington is Sacrificing their Own Troops at the Behest of Israel

The bottom line is that Washington is preparing for a major war in the Middle East to save Israel by sacrificing its own US troops.  The Jerusalem Post published what US Air Force Third Air Force Commander Lt. Gen. Richard Clark had said in 2018:     

Washington and Israel have signed an agreement which would see the US come to assist Israel with missile defense in times of war and, according to Haimovitch, “I am sure once the order comes we will find here US troops on the ground to be part of our deployment and team to defend the State of Israel.”

And those US troops who would be deployed to Israel, are prepared to die for the Jewish state, Clark said, “We are ready to commit to the defense of Israel and anytime we get involved in a kinetic fight there is always the risk that there will be casualties. But we accept that – as every conflict we train for and enter, there is always that possibility,” he said

The US occupation in Syria and Iraq is about assisting Israel’s geopolitical agenda and we must include the US strategic goal to control the abundant natural resources and the political landscape of the Middle East.

If the US and Israel were to be victorious in a world war which is highly unlikely, governments in the Middle East and Africa will be forced to accept Western and Israeli dominance indefinitely, if not, those who want their country to be free and sovereign will be subject to regime change or will face threats of being bombed back to the stone age just like what they are doing to Gaza. The obvious is right in front of our eyes.

US Seeks Plausible Deniability as it Lights Middle East on Fire

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By Brian Berletic

Source: New Eastern Outlook

A surprising change of tone came from the Pentagon in early December. After weeks of devastating Israeli military operations inside Gaza, the US Secretary of Defense implored Israel to demonstrate restraint and concern for the civilian population.

The Hill in its early December 2023 article, “Israel risks ‘strategic defeat’ if civilians aren’t protected, Pentagon chief says,” would report:

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Israel risks a “strategic defeat” if it does not work to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza amid its war on militant group Hamas in the region. “The center of gravity is the civilian population and if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat…”

The article also noted:

The Biden administration has issued caution that a campaign in southern Gaza must be carried out more precisely than Israel did in the first leg of the war.

After a century of American military aggression killing millions (mostly civilians) around the globe, everywhere from Southeast Asia to North Africa, across the Middle East and deep into Central Asia, is Washington finally finding a sense of humanity?

No.

All while US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin attempted to convince the world that Washington cares about the Palestinian civilian population, the US continues flooding the Israeli arsenal with US-made weapons, enabling the campaign of indiscriminate brutality.

Bloomberg in its November 2023 article, “US Is Quietly Sending Israel More Ammunition, Missiles,” would report:

The Pentagon has quietly ramped up military aid to Israel, delivering on requests that include more laser-guided missiles for its Apache gunship fleet, as well as 155mm shells, night-vision devices, bunker-buster munitions and new army vehicles, according to an internal Defense Department list. 

The weapons pipeline to Israel is extending beyond the well-publicized provision of Iron Dome interceptors and Boeing Co. smart bombs. It continues even as Biden administration officials increasingly caution Israel about trying to avoid civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip.

Israel could not continue its military operations and the subsequent destruction of Gaza’s civilian population without this US military aid. Israel also continues to enjoy US political protection within the halls of the United Nations.

Washington cannot even say it didn’t know its weapons would be used by Israel to carry out this indiscriminate brutality because Israeli military representatives openly declared they would before their military operations into Gaza even began.

The Guardian in their October 10, 2023, article, “‘Emphasis is on damage, not accuracy’: ground offensive into Gaza seems imminent,” admitted:

IDF spokesperson R Adm Daniel Hagari made the startling admission that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had already been dropped on the tiny strip, adding that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy…”

Why then does Washington want the world to believe it has growing concerns over the nature of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, and more specifically, concerns regarding the brutality Washington is admitting is being used against the civilian population?

Washington’s History of Pleading Peace While Pursuing War 

Washington wants plausible deniability. The US has for years followed a familiar pattern of attempting to covertly provoke nations and regions into conflict while publicly appearing to pursue reconciliation and peace.

For example, the US for years rhetorically supported the Minsk agreements regarding reconciliation within Ukraine, all while deliberately building up Ukraine’s military capabilities to empower and encourage the widening violence in eastern Ukraine and the eventual provocation of Russia to become directly involved in the conflict.

Likewise, the US officially maintains a “One China” policy in regards to the status of Taiwan, recognizing it as an integral part of Chinese territory, yet unofficially Washington has done everything in its power to undermine the policy and provoke war with China over its efforts to support separatism in Taipei.

Officially, the US supports the two-state solution regarding Israel and Palestine. Unofficially, and sometimes quite openly, the US has supported the most extreme elements within both Israel and among Palestinians to ensure no such peace agreement is ever possible.

Israel as the Eager Provocateur 

The intention by Washington to use Israel as a proxy and provocateur within the Middle East is well documented within US government and corporate-funded policy think tank papers. One such paper, published by the Brookings Institution in 2009 titled, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran,” focuses on containing Iran politically, militarily, and economically. It lays out options for disarming Iran and for overthrowing its government through US-sponsored sedition or US military intervention. Beyond the US and groups the paper sought to use as proxies within Iran, the paper also cited Israel as an eager regional proxy that could attack Iran, triggering a regional war that the US could then appear “reluctant” to join. The goal, of course, is to appear that the US sought peace, being left with no choice but war, all while a US-led war was the objective to begin with.

The paper notes:

…it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.)

It also says:

“In a similar vein, any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.”

Here, the paper admits Iran does not seek war, but could be provoked into one anyway, and notes that the US, or Israel, could then carry out military aggression against Iran having convinced the world they did so reluctantly.

Israel factors so heavily in US plans to provoke war with Iran, it was given its own chapter in the paper. Chapter 5 of the paper is titled, “Leave it to Bibib: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike,” and notes how a war started by Israel could then be cited as a pretext for the US itself to join in afterwards, and most importantly, appear to do so “reluctantly.”

Thus, as Israel continues destroying Gaza, targeting the civilian population deliberately, knowingly triggering unrest across the region which in turn is placing pressure on Arab governments as well as Iran’s to respond, the stage is being set for the possibility of wider conflict.

As Israel attacks, invades, and erases Gaza, it is also targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon. Both the US and Israel have already carried out strikes in Syria. The goal is to trigger a conflict the US and Israel can portray as an act of aggression against either or both to then expand military operations across the whole region.

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin posing as concerned for the Palestinian population all while arming Israel to continue indiscriminately brutalizing them, is being done to convince the world the US is pleading peace all while in actuality pursuing wider war.

The US used the proxy war in Ukraine to reorder Europe and reassert hegemony over the continent, rolling back European cooperation with both Russia and China. The US likely seeks to repeat a similar process in the Middle East where relations are improving within the region between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and between Syria and the rest of the Arab World. The region also collectively continues moving closer with Russia and China as well as toward multipolarism.

Only time will tell if the region continues successfully moving out from under generations of Western hegemony – first under the British Empire and now under the US – or if the US will successfully trigger regional conflict that can divide, destroy, and disrupt this process, just as it has in Europe.