UPDATED (10/10): Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip are documented through the medium of photos and videos posted online by Israeli soldiers themselves during the year-long genocide.
Named and shamed. All the International Criminal Court need do is start criminal proceedings.
The Nazis hid their systematic crimes; Israelis–a majority–celebrate them, even use their depraved exploits on dating apps. Israeli society has a sadistic pornographic edge to it.
One Year of Genocide. Courtesy of BBOBBY, Lowkey and DoubleDownNews. Take it from one who has a facility with words: this is powerful, brilliantly done. Not a word is misplaced. Not a rhythm in this calculated genocide is uncalculated.
UPDATE 10/1: The Arab world mourns the death of Hassan Nasrallah, a man Norman Finkelstein called, in conversation with Glenn Greenwald a week prior to Nasrallah’s murder, “The frankest most impressive leader on the world stage.” (“Gaza is Gone.”)
Via SEYMOUR HERSH
The munitions dropped on a city block in the south of Beirut, by the mad dog medinah, to murder Hassan Nasrallah, are described thus by the New York Times, otherwise known as Israel’s stenographer:
A video published by the Israeli military showed that planes it said were used in the attack that killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on Friday night carried 2,000-pound bombs, according to munitions experts and a New York Times analysis.
The video showed eight planes fitted with at least 15 2,000-pound bombs, including the American-manufactured BLU-109 with a JDAM kit, a precision guidance system that attaches to bombs, according to Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician. These bombs, a type of munition known as bunker busters, can penetrate underground before detonating.
UPDATE 9/30: Luckily I have Hebrew. Two versions do America’s overlords who are in Israel transmit to the world. The Hebrew Maariv lede reads, “The Americans got the message: ground invasion of Lebanon is not a question of ‘if’ but of ‘when.'”
UPDATE 9/28: As Mouin Rabbani reasons, the late Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hizballah, did the principled thing: He stood foursquare with the Palestinians of Gaza against the mass murderers of Israel. The world stood by during the Jewish Holocaust, even though by 1942, the Final Solution was quite well-known among Allied powers.
Mad dog Medinah (=country in Hebrew) Israel dropped 85 tons of explosives on southern Beirut’s civilians to murder a major Arab political leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah? holds a majority seats in Lebanon’s Parliament. By the way, where do u think the Kirya, Israel’s major military compound, is located? In the heart of Tel Aviv
2:32 PM · Sep 28, 2024
Confirmed by Hizballah on Saturday, Nasrallah’s killing comes after a series of tactical successes in the early stages of Israel’s unfolding full-scale attack on Lebanon, an open-ended assault that may well equal in barbarity Tel Aviv’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. These are terrible and difficult thoughts to absorb after almost a year of genocide. …
Nasrallah’s stature as a tactical and strategic thinker, as the most prominent and trusted leader of the Axis of Resistance, and as a personality capable of inspiring and reassuring supporters even in the worst of times, cannot be overstated.
The euphoria in Israel, Washington and some Arab capitals, will be exceeded only by the grief of Nasrallah’s supporters, who are far more numerous.
And there is no doubt that the loss is real and great from the perspective of a resistance that faces not only Israel’s formidable arsenal, but all the resources of the United States and the collective West.
Israel’s ability to carry out this series of attacks in quick succession will shake the confidence of many in Hizballah’s legendary prowess and operational security.
The attacks will go some way to restoring the prestige Tel Aviv has lost among its Western and Arab backers after a year of military failure in Gaza, and its failure to prevent the Hamas military offensive that wiped out the Gaza division of Israel’s army on 7 October 2023.
And although Hizballah has been hammering Israeli military assets and settlements in the north of historic Palestine with rockets, many in the region are asking why the resistance group’s response to Israel’s escalating aggression has not been harder and harsher – even as Israel intensifies its bombardment of civilians across Lebanon and within its capital.
Like others before him, Nasrallah gave his life on the road to liberate Palestine, and that struggle did not end today.
UPDATE 9/19: The long arc of the Israeli terroristic enterprise has expanded into Beirut, Lebanon, in the form of a staggered operation against civilians, which saw the yellow-bellied Mossad operatives (allegedly) booby trap thousands of pagers and other devices deployed by Hezbollah non-combatants in civilian life (Hezbollah is an elected Lebanese political party). The Israelis killed dozens and caused gruesome injuries to thousands, all to the whooping and cawing of their flaccid girly fanboys and groupies stateside. Need I say that all this is prohibited by the laws of armed conflict? (George Galloway’s “The Biggest Act of Mass terrorism” renders the best analysis of the biggest act of mass terrorism .)
A particularly disgusting aspect is the weaponization by Israel of electronic commodities. Let us hope that this malevolent tampering spurs local Lebanese industries. It will certainly lend the competition an edge.
Two things to bear in mind: First, Israeli mama’s boys opt for digital warfare because they lack the courage to fight combatants openly and up close like men would. Second, Israel is the proud promulgator of the “doctrine of inflicting massive harm to civilians.” Israel, the neighborhood bully, proudly named its killer creed “after an area of Beirut, Dahiya.” (MEI) All this occurred practically in the presence of US special envoy Amos Hochstein, which shows how Israel spits on its biggest benefactor, the US.
UPDATE 9/11: Murdering Animals and Owners, as in “mowing the lawn”; it’s all in a day’s work for Israel’s finest. I give you The Chosen People’s Settlers. What a mindset it takes to slaughter a helpless creature:
UPDATE (9/5/2024):‘Mowing the Lawn.’ The Devil and its handlers, IDF under Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, said on Wednesday that the military has been “mowing the lawn” during an ongoing major operation” in the West Bank, which will require the need to “pull out the roots.”
The West Bank has now been invaded by IDF. The orgiastic destruction of built and natural habitat has begun there in earnest. Ethnic cleansing has commenced there too. Since October 7, one child has been killed in the West Bank every 2nd day
The “operation” dubbed “Summer Camps” now openly uses terms Israel had once denied were in use.
Suffer the children.
UPDATE (9/2/024): Genocidal impetus is underway in the West Bank courtesy of Satan’s forces on earth. Via Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur to the occupied territories, comes the news that the IDF is in the midst of a full military assault, destroying hospitals, roads, infrastructure already damaged in prior raids, replete with telling the Palestinians to evacuate en mass. (Drop Site)
Via Bashir Matahen, the director of Public Relations and Media at the Jenin Municipality: “The occupying (Israeli) forces have demolished more than 70% of the city’s streets completely (…) to a depth of approximately one to one-and-half meters, which has led to the destruction of water and sewage networks, as well as communication and electricity cables, in the areas that were demolished, initially estimated to cover 20 kilometers.” (Middle East Monitor)
UPDATE (8/29/024): Israel: What Moral Rot Looks Like: As Israel’s IDF death squads, Einsatzgruppen, murder, maim, starve and destroy all human life in Gaza, and increasingly the West Bank—where land and pitiful possessions are being stolen daily with impunity by armed settlers—the IDF’s auxiliaries, says Mouin Rabbani—Israelis party on. The picture of moral decadence:
According to UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), on average, “one Palestinian child [has been] killed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, every two days since October 2023.”
Since the Demon State began its genocide in Gaza, young Bisan, a heroic reporter, chronicler of life under Genocide, has prefaced each of her many transmissions from Gaza like this: “This is Bisan in Gaza, and I am still alive.” In what universe is a young woman forced into such a reality for close on a year? Now Bisan’s skin is ulcerating. Due to the absence of sanitation infrastructure (bombed) and products (aid delivery halted by the Satan State) in Gaza; a human being’s largest organ and barrier to pestilence—the skin—is losing its capacity to protect internal organs. This is very dangerous, since all roads lead, via Israel, to sepsis and organ damage, even death.
Oren Ziv from +972, August 19, 2024, reports on the latest Settler Pogroms. IDF soldiers watch on as settlers rampage through West Bank villages, burning, looting and, yes, murdering. Arrests? Nah. For what? Nothing to see. Move on. Jewish supremacy; Jews über alles. “If you try to defend yourself, you’re dead’”.
Watch this Twitter video, via the Human Rights organization, B’Tselem. “Rape in the name of God,” threatens a Settler named Shem Tov Luski . And Christians defend these people and alienate me. I’ve added “Christian Ethics” to my skill set on LinkedIn.
In the latest essay, I had also mused about the Israeli sexual prurience:
“When they are not fantasizing and embellishing about mass rape by their enemies (read Ali Abunimah’s ‘Debunking ‘Screams Before Silence,’ Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 Oct. ‘mass rape’ film‘), and raping Palestinian prisoners—the Israel defense Forces (IDF), and Israel’s other policing agencies, in conjunction with the societal structures that support them, are striving to codify their de facto daily criminal conduct in law.”
As do I mention the temperamental difference between the peoples, Israeli and Palestinian. You can see it in the video. The Palestinian man is embarrassed at the sexual brazenness. Not the Settler.
Essay was cancelled here, author dismissed, for adhering to Christian, not AIPAC, ethics. We know what Jesus would have done. Actually, as one Christian told me, Christ did inveigh exactly against what he termed “The Synagogue of Satan.”
The totem words and adjectives we use to describe Israel, a perverse and pornographically murderous society, fail. One day flows into the next, each indistinguishable in the level of sadistic torture and carnage dreamed up by the IDF Einsatzgruppen.
As televised vignettes at July’s end showed, the Israelis, a “bizarre specimen of moral laxity,” in the 1728 words of Southern gentleman William Byrd, had been openly rationalizing the need to codify in law the rape of Palestinian hostages.
The crimes of genocide, the making and mass-marketing of online snuff films featuring murdered Palestinians, and the commission of extra-judicial assassination the globe over—these Israel has already de facto legalized in what passes for law in that thugocracy.
By the Middle East Monitor’s telling, “A Gaza detainee allegedly sexually abused by Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman … suffered ‘a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs’ as a result of the immense torture he was subjected to by Israeli occupation soldiers. …One of the nine Israeli soldiers arrested for abusing him was released without charge. Deliberations about the other eight are continuing.”
Like Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the rape in Sde Teiman was captured on camera. Watch! Have an emesis dish close by. ……
A deception embedded deep in this lattice of lies is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises and individuals, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself. Indeed, a new report authored by the aforementioned +972 Magazine, “for the human rights group Yesh Din, shows how the main role of Israel’s military law-enforcement system is to maintain the appearance of internal accountability in order to shield itself from external criticism.”
In this case, the greater goal of Israel’s legal apparatus and jurisprudence is to fend off charges of genocide and war-crimes in international courts of law. Be mindful, then, that any investigation ever launched or any arrests made by Israeli authorities are symbolic, cursory and inconsequential, part of a well-established strategy to safeguard the greater criminal enterprise. …
Essentially, expect the Jewish State’s stooges (Alan Dershowitz in the lead) to be trotted out to huff and puff indignantly at the very notion that a manifestly lawless thug of a state, whose justice system is complicit in minting maniacal laws in support of unfathomable thuggery and cruelty, is incapable of investigating itself. Antisemitism.
