10-24-2023, 05:44 PM
THE DAJALLIC ZIONIST ISRAELI "BASTARD" STATE WHICH WAS GIVEN BIRTH BY THE DAJALLIC UN DISCUSSES THE ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR. WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT FROM THIS ORGANISATION? THE ENTIRE DEBATE IS ABSOLUTELY WRONGLY STRUCTURED. THE ISSUE THAT SHOULD BE DEBATED IS ADDRESSING THE VIOLATION OF THE RIGHTS OF PALESTINIANS FOR OVER 75 YEARS.
SURE THE 200 PLUS HOSTAGES SHOULD BE RELEASED. BUT HOLD ON WHAT ABOUT THE ZIONIST OPPRESSION OF THE FORGOTTEN 20000 PALESTINIAN PRISONERS? THEY SHOULD ALSO BE RELEASED IMMEDIATELY AND UNCONDITIONALLY . BUT EXCUSE ME UN YOU HAVE PLACED THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE AS HOSTAGES IN THEIR OWN LAND FOR OVER 75 YEARS. THE WHOLE DEBATE IS A FARCE. THE WEST IS MILITARILY COLLUDING WITH ITS CREATION OF A ROGUE STATE BASED ON VIOLENT ROBBERY OF PALESTINIANS LAND.
HAMAS IS BLAMED FOR TERRORISM BUT THERE IS NO MENTION OF THE DAJALLIC ZIONIST STATE'S COLONIAL SETTLER TERRORISM, VIOLENT APARTHEID AND ETHNIC CLEANSING AGAINST THE PALESTINIANS AND RELIGIOUS VIOLATION OF SACRED AL AQSA.
THE EVENTS OF OCTOBER 7 ONWARDS WERE A REACTION TO THE PROVOCATIONS OF THE MOST EXTREMIST RACIST ZIONIST REGIME AND FOREIGN SETTLERS ON THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES. THOSE WHO ARE PRETENDING TO BE DEAF, DUMB AND BLIND TO THIS ARE ABETTERS OF WAR CRIMES. THEY NEED TO BE TRIED IN A WORLD COURT OF JUSTICE FOR WAR CRIMES.
THE ISSUE IS NOT ABOUT A NATION'S RIGHT TO SELF DEFENCE AND CONDEMNATION OF HAMAS. THE ISSUE IS ABOUT RESISTANCE AND SURVIVAL OF THE PALESTINIANS AND PALESTINIAN LIVES AGAINST A SLOW MOTION GENOCIDE. THE IDF'S AERIAL SAVAGERY AND TELEVISED ORGY IS BARBARISM OF THE WORST KIND. THE INCINERATION OF BABIES, CHILDREN AND ELDERLY IS NAZISM AND MUST BE STOPPED. THERE MUST BE A CEASEFIRE IMMEDIATELY.
THE COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT OF THE CIVILIAN PALESTINIAN POPULATION VIOLATES INTERNATIONAL LAW. THE DAJJALIC ZIONIST STATE'S BARBARIC VIOLENCE THREATENS TO ESCALATE AND THREATENS THE REGION'S PEACE.
IN AN AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA THE MSM MONOPOLY IS BROKEN. THE SO CALLED RULES BASED INTERNATIONAL ORDER IS SEEN TO BE A COVER TO PROMOTE WESTERN INTERESTS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE REST OF THE WORLD. THAT SYSTEM IS FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED AND EXPOSED AND DOES NOT HAVE THE CONSENT OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH.
THE CURRENT CONFLICT HAS EXPOSED THE ETHNIC CLEANSING AND GENOCIDE OF THE DAJJALIC ZIONIST STATE. IT'S CREDIBILITY IS ERODING AMONGST THE WORLD' S POPULATION.
THE UN'S INACTION AND COMPLACENCY CONDEMNS IT TO BE DISBANDED. AN INTERNATIONAL PEACE KEEPING FORCE NEEDS TO INTERVENE IMMEDIATELY AND PALESTINIANS MUST BE GIVEN THEIR RIGHTS OF SELF DETERMINATION IMMEDIATELY AND UNCONDITIONALLY.
WE STAND FOR GLOBAL JUSTICE.
HASBUNALLAH
http://www.army-of-mahdi.com/download/au..._kommt.mp3
UNSC DEBATES ISRAEL HAMAS WAR & THE QUESTION OF A PALESTINE SOLUTION
TURKISH PRESIDENT RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN CALLS FOR IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE IN GAZA
MIDDLE EASTERNERS HAVE WORDS FOR THE WESTERN PRESS WHO'VE BEEN LYING ANOUT THEM
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/20...bout-them/
The western press have been finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to do reporting alongside the middle easterners they’ve been lying about for generations, and discovering that a lot of those middle easterners speak English and have a few things to say.
Caitlin Johnstone
Hundreds of US congressional staffers are passing around a letter urging their bosses to call for a ceasefire, there’s a silent mutiny brewing in the State Department over the Biden administration’s Gaza actions, mainstream reporters have been refusing to parrot Israel narratives, and the streets are full of pro-Palestine demonstrators.
This is different. What we are seeing right now is a deviation from the usual script.
The western press have been finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to do reporting alongside the middle easterners they’ve been lying about for generations, and discovering that a lot of those middle easterners speak English and have a few things to say.
Check out this clip of Egyptian podcaster Rahma Zein laying into CNN’s Clarissa Ward at a protest at the Rafah Crossing border gates:
And this clip of a Palestinian man telling off CNN’s Sara Sidner?—?who helped circulate the infamous “40 decapitated babies” psyop?—saying “You are genocide supporters! You are not welcome here! Genocide supporters! Fuck CNN! Fuck CNN!”:
An urgently needed message and a long overdue confrontation.
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If Israel didn’t bomb that hospital then why did it doctor up a fraudulent audio clip pretending to show Hamas fighters saying Israel didn’t bomb the hospital?
The only way to reconcile this fact with a belief in Israel’s innocence is rigorous psychological compartmentalization.
A lot of the distortion around this current crisis arises from confusion between peace and the baseline status quo. Because Israel had been trucking along at the same status quo for so long, people assume there was a state of peace when Hamas attacked it, which was why the western political/media class were able to frame it as an “unprovoked” attack. But in reality the status quo in Israel has been one of continually escalating violence, tyranny and abuse for generations, not one of peace.
The trouble with abusive dynamics that have been going on for a long time is that after a while those who aren’t directly affected by the abuse tend to get used to that way of being and start thinking of it as normal. So when there’s pushback against that abusive status quo, it looks to them like it came completely out of nowhere at the hands of an unprovoked aggressor.
Stand on someone’s face for long enough and one day it will surprise you if he eventually bites your foot. You might even feel like you were the victim, because that’s just what you’d gotten used to.
And the imperial media of course do everything they can to exacerbate public confusion about this crucial distinction. The Hamas attack is being constantly framed as an unprovoked act of aggression by evil men who wanted to do evil things to Jews, solely because they are evil and hate Jews. History began on October 7, and all the events from 1948 onward never happened.
Empire propagandists do this constantly by the way, wherever it suits the information interests of the empire.
After 9/11 it was “they hate us for our freedom” and all the US aggressions in the middle east which provoked Al Qaeda were swept under the carpet. When Russia invaded Ukraine the well-documented NATO provocations and violence in the Donbass which gave rise to it were written out of the history books, and history began on February 24, 2022. If China ever reacts to the US military surrounding it with war machinery and its aggressive provocations in Taiwan, that will be framed as a completely unprovoked attack which came completely out of nowhere as well.
Circumstances aren’t peaceful just because we are used to them. Just because you are able to go about your daily routine without major disruption doesn’t mean someone isn’t being horrifically abused by the status quo which makes your way of life possible. Peace doesn’t look like everyone complying with the status quo regardless of its abusiveness, it looks like the absence of abuse.
ISRAEL IS CAUGHT LYING TIME AND AGAIN AND YET WE NEVER LEARN
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/20...ver-learn/
Disinformation over the blast at Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital worked as planned, taking the focus off the victims and lifting pressure on Israel to stop its rampage
Jonathan Cook
A man carries a rescued Palestinian girl from the rubble of a building after an Israeli air strike at the Rafah refugee camp, in the southern Gaza Strip. Western politicians and media act as if they are caught in a permanent spell, sympathetically indulging even the most wildly improbable denials from Israel that it has committed war crimes.
As Lenin famously observed: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth”.
We can go further. It never matters how often Israel is caught out in a lie, because its next lie will be given the benefit of the doubt. Western media refuse to learn from the past.
The latest example came a few days ago. Israel vigorously kicked up dust to obscure its responsibility for hitting the al-Ahli Baptist hospital in Gaza City last Tuesday, killing many hundreds of Palestinians sheltering in its grounds. Faced with Israel’s relentless campaign of bombing, families had assumed they would be safest close to a Christian institution.
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Drawing on previous experience, Israel rightly assumes that by the time the dust settles – and the truth emerges – the world will have moved on. The lie will stand.
Context stripped out
Israel’s job is made considerably easier by the media, whose coverage of Israeli atrocities can invariably be depended on to strip out relevant context.
As Israel began pummelling Gaza more than two weeks ago with thousands of high-explosive bombs, its leaders clarified exactly what their intent was.
Referring to the people of Gaza as “human animals”, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to “eliminate everything”. An Israeli military official explained that the “emphasis is on damage, not accuracy”. Another said Gaza would be reduced to “a city of tents… There will be no buildings.”
Meanwhile, President Isaac Herzog accused the entire people of Gaza of being responsible for the Hamas attack, effectively denying every man, woman and child their civilian status and designating them all terrorists. He added: “We will break their backbone.”
Israel has demanded that Palestinians leave the northern half of the tiny Gaza Strip, requiring them to ethnically cleanse themselves. It has indicated that the vacated area would be treated as a free-fire zone.
According to the United Nations, in less than two weeks, a quarter of Gaza’s homes have been turned to rubble, and 600,000 Palestinians left homeless. To ensure Palestinians do as they are told, Israel has targeted the support structures and major institutions in northern Gaza which ordinary people depend on. Mosques, schools, United Nations compounds and hospitals have been hit.
In the days leading up to the attack on al-Ahli hospital, 23 other medical centres in northern Gaza received warnings to evacuate immediately. Dozens have been hit, according to the World Health Organisation. Those threats were ignored because the hospitals are already overflowing with patients too injured from Israel’s bombardments to be moved, and because there are no facilities to treat them elsewhere.
Apparently angered by this defiance, Israel hit al-Ahli hospital with two shells three days before the larger strike. This is known by the Israeli military as its “knock on the roof” procedure: firing a small weapon at a building as advance warning to evacuate before a much bigger strike.
Gaslighting operation
Israel had told us precisely what it was going to do. But when it then did it, Israel began its now familiar gaslighting operation. It denied it was the guilty party, accusing a Palestinian militant group, Islamic Jihad, of the war crime instead.
It said a Palestinian rocket had misfired and fallen onto the hospital. Israel’s claim was ridiculous. On a video of the actual strike, you can hear the loud whistling sound of an incoming, high-velocity missile or shell moments before it explodes. Palestinian groups in Gaza have only primitive rockets that lumber through the sky. If one fails, it tumbles at free-fall speed, not at near-supersonic velocity.
The casualty rate alone proved it had to be an Israeli missile. No Palestinian rocket has ever killed more than a handful of people, not hundreds as this one did. But Israel was ready with a campaign of lies and disinformation. Embarrassingly, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had issued a social media post celebrating Israel hitting a supposed “terrorist base” in the hospital. The post was hurriedly deleted.
Instead, Israel issued footage of a Palestinian rocket falling nearby. However, Israel had to pull the video, too, when journalists noticed the time stamp was 40 minutes after the explosion at Al-Ahli.
Next, Israel produced a laughably inept audio recording supposedly of two Hamas fighters chatting – in the wrong dialect – about whether they or their rivals in Islamic Jihad had fired the stray rocket.
Israel runs a “mistaravim” unit of Israelis who disguise themselves as Palestinians to operate undercover in Palestinian communities. It also famously operates networks of Palestinian collaborators whom it threatens or bribes. Faking an audio would be child’s play for Israel.
In any case, in the recording the pair cited a cemetery close to the hospital as the site of their supposed failed rocket launch. But that contradicted other Israeli military claims that the rocket had been fired from an entirely different location.
At the weekend, Forensic Architecture, a research team based at the University of London, issued their preliminary findings. Analysis of the site showed, both from the pattern of damage caused by the strike and changes in the sound signature of the projectile as it moved through the air, that its trajectory was from Israel into Gaza, not out of Gaza. Other analysis indicated that the audio file of the two Hamas operatives talking had been manipulated.
Israel’s disinformation skills looked almost as amateur as its much-vaunted intelligence operations, which failed to spot months of planning by Hamas for its breakout on 7 October.
Seed of doubt
The goal here, as ever, was not to produce evidence but to win the propaganda battle through misdirection, planting a seed of doubt that western politicians and media could then exploit to cloud the issue for their publics.
Instead of giving the victims proper attention, instead of finally galvanising anger over Israel’s wanton killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians in two weeks, the media’s reporting reverted to a predictable formula. It weighed claim and counter-claim over the hospital strike, it carried profiles about Islamic Jihad, and – most importantly for Israel – it adopted a wait-and-see, don’t-rush-to-judgment approach.
A moment that might have led to concerted diplomatic pressure on Israel to stop its rampage and negotiate a ceasefire dissolved into a round of bickering in which the hospital victims entirely disappeared from view.
By the time outside observers get into Gaza and carry out forensic tests, assuming they can, the story will be cold. No one will care, and Israel will not be held to account – morally, diplomatically or legally. This is all too familiar to anyone who has followed decades of the media’s endlessly forgiving coverage, when it matters, of Israel’s occupation and illegal colonisation of the Palestinians’ historic homeland.
The fog that instantly enveloped al-Ahlihospital story was a repeat – if on a far bigger scale – of what happened last summer when five Palestinian teenagers were killed in an air strike on Jabaliya refugee camp.
As with the hospital massacre, Israel immediately denied it was responsible, saying it had not carried out air strikes on Jabaliya at the time. It blamed Islamic Jihad for a rocket misfire.
“We have videos that prove beyond doubt that this is not an Israeli attack,” an Israeli official confidently asserted.
Oded Bassuk, head of the army’s operations directorate, called the children’s deaths “a self-inflicted injury. We could see the rocket hit a Palestinian home.”
As with the hospital story, the military released video footage purporting to show the misfired rocket. But it was all deceit. Later, when the story had moved on, the Israeli army quietly admitted that it was responsible for killing the children.
Boys on the beach
The murder of children by Israel is not an unusual occurrence. But it is also when Israel can be expected to concoct its biggest falsehoods – for the obvious reason that the killing of children is when the world briefly wakes up to Palestinian suffering before turning off again.
As with the hospital strike, a potentially pivotal moment arrived in 2014 during another of Israel’s repeated rampages in Gaza. A series of Israeli strikes killed four young boys from the Bakr family who were playing football on a beach.
