Will Palestine Ever Be Free? Understanding Elite Strategy in the Global Context

By Robert J. Burrowes

As the Elite program to kill or enslave us all proceeds virtually unimpeded, one way in which this is being accomplished is by using two of the Elite’s oldest known tools: War and genocide. With the active complicity of its agents in governments and elsewhere, the Elite is killing off substantial numbers of ‘ordinary’ people (but certainly not Elite members or agents) in wars between various countries, most notably, Ukraine and Russia, as well as in genocidal attacks such as that by Israel against the Palestinian ghetto of Gaza.

While I have previously explained how the war between Russia and Ukraine (along with the latter’s NATO allies) is being used to advance the Elite program – see ‘The War in Ukraine: Understanding and Resisting the Global Elite’s Deeper Agenda’ – it is equally clear that wars anywhere, as well as genocides, serve the same purpose.

In this article I will focus on how the genocidal assault on Gaza and the ongoing military attacks on the occupied West Bank constitute a fundamental threat to the people of Palestine while at the same time they are only a local manifestation of the wider assault on humanity. See ‘We Are Being Smashed Politically, Economically, Medically and Technologically by the Elite’s “Great Reset”: Why? How Do We Fight Back Effectively?’

Unfortunately, very few people are perceiving this connection and the fundamental threat it poses to us all and, in the sense that this is being achieved, the genocide in Gaza is successfully distracting people from the wider program to kill or enslave everyone.

This is obvious from any candid assessment of the evidence readily available to those seeking it. Let me start with an overview of the evidence in relation to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.

Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

To begin, this evidence reveals the fact that the Israeli government has long supported and funded Hamas as one part of its strategy to divide and disempower the official Palestinian leadership, keep ordinary Israelis and Palestinians in a state of fearful submission to their respective elites, and undermine any efforts to achieve Palestinian statehood. There are many studies that discuss various elements and motivations for this arrangement. See, for example, How and why Israel helped create Hamas?’, ‘Criminality Beyond Description: Netanyahu Supports both Hamas as well as Al Qaeda Terrorists. Israel Actively “Cooperates” with Hamas, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda’, ‘Hamas’ Attack on Israelis Strengthens, Not Weakens, Israel’s Right Wing Political Elite’ and ‘Hamas Created by Israel and Recognised by Council of Europe’.

In the words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: ‘Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas’. See ‘Analysis: Another Concept Implodes: Israel Can’t Be Managed by a Criminal Defendant’.

It includes evidence that, despite the claim of an ‘intelligence failure’ by Israel when Mossad is possibly the most powerful intelligence agency on the planet – see No, the Hamas Invasion Was Not an Israeli “Intelligence Failure”’ – Israel and Hamas colluded to facilitate the Hamas incursion into Israel on 7 October 2023. According to former Israeli intelligence analyst Efrat Fenigson: ‘To me this surprise attack seems like a planned operation…. the work of the Deep State…. the people of Israel and the people of Palestine have been sold, once again, to the higher powers that be.’ See ‘Israel-Hamas War – An Update Oct. 7th, 2023, an update from the field, with my key insights, questions and concerns’.

And, according to one source citing a former commander of the Kerem Shalom Battalion which oversaw a section of the high-security barrier between Gaza and Israel, and who knows the area in detail: ‘The obstacle is built so that even a fox cannot pass it.’ He goes on to elaborate why this is the case in considerable detail. See ‘Section Commander of the Gaza Fence: “The obstacle is built so that even a fox cannot pass it”. They Let It Happen. The Hamas Attack Was Allowed to Close the Book on Palestine’. Probably as part of the official cover-up, this was effectively denied by General Herzl Halevi, formerly head of the IDF Southern Command and now Israel Defense Force Chief of Staff. See ‘Israeli army chief admits “failure”’.

But let us assume for a moment that Hamas is not an Israeli collaborator. Was the raid on 7 October ‘The Most Successful Military Raid of this Century’ as it was characterized and described by military analyst Scott Ritter? See ‘The October 7 Hamas Assault on Israel: The Most Successful Military Raid of this Century’.

Did it actually matter that Hamas appears to have achieved movement in the direction of its stated goals – as noted by Ritter: to reassert the right of the Palestinian people to a homeland, release of the 10,000-plus Palestinian political prisoners (including children) locked up in Israel, a return to the sanctity of the Al Aqsa Mosque – as Ritter claims and despite or even because of the enormous ‘sacrifice’ made by the ordinary men, women and children of Gaza?

Did all of those Palestinians – including children – who weren’t consulted about the raid and have been (or will be) killed during Israel’s genocidal response knowingly and willingly sacrifice their lives? Or were they hapless victims of the violent ideology of their leaders who do not value ‘ordinary’ lives?

Despite the truism that Ritter identifies – ‘you can’t solve a problem unless you first properly define it…. any solution which has nothing to do with the problem involved is, literally, no solution at all’ – with which I agree, Ritter has a very limited, essentially military, interpretation of the conflict and what will be necessary to resolve it. That is, he suggests, the conflict is between the Israeli government and Hamas, it is military in nature and it will be won (or lost) according to political shifts the military resistance offered by Hamas generates in other parts of the world (including the Arab/Islamic worlds and the United States).

But as will be obvious from my explanation below, Ritter does not understand this conflict, particularly the global forces driving it and their reasons for doing so and that, from the perspective of ‘ordinary’ people, the ‘gains’ from the raid he nominates (and the genocide following) are worth nothing, and that the deaths of both ordinary Israelis and Palestinians as a result is a terrible price to pay.

For brief attempts to offer some insight into this overall conflict and ways forward, these articles by Professor Johan Galtung (written more than a decade ago) are worth considering: ‘Palestine/Israel: What Peace Would Look Like’ and ‘Israel’s Sociocide, Genocide, Ecocide in Gaza’.

In any case, whatever the origin of the military raid by Hamas (and its ongoing engagement with Israeli forces in Gaza), the evidence of the killing of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians is well documented.

This includes evidence that, in accordance with the Israeli military’s ‘Hannibal Directive’ – crudely, ‘better dead than abducted’ – the Israeli military was responsible for a significant number of the military and civilian deaths of its own citizens during the attack by Hamas. See ‘A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack’.

It includes evidence that the Hamas incursion known as ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ and the ongoing Israeli response has led to hostilities that have so far killed well over a thousand ordinary Israeli citizens and soldiers (and zero governing Israelis) as well as more than 10,000 ordinary Palestinian men, women and children, and some ‘soldiers’ (but zero leading Palestinians). See ‘Is the Gaza-Israel Fighting “A False Flag”? They Let it Happen? Their Objective Is “to Wipe Gaza Off the Map”?’, ‘Israel-Palestine: Names released of 7,028 Palestinians killed after Biden questions death toll’ and ‘More than 10,000 Palestinians killed since 7 October, say health officials’.

It includes evidence that Israel intends to ‘ethnically cleanse’ Gaza, possibly by forcing the Palestinian population out of Gaza and into the Sinai desert in Egypt. See ‘Israeli Intelligence Ministry Policy Paper on Gaza’s Civilian Population, October 2023’ and ‘Expel all Palestinians from Gaza, recommends Israeli gov’t ministry’.

In his thoughtful analysis of the situation, former UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Professor Richard Falk offers a similar conclusion:

My analysis leads me to conclude that this ongoing war is not primarily about security in Gaza or security threats posed by Hamas, but rather about something much more sinister and absurdly cynical.

Israel has seized this opportunity to fulfill Zionist territorial ambitions amid “the fog of war” by inducing one last surge of Palestinian catastrophic dispossession. Whether it is called “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide” is of secondary importance, although it already qualifies as one of the biggest humanitarian catastrophes of the 21st century. See ‘Israel-Palestine war: Israel’s endgame is much more sinister than restoring “security”’.

While Hasan Illaik argues that the plan to ‘displace millions of Palestinians’ is ‘nigh impossible to achieve’ and notes that the plan has been rejected by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi – see ‘The US is fueling, not avoiding, a regional war’ – even its substantial or just partial fulfillment would open new possibilities for Israel and the United States.

Nevertheless, despite the evidence presented above and the considered opinion of the experts cited, Scott Ritter argues that Israel will find it extraordinarily difficult to defeat Hamas. Ritter offers historical evidence of battles taking place in confined spaces where damage has been inflicted by prior bombing that impedes subsequent ground operations because of the vast quantities of rubble. He also cites other battles where large tunnel networks were extremely difficult to neutralize. In Ritter’s view, Hamas has both of these battlefield advantages in Gaza, including over 500 kilometres of tunnels. See Israel Faces “Near Impossible Task” in Gaza’.

Unfortunately, however, there is some evidence that Israel is planning to flood Hamas tunnels with nerve gas – see ‘Israel-Palestine war: Israel plans to flood Hamas tunnels with nerve gas, source says’ – but, whether or not it does so, a ground invasion is not the only way to ‘clear’ Gaza of its ‘surface’ population with another weapon already being used by Israel against Gaza.

