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https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/31/patrick-lawrence-deeper-into-depravity/

Deeper Into Depravity

 

Diego Ramos, ScheerPost’s managing editor, forwarded me a video clip last week he thought I ought to see. Sending it under the subject line, “Disturbing trend in Israel,” my colleague must have reckoned I have not been sufficiently shocked by the events in Israel and Gaza since Hamas mounted an assault into southern Israel on October 7 and the Israeli Defense Forces began a purposely disproportionate response to the incursion—purposely disproportionate as a matter of official policy since David Ben–Gurion put it in place during his premiership in the 1950s. 

Diego did his disturbing work. The video he forwarded outdoes it all so far by provoking a disgust as profound as any I have ever felt. It features a number of scenes wherein Israelis record themselves sadistically ridiculing Palestinians in the most cravenly cruel manner. They imitate Palestinian children dying or starving. They apply racially offensive makeup. They laugh and dance while switching lights on and off and while ostentatiously drinking water from taps—this last to mock Gazans as Israel deprives them of power, potable water, food and much else.

And I am describing the children in these videos, ranging in age from, maybe, six or seven to somewhere in their teens or early twenties. The mothers stand behind them, smiling with approval and delight. Here is the video as posted by Al Jazeera English last Thursday. I have since seen several others like it.

By common agreement among many lawyers, scholars of international law, special rapporteurs, and the like—including Israelis in these fields—what we witness daily now is by all acceptable definitions a genocide. Whether or not Israel is committing war crimes by the hour is not even worth debating. But I am taken up now by the spectacle of human beings who have allowed themselves to be destroyed in the name of an ideology that proves every bit as racist as it was when, in 1975, the U.N. General Assembly declared Zionism to be so. Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991; it should not have been.

I am reminded of what I learned years ago when studying the Japanese Imperial Army’s conduct in China and Korea before and during World War II and the long record of the Kempeitai, commonly known as Imperial Japan’s Thought Police. Victimizers, I came to conclude with conviction, are victims, too. This holds for the people in the videos I have recently viewed and for every Israeli wearing an IDF uniform. They have been stripped of all ordinary decency by the radical ideologues of “the Jewish state.” They can laugh or sneer or pull all the triggers they like: Their lives, too, have been destroyed. Look at the videos: The evidence of this is in every frame.  

“Nothing human disgusts me” is a line I remember well from The Night of the Iguana, the 1961 play by the superbly human Tennessee Williams. I hold to this thought (even while reading the foreign pages of The New York Times). What has happened to the people in the videos must disgust us. But what they suffer as victims could happen to all but the strongest among us. They are appalling specimens of humanity, but they are human. As we find our way to some morally, intellectually defensible high ground during the atrocities we witness daily, we need to bear this in mind.

And this, too: Those videos were not shot in isolation. They reflect a culture of racism, xenophobia, hatred, and—we see this now—sadism that has taken pride in itself for many years. These sentiments are instruments of the state, carefully cultivated. You may remember the videos shot at the time of the al–Aqsa crisis two years ago. Young Israelis in sparkling school uniforms or stylish clothes leapt up and down in a sort of frenzy in the streets of Jerusalem while shouting, “Death to all Arabs.” I read those images looking back and forward: They were the flowers of the Israeli state’s century of official indoctrination and a prelude to the videos coming out now.

Arnold Toynbee, the great if no longer fashionable historian, argued in his 12–volume “A Study of History” that civilizations rise when creative elites respond to new circumstances with imagination and courage, while they decline, in turn, not in consequence of external factors but due to spiritual collapses within. This is the Israel of Bibi Netanyahu, the Israel whose plan, we know by way of an official document leaked over the weekend, is to ethnic-cleanse Gaza and incorporate it into the Jewish state. Its leaders are brutes and—as the videos I reference show—they have destroyed Israel’s human spirit. 

I saw an interview Sunday with a Defense Department contractor who has visited Israel dozens of times over many years on DoD work. He recounted the steady decline in any belief in a peaceful settlement of the Israel–Palestine crisis that he has detected since 2007. For most Israelis, he observed, it is down to violence now. A headline in Monday’s editions of The Times, recording these changing desires and expectations: “I Don’t Have That Empathy. It’s Not Me Anymore.” This is the voice of a nation that has demolished itself in its attempts to destroy others. 

A couple of weeks ago in this space I published a commentary asserting that the two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine question is dead, and a single, secular state is the only way forward. I had some mail afterward to the effect that a one-state solution is too far from reality to think about. I will reply here that these readers have it upside-down. A one-state solution is now the only realistic idea worth considering. Until Israelis accept that they must live in a single nation wherein Palestinians dwell as equal citizens, there is no more future for them than there is for Palestinians. They, Israelis, will be condemned to live in a walled-off garrison state that will come to look ever more like a commodious version of the “open-air prison” we speak of when we speak of Gaza. 