Explained in Part II, first, using Hoppean Argumentation, is why Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while committing genocide, all the while demanding the right to genocide. These tactics amount to ISRAEL, EFFECTIVELY, CLAIMING AUTHORITY TO COMMIT GENOCIDE.
Next, lest I be accused of arguing in circles, the concept of genocide is reasonably qualified and clarified. In particular, with reference to Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. ISRAEL HAS ACED THE GENOCIDE BAR! I explained why the positive law’s definition of the systematic, methodical annihilation of a people is inoffensive to the natural-law libertarian.
The reason I then, and in most of my essays on Gaza, insist on CHRONICLING A DAY IN THE LIFE … of Gaza is this: We owe it to the holocaust survivors and their families, and to the historical record, which is vulnerable to the revisionism of Zionists. However insurmountable, and to bear witness to genocide, as we must—Gaza’s dead must be counted, recited and commemorated.
Showing how Israel CO-OPTS HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW—how Israelis cloak their murderous rampages on civilians in the raiment of human-rights nomenclature is essential. Of course, no matter who has committed a crime in my neighborhood or in its vicinity; Washington State has no right to turn me out of my home, which is mine, which I own. The state certainly has no right to pulverize my home because its agents believe outlaws hide in the neighborhood.
On to ISRAEL’S LAW OF RULE IN THE WEST BANK. Did you know that, “A combined ‘effort’ between IDF- and security force soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is responsible for pogroms in which over 528 Palestinians have been murdered since October 7, among whom were 126 children“? We ought to know this.
Finally, PALESTINIANS VALIDATED VIA ARGUMENTATION: The Hoppean principle applied in this essay’s opening is used in the coda to to validate the Palestinians’ reality, as they have been telling it to a mostly unbelieving universe (myself included) over decades.
The Hoppean proposition deployed to trace the contours of Israel’s reality is this: Israel can’t deny it is engaged in genocide as it enacts genocide. Since it does, it must be seen as performing a lie for which it deserves the contempt reserved for those who are mired in and embody lies and contradictions.
Using the same meta-principle, Israel’s televised genocide has corroborated the reality of the Palestinians—their reasons for resentment and resistance—as they’ve been telling it to the world. Excerpt from the coda:
…Palestinians under Israel are perhaps the most imperiled people in the world. If the proponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza were to deny this; they’d be living a lie. To expose the liar’s life of lies; the denier of the Palestinian reality ought to be compelled to live his own lie. How would our holocaust denier be forced into performing or living his lie?
Like this: The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would have to be parachuted into the midst of the living ghosts of Gaza. He would be filmed as he lives the life of a Palestinian, running hither and yon as the tanks advance on him, or ducking-and-diving during bombardments from above, as if one can escape the death radius of a 2000- or 500 pound, American-made bomb.
The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would be recorded scratching for scraps, lugging jerricans of brackish, contaminated drinking water back to his nylon dwelling, clambering over kilometers of decaying structures, through ruins and twisted metal. Our camera’s viewfinder will find the denier queuing with thousands to use a single functioning toilet, plumbing having been pulverized by the Israelis. He or she would be taped up-close in the throes of dysentery, sepsis, and starvation; intubated or cannulated or amputated or C-sectioned without narcotics, writhing on a hospital floor as slippery as an abattoir, listening to the incessant whirring above of Israel’s killer-cum-spy drones.
The links are legion throughout; the logic unassailable.
UPDATE VIII (7/26): Ethnocide In The West Bank. If the West Bank is increasingly looking like Gaza, it’s because it and its people are being evicted and murdered, too. The great Peter Oborne (Unscripted), on “How Israel devastated refugee camps in the West Bank since 7 October.”
UPDATE VII (7/24): War Criminal In Congress.Patriot Scott Ritter, who has been fighting for his country for a lifetime: “I’d have tackled the SOB Bibi for launching a frontal assault on our people & on what makes America great: the Constitution, the 1st Amendment.” May the colluding quislings of Congress, bought and paid for by War Criminals, rot. WATCH.
… Israel is waging jointly with its American allies …. Over the past 10 months or 300 days, nearly 40,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed and 90,000 wounded. The majority of them are children and women. This is twice as many as the number of civilian victims on both sides of the conflict in southeastern Ukraine over the past 10 years. The number of civilian victims [in Gaza] over the past 10 months is twice as large as the number of civilian victims in Ukraine over the past 10 years since the state coup in February 2014. According to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry that examines violations of international human rights law, Palestinians aged below 18 make up approximately half of Gaza’s population. It means that they were born and grew up in conditions of a total blockade. Apart from the current escalation of violence, they have seen other Israeli military operations, namely Summer Rains and Autumn Clouds in 2006, Hot Winter and Cast Lead in 2008-2009, Pillar of Defence in 2012, Protective Edge in 2014, and Guardian of the Walls in 2021.
Gaza is in ruins today. Residential buildings, schools and hospitals have been turned into rubble, and the critical civilian infrastructure facilities have been knocked out of service. There is an epidemic of infectious diseases and mass hunger there. It is a real humanitarian disaster. There is no safe and reliable access to the victims and those in need amid the ongoing hostilities.
UPDATEV (7/23). BUSTED: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) Issues Momentous Advisory Ruling AGAINST Israel’s Occupation, including how these rulings must be operationalized:
“Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”
Israel, moreover, is bound by this decision by virtue of being “party to several legal instruments containing human rights obligations, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 21 December 1965 (CERD), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966 (the ‘ICESCR’) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 19 December 1966 (the ‘ICCPR’).”
(7/23/024): Palestinian beauty BELLA HADID has held strong against the genocidal forces of evil. Boycot Adidas, which caved to the Zionist lobby, which is responsible for throttling, banning, libeling and maligning all protest, written or enacted, against Israel’s genocide of Gazans.
UPDATE I: Funny tidbit regarding my essay on The Unz Review. I can’t post it on Twatter, or X, for you. The phrase used in the title, that of Jesus not mine, is considered hate speech on X. The X algorithm doesn’t discriminate between the naughty words of the putative Son Of God and those of other mortals. Banned.
UPDATE II (7/6): Categorically true. A philosopher, via Mondoweiss: “… if someone, after the horrific punishment meted out by Israel on Gaza, could still defend Israel, then this manifests a serious moral character flaw. … If you support Israel in the middle of a genocide, you’re an awful person.”
UPDATE III (7/8): IDF war criminals are trying to shed culpability. The English 972 article is milder, so I translate from the Hebrew version of the magazine, whose URL cannot be transposed here as it is in Hebrew: ‘We fired without discrimination. Often just for fun. We burned down homes. Every male between 16 and 50 was considered a terrorist, fair game. The bodies we bulldozed into ditches, so as to reduce visibility to service providers.’
UPDATE IV (7/10): The august British medical journal, The Lancet, has awoken to its obligation to Truth:
In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7-9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28,000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58,260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85,750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024.
ONLY-FOLLOWING-ORDERS DEFENSE. I’ve heard friendlies, righteous commentators, express sadness over the fact that IDF soldiers will invariably suffer from years of assorted Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. Not so fast. With every Tik Tok upload, the IDF have proven themselves murderous and without morals. By the numbers. Here is the latest exemplar of the “most moral military in the world”:
No shortage of shameless IDF. The Nuremberg defense is invalid: “I was only following orders. I had been brainwashed.”
? Bram Settenbrino shared these videos of himself indiscriminately shooting a gun and blowing up a mosque
Total War: Total warfare is a war … against any and all ~ilana
To refuse to bear witness to the prosecution of Total Warfare against Gazans—also the defining event of 2023 and the decade, twinned with COVID—is to be inhuman, insane, incoherent. To the Greek philosophers, to be mired in such contradiction was to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane ~ilana
For one thing, he who offends against innocents is responsible for his offenses; not a third party. For another, whether it is committed by decree of the one or by the will of the many; by actors within or without The State; by the designated ‘good guys’ or by the ‘bad guys’—murder of innocents is always murder. Murder by ‘democratic’ approval is also still murder, however many approve of it. At the same time, mass murder is never ‘unintentional’ when you know it is inevitable and incidental to your ‘mission’ ~ilana
INTRODUCTION TO THIS POST (Begun Oct 7):
Inarguably, the case against Israel’s murder spree in Gaza is ethically quite simple. (“Hermetically Sealed Indictment Of The Jewish Taliban’s Mass Murder And Ethnic Cleansing In Gaza,” January 4, 2024.) It is NOT within the realm of opinion. It is immutable, eternal truth. Right and wrong are universal, not relative. There are no tribal privilege clauses. Like gentiles, Jews are prohibited from mass murder. The Sixth Commandment is not opinion. Neither is it optional. “Thou shalt not murder” is called a commandment for a reason. Saint Augustine’s Just War Theory, while imperfect, is closer to truth than opinion. Natural law going back to the ancients and derived from deductive reason and the nature of man: not opinion. What Israel is visiting on Gazans and their little enclave is irreparable, orgiastic mass murder and ethnic cleansing. A “blitzkrieg, by any other name,” against a civilian populations, which is being bombed, buried—alive and dead—evicted for life. There is no debate about the veracity of this statement.
(Credit Al Jazeera, via screen pic capture)
UPDATE (8/29/024): Israel: What Moral Rot Looks Like: As Israel’s IDF death squads—Einsatzgruppen—murder, maim, starve and destroy all civilian life in Gaza, and increasingly the West Bank—where land and pitiful possessions are being stolen daily with impunity by armed settlers—the IDF’s auxiliaries, says Mouin Rabbani—Israelis party on. The picture of decadence:
(7/23/024): Palestinian beauty BELLA HADID has held strong against the genocidal forces of evil. Boycot Adidas, which caved to the Zionist lobby, which is responsible for throttling, banning, libeling and maligning all protest, written or enacted, against Israel’s genocide of Gazans.
ALSO: BUSTED. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) Issues Momentous Advisory Ruling AGAINST Israel’s Occupation, including how these rulings must be operationalized, namely, the
“Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”
Israel, moreover, is bound by this decision by virtue of being “party to several legal instruments containing human rights obligations, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 21 December 1965 (CERD), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966 (the “ICESCR”) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 19 December 1966 (the “ICCPR”).” (READ Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024)
7/11/024:MASS HANNIBAL Confirmed: Scroll down in this lengthy war-log, which I have kept going since October, 2023, to November 11, 023, when I quoted Col. Nof Erez “describing the Israeli army’s response to Oct. 7 as ‘MASS HANNIBAL.” Yasmin Porat, I wrote below, “bore witness to the same.” I cited her Hebrew interview with Aryeh Golan.