As in earlier manifestations of war and genocide, military forces have sometimes laid siege to a trapped population to starve it to death. And this is now happening in Gaza. According to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: ‘We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals, and we are acting accordingly.’ See ‘Israeli Defense Minister Announces Siege On Gaza To Fight “Human Animals”’.

Employing this tactic in Gaza will compound the death toll dramatically as time goes by with water treatment plants and medical facilities, such as hospitals, already destroyed by a sophisticated combination of weapons. See They let humanitarian aid in. Then they bombed it so that Gaza would starve’ and ‘“Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” Day 20: Human rights group warns Israel is “using starvation as a weapon of war” in Gaza’.

You can see photos of the devastation in Gaza and its genocidal impact on the Palestinian people in the compilation presented by Antonio C. S. Rosa here: ‘Genocide in Pictures: Worth a Trillion Words’.

In any case, if we step back from the immediacy of this conflict and consider the Elite perspective on what is taking place, plenty of people are being killed and other Elite objectives are being achieved by what is happening.

A Regional War?

Beyond what happens in Gaza, however, the conflict includes evidence that this war could be expanded beyond Israeli and Palestinian borders into the wider region so that the killing can be compounded and a wider set of Elite objectives fulfilled.

This could occur by engaging Hezbollah in Lebanon – although prior speculation regarding the role of Hezbollah in supporting the Palestinians was toned down following Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s carefully-crafted speech on 3 November, which was notably moderate: see ‘Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah speech on Israel-Hamas war: Key takeaways’ – resistance groups in Syria and by attacking Iran. While previously considered ‘unlikely’ by the prominent analyst Professor Michel Chossudovsky, he now believes ‘The war on Iran Is No Longer On Hold’. See ‘“Regional Middle East war is possible, including a US attack on Iran,” interview with Dr. Jamal Wakim’ and ‘Israel and the US-NATO Alliance. Towards Military Escalation? “Theater Iran Near Term (TIRANNT)”? The War on Iran Is No Longer On Hold?’

In fact, as Chossudovsky points out in his most recent video interview, Israel has a vast military (including nuclear) capability compared to the poorly-armed Palestinians and is reinforced by both extensive military aid from the United States as well as a major US military presence (including two aircraft carrier battle groups, a substantial fleet of fighter aircraft and special forces troops) that has been deployed to the Middle East to engage in a wider war in pursuit of long-standing US political objectives to subjugate Iran and reshape the Middle East. See ‘A Planned US-Israeli Attack on Iran is Contemplated: The U.S. led War on the People of Palestine and the Middle East is a Criminal Undertaking’.

Professor Michael Hudson agrees. In an interview, Hudson indicated that ‘the United States has always viewed Israel as just our foreign military base, not Israel…. [our] landed aircraft carrier… takeoff point’ for the US to control the Middle East with its vast oil and gas reserves. But in elaborating his explanation, Hudson goes on to highlight that the US supports Netanyahu (rather than Israel itself), ‘an unpleasant, opportunist, and corrupt person’ to distract attention from the US role in supplying the military weapons to kill people in Gaza and the West Bank which is essentially designed to provoke a response from Hezbollah in Lebanon. Why? By using the corporate media to keep talking about Hamas and Hezbollah as puppets of Iran, the intention is to use any military response from Hezbollah to ‘justify’ a ‘move not only against Lebanon, but all the way via Syria, Iraq, to Iran’ with the aim of controlling Middle Eastern oil. This would make it possible ‘to cut off oil and gas and to sanction any country that tries to go multipolar, any country that tries to resist US unipolar control.’ In essence, Hudson summarizes, ‘Basically, there’s a fight for who is going to control the world right now’. Watch ‘Why Does the US Support Israel?’

Many analysts have discussed the possibility of a wider war with Hasan Illaik arguing that ‘Both in practice, and publicly, the US government and military are running this Israeli war’ with the intention of fueling a wider one. See ‘The US is fueling, not avoiding, a regional war’. Huseyin Vodinali considers the possible role of countries like Yemen and Turkey as the war expands and argues that ‘China and Russia support Palestine and declare that they will stand by Syria and Iran.’ See ‘“A Big Event is Coming, its Name is a Regional War”? The Danger Waiting for Turkiye’.

In contrast, however, Scott Ritter cogently argues that the US and Israel combined do not have the logistical capacity to successfully fight and defeat Iran. See ‘US Not Ready for War With Iran’.

Military and geopolitical analyst Andrei Martyanov agrees. In a wide-ranging interview in which he referred to the two US aircraft carriers now in the region as ‘sitting ducks’, he offered an outline of Iran’s sophisticated air-defense systems and its ballistic missile capabilities (which could easily knock out all US bases in the Middle East, the carrier battle groups now in the region and leave ‘Tel Aviv and Jerusalem… burning’) as just two of the problems confronting the US and Israel in any consideration of an attack on Iran. Beyond these problems and among others, he mentioned that the mythology attached to the Israeli military was largely propaganda from 1967 and 1973 and did not apply now. He described the Israeli army as a ‘very well equipped police force’ and also briefly discussed the debilitating decline in US military production and noted that ‘the decline and degradation of the American political class is astonishing’. Watch ‘The US and Israel cannot defeat Iran’.

And what about nuclear weapons, which neither Ritter nor Martyanov considered in the cited sources? While the US and Russia might be reluctant to use nuclear weapons, Col. Douglas Macgregor (ret.) argues that Israel cannot be relied upon in the same way. Watch ‘Israel A “Nuclear Wildcard” On “Dangerous Road To Armageddon”’. Former CIA agent, Philip Giraldi agrees. See ‘The Gaza Genocide Continues: Israel is an unrestrained monster that endangers all of us’.

In contrast, and despite the use of a nuclear weapon on Gaza being advocated by Israeli government Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, Timothy Alexander Guzman argues that ‘There is no doubt that Russia and other world powers including China would not allow Israel to hit Iran with a nuclear bomb. If Israel decided to use a nuclear weapon anywhere in the Middle East, it would unite all Muslims against Israel’ and that is something for which Tel Aviv and Washington are not prepared. See ‘“Drop a Nuclear Bomb on Gaza”: Israeli Minister Says Using Nukes on Gaza an Option’.

In essence, while there are sound political and military reasons for both Israel and the US to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, given the insanity of some key figures in this conflict, it is difficult to assert anything with certainty in this regard.

Moreover, irrespective of the many factors that might be considered in relation to the ‘wider war’ issue, it should be noted that there are plenty of ‘minor’ military clashes already taking place throughout the Middle East. As reported by the highly reputable ‘South Front’, and confirmed by the Telegram channel ‘War Monitor’, ongoing military engagements are being reported taking place involving Hezbollah (for example, targeting Israeli army positions on the Lebanese-Palestinian border), Syria (for example, using air defences to confront Israeli targets in the vicinity of Damascus), Yemen (for example, with the Houthis reporting the targeting of sensitive sites in Israel’s Eliat area on the Gulf of Aquaba) and the US Pentagon (reporting engagement by pro-Iranian groups in both Syria and Iraq).

These reports are also confirmed in the article by Professor Adham Saouli who suggests that, like the US, ‘Hezbollah is using the time to set the stage for a regional war should that become necessary.’ See ‘Hezbollah and the 2023 Israeli War on Gaza’.

Before proceeding however, there is one more critical issue to consider, nothwithstanding what has been written above.

What is the prospect of the US orchestrating a false flag attack – perhaps on a US vessel in one of its two carrrier strike groups in the region – to ‘justify’ an attack on Iran? With the USS Gerald R. Ford and escort vessels stationed in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and escorts currently operating in the Gulf of Oman off the Arabian Peninsula – see ‘Aircraft Carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Now in Gulf of Oman’ – such an attack could ignite a regional war (and easily expand beyond the Middle East).

How might this be done?

Most simply by directing Israel to launch a missile (from land, sea or air) at the designated target and then deluging the corporate media with the claim that it was Iran that launched the missile.

Under cover of the initial confusion, it would be simple enough to initiate military action against Iran (and, possibly, certain allies) by Israeli and US forces to ‘respond’ to this attack and any debate about the source of the attack would be relegated to the backburner while the war quickly inflamed and national populations were manipulated to ‘rally around the flag’.

You might ask, of course, why would this be done? Why start a war where there is none?

The answer is the same as it has been throughout history. If you like, you can read brief accounts of 42 false flag attacks in the past century. See ‘42 ADMITTED False Flag Attacks’.

Wars enable Elites to consolidate and expand their power, and make vast profits. Every weapon fired represents profit; every weapon, building and other asset destroyed represents profit (for example, in subsequent rebuilding); every country subjugated represents profit in the form of control of its resources (strategic minerals, fossil fuels, fresh water, cultural heritage…); every person killed represents progress in the Elite depopulation program; and every war presents opportunities for tightening Elite control (particularly while submissively frightened populations tolerate government actions supposedly to enhance ‘national security’ but really to enslave us in one of the Elite’s increasingly technocratic prisons cities).

Have you ever wondered why governments are never really interested in avoiding or even winning wars (despite rhetoric to the contrary)?

The Elite most effectively consolidates its power and maximizes its profit by ensuring perpetual war. And it simply ensures that its agents in government make this happen.

In this scheme of things, you are the victim in every sense of the word: You vote in elections believing you are living in a ‘democracy’, you pay the taxes to buy the weapons, you join the military to fight (believing you are defending ‘your country’), you are the soldier or civilian who is killed (not a member of the Elite profiting from your killing/dying), and you do the suffering when someone you love dies.

War is one of the Elite’s most profitable enterprises and control of everything from the human ‘socialization’ (that is, terrorization) process and ‘education’ systems to the messaging of the corporate media and ‘entertainment’ industry means that you learn that violence is not only ‘necessary’ but really the ‘only’ effective way to deal with international conflict.

You are always the victim.

World War III?

Separately from the nuclear threat and whether or not there is a false flag attack to precipitate a wider war, there is some expert opinion that the war could expand into World War III, although Guzman draws attention to another US problem: It’s ‘$33 trillion… debt with a US dollar reserve currency that is not so popular as before’. See ‘The Powder Keg in the Middle East has Exploded: What Israel’s War on Gaza Means for the Rest of the World’ and ‘Large Scale U.S. Military Buildup in the Middle East: Is America Preparing to Launch World War III?’

In any case, the conflict is attracting meaningful attention from well beyond the region with statements, for example, from key Russian leaders including President Vladimir Putin expressing solidarity with the people of Palestine. See ‘Vladimir Putin held a meeting with members of the Security Council and Government, and the heads of security agencies’ and ‘Russia’s public pivot to Palestine’.

So far, however, Putin has shown himself to be adept at avoiding direct military confrontation with the USA over the war in Ukraine and, from a nation-state perspective, the latter clearly lacks the capacity to engage Russia directly for the reasons Martyanov gave in relation to the USA and Iran.

But to elaborate my point above: There are plenty of powerful vested interests with a stake in this conflict and a lot of insane individuals involved too which means that there are enormous pressures pushing for a wider regional war. However, if the war expands beyond Israel and Palestine, there is no guarantee it will remain contained within the region either.

And, as explained just above, it doesn’t matter what countries are involved or how many are killed. The Elite will carefully consider its options with the inclination to expand its power and increase its profits at every opportunity.

The Rothschilds

Before departing this immensely complex subject, about which a great deal has been written, there is another dimension to this conflict that is invariably ignored. And that dimension concerns the role of the Rothschild family.

Why highlight the Rothschild family? Consider the following.

As noted by Richard S. Dunn in his historical overview of events leading to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine – see ‘Israel Should Know: “What Thou Sowest, Thou Shall Also Reap”’ – the letter advising the Jews of the British government intention was sent to Lionel Rothschild.

According to the official Rothschild Archive:

On November 2, 1917, the British Government expressed its sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations and announced that it would use its “best endeavours” to facilitate “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. The announcement came in a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lionel Walter, 2nd Lord Rothschild (1868-1937), the unofficial leader of the British Jewish community. The Balfour agreement became the diplomatic foundation stone of the state of Israel….

The Balfour Declaration used deliberately vague language. The term “national home” was chosen in order to minimize the Zionist dream, to make Palestine a Jewish state. The Arabs, whose “civil and religious” (not national and political) rights were not to be prejudiced as the declaration put it, were referred to only as “existing non-Jewish communities”. You can read the letter and the Rothschild commentary on it here: ‘Walter Rothschild and the Balfour Declaration’.

The Rothschild commentary on this development includes these words: ‘Beginning in 1916, the British hoped that in exchange for their support of Zionism, “the Jews” would help to finance the growing expenses of the First World War, which was becoming increasingly burdensome. More importantly, policy-makers in the Foreign Office believed that Jews could be prevailed upon to persuade the United States to join the War.’

Since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 (at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians), in which they played such a critical role, the Rothschilds have continued to exercise their enormous political and economic clout to both build the state of Israel and ‘defend’ Israel, including by mobilizing the military and financial support for it from the United States. While some of this support is publicly known (such as that of James de Rothschild in financing the building of the Knesset in Israel), as with the bulk of Rothschild affairs (including in the US), most of this support is concealed behind a myriad of Rothschild-controlled corporations, front groups and ‘third parties’, many with significant public profiles.

And this explains why supposedly scholarly books such as Jews in American Politics do not reference the Rothschilds even once while Benjamin Ginsberg, one of the authors, readily acknowledges that ‘the greatest triumph of American Jewish organizations during the postwar period [was] recognition of the state of Israel. Despite the opposition of large segments of the British government and the U.S. State and Defense departments, American Jewish groups succeeded in securing President Truman’s support for the creation of a Jewish state to house Jewish refugees from Europe. Over the ensuing decades, American Jews successfully urged the U.S. government to provide Israel with billions of dollars in American military and economic assistance. In recent years, Jewish groups have fought not only for aid for Israel but for American humanitarian intervention in other regions of the world as well.’

While not discounting the roles of other prominent individuals and families, it is nevertheless the case that the long-standing Rothschild practice of obscuring their role has ensured that much of what it does is concealed. This is why, for example, few people know that the Rothschilds control the US Federal Reserve and own substantial holdings (again, often through tightly-controlled ‘third parties’) in the global (including US) weapons industry. So while Molly Gott and Derek Seidman offer a fine report on ‘Corporate Enablers of Israel’s War on Gaza’ and even name some prominent individual donors to pro-Israeli lobby groups, rarely do studies of this nature expose the human individuals who ultimately own the weapons corporations.

And yet, as official Rothschild biographer Oxford scholar Niall Ferguson candidly noted ‘If late-nineteenth-century imperialism had its “military-industrial complex” the Rothschilds were unquestionably part of it.’ See The House of Rothschild: Volume 2: The World’s Banker: 1849-1998: Volume 2: The World’s Banker: 1849-1999 p. 579.

But now with a significantly expanded range of ways of obscuring the family investments, such as through the private but major asset management corporation Vanguard, the Rothschilds will benefit handsomely from President Biden’s recent announcement of a ‘giant’ weapons package to Israel – see ‘Biden asks Congress for Israel, Ukraine aid in giant defense package’ – with most of the money going to US weapons corporations in which the Rothschilds have substantial investments. Profiting from war (and military conflict generally) is the second oldest trick (after profiting from money) in the Rothschild money-making machine. See Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until ‘You’ll Own Nothing.’

And there is a third old trick too: ownership of massive resource corporations, starting with oil and gas.

Thus, yet another part of the long-standing plan behind the current genocide is undoubtedly to enable Israeli seizure of the gigantic Leviathan maritime natural gas reserves in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza. See ‘“Wiping Gaza Off The Map”: Big Money Agenda. Confiscating Palestine’s Maritime Natural Gas Reserves’.

While Felicity Arbuthnot, in the 2013 article just cited, nominated the interest of the BG Group in Gaza’s gas and oil reserves, in early 2016, the BG Group became part of Shell Global. See Combining Shell and BG: a simpler and more profitable company’.

Of course, Shell has been a Rothschild corporation since the very early 20th century. According to the Rothschild Archive: ‘As it turned out, Rothschilds had a decisive influence in shaping Royal Dutch Shell, more so than anyone had previously imagined.’ See ‘Searching for oil in Roubaix’. But Shell does not represent the only Rothschild investment in energy supplies.

Another motivation for Rothschild involvement concerns a long-standing interest of the family’s. Following a brief discussion with British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli on 14 November 1875, Lionel Rothschild agreed to finance the British Government’s purchase of 177,000 shares in ‘one of the world’s great commercial and strategic assets’, the Suez Canal Company, from Egypt’s debt-ridden Khedive for £4,000,000 at 3% interest. See The Rothschilds: A Family Portrait pp. 150-152. This gave the British government a majority holding in the waterway that enabled commercial and military shipping to bypass the Cape of Good Hope in traveling from Europe to Asia and Oceania.

In 1882 the UK invaded and occupied Egypt, taking control of the country as well as the Suez canal which then became a geopolitical weapon during subsequent wars. It also later became critical for the transport of oil from the Middle East to Europe (and elsewhere).

During and following World War II, Britain maintained a vast military complex at Suez with a garrison of some 80,000 soldiers.

But following a military coup that removed the Egyptian monarchy in 1952 and in the context of a geopolitical world in considerable turmoil on various levels (including the decolonization process, the Cold War, and the Arab-Israeli conflict), ownership of the Suez Canal became increasingly contentious. Thus, on 26 July 1956, the Suez Canal Company was nationalized by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. This led to the Suez Crisis in October when Israel and, subsequently, the UK and France invaded Egypt and Gaza in an attempt to remove President Nasser and restore western control. Pressure from the United States and the UN led to withdrawal of the invaders.

Today, the Suez Canal earns Egypt $US9.4billion each year. See ‘Suez Canal records historic high as revenues reach $9.4B’.

But what if there was a second canal through Israel?

In fact, in 1963 there was a plan to investigate the creation of another canal, this one known to Israelis as the Ben Gurion Canal. The plan was to use 520 nuclear weapons to blast a new canal from the Gulf of Aquaba to the Mediterranean Sea, exiting adjacent to Gaza. See ‘Use of Nuclear Explosives for Excavation of Sea-Level Canal Across the Negev Desert’, ‘The US had a plan in the 1960s to blast an alternative Suez Canal through Israel using 520 nuclear bombs’, ‘Israel Destroys Gaza to Control World’s Most Important Shipping Lane’ and An alternative to the Suez Canal is central to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians’.

The plan was eventually shelved, presumably at least in part because the fallout from the nuclear explosions would have made the environmental cost of the project prohibitive. But what if such a plan was now feasible and the shortest route went through Gaza?

Is there a more ‘acceptable’ (that is, non-nuclear) weapon that could be deployed to create the canal now?

The obvious domain to look for possible answers is the expanding range of geoengineering weapons.

Why?

After many years spent researching geoengineering weapons, in a 1996 article, Dr. Rosalie Bertell summarized 50 years of destructive programs targeting control of the upper atmosphere. She concluded the article with the following words: ‘The ability of the HAARP/Spacelab/rocket combination to deliver very large amounts of energy, comparable to a nuclear bomb, anywhere on earth via laser and particle

beams, is frightening.’ See ‘Background on the HAARP Project’ but you can read much more in Dr. Bertell’s book Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War.

So if one considers the range of geoengineering weapons that might be used in this context, one possibility would be to use HAARP: the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. HAARP is currently ‘the most important facility used to generate extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic radiation in the ionosphere. In order to produce this ELF radiation the HAARP transmitter radiates a strong beam of highfrequency (HF) waves modulated at ELF…. high-power ELF radiation generated by HF ionospheric heaters, such as the current HAARP heater, can cause Earthquakes, Cyclones and strong localized heating.’ See ‘High-power ELF radiation generated by modulated HF heating of the ionosphere can cause Earthquakes, Cyclones and localized heating’.

If this weapon could be used, it would need to be calibrated to perform the massive task of excavating the canal (or at least pulverizing the materials that need to be excavated into a readily removable form).

Another possibility would be what are called ‘Rods from God’ (Kinetic Orbital Bombardment). See ‘Aerospace Historical Engineering Analysis: Project ThorWhen the U.S. tried to turn Telephone Poles into Weapons of Mass Destruction’ and ‘“Rods from God” not that destructive, Chinese study finds’.

These weapons were used to create the earthquake in Turkey in February 2023. See ‘Serdar Hussein Yildirim statement re Turkish earthquake’ with an English transcript of Serdar Hussein’s statement here.

So, as in the case in relation to the HAARP ELF radiation option, if this weapon was to be used to construct another canal, it would need to be calibrated to be less destructive than those used in Turkey.

But whatever technological challenges might remain in choosing the geoengineering weapon(s) and deploying it/them effectively, the financial rewards of having a second canal would be vast. And given existing Rothschild financial interests in infrastructure – ‘Over the last 200 years the Rothschilds have systematically gained control of much of the infrastructure of the modern industrial world.’ See Enemies of the People: The Rothschilds and their corrupt global empire p. 23. – and geoengineering – see ‘The Rothschilds and the Geoengineering Empire’ – it is reasonable to postulate their interest in financing such a project and profiting from it indefinitely into the future.

Beyond its profound control of money, weapons, energy and infrastructure (not to mention other sectors), the Rothschilds own a substantial proportion of the corporate media, again both directly and through agents. For example, by the late C19th their Paribas Bank ‘controlled the all-powerful news agency Havas, which in turn owned the most important advertising agency in France.’ See Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War p. 214.

But Rothschild interests in the corporate media extend far beyond France. If you would like to read more about the extensive Rothschild ownership and control of the media, Paul Cudenec offers more examples in his thoughtful and wide-ranging overview of the family’s extraordinary violence and exploitation in Enemies of the People: The Rothschilds and their corrupt global empire.

Their extensive media ownership means that the Rothschilds have significant control of the primary narrative presented in worldwide ‘news’ outlets, including in relation to Israel: the ‘victim’ Israel must always ‘defend’ itself. So that even when some accurate and graphic media get through some corporate social media channels (Facebook, X, Youtube…) or some events not sponsored by the Elite, such as the current wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations around the world, are reported in the corporate media – see ‘Around the world, people take to the streets for Palestine’ and ‘More Demonstrations for Palestine’ – it doesn’t mean anything. Even footage of demonstrations that are protesting the genocide in Gaza can be blandly presented as demonstrations ‘calling for a ceasefire’ or something equally effective at distracting people from the truth. And even if they do not, demonstrations are routinely ignored. History records the futility of such protest demonstrations even when they garner some attention for a secondary narrative.

The reason for this is simple. Demonstrations as well as any number of randomly advocated ‘actions’ – such as those nominated in lists such as these: ‘What You Can Do’, Defund Israeli Genocide & Colonialism – 8 Tips for Getting Involved’ and ‘Calendar of Resistance for Palestine! Events and actions around the world’ – mean nothing in a strategic sense. Why?

Because for any particular tactic (action) to have strategic value, it must be derived from a strategy that has been designed to alter the power relationship between the actual perpetrator and their victim. If there is no comprehensive strategy to guide tactical choice, or if the tactic is chosen to achieve a political objective rather than a strategic goal – see ‘The Political Objective and Strategic Goal of Nonviolent Actions’ – it is not possible for the tactic to achieve a strategic gain (although it might allow those doing the action to let off a little emotional steam and feel good about themselves).

Unfortunately, demonstrations and many other ‘actions’ are routinely endorsed by those who have never considered the importance of using strategic guidance to determine tactical choice (and ensuring this does not happen is also an excellent way of subverting the resistance). See ‘The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?’

But to return to the theme above, if you believe that the Rothschilds do not leverage their ownership and control of such vast assets (in money, weapons, energy, infrastructure and media to name just a few key sectors) to achieve outcomes in the perceived interest of the family, including by manipulation of political leaders, you can read relevant Rothschild history – and even the official biography written by Niall Ferguson cited above – which documents a rather endless list of ‘gifts’ (that is, bribes) to a range of monarchs, including the British Crown, and political leaders.

Moreover, while many people are a little squeamish in response to the profoundly distasteful images of Palestinian children mangled by Israeli-fired weapons, the Rothschilds had turned their backs on such suffering more than 200 years ago. You cannot profit by financing both sides of wars for more than 200 years and have any sense of human compassion. From the Rothschild perspective and compared to other mass slaughters from which they have profited enormously, such as World Wars I and II, the genocide in Gaza is inconsequential.

Hence, if we are to understand the current Israeli genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza, it is necessary to understand the foundations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the background role that the Rothschilds continue to play. Using a longstanding network of allies and agents, which includes corrupt (that is, ‘bought’) politicians in Israel and the United States as well as such networks as the ‘The Israel Lobby’ in the USA, it is not difficult to shape the words that come out of the mouths of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and US President Biden as well as the military actions that follow.

Which is why it also matters nought that Netanyahu and Biden are registering their highest unpopularity ratings with their respective electorates at the moment. See ‘Shock at Attack, Fury at Failure: How Netanyahu’s Approval Ratings Have Hit Rock Bottom in Israel’ and ‘How un/popular is Joe Biden?’

They do not answer to their electorates and Netanyahu and Biden are well aware of that. As long as they serve their masters faithfully, their roles are secure (however they unfold), even despite their extensively-documented corruption as well. See ‘Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption scandals, explained’ and ‘Joe Biden – Corrupt’.

Of course, Rothschild allies and agents ensure that these two individuals are surrounded and supported by a wide coterie of equally corrupt and politically unaccountable agents ranging from a wide spectrum of other national political leaders, to members of the US Congress and Israeli Knesset.

These allies and agents also ensure that those who are openly critical of Israeli apartheid and genocide are subjected to sufficient backlash so that many, and more of those who witness the treatment, are cowed into silence. As Sam Adler-Bell points out: ‘For decades, it has been the explicit mission of pro-Israel groups to disallow certain kinds of speech, conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism.’ But this is just the start of a wide range of censure options used against those who support the liberation of Palestine. See ‘War of the Statements: The unusual way Americans have processed the Israel-Hamas War’, ‘The Free Speech Exception: Support for Palestinian rights is facing a McCarthyite backlash’ and ‘Lawless in Gaza: Why Britain and the West back Israel’s crimes’.

It also explains why statements by powerless actors ranging from the UN Secretary-General – see ‘UN chief says “clear violations of international humanitarian law” in Gaza’ and ‘Secretary-General’s statement – on the situation in Gaza’ – and some UN agency heads – see ‘“Enough is enough. This must stop now,” UN agency chiefs say in joint statement urging Gaza ceasefire’ as well as some US diplomats – see ‘U.S. diplomats slam Israel policy in leaked memo’ – are a waste of time although they achieve their purpose by deceiving some people into believing that ‘key’ people are concerned and something might happen. It won’t.

In fact, issuing statements is an industry in itself and highlights the powerlessness of a staggering array of actors, some of whom might be more meaningfully engaged in the struggle to liberate Palestine were they given strategically impactful actions to take. See ‘War of the Statements: The unusual way Americans have processed the Israel-Hamas War’.

But to return to the main point, as Emanuel Pastreich characterizes this connection, ‘The billionaires made Israel and the United States their toys, using the armies, the economies, and the technologies of these two countries to advance their plans for world domination.’ See ‘The Forbidden Truth: Israel and the U.S. Are “Toys of the Billionaires”. “A War with Iran Is Just Around the Corner”.’

Consequently, and despite possible initiatives by third parties, a critical variable that cannot be ignored is that containing the insane Global Elite that is driving these wars and genocides as well as the overall descent into technocracy is extraordinarily difficult. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

And it means that their wars, genocides and the ongoing imposition of their technocracy won’t be stopped by statements, petitions, lobbying politicians, protests or legal challenges although Elite-controlled media will talk about these as part of their strategy to ensure our dissent is absorbed and dissipated.

Summary

Thus, as is happening behind the scenes of mass slaughter of ordinary (mainly Ukrainian but also Russian) soldiers in Ukraine, where the creation of all of the infrastructure necessary to impose the Global Elite’s technocracy on both populations proceeds apace with Presidents Putin and Zelensky fully complicit – again, see ‘The War in Ukraine: Understanding and Resisting the Global Elite’s Deeper Agenda’ – there is little doubt that the heavily technocratized Israel at the behest of the United States and (intentional or otherwise) complicity of Hamas, is simply killing Palestinians in Gaza (and the West Bank) while displacing as many as possible. This is being done to precipitate responses from other countries that will enable the United States to ‘justify’ pursuit of a range of geopolitical goals – inevitably involving more killing – on behalf of its Elite masters, while facilitating the more elaborate imposition of the necessary ‘smart city’ technologies on whatever population lives in Gaza when the genocide is concluded and the inevitable technocratic rebuilding commences.

My point is unpalatable but simple: The Global Elite is in the process of implementing its long-planned and complex program to kill off vast numbers of people and imprison those left alive as transhuman slaves in their technocratic cities. So while there is value in considering events from various perspectives, it is important that sight is not lost of this fundamental Elite program and the insight that this perspective offers.

Of course, the Elite’s ‘kill or enslave’ program is being implemented everywhere, not just in war zones and zones of obvious genocide. And all governments are complicit, not just the US and Israeli governments and the Palestinian leadership.

So whatever position we might take on any given war, genocide or other violent conflict, we also need to understand and resist the fundamental Elite program – see below – if we are to successfully defend ourselves and those we love, from both its genocidal programs and rapidly advancing technocracy.

In addition, as always, if we want to end war as an instrument of Elite policy, we must strategically campaign to do so. See ‘Strategic Goals for Ending War’.

And if national populations such as the Palestinians wish to defend themselves from genocidal attacks, rather than simply lobby for the beneficial intervention of third parties, they must use an appropriate strategic response (modified from this template). See ‘Strategic Goals for Defeating a Genocidal Assault’.

Of course, it they wish to liberate themselves from occupation, they must bypass the corrupt Palestinian leadership in both the West Bank and Gaza and mobilize ‘ordinary’ Palestinians and international solidarity activists to campaign strategically to do so, as I have been explaining since the early 1990s. See Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy’ or, for the fullest elaboration, The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach.

This means they must do far more than encourage involvement in just a few tactics as advocated by the Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement. Of course, these tactics could usefully form part of a comprehensive strategy.

In any case, a start on this comprehensive strategy – both to end the genocide and end the occupation – is just starting to happen with trade unionists in Palestine calling for solidarity action from fellow unionists worldwide. See ‘Palestinian Trade Unions Call for an End to Arming Israel’. And this is getting some traction as unions start to respond. See ‘Unions Worldwide Boycott Arms Supplies to Israel’.

Needless to say, there are a great many social groups (within Palestine, in Israel and in third-party countries) – identified on the ‘Strategic Goals’ page – who can be mobilized to take action, as well as a large number of nonviolent acts of noncooperation and intervention – listed in ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’ – from which the appropriate combination of tactics can be strategically chosen as explained in ‘Strategic Considerations in the Selection and Implementation of Nonviolent Tactics’. By following this process, concerned people anywhere can take solidarity action with Palestine (not just protest) to end the genocide in the short term and the occupation in the medium term.

The reality is simple: Unless Palestinians commit to developing and implementing a comprehensive nonviolent strategy of liberation, Palestine will continue to be the victim of forces beyond its control at the cost of an enormous number of lives, whatever optimism some might feel at the outpouring of popular support being exhibited by those attending Palestinian solidarity demonstrations around the world at the moment.

Strategy is determinative; not numbers.

Resisting the Elite’s Technocracy

Beyond the defense of Palestine, if you are committed to being strategic in your resistance to the Elite’s ongoing imposition of its genocidal and technocratic programs on us all, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.

More simply, and as a minimum, you can download the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 23 languages (Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Slovak and Turkish) with more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘One-page Flyer’.

You are also welcome to consider sharing the article ‘Policing the Elite’s Technocracy: How Do We Resist This Effectively?’ with your local police. Resistance by police will be vital to the success of our resistance efforts.

And you might also consider organizing or participating in a local strategy to halt the deployment of 5G, given its crucial role in making the Elite’s ‘smart city’ technocratic prisons function. See ‘Halting the Deployment of 5G’.

If you like, you can also watch, share and/or organize to show, a short video about the campaign here: ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ video.

Moreover, if this strategic resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram or Signal groups (with advice on accessing the necessary links on the website).

Conclusion

The world system is a system of power. And it is extraordinarily violent. See Why Violence? and Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice.

This world system is controlled by a small group of extremely wealthy and powerful families that had established their supremacy in world affairs by the late 19th century. See Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until ‘You’ll Own Nothing.’

Thus, what happens now in a particular global, regional, national or even local context has been fundamentally shaped by detailed Elite plans that have been ongoingly formulated and refined, as well as progressively implemented over the past 5,000 years. And we have long ago past the point in which a local population confronts a local Elite in what might once have been a local fight.

Consequently, what happens in this world system is an outcome of power. Laws and legal systems, human rights and human needs count for nothing in this world, unless they do not impact power relationships. Whatever laws exist are breached when it is convenient for powerful actors to do so. And no-one holds those responsible for such breaches accountable. Do you really think that anyone in Israel, or the Rothschild family and its agents, will be held accountable for the genocidal atrocities inflicted on Gaza?

However, just because the Elite and its agents are extraordinarily powerful, operate beyond the rule of law and have no conception of morality, it does not mean that they cannot be stopped. But if we are to stop them in any context, we must work together both strategically and in sufficient numbers. Turning up at a demonstration or doing any one or more of a million things when it suits us will not stop them.

Thus, if we are to resolve any conflict, including those that involve military violence, several things are necessary.

Primarily, the conflict configuration must be analyzed very carefully so that it is fully understood. This includes an understanding of who, most fundamentally, is driving the conflict, why (and for what purposes and benefits) and how they are doing so. This is essential and in sharp contrast to just assuming the conflict is how it is routinely presented or even how it superficially appears.

We must then design a strategy that, if implemented, will succeed in achieving our desired outcome. And, finally, we must mobilize sufficient people to participate in implementing this strategy.

For example, in the current context, it is easy to perceive that people like Klaus Schwab, Yuval Noah Harari and Bill Gates are benefiting from the World Economic Forum push to impose a technocracy on us all, but they are just the front men, positioned to act on behalf of far more powerful global actors.

And it is easy to identify that Benjamin Netanyahu is benefiting from the violence in Palestine but this is utterly superficial. Like any politician he is the lackey of more powerful global actors who offer him trinkets (but of value to him) to do their bidding.

So we have a choice. Whether as a global population or a local one, we can continue to be the victims while we attribute blame to the puppets (political leaders and a vast range of organizations) put in place to perform on behalf of others.

Or, as I have tried to do in this article, we can do the work to understand how the world works, who really exercises power, the means they are using to exercise it, and then mobilize enough people to participate in carefully-designed nonviolent strategies to stop them.

If we do not take the latter course very soon now, those of us left alive will all be enslaved in one of the Elite’s technocratic (‘smart city’) prisons.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Gaza Ceasefire?

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

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ramzy Baroud writes for The Jordan Times:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Lethal “Aid” for Israel

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

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

By W.J. Astore

Source: Bracing Views

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israel Is Now the Greatest Source of Anti-Semitism

By Eric Zuesse

Source: Dissident Voice

On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva (and I here, in boldface, add a few links for documentation of some of his assertions):

This will be my last official communication to you. …

The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions, are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms [against Arabs] are accompanied by Israeli military units.

Across the land, Apartheid rules.

This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, [Jewish] settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities. …

We must begin now or surrender to unspeakable horror. I see ten essential points: 1. Legitimate action: First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution, its impotent and complicit Quartet, and its subjugation of international law to the dictates of presumed political expediency. Our positions must be unapologetically based on international human rights and international law. 2. Clarity of Vision: We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity. 3. One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land. …

Israelis learned well from Hitler: they elected governments that did (or else condoned doing) to the non-Jewish natives in their land (who before 1948 were 61% Muslim, 30% Jewish, and 8% Christian), what Hitler had done to Jews in Christian Europe — and now they are being supported by the U.S. and its allies to deliver Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian problem: extermination.

The self-defense by Israel and its apologists, for this reality that drove Mokhiber to quit and to condemn them, is for them to ignore all of that reality, and to focus instead upon the responses to it by the Palestinians. The self-defense, in other words, is to condemn not the side that started this war (themselves) beginning in 1948, but the side that then, and even earlier (in the late 1930s), were trying to prevent or avoid it (the Palestinians). The evil in this deception by the perpetrators — by the Israelis and their apologists — is obvious, and here is how it is driving a surge in anti-Semitism:

Israel and its apologists say that anti-Israelism is the same thing as anti-Semitism (so that to condemn Israel is to condemn all Jews), but here they lie yet again because outside of Israel are many Jews who loathe what Israel has been doing in their names. The very idea that all Jews are Israelis, or even support the Israelis and oppose the Palestinians in this war between the aggressor (Israelis) and the defender (the Palestinians), is stupid. That idea simply is not the case; but yet many Jews are being targeted by AUTHENTIC anti-Semites as-if it WERE the case.

Comments by many readers and viewers online are rife with such anti-Semitism, and the global community of that authentic anti-Semitism grows ever-larger, the closer that Israel and the U.S. get to delivering their final solution to the Palestinian problem. A great many of these anti-Semitic comments are coming from individuals who condemn all Jews on the basis of anti-Semitic lines from the New Testament (such as John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and the earliest-written one of them all, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 — all of which lines I have discussed here). However, many come instead from the Old Testament, which historians consider to be mythical but theologians and preachers believe instead to be “the Word of God”; and, so, scholars cannot agree with one-another on what is history and what in the Old Testament is instead merely myth (religious propaganda, for spreading the Jewish faith).

According to Wikipedia’s article on the “Kingdom of Judah“:

Centered in the highlands of Judea, the kingdom’s capital was Jerusalem.[3] Jews are named after Judah and are primarily descended from it.[4][5] The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Judah as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, a term denoting the united monarchy under biblical kings SaulDavid and Solomon and covering the territory of Judah and Israel. However, during the 1980s, some biblical scholars began to argue that the archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late-8th century BCE is too weak, and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed.[6][7] In the 10th and early 9th centuries BCE, the territory of Judah appears to have been sparsely populated, limited to small rural settlements, most of them unfortified.[8]

and Wikipedia’s “Davidic line” says that,

as for David and his immediate descendants themselves, the position of some scholars, as described by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed, espouses that David and Solomon may well be based on “certain historical kernels”, and probably did exist in their own right, but their historical counterparts simply could not have ruled over a wealthy lavish empire as described in the Bible, and were more likely chieftains of a comparatively modest Israelite society in Judah and not regents over a kingdom proper.[27]

If the actual historical nation of Israel was ONLY what is shown on the map as constituting the Kingdom of Judah, then neither Gaza nor the northern two-thirds of the West Bank had ever been in any ancient Israel; and, so, anyone who says that the Jews in 1948 were ‘coming home’ to ‘Israel’ is historically wrong. However, those Jews were ethnically cleansing the land. It’s well-documented, such as hereherehere, and here. And even if ancient Israel had included all of the land that now is Israel, it wasn’t so at all in recent centuries, when virtually all of the residents there were Muslims and Christians — though Jews were demanding to control it while being only a tiny percentage of the population there. Their supremacism was clearly not only fascist but racist; it was Jewish Nazism. Furthermore, during the 1930s, Zionists considered themselves to be fascists; and fascists in both Germany and Italy considered Zionists to be Jewish fascists, ideological brothers of both Italy’s and Germany’s fascists (Christianity’s fascists). And Albert Einstein and other prominent progressive Jews in the U.S. after World War II described as “fascists” Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected by Israel’s Jews to lead Israel. And yet the U.S. Government backed them, not only when Begin and Shamir were leading massacres of Arab villages in the 1940s, but when both men became Israel’s leaders in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s — and afterward, under their political follower Benjamin Netanyahu: clearly, a racist-supremacist apartheid regime ever since its founding, a regime which defines the supreme group, “Jew,” not only by religion, but by descent; that is, racially. Under U.S. President Harry S. Truman, the America and the world that his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was against the formation of a Jewish state and even resisted his aides who backed Churchill’s strong support for the creation of Israel, and who also was opposed to Winston Churchill’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s urgings for a war against the Soviet Union) had sought and carefully planned — the world that FDR had been intensively working to build — abruptly ended. And, more than anything else, this is the reason why, on 28 October 2023, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva, to resign his post. He resigned his post because now the final solution to the Palestinian problem — the problem that Truman and his successors enabled fascist Jews to create — is about to come to a head. And decent Jews everywhere will be experiencing the backlash from what the indecent ones — who are the majority in Israel — are doing. The decent Jews will be getting the backlash for what the indecent ones are doing, but the blame really should go ONLY to the Israelis, and to the UK and U.S. billionaires (and their politicians and ‘news’-media) who have been constantly propagandizing for them.

Israelis May Ask Who the Real Hostage-Takers Are: Hamas or Netanyahu Regime?

By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war Cabinet are pushing ahead with a limited ground invasion of Gaza – even though that will mean disaster for thousands of more innocent lives, including over 200 Israeli hostages.

The Biden administration has reportedly been trying to delay the drastic manoeuvre to give more chance for negotiations to secure the release of hostages. But Netanyahu and his cabinet are driven by their ideological fanaticism and need to save face.

Since the attacks on Israel by Hamas Palestinian militants on October 7, the world has been waiting for a much-vaunted ground invasion by the Israeli Defense Forces into the Gaza Strip. Over 1,400 Israelis were killed during the Hamas raids. An estimated 230 hostages were taken by the militants back to Gaza where they are held in secret locations presumably in a network of underground tunnels.

Three weeks of intense aerial bombardment of the Palestinian coastal territory have wrought unprecedented death and destruction in Gaza. Over 8,000 people have been killed with 70 percent of the toll due to women, children and elderly, according to Gaza’s health officials.

The plight of the hostages presents a dilemma for Netanyahu. He is trying to assure Israelis that the “second stage” of the “war on Hamas” – that is the ground invasion – will achieve both objectives of defeating Hamas and rescuing the hostages.

However, the Israeli leader and his war Cabinet are cynically deceiving their people. If the IDF proceed further with its ground operation, the hostages will most likely die.

Already Hamas spokesmen have claimed that 50 hostages have lost their lives during the relentless air strikes over the past three weeks. Hamas released four of the hostages on humanitarian considerations.

The fierce gun battles that are anticipated amid the rubble of Gaza and throughout the maze of tunnels do not bode well for the safe return of the remaining captives.

This is why families of the hostages and many supporters among the Israeli public are calling on Netanyahu to abandon the ground operation and to engage in negotiations for a prisoner exchange.

Hamas officials have offered the release of hostages in exchange for the freedom of all Palestinian political prisoners held by the Israelis. The Israelis detained an estimated 5,000 Palestinians before October 7.  The number has increased dramatically over the past three weeks due to a repressive policy of reprisal by the Israeli state. Hundreds of Palestinians in the other enclave territory of the Occupied West Bank have been taken into custody under emergency powers.

Israeli families are becoming increasingly angry at the way Netanyahu and his ministers are handling the crisis. Protests were held at the weekend outside the Ministry of Defence in Tel Aviv. One parent demanded: “We want all of them [the hostages] back with us today. We want you, the Cabinet, the government, to imagine that these are your children.”

Many Israelis have pointed out how Netanyahu’s sons, Yair and Avner, have inexplicably avoided military call-ups during the so-called state of war declared by the Cabinet. Netanyahu’s eldest son Yair (32) has been on an extended holiday in Miami since April this year.

Others are indignant at the seemingly callous attitude towards the families. “They feel like they’re left behind and no one is really caring about them,” said Miki Haimovitz, a former lawmaker. “No one is explaining what’s going on,” he added, as quoted by Associated Press.

Another lawmaker, Ofer Cassif, told the Strategic Culture Foundation that the Netanyahu government is ramping up repressive powers against any form of opposition to its military and security policies.

Cassif says public meetings throughout Israel are being banned for any groups who are calling for an end to the violence and for negotiations to prevail. He says the persecution is particularly sharp against Palestinians living in Israeli territory. Still, all citizens including Jews who are speaking out against war are liable to be charged as “terrorists”.

In a statement, Cassif, a Member of Parliament (Knesset) for the Hadash party said: “Netanyahu and his thugs use the smokescreen of the war to impose a martial law on Israeli citizens, predominantly Palestinian ones: protests are prohibited and can now be answered with live ammunition, workers and students are suspended and dissidents are persecuted for posts on the social network. I plead to the world – supporting the Israeli government is not supporting Israeli people – it is supporting fascism, death and dictatorship. If you wish to help Israeli people in this dire time – support the peace movement, not the warmongers who waged a war against their own people.”

Despite the repression, a groundswell of public opposition is building against Netanyahu and his coalition administration, which comprises extreme Zionists like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Interior Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Last year, Netanyahu riled mass opposition to what was perceived by the public as a grab for dictatorial powers under the so-called reform of the state’s judiciary. Netanyahu has avoided court prosecution for several corruption cases by extending his time in political office. He has done this by making a pact with extremists who have long wanted to eradicate residual Palestinian territory in Gaza and the West Bank to fulfil a Zionist project of forming “Eretz Israel” (Greater Israel).

When the Hamas killings took place on October 7, many Israelis initially rallied behind Netanyahu and his War Cabinet.

But despite the repressive climate in Israel, many people are now asking questions of Netanyahu and his regime. How was such a security failure possible on October 7? Netanyahu, the wily and slippery character he is, has tried to scapegoat his military team only for them to hit back at him.

In extreme overcompensation for failure, Netanyahu and his fanatical Cabinet are going hard into Gaza to show muscle, regardless of the innocent suffering and mounting war crimes. All too evidently, also of disregard is the fate of Israeli hostages.

The criminal recklessness of Netanyahu and his regime will rebound with a vengeance. Over half of the hostages held by Hamas are foreigners, including American and British citizens.

The death and destruction in Gaza could be stopped immediately if Israel abided by the United Nations’ call for an immediate ceasefire. But, diabolically, the Palestinians, Israelis and indeed the wider region are being held hostage by a psychopathic regime headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.

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

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

Image Credit: AFP

By Dave Lindorff

Source: Nation of Change

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

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

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

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

And still, no burgeoning, blooming peace movement.

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

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

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

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

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

Get it?

It’s time to take that to the streets.

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

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

Julian Assange’s Imprisonment Is The Intellectual Imprisonment of Us All

By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

Julian Assange has been imprisoned since 2012 because he had provided, to whistleblowers who were in government and who saw and could supply to his WikiLeaks organization, items of evidence which indicated that their government was breaking its own laws, protection of their personal identity, which confidentiality they could then rely upon for their personal safety, to protect those whistleblowers against retaliation by their government. No regular ‘news’-medium could or would reliably do that, but Assange and his WikiLeaks organization could, and they always did. This is why governmental whistleblowers did go to them for this purpose.

The power that a government has to ‘classify’ documents is the power that it has to hide evidence from its public and so to rule its population as being their subjects instead of (authentically) their citizens: it is the ability to BE a dictatorship. (It might arguably be acceptable when a democracy is being invaded by a foreign country, but never — other than that — can there be governmental secrecy to protect itself unless the government is a dictatorship — NOT a democracy — in which case the Government is, itself, being the enemy of its own population.) Without such secrecy against the public, the government would be a democracy, because then the population would be voting in an authentically free information-environment where there exists uncensored information to the public, so that each individual can make one’s OWN individual judgments regarding what is true, and what is false. But, otherwise, a government is a dictatorship.

This power (classifying governmental information) is also a government’s power of legal impunity so that it can violate its own laws and know that the voting public will not know that it did. That routine power of classifying information is the intellectual imprisonment of the nation’s entire population.

Julian Assange is not a subject (‘citizen’) of the U.S. Government, nor is he a subject of the UK Government, nor is he a subject of the other two Governments (Sweden and Ecuador) that have participated in assisting America and Britain to place and keep him in varying forms of (now super-max) imprisonment for over a decade, but they have done it, during all of this time, and never yet has he been tried and convicted of anything other than his having jumped bail in 2012 on a phony rape charge that even its alleged victim admitted had been false; so, in effect, if not in reality, his very imprisonment is an example of those governments’ dictatorships — it has already been long-term imprisonment without trial. ONLY a dictatorship does that. Only a dictatorship can do that.

Assange is instead a subject of the Australian dictatorship, which has done nothing at all to assist him or to protest his being raped by ‘law’ in those foreign lands. The fact that there are not revolutions overthrowing and replacing the Governments in each one of the countries that has participated in this ‘legal’ rape of Assange is testimony to the effectiveness of the intellectual imprisonment of each one of those nations’ populations.

Assange has been in various forms of imprisonment by UK for the last ten years without his ever having been convicted of anything except that in 2012 he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for jumping bail (on sexual charges against him that even the alleged accuser denied were true). And yet he remains now in solitary confinement (“23 hours a day locked in their cells”) in a super-max British prison, because the U.S. Government won’t stop its demand that he be extradited to the U.S. (and killed here — imprisoned for up to 175 years — instead of in Britain). His only ‘crime’ was his publishing only truths, especially truths that cut to the core of exposing the U.S. regime’s constant lying. So, this blatant and illegal injustice against an international hero (virtually everywhere except in the United States) is today one prominent disproof of the U.S. and UK lies to the effect that they are democracies. On 26 September 2021, Yahoo News reported (based largely on reporting in Madrid’s El Pais on 5 January 2021) that the Trump Administration felt so embarrassed by some information that had been WikiLeaked, they drew up detailed plans to kidnap Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to “rendition” him for possible execution by America. The plans, including “meetings with authorities or approvals signed by the president,” were finally stopped at the National Security Council, as being too risky. “Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration”, even without any legal basis to try him in the United States. So: the Trump Administration then prepared an indictment against Assange (to legalize their extradition-request), and the indictment became unsealed or made public on the same day, 11 April 2019, when Ecuador’s Government allowed UK’s Government to drag Assange out into UK super-max solitary-confinement imprisonment, and this subsequently produced lie-based U.S. & UK tussles over how to prevent Assange from ever again being able to reach the public, either by continuing his solitary confinement, or else by, perhaps, poisoning him, or else convicting him of something and then executing him. On 4 January 2021, a British judge nixed Assange’s defense case: “I reject the defence submissions concerning staying extradition [to U.S.] as an abuse of the process of this court.” Earlier, her handling of Assange’s only ‘trial’, which was his extradition hearing, was a travesty, which would have been expected in Hitler’s courts, and which makes clear that UK’s courts can be just as bad as Nazi courts had been. However, the U.S. regime’s efforts to grab Assange continued on. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the overwhelmingly compliant U.S. Congress, are all to blame for that dictatorial regime’s pursuit against that champion of truth-telling; and the same blame applies to the leadership in UK. On 10 December 2021, BBC bannered “Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules”. Blatantly, both America and England lie in order to refer to themselves as being democracies. In fact, America has the world’s highest percentage of its residents in prisons. It’s the world’s #1 police-state. Is that because Americans are worse than the people in other countries, or is it instead because the thousand or so individuals who collectively control the nation’s Government are, themselves, especially psychopathic? Evidence will now be linked-to on that question: America has been scientifically examined more than any other country has, in regards to whether it is an aristocracy, or instead a democracy, and the clear and consistent finding is that it’s an aristocracy. And it clearly is that at the federal level. (Here is a video summarizing the best single study of that, and it finds America to be an aristocracy, because it’s controlled by the richest few). And Norway’s aristocracy had also been part of this scandal. It is an international scandal, and keeps getting worse.

On June 19th, Chris Hedges headlined “The Imminent Extradition of Julian Assange & the Death of Journalism” and documented that the alleged ‘assurances’ that the U.S. regime had provided to the UK regime on the basis of which the latter dictatorship would be transferring Assange to a super-max prison in the United States, had as many holes in it as a ton of Swiss cheese.

ONLY in barbaric dictatorships is any of this even possible, but here it is real.

Assange’s ‘trial’ will be the trial of ‘democracy’ in whatever nation it will be executed.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion

The End Stage of American Empire

By William J. Astore

Source: TomDispatch.com

All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving?

For me, that last question is radical indeed. From my early years, I believed deeply in the idea of America. I knew this country wasn’t perfect, of course, not even close. Long before the 1619 Project, I was aware of the “original sin” of slavery and how central it was to our history. I also knew about the genocide of Native Americans. (As a teenager, my favorite movie — and so it remains — was Little Big Man, which pulled no punches when it came to the white man and his insatiably murderous greed.)

Nevertheless, America still promised much, or so I believed in the 1970s and 1980s. Life here was simply better, hands down, than in places like the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China. That’s why we had to “contain” communism — to keep them over there, so they could never invade our country and extinguish our lamp of liberty. And that’s why I joined America’s Cold War military, serving in the Air Force from the presidency of Ronald Reagan to that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And believe me, it proved quite a ride. It taught this retired lieutenant colonel that the sky’s anything but the limit.

In the end, 20 years in the Air Force led me to turn away from empire, militarism, and nationalism. I found myself seeking instead some antidote to the mainstream media’s celebrations of American exceptionalism and the exaggerated version of victory culture that went with it (long after victory itself was in short supply). I started writing against the empire and its disastrous wars and found likeminded people at TomDispatch — former imperial operatives turned incisive critics like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, along with sharp-eyed journalist Nick Turse and, of course, the irreplaceable Tom Engelhardt, the founder of those “tomgrams” meant to alert America and the world to the dangerous folly of repeated U.S. global military interventions.

But this isn’t a plug for TomDispatch. It’s a plug for freeing your mind as much as possible from the thoroughly militarized matrix that pervades America. That matrix drives imperialism, waste, war, and global instability to the point where, in the context of the conflict in Ukraine, the risk of nuclear Armageddon could imaginably approach that of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. As wars — proxy or otherwise — continue, America’s global network of 750-odd military bases never seems to decline. Despite upcoming cuts to domestic spending, just about no one in Washington imagines Pentagon budgets doing anything but growing, even soaring toward the trillion-dollar level, with militarized programs accounting for 62% of federal discretionary spending in 2023.

Indeed, an engorged Pentagon — its budget for 2024 is expected to rise to $886 billion in the bipartisan debt-ceiling deal reached by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — guarantees one thing: a speedier fall for the American empire. Chalmers Johnson predicted it; Andrew Bacevich analyzed it. The biggest reason is simple enough: incessant, repetitive, disastrous wars and costly preparations for more of the same have been sapping America’s physical and mental reserves, as past wars did the reserves of previous empires throughout history. (Think of the short-lived Napoleonic empire, for example.)

Known as “the arsenal of democracy” during World War II, America has now simply become an arsenal, with a military-industrial-congressional complex intent on forging and feeding wars rather than seeking to starve and stop them. The result: a precipitous decline in the country’s standing globally, while at home Americans pay a steep price of accelerating violence (2023 will easily set a record for mass shootings) and “carnage” (Donald Trump’s word) in a once proud but now much-bloodied “homeland.”

Lessons from History on Imperial Decline

I’m a historian, so please allow me to share a few basic lessons I’ve learned. When I taught World War I to cadets at the Air Force Academy, I would explain how the horrific costs of that war contributed to the collapse of four empires: Czarist Russia, the German Second Reich, the Ottoman empire, and the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Habsburgs. Yet even the “winners,” like the French and British empires, were also weakened by the enormity of what was, above all, a brutal European civil war, even if it spilled over into Africa, Asia, and indeed the Americas.

And yet after that war ended in 1918, peace proved elusive indeed, despite the Treaty of Versailles, among other abortive agreements. There was too much unfinished business, too much belief in the power of militarism, especially in an emergent Third Reich in Germany and in Japan, which had embraced ruthless European military methods to create its own Asiatic sphere of dominance. Scores needed to be settled, so the Germans and Japanese believed, and military offensives were the way to do it.

As a result, civil war in Europe continued with World War II, even as Japan showed that Asiatic powers could similarly embrace and deploy the unwisdom of unchecked militarism and war. The result: 75 million dead and more empires shattered, including Mussolini’s “New Rome,” a “thousand-year” German Reich that barely lasted 12 of them before being utterly destroyed, and an Imperial Japan that was starved, burnt out, and finally nuked. China, devastated by war with Japan, also found itself ripped apart by internal struggles between nationalists and communists.

As with its prequel, even most of the “winners” of World War II emerged in a weakened state. In defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union had lost 25 to 30 million people. Its response was to erect, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, an “Iron Curtain” behind which it could exploit the peoples of Eastern Europe in a militarized empire that ultimately collapsed due to its wars and its own internal divisions. Yet the USSR lasted longer than the post-war French and British empires. France, humiliated by its rapid capitulation to the Germans in 1940, fought to reclaim wealth and glory in “French” Indochina, only to be severely humbled at Dien Bien Phu. Great Britain, exhausted from its victory, quickly lost India, that “jewel” in its imperial crown, and then Egypt in the Suez debacle.

There was, in fact, only one country, one empire, that truly “won” World War II: the United States, which had been the least touched (Pearl Harbor aside) by war and all its horrors. That seemingly never-ending European civil war from 1914 to 1945, along with Japan’s immolation and China’s implosion, left the U.S. virtually unchallenged globally. America emerged from those wars as a superpower precisely because its government had astutely backed the winning side twice, tipping the scales in the process, while paying a relatively low price in blood and treasure compared to allies like the Soviet Union, France, and Britain.

History’s lesson for America’s leaders should have been all too clear: when you wage war long, especially when you devote significant parts of your resources — financial, material, and especially personal — to it, you wage it wrong. Not for nothing is war depicted in the Bible as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. France had lost its empire in World War II; it just took later military catastrophes in Algeria and Indochina to make it obvious. That was similarly true of Britain’s humiliations in India, Egypt, and elsewhere, while the Soviet Union, which had lost much of its imperial vigor in that war, would take decades of slow rot and overstretch in places like Afghanistan to implode.

Meanwhile, the United States hummed along, denying it was an empire at all, even as it adopted so many of the trappings of one. In fact, in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington’s leaders would declare America the exceptional “superpower,” a new and far more enlightened Rome and “the indispensable nation” on planet Earth. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, its leaders would confidently launch what they termed a Global War on Terror and begin waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, as in the previous century they had in Vietnam. (No learning curve there, it seems.) In the process, its leaders imagined a country that would remain untouched by war’s ravages, which was we now know — or do we? — the height of imperial hubris and folly.

For whether you call it fascism, as with Nazi Germany, communism, as with Stalin’s Soviet Union, or democracy, as with the United States, empires built on dominance achieved through a powerful, expansionist military necessarily become ever more authoritarian, corrupt, and dysfunctional. Ultimately, they are fated to fail. No surprise there, since whatever else such empires may serve, they don’t serve their own people. Their operatives protect themselves at any cost, while attacking efforts at retrenchment or demilitarization as dangerously misguided, if not seditiously disloyal.

That’s why those like Chelsea ManningEdward Snowden, and Daniel Hale, who shined a light on the empire’s militarized crimes and corruption, found themselves imprisoned, forced into exile, or otherwise silenced. Even foreign journalists like Julian Assange can be caught up in the empire’s dragnet and imprisoned if they dare expose its war crimes. The empire knows how to strike back and will readily betray its own justice system (most notably in the case of Assange), including the hallowed principles of free speech and the press, to do so.

Perhaps he will eventually be freed, likely as not when the empire judges he’s approaching death’s door. His jailing and torture have already served their purpose. Journalists know that to expose America’s bloodied tools of empire brings only harsh punishment, not plush rewards. Best to look away or mince one’s words rather than risk prison — or worse.

Yet you can’t fully hide the reality that this country’s failed wars have added trillions of dollars to its national debt, even as military spending continues to explode in the most wasteful ways imaginable, while the social infrastructure crumbles.

Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion

Today, America clings ever more bitterly to guns and religion. If that phrase sounds familiar, it might be because Barack Obama used it in the 2008 presidential campaign to describe the reactionary conservatism of mostly rural voters in Pennsylvania. Disillusioned by politics, betrayed by their putative betters, those voters, claimed the then-presidential candidate, clung to their guns and religion for solace. I lived in rural Pennsylvania at the time and recall a response from a fellow resident who basically agreed with Obama, for what else was there left to cling to in an empire that had abandoned its own rural working-class citizens?

Something similar is true of America writ large today. As an imperial power, we cling bitterly to guns and religion. By “guns,” I mean all the weaponry America’s merchants of death sell to the Pentagon and across the world. Indeed, weaponry is perhaps this country’s most influential global export, devastatingly so. From 2018 to 2022, the U.S. alone accounted for 40% of global arms exports, a figure that’s only risen dramatically with military aid to Ukraine. And by “religion,” I mean a persistent belief in American exceptionalism (despite all evidence to the contrary), which increasingly draws sustenance from a militant Christianity that denies the very spirit of Christ and His teachings.

Yet history appears to confirm that empires, in their dying stages, do exactly that: they exalt violence, continue to pursue war, and insist on their own greatness until their fall can neither be denied nor reversed. It’s a tragic reality that the journalist Chris Hedges has written about with considerable urgency.

The problem suggests its own solution (not that any powerful figure in Washington is likely to pursue it). America must stop clinging bitterly to its guns — and here I don’t even mean the nearly 400 million weapons in private hands in this country, including all those AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. By “guns,” I mean all the militarized trappings of empire, including America’s vast structure of overseas military bases and its staggering commitments to weaponry of all sorts, including world-ending nuclear ones. As for clinging bitterly to religion — and by “religion” I mean the belief in America’s own righteousness, regardless of the millions of people it’s killed globally from the Vietnam era to the present moment — that, too, would have to stop.

History’s lessons can be brutal. Empires rarely die well. After it became an empire, Rome never returned to being a republic and eventually fell to barbarian invasions. The collapse of Germany’s Second Reich bred a third one of greater virulence, even if it was of shorter duration. Only its utter defeat in 1945 finally convinced Germans that God didn’t march with their soldiers into battle.

What will it take to convince Americans to turn their backs on empire and war before it’s too late? When will we conclude that Christ wasn’t joking when He blessed the peacemakers rather than the warmongers?

As an iron curtain descends on a failing American imperial state, one thing we won’t be able to say is that we weren’t warned.