“We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness,” Netanyahu said in a much-remarked speech to the nation last Wednesday, “and light shall triumph over darkness.” This is the utterance of a destroyer—of people, of hope—a man who cannot find his way out of the Old Testament and nonsensically demands we live in it with him, a man who simply should not be leading anything in the 21^st century. 

And we, we Americans, are urged daily to support the depravity into which this man leads Israel ever more deeply. Netanyahu’s depravity, Israel’s, must be ours, too. We are urged now to openly endorse war crimes and a genocide. And so we, too, are in consequence letting an apartheid state’s intentionally terrorizing campaign against Palestinians accelerate our none-too-sturdy nation into the kind of internal collapse Toynbee described as the dynamic of decline.

Across the country you find confrontations between those who argue in behalf of their consciences and those who censure, name-call, deplatform, or otherwise attempt to ruin them for not supporting open-and-shut murder. At the University of Pennsylvania, wealthy donors threaten to withhold their support if the administration does not come out in favor of this savagery. The Writers Guild of America West is under attack for similarly refraining. Artforum, the monthly chronicler of the gallery scene, fired its editor for signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire, whereupon collectors now threaten to “deaccession” the works of artists who also signed. Let us add to this a 71–year old man’s murder of a 6–year-old Palestinian boy near Chicago two weeks ago, an incident that left his mother in critical condition. 

These implicit defenses of systematic savagery must be dressed up, of course. And so America plunges into the disgracefully cynical argument that to oppose the Israeli operation in Gaza is anti–Semitic. The Chinese put their hands up to contribute to a ceasefire and talks toward an enduring settlement of one or another kind, but China is anti–Semitic because it has not condemned the Hamas assault. 

A museum bureaucrat named Sarah Lehat Blumenstein is now going after artists who signed the letter that got Artforum’s editor fired. She threatens them with “a deaccession plan to dimmish the artists’ status.” Explaining herself in an interview with The Times, she said her efforts reflect “a fear that rising anti–Semitism was endangering her right to exist.”

The ADL may wish to come after me for this one, such have things come to, but this statement proposes a patently ridiculous equivalence, albeit one emblematic of the post–October 7 climate. If you oppose the Israelis’ genocide operation and merely call for a ceasefire, some museum functionary is frightened that her life is under threat? I view this as more than a vulgar misuse of history and a contemptuous use of the victim card. This reflects a nation that no longer knows how to make sense of itself. 

I loved, in this connection, a piece The Times ran in last Saturday’s editions to dress up, as a matter of personal affection, what has to be the Biden regime’s worst policy failure to date. Joe Biden just loves Israel, Peter Baker, The Times’s White House correspondent, wants us to know, and we should understand this—and along the way accept his “unwavering support.” “Some confidants,” Baker then writes, “said that Mr. Biden’s Irish heritage makes him relate to the plight of historically marginalized people and that his own family tragedy connects him to the grief of those who have lost so much.”

Readers, take as much time as you wish lingering over this, among the most preposterous sentences written to explain U.S. policy since violence erupted October 7. 

We propose to ban the exercise of conscience, condemnations of the out-of-control violence of an openly racist nation. No, you cannot think that. No, you cannot say that. You must think and say this. We tell ourselves stories about what good, well-intended fellows are those who support atrocities. U.S. foreign policy has not for many decades had much to do with the ideals of Western civilization as we were taught to think of them. Now we whose taxes pay for policy are urged to come right out with it: Yes, we approve of war crimes, violence against noncombatants, ethnic cleansing. What is Israel costing us? Ourselves and our self-respect, our psychological coherence, our regard of history, our culture, our humanity. 

Israel, the U.S. and the rest of the West cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the grave, grave error of al–Nakba in 1948, when began the forcible removal of Palestinians from their land. See the Toynbee reference above: Nobody in power has the creativity, imagination, or confidence to confront the present as the consequence of this error and begin acting to correct it. And so Israel will continue to pull us in the wrong direction—or further in the wrong direction, I ought to say. I hope I am not around if ever Americans start in with the sadistic videos. 