At the time, Israel claimed that the children had been killed accidentally, because they strayed into a seafront “compound belonging to Hamas’s Naval Police and Naval Force (including naval commandos), and which was utilised exclusively by militants”. Israel’s claim, which gained amplification in the media, was that the boys were collateral damage in a drone strike on Palestinian militants.
Unfortunately for Israel, this was easily disproved. Several western journalists, who in those days dared to venture into Gaza, witnessed the strike because the beach was next to their hotel. The idea that Hamas militants would locate themselves on a beach next to a hotel known for hosting western journalists was patently absurd from the off.
Those journalists confirmed that there were no militants in the area at the time, and that the boys should have been visible as children to the drone operators.Reporters noted that the beach was regularly used by fishermen and families for bathing. An investigation of a small shipping container, which had been destroyed by an Israeli missile the day before, also failed to support Israel’s claim that military equipment was stored there.
A later investigation found that the drone operators had fired without taking care to distinguish between the children and militants. None of that mattered. Israel’s massacre of the children was forgotten. With no pressure on it, Israel’s reliably supine supreme court ruled last year that no further investigation was necessary. Case closed.
Executed by sniper
Perhaps the best-known recent disinformation campaign by Israel occurred 18 months ago, over the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Her murder, while wearing a flak jacket emblazoned with “Press” during an Israeli invasion of the West Bank city of Jenin, caused a wave of international indignation. It was a particularly high-stakes moment for Israel. The media took an unusual degree of interest because Abu Akhleh was a prominent journalist who had worked with many of those reporting on her killing. She also held American citizenship.
Again, Israel blamed Palestinians for the death of one of their own. They produced a video that purported to show an exchange of fire with Palestinian gunmen close to where Abu Akleh was standing when she was shot in the head.
But an investigation by Israel’s B’Tselem human rights group proved the video was taken in an entirely different area of Jenin.Major US media carried out their own investigations showing Israel had lied. There was no gunfight near Abu Akleh’s location. The most likely explanation was that an Israeli sniper decided to execute her, aiming for the narrow area of exposed flesh between her helmet and flak jacket collar.Belatedly, with the story refusing to go away, Israel admitted one of its soldiers was most likely responsible for her killing.
Israel doesn’t just actively lie when its army murders. One of its most cynical deceptions arrived in 2021 when it designated six respected Palestinian human rights and welfare groups in the West Bank as “terrorist organisations”.
It demanded that the European Union immediately stop funding them. Their offices were raided, with equipment confiscated and smashed, and their doors sealed. Staff were arrested.
Israel’s aim was obvious: to shut down organisations that provide support structures for ordinary Palestinians and advocate in international forums for the Palestinian cause by documenting Israeli crimes. That has been especially important when cash-strapped foreign media have been shutting down their own bureaux in the region.
The lie was so outrageous that even some usually receptive media outlets had trouble swallowing it. Many months later, leaks of a highly classified CIA report revealed that the Israeli accusations were entirely without foundation.
Culture of lying
The list of these deceptions and disinformation campaigns just goes on and on.
Look up the names Muhammad al-Durrah, Rachel Corrie, James Miller, Tom Hurndall, Iain Hook. Israel dissembled over all these high-profile murders carried out by its soldiers.
Even cursory research shows Israel lying about its use of cluster munitions in Lebanon in 2006, as well as its mass killing of civilians in the Lebanese village of Qana in the same war – exactly 20 years after it had earlier lied about its responsibility for killing more than 100 civilians in a United Nations compound in the same village.
Israel lied about its oversight of the mass killing of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon in 1982 by its Christian Phalangist allies. None of this should surprise. The culture of lying has prevailed since before Israel’s creation in 1948. From its inception, the Zionist movement promoted the lie that Palestine was an empty land.
To perpetuate this foundational myth, Israel lied about its wholescale ethnic cleansing operations in 1948 – one in the north was called Operation Broom – that forced out some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and drove them into refugee camps. It falsely claimed they had been ordered to do so by neighbouring Arab states.
It hid archival evidence of massacres of Palestinian civilians carried out by its forces, such as at Tantura and Dawayimah, and smeared anyone who tried to draw attention to them.
Equally, it lied that it offered the refugees a chance to return. And it destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages to stop the refugees from coming back to their homes – and then sought to conceal these crimes by planting forests in their place.
Edifice of lies
Armies end up lying in times of war because inevitably they commit crimes they wish to conceal.
The difference with Israel is that its lies are integral to its decades-long existence as a state dispossessing and colonising another people’s homeland. It must mask its system of apartheid and the crimes that inhere in such regimes of privilege and subjugation.
Israel is at permanent war with the Palestinians and the wider region, so it must lie compulsively and continuously. Each lie builds on the earlier ones. Should one fall, the whole edifice risks crumbling.
Which is what makes untangling those lies such a difficult and thankless task.
Having to engage in protracted forensic battles against Israel and its many apologists to expose every single lie draws attention away from Israel’s even bigger deceptions. It obscures the context.
Fighting to hold Israel to account for killing hundreds at al-Ahli hospital comes at the price of shifting the focus away from the fact that Israel is actively carrying out an ethnic cleansing operation in Gaza and committing genocide against the Palestinian people there.
To struggle against one lie is to leave other lies – often lies of omission – free to worm their way into the public’s consciousness.
These difficulties are compounded by the media’s willingness to indulge and collude in Israel’s disinformation – as it has been doing since the creation of a self-declared Jewish state – because Israel is such an important strategic asset. As a reliable ally, it was intended to project western power into the oil-rich Middle East.
Those who seek to bring light to a subject immersed in so much darkness find themselves smeared as antisemites – as though solidarity with Palestinian suffering could only ever be motivated by hatred of Jews.Which is why Israel can live with the bickering over who hit the al-Ahli hospital. Because the storm will soon pass, and the Palestinian victims will still be dead.
LET THEM EAT CEMENT
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/20...at-cement/
Israel is not only decimating Gaza with airstrikes but employing the oldest and cruelest weapon of war — starvation. Israel’s message, on the eve of a ground invasion, is clear. Leave Gaza or Die.
Chris Hedges
Made in Israel – by Mr. Fish
Israel, with the backing of its U.S. and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafah into refugee camps in Egypt. The reverberations will be catastrophic, not only for the Palestinians, but throughout the region, almost certainly triggering armed clashes to the north of Israel with Hezbollah in Lebanon and perhaps with Syria and Iran.
The Biden administration, slavishly doing Israel’s bidding, is fueling the madness. The U.S. was the only country to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to deliver food, medicine, water and fuel to Gaza. It has blocked proposals for a ceasefire. It has proposed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that says Israel has a right to defend itself. The resolution also demands Iran stop exporting arms to “militias and terrorist groups threatening peace and security across the region.”
The U.S. and its Western allies are as morally bankrupt and as complicit in genocide as those who witnessed the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and did nothing.
The conflict, which has taken the lives of 1,400 Israelis and at least 4,600 Palestinians in Gaza, is widening. Israel carried out a second airstrike on two airports in Syria. It daily trades rocket barrages with Hezbollah militias. U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria have been attacked by Shia militias. The USS Carney, a guided missile destroyer, shot down three cruise missiles on Thursday, apparently launched by the Houthis in Yemen and heading towards Israel.
Israel is also struggling to quell daily violent clashes in the occupied West Bank. It carried out an airstrike on Sunday on a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp – the first air strike in the West Bank for two decades – that killed at least 2 people. Armed Jewish settlers have been rampaging through Palestinian towns in the West Bank. At least 90 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by armed settlers or the Israeli military since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. Some 4,000 workers from Gaza and 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been arrested in the past two weeks, doubling the number of Palestinian prisoners to 10,000 held by Israel, over half of whom are political prisoners
“Many of the prisoners have had their limbs, hands and legs broken … degrading and insulting expressions, insults, cursing, tying them with handcuffs to the back and tightening them at the end to the point of causing severe pain … naked, humiliating and group search of the prisoners,” the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Detainees’ Affairs, Qadura Fares, said at a press conference.
B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, told the BBC that since the Oct. 7 attack, it had documented “a concerted and organized effort by settlers to use the fact that the entire international and local attention is focused on Gaza and the north of Israel to try to seize land in the West Bank.”
Inside Israel, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Jerusalem IDs are being harassed, detained, arrested and expelled from jobs and universities in what is described as a “witch hunt.” More than 152,000 Israelis have been evacuated from towns and villages near the borders of Gaza and Lebanon.
The U.S., in an effort to thwart a military response by Iran that could trigger a regional war, is deploying an additional 2,000 troops to the Middle East. It will redeploy one of its strike groups to the Persian Gulf and send additional air defense systems to the region. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its strike group — which last weekend was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to join the USS Gerald R. Ford — has been redirected to the Persian Gulf. A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile battery, and Patriot missile defense system battalions, have also been sent to the Persian Gulf.
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Israel has unleashed its Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Death, Famine, War and Conquest.
It has given Gazans two choices. Leave Gaza or die.
Palestinians will be killed not only from the bombs and shells, and eventually, with the ground invasion, bullets and tank shells, but from hunger and epidemics such as cholera. Without water, fuel and medicine and with the breakdown of sanitation, diseases will spread swiftly. The U.N. states that hospitals in Gaza “are on the brink of collapse.” Thousands of patients will die once fuel runs out for hospital generators.
A doctor from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza reported in an interview Saturday, “We are collapsing.” He spoke of a lack of oxygen, light and medical supplies, no water in some departments, concerns about cholera and the loss of doctors killed by Israeli airstrikes, including a dentist killed in Israel’s bombing of an Orthodox church that left at least 18 dead, including several children.
The handful of trucks, 37 so far, of aid into Gaza is a cynical public relations gimmick demanded by the Biden administration. It will do little to alleviate the Israeli-engineered humanitarian crisis. The U.N. says it needs at least 100 aid tracks a day. Gaza’s last functioning seawater desalination plant shut down on Sunday because of a lack of fuel.
Israel has no intention of lifting the total siege on Gaza. It announced it will increase its airstrikes. It will continue, as it has for the past two weeks, to extinguish the lives of Palestinians and terrorize and starve them into leaving Gaza.
The ground assault on Gaza will not be quick. It will involve weeks, perhaps months, of street fighting. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin compared the looming battle in Gaza to the U.S. assault on the Iraqi city of Mosul, held by ISIS, in 2014. It took the U.S. nine months to recapture Mosul.
When Israel says this will be a “long war” they are, for once, telling the truth.
Israel has requested more military aid from Washington, $14.3 billion including $10.6 billion for air and missile defense. It will get it. Israel is rapidly depleting its stocks as it pounds Gaza, including in the south of Gaza where hundreds of thousands of displaced families from the north have fled.
Israel will not permit the distribution of the $100 million in U.S. aid pledged for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, at least not until their scorched earth campaign is finished. But by then, Gaza will be unrecognizable. Israel will have annexed part or all of it. Maybe the money can go to building more illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. And pledging aid is not the same as appropriating it. So perhaps that, too, is part of the illusion.
Egyptian officials are acutely aware of what comes next. Up to half, maybe more, of the 2.3 million Palestinians will be pushed by Israel into Egypt on Gaza’s southern border and never be allowed to return.
“What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refuge and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted,” Egyptian president Abdulfattah al-Sisi warned.
Reports out of Egypt contend that Washington has promised to forgive much of Egypt’s massive $162.9 billion debt, as well as offer other economic incentives in exchange for Egypt’s acquiescence to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The refugees, once they cross the border into Egypt, will be left to rot in the Sinai.
“There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale. The international community must do everything to stop this from happening again,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.
Israel has long used war to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Government officials have openly called for another Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the term for the events of 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from historic Palestine and driven into refugee camps to create the state of Israel. During the 1967 war, which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel ethnically cleansed another 300,000 Palestinians during the Naksa, or “day of the setback,” which is commemorated every year by Palestinians.
Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, however, is not limited to wars. There has been an ongoing slow motion ethnic cleansing as Israel has steadily built more Jewish-only colonies and incrementally seized Palestinian land. Palestinians, denied basic civil liberties in Israel’s apartheid state, have been robbed of assets, including, often, their homes. They have faced mounting restrictions on their physical movements. They have been blocked from trading and business, especially the selling of produce. They have found themselves increasingly impoverished and trapped behind walls and security fences erected around Gaza and the West Bank. At the same time, they have endured periodic Israeli airstrikes, targeted assassinations and near daily attacks by armed Jewish settlers and the Israeli army.
Israel prevented Palestinians who left the West Bank and Gaza Strip from returning at the rate of about 9,000 Palestinians per year following the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, according to the Israel human rights group HaMoked. Israel has also revoked the residency permits for some 14,000 Palestinians who lived in East Jerusalem since 1967 according to B’Tselem.
Israel demolished 9,880 structures, including over 2,600 inhabited residential buildings, displacing over 14,000 people and affecting 233,681 in the West Bank alone between Jan. 1, 2009 and 7 Oct. 7, 2023, according to data from the U.N Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Since the Oct. 7 attack, a further 38 homes and other structures were demolished in the West Bank affecting an additional 13,613 people and displacing at least 73.
Less than 2.2 percent of Palestinian requests for construction permits made between 2009 and 2020 were approved, according to data from Peace Now and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The number of Israeli colonists in the occupied territories, however, has gone from zero before the June 1967 war, to between 600,000 to 750,000 spread out across at least 250 settlements and outposts throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, all of them in violation of international law.
Israel makes no secret about its intentions.
Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told troops preparing to enter Gaza, “I have released all the restraints.” Knesset member Ariel Kallner, part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called on X, formerly known as Twitter, for “a Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.”
The Israeli army mobilized Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old army veteran, to “motivate” the troops. Yachin was a member of the Lehi Zionist militia that carried out numerous massacres of Palestinian civilians, including the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, where over 100 Palestinian civilians, many women and children, were slaughtered.
“Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them,” Yachin said addressing Israeli troops.
“Erase them, their families, mothers and children,” he went on. “These animals can no longer live.”
“Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them,” he said. “If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.”
Where are our humanitarian interventionists? The ones who wept crocodile tears about the human rights of Ukranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans and Afghans, to justify massive arms shipments and war? Where is the old anti-war wing of the Democratic Party and the liberal class? What has happened to the public intellectuals who used to decry the slaughter of innocents and the U.S. war machine? Where are the jurists who uphold the rule of international law? Why are the few lonely voices speaking out about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians attacked, censored and doxxed?
“The previous president wanted to ban us and probably put us in concentration camps,” said Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, at a rally in support of a ceasefire on Oct. 20 in Washington in front of the U.S. Capitol. “This one wants us just to die. That’s how it feels. Shame on them.”
Israel will not halt its genocidal campaign in Gaza against the Palestinians until there is a U.S. arms embargo on Israel. Our weapons systems, munitions and attack aircraft sustain the slaughter. We must terminate the $3.8 billion in military aid that the U.S. gives to Israel each year. We must support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and demand suspension of all free trade and other agreements between the U.S. and Israel. Only when these props are knocked out from under Israel will the Israeli leadership be forced, as was the apartheid regime in South Africa, to integrate Palestinians into one state with equal rights. As long as these props remain, the Palestinians are doomed.
SURE THE 200 PLUS HOSTAGES SHOULD BE RELEASED. BUT HOLD ON WHAT ABOUT THE ZIONIST OPPRESSION OF THE FORGOTTEN 20000 PALESTINIAN PRISONERS? THEY SHOULD ALSO BE RELEASED IMMEDIATELY AND UNCONDITIONALLY . BUT EXCUSE ME UN YOU HAVE PLACED THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE AS HOSTAGES IN THEIR OWN LAND FOR OVER 75 YEARS. THE WHOLE DEBATE IS A FARCE. THE WEST IS MILITARILY COLLUDING WITH ITS CREATION OF A ROGUE STATE BASED ON VIOLENT ROBBERY OF PALESTINIANS LAND.
HAMAS IS BLAMED FOR TERRORISM BUT THERE IS NO MENTION OF THE DAJALLIC ZIONIST STATE'S COLONIAL SETTLER TERRORISM, VIOLENT APARTHEID AND ETHNIC CLEANSING AGAINST THE PALESTINIANS AND RELIGIOUS VIOLATION OF SACRED AL AQSA.
THE EVENTS OF OCTOBER 7 ONWARDS WERE A REACTION TO THE PROVOCATIONS OF THE MOST EXTREMIST RACIST ZIONIST REGIME AND FOREIGN SETTLERS ON THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES. THOSE WHO ARE PRETENDING TO BE DEAF, DUMB AND BLIND TO THIS ARE ABETTERS OF WAR CRIMES. THEY NEED TO BE TRIED IN A WORLD COURT OF JUSTICE FOR WAR CRIMES.
THE ISSUE IS NOT ABOUT A NATION'S RIGHT TO SELF DEFENCE AND CONDEMNATION OF HAMAS. THE ISSUE IS ABOUT RESISTANCE AND SURVIVAL OF THE PALESTINIANS AND PALESTINIAN LIVES AGAINST A SLOW MOTION GENOCIDE. THE IDF'S AERIAL SAVAGERY AND TELEVISED ORGY IS BARBARISM OF THE WORST KIND. THE INCINERATION OF BABIES, CHILDREN AND ELDERLY IS NAZISM AND MUST BE STOPPED. THERE MUST BE A CEASEFIRE IMMEDIATELY.
THE COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT OF THE CIVILIAN PALESTINIAN POPULATION VIOLATES INTERNATIONAL LAW. THE DAJJALIC ZIONIST STATE'S BARBARIC VIOLENCE THREATENS TO ESCALATE AND THREATENS THE REGION'S PEACE.
IN AN AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA THE MSM MONOPOLY IS BROKEN. THE SO CALLED RULES BASED INTERNATIONAL ORDER IS SEEN TO BE A COVER TO PROMOTE WESTERN INTERESTS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE REST OF THE WORLD. THAT SYSTEM IS FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED AND EXPOSED AND DOES NOT HAVE THE CONSENT OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH.
THE CURRENT CONFLICT HAS EXPOSED THE ETHNIC CLEANSING AND GENOCIDE OF THE DAJJALIC ZIONIST STATE. IT'S CREDIBILITY IS ERODING AMONGST THE WORLD' S POPULATION.
THE UN'S INACTION AND COMPLACENCY CONDEMNS IT TO BE DISBANDED. AN INTERNATIONAL PEACE KEEPING FORCE NEEDS TO INTERVENE IMMEDIATELY AND PALESTINIANS MUST BE GIVEN THEIR RIGHTS OF SELF DETERMINATION IMMEDIATELY AND UNCONDITIONALLY.
WE STAND FOR GLOBAL JUSTICE.
HASBUNALLAH
http://www.army-of-mahdi.com/download/au..._kommt.mp3
UNSC DEBATES ISRAEL HAMAS WAR & THE QUESTION OF A PALESTINE SOLUTION
TURKISH PRESIDENT RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN CALLS FOR IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE IN GAZA
MIDDLE EASTERNERS HAVE WORDS FOR THE WESTERN PRESS WHO'VE BEEN LYING ANOUT THEM
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/20...bout-them/
The western press have been finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to do reporting alongside the middle easterners they’ve been lying about for generations, and discovering that a lot of those middle easterners speak English and have a few things to say.
Caitlin Johnstone
Hundreds of US congressional staffers are passing around a letter urging their bosses to call for a ceasefire, there’s a silent mutiny brewing in the State Department over the Biden administration’s Gaza actions, mainstream reporters have been refusing to parrot Israel narratives, and the streets are full of pro-Palestine demonstrators.
This is different. What we are seeing right now is a deviation from the usual script.
The western press have been finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to do reporting alongside the middle easterners they’ve been lying about for generations, and discovering that a lot of those middle easterners speak English and have a few things to say.
Check out this clip of Egyptian podcaster Rahma Zein laying into CNN’s Clarissa Ward at a protest at the Rafah Crossing border gates:
And this clip of a Palestinian man telling off CNN’s Sara Sidner?—?who helped circulate the infamous “40 decapitated babies” psyop?—saying “You are genocide supporters! You are not welcome here! Genocide supporters! Fuck CNN! Fuck CNN!”:
An urgently needed message and a long overdue confrontation.
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If Israel didn’t bomb that hospital then why did it doctor up a fraudulent audio clip pretending to show Hamas fighters saying Israel didn’t bomb the hospital?
The only way to reconcile this fact with a belief in Israel’s innocence is rigorous psychological compartmentalization.
A lot of the distortion around this current crisis arises from confusion between peace and the baseline status quo. Because Israel had been trucking along at the same status quo for so long, people assume there was a state of peace when Hamas attacked it, which was why the western political/media class were able to frame it as an “unprovoked” attack. But in reality the status quo in Israel has been one of continually escalating violence, tyranny and abuse for generations, not one of peace.
The trouble with abusive dynamics that have been going on for a long time is that after a while those who aren’t directly affected by the abuse tend to get used to that way of being and start thinking of it as normal. So when there’s pushback against that abusive status quo, it looks to them like it came completely out of nowhere at the hands of an unprovoked aggressor.
Stand on someone’s face for long enough and one day it will surprise you if he eventually bites your foot. You might even feel like you were the victim, because that’s just what you’d gotten used to.
And the imperial media of course do everything they can to exacerbate public confusion about this crucial distinction. The Hamas attack is being constantly framed as an unprovoked act of aggression by evil men who wanted to do evil things to Jews, solely because they are evil and hate Jews. History began on October 7, and all the events from 1948 onward never happened.
Empire propagandists do this constantly by the way, wherever it suits the information interests of the empire.
After 9/11 it was “they hate us for our freedom” and all the US aggressions in the middle east which provoked Al Qaeda were swept under the carpet. When Russia invaded Ukraine the well-documented NATO provocations and violence in the Donbass which gave rise to it were written out of the history books, and history began on February 24, 2022. If China ever reacts to the US military surrounding it with war machinery and its aggressive provocations in Taiwan, that will be framed as a completely unprovoked attack which came completely out of nowhere as well.
Circumstances aren’t peaceful just because we are used to them. Just because you are able to go about your daily routine without major disruption doesn’t mean someone isn’t being horrifically abused by the status quo which makes your way of life possible. Peace doesn’t look like everyone complying with the status quo regardless of its abusiveness, it looks like the absence of abuse.
ISRAEL IS CAUGHT LYING TIME AND AGAIN AND YET WE NEVER LEARN
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/20...ver-learn/
Disinformation over the blast at Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital worked as planned, taking the focus off the victims and lifting pressure on Israel to stop its rampage
Jonathan Cook
A man carries a rescued Palestinian girl from the rubble of a building after an Israeli air strike at the Rafah refugee camp, in the southern Gaza Strip. Western politicians and media act as if they are caught in a permanent spell, sympathetically indulging even the most wildly improbable denials from Israel that it has committed war crimes.
As Lenin famously observed: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth”.
We can go further. It never matters how often Israel is caught out in a lie, because its next lie will be given the benefit of the doubt. Western media refuse to learn from the past.
The latest example came a few days ago. Israel vigorously kicked up dust to obscure its responsibility for hitting the al-Ahli Baptist hospital in Gaza City last Tuesday, killing many hundreds of Palestinians sheltering in its grounds. Faced with Israel’s relentless campaign of bombing, families had assumed they would be safest close to a Christian institution.
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Drawing on previous experience, Israel rightly assumes that by the time the dust settles – and the truth emerges – the world will have moved on. The lie will stand.
Context stripped out
Israel’s job is made considerably easier by the media, whose coverage of Israeli atrocities can invariably be depended on to strip out relevant context.
As Israel began pummelling Gaza more than two weeks ago with thousands of high-explosive bombs, its leaders clarified exactly what their intent was.
Referring to the people of Gaza as “human animals”, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to “eliminate everything”. An Israeli military official explained that the “emphasis is on damage, not accuracy”. Another said Gaza would be reduced to “a city of tents… There will be no buildings.”
Meanwhile, President Isaac Herzog accused the entire people of Gaza of being responsible for the Hamas attack, effectively denying every man, woman and child their civilian status and designating them all terrorists. He added: “We will break their backbone.”
Israel has demanded that Palestinians leave the northern half of the tiny Gaza Strip, requiring them to ethnically cleanse themselves. It has indicated that the vacated area would be treated as a free-fire zone.
According to the United Nations, in less than two weeks, a quarter of Gaza’s homes have been turned to rubble, and 600,000 Palestinians left homeless. To ensure Palestinians do as they are told, Israel has targeted the support structures and major institutions in northern Gaza which ordinary people depend on. Mosques, schools, United Nations compounds and hospitals have been hit.
In the days leading up to the attack on al-Ahli hospital, 23 other medical centres in northern Gaza received warnings to evacuate immediately. Dozens have been hit, according to the World Health Organisation. Those threats were ignored because the hospitals are already overflowing with patients too injured from Israel’s bombardments to be moved, and because there are no facilities to treat them elsewhere.
Apparently angered by this defiance, Israel hit al-Ahli hospital with two shells three days before the larger strike. This is known by the Israeli military as its “knock on the roof” procedure: firing a small weapon at a building as advance warning to evacuate before a much bigger strike.
Gaslighting operation
Israel had told us precisely what it was going to do. But when it then did it, Israel began its now familiar gaslighting operation. It denied it was the guilty party, accusing a Palestinian militant group, Islamic Jihad, of the war crime instead.
It said a Palestinian rocket had misfired and fallen onto the hospital. Israel’s claim was ridiculous. On a video of the actual strike, you can hear the loud whistling sound of an incoming, high-velocity missile or shell moments before it explodes. Palestinian groups in Gaza have only primitive rockets that lumber through the sky. If one fails, it tumbles at free-fall speed, not at near-supersonic velocity.
The casualty rate alone proved it had to be an Israeli missile. No Palestinian rocket has ever killed more than a handful of people, not hundreds as this one did. But Israel was ready with a campaign of lies and disinformation. Embarrassingly, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had issued a social media post celebrating Israel hitting a supposed “terrorist base” in the hospital. The post was hurriedly deleted.
Instead, Israel issued footage of a Palestinian rocket falling nearby. However, Israel had to pull the video, too, when journalists noticed the time stamp was 40 minutes after the explosion at Al-Ahli.
Next, Israel produced a laughably inept audio recording supposedly of two Hamas fighters chatting – in the wrong dialect – about whether they or their rivals in Islamic Jihad had fired the stray rocket.
Israel runs a “mistaravim” unit of Israelis who disguise themselves as Palestinians to operate undercover in Palestinian communities. It also famously operates networks of Palestinian collaborators whom it threatens or bribes. Faking an audio would be child’s play for Israel.
In any case, in the recording the pair cited a cemetery close to the hospital as the site of their supposed failed rocket launch. But that contradicted other Israeli military claims that the rocket had been fired from an entirely different location.
At the weekend, Forensic Architecture, a research team based at the University of London, issued their preliminary findings. Analysis of the site showed, both from the pattern of damage caused by the strike and changes in the sound signature of the projectile as it moved through the air, that its trajectory was from Israel into Gaza, not out of Gaza. Other analysis indicated that the audio file of the two Hamas operatives talking had been manipulated.
Israel’s disinformation skills looked almost as amateur as its much-vaunted intelligence operations, which failed to spot months of planning by Hamas for its breakout on 7 October.
Seed of doubt
The goal here, as ever, was not to produce evidence but to win the propaganda battle through misdirection, planting a seed of doubt that western politicians and media could then exploit to cloud the issue for their publics.
Instead of giving the victims proper attention, instead of finally galvanising anger over Israel’s wanton killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians in two weeks, the media’s reporting reverted to a predictable formula. It weighed claim and counter-claim over the hospital strike, it carried profiles about Islamic Jihad, and – most importantly for Israel – it adopted a wait-and-see, don’t-rush-to-judgment approach.
A moment that might have led to concerted diplomatic pressure on Israel to stop its rampage and negotiate a ceasefire dissolved into a round of bickering in which the hospital victims entirely disappeared from view.
By the time outside observers get into Gaza and carry out forensic tests, assuming they can, the story will be cold. No one will care, and Israel will not be held to account – morally, diplomatically or legally. This is all too familiar to anyone who has followed decades of the media’s endlessly forgiving coverage, when it matters, of Israel’s occupation and illegal colonisation of the Palestinians’ historic homeland.
The fog that instantly enveloped al-Ahlihospital story was a repeat – if on a far bigger scale – of what happened last summer when five Palestinian teenagers were killed in an air strike on Jabaliya refugee camp.
As with the hospital massacre, Israel immediately denied it was responsible, saying it had not carried out air strikes on Jabaliya at the time. It blamed Islamic Jihad for a rocket misfire.
“We have videos that prove beyond doubt that this is not an Israeli attack,” an Israeli official confidently asserted.
Oded Bassuk, head of the army’s operations directorate, called the children’s deaths “a self-inflicted injury. We could see the rocket hit a Palestinian home.”
As with the hospital story, the military released video footage purporting to show the misfired rocket. But it was all deceit. Later, when the story had moved on, the Israeli army quietly admitted that it was responsible for killing the children.
Boys on the beach
The murder of children by Israel is not an unusual occurrence. But it is also when Israel can be expected to concoct its biggest falsehoods – for the obvious reason that the killing of children is when the world briefly wakes up to Palestinian suffering before turning off again.
As with the hospital strike, a potentially pivotal moment arrived in 2014 during another of Israel’s repeated rampages in Gaza. A series of Israeli strikes killed four young boys from the Bakr family who were playing football on a beach.
At the time, Israel claimed that the children had been killed accidentally, because they strayed into a seafront “compound belonging to Hamas’s Naval Police and Naval Force (including naval commandos), and which was utilised exclusively by militants”. Israel’s claim, which gained amplification in the media, was that the boys were collateral damage in a drone strike on Palestinian militants.
Unfortunately for Israel, this was easily disproved. Several western journalists, who in those days dared to venture into Gaza, witnessed the strike because the beach was next to their hotel. The idea that Hamas militants would locate themselves on a beach next to a hotel known for hosting western journalists was patently absurd from the off.
Those journalists confirmed that there were no militants in the area at the time, and that the boys should have been visible as children to the drone operators.Reporters noted that the beach was regularly used by fishermen and families for bathing. An investigation of a small shipping container, which had been destroyed by an Israeli missile the day before, also failed to support Israel’s claim that military equipment was stored there.
A later investigation found that the drone operators had fired without taking care to distinguish between the children and militants. None of that mattered. Israel’s massacre of the children was forgotten. With no pressure on it, Israel’s reliably supine supreme court ruled last year that no further investigation was necessary. Case closed.
Executed by sniper
Perhaps the best-known recent disinformation campaign by Israel occurred 18 months ago, over the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Her murder, while wearing a flak jacket emblazoned with “Press” during an Israeli invasion of the West Bank city of Jenin, caused a wave of international indignation. It was a particularly high-stakes moment for Israel. The media took an unusual degree of interest because Abu Akhleh was a prominent journalist who had worked with many of those reporting on her killing. She also held American citizenship.
Again, Israel blamed Palestinians for the death of one of their own. They produced a video that purported to show an exchange of fire with Palestinian gunmen close to where Abu Akleh was standing when she was shot in the head.
But an investigation by Israel’s B’Tselem human rights group proved the video was taken in an entirely different area of Jenin.Major US media carried out their own investigations showing Israel had lied. There was no gunfight near Abu Akleh’s location. The most likely explanation was that an Israeli sniper decided to execute her, aiming for the narrow area of exposed flesh between her helmet and flak jacket collar.Belatedly, with the story refusing to go away, Israel admitted one of its soldiers was most likely responsible for her killing.
Israel doesn’t just actively lie when its army murders. One of its most cynical deceptions arrived in 2021 when it designated six respected Palestinian human rights and welfare groups in the West Bank as “terrorist organisations”.
It demanded that the European Union immediately stop funding them. Their offices were raided, with equipment confiscated and smashed, and their doors sealed. Staff were arrested.
Israel’s aim was obvious: to shut down organisations that provide support structures for ordinary Palestinians and advocate in international forums for the Palestinian cause by documenting Israeli crimes. That has been especially important when cash-strapped foreign media have been shutting down their own bureaux in the region.
The lie was so outrageous that even some usually receptive media outlets had trouble swallowing it. Many months later, leaks of a highly classified CIA report revealed that the Israeli accusations were entirely without foundation.
Culture of lying
The list of these deceptions and disinformation campaigns just goes on and on.
Look up the names Muhammad al-Durrah, Rachel Corrie, James Miller, Tom Hurndall, Iain Hook. Israel dissembled over all these high-profile murders carried out by its soldiers.
Even cursory research shows Israel lying about its use of cluster munitions in Lebanon in 2006, as well as its mass killing of civilians in the Lebanese village of Qana in the same war – exactly 20 years after it had earlier lied about its responsibility for killing more than 100 civilians in a United Nations compound in the same village.
Israel lied about its oversight of the mass killing of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon in 1982 by its Christian Phalangist allies. None of this should surprise. The culture of lying has prevailed since before Israel’s creation in 1948. From its inception, the Zionist movement promoted the lie that Palestine was an empty land.
To perpetuate this foundational myth, Israel lied about its wholescale ethnic cleansing operations in 1948 – one in the north was called Operation Broom – that forced out some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and drove them into refugee camps. It falsely claimed they had been ordered to do so by neighbouring Arab states.
It hid archival evidence of massacres of Palestinian civilians carried out by its forces, such as at Tantura and Dawayimah, and smeared anyone who tried to draw attention to them.
Equally, it lied that it offered the refugees a chance to return. And it destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages to stop the refugees from coming back to their homes – and then sought to conceal these crimes by planting forests in their place.
Edifice of lies
Armies end up lying in times of war because inevitably they commit crimes they wish to conceal.
The difference with Israel is that its lies are integral to its decades-long existence as a state dispossessing and colonising another people’s homeland. It must mask its system of apartheid and the crimes that inhere in such regimes of privilege and subjugation.
Israel is at permanent war with the Palestinians and the wider region, so it must lie compulsively and continuously. Each lie builds on the earlier ones. Should one fall, the whole edifice risks crumbling.
Which is what makes untangling those lies such a difficult and thankless task.
Having to engage in protracted forensic battles against Israel and its many apologists to expose every single lie draws attention away from Israel’s even bigger deceptions. It obscures the context.
Fighting to hold Israel to account for killing hundreds at al-Ahli hospital comes at the price of shifting the focus away from the fact that Israel is actively carrying out an ethnic cleansing operation in Gaza and committing genocide against the Palestinian people there.
To struggle against one lie is to leave other lies – often lies of omission – free to worm their way into the public’s consciousness.
These difficulties are compounded by the media’s willingness to indulge and collude in Israel’s disinformation – as it has been doing since the creation of a self-declared Jewish state – because Israel is such an important strategic asset. As a reliable ally, it was intended to project western power into the oil-rich Middle East.
Those who seek to bring light to a subject immersed in so much darkness find themselves smeared as antisemites – as though solidarity with Palestinian suffering could only ever be motivated by hatred of Jews.Which is why Israel can live with the bickering over who hit the al-Ahli hospital. Because the storm will soon pass, and the Palestinian victims will still be dead.
LET THEM EAT CEMENT
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/20...at-cement/
Israel is not only decimating Gaza with airstrikes but employing the oldest and cruelest weapon of war — starvation. Israel’s message, on the eve of a ground invasion, is clear. Leave Gaza or Die.
Chris Hedges
Made in Israel – by Mr. Fish
Israel, with the backing of its U.S. and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafah into refugee camps in Egypt. The reverberations will be catastrophic, not only for the Palestinians, but throughout the region, almost certainly triggering armed clashes to the north of Israel with Hezbollah in Lebanon and perhaps with Syria and Iran.
The Biden administration, slavishly doing Israel’s bidding, is fueling the madness. The U.S. was the only country to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to deliver food, medicine, water and fuel to Gaza. It has blocked proposals for a ceasefire. It has proposed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that says Israel has a right to defend itself. The resolution also demands Iran stop exporting arms to “militias and terrorist groups threatening peace and security across the region.”
The U.S. and its Western allies are as morally bankrupt and as complicit in genocide as those who witnessed the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and did nothing.
The conflict, which has taken the lives of 1,400 Israelis and at least 4,600 Palestinians in Gaza, is widening. Israel carried out a second airstrike on two airports in Syria. It daily trades rocket barrages with Hezbollah militias. U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria have been attacked by Shia militias. The USS Carney, a guided missile destroyer, shot down three cruise missiles on Thursday, apparently launched by the Houthis in Yemen and heading towards Israel.
Israel is also struggling to quell daily violent clashes in the occupied West Bank. It carried out an airstrike on Sunday on a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp – the first air strike in the West Bank for two decades – that killed at least 2 people. Armed Jewish settlers have been rampaging through Palestinian towns in the West Bank. At least 90 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by armed settlers or the Israeli military since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. Some 4,000 workers from Gaza and 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been arrested in the past two weeks, doubling the number of Palestinian prisoners to 10,000 held by Israel, over half of whom are political prisoners
“Many of the prisoners have had their limbs, hands and legs broken … degrading and insulting expressions, insults, cursing, tying them with handcuffs to the back and tightening them at the end to the point of causing severe pain … naked, humiliating and group search of the prisoners,” the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Detainees’ Affairs, Qadura Fares, said at a press conference.
B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, told the BBC that since the Oct. 7 attack, it had documented “a concerted and organized effort by settlers to use the fact that the entire international and local attention is focused on Gaza and the north of Israel to try to seize land in the West Bank.”
Inside Israel, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Jerusalem IDs are being harassed, detained, arrested and expelled from jobs and universities in what is described as a “witch hunt.” More than 152,000 Israelis have been evacuated from towns and villages near the borders of Gaza and Lebanon.
The U.S., in an effort to thwart a military response by Iran that could trigger a regional war, is deploying an additional 2,000 troops to the Middle East. It will redeploy one of its strike groups to the Persian Gulf and send additional air defense systems to the region. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its strike group — which last weekend was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to join the USS Gerald R. Ford — has been redirected to the Persian Gulf. A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile battery, and Patriot missile defense system battalions, have also been sent to the Persian Gulf.
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Israel has unleashed its Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Death, Famine, War and Conquest.
It has given Gazans two choices. Leave Gaza or die.
Palestinians will be killed not only from the bombs and shells, and eventually, with the ground invasion, bullets and tank shells, but from hunger and epidemics such as cholera. Without water, fuel and medicine and with the breakdown of sanitation, diseases will spread swiftly. The U.N. states that hospitals in Gaza “are on the brink of collapse.” Thousands of patients will die once fuel runs out for hospital generators.
A doctor from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza reported in an interview Saturday, “We are collapsing.” He spoke of a lack of oxygen, light and medical supplies, no water in some departments, concerns about cholera and the loss of doctors killed by Israeli airstrikes, including a dentist killed in Israel’s bombing of an Orthodox church that left at least 18 dead, including several children.
The handful of trucks, 37 so far, of aid into Gaza is a cynical public relations gimmick demanded by the Biden administration. It will do little to alleviate the Israeli-engineered humanitarian crisis. The U.N. says it needs at least 100 aid tracks a day. Gaza’s last functioning seawater desalination plant shut down on Sunday because of a lack of fuel.
Israel has no intention of lifting the total siege on Gaza. It announced it will increase its airstrikes. It will continue, as it has for the past two weeks, to extinguish the lives of Palestinians and terrorize and starve them into leaving Gaza.
The ground assault on Gaza will not be quick. It will involve weeks, perhaps months, of street fighting. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin compared the looming battle in Gaza to the U.S. assault on the Iraqi city of Mosul, held by ISIS, in 2014. It took the U.S. nine months to recapture Mosul.
When Israel says this will be a “long war” they are, for once, telling the truth.
Israel has requested more military aid from Washington, $14.3 billion including $10.6 billion for air and missile defense. It will get it. Israel is rapidly depleting its stocks as it pounds Gaza, including in the south of Gaza where hundreds of thousands of displaced families from the north have fled.
Israel will not permit the distribution of the $100 million in U.S. aid pledged for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, at least not until their scorched earth campaign is finished. But by then, Gaza will be unrecognizable. Israel will have annexed part or all of it. Maybe the money can go to building more illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. And pledging aid is not the same as appropriating it. So perhaps that, too, is part of the illusion.
Egyptian officials are acutely aware of what comes next. Up to half, maybe more, of the 2.3 million Palestinians will be pushed by Israel into Egypt on Gaza’s southern border and never be allowed to return.
“What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refuge and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted,” Egyptian president Abdulfattah al-Sisi warned.
Reports out of Egypt contend that Washington has promised to forgive much of Egypt’s massive $162.9 billion debt, as well as offer other economic incentives in exchange for Egypt’s acquiescence to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The refugees, once they cross the border into Egypt, will be left to rot in the Sinai.
“There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale. The international community must do everything to stop this from happening again,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.
Israel has long used war to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Government officials have openly called for another Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the term for the events of 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from historic Palestine and driven into refugee camps to create the state of Israel. During the 1967 war, which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel ethnically cleansed another 300,000 Palestinians during the Naksa, or “day of the setback,” which is commemorated every year by Palestinians.
Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, however, is not limited to wars. There has been an ongoing slow motion ethnic cleansing as Israel has steadily built more Jewish-only colonies and incrementally seized Palestinian land. Palestinians, denied basic civil liberties in Israel’s apartheid state, have been robbed of assets, including, often, their homes. They have faced mounting restrictions on their physical movements. They have been blocked from trading and business, especially the selling of produce. They have found themselves increasingly impoverished and trapped behind walls and security fences erected around Gaza and the West Bank. At the same time, they have endured periodic Israeli airstrikes, targeted assassinations and near daily attacks by armed Jewish settlers and the Israeli army.
Israel prevented Palestinians who left the West Bank and Gaza Strip from returning at the rate of about 9,000 Palestinians per year following the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, according to the Israel human rights group HaMoked. Israel has also revoked the residency permits for some 14,000 Palestinians who lived in East Jerusalem since 1967 according to B’Tselem.
Israel demolished 9,880 structures, including over 2,600 inhabited residential buildings, displacing over 14,000 people and affecting 233,681 in the West Bank alone between Jan. 1, 2009 and 7 Oct. 7, 2023, according to data from the U.N Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Since the Oct. 7 attack, a further 38 homes and other structures were demolished in the West Bank affecting an additional 13,613 people and displacing at least 73.
Less than 2.2 percent of Palestinian requests for construction permits made between 2009 and 2020 were approved, according to data from Peace Now and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The number of Israeli colonists in the occupied territories, however, has gone from zero before the June 1967 war, to between 600,000 to 750,000 spread out across at least 250 settlements and outposts throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, all of them in violation of international law.
Israel makes no secret about its intentions.
Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told troops preparing to enter Gaza, “I have released all the restraints.” Knesset member Ariel Kallner, part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called on X, formerly known as Twitter, for “a Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.”
The Israeli army mobilized Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old army veteran, to “motivate” the troops. Yachin was a member of the Lehi Zionist militia that carried out numerous massacres of Palestinian civilians, including the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, where over 100 Palestinian civilians, many women and children, were slaughtered.
“Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them,” Yachin said addressing Israeli troops.
“Erase them, their families, mothers and children,” he went on. “These animals can no longer live.”
“Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them,” he said. “If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.”
Where are our humanitarian interventionists? The ones who wept crocodile tears about the human rights of Ukranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans and Afghans, to justify massive arms shipments and war? Where is the old anti-war wing of the Democratic Party and the liberal class? What has happened to the public intellectuals who used to decry the slaughter of innocents and the U.S. war machine? Where are the jurists who uphold the rule of international law? Why are the few lonely voices speaking out about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians attacked, censored and doxxed?
“The previous president wanted to ban us and probably put us in concentration camps,” said Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, at a rally in support of a ceasefire on Oct. 20 in Washington in front of the U.S. Capitol. “This one wants us just to die. That’s how it feels. Shame on them.”
Israel will not halt its genocidal campaign in Gaza against the Palestinians until there is a U.S. arms embargo on Israel. Our weapons systems, munitions and attack aircraft sustain the slaughter. We must terminate the $3.8 billion in military aid that the U.S. gives to Israel each year. We must support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and demand suspension of all free trade and other agreements between the U.S. and Israel. Only when these props are knocked out from under Israel will the Israeli leadership be forced, as was the apartheid regime in South Africa, to integrate Palestinians into one state with equal rights. As long as these props remain, the Palestinians are doomed.