printIsrael’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.
First up, Israeli society’s latest demonstration of depravity: When they are not fantasizing and embellishing about rape (“Debunking ‘Screams Before Silence,’ Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 Oct. ‘mass rape’ film“), and raping Palestinian prisoners—the IDF and the state and societal structures that support it is fighting for the legal right to rape their enemies. Or justifying the twisted sensibilities of their military and countrymen. And, Israeli depravity is indeed endemic. (See “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?” Oh yes.)
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.
Read my own analysis of how Israel and its courts “CO-OPT HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW” (In “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide”.)
Israel is a lattice of lies.
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)
According to historian Ilan Pape (starting at around 18 minutes into this Electronic Intifada interview), such repulsive executions have been part of the Israeli State’s founders’ modus operandi since its inception, and before. Here is a likely inexhaustive Wikipedia list of the “zombie state killer’s” extra-judicial kills over the years. “Eight other times had Israel been accused of assassinations in Iran.”
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.
As I noted in November of 2004, during America’s war on Iraq, the august British medical journal The Lancet is ever late to its obligations. In character, and with regards to Gaza, The Lancet has finally, ten months into a genocide, awoken to the 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.
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” (‘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.”
Ron was alerting his readers to a belated and brief Politico awakening, in the form of an article,
“…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.
MORE:
“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.
The image appended to this post features the Rabbi who urged Gaza genocide and excused rape by soldiers. That was in 2017. In my June, 2024 essay, “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism,” another delightful mover-and-shaker in Israeli moral precincts, name of Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim, made a cameo:
“The culture comes from the top,” I wrote:
“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.”
Similarly, before it discovered that the “Goyim” were repulsed; the “Most Moral Army in the World” had been operating an “exclusive-content” “channel to share the gruesome killing of Palestinians.” This IDF-run public war-porn channel, out of Israel, served up content in which murder was sauced-up or overlaid by sex talk.
Snuff films.
Such patterns of arousal—the commingling of serial killing and sex—are associated with psychopathy. The psychopathic fusion of lust and murder appears endemic among IDF soldiers. The channel, which catered to Israeli audiences, was called “72 Virgins – Uncensored.” How cruel. The revelation comes via Ha’aretz, an august Israeli news source.
Also at the Unz Review.
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.
They are introduced and supported by Talia Mullin of ScheerPost and by another stalwart supporter of Palestine, The Unz Review.
Do not apply The Censor to reality. Do not Look Away from the demon state’s ‘handiwork.’
Brilliant essay!
Keep up the good work!