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https://edwardcurtin.com/the-roots-of-radicalism-and-the-structure-of-evil/

The Roots of Radicalism and the Structure of Evil

My title is redundant for a reason, since the root of the word radical is the Latin word, radix, meaning root.  For I mean to show how the use and misuse of language, its history or etymology, and ours as etymological animals as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gassett called us, is crucial for understanding our world, a world once again teetering on the edge of a world war that will almost inexorably turn nuclear as events are proceeding.  If our language is corrupted, as it surely is, and political propaganda flourishes as a result, the correct use of our language and the meaning of words becomes an obligation of anyone who uses them – that is, everyone, especially writers.

The United States government exists to wage war.  In its present form, it would crumble without it; and in its present form, it will crumble with it.  Only a radical structural change will prevent this.  For war-making is at the core of its budget, its raison d’être – 816.7 billion for the Fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act alone – a deficit-financed sum that tells only part of the story.  This amount that finances the military-industrial complex and its blood money is for a country that has never been invaded, is bordered by friendly neighbors, and is oceans away from the multitude of countries its leaders attack and call our enemies.  The U.S. wages wars around the world because killing is its lifeblood, its structural essence.

In writing of the misuse of language, George Orwell wrote, “It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”  So with these words Orwell slyly places us within the enigma of the chicken and the egg, a conundrum or paradox that relates to my theme in a weird way, but which I will directly ignore.

By radical I do not mean the widespread political usage as in radical-right or radical-left or radical meaning one who plays the role through dress or demeanor.  I am using the word in its primary meaning – a radical is one who is rooted in the earth, which means everyone.  Everyone therefore is mortal, human not a god, and comes from the earth and returns to it.  Everyone is radical in this sense, although they may try to deny it.  And the more one feels alive the more one senses one will die and doesn’t like the thought, therefore many tamp down their aliveness in order to reduce their fear of death.  The best way to do this is to disappear into the crowd, to become a conventional person.  To act as if one didn’t know that one’s political leaders were in love with death and killing and were not obedient cogs in a vast systemic killing machine.  Maybe the unconscious assumption is that these “leaders” can kill death for you by killing vast numbers of people and make you feel someone has control of this thing called death.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who stood strongly against the Vietnam War and marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., put the basic sense of radical well when he said:

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. . . . get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

To be radically amazed that we exist is to be equally amazed that we will die.  And there’s the rub.

Yesterday I got in our car and drove away to meet a journalist friend.  It was evening and my wife had previously used the car.  I had just spent time following all the dreadful news about the massive slaughter by Israel of Palestinians in Gaza, including the death of more than 3,000 children whose numbers are climbing fast.  Visions of those children and babies played havoc with my spirits, and I kept thinking of my own children and the love and tenderness that comes with being a  parent.  A musical cd that my wife had been listening to started playing.  The case was on the console.  It was Sacred Arias by Andrea Bocelli.  He of the majestic voice was singing Silent Night.  I was overwhelmed with tears by his passionate words:

Silent night! Holy night!
All is calm, all is bright
round yon Virgin Mother and Child,
Holy infant so tender and mild,
sleep in Heavenly peace!
sleep in Heavenly peace!

I saw nights in Gaza as Israeli bombs burst and shattered everyone and everything to bits, all the holy infants, the children and adults.

I felt beside myself with grief, a U.S. citizen driving down a safe country road contemplating the savagery of my nation and its support for the Israeli government’s brutality and mass killings of Palestinians for all the world to see on screens everywhere.

I felt ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game reserved for rhetoric alone as it joins in the massacre of the innocent, as it always has, now together with the apartheid Israeli regime.

I thought of all the compromised politicians who pledge their allegiance to the killers, Biden and all his presidential predecessors, now including the aspirant Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a man with a conscience on many important issues whom I have supported in his quest for the presidency, but a man whose conscience has abandoned him when it comes to the Palestinians, as Scott Ritter has recently documented.  I have privately urged Kennedy to reconsider his “unwavering, resolute, and practical” support for the Israeli government following the Gaza breakout of October 7, but to no avail.  In fact, I have been trying to get him to withdraw his unconditional support for Israel since the summer when he withdrew his support for Roger Waters, marched with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in the Israel parade in NYC, and allowed Boteach to say that Sirhan Sirhan had killed his father without correcting him since he knew it was an egregious lie.  My failure in this regard deeply saddens me.

I felt betrayed again – perhaps you will call me naïve – as when I was young and last put my trust in voting for a US presidential candidate in 1972.  I thought I had learned to radically grasp the systematically corrupt nature of the U.S. warfare state.  Now more than three weeks have passed and Bobby Kennedy has remained silent, only to ask for our prayers for the victims of the mass shooting in Maine.  For the Palestinians, not a word. Although he considers the Israeli-Palestinian situation complicated, there is nothing complicated about genocide; it doesn’t necessitate long analyses and discussions with advisers.  The facts of the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza are evident for all to see, if they wish.  Bobby Kennedy has turned away.  And I have now sadly turned away from him.

I remembered the Gospel words I heard long ago about the fulfillment of the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, sobbing and loudly lamenting: it was Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because they were no more.”  But this time it is not the Jewish Rachel, for Herod has assumed the name Netanyahu and his U.S. allies, and the weeping ones are Palestinian mothers and fathers.  Nothing can justify such slaughter, not the terrible killings of innocent Israelis on October 7 that I denounce; not the fear that the birth of messengers of peace might strike into Herod/Netanyahu’s heart – nothing!  Seventy-five years of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians continues apace. The Jewish child Jesus, the radical preacher of love and peace for all people, didn’t die on a private cross, nor do the Palestinians.  So it goes.

I thought of the indescribable sweet wonder of holding your baby in your arms while realizing how many Palestinian parents have been holding their dead children in theirs.  Rage welled up in me at the obscenity of those who support this and those who shut their eyes to it and those who remain silent.

I realized that as a Christian I am baptized into the human family, not some special in-group, which is the opposite of Jesus’s message.  Every child is holy and innocent and to massacre them is evil.  And to remain silent as it happens is to be complicit in evil.

I remembered how these many ongoing weeks of terror started and thought of a poem that is succinctly apposite: Harlem by Langston Hughes:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

And I thought that he could have omitted that final question mark because we have our answer, then and now.

Then the music stopped and I arrived at my destination to meet my friend.

Yes, to be radical is to be rooted in the earth and to realize all people are part of the human family, each of us made of flesh and blood and therefore sisters and brothers deserving of justice, peace, and dignity.  But this is just a first step in the grasping of the full dimension of the radical vision.  It can end in fluff if a second step is not taken: to use our freedom to uproot ourselves from the conventional government and mass media propaganda and mind control that clouds our understanding of how the world works. This takes study and work and an understanding of the historical and systemic roots of all the alleged “unprovoked” violence that ravages our world.

Thus the existential and socio-historical merge in the radical vision that allows us to grasp the structures of evil and our personal responsibility.

Today that obligation is clear: To oppose the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians.

Otherwise we are guilty bystanders.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/10/31/we-are-ruled-by-sociopaths-and-morons/

We Are Ruled By Sociopaths And Morons

The response to the Gaza crisis from western leaders and media outlets and celebrities shows very clearly that we really are led by the least among us. The least wise. The least intelligent. The least compassionate. The least insightful. We are ruled by sociopaths and morons.

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You are being offered two narratives to choose from: 

1. Palestinians in Gaza are evil orc-like savages who just want to murder Jews and must therefore be caged and killed. 
2. Palestinians in Gaza are thinking human beings who are reacting to intolerable abuses inflicted upon them. 

Which is more believable?

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We’re being told that Israel needs to wage a relentless bombing campaign which is killing civilians by the thousands in order to eliminate Hamas, because Hamas must be destroyed to achieve a lasting peace. Every part of this is transparently false.

Firstly the premise that Hamas must be eliminated to achieve peace is fallacious; peace can be achieved by eliminating the abuses and righting the wrongs which gave rise to Hamas in the first place. There’s no rational reason to believe Hamas would continue to exist in its current iteration or keep waging violent resistance if the theft and injustice from 1948 onward were rolled back, refugees had the right to return, apartheid abuses were ended, and people were no longer kept in a giant concentration camp where they are deprived of basic human needs.

Secondly the premise that you can bomb people into accepting an abusive status quo is self-evidently absurd. Even if Israel kills every single member of Hamas, there will be hundreds of thousands of survivors of this onslaught who see the depravity of Israel and refuse to accept it. You think all these orphaned boys and all these men who saw their loved ones ripped apart by military explosives are just going to be cool with the status quo from here on out? Of course not.

And Israel knows this, which is why its preferred solution is to kick all survivors of this onslaught out of Gaza and into refugee camps in the Sinai Peninsula. It knows that nothing it’s doing will actually work and it refuses to make the reparations that will work, so its only other option is the elimination of Gazans one way or the other. Ethnic cleansing and mass displacement is not “peace” by any stretch of the imagination, but it might allow Israel to keep its abusive status quo intact.

Those are Israel’s only real options for sustainable stability: either right all the wrongs which led to this, or go the opposite direction and inflict far more wrongs to answer the Palestinian question once and for all. It’s pretty clear watching all this that Israel has opted for the latter.

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The narrative managers are still struggling with the problem that when they announced that Palestinians had escaped from their concentration camp and killed a bunch of Israelis, an inconvenient number of people started asking “Wait, what were they doing in a concentration camp?”

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I find nothing less morally or philosophically interesting than pontificating on how the traumatized prisoners of a horrible concentration camp should have conducted themselves once they broke free of its confines. As far as I’m concerned everything that happened on October 7 was the result of generations of Israeli abuse, the British decisions which made it all possible, and the American backing which has kept it going.

Israeli policies created Hamas. I don’t mean this in the usual “Netanyahu boosted Hamas to sabotage peace and undermine its more moderate rivals” sense, I mean it in the “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable” sense. If you stomp out every possible peaceful avenue of resistance, naturally you’re going to see the rise of factions which favor violent resistance.

One of my most formative experiences in understanding this conflict happened in 2018 when I watched Israeli soldiers firing on protesters with sniper rifles and live ammo. B’Tselem explicitly denounced this as unlawful. There’s nothing that could possibly make such a thing okay, and it was a very clear illustration of the way Israel has cut Palestinians off from all the normal pathways toward peaceful resolution.

I said when all this started that I believe the Hamas attack will ultimately be a net negative for Palestinians, but that I can’t in good conscience “condemn Hamas” because nobody can articulate a positive direction that Palestinians should be taking. The fact that all peaceful avenues of resistance have been cut off is not the fault of the Palestinians, and it’s not the fault of Hamas. It’s the fault of the Israeli government.

Hamas is just what you get when you create an intolerably abusive apartheid state which keeps millions of people in a concentration camp whose inhabitants are cut off from basic human needs and make peaceful revolution impossible. Hamas isn’t the disease, it’s a symptom of the disease. The disease is an apartheid settler-colonialist project which cannot exist without endless violence, warfare and abuse.

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I refuse to be shamed and demonized for supporting peace by people who support the murder of thousands of children.

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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/10/30/know-your-enemy/

Know Your Enemy

Upton Sinclair said that it was hard to get a man to understand a thing when his paycheck depended on his not understanding it. There is a parallel to that idea at work in American people today.

Americans live uneasily, in the illusion of democracy, under the most powerful, and determinedly evil, government as has ever existed. Most may not read on, outraged in moral certainty the assertion is insane. Moral certainty has gotten us where we are.

For those who wished to know the truth of America’s Capitalist Empire and were capable of facing it, it was always available, and it continues to be. To cite the America’s criminal history would take volumes, and those volumes already exist, for those with courage to peruse them. The Empire’s catalogue of criminality is not in question by the informed. It is indisputable: a given.

The vast mass of the ignorant have been made so by scientific propaganda, and they have lost their capacity for independent thought. They were powerless to prevent the creation of their opinion, and they are sure their views about America are their own, individually arrived at. That makes them hard to modify.

Unamuno said that all learning requires admission of ignorance, which is why it is so assiduously resisted. There is a prevailing idea that adults should be ashamed to admit ignorance, which prevents most from learning anything, but there is another factor yet more powerful. To admit he is wrong about a deeply held, core belief not only exposes his error but also challenges his very essence as a man. To admit one was wrong in saying the Steeler’s won the Super Bowl is not hard; to admit one has been indoctrinated with a totally false understanding of one’s own country is not possible without great anxiety and shame.

Positive revitalization of the propagandized American mind will not occur. Not now; not ever. Facts or events that challenge the existing complex of American’s prejudices and certainties will effect no change in entrenched, received opinion. The captivity of the American conscience is total and permanent.

The long history of The Empire’s purposeful, cynical erasure of American’s ability to know the truth of their government’s villainy has trained them to eagerly embrace the agents and causes of their betrayal. This is tragic on a monumental scale because The Empire’s crash will be paid for most punishingly by its people.

The poisonous propaganda was never partisan. It was not an exclusive product of a party or political ideology, of left or right, liberal or conservative, progressive or reactionary. It is a quasi-religious dogma that exalts the dominion and hegemony of a Super Race that has exploited and enslaved the world for its profit. As in every historic empire, stimulation of human vanity insures that the mass feels its identity with the controlling power, feels at one with it, even as it is absolutely subjected by it.

This is a process as old as history. It was refined and reinforced by terror in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but it was so perfected by the American Empire that bloody, flagrant terror was not needed. What Orwell wrote of presciently has been fully instituted. Americans, left and right, liberal or proto-fascist, are irretrievably in the thrall of Capitalist dogma, and happy to be.

In its period of greatest stress, the Soviet Union employed what it called War Capitalism. That term defines our economic system, now permanent. The Empire depends entirely on production for war; it dwarfs all other sources of profit for its giant corporate owners. America is a War Machine, whose people support it unreservedly. The Empire could not continue if it were not so.

Consider these obscenities. The last seventy years of wars with no benefit at all to Americans. Fifty years of wage stagnation and inflation with no legislation for working people. The greatest wealth gap between super rich and average Americans in history. The most expensive, inadequate health care of any major nation, in which millions go broke and die while drug companies gouge them. An education system run for profit, not content or quality. A justice system that jails the poor and enables rich criminals. A political system in which the elite select figureheads and placate the hoodwinked electorate by permitting it to endorse them.

These, of course, are general indictments. There are specific horrors to expose. The Empire, having enriched its War Machine with decades of profitable failures—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria—is pursuing two egregious crimes against humanity at once, in Ukraine and Israel. In one it goads and funds a vicious neo-Nazi regime in a brutal farce fueled by slaughter of its own people for the sole purpose, ludicrous on its face, of “weakening Russia”. In the other, it aids and supports a neo-Nazi regime in extermination of the race it raped and dispossessed to entrench its vicious military tyranny. In neither of these evil enormities is there an iota of moral justification, or a scintilla of benefit, to the deluded American people. But it pays for them.

As empires decay, their governments exude the odor of death, and so it is with ours. The pretense of competence, or even of a minimal capability, can no longer be sustained by it. In the next Presidential election, a gross, boorish, criminal buffoon will face a senile, lying, criminal clown. The Senate is a geriatric rest home and hospice for the moribund, and the House is a ululating zoo of queer fauna, loony, furious and irreconcilable, and with no sane keeper. Agencies and bureaus are staffed and managed to subvert and betray the functions they were designed to perform.

There is a general malaise, an amorphous dissatisfaction among the people but it has no substance, no unifying principle; only a brute sense that something is wrong. The people simply can not conceive that everything is wrong. Baffled victims of their evil system, they rage, storm, and cheer their chosen idols, unable to comprehend that their only truly invincible enemy is themselves.

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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/10/30/this-is-what-it-was-like-to-be-indifferent-to-nazi-genocide/

This Is What It Was Like to Be Indifferent to Nazi Genocide

Looking back at the horrors inflicted by Nazi Germany, a fascinating, disturbing question is: why and how could so many people at that time be indifferent to the crimes? After the defeat of the Nazi fascist regime, people adamantly lamented “never again” would such horror be permitted.

Part of the lament was due to a sense of collective guilt that more wasn’t done at the time to stop the systematic mass killings and brutality.

Well, up to a point, it is happening again in Gaza where 2.3 million have been subjected to three weeks of constant, indiscriminate bombardment amid a total blockade of water, food and other basic human necessities.

And, shamefully, incredibly, the world is letting it happen – again. This time, we don’t have the mitigatory excuse of ignorance and lack of information from antiquated communication systems. The mass murder in Gaza is on prime-time television.

The United Nations Security Council is seemingly at an impasse to muster a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and the urgent dispatch of aid trucks into the Gaza Strip. Three weeks of massacring a civilian population trapped in a coastal area – described as the world’s biggest open-air concentration camp – have been permitted to continue while the UN Security Council wrangles over diplomatic resolutions.

At the rate of killing by Israeli military forces, the death toll in Gaza will soon reach 10,000 with multiples of that as injured. That’s just the violent casualties. With no water or food and hospitals closing from lack of fuel, the mortality will likely be even greater. Most of the dead and injured are women and children who have nothing to do with the killings by the Hamas militants from Gaza on October 7 when 1,400 Israelis died.

The horror in Gaza is comparable to the Nazi brutality inflicted on the Warsaw Ghetto during four weeks in April-May 1943 when over 10,000 Jewish civilians were killed in reprisal for an armed uprising by resistance fighters.

Many people around the world are rightly outraged by the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. Huge public protests in Arab nations as well as in Europe and North America condemning the Israeli war crimes are indicative of the collective disgust over the daily massacre and starvation.

There seems to be a historic watershed moment now in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For too many decades, the Israeli regime has gotten away with mass murder and criminal occupation against the Palestinians. Part of that license was due to the confusion in world opinion caused by the Zionist distorted conflation of the history pertaining to the Nazi holocaust.

What is becoming increasingly clear to the world is that the Israeli regime is a perverse travesty of the Jewish genocide under the Nazis. Since its illegal inception as a colonial state in 1948, the Zionist regime is comparatively a continuation of the fascist crimes that were committed by Nazi Germany against Jews – the difference being that the newer victims are the Palestinians.

It seems incredible to say this: the Israeli apartheid regime is finally losing the propaganda war. It seems incredible to say this because one should wonder why it has taken so long for the horrific truth to be widely seen before now.

It should be patently evident that huge crimes are being perpetrated when we see children decapitated by air strikes when hospitals are being blown up, when medics and journalists are being killed, and when babies are dying from incubators being shut down from lack of electricity. It seems almost bizarre to say that the perpetrators of such barbarity are finally losing the propaganda war. How did they ever get away with it?

So, why isn’t there a world-stopping condemnation of this barbarity? There are huge public protests and anger around the world against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians but surely there should be more action than that to bring this obscenity to a peremptory end – now.

This is where the Western leaders, governments and media are part of the endemic problem.

U.S. President Joe Biden has the sickening bigotry to say that Palestinians are lying about the casualties in Gaza. Biden is echoing the Israeli regime’s flagrant lies that the people in Gaza are cutting off their electricity supplies and bombing their own hospitals.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has the nauseating gall to say that the people of Gaza are “victims of Hamas terrorism” and he wishes Israel “to win”.

France’s Macron, Germany’s Scholz, the EU’s Von Der Leyen, Canada’s Trudeau, and so on. They are all vile apologists and obscurantists for genocide.

All the Western leaders cynically profess their support for “Israel’s right to self-defense” as it slaughters innocent civilians by the hundreds every day. Such establishment deception by Western rulers – amplified by servile Western media – has caused confusion, disinformation and disorientation among the public. (Not only on the issue of Israel-Palestine but countless other subjects too.)

The United States has blocked at least two resolutions at the UN Security Council calling for an immediate ceasefire because the wording of the proposals does not codify “Israel’s right to self-defense”.

This is playing politics and shielding crimes while thousands of innocent people are being murdered under a rain of bombs and starved to death under the rubble.

This is what genocide looks like and this is what it is like for the world to stand by and watch. If you thought it would have been impossible to happen then think again, open your eyes, it is.

The Western media – the European and United States media outlets like BBC and CNN to name only two – have helped minimize the criminality of the Israeli regime and the nefarious role of complicit Western state backers. Yes, these outlets have shown footage of appalling destruction in Gaza by the Israelis, but these same outlets rarely tell viewers the names of the victims nor how wanton and evil the killing is. There is a systematic bias to diminish the criminality of the U.S. and European-backed Israeli violence against a captive civilian population.

Compare the disproportionate, non-stop coverage the Western media have given to the war in Ukraine over the past 19 months. According to the UN figures, there have been 10,000 civilian deaths in the Ukraine conflict compared with the deaths in Gaza over three weeks. Russia has been accused, vilified and condemned at every turn over the violence in Ukraine – even though the root cause of that conflict can be attributed to the U.S.-led NATO and the Nazi regime weaponized in Kiev since a CIA-orchestrated coup in 2014.

The hypocrisy of the Western media is reflective of the unscrupulous political agenda of their governments. Russia is deemed to be an official enemy, therefore media coverage is disproportionate and pejorative, indeed propagandistic. While the Tel Aviv regime whose crimes are colossal and glaring is relatively shielded by the Western media in accord with the prejudices of their governments.

Nonetheless – and this is historically significant – there is an abrupt and widening glitch in the thought-control matrix. The sheer, grotesque criminality of the Israeli regime and the West’s institutional complicity is no longer concealable in spite of the massive lies and distortions. People in Western nations and around the world are increasingly becoming aware of the genocide that alleged democratic powers are committing. Not only aware but abhorred and furious.

The Israeli apartheid regime is finished. And so too are the corrupt Western regimes that have masqueraded for so long as “democracies”.

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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/10/30/nakba-2-0-revives-the-neocon-wars/

Nakba 2.0 Revives the Neocon Wars

The Israel vs. Arab Children War, which doubles as the Hegemon vs. Axis of Resistance War, both a sub-branch of the NATO vs. Russia and NATO vs. China War, is veering totally out of control.

By now it’s firmly established that with China brokering peace all across West Asia, and Russia-China going all out on BRICS 11, complete with facilitating energy trade settlements outside the U.S. dollar, The Empire Strikes Back would be totally predictable:

Let’s set West Asia on fire

The immediate goal of Straussian neocon psychos and their silos across the Beltway is to go for Syria, Lebanon – and ultimately Iran.

That’s what explains the presence in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean of a fleet of at least 73 U.S./NATO warships – ranging from two American aircraft carrier groups to 30+ ships from 14 NATO members involved in the ongoing Dynamic Mariner war games off the coast of Italy.

That’s the largest concentration of U.S./NATO warships since the 1970s.

Anyone believing this fleet is being assembled to “assist” Israel in its Final Solution project of imposing Nakba 2.0 on Gaza must read some Lewis Carroll. The shadow war already in play aims to smash all the Axis of Resistance nodes in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq – with Iran kept as the culminating piece de resistance.

Any military analyst with an IQ over room temperature knows all those expensive American iron bathtubs are destined to become sub-oceanic coral reef design – especially if visited by hypersonic missiles.

Of course, this could all be just your average American Power Projection/Deterrence Show. The main actors – Iran and Russia – are not impressed. All it takes is a backward glance over the shoulders at what a bunch of mountain goat herders with fake Kalashnikovs did to NATO in Afghanistan.

Moreover, the Hegemon would need to rely on a serious network of bases on the ground if it ever considered launching a war against Iran. No West Asia actor would allow the U.S. to use bases in Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq or even Jordan. Baghdad is already engaged, for quite a while, in getting rid of all American bases.

Where’s my new Pearl Harbor?

Plan B is, what else, setting up yet another Pearl Harbor (the last one was only a few weeks ago, according to Tel Aviv). After all organizing such a lavish display of gunboat diplomacy in an inland sea unveils a mouth-watering choice of sitting ducks.

It’s idle to expect Pentagon head Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin to factor the possible, cosmic humiliation of the Hegemon having one of its multibillion-dollar bathtubs sunk by an Iranian missile. Were that to happen, they would go – literally – nuclear.

Alastair Crooke – the gold, platinum and rare earth analytical standard – has warned that all hot spots may blow up all at once, destroying the entire (italics mine) U.S. “alliance system”.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, as usual, nailed it, when he said that if Gaza is destroyed, the resulting catastrophe will last “decades, if not centuries.”

What started as a roll of the dice in Gaza is now expanding to all of West Asia and afterwards, inevitably, to Europe, Africa and Asia.

Everyone remembers the preamble to the current incendiary circumstances: the Brzezinski-tinged gambit played out in Ukraine to cut off Europe from Russian natural resources.

This has metastasized into the greatest world crisis since 1939. The Straussian neocon psychos in D.C. have no clue how to back off. So as it stands there is less than zero hope for a peaceful solution for both intertwined wars.

As I previously stressed, the leaders of major oil producers – Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait – can cut off almost half of oil production in the world in one fell swoop, demolishing the entire economies of the EU and U.S. without firing a shot. Diplomatic sources assure this is being seriously considered.

As an old school Deep State source, now in Europe, told me, serious players are actively involved in sending this message to the Beltway “to make the U.S. think twice about igniting a war that they cannot control. When they go to Wall St. to check out the derivative exposure they will already have had time to think it over as documents were sent to folks like Larry Fink at Blackrock and Michael Bloomberg.”

In parallel, a serious discussion is evolving in intel circles across the “new axis of evil” (Russia-China-
Iran) about the necessity of consolidating a unified Islamic pole.

The prospects are not good – even if key poles such as Russia and China have clearly identified the common enemy of the whole Global South/Global Majority. Turkey under Erdogan is just posing. Saudi Arabia will not invest itself into defending/protecting Palestine no matter what. American client/minions in West Asia are just scared. That leaves only Iran and the Axis of Resistance.

When in doubt, remember Yahwe

Meanwhile, the vengeful, narcissistic tribe of conquistadors, masters of political deception and moral exemption, is deep into consolidating its Nakba 2.0 – which doubles as the perfect solution to illegally gobble up all that gas offshore Gaza.

The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence’s deportation directive affecting 2.3 million Palestinians is quite clear. It has been officially endorsed by the Ministry on October 13.

It starts with expelling all Palestinians from northern Gaza, followed by serial “land operations”; leaving routes open across the Egyptian border in Rafah; and establishing “tent cities” in northern Sinai and later on even new cities to “resettle Palestinians” in Egypt.

Humanitarian Law and Policy Consultant Itay Epshtain has noted, “I have not been able to detect, as of yet, an agenda item or government decision endorsing the directive of the Ministry. If it was indeed presented and approved it would not likely be in the public domain.”

Several of Tel Aviv’s own extremists are confirming it in their outbursts, anyway.

As for the wider war, it has already been written. A long time ago. And they want to follow it to the letter, in tandem with American Christian Zio-cons.

Everyone remembers Gen Wesley Clark going to the Pentagon two months after 9/11 and learning about the neocon/Christian Zio-con plan to target 7 countries in 5 years for destruction:

Those were Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, Sudan – and Iran.

All of them were destabilized, destroyed or plunged into chaos.

The last one on the list is Iran.

Now go back to Deuteronomy 7:1-2, 24:

“Yahweh told Israel that he has identified “SEVEN NATIONS GREATER AND STRONGER THAