Lies About Jews, Israel, and the War in Gaza

Posted on March 12, 2024 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

News-reports are so full of lies and misrepresentations about Jews, Israel, and the war in Gaza, as to be commonly propaganda that conveys falsehoods more than truths.

Two news-reports from Reuters on February 28th will be cited here as examples of such propaganda:

“After threats and abuse, British lawmakers question their safety over Gaza” opened:

It was 10 minutes of shouted accusations of being a “genocide enabler” and having “blood on your hands” that made a British lawmaker fear for his safety over his decision to voice support for Israel in its war with Hamas.

Almost touching noses with his accuser before walking away and warning he would call the police, the opposition Labour Party member said the incident in a town in his constituency was just the latest of several that made him change his behaviour.

He now makes sure he sits near the door on public transport and limits meetings with the public.

“It feels like it could just need one spark to flip from someone giving you tuppence (criticism) in the street to escalating to actual violence,” the lawmaker said.

After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that sparked the war in Gaza, more than 10 British politicians spoken to by Reuters said the abuse directed at them had become more intense. At least one cited this as a factor in deciding not to seek a new term in parliament in an election later this year.

Its underlying presumption (such as in “the Oct. 7 Hamas attack … sparked the war in Gaza,” which is intended to communicate the false impression that this war started on 7 October 2023 and so the aggressor in this war is the Gazans not the Israelis — and NOT at Israel’s founding in 1948 so that the aggressor is the Israelis, and the Palestinians are only reacting against that long-ongoing aggression) is that to be against Israel and to be for Palestinians, is to be anti-Semitic, but many Jews — including Albert Einstein and other prominent ones — have called Israel and its current leadership “racists” and “fascists” against the vast majority of the population in the area that in 1948 became “Israel”, which was originally called “Palestine” not “Israel” and was overwhelmingly Muslim not Jewish before Britain gave this land to the few Jews there and started Israel in 1948. Immediately, the racist-fascist Jews there, self-called “Zionists” as believers in the Jewish Scripture’s (Christian Old Testament’s) myth that ‘God’ gave it to them and ordered them to exterminate the then-current residents, carried out their biblically commanded ethnic cleansing war to clear the land for incoming Jews from European Christianity’s German-led Holocaust. For examples, Deuteronomy 7:1-2, 7:16 and 20:15 -18, have ‘God’ in that Scripture say that when the Israelites enter the promised land they are to exterminate the Canaanites, Hittites, Girgishites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, living there. So, Israel was founded by the far-right subsequently Likud Party leaders of Israel, such as Yitzak Shamir and Menachem Begin, who led the extermination of entire Arab villages in the Nakba or “Catastrophe” as it’s called by Palestinians — the Palestinians’ equivalent to what for Jews the Holocaust had been. The Jews will never forget the Holocaust, just as the Palestinians will never forget the Nakba — but whereas the Nakba has continued with varying degrees of intensity ever since 1948 (culminating now in the Israel-America extermination of Gazans), the Holocaust ended in 1945.

It all goes back to 1948, the creation of Israel. Here’s from a lengthy article “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs” in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper on 6 July 2019, about how Israel’s Government cleansed, eliminated, thousands of key documents, which remain unknown, but some scraps of which survived, such as, “And then Ben-Gurion lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the villages] so they won’t have anywhere to return to. That is, all the Arab villages.”

On 24 August 2014, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network headlined “Over 300 Survivors and Descendants of Survivors and Victims of the Nazi Genocide Condemn Israel’s Assault on Gaza” and presented their letter to the world, signed by (at that time) 327 of them:

As Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide we unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine. We further condemn the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world.

We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch. In Israel, politicians and pundits in The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post have called openly for genocide of Palestinians, and right-wing Israelis are adopting Neo-Nazi insignia.

Furthermore, we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water.

We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!

Consequently: many Jews are anti-Israel even though they profess themselves to be still Jews. Only bigots equate pro-Israel with being not anti-Semitic, and equate anti-Israel as being anti-Semitic (or anti-Jews). There is, in reality, no equation whatsoever between anti-Israel and anti-Jew. Only propaganda claims or implies any such false equation.

Albert Einstein and 26 other prominent Jewish progressives co-signed a letter to the editor of the New York Times published 4 December 1948, condemning Menachem Begin by name as a “fascist,” and saying, of his work (and of his unnamed colleague in that work, Itzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected Prime Ministers of Israel, and whose follower Netanyahu today leads Israel), that:

A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 [1948], terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants (240 men, women, and children) and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.

‘News’-reports such as that one from Reuters, which imply that every Jew is a Zionist (supports Israel), and that only anti-Semites condemn Israel, are arrant lies. They deceive for political purposes. That is propaganda. It forced the progressive leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn out of power and out of politics in Britain. So: these are extremely potent lies. This Reuters ‘news’-report opens with a large photo of marchers in Britain holding up the star of David and the flags of Israel and Britain, and “Never Again Is Now” signs, suggesting that to oppose Israel’s genocide of Gazans is to be anti-Semitic — is to be bigoted against Jews. This is mass-mind-control by Reuters, to make Brits think that they ought to side with the Israelis against the Gazans, and to therefore support Israel’s genocide of Gazans (as, somehow, being a justifiable response to the 7 October 2023 Hamas-Gazan attack against Israelis).

A subtler lie in it is that the war in Gaza started on 7 October 2023, instead of in 1948. The reality is that the 7 October 2023 event was the victims’ crying out, to the entire world, to call public attention to their living in the world’s largest (and constantly under siege by their prison-guards) open-air prison, Gaza, that they’re born into and permanently sentenced to, by Israel. It’s not where they want to live, no more than any prison anywhere is. But, after 7 October 2023, Israel decided to eliminate the Gazans and labelled this Israel-America genocide of Gazans partnership a ‘war against Hamas’ — which is yet another lie that the media publish without question, without shame, and purely as propaganda from and about Israel.

Also on February 28th, Reuters headlined “Michigan’s strong ‘uncommitted’ vote shows Israel impact on Biden support” and opened “DEARBORN, Michigan/WASHINGTON, Feb 28 (Reuters) – Joe Biden’s campaign and top Democratic officials vowed to double down on efforts to win over voters as the U.S. president aims to solve conflicts in the Middle East, after Michigan registered a stronger-than-anticipated protest vote over his support of Israel.” It included this line from Biden’s campaign — with no question (far less rebuttal) being presented about it: “Biden’s campaign will continue to ‘make our case in the state – to both uncommitted voters and the entire Michigan constituency,’ a senior campaign official said as the results were tallied. ‘The President will continue to work for peace in the Middle East.’” But actually, as Politico had headlined on February 13th, “US won’t punish Israel for Rafah op that doesn’t protect civilians” and it said that the Biden Administration has informed the Netanyahu Administration that if it decides that it has no practicable way to expel the Gazans to foreign lands (which Israel’s Government — assisted by America’s Government — has been trying to do ever since October 16th) then the U.S. Government will not punish Israel if it simply slaughters all of them. “No reprimand plans are in the works, meaning Israeli forces could enter the city and harm [Politico’s euphemism for slaughter] civilians without facing American consequences [meaning punishment]. More than half of the enclave’s 2.3 million population has fled to Rafah.” So: that would entail slaughtering 1.15 million Gazans there. The Politico article made no mention of what would be done with the 1.15 million survivors, the Gazans who haven’t yet gotten to Raffah, but if Netanyahu would halt the extermination program at that point, a rationale for discontinuing the operation there would be hard if not impossible to imagine — at least inasmuch as half of Gazans would then already have been slaughtered by Israel.

And this slaughter of Gazans is being done with U.S.-made weapons and military intelligence, and so it is actually a joint U.S. and Israeli operation. As Israel’s Jewish News Service reported on November 27th:

Israel’s dependence on the United States was stated bluntly by retired IDF Maj. General Yitzhak Brick in an interview earlier this week.

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

From 7 October 2023 up through 23 December 2023, the U.S. Government shipped to Israel 10,000 tons of U.S. weaponry and ammunition; and Biden has pressed harder on Congress to authorize an additional $14 billion of such assistance to be donated by U.S. taxpayers, to Israel, in order to complete what it’s doing to Gaza — whatever that may turn out to be — than he has ever pressed Congress to approve anything (except donating even more weapons and intelligence to Ukraine too). And, then, on January29th, YNET News, the most popular internet portal in Israel, headlined “Global ammunition shortage forces Israel to limit bombings”, and they reported that “Over 25,000 tons of weapons have been delivered to Israel via approximately 280 aircraft and 40 ships from the U.S. since the onset of the conflict.” So, obviously, Biden, rather than being “The President [who] will continue to work for peace in the Middle East,” is instead actually an equal partner along with Netanyahu, in carrying out this Israel-U.S.-planned genocide. How many of Reuters’s readers know this fact? Furthermore, that Reuters article likewise stated (without pointing out the absurd lie) that “the U.S. president aims to solve conflicts in the Middle East.” How can that be? Perhaps he intends to ship yet more billions of dollars worth of U.S.-made taxpayer-donated weapons to Israel in order to enforce that ‘peace’ — the ‘peace’ of the graveyard. So sayeth Reuters, at any rate. And believeth its readers? But that is the mainstream ‘news’-‘reporting’, and this certainly is NOT. What is the reality? And why does the opposite side hide it? And who are paying them to hide it?

Which people actually control a ‘democracy’: the people who fund political propaganda, or the people whose votes are swayed by it? If a country is controlled by contending factions between the billionaires — such as Democratic ones versus Republican ones — is that a democracy? If it’s instead an aristocracy, is there any way to overthrow and replace it by a democracy, other than to have an authentic revolution?

“WHO OWNS THE WORLD?” A SMALL GROUP OF BIG MONEY

Posted on March 11, 2024 by Reid Mukai

By Peter Koenig

Source: The 4th Media

“Who Owns the World” is the title of an extraordinary documentary, describing how Big-Big Money controls not only every aspect of your life, but has a stranglehold on every government, the political UN body, as well as every UN agency, and all industries and services of this globe.

These largest investors are BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street.

These same investment groups also control over 90% of the world’s major media. Even Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is majority owned by BlackRock / Vanguard. It is therefore no miracle that hardly any news penetrates the walls of secrecy about these major shareholders of every aspect of human life and life-related activities and businesses.

It is a monopoly that can literally not be opposed by traditional means. They have also invented the “rules-based order” — overruling every international and national law at their will. They know no limits, no ethics and adhere to no human or human rights standard. POWER is them.

The two most powerful investors and investment managers are BlackRock and Vanguard. They are closely linked, to the point where their management is largely inter-changeable. Vanguard is BlackRock’s largest shareholder, meaning that they control BlackRock.

Though Vanguard is not transparent about its own shareholders, Vanguard is owned by the richest families on earth. Vanguard has been created to hide their investments and money transactions.

Through non-profit organizations, like the Rockefeller Foundation, Gates Foundation, Rothschild Foundation, JPMorgan Foundation, Clinton Foundation, Bush Foundation, Albert DuPont Charity Trust – and so on, billions of “donation” money is transferred – tax-free – to Vanguard, a shield for their potentially criminal transactions and funding.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest funder of WHO. It also controls GAVI, the vaxx-alliance – and is therefore the most influential organization over human health – and death.

These same people, alias Foundations, also own Blackrock – which is why BlackRock and Vanguard are interchangeable or can act as one, if it is to their advantage.

According to Bloomberg, by 2028, the two will own / manage some 20 trillion dollars – about a fifth of the current world GDP.

If joined by State Street, as is often the case, the world’s fourth largest investment manager, you may add another US$ 3 to US$ 4 trillion of managed assets. Sometimes they are joined by Berkshire Hathaway, City Bank, Bank of America, Chase & Co, Goldman Sachs… adding another few trillion of managed assets to their pie.

However, these second or third ranking financial institutions, in turn, are also owned by BlackRock and Vanguard. One might call it an omnipotent vicious circle from which it is almost impossible to escape.

See this one-hour Rumble-video for more details and network of ownership that literally rules the worldhttps://rumble.com/vn7lf5-monopoly-who-owns-the-world-must-see.html .

With that power they can leverage every country in the world, every institution, and every corporation – as they are the largest shareholders of the industrial, military, service and infrastructure investment machine that makes the world turn.

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Please allow just a little detour to Gaza, where the Zionist racist massacre of an entire population has been going on as today for 141 days. Some 30,000 Palestinian have been killed; 70% children and women. Children and women are the prime targets, because children are the next generation and women are the bearer of the next generation – they must be eliminated by the supremacist Zionists.

The horror and inhumanity have no words, cannot be appropriately described with our human vocabulary: Bombs have liquidated an entire family. The mutilated body of a seven-year-old girl, Sidra, is hanging from a wall. Hind, a six-year-old girl, was mercilessly killed by Israeli armed forces, as she was begging for help from an ambulance, surrounded by the cadavers of her killed family. As illustrated by “Hildebrandt”, a Peruvian, renowned non-mainstream news media (23 February 2024).

Tell me, please, are these all-powerful financial conglomerates not powerful enough to stop this massacre at once? They hold entire nations hostage to do their bidding, but they cannot stop Israel, the Zionists behind the State of Israel, from their merciless atrocious killing, murder, massacre of an entire population?

Are they powerful enough to preventing the United States, their Anglosaxon and European puppet governments from halting their money, weapon, and “moral” support of the Zionist onslaught? – Or is their power behind the US veto breaking the UN Security Council’s quest for a Ceasefire in Gaza?

In any case, by not using their power to stop the Zionist war against Palestine, to stop any war, any killing in the world, are they not complicit in the mass-murders in Gaza and around the world by not ending them?

They could. Why are they not doing it?

They are drunk with Power – and as we know, power and money have been derailing humanity for a long time – but now the extent of shame and barbarism has reached a level, where our civilization risks to disappear; and where there is no way to escape – not the traditional ways.

BlackRock / Vanguard are also major shareholders in the secondary and tertiary asset management and banking institutions. So, they control the managed investments of, say, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, City, Chase, Morgan-Stanley – you name it.

If you invest, for example, in a food conglomerate, like Nestlé, Unilever, PepsiCo, most have no idea that they invest in BlackRock / Vanguard, major shareholders of these food corporations, and by doing so, they also invest in the worldwide military industrial (killing) complex which is too is controlled by BlackRock / Vanguard.

BlackRock / Vanguard / State Street are also the powers behind the power – most often invisible. For example, BlackRock has close links with many Central Banks, especially with the Federal Reserve.

They lend money to the FED – and are a principal adviser to the FED and most likely to other central banks, including they advise on computer systems they use and which connects them.

BlackRock, is by far the largest influencer and donor, or “partner”, as they prefer to call themselves, therefore, also “commander”, of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the entire UN system, its political arm, as well as its sub-agencies – and by proxy, also the World Health Organization (WHO) – and not to forget GAVI, the Vaccination Association, physically located just next door to WHO – and by further extension, Big-Pharma, the pharma industry.

Together with their faithful think-alike executer of WEF’s mandates, Mr. Klaus Schwab, as well as the multibillionaires, such as the Gates, Rockefellers, Soros’ of this world, one can easily deduct – they – BlackRock and Co. – control our lives – health and death.

Through their world-domineering ownership of all that moves, shakes, and produces, they are globalists, eugenists and “green-agenda” eccentrics – pushing the climate change lie – come hell or high water. Costs in money and lives do not matter.

Were these financial monsters behind the covid-plandemic idea? What a question!

Their agenda – eugenist, destruction of current economic structures to rebuild according to this small elite’s criteria – is clearly spelled out by the Club of Rome’s (CoR) “Limits to Growth” (1972), and the follow-on Report “The First Global Revolution” (1991) which claims early on in its text that annihilation of the current system is a MUST, to rebuild, bringing the fundamental changes in favor of the elite – with eugenics and absolute control always in the fore.

Is the CoR at the service of the global financial empire? After all, the same powers are behind both.

Not by coincidence, the Rockefeller Group is the inventor of the Club of Rome, today comfortably seated, tax free and with full diplomatic immunity, in Switzerland.

The fake Covid plandemic is the first building block for this all-destructive mechanism, the “corner stone’ of destruction, so to speak. The lockdowns, the inhuman, totally invalid PCR tests, the fear-mongering – the invented covid-death rates – were very effective in manipulating people, but also in laying the groundwork for the overall annihilation of our society and even civilization, in shifting assets from the bottom to the top – and in abolishing the world economy that carries our civilization.

Once the people were shivering from fear, the deadly “vaxxes” were introduced. Lo and behold, by now, despite ever-louder opposition – about 5.7 billion people – out of the world’s 8 billion (more than 70%) have received at least one jab – and most got 2 or 3 injections.

These poisonous injections are in the human bodies and may most likely react sooner or later. According to Mike Yeadon, former VP and Chief scientist of Pfizer – over the next three to ten years, the death-toll will increase probably drastically, but most people will not link it to the “vaxxes” — either because they have been indoctrinated that deaths are due to long or late covid, or because they suffer from and live in cognitive dissonance.

Big Money to own and control it all, must drastically reduce world population. This is propagated by the WEF, and as of this day by the CoR (see this https://www.globalresearch.ca/author-limits-growth-promotes-genocide-86-world-population/5818133 .

WEF’s Chairman, Klaus Schwab’s top advisor, Israeli Professor, Yuval Noah Harari, asks openly what to do with the “useless eaters” when their “raison d’être” has ben replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Giving them a base salary for (temporary) survival, getting them hooked on violent video games to prep them for the future, and to let them gradually “disappear”?
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In addition to severe human injuries and death, the vaxxes also reduce male and female fertility, cause miscarriages, highly aggressive and lethal turbo-cancers, and if course, myocardities and sudden deaths.

Overall excess mortality in the west is as high as 20% in some countries. In the UK, where excess deaths are alarming the common public, they have started modifying statistics to erase surplus mortality.

In parallel, mostly funded by the Soros Open Society Foundation, the Woke movement is ravaging the western world, with promotion of sex changes – and the infamous “multi-letter” agenda – LGBTQIA+ = Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual. WOW! – This is promoted in schools, in some countries with strict bans of parents’ interference in their children’s, as young as 11 years, wishes for sex-change.

This agenda reduces birth rates further.

Endless wars – create chaos, confusion, desperation and, of course, also deaths.

The Money Masters have succeeded in creating the first building blocks. WHO may soon become the most powerful health (life and death) tyranny on earth, if the infamous Pandemic Treaty and the harshly modified International Health Regulations (IHR) are approved at the upcoming World Health Assembly (WHA) in May 2024.

Knowing who is in possession and control of WHO and the WHA, the world is called upon to exit WHO. Internationally renowned Dr Peter McCullough testified in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, about the social and economic consequences of covid vaxxes, as well as the potentially impending WHO tyranny – concluding with a call on the EU and the US – and the rest of the world to exit WHO.

See this https://www.unitedaustraliaparty.org.au/video/dr-peter-mccullough-testified-in-the-european-parliament-in-strasbourg-chaired-by-christine-anderson/ .

To retake the world, by We the People, leaving BlackRock, Vanguard & Co. behind, exiting the UN system and WHO – would be the next step. Most important, and possibly the only way defeating this money power, is withdrawing from the current societal system and start afresh.

Small communal economies – as far away as possible from any digitization – with a dynamic cooperation among themselves, evolving naturally and on a higher spiritual level than the low vibrating one which is typical for our material world and the present strive for ever more material goods.

“Only when we are divided, can the elite retain its power over us.”

“The Wound is the Place, where the Light enters You”. By the great Sufi poet, Rumi

Their weapons are blackmail and fear.

WE MUST NOT FEAR.

We are the 99%.

We can do it.

And we MUST do it for survival of humanity.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020) Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Gaza: Genocide by Starving

Posted on March 8, 2024 by Reid Mukai

By Jamal Kanj

Source: Global Research

Imagine you are at home, with your wife and children. It’s dinner time before you put your three children to sleep. The room is cold, the propane cooking cylinder empty, no food, no electricity, or drinking water.

Your youngest child, Manar, cries, “I’m hungry. We haven’t had food for the last four days.” She rubs her dry bluish hands together, “Uhf-uh-ih-ih-uhhf, … I’m cold.” The words escape her chattering teeth.

You, let’s say your name is Nader, look at Manar’s feeble body, her pale skin has lost color. The once bouncy curly black hair had tangled and knotted like a cluttered eagle nest, unwashed for more than a month.

Ahmad asks his wife, “Noora, did you search the cabinets and closets for the dry food?”

Noora took a deep breath, “More than ten times, our kitchen is as empty as our stomachs.” She looked at the cold floor in despair, her face twisted into a sorrowful mask.

“Press this against Manar’s stomach,” he said in a low voice and handed Noora a bag full of sand. “It’ll help her sleep, again.”

It wasn’t the first night they put their children to sleep with a sack of sand on their stomach. This has become a common method for Gazans to suppress hunger. It was after midnight when Manar stopped crying, only then Nader and Noora had a chance to close their eyes, not knowing how more miserable the next day would be.

Unsure of the time, Nader jumps from the floor mattress to a strong pounding at the door. Loud pandemonium and commotion outside, he looks at his watch, 3:45 am. His first thought, the Israeli military ordering residents to vacate the building before blowing it up, as they had done dynamiting blocks of buildings in his neighborhood a week earlier. Noora and the children awake. Manar crawls to the corner with her siblings, wraps herself around her mother.

Nader leaped to the door to find his neighbor brother, Ali, on the other side panting for air.

“Come Nader … come, let’s go.” He stopped to catch a breath after running up the stairs. “Flour trucks.” His chest ballooned and deflated several times, “trucks arriving at the Nabulsi roundabout.” Ali moved sideways to make way for neighbors clumping down the stairs.

The children’s faces lit up. Their eyes like laser light, at Nader, wide open, waiting for his response.

“There were Israeli tanks at the roundabout. They ordered me home yesterday and didn’t allow me to bring water,” Nader said.

“The UN is distributing the flour. The Israelis allowed the trucks in.” Ali looked down the stairs, “Let’s go before it’s too late.” He urged Nader.

Nader turns his head toward his children, Manar’s laser focused eyes turn into a vacant stare, open mouth. He clenched his teeth, pulled the winter coat from the hook, closed the door behind and followed his older brother Ali, down to the street.

The above is not a work of imagination, but a reality of life endured by thousands of individuals in Gaza for more than 150 days. It is exactly what happened in the Flour Massacre on February 29 to thousands of starving fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters in north Gaza. Where Israel used aid trucks to lure, murder and injure almost 900 hungry civilians. The blood of the starving, young and old, man and woman, drenched the flour sacks meant to feed hungry children.