Ha’aretz has finally done its journalistic due diligence, on how Israelis military both issue and obey orders to kills their own, although the israeli daily hums and hedges a lot:
“Documents and testimonies obtained by Haaretz reveal the Hannibal operational order, which directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity, was employed at three army facilities infiltrated by Hamas, potentially endangering civilians as well.”
Mondoweiss: The “Haaretz report was significant in the number of military sources it interviewed who confirmed that there were direct orders to implement the Directive,” which is “an Israeli policy that instructs the military to open fire on its own soldiers to prevent them from being taken captive.”
Essentially, “Israeli Officials OK’d Using Hannibal Directive to Turn Border Area on Oct. 7 into ‘Extermination Zone.’” (Democracy Now!)
(6/25/024): The faction that is imperiling Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s career now has put an end to most of our careers over 23 years:
As below, but add the “Israel lobby, Republican and Democrat.”
“The Democratic establishment and Israel lobby are seeking to destroy the political career of Rep. Jamaal Bowman because he dared to criticize the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. And many liberals are joining right in.” (Mondoweiss)
“The Democratic establishment and Israel lobby are seeking to destroy the political career of Rep. Jamaal Bowman because he dared to criticize the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. And many liberals are joining right in.” (Mondoweiss)
Good news: Egyptian soldiers are raring to go. They say “their country has failed Gaza.” Conscripts at the Sinai-Gaza border decry the Sisi government’s silence on the killing of own soldiers and inaction towards Israeli atrocities.”
(6/10/024):Palestinians Had Always Poo-pooed the Pier. They Know America.
Videos circulating on social media showed the helicopters that were used in the operation to evacuate the Israeli captives taking off from the vicinity of the U.S. pier that was built off the coast of Gaza in order to deliver “much-needed humanitarian aid” to Gaza. The $230m pier, which was completed last month, has drawn significant criticism from rights groups and activists who say the pier is an ineffective way to deliver aid.
6/9/024: “Today’s rescue operation,” tweets Itay Epshtain, senior humanitarian law and policy consultant, “raises concerns with numerous civilians injured and killed, and – according to unconfirmed media reports – perfidious use of humanitarian relief vehicles launched from the pop-up port.” Earlier in their genocide, the Israeli commando, if you recall, had committed a massacre in the Ibn Sina hospital in Jenin, Gaza, dressed in scrubs. There are as yet unconfirmed reports that the special forces that murdered over 50 Palestinians for each of the four hostages rescued had entered the camp disguised as a convoy of displaced persons.
(6/8/2024): A US hostage rescue?
“An American cell in Israel supported the efforts to rescue four Israeli hostages, working with Israeli forces on the operation,” the official told CNN. Four Israeli hostages were rescued from the central Gaza Strip after what appears to have been a US assisted military operation in the area. (MEM)
The death toll from the Israeli bombing on Saturday of the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza has risen to 210, the Government Media Office in the besieged Palestinian enclave said, Anadolu Agency reports. ‘Some 210 martyrs and more than 400 injured were brought to Al-Aqsa Hospital due to the brutal Israeli massacre in the Nuseirat camp,’ the office said in a statement. (MEM)
A ratio of 50 to one: Fifty Palestinians dead for each Israeli rescued.
(6/7/024): Israeli attack and kills dozens of people sheltering in UN school in Gaza: Israeli serial killers “bombed a United Nations-linked school in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, killing at least 40 displaced Palestinians and injuring dozens more according to officials and local media.” (Al Jazeera.)
It used to be thought of as treason, a citizen of one country serving in another’s armed forces. But two “Republican US Representatives” want to reward and reinforce dual loyalties. They “have submitted a bill that would extend the same benefits provided to US military servicemembers and veterans to American citizens who choose to serve in the Israeli military.” (Ron Paul Institute)
GAZA (6/4/024): Our “friends” the Israelis bad mouth any American Administration quite openly. They make it known who is in charge: the parasite state, Israel. “Speaking in Manhattan, Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister urges the rejection of Biden’s ceasefire plans: “No surrender, not to American pressure, not to anything.”
Israeli air attacks and shelling have killed at least 15 people in central and southern Gaza – including children, women and policemen helping protect aid deliveries in the southern city of Rafah. Civilians killed and injured as Israel announces its ground forces have moved into the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah, while fighter jets and artillery attack targets in the area.
While there will be relief that finally Israel’s shield of immunity and impunity is being punctured, Khan also charged several leaders of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas with various crimes. Khan claims that Hamas politburo leader Ismail Haniyeh, its Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar and the chief of its military wing Muhammad Deif are responsible for crimes including extermination, murder, hostage-taking, torture and rape. The political nature of the charges against the Hamas leaders is clear from the fact that Khan has charged more Palestinians with crimes than Israelis. A cynical view might be that Khan only charged the two Israeli leaders that Washington wants to see gone, while letting countless other Israeli political and military officials off the hook – at least for now. Moreover, Khan included the charges of rape and sexual violence, giving credence to Israeli atrocity propaganda that has been thoroughly debunked, and for which Israel has presented no credible evidence.
MAY 17: THE BANALITY OF EVIL. Naveh Dromi, columnist for a Ha’aretz, the most highbrow of Israel’s (center-left) dailies—Ha’aretz, which once had intellectual ballast—writes on May 16, 2024, in hideous, heavily anglicized Hebrew, that she has “a ‘teoria’” (a theory), in which Palestinians experience “a second Nakba.” Israelis are such Jewish supremacists that such statements pervade and percolate across their society, civil and state.
May 16: LET US NOT FORGET THE WEST BANK. A combined effort among West Bank settlers and IDF and security force soldiers is responsible for pogroms in which upwards of 400 West-Bank Palestinians have perished since October 7. The soldier-supported West Bank settlers have murdered more than nine Palestinians in the territory in that time. Reports Human Rights Watch:
Between October 7, 2023, and March 18, 2024, Israeli forces conducted a monthly average of 640 search-and-arrest and other operations in the West Bank, nearly double the 340 such operations during the first nine months of 2023, according to OCHA. These operations resulted in the killing of 304 Palestinians, out of a total of 409 killed by Israeli forces during this period.
May 12: The Israel First mob embodies ugly. Medea Benjamin, tiny, diminutive, long-time anti-war activist, is quiet, rational, polite. She galvanizes reason. The feral women who accost here are anything but. To say that they lack breeding is an understatement. Watch. Listen. They froth, they fulminate, they gesticulate wildly, and they wish upon her the unutterable: that she be raped, cut open. The one is an Israeli (terrorizing Medea, an American). And STUPID. You can’t quantify or fix this kind of stupid. Watch. Listen
MAY 6: WATCH. Note how unimpressive are ALL these Jewish supremacists: Their criminal minds shared willingly, in excitable, ugly, anglicized Pidgin Hebrew. Ever so base. Atavistic. Not one of the participants on Channel 12’s “Ofira & Levinson” talk show, appears remotely averse to genocide of Palestinians. Seven months into it, Israel’s mass murder of innocents does not appear to cross their minds, such as these are. Israeli sense of right and wrong—and I generalize based on extensive and ongoing polling—is utilitarian, primitive, lower-order tribalism.
Shimon Boker, vice chairman of the World Likud: “I think we should’ve gone into Rafah yesterday already… There are no uninvolved (civilians) there. You have to go in and kill and kill and kill… We have to kill them before they kill us.”
May 3, 2024: You can’t possibly be so stupid, at this stage, and after 7 months of televised, genocidal IDF action in Gaza, to believe anything the Israel First American media assert. If you are, well, here are some elementary updates: The country wide—nay, worldwide—anti-genocide campus protests, to their participants’ great credit—are peaceful. The instigators, whose violent demeanor and menacing tactics are straight out of Israel; some are alleged to be expat Israelis/IDFniks—are the genocide-supporting pro-Israel camp. Yet the New York police are arresting peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators and trashing their two-week-old protest encampments. Reuters has confirmed these facts, via Al Jazeera (whose report I chose for you because Reuters’ report is syntactically jumbled, I suspect, on purpose):
The attackers, carrying Israeli flags, then tried to tear down the pro-Palestinian camp, assaulting students with pepper spray, sticks, stones and metal fencing. Police stood by, failing to protect students, who re-commandeered the metal fencing thrown at them to shield themselves
APRIL 30: If you wish to retain fidelity to reality, switch off your country’s Main Stream Media all, chief of which is Fix News. Watch the “October 7” forensic expose so titled. Al Jazeera conducted an impeccable analysis of all primary sources, as a journalist must do. And it is, it seems to me, without blemish. Here, director of “The truth about October 7,” Richard Sanders, reputable, old-school British journalist, discusses his Al Jazeera film with Peter Oborne. Sanders seems quite surprised that he is no longer permitted to do old-fashioned journalism.
There was very likely sporadic rape, probably by Gaza gangs who burst through the fence. But no mass, systematic rape happened at the hands of Hamas militants, as claimed in the West. I believe two babies died in the horrific attack. None were microwaved or beheaded, as MSM keep claiming. The New York Times, however, lied, lies. In response, journalism professors have written demanding the NYT come clean and purge its lies on the topic.
Dozens of tenured journalism professors at top schools across the U.S. have raised concerns that The New York Times is risking its own credibility, as well as the credibility of journalism at large, with its inaction on an article about sexual violence on October 7 that has come under scrutiny in recent months due to its reliance on questionable — and, in some cases, debunked — evidence.
“So it’s confirmed,” tweeted Max Blumenthal. “The sister of Gal Abdush has accused NYT’s Jeffrey @gettleman, @AdamSella1 and @Anatschwartz of manipulating her family to advance the bogus narrative that she’d been raped by Hamas militants on October 7.”
The genocide in Gaza is a scandal that makes WMD in Iraq look like amateur hour.
Sources countervailing to the Fake News are The “Gray Zone,” which exposed the en masse rape lies early on, and whose coverage and commentary is excellent and smart. Al Jazeera does excellent journalism. Ditto Judge Andrew Napolitano, Middle East Eye, Democracy Now, and Novara Media. My favorite is Electronic Intifada. If you are someone who mentions the Jerusalem Post or Fox News to me—the most polite quip I can level at you is: You have not been paying attention. Differently put: clueless.
The best commentary comes, naturally, via yours truly. Scroll down this lengthy post for a list of essays, columns and podcasts. Essays and columns are here.
Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Palestinians and their homesteads and animals are subject to marauding Jewish settlers. The IDF army and Israeli police act as onlookers or aid the killer settlers.
Switch off your country’s MSM.
APRIL 12: ISRAELIS Approve. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, a polling organization, a preponderance of 55% of Jewish Israelis have a positive view of the performance of IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi. Defense Minister Gallant comes in at 46%, followed by Minister Benny Gantz (37.5%).
Most remarkably, 47 percent of a sample of the Israeli Left “think that Israel should not take into consideration the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza or should do so only to a small extent, while 50 percent think it should consider their plight to a fairly large or very large extent. By contrast, large majorities in the Center (71 percent) and on the Right (90 percent) say that Israel should only take into account the suffering of the Palestinian population to a small extent or should not do so at all.” (Tamar Hermann, Yaron Kaplan, Dr. Lior Yohanani, “War in Gaza Survey 13,” March 26, 2024)
APRIL 6: Gaza: What If America Were the Good Guy?: How best to move resources: It was obvious to me that aid is most efficiently delivered from a place of plenty and infrastructure, Israel, into northern Gaza. I suspect any half-decent development economist would second that. The West has only now awakened to the logic of logistics, gently nudging Israel to consider opening Beit Hanoon (Erez) crossing. But only temporarily.
Converted to a mission of mercy; the US 315th Air liftWing, for example, could make mincemeat of the Israelis, in their manifest evil.
MARCH 28: ‘Anatomy Of A Genocide’ By Francesca Albanese “Anti-Semite” is how Matthew Miller, State Department, libels Francesca Albanese for her brilliant report, “Anatomy Of a Genocide,” to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
I will be out with a major essay soon. (X is cutting back my feed something fierce. Please Follow and Share. )
MARCH 22: ISIS-K-CIA? Who do you think is behind a murderous attack on a theater in Moscow? My colleague and pal David Vance has read my mind. I feel an episode of HARD TRUTH coming on. Why would ISIS-K attack a Moscow theater? And who is ISIS-K? Some low IQ Abduls the CIA has entrapped and is grooming and funding? ISIS-K-CIA?
Meanwhile, terrorist client state Israel is unleashing on Rafah with Genocide Joe’s blessing and with Made In America bombs.
MARCH 20: Drum roll for Trump’s crooked point person on foreign policy, the Middle East and much else: Jared Kushner. America’s Israel First media are in a peculiar position of covering up and finessing Jared Kushner’s nauseating remarks about ‘moving [Gazans] out and then clean[ing] it up,’ greedily intimating that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable.” That the “Middle East Initiative, a program of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government,” entertains Jared Kushner says it all about intellectual discourse at an elite university in the US.
MARCH 16: Like the Devil she serves, Melanie Phillips thinks that the ASSERTION of IDF propaganda points, in a posh Oxbridge accept—equals a winning ARGUMENT. She confuses assertion with argument. Phillips, who lives part time in Israel, concedes that Israel indeed stops Gaza-bound aid trucks, but, asserts this idiot, it’s because, “the food is stolen by Hamas.” Grade-eight level denial by a stupid shill. WATCH. “I am telling you” is Phillips’ authoritarian command to the audience and the anchor. They must heed her. Hers is not a fact-based or logical argument. LISTEN. And remember what your “lying eyes” are telling you. Believe them. The line is from my “Hermetically Sealed Indictment Of The Jewish Taliban’s Mass Murder And Ethnic Cleansing In Gaza.” The images and numbers you see and hear coming out of Gaza are the truth.
MARCH 11: EVIL: If you are silent, or endorsing or exculpating what is being visited on Gazans—you are EVIL. “Scenes that should shame any country that is enabling” these intentional atrocities against civilians, seconds Michael Walker of Novara Media. Well, of course. It is no news that CNN is submerging the story of Gaza’s eradication; its best reporters—Clarrisa Ward, for example—made scarce. To surface online is the occasional reality check: children starving. Israel needs to pay for what it has done, with a quarter of Gaza’s population now teetering on famine, according to a senior UN official, and Israel, to all intents and purposes—enabled by the West—maintaining its steadfast coward’s siege on Gaza.
Here Clarissa Ward talks politely to Israeli, “not-a-single-loaf” savages, trying to stop food and supplies from entering Gaza. Imagine being proud of being instrumental in the mass deaths of vulnerable innocents.
Bisan From Gaza. I watch this young vlogger on Al Jazeera TV, and recommend her as an inspirational young woman. (She looks like my own daughter: same coloring, same hair, similar features. Beautiful. Brave.) Pray for Bisan, if God is listening. Mind you, a look at Israel’s demonic deeds and one is reminded of the words of famed French novelist Jules Renard: “I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for his reputation if he didn’t.”
MARCH 9: The image on Barely a Blog’s six-month long chronicle comes courtesy of Norman Finkelstein, the foremost chronicler of Gaza. A scholar with a great heart and a mind to match. The face of a starving Palestinian little martyr is indubitably purer and more beautiful than the sated, smug faces of Ben Shapiro’s family. Pater Shapiro’s coarsening features evince a decaying soul. (Ben-Shap happens to also be pretty dim, as my BAB Ben-Shap dossier attests.)
MARCH 8: There is no International Women’s Day for Gaza’s women, 9000 of whom have already been murdered by Satan’s army, the IDF. About 63 women are being slain daily by the same force, including 37 mothers each day.
While American women prepare to go to the polls to ensure their right to evict fetuses from their wombs; Gaza’s women are fighting to keep their fully formed babies alive, safe from unguided bunker-buster bombs lobbed by Israel, provided by America.
This these women do without potable water, sanitation, shelter and sustenance, courtesy of Israel, aided and abetted by Biden and, “Ursala von der Leyen, a German citizen, president of the European Commission,” who, by Norman Finkelstein’s telling, “has of late lustily embraced Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.”
MARCH 3: George Galloway Elected As Protest For GAZA—And Against Our Overlords’ New Norm Of Genocide. My dear friend Dr. Clyde Wilson has, naturally, detected the thread in my new book, in particular, and in my thinking, in general, toward labor. Were not my columns on outsourcing, in the early 2000s, condemned by strict economic libertarians? Yes, they were. This major enduring thread, consequently, means that celebrated here is the political coup of the great George Galloway in Rochdale. One of the few great political minds standing, who is capable of extemporaneous verbal swordplay, both rational and fun—Galloway, as noted in 2005, is a master flyter: the ancient Scottish form of invective. Lots of flyting words to come. A delicious sample is here, below:
“You are talking about little Rishi Sunak, at the fag end of his primeministership. Don’t talk to me as if he’s come down from the Mount with tablets of stone. …Who won the election, me or Rishi Sunak? I was just elected with a thumping majority, by the people of Rochdale. Why is that difficult for you [Sky’s reporting sock-puppet] to grasp? That’s all that matters to me. . … I have a mandate, that’s my answer to you [having concentrated the campaign on foreign affairs, for which Uncle Sam’s sock-puppet Sunak is maligning him]. Don’t keep telling me about the prime minister as if he was Moses. Do I respect the prime minister? [in answer to Sky sock-puppet]. No. I despise the prime minister. Millions of millions of people despise the prime minster.”
February 28: Aaron Bushnell is dead not of mental disease, but in protest of a morally depraved society. He was calm and rational—a man—when he recited his reason for self-immolation: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide. This is what our ruling class has decided is the new normal.” Active duty airman Bushnell then set himself alight as a last resort, to protest the genocidal mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Gazans, executed by de facto terrorist state Israel, with American imprimatur, money and materiel.
The man died horrifically, yet heroically. He stood erect like a Real Man until he could no longer. Again, Aaron Bushnell was driven not by mental illness but by the moral deficits besetting State and society. The indifference to the daily, industrial-scale mass murder of innocent Gazans by rogue state Israel.
February 21: LEGALIZED MURDER: TO MURDER OR NOT TO MURDER, THAT’S NOT THE QUESTION, you state-sanctioned thugs. The U.S. vetoes a United Nations Security Council resolution to stop murdering Gazans. (“Ally Israel maims ten kids a day in Gaza. Gotta keep it up,” “reason” our representatives.)
With pellucid logic and ethics, Amar Bendjama, Algeria’s ambassador to the U.N, stated that, “A vote in favor of this draft resolution is a support to the Palestinians’ right to life.” But what does he know, right?
Strip the US of UN veto power. The UN is full of knaves. That much is known. But murderous Uncle Sam is undeserving to sit even among known knaves.
February 19: Howard Jacobson Finds Industrial-Scale Mass Murder Repetitive. OH, THE BANALITY OF EVIL.More than ten of Gaza’s children lose legs daily by Satan’s army (read more about these children hobbled for life): The vampiric, criminal IDF. Author Howard Jacobson, a British Israel Firster—fulminating, in sullen fury—demands on BBC’s Newsnight that fewer visuals be shown of Gaza’s dead and dying. Too repetitive. Also, it does his Israel First side no good.
Jewish liberals (conservatives are as bad): Why does anyone celebrate these morally degenerate, pseudo-intellectuals? When they are not disgorging banalities; they are, like Jacobson, just so unimpressive, mediocre—developmentally backward in ethical reasoning, plumping for tribal interests, over universal ethics. Their humane impulse is delimited by their tribal interests. If honest, developmental psychologists will tell you that the Howard Jacobsons of the world have not attained a higher level of ethical reasoning. Theirs is an expedient humanity; the kind that garners accolades from other mediocrities, namely the culture at large. Says Howard:
“Do we need to see some of these images [out of Gaza] quite as often as we do? The same images, or another version of it? You’re taking a side [when you show them].”
The anchor Idiot hasn’t the foggiest; is too dim to tell this man that each image of a Gazan to assault Howard Jacobson’s sensitive eyes is a fresh, new image of genocidal murder; that his beloved, unimpeachable Jewish State is conducting what is industrial-scale mass murder.
This disgrace of a human being, Howard Jacobson, who will never suffer a deserved fall from grace, continues:
“There are reasons for what is happening [to Gazans].” Besides, Israelis “haven’t apologized grandly enough for their mistakes.”
Between the afternoon of 16 February and noon on 19 February, according to the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza, 234 Palestinians were killed and 350 Palestinians were injured, including 107 killed and 145 injured in the last 24 hours. Between 7 October 2023 and noon on 19 February 2024, at least 29,092 Palestinians were killed in Gaza and 69,028 Palestinians were injured, according to MoH in Gaza.
Howard Jacobson sums up his self-interested point by lamenting that visuals of Gazans dying and Israeli good-natured (presumably) gruffness create antisemitism for life. The man is worse than a disgrace; he’s dumb detritus.
How can someone plumping for tribal interests over universal ethics have risen so in society? More striking than his developmentally challenged ethics is Jacobson’s sheer banality.
February 13: RAFFAH. The IDF terrorist army has commenced an offensive against 1.5 million Palestinian refugees huddled in Raffah. For the “I don’t believe my lying eyes” holocaust denier crowd; Israel has now cemented its status as a genocidal state, engaged in the eradication and razing of Gaza and the eviction and/or murder of millions of its residents, for Raffah is the ONLY PORTAL through which aid for dying Gazans is admitted.
Twenty-eight thousand Gazans, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, have perished (at least, as many more have been–and are being–buried dead and alive). A quarter of Gaza’s residents are starving.
A Hermetically Sealed (analytical) Indictment of the Jewish Taliban is here.
With other righteous Americans, the great ladies of Code Pink, whom I’ve watched since 2002—and who were just as fine during Genghis Bush’s war on Iraqis—camped out at the Blinken mansion. This “man” has returned to his warm bed, to food, running and potable water, after facilitating Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza ongoing.
GOP FOR GENOCIDE. Meanwhile, if you know one thing, it is that the GOP is a reliable engine for Genocide. Highlighted are some particularly execrable, yet familiar, names supporting billions of dollars in bombs, for Israel to lob at innocent civilians and what remains of their neighborhoods.
Sen. John Boozman (Ark.)
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.)
Sen. Bill Cassidy (La.)
Sen. Susan Collins (Maine)
Sen. John Cornyn (Texas)
Sen. Kevin Cramer (N.D.)
Sen. Mike Crapo (Idaho)
Sen. Joni Ernst (Iowa)
Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa)
Sen. John Hoeven (N.D.)
Sen. John Kennedy (La.)
Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.)
Sen. Jerry Moran (Kan.)
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)
Sen. James Risch (Idaho)
Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah)
Sen. Mike Rounds (S.D.)
Sen. Dan Sullivan (Alaska)
Sen. John Thune (S.D.)
Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.)
Sen. Roger Wicker (Miss.)
Sen. Todd Young (Ind.)
February 4: WHOSE A SOCK-PUPPET? SUNAK & THE WEST. The ramp-up to war on Iran is reminiscent of the war on Iraqis, against which this column burned as hot a a Babylonian kiln, for years, starting on Sept 19, 2002.
The US is not only supplying the matériel for Israel’s genocidal war on Gazans, but providing diplomatic cover—running interference—for Israel’s ethnocidal mass murder spree ongoing in Gaza. The Houthis, “acting in support of the Palestinians of Gaza,” as we noted below, in this very long thread, are said, by Foreign Policy Inc., to be strictly doing Iran’s bidding. For, as you know, there is no such things as patriotism, nationalism, comity or fellow-feeling among groups outside the West. (I’m being cynical.) Thus, courtesy of the Western military and foreign policy Oink, the Houthis’ valiant military intervention on behalf of the Palestinians who are being massacred daily, with Western imprimatur, is nothing more than the protest of marionettes who’re manipulated by their Iranian masters.
Lies. Regional alliances and fidelities are often ancient and certainly more complex than the West is able to entertain. Here is an essay I wrote in 2017 about the (regional) forces at work in Yemen’s civil war, in the context of (centralizing) ignorant US meddling.
The Houthis are heroes. An authentic puppet, on the other hand, is UK’s Rishi Sunak. “Recent attacks on UK and international vessels are unacceptable,” writes sock-puppet Sunak. It’s our duty to protect innocent lives and preserve freedom.” Sunak’s call to “Protect innocent lives” does not extend to Palestinian lives. Here is the latest butcher’s bill:
Killed: at least 27,365 people, including more than:
11,500 children
8,000 women Injured: more than 66,630, including at least:
8,663 children
6,327 women Missing: more than 8,000
February 1, 2024: The best rendering of the decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is by Norman Finkelstein and Craig Mokhiber on the Katie Halper channel. I seldom watch online videos; I read. It’s many times more efficient. Moreover, commentary videos are mostly by fools. Even when tolerable, the amount of good data or insights distilled will amount to minutes out of hours of drivel. Conversely, every appearance by Dr. Finkelstein, a man with intellectual heft, is gold. WATCH.
My perspective about the ICJ’s decision is dimmer. Unfocused as I was on legalistic, Talmudic definitions of genocide; it was obvious that what was, indubitably mass murder and ethnic cleansing—crimes that are in process and ongoing—had to be stopped, forthwith. An effective and just ICJ would have issued a binding Cease and Desist order instructing the Devil’s army, the IDF, to stop its depredations.
January 25: Jumping ship. What do you know? Jonathan Conricus, former IDF spokesman for mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, is now senior fellow at the Foundation For Defense Of Democracies. Or, as a cursory perusal of the FDD members page indicates, the promotion of Israelism in Washington DC. Ditto IDF mouth Keren Hajioff. Following a stint, during which she mindlessly chorused and covered for mass murder—she too has taken shelter with an American “think tank,” promoting the interests of entities not the United States, and overriding the balancing forces of regionalism in the Middle East.
January 14: I see Amira Hass, Ha’aretz’ reporter in the territories, is back on the front page. She appeared to have been “disappeared” in the initial stages of the war on Gazans. Or, so it appeared to me. For solid, factual reporting, she is a good source.
January 11: The United States is running interference for Israel, bombing neighboring countries so as to prevent them from putting up any opposition to what is being done to Gaza’s civilians. The US is giving cover to Israel to allow it to complete the eviction of Gazans to “tent cities” in the Sinai, and to finalize the ruination of Gaza through relentless bombardments of what remains of the civilian infrastructure.
In the interim, “South Africa … has brought a case before the International Court of Justice, which will hear a complaint asking it ‘to act urgently to protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people under the genocide convention, which continues to be violated with impunity.'” (The Guardian)
The crooked Western media, and the twisted minds behind the US foreign policy think tank cabal, are unprepared to consider the obvious merit—the substance—of South Africa’s case to the International Court. Instead, they resort to ad hominem attacks: South Africa is said to simply be congenitally pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel.
Once again, allow me, someone who wrote the blueprint book about the deformities of South Africa’s democratic dispensation, to dispel the strategy with logic: It is quite possible to be both prone to the Palestinian side of the conflict and still to make a good case against Israel’s war on Gazans, as I did in “Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban Not The Israel I Grew Up In.” The two things are not mutually exclusive.
It is, in fact, scandalous for patriotic, if ignorant, Boers and stupid US right-wingers to denigrate South Africa’s Boer regime by comparing it to the Netanyahu regime’s actions in Gaza. Over decades, under National Party’s rule, the Boers never remotely approached conduct such as that of the Israelis loosed in Gaza. Never. For example, hundreds were killed during the Soweto Uprising, not tens of thousands as is the case in Gaza. Africans were never-ever mowed down in their tens of thousands, as Gaza’s civilians are: bombed, buried alive, then evicted for life.
If you want to read the exhaustive story about the Israel-South Africa relationship, going back to the apartheid years, there is an in-depth chapter in Into the Cannibal’s Pot (2011), which is the definitive anatomy of post-Apartheid South Africa. Still. The chapter is: “Why Do WASP Societies Wither?
Israel’s defense is to shout… you guessed it, “antisemitism.”
” … a ‘blood libel’. … The country’s biggest supporter, the US, has dismissed the case as “meritless”.
Sadly, these well-meaning efforts—-a legal cease and desist order against Israel—is already too late for Gaza. But, South Africa has done the right and admiral thing. (MORE)
January 4, 2024: There is cause for pride, for once, in South Africa. It has presented a legal case, to the international courts, the success of which could be followed with a Cease and Desist Order against Israel, for carrying out a campaign of ethnocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. Biden, Anthony Blinken and Austin could also be implicated, with luck, if to follow is action taken by the American-based Center for Constitutional Rights, indicting the Biden Admin in aiding and abetting in genocide. As I write in my latest column, “Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban, Not the Israel I Grew Up in”:
If one is enjoined against aiding and abetting in the murder of a single innocent individual; by logical extension, we Americans should not knowingly aid and abet in the murder of the many. Not in our name ~ilana
Strictly speaking, mass murder in Gaza likely doesn’t meet the legalistic definition of genocide. I have not used “genocide” in my own essays on Gaza. But, is the purpose here to stop mass murder and ethnic cleansing of an entire population or obey positive-law strictures to the letter? The first.
An ability to issue something like as Restraining Order, to keep away an entity engaged in en masse abuse: that would be perfect.
Involved is Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, author of Palestine, Palestinians, and International Law, as well as World Politics, Human Rights, and International Law. (Democracy Now!) Full transcript. Tragically, predicated on its arriving at the right outcome, the Court will still probably take years to do anything.
December 31: Supporters of Israel’s ethnocide, The War Street Journal, for one, have awakened to its barbarism. So long as their hostages were returned; Israelis were in general support of war crimes in Gaza, as gleaned from a circuitous December 2023 poll, to which fully 83 percent of a representative sample of Israelis replied overwhelmingly favorably to the question, “To what degree do you support encouraging the voluntary emigration of Gaza Strip residents?”
Not only is Israel murdering tens of thousands of Gaza’s civilians–-21,822 Palestinians have been killed since the war began (Via Ha’aretz, Israel News, Sunday, 31.12.2023)—it has gone and done a Taliban on heritage sites, some dating back to antiquity.
December 30: “Approximately 70% of the homes in Gaza and half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, according to the Wall Street Journal.” (Via Ha’aretz, Israel News, Saturday, 30.12.2023) “21,672 Palestinians have been killed and 56,165 were wounded since the war began.”
December 28: DEAD BY IDF. On average, nearly 300 people have been killed—are being killed—each day since the beginning of the war https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67764664. As of today, dead by IDF are 21,320 Palestinians. 55,603 have been wounded. (Via Ha’aretz, Israel News, Thursday, 28.12.2023) The number of displaced people in the Strip has reached 1.9 million.
December 25: Finally. Pope Francis on the Israeli ongoing strikes and massacres in Gaza:
“I plead for an end to the military operations with their appalling harvest of innocent civilian victims.”
“The kids are the little Jesuses of today.”
December 20: The almost-gleeful murder and hunting down by IDF of its own hostages comports with the Israeli army’s Rules Of Engagement with Gaza’s civilians: It amounts to an orgiastic bloodletting. Camera mounted on a dog captured footage of the crime. “In the film, the hostages are heard calling for help in Hebrew.” But even the dog was blown up. (Via Ha’aretz, Israel News, Wednesday, 20.12.2023)
The near-gleeful murder & hunting down by #IDF of #hostages comports with #Israel's army's #RulesOfEngagement with #Gaza’s civilians: it amounts to an orgiastic bloodletting. Camera mounted on a dog captured footage of crime. But even the dog was blown uphttps://t.co/uQwo2lmhfb
December 19: Avi Shamriz, the father of Alon, one of the hostages killed by the IDF, called the shooting of his son and the other two hostages “an execution – literally.” (Ha’aretz, Israel News, Monday, 18.12.2023) A British Special Ops soldier told the wildly pro-Israel BBC News that the IDF “opened up” on the three as though they presented an immediate threat; it appeared as though these were the soldiers’ rules of engagement. When the last hostage standing rushed back into the wreckage whence he came; the IDF pursued him. You know his fate. One or two military men who were allowed to speak candidly on teli framed these IDF tactics as very deliberate.
Avner Gvaryahu, who heads Breaking the Silence, a whistleblower group that documents testimonies of former Israeli soldiers, said soldier accounts from previous military engagements in the Gaza Strip showed that once an area was deemed by the military to be cleared of civilians, they were instructed to “shoot everything that moves.”
“The army said this happened in violation of the rules of engagement. I’m skeptical of that, based on what we know of previous operations in Gaza,” he said. “How many Palestinians were shot at like this?” (ABC News: “In Israel’s killing of 3 hostages, some see the same excessive force directed at Palestinians”)
Agreed. Reiterated below. Look no further than the orgiastic bloodletting of Gazans by the IDF to understand the indifference to life evinced by this military in Gaza. The almost-gleeful murder and chasing down of hostages by the IDF exists on a continuum. Look to the “excessive force directed at Palestinians” to make sense of it.
You are what you do. We know the IDF by its collective actions in Gaza
Well, some don’t. Don’t tell me Israel has not propagandized the ditto-heads. Look at the overwhelmingly venomous responses to straightforward, pitiful video reportage, via CNN, showing the reality in Gaza’s hospitals in the “good old days,” November 13, 2023. I too was propagandized, until October 7.
What television to watch for war coverage? In wartime, my readers know, from my Bush-years writing, to switch to the Left or war coverage. Fox New has always been a study in war porn. Fox is “TUNED-OUT, TURNED-ON, AND HOT FOR WAR.” (2003) The dumb bimbos (enabled by male accomplices) shaking their wares for war.
19,667 Palestinians are dead; 52,586 wounded since the war began. And there is no end in sight.
December 18: Al Jazeera is to petition the International Criminal Court over the death by IDF of cameraman Samer Abu Daqa. We hope they prevail—as we had hoped, November 14, that “Bibi Netanyahu …Finds Himself In the Dock, In The Hague.”
The IDF claimed the ambulance couldn’t drive on Gaza’s … damaged roads.
The Greek philosophers claimed that to be mired in contradiction was to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.
This juncture—being less than human, less than coherent, less than sane—has arrived in the annals of the IDF.
December 16:
You are what you do~ilana
Killing their own with such unexamined ease tells you something about the IDF’s Rules Of Engagement with Gaza’s civilians. Extrapolate one can from this, the IDF’s, conduct—killing surrendered, manifestly unarmed men—to the IDF’s Rules Of Engagement with Gaza’s civilians, evident in the orgiastic bloodletting; the ethnic cleansing , i. e. the displacing of 85% of population and the murdering of close to 19,000 souls.
One of the great wartime journalists of our time is Clarissa Ward. Likewise does Richard Engel deserve recognition for his wartime work over decades. (Arwa Damon, too. She has vanished. Where to?)
Here is a segment of this veteran journalist’s first access to Gaza. The Butcher has opened the abattoir to some scrutiny.
The three had waved a white flag. They died by IDF. Our friend Tom Piatak sends the heartbreaking letter mailed to the faithful from the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The Patriarchate’s message: An IDF “sniper shot and killed two women inside the Holy Family Parish in Gaza on Saturday. ..The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem oversees Catholic Churches across Cyprus, Jordan, Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.”(CNN, Dec. 16)
December 14: “We are no strangers to human suffering—to conflict, to natural disasters, to some of the world’s largest and gravest catastrophes—but we’ve seen nothing like the siege of Gaza”: So wrote leaders of some of the world’s top humanitarian organizations, in a New York Timesop-ed Tuesday, December 13. (Via Jake Johnson, at Common Dreams.)
“Nearly half of the munitions Israel’s Air Force used in Gaza have been unguided, also known as ‘dumb bombs’ [imprecise], according to a new U.S. intel assessment. … At least 18,787 Palestinians have been killed and 50,897 wounded in Gaza since the war began….’Israelis don’t see images from Gaza because our journalists are not doing their job'” (Via Ha’aretz: Israel News, Thursday, 14.12.2023)
December 13: “Civilians make up 61% of Gaza deaths from airstrikes, Israeli study finds.” This is most likely a biased project, favorably depicting the mission’s “success,” if one considers the visuals and the reckless stupidity of this army and its generals—the Israel Defense Forces is now generating targets in a droll way: with AI, artificial intelligence.
Slight correction to this facile title at The Guardian: “Gaza was a ‘living hell’ before heavy winter rains drenched makeshift tents,” upwards of 85 percent of the Gazans having been displaced before rainfall.
December 10: On the proportionality imperative of Just War Theory. Three days ago, Ryan McMaken, editor on “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Just How Vampiric Are The ‘Vaunted’ Israel Defense Forces?,” spoke to the number of Palestinians dead on December 7, highlighting wryly this next ratio: “The casualties ratio in this war is now more than 12 to 1. About 17.7K murdered Palestinians to 1.3K murdered Israelis. I wonder at what ratio the Gazans will have been ‘deterred’? 50 to 1? How about 100,000 dead in Gaza versus 1300 dead in Israel? That’ll teach ’em!”
This ratio speaks to the proportionality imperative of Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Just War Theory, obliterated by Israel.
Ha’aretz today (12/10 & the 11th), day 65, “… at least 18,000 Palestinianshave been killed. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad hold hostage more than 137 soldiers and civilians, dead and alive, including foreign nationals. … Hamas [had] killed at least 1,200 Israelis and wounded more than 3,300 in a merciless assault” that preempted this war. By today, December 11, at least 18,205 Palestinians had been killed (via Ha’aretz: Israel News, Monday, 11.12.2023)
As I said, the proportionality imperative of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Just War Theory Israel has sundered.
December 8: Eviction. Where does The Devil wish Gaza’s 1.9 million displaced civilians to go? Some 85 percent of Gaza’s population (Democracy Now! Amy Goodman, December 6, at 1:11 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7hEvAj7qWg) is living in “apocalyptic conditions.” Where do they go? Where?
GOD HELP THE SOUL of the Jewish State if this is not Fake News—and how I pray it is, but ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDEST.
“Option C: The evacuation of the civilian population from Gaza to Sinai”
Here is the Population Eviction document in Hebrew: I fear the URL will cause issues with Word Press, so here is a screen picture of the URL link for you @ https://www.mekomit.co.il/ . I read the Hebrew. Gimel (#C) is ‘Arei Ohalim’ = ‘tent cities’ in Sinai.
Sinai is a desert!
Someone assure me, please, that this is fake news. But is media—right or left—asking the questions? Of course not. License has been given to kill and destroy an entire community.
Ha’artez reports, on day 63 of the offensive against Gaza’s civilian, 17,177 dead, figures considered “broadly” accurate.
December 7: DENIAL OF A HOLOCAUST: Also in its newsletter, sent to subscriber’s Outlook, does the New York Times’ David Leonhardt confirm that, “many international observers believe that the overall death toll is accurate. U.S. officials largely accept it, as do some top Israeli officials. …Either way, the pace of civilian deaths — at least 10,000 in two months — is extremely high for a war. … Gazan civilians are dying at a faster rate than civilians did during the most intense U.S. attacks in Afghanistan or Iraq. … Israel has dropped 2,000-pound bombs on Gaza’s densely populated neighborhoods. …These Israeli bombs have turned much of Gaza to rubble. Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon official, has told The Times that he thinks the closest comparisons to so many large bombs falling in such a small area are the Vietnam War or World War II.”(NYT, Dec. 7, 2023)
This column, then, was correct—I was not giving in to hyperbole when I invoked Dresden and Hamburg, in my November 2 and November 11 columns:
December 6: DENIAL OF A HOLOCAUST. Commenced among truth deniers is the denial of the holocaust unfolding in Gaza. The number of dead is not to be believed, say deniers. Ha’aretz is Israel’s newspaper of record. Daily, they report “the Hamas-controlled health ministry’s” numbers. Today, 12/6/023, Ha’aretz says “16,248 Palestinians have been killed since October 7.” I get their daily briefings. They appear to support the war. Were in not “broadly reliable,” Ha’aretz would not be using these figures. It is a very good newspaper.
Dec 5: “Gaza’s health ministry, whose data the U.N. has deemed broadly reliable, said on Monday that at least 15,899 Palestinians, 70% of them women or people under 18 whom it defines as children, have been killed in Israeli bombardments over eight weeks of warfare.” (“Despite Gaza Death Toll Soaring, U.S. Unlikely to Rethink Weapons Supplies to Israel“)
UPDATE (12/17/023): Satellite companies have restricted images of Gaza, reports SEMAFOR, effectively concealing Crimes Against Humanity. Educated guess: They’re beholden to the clientèle, the military-industrial-complex, and the National Security Agency (NSA). The Top Dog client is the US Military. The client state is Israel, the IDF.
As of Nov 27, 2023, Jamon Van Den Hoek & Corey Scher, two scholars using satellite-radar technology to map damage in Gaza, provided maps according to which between 56,000 and 74,300 buildings in the Gaza Strip (5% & rising in the ‘safe’ South) were damaged or destroyed by that date. 50%+ of The Strip. Nobody is disputing that 1.9 million have been displaced. If ALL news outlets were reporting these approximate consensus numbers only with respect to Israelis — they would be accepted as truth.
December 3: The Devil is now unleashing on the “safe” Southern Gaza. If you care not about Gaza’s civilians, spare a thought for animals dying: dogs, cats, little grey donkeys carting their owners to … nowhere. For the Devil is now unleashing on the ‘safe’ South.
I wrote a column for tomorrow. Did some interesting calculations for it; for you, the reader. My numbers are already out-of-date. “316 Palestinians have been killed since the cease-fire ended, and … fatalities have surpassed 15,500. According to Reuters, the prominent scientist Sufyan Tayeh was killed in an Israeli airstrike.” (Haaretz, Israel News, Sunday, 03.12.2023)
G-d help anyone who dares to justify the IDF’s total war on Gazans. Their souls will be consigned to purgatory.
These include the littlest of children: Babies in incubators, their tiny bodies pierced by IV drips (which must be deftly inserted by dedicated healthcare providers), evacuated; shuttled from hospital to hospital, in constant peril. Gaza’s preemies are now in Cairo, most without their parents for the babies may be orphans. Egyptian doctors will try to stabilize critically ill, malnourished neonatals who have been deprived systematically of oxygen, nutrients, and medicine.
As the usual merry band of media hacks grinds on about the evil of abortion, one must ask: What about fully formed little people? Is it okay to make repeated attempts on their lives?
GAZA IN TWEETS:
Israel’s offensive against Gazans, by any other name, is evil incarnate. You cover up this truth at your peril—fail to bear witness to it; and your soul is doomed ~ilana
Jamon Van Den Hoek and Corey Scher are two scholars who utilize satellite-radar technology to map the damage: Fifty percent of buildings in the compact Northern Gaza; 5 percent in Southern Gaza, rising and expected to rise. The two “leverage science and open data” to highlight that, so far, between 56,000 and 74,300 buildings have been damaged or destroyed throughout the Gaza Strip, approximately one building in five.”
Israel’s newspaper of record, Ha’aretz, had intellectual ballast in the Israel of my youth. It has turned into a shill for the State. It dubs “billionaire Elon Musk, a serial endorser of antisemites,” and approvingly reports that Musk has been summoned to “PM Netanyahu” and “President Isaac Herzog.” One of the world’s wealthiest men is allowing himself to be submitted to reeducation; incapable of articulating the American core value of free speech, clearly unappreciated in Israel. Our US Constitution is meant to let everyone have their say, haters too.
UPDATE (11/29): HAMAS, however, is not ISIS: As an AP essay points out, likening Hamas to the Islamic State group “misses the mark in key ways”:
Hamas is an exclusively Palestinian movement. Its members are Palestinian and its ideology, albeit violent, is focused on liberating what it says is occupied land through the destruction of Israel. While branded a terrorist group by Israel and its Western allies, its deadly attacks have been focused on Israeli targets.
I summarize from Hebrew: The scorched home #Netanhayu is touring with #ElonMusk belongs to Itamar Cohen, who hid behind its walls on #Oct7, forsaken by #Bibi's #IDF & government. The #Israeli gov never asked Cohen for permission to use his home as a PR arena; cancelled him out. https://t.co/mqj1EnjyUI
UPDATE (11/27): Grotesque burlesque was Tal Heinrich, mouthing to CNN (November 25, 2023 – 18:00 ET). Said the spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
…we are a nation that unlike [Hamas] values life, and I can tell you that we are very proud to be part of this nation that is so committed to the principle of leaving nobody behind. That is really the epitome of the difference between us and these terrorists that we’re fighting up against.
To any substantive question posed, this she-devil’s replied, “I can’t comment on anything like that.” In addition to the butcher’s bill courtesy of the life-loving Israeli military (15,000 civilians so far):
1 of the world's wealthiest men, #ElonMusk, allows himself 2be submitted to reeducation; incapable of articulating the American core value of #FreeSpeech, clearly unappreciated in Israel. Our #US#Constitution is meant to let everyone have their say, haters too. #EthnicCleansinghttps://t.co/4sNBRuIMIQ
UPDATE (11/25): PBS reports that “Hamas released 13 Israelis and 11 Thai and Filipino workers kidnapped in the October 7 terrorist attack.” While Ha’aretz reported that “Israel released 39 Palestinian prisoners on Friday—17 minors and 22 women,” Ha’aretz failed to flesh out their stories.
Via PBS & Al Jazeera, we learn that Israel will free “33 Palestinians who had been detained at Israel’s Ofer Prison in the West Bank; 150 will eventually be freed.” And that, “Palestinian Sawsan Bkeer’s daughter Marah had been jailed in Israel for eight years.” “When the October 7 attacks took place, she was moved into solitary confinement.. ..Israel’s security forces used tear gas to disperse those waiting to see the exchange, but some finished their long wait at home.”
UPDATE (11/23): Journalist Ayat Al Khaddour vlogged heroically from her home in Gaza until she was stopped by an Israeli “precision” bomb.
I hope with all my heart that this here is Fake News, but here you can listen to an authentic Israeli reservist pilot, Col. Nof Erez, speaking in good Hebrew, not in the anglicized Pidgin Hebrew heard from most of the dumbed-down TV operatives out of Israel; describing the Israeli army’s response to Oct. 7 as “MASS HANNIBAL.” G-d help them if this is so. Save their souls. Is a doctrine such as “Hannibal” still extant? The IDF needs to say! After observing what has been done in Gaza—an obscene, operationally idiotic offensive against mostly civilians—almost anything appears possible.
Yasmin Porat, also a decent orator, bore witness to the same:
“…As to the utilitarian aspect of its mission; the IDF is handsomely equipped to fail. ‘To be very good at something inherently stupid …is not the mark of high intelligence.’
"…As to the utilitarian aspect of its mission; the #IDF is handsomely equipped to fail. 'To be very good at something inherently stupid …is not the mark of high intelligence.'”https://t.co/IjLYIgpktu#Gaza
An #Israeli op-ed scribbler asks readers to ponder the heft of an 'insight,' in plain sight, at which he alone has arrived.#GAZA CITY IS GONE: Yes, Ha'aretz; Americans See It. The World Sees It. pic.twitter.com/Msxzkk8rlY
A hospital should never be demolished; DEMOLISH WE MUST, instead, the demented ‘argument’ that says Israel has the right to drop 2000 lb bombs on Gazan doctors and patients, who are, apparently, custodians of Hamas, too.
It’s too late now, but, “Was it possible to defeat Hamas and prevent the carnage in Gaza”? Yes. IN A HARD TRUTH PODCAST, David Vance and I detailed a smarter, more effective response that targets only the culprits of October7 slaughter, not innocents. Do Follow.
Outlined in the podcast https://rumble.com/v3t9lwv-how-to-defeat-hamas-and-stop-the-carnage-in-gaza.html was a worldwide judicial plan. It’s prefaced with a caveat: The plan seems lefty and weak. NOT! It’s strong and just and woudl have been far and away more effective than the Gaza mass murder and Ethnic Cleansing, which equals recruits for Hamas ad infinitum.
It's too late now, but “was it possible to defeat Hamas and prevent the carnage in #Gaza”? Yes. IN A HARD TRUTH PODCAST, we detailed a smarter, more effective response that targets only the culprits of #October7 slaughter, not innocents. Do Follow. https://t.co/ZyD2QlolsThttps://t.co/4wQPYNwEoi
Thanks, Tom Piatak, fellow warrior. Judging by the consistency in which my recent columns on Israel have been promptly rejected by publications on the Right—these people know the column’s predictability and ethical veracity—my value in swaying the Israel First knaves is … zero. But thanks.
Image: I have this image in my head of so many darling little grey donkeys, likely dropping dead, too, for lack of food and water, carting their owners and their meager belongings to … where? Where? Nowhere. The image is reality. For the Devil has unleashed everywhere. He is loosed upon Gazans.
IF it is portrayed as a war crime; genocide—the methodical, malicious murder of the many—can be dismissed as incidental to battle; a mere case of, “Oops, bad things happen in war.” You hear the last phrase all the time from Israel’s supporters, as they gush their enthusiasm for the Jewish State’s crimes.
The genocide-as-a-war-crime conceptualization provides cover and lends imprimatur for criminals and criminality. You mitigate and minimize genocide when you call it a war crime.
This is precisely the point of Israel and its co-belligerents: The purpose of framing Israel’s ongoing extermination of Palestinian society in Gaza as a byproduct of war—the same having commenced in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—is to give the impression that industrial-scale mass murder is often incidental to war. Bad things happen in the butcher’s shop of war.
But genocide—legally and morally—is a stand-alone crime; it is not a crime attached to a set of mitigating or explanatory circumstances. The Jewish State, gleefully engaged in methodical, indiscriminate mass murder, is thus a criminal entity. Perhaps not a common criminal, but, nevertheless a criminal country, a threat to the comity of nations. It doesn’t take a Carl von Clausewitz, famed Prussian general and war theorist, to figure this out.
Disquieting though this is, a better source of metaphor for Israel than von Clausewitz is Truman Capote. He is the originator of the true-crime genre, in which a real event is treated with fictional techniques and turned into a literary work of art. That Capote’s In Cold Blood certainly is.
Israel, to commandeer and paraphrase Capote, is that “rarity, a natural killer—absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows.”
In any event, because it is an indefensible crime for which there are no extenuating circumstances or traditional defenses—genocide is not a war crime.
The manifestly willful attempt to destroy a society and its people is a crime for which the death penalty—execution of those involved—has, historically, been meted. The exculpatory agents of Israel’s crimes against humanity are, alas, incapable of reasoning from fact, ethics and logic. Like programmed automatons, they therefore recite a counterfactual storyline, an ideological meme.
Israel’s odious excuse-making has come to be known as Hasbara. …
In Hebrew, hasbara is the name of the verb to explain (lehasbir). It means explanation. Exculpatory constructs, assorted Hasbara, serve to coat Israel’s corporeal crimes against humanity with ideological respectability, to give these some imagined purity of purpose.
Think of Hasbara as the steady supply of bogus constructs with which to rape reality.
Hasbara to frame the specter of baby flesh peeled away to expose gleaming white bone—little bodies and minds shattered for life should they live—as the doing of a third party. “I didn’t do it,” jokes Bart Simpson in that all-American parody, The Simpsons. Hamas made me do it. CNN’s Hasbara, which ascribes an almost-attractive raffishness to IDF criminals, has it that the Occupation made Israeli soldiers commit their crimes. …
… Having figured out, over this pixelated page, that genocide must be addressed as a crime, not a war crime, I humbly discover that I stand on the shoulders of “Raphael Lemkin.
Lemkin was … first …to put forward the theory that genocide is not a war crime and that the immorality of a crime such as genocide should not be confused with the amorality of war.” Genocide is “the gravest and greatest of crimes,” and thus dubbed “a crime against humanity,” wrote Lemkin, a Polish, Jewish human rights lawyer.
“‘The term does not necessarily signify mass killings although it may mean that,’ Lemkin explained in a 1945 article. ‘More often it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations’—cultural institutions, physical structures, the economy—’of the life of national groups.” (Via Mother Jones.)
Much like any good libertarian, Lemkin was a natural-rights thinker, whose reasoning about genocide—the intentional murder of the many—was derived from reasoning about the crime of homicide. Mass murder, essentially, is when “the natural right of the individual to exist” has been sundered many times over.
As to the offender: If the individual may not gratuitously and serially kill people; neither may the collective, the state, exterminate a class of people. It should make no difference as to whether the felon is a lone criminal or the “common force,” to use Frédéric Bastiat’s natural-rights nomenclature. In The Law, Bastiat writes this:
“Since … force by an individual cannot legitimately be… used against the person, freedom, or property of another individual, by the same argument, the common force cannot legitimately be used to destroy the person, freedom, or property of either individuals or classes.” …
Israel’s token rape arrests, more cunningly, are part of a strategy to fend off genocide and war-crimes charges. Israel has become adept at narrative, repeating mantras about its unsurpassed morality. One lie embedded deep in the lattice of lies that is Israel is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises and individuals, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself ~ilana.
According to Truthout.org, “the Israeli Knesset, on Monday [its lawmakers, no less] was debating whether or not sexual abuse was a legitimate tactic for Israeli soldiers. (International law considers sexual violence by soldiers to be a war crime.) … Members of the Israeli government have also defended the soldiers, claiming it is wrong for the government to charge the reservists.”
Real lovelies, aren’t they?!
To its patsy press, the AP, “The Israeli military said, Monday, that “it was holding nine soldiers for questioning following allegations of ‘substantial abuse’ of a detainee at a shadowy facility where Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians since Oct. 7.”
According to Middle East Monitor, “A Gaza detainee allegedly sexually abused by Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman … suffered ‘a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs’ as a result of the immense torture he was subjected to by Israeli occupation soldiers. …One of the nine Israeli soldiers arrested for abusing him was released without charge. Deliberations about the other eight are continuing.”
Next, by Democracy Now’s telling, “A right-wing mob including members of the Knesset broke into two Israeli military bases in an effort to prevent Israeli military police from detaining the nine soldiers who were under investigation for gang raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman facility.”
+972 Magazine’s Oren Ziv correctly elucidates that “the support of Israeli political leaders, including some members of the Knesset who participated in the riots, and the apathy of the military police all indicate that those protesting against the soldiers’ charges are ‘the face of the state,’ expressing what are “mainstream” views in Israeli society.” (Confirmed. See “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?“)
Israel’s token rape arrests, more cunningly, are part of a strategy to fend off the genocide and war-crimes charges. Israel has become adept at narrative, repeating mantras about its unsurpassed morality. One central lie embedded deep in the lattice of lies that is Israel is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself.
A new report authored by said 972 Magazine journalist “for the human rights group Yesh Din shows how the main role of Israel’s military law enforcement system is to maintain the appearance of internal accountability in order to shield itself from external criticism.”
Essentially, to fend off the very notion idea that this lawless thug state is not a lawless thug state, whose justice system is complicit in minting maniacal laws in support of lawless, unfathomable thuggery and cruelty.
Rape of hostages, held in detention without charge, bleeds nicely into extra-judicial assassination.
Ismail Haniyeh, a major political leader representing the Palestinians of Gaza, who also enjoys wide support among the Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (as polls clearly show), was executed extra-judicially—how else?—by rogue state Israel.
Haniyeh is widely viewed among the people of the Arab world—not their ruling elites, who are puppets of the Axis of Genocide—as a uniter of Shia and Sunni. He was also beloved of his immediate neighbors in Gaza’s al-Shati refugee camp.
“Israeli forces [had] bombed members of Haniyeh’s family in the al-Shati refugee camp twice, killing at least three of his sons, two grandchildren, his sister and around 10 other relatives.” (Middle East Eye)
From diplomatic attaches, to university professors, to scientists, to thinkers and men of words—as in activists—to military men, to jailed prisoners, to resistance figures and fighters, and some just “unknown” collateral-damage, for-fun kills: you name them; Israel has targeted them.
As I pointed out in “The U.S. As The Globe’s Judge, Jury And Executioner,” a 2020 column, “blind patriotism stateside, too, is predicated on accepting that it is up to the U.S. government and its ruling elites to determine who lives and who dies around the world.” Some say war criminal Netanyahu pushed for the murder of Qassim Soleimani, an Iranian major general. Among the Axis of Genocide, with respect to extra-judicial, illegal assassinations—it is safe to say that, while America emulates Israel, Israel is a kingpin crime boss on this front. Unmatched in picking off people with whom it doesn’t wish to talk diplomatically. Theoretically, that is almost everyone.
Ismail Haniyeh, “who served as the fourth Palestinian prime minister and the third political leader of Hamas, … [Hailed] from a family of refugees expelled from historic Palestine during the Nakba in 1948, he grew up in northern Gaza’s beachside al-Shati refugee camp. He ascended through the ranks of Hamas, starting as the secretary to the group’s founder, Ahmed Yassin, and eventually leading its political bureau.”
Haniyeh—also lead negotiator in the matter of the hostages, Palestinian and Israeli—had lost upwards of 60 members of his family, including children and grandchildren. His murder, on Iranian territory, “came hours after Israel bombed Lebanon on Tuesday evening, killing three civilians,” as well as murdering “Fuad Shukr, Hizballah’s most senior military official and its leader Hasan Nasrallah’s close confidant.”
In “an attack that killed at least 90 people and wounded 300 in al-Mawasi, an Israeli designated ‘safe zone’ west of Khan Younis,” the Coward Army, IDF, which bombs civilians from above, seldom engaging in face-to-face combat, had killed Mohammed Deif, commander of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. The genocide has made it unequivocally clear that, as I explained in logic (“Israel Indicted, Palestinians Validated In Fact, Law & Hoppean Argumentation,” 07/03/2024) that—boy, oh boy—do the Palestinians need their resistance.
When Ismail al-Ghoul, a young Gazan journalist, and Rami al-Rifi, his cameraman, went to report from Haniyeh’s humble home, in the al-Shati refugee camp—where kids had congregated to commemorate their neighbor, also the political leader of their resistance–-Israel assassinated them too. As is the case with all journalist targeted by the criminal enterprise Israel, they were “in a clearly identifiable press vehicle when a missile directly hit them. It killed both reporters and a young boy walking by. The strike left young Ismail al-Ghoul headless.”
Al-Ghoul’s colleague, Al Jazeera’s journalist Hind Khoudary, such a reserved young woman whose courageous reporting we’ve watched over ten months, broke down on air, inconsolable. Her utter despair was that of one who has followed the rules, but found that those were no deterrents to Israel’s wanton—clearly intentional—slaughter of Gaza’s best, brightest and bravest, young people in the full flowering of their vitality.
China was also quick to condemn the murder of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who had been acting as Israel’s lead interlocutor in hostage negotiations, as an “act of assassination.” An “unacceptable political assassination,” responded Russia’s foreign ministry. Türkiye’s president, Tayyip Erdogan, “condemned the assassination in Tehran and said the killing would not break Palestinians’ will.” (Reuters)
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had pointed out, July 17, 2024, that,
Over the past 10 months or 300 days, nearly 40,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed and 90,000 wounded. The majority of them are children and women. The number of civilian victims [in Gaza] over the past 10 months is twice as large as the number of civilian victims in Ukraine on both sides of the conflict over the past 10 years since the [US sponsored] state coup in February 2014.
Correction: These are the confirmed deaths, where Gaza’s pitifully diligent Hamas-run government has managed to faithfully tally individual with his or her remains.
In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7-9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip.
Furthermore, I believe my “lying eyes.” Going by the “lying eyes” standard—satirist Richard Pryor’s wry phrase for he who has been caught in flagrante delicto—I believe my “lying eyes.” Those “lying eyes” speak to the scale of Israel’s depredations against Gazans. Once the “runaway Zombie Killing Machine” (Rami Khouri‘s coinage) is stopped, I believe it quite possible, given the scale of annihilation, that as many as half-a-million Palestinians will have been exterminated, with American imprimatur, and only the faintest protest.
BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, with BRICS announcing the admission of Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina as new member states) might want to consider an urgent course of action to stop Israel—an amoral pornographically violent terrorist state by any other name—or their leaders will be next. I venture that dissidents, activists or writers (whose careers have not yet been destroyed by neoconservatives decades ago) are in danger, all, of death by the demon state.
The totem words and adjectives we use to describe Israel, the most perverse and pornographically murderous society imaginable, fail. In the tradition of bearing witness, at which all my Gaza Essays aim, I close with some recent Israeli feats of depravity visited upon Palestinians martyrs by their Israeli occupier-pornographer:
“In particular,” comments Ron Unz, unmatched in his courage, “it was obvious that Israeli snipers were deliberately shooting young Palestinian children and toddlers, aiming precision shots at their hearts and at their heads.”
“…it published. [A] very lengthy account by two experienced American surgeons who had visited Gaza to provide medical assistance and were utterly horrified by what they encountered there. According to Dr. Mark Perlmutter, in just a couple of weeks he saw more carnage inflicted upon civilians than he had in the combined total of his previous thirty years of humanitarian visits to war-zones around the world. In particular, it was obvious that Israeli snipers were deliberately shooting young Palestinian children and toddlers, aiming precision shots at their hearts and at their heads“.
American volunteer surgeons, Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, attest that Israeli snipers deliberately shoot Palestinian children and toddlers, aiming precision shots at hearts and heads.
… We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.
“In the United States we would never dream of operating on anyone without consent, let alone a malnourished and barely conscious 9-year-old girl in septic shock. Nevertheless, when we saw Juri, that’s exactly what we did.
We have no idea how Juri ended up in the Gaza European Hospital preoperative area. All we could see was that she had an external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.
In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.
“Jesus Christ,” Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, “she’s just a fucking kid.”
THEN THERE WAS
The sight of thousands and thousands of semi-trucks parked alongside the highway for nearly 30 miles was truly something to behold — convoys of lifesaving aid turned into static walls of a tunnel directing us toward Gaza….
By Israel.
… health sector salaries are paid by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and are always cut off during Israeli attacks. …
Since October 7, at least 500 healthcare workers and 278 aid workers have been killed in Gaza. Among them was Dr. Hammam Alloh, a 36-year-old nephrologist at Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate when Israel besieged the hospital in October.
MORE HERE.
* The screen picture of the image, via the two doctors, depicts one young man in three stages of slow death inflicted by his Israeli torturers: The picture of the Palestinian man, a nurse, and what Israel visited upon him over three encounters, rendering him a husk, a shadow of the first image, in which his leg has been blown off, but he is still otherwise youthful. The man in the wheelchair’s wasted legs can no longer ambulate.
I want to hear no sympathy, not ever, for IDF psychopaths, who, the evidence is conclusive, shoot and loot for fun. Nobody ordered them to shoot kids in the head; they do it for the love of it, because of who they are.
“His flesh softer than sin, Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim, the head of the military rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces, had indicated, in 2016, that ‘as part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers’ morale during fighting, it is permitted to …satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will… .’ News of the rabbinical rape-injunction came courtesy of Israel’s YnetNews.com.”
UPDATE (8/12/024): The kind of money behind the Fifth Column that is AIPAC destroyed the political career of Rep. Jamaal Bowman because he dared to voice disdain for the Israeli genocide. Cori Bush, a Democrat representing the 1st Congressional District in Missouri, didn’t stand a chance. In 1963, William Fulbright, academic, statesman and politician, tried to investigate AIPAC for assorted fraud. Guess what became of him. (Track AIPAC) https://lnkd.in/gge-QJxB
Thes images, a daily reality, are via heroic Gazan photojournalists Adel Al-Hawajri and Hosni Salah.