Israel’s Gaza Solution: Let Palestinians Die Before the World. Bombing Hospitals and UN Institutions. Nobody Will Stop Israel

In its efforts to render life in Gaza uninhabitable, Israel has not only targeted essential infrastructures such as hospitals, universities, water treatment plants, and roads but has also directed attacks towards civilian police. This deliberate targeting of police aimed to exacerbate the suffering and provoke a collapse of law and order. Despite warnings from the U.S. against targeting civilian police who maintained public safety and managed the orderly distribution of food, Israel dismissed such concerns, seeking to create lawlessness and chaotic conditions to worsen starvation and justify its actions as in the case of the Flour Massacre.

In covering the story, the Gaza absent Western media became willing outlets to market Israel disinformation cloaked in euphemisms to obscure the grim reality on the ground. Outlets like CNN along with other print media and the BBC for example referred to the death of 112 and the injuring of 760 hungry human beings as “Gaza food aid carnage” or “a chaotic encounter with Israeli troops,” blaming the death on stampedes and truck drivers. They then broadcasted, unquestionably, Israeli-manipulated videos showing the product of the Israeli designed chaos and claiming the hungry crowd posed a threat to its soldiers.

This wasn’t different from an earlier misinformation propagated by CNN Wolf Blitzer, when hosting Mark Regev, the Israeli version of the German Joseph Goebbels, in his show, The Situation Room, on November 15, 2023 where he started the show by saying “Happening now, the Israeli military says it uncovered Hamas weapons and a command center inside Gaza’s largest hospital.” Needless to say, it was all false. In spite of Regev’s abject disregard to basic truth, the Israeli Goebbels was brought again to CNN this week to market the flour truck massacre spinning lies, unchallenged, and claiming no Israeli involvement in the gunfire and blaming the shooting on “Palestinian armed groups.”

Unarguably, CNN, much like most of the American and European news outlets, have become a platform for disinformation with Israeli embedded hosts such as Blitzer who honed his journalistic prowess as a pro-Israel propogandist working for America Israel Public Affairs Committee, serving as an editor for its Near East Report in the mid 1970s.

It wasn’t until Al Jazeera aired a video showing the “chaotic” scene amidst heavy gunfire around the food truck, along with footage revealing bullet injuries in the upper bodies of victims, when some U.S. outlets, such as the New York Times, who espouses a faux professionalism, couldn’t continue ignoring the flagrant Israeli lies. The paper revisited the Israeli drone video that was made available to the compliant U.S. media outlets. After careful review the newspaper concluded that the footage had been altered with “multiple clips spliced together.” The edits conveniently erased the events just before the crowd dispersed in all directions, evading bullets, scrambling over trucks, seeking cover behind vehicles and structures, and falling to the ground from direct gunshot wounds.

It is important to point out, the targeting of aid trucks at the Nabulsi roundabout is neither the first nor the last of Israeli attempts to obstruct the delivery of food aid in Gaza. Approximately three weeks prior, on February 6, Israel fired upon a crowd gathering at the Kuwaiti roundabout, while naval gunboats targeted UNRWA humanitarian food trucks. More recently, or three days following the Flour Massacre, on March 3rd, Israel once again opened fire on a hungry crowd awaiting food trucks at the Kuwaiti roundabout, resulting in the deaths and injuries of several civilians.

The submissive prostration of Western media, providing unchallenged platforms to Israeli PR spokespersons, is unprecedented in the so called “free world.” By agreeing to Israeli directives restricting media access into Gaza, Western mainstream media has no presence to report from the theater. Gone AWOL, the media has been transformed into an active participant in whitewashing Israeli genocide where the Gaza coverage has been regulated, directly and indirectly, by an Israeli hasbara manifested by the managed evidence and narrative of the Flour Massacre. Or to paraphrase the original Goebbels, Western mainstream media has become a “keyboard on which Israel plays.”

In fact, Western, and particularly American genuflection to Israel extends beyond the media. Case in point, almost two weeks ago, the White House National Security Communications Advisor, John Kirby, disparaged his own U.S. army, praising the Israeli forces for taking actions to protect civilians, stating that he was “not sure our own (American) military would take” similar actions.

When asked about the murdering of the hungry civilians in Gaza, Kirby’s boss, Joe Biden pled ignorance stating “There’s two competing versions of what happened. I don’t have an answer yet.”

In avoiding answering the question, the U.S. president accorded equal credence to the Israeli disinformation machine. In keeping up with his standing, Biden is consistent in his anti-Palestinian bias hyperbolizing Israeli victimhood, while downplaying Israeli crimes against Palestinians under the pretext of not having enough information.

This week and after five months of pleading for Israel to allow more aid trucks into Gaza, Biden joined other inept Arab dictators in an inconsequential gesture dropping 38,000 meals to 2,4 million in Gaza. A stunt by the incompetent leaders which is aimed more at mollifying international outrage against Israel than a genuine desire to alleviate the mounting starvation levels in Gaza.

The made for TV theatrical air drop of mere 38,000 meals was like a grain of sand on the beach of Gaza. The parachuted meals were equivalent to providing a minuscule 0.005 of the daily meal for every Gazans, or the equivalent of offering 5 loaves of bread per 1000 individuals. This is a farce and rings hollow from an Administration that plans to send Israel almost $15 billion, in addition to the weapons and political cover that empower Israel to carry out the very siege the air drops purportedly intend to mitigate. The starvation in Gaza is not due to a drought or a natural disaster, but an Israeli made catastrophe enabled by Biden, Western governments, and blessed by Arab dictators.

As you read this, remember Nader, who joined his brother Ali to feed his hungry child, Manar. He would have been most likely one of those killed or injured in the February 29, Flour Massacre. His children, if alive, are still hungry and cold at home, watching through a broken window (U.S.) aid parcels parachuting from the skies alongside the roar of an American-made jet delivering 2000-pound bombs over their heads.

Manar, if she wasn’t among the more than 15 children who tragically perished this week from malnutrition and dehydration, will always recall how the Israeli-made starvation drove her father to death.

Why does Israel destroy hospitals?

Posted on March 5, 2024 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Larudee

Source: Dissident Voice

Hospitals are prime strategic targets of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The Nasser hospital in Rafah is the only major one still standing, along with a handful of smaller ones. All the rest have been destroyed, along with many of the patients and medical staff. Many have been slaughtered, while the helpless have been left to die, like the premature babies in their incubators, simply abandoned to the inevitable. Doctors and other personnel have been taken captive for an unknown length of time. Even the Nasser hospital is no longer functioning, having been taken over by Israeli soldiers, and all its patients and medical staff expelled. Its existence as a structure is a mere technicality. It is no longer a hospital, and it wouldn’t be the first to be exploded into yet another pile of rubble.

These attacks are not random, nor are the ones against bakeries, schools, and infrastructure, including water, sewage and electricity. Although more than half of all the buildings in Gaza are now rubble or unusable, the ratio for hospitals is much higher. Why?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims that his objective is to destroy Hamas, but he is in fact destroying everything but Hamas. He knows perfectly well that Hamas is not using the hospitals, nor any of the other places laid waste by the Israeli military, armed with inexhaustible US munitions. To the extent that he even bothers to use Hamas as an excuse, few believe him anymore.

If he wants to find Hamas, he knows where they are: deep underground, in hundreds of miles of their armored and fortified hi-tech tunnels. The 10,000 tons of bombs dropped on Gaza thus far have not even been aimed at Hamas or the tunnels. Israel is casualty averse, and they know that fighting Hamas leads to casualties that will hurt Netanyahu’s popularity, already in the cellar. This is why their target has been the entire population of Gaza. Massive killing of Palestinian civilians, more than 2/3 of them women and children, make it look like he is accomplishing something.

This helps to explain the hospitals. If there is no place to treat the wounded and the sick, more Palestinians die. If your real target is the entire Palestinian population, this is an effective way to do it. Destroying hospitals has a multiplier effect upon the death toll. Furthermore, it is mainly the hospitals that compile the statistics of Palestinian dead and wounded for the Gaza Ministry of Health. If there are no hospitals, more people will die anonymously, reducing the evidence of genocide.

The multiplier effect of hospitals on the death toll also works for water, sewage, shelter, fuel, and of course food. The removal of such facilities and provisions causes deaths that tend not to be included as war dead. If Netanyahu’s objective is to decrease – or entirely eliminate – the inhabitants of Gaza, these are much more effective ways to do it. Granted, Zyklon-B might be even more effective, but there are limits to what even Netanyahu might be willing to use.

This is not speculation. Netanyahu and most of his government have publicly declared their intentions. Quotes and videos of their genocidal purpose have been used by South Africa’s attorneys to win an injunction from the International Court of Justice. Netanyahu is running out of options. Hamas presented its ceasefire/peace proposal, which (as predicted) is unacceptable to Israel, because it fails to advance Israel’s plans for either territorial expansion or ethnic cleansing, or both.

Israel is losing the combat war in Gaza, thanks to the brilliant Hamas strategy of 1) making itself impervious to air bombardment, 2) an ability to manufacture its own weapons locally, designed specifically for Israeli systems, and 3) impeccable training of fighters capable of acting in small units, with intimate knowledge of both their enemy and Israeli weapons systems, as well as their own. Israel is not prepared to take significant casualties among its own population, and apparently its 5000-6000 mercenaries are not prepared to go on suicide missions.

That leads, once again, to genocide as the only strategy. That’s why Netanyahu is planning to up his game by destroying Rafah city, the tiny pen into which he has herded most of the population, swelling its numbers some 400%, most of them in tents or under tarpaulins providing flimsy protection from the rain and cold.

An Israeli attack will probably yield a lot more casualties per day than heretofore, to which Netanyahu can point with pride among his dwindling followers. But the US can’t appear to condone such actions, so its humanitarian-minded president has asked his Israeli counterpart to provide an evacuation plan for the civilians. Netanyahu has agreed, and when asked where they can go, he points to newly bombed out expanses in what used to be the neighboring city of Khan Younis. Now his friend, Genocide Joe, can rest easy. ICJ? No problem. Israel still has time to submit its progress report to the Court on ending its “plausibly genocidal” actions.

The West’s duplicitous stance and hypocrisy draw condemnation in the world

Posted on March 4, 2024 by Reid Mukai

By Viktor Mikhin

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Many politicians around the world strongly condemn not only Israel’s inhumane policy in the Gaza Strip, when peaceful Palestinians are being slaughtered, but also the hypocrisy, duplicity, pharisaism and arrogance of the West. In one case, the current worthless rulers of Europe condemn the defence of their citizens in Donbass by Russia, which is complying with all international rules of engagement. On the other, when Israel started to destroy civilians in the Gaza Strip (which according to international laws is considered a policy of genocide), the West welcomes and applauds, defending its protégé in the Middle East in every possible way.

For example, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan called the West’s position on Gaza, which differs from its position on Ukraine, “the height of hypocrisy.” “What happened in Gaza, has caused the West and the Europeans to lose all their reputation, all their accumulated credits (of trust). They have squandered all their political capital in the eyes of humanity, especially in the eyes of our generations,” Turkish daily Hürriyet quoted Hakan Fidan as saying. According to him, it will not be easy for the West to regain the lost trust. “It will not be easy for them to regain it. Unlike their stance on Ukraine and Russia, their stance on Gaza is the height of hypocrisy. They cannot talk about principles, virtue and morality. They ignore them completely. I see that all this is preparing the ground for a huge geostrategic rupture,” the minister said.

A huge swath of the Global South sees and criticises the double standards that guide the West’s actions in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine, as the New York Times (NYT) reluctantly reported through gritted teeth. The publication notes that for the past 20 months, US authorities have actively criticised Moscow for its special military operation in Ukraine, but now that the IDF has carried out a bloodbath in Gaza, full American support for Israel risks creating new and complex obstacles in Washington’s efforts to win over world public opinion.

The war in the Middle East, the piece says, is driving a wedge between the West and leading nations of the Global South such as Brazil and Indonesia. In addition, the West’s unconscionable double standard in defence of Israelis has been sharply criticised by leaders of the Arab world. The fact that the West treats Ukraine as a special case because it is in Europe, against the backdrop of Middle East escalation, has only increased discontent in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There, the impression is that the West is more concerned about refugees from Ukraine than about those affected by the conflicts in Arab countries. The publication has to admit that the West has failed to convince countries such as India and Turkey to support sanctions against Russia. Given the bloody events in the Gaza Strip, “Western efforts to widen the front against Russia are unlikely to be successful in the near future“.

Earlier, American businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who was seeking the nomination as the country’s presidential candidate from the Republican Party (he ended his campaign and supported Donald Trump’s candidacy in the presidential election), said that the United States should seek an early settlement of the conflict in Ukraine, which would provide for the transition of Russian-speaking regions into Russia. And he is not alone in the US, where questions are increasingly being asked as to why it is the Americans who should bear the brunt of the financial burden and supply vast quantities of weapons to the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev.

Irish MEP Mick Wallace has rightly stated that the Ukrainian conflict is still going on because of the unwillingness of the United States to end it. He expressed the same opinion with regard to the situation in the Gaza Strip. The world media also noted that the International Criminal Court, at the behest of the United States, has ignored many years of genocide in Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and therefore the ICC is “unfair in its choice of topics to explore” and has turned into “an unscrupulous legal body of the West.”

Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya has accused the United States of its position preventing the Security Council from adopting resolutions aimed at stopping the violence in the Gaza Strip, RIA Novosti reported. “It is regrettable that under these circumstances the UN Security Council has so far failed to adopt a single resolution demanding a halt to the violence because of the position of one delegation, the United States, which is blocking all efforts and initiatives to stop the bloodshed,” the diplomat said. He noted that this gave Israel carte blanche to further destroy the Palestinians.

The huge difference in the West’s attitude to the Palestinian-Israeli and Ukrainian conflicts points to hypocritical double standards, one of the goals of which is to interpret international law exactly as it suits the US. In this case, the fate of the Palestinian population is much less interesting to the hardened Western officials in terms of “domestic political points.” How many times have Western delegations requested UN Security Council meetings on Ukraine? The answer is at least twice a month, while how many times the said delegations have requested Security Council meetings on the Middle East issue – zero. Apparently, in this case comments are unnecessary, the conclusion is already on the surface. The West’s double standards “in all their glory” were also observed in the situation with the migration crisis in the EU. While Ukrainian refugees have been given all sorts of benefits, refugees from Africa and the Middle East are being “kept in camps in inhumane conditions”.

The State Department has after all decided to explain the difference in its approaches to the situation in Gaza and Ukraine in the way that yesterday’s hegemon considers, rather than in accordance with the generally accepted laws of international law. Thus, the deputy head of the State Department’s press service, Vedant Patel, responded to a journalist’s question about the difference in the approaches of the US authorities to the situation in the Gaza Strip and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The official said that Washington sees no grounds to accuse Israel of genocide of Palestinians, and “one should be very careful when making such statements.” At the same time, when Patel was asked why US President Joe Biden “very quickly” called the events in Ukraine “genocide” in 2022, the State Department official could not give more specific explanations. He only noted that “such definitions must be made with a careful consideration of the law and the facts”, without specifying which facts he had in mind. He simply did not have a reasonable answer, and in the current circumstances he did not dare to say that this was Washington’s wish and favourable.

Incidentally, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said earlier that international law must be respected in all conflicts. This is a correct observation, but according to the Secretary General’s personal interpretation, the conflicts in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine have differences. And he personally believes that Israel, which destroys peaceful Palestinians, strictly observes international law, while Russia, which fights against the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev only on the battlefields, violates this law. Apparently, in Stoltenberg’s “enlightened” opinion, Russia will respect international law only when it, like Israel, destroys the peaceful population of our brother nation. A strange opinion worthy of a schizophrenic from a psychiatric hospital. On this occasion, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the statement by the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, about the “senselessness of humanitarian aid supplies to the Gaza Strip” if hostilities continue there an apologetic of transhumanism. She asked her colleague whether he also considered it pointless to provide medical assistance and love “someone who will die tomorrow”. There was, of course, no reply.

The accusations against the Russian side on the subject of “indiscriminate strikes” against Ukrainian cities can best be assessed by comparing “two realities” – the situation in Ukraine and in the Gaza Strip. In this regard, we can recommend that opponents go to the Internet and familiarise themselves with Ukrainian news or watch local TV channels. On Ukrainian websites one can easily find a large number of reports on club and restaurant life in such cities as Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk and others. Ukrainian state institutions and other municipal buildings are functioning normally almost everywhere, transport continues to operate, schools and hospitals are open. This situation can be observed almost two years after Russia launched a special operation aimed at protecting the population of Donbas from the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv. All of this shows, as has been repeatedly confirmed by independent observers, that the Russian Armed Forces are conducting exclusively precision strikes against military facilities and infrastructure related to military capabilities. This policy is in sharp contrast to the crimes against humanity committed by the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, which is deliberately firing Western-made missiles at civilians in Donbas. And there are numerous facts and evidence to this effect, which at the very least would make for a new Nuremberg process.

The current leaders of the West should look at what their lackey Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip, which for three months now has sought to raze the territory and destroy the Palestinians living there. Not only have hospitals and schools been burned to the ground, but entire towns have been destroyed, and the death toll, including a large number of children, is appalling. And all this is happening before the eyes of the world in the 21st century, to the hooting and applause of the Biden administration and the current rulers of Europe, who have finally lost shame, conscience and simple human compassion. “Comparing these two realities, ask yourself a question: how many times have you condemned the methodical annihilation of peaceful Palestinians?” – noted Russia’s UN representative Nebenzya, when asked by Western representatives whether they had ever supported calls for a ceasefire in the Middle East conflict, whether they had condemned Israel’s anti-human crimes. The answer would be only negative. Not only has the West done nothing to stop Israel’s current massacre of Palestinian civilians, it has encouraged them even more by supplying the latest lethal weapons, financially pumping in huge sums of money and defending them on the international stage. Suffice it to say that the US representative at the UN has twice vetoed Security Council resolutions to stop the deadly slaughter in the Gaza Strip, unleashing the Israeli military for even more atrocious crimes, rightly assessed by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

In the current circumstances, when the former hegemon has lost its power and authority, it has to resort more and more to hypocrisy and double standards to somehow camouflage its bankrupt policy. But no matter how hard the West, led by the U.S., tries, they will no longer be able to fundamentally influence events in the world. And the events in Ukraine, where Russia is successfully conducting a special military operation to protect the Russian population, and the bloody events in the Gaza Strip are the best evidence of this.

Arab regimes collude with Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza

Posted on February 23, 2024 by Reid Mukai

By By Jean Shaoul

Source: Defend Democracy Press

As Israel’s fascist government prepares to launch a massive ground invasion to take over Rafah city, discussions are now under way about setting up 15 campsites—each with around 25,000 tents—across the southwestern part of the Gaza Strip, to house the million-plus Palestinians that have taken refuge in the city.

These tent cities are to be funded by the United States and Arab despots and operated by the butcher of Cairo, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Egypt and other Arab regimes are in effect providing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the ability to claim he has assured the “safe passage” he said he would provide so that the planned ground invasion could take place. As Netanyahu again declared as Israel mounted a massive aerial bombardment of the city, his real goal is “total victory”—which means killing as many Palestinians as possible and driving the rest into the desert.

That such proposals could even be discussed with the Arab regimes confirms that their collusion with Israel’s genocidal offensive against Gaza, from day one, has now become direct participation in its ethnic cleansing through a second Nakba.

Israel has already killed at least 29,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, buried thousands more under the rubble, and displaced approximately 86 percent of Gaza’s population—1.7 million out of 2.3 million people. The majority are now sheltering in Rafah, close to the border with Egypt where they face famine, lack access to clean water and medical care and the imminent prospect of extermination.

Egypt: Israel’s border guard

Egypt, the most populous Arab state with 104 million people and the key frontline state, has for decades played a criminal role as a direct accomplice in Israel’s suppression of the Palestinians and its de facto border guard.

Since signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Cairo has extended its ties with Tel Aviv, importing natural gas from Israel for refining and re-export, coordinating security over their shared border and the Gaza Strip, maintaining Israel’s blockade on Gaza, and strictly limiting the movement of people and goods across its borders after Hamas took control in 2007. Egypt stood by when Israel launched murderous assaults on the besieged enclave in 2008-9, 2012, 2014, the 2018-29 Great March of Return and 2021.

When the Gaza offensive started in October, Israel’s “wartime proposal” to push Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians into Egypt’s Sinai desert was met with a furious response from Cairo. However, this was not out of any concern for the Palestinians but because of what El-Sisi called “Gaza’s existential threat to Egypt’s national security.” If a million Gazans crossed the border, he warned, this would lead to a resurgence of Islamist “militancy” in Sinai.

When El-Sisi refers to a resurgence of Islamist militancy, he means a renewal of the mass popular opposition known as the 25 January Revolution, which in 2011, at the height of the “Arab Spring”, ended Mubarak’s personal rule. On July 3, 2013, the junta was able to resume power in a military coup thanks to the political bankruptcy of the bourgeois liberal opposition and their pseudo-left appendages in the Revolutionary Socialists, who provided leading personnel for the anti-Islamist Tamarod movement through which the military and its billionaire backers prepared the political ground for the coup. El-Sisi has brutally crushed all dissent ever since and the last thing he wants is millions of displaced and angry Palestinians to act as the focus for broader political opposition to his regime, to US imperialism and all its allies in the region.

The army has already fortified the concrete border wall with Gaza, installing barbed wire to prevent the Palestinians from crossing into the Sinai and deploying troops and 40 tanks along the border.

El-Sisi, speaking at a press conference on October 18 with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Cairo, argued that Israel could move Gaza’s Palestinians to Israel’s Negev desert instead of Sinai “until Israel is capable of defeating Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Afterwards, Palestinians could return to their homeland.”

Reports are circulating, citing the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights, that Egypt is constructing an eight-square-mile walled enclosure in northern Sinai to host Palestinians forcibly expelled from Gaza, though this is described as a “contingency plan” in the event Palestinians succeed in breaching the reinforced border.

There is a ‘security zone’ under construction in the Sinai Peninsula to ethnically cleanse at least some of the Palestinians from Gaza.

UK and US-backed ethnic cleansing in front of the whole word.

Crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, there is no line to these fucks. https://t.co/fLK4b0NDi2 pic.twitter.com/QELGSv6xXQ
— Tiberius (@ecomarxi) February 14, 2024

But wherever the de facto concentration camps being discussed are eventually established, Egypt and the other Arab regimes involved are giving a greenlight for mass murder in Rafah. On Sunday, with breathtaking cynicism Egyptian officials, responding to these latest proposals for tent cities, told Israel that they would not object to a military operation in Rafah as long as it is conducted without harming Palestinian civilians. Army Radio also said that Egypt had emphatically denied reports it might pullout of its 1979 Camp David treaty if Israel attacked Rafah.

All the oil-rich despots are working openly with Israel to enable it to pursue its genocidal war, even deepening their ties to ensure Israel can continue the war without hindrance. They cover their treachery with crocodile tears over the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, support for South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and appeals for an urgent meeting of the toothless UN Security Council that is subject to Washington’s veto “to prevent Israel from causing an imminent humanitarian disaster for which everyone who supports the aggression is responsible.”

Jordan: Repressing Palestinian protests

Jordan has played the most open role in repressing popular opposition to Israel. It shares a long border with Israel and is home to over 2.2 million registered Palestinian refugees driven there by wars between 1947 and 1967, and their descendants. Around half of its 11 million population are of Palestinian descent, of whom around two thirds have been granted citizenship, but they face discrimination while nearly 400,000 still live in 10 refugee camps. Jordan has maintained a “cold peace” with Israel following a US Clinton administration-brokered normalization treaty in 1994.

The Jordanian government has banned protests along its border with the West Bank and clamped down on protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), it has “arrested or harassed” over 1,000 pro-Palestine protesters who have called for the Jordanian government to take action against Israel. Lama Fakih, HRW’s Middle East director, said “Jordanian authorities are trampling the right to free expression and assembly to tamp down Gaza-related activism.”

Last week, the authorities arrested activist, Khaled al-Natour, after he shared posts calling for the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, as part of the government’s heightened crackdown on pro-Palestine activists, under a controversial new cybercrime law. According to Amnesty International, the vaguely worded law, passed in August, gives the government huge latitude to crack down on free speech and has been used to arrest and charge at least six political activists for their “social media posts expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments or criticizing the authorities’ policies towards Israel and advocating for public strikes and protests.”

Arab regimes keeping Israel’s economy running

Jordan, along with several other Arab states, is also playing a central role in keeping Israel’s economy functioning during the war.

According to Israel’s television Channel 13, the United Arab Emirates-based PureTrans FZCO and Israel-based Trucknet, which provides logistics technology for the Arab shipping companies, are transporting vital goods, including food, plastics, chemicals and electronic devices and components, between Dubai’s Jebel Ali Port and Haifa port, via roads passing through Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

The route was established prior to the Gaza offensive. In June, Miri Regev, Israel’s Minister of Transportation and Road Safety, announced plans to develop the route, stating on X/Twitter that “the overland transportation of the goods will shorten the time by 12 days and greatly reduce the existing waiting time due to the wire problem. We will do it and we will succeed.” In September, Trucknet signed a shipping agreement with the UAE and Bahrain.

The plans also include a railway line, yet to be agreed, linking the UAE and Israel with a high-speed train service between Israel’s northern city of Beit She’an and southern port of Eilat on the Red Sea.

The route has assumed greater strategic significance since October and especially because of Houthi attacks on Israeli-linked shipping in the Red Sea, helping Israel circumvent the shipping blockade and cutting the 14-day sea route around the Cape to four days.

Acutely conscious of the mass opposition within its already restive population to Israel’s genocidal war, Jordan denied that goods were being transported to Israel via its territory. But television reports showing trucks from the UAE crossing Jordanian territory to reach Israel exposed this lie, sparking anger and demonstrations against Jordan’s ‘shameful land bridge’ to Israel.

The Dubai-Haifa “land corridor” was in fact first mooted in 2017 by Israel’s transport minister Yisrael Katz and highlighted at the signing in 2020 of the Abraham Accords with the UAE and Bahrain–and later with Sudan and Morrocco–that ended the participants’ long-standing economic boycott of Israel. It made apparent Israel’s economic ties with the Gulf states that had long been kept under wraps.

The Accords not only signified the ditching of their long defunct adherence to securing a “two-state solution,” even as Netanyahu threatened to annex one third of the West Bank, illegally occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab Israeli war. It crucially paved the way for trade and investment deals with Tel Aviv, particularly in arms, technology and cyberware, and Israel’s broader economic integration into the region begun clandestinely after the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Saudi Arabia and the planned war against Iran

Bahrain could only sign up to the Accords with the tacit consent of its paymaster in Saudi Arabia. Riyadh is now directly involved in the Dubai-Haifa corridor as part of its efforts to extract as many concessions as possible from Washington, including a defence agreement, commitment of “security” support, arms and fighter jets and help with a civilian nuclear program, even as it expanded its economic and political links with China to strengthen its bargaining position.

The land corridor is a key concern for the US and European imperialist powers. It is aimed at positioning the Israeli port of Haifa as a major gateway to Europe, altering the political and economic map of the region by bypassing the Red Sea and furthering Israel’s integration into the Gulf states’ economies.

Haifa would be the linchpin of the India-Middle East Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a major transport infrastructure project aimed at integrating India, the Gulf and Europe while avoiding Iran, which would bring India closer to US imperialism and counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Oman’s Salalah Port, which has extensive ties with India, could also become part of the new network.

The project, which excludes Turkey, the largest non-oil economy in the Middle East, has aroused Ankara’s wrath, with government officials saying that the most suitable route for east-west trade passes through Turkey not Greece. It also undermines Egypt’s Suez Canal that is already suffering financial losses from the diversion of shipping round the Cape, intensifying its economic and social crisis.

The Arab regimes now account for one quarter of Israel’s $12.5 billion defence exports. Leaders from the UAE have also reiterated their commitment to the Abraham Accords, with UAE presidential foreign affairs adviser Anwar Gargash telling a conference in Dubai last month, “The UAE has taken a strategic decision, and strategic decisions are long-term.”

The bilateral flow of goods has exploded, expanding from $11.2 million in 2019 to $2 billion, excluding software, from January to August 2023, according to Israel’s UAE ambassador. The UAE-Israel partnership deal that came into force last year lowered tariffs with the aim of increasing bilateral trade to $10bn within five years. While far less than Israel’s trade with the European Union and Turkey, this is nevertheless far more than Israel’s trade with Egypt and Jordan.

As Israeli CEOs told the Financial Times, amid the Gaza genocide it has been “business as usual,” with new investment plans going ahead and the UAE’s airline continuing its flights to Tel Aviv even as others cancel theirs.

While Saudi Arabia was never a “frontline state” in the Arab Israeli conflict, in October 1973 it led the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) ban on the export of oil to those countries that had supported Israel during the October 1973 Arab Israeli War. The war began after Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recover the territories lost in the 1967 war. Only Iraq and Libya did not take part in the oil embargo that was lifted in March 1974, by which time the price of oil had risen nearly threefold, massively increasing the oil states’ wealth and reactionary political influence in the region.

50 years later, there has been no mention of a similar embargo in defence of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, indicating the monarchies’ backing for Israel’s war, paid for and planned by the Biden administration, to assert US hegemony over the resource-rich region and suppress all opposition to Washington and its regional allies and to their own regime.

Israel’s war on Gaza has done nothing to derail Washington’s long-running efforts to broker a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. A potential Saudi-Israel deal is a crucial part of its bid to settle the Gaza conflict with Riyadh indicating its willingness to proceed with discussions. For their part, the US and UK have consolidated the reversal of their previous opposition to Riyadh’s war to unseat the Houthis in Yemen, launching hundreds of aerial strikes on the Houthis in response to their attacks on shipping linked to Israel aimed at putting pressure on Israel to end its war and blockade of Gaza.

The Arab regimes, whose populations hold them in contempt, have made a pact with the devil: support for Israel—and by implication US imperialism—in return for Washington’s commitment to back their “security” in the event of a new “Arab Spring” or mass movement to unseat them, and to wage war against Iran, which has backed opposition forces to their rule, as part of its preparations for war on China.

Let Them Eat Dirt

Posted on February 21, 2024 by Reid Mukai

The final stage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an orchestrated mass starvation, has begun. The international community does not intend to stop it.

By Chris Hedges

Source: Scheer Post

There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed.

Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza.

UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that, as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.”

UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused UNRWA after the ruling of providing false information to the ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics, schools and food, had to be eliminated. Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a political as well as material objective.

The evidence-free Israeli accusations against UNRWA that a dozen of the 13,000 employees had links to those who carried out the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, which saw some 1,200 Israelis killed, did the trick. It led 16 major donors, including the United States, the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Japan, to suspend financial support for the relief agency on which nearly every Palestinian in Gaza depends for food. Israel has killed 152 UNRWA workers and damaged 147 UNRWA installations since Oct. 7. Israel has also bombed UNRWA relief trucks.

More than 27,708 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, some 67,000 have been wounded and at least 7,000 are missing, most likely dead and buried under the rubble.

More than half a million Palestinians – one in four – are starving in Gaza, according to the U.N. Starvation will soon be ubiquitous. Palestinians in Gaza, at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or vegetables. There is little flour to make bread. Pasta, along with meat, cheese and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars. The healthcare system in Gaza, with only three of Gaza’s 36 hospitals left partially functioning, has largely collapsed. Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has begun to bomb. Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes.

“There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,” writes Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and the author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” in the Guardian. “And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.”

The United States, formerly UNRWA’s largest contributor, provided $422 million to the agency in 2023. The severance of funds ensures that UNRWA food deliveries, already in very short supply because of blockages by Israel, will largely come to a halt by the end of February or the beginning of March.

Israel has given the Palestinians in Gaza two choices. Leave or die.

I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as in Gaza, did little to intervene.

The precursor to starvation – undernourishment – already affects most Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it.

Soon, lacking enough iron to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, they become anemic. The body feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs – brain, heart, lungs, ovaries and testes — atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.

It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.

I saw hundreds of skeletal figures, specters of human beings, moving forlornly at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the remains of entire families.

In the abandoned town of Mayen Abun bats dangled from the rafters of the gutted Italian mission church. The streets were overgrown with tussocks of grass. The dirt airstrip was flanked by hundreds of human bones, skulls and the remnants of iron bracelets, colored beads, baskets and tattered strips of clothing. The palm trees had been cut in half. People had eaten the leaves and the pulp inside. There had been a rumor that food would be delivered by plane. People had walked for days to the airstrip. They waited and waited and waited. No plane arrived. No one buried the dead.

Now, from a distance, I watch this happen in another land in another time. I know the indifference that doomed the Sudanese, mostly Dinkas, and today dooms the Palestinians. The poor, especially when they are of color, do not count. They can be killed like flies. The starvation in Gaza is not a natural disaster. It is Israel’s masterplan.

There will be scholars and historians who will write of this genocide, falsely believing that we can learn from the past, that we are different, that history can prevent us from being, once again, barbarians. They will hold academic conferences. They will say “Never again!” They will praise themselves for being more humane and civilized. But when it comes time to speak out with each new genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.

Southern countries no longer trust the West

Posted on February 20, 2024 by Reid Mukai

By Veniamin Popov

Source: New Eastern Outlook

The genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza against Palestinians under US patronage has had an enormous impact on developing countries. Four months of Israeli military action against the Palestinians had been a watershed in the attitude of the Global South towards the West: the number of civilians killed and wounded, most of them women and children, was approaching 100,000; in an enclave of nearly 2.5 million people, one third of the houses had been completely destroyed. This has not just shown the hypocrisy of the Western Powers with their constant policy of double standards. It has convinced many that the West cannot be at the mercy of the West: it will stop at nothing to impose solutions that are favourable to it.

Many in the Middle East and the Global South were struck both by the brutality of Israel’s military campaign and the unwavering support for it by Western governments. “For them this is as much a war”, wrote the Al Ahram newspaper on 30.01.2024, “as US President Joe Biden’s war as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s, and the continued indifference to the scale of destruction has once again confirmed how cheap Arab life seems to Western leaders”.

As Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, argues in his book What Really Went Wrong: The West and the Collapse of Democracy in the Middle East, the United States and other Western countries, principally Britain, have for nearly a century pursued an interventionist, militaristic and anti-democratic foreign policy that has largely ignored the interests of the Middle East. After the brutal Hamas attack on 7 October, which revealed, in the words of Egypt’s Al Ahram, the folly of Biden and Netanyahu’s approach, there was no restraint or attempt to think through the consequences of the current war. Instead, Biden and his European allies supported Israel’s fatal attack on the Gaza Strip. Despite the fact that the civilian death toll is rising at an unprecedented rate, the humanitarian crisis is becoming more acute by the day, and governments around the world have called for a ceasefire, Biden has shown no willingness to intervene to prevent bloodshed.

It is no coincidence that the media of many nations published articles about Frantz Fanon, an anti-colonial activist who grew up in a black middle-class family in French colonial Martinique: more than any other writer of the time, he captured the rage generated by colonial humiliation in the hearts of colonised people, and was a remarkably astute analyst of contemporary ills – the ongoing psychological traumas of racism and oppression, the enduring power of white nationalism, and the scourge of authoritarian predatory post-colonial regimes. In Fanon’s view, the world then was split in two, which is also absolutely true of today.

The West’s current strategy has failed colossally, and the American-led Anglo-Saxon empire is also failing: the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the Turkish Daily Sabah newspaper reported in early February, have exposed the limits of Western power and its highly duplicitous approach to international law and the laws of war. The decision by some Western states to cut off funding to the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA “is a brazen and shameless move to starve the Palestinians and force Hamas to capitulate”.

By supporting Israel and allowing it to kill tens of thousands of civilians, Western countries are putting themselves on the opposite edge of the values and principles of multilateralism and respect for human rights, “they are going against the very foundations on which the UN was built”, the Al Jazeera website wrote on 16.01.24. Another article on the same site noted that Gaza will be the grave of the Western-led world order: by supporting Israel’s atrocities, the West has undermined what is left of its authority and brought the rules-based world order to the point of no return: the authority of the West has been irrevocably undermined.

The United States military strikes on Syria, Iraq and Yemen have caused an explosion of anti-American sentiment throughout the Arab world, once again demonstrating the aggressive nature of US policy in the Middle East and Washington’s complete disregard for the norms of international law.

According to a poll conducted in 16 Arab states on 10.01.24 – 89% of respondents opposed recognising Israel, and 77% considered the US and Israel the biggest security threat to the region.

The Saudi newspaper Arab News emphasised in mid-January this year that many Western leaders are increasingly moving away from their people. In early February, the New York Times reported that more than 800 US and EU civil servants published a protest against their governments’ support for Israel; last November, more than 500 employees of 40 US government agencies sent a letter to President Biden criticising his policies on the Gaza war.

Turkish newspapers have consistently published stories that the Global North should abandon old approaches and rethink its international policies.

Ghassan Charbel, editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, noted on 29.01.24 that the continuation of the Gaza massacre is costing the countries of the region and the world economy dearly, it is also hitting America’s interests and image.

Recent events on the world stage are increasingly convincing the people of developing countries that their interests are at odds with those of the West, and in some issues are diametrically opposed.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: Genocide

The West’s duplicitous stance and hypocrisy draw condemnation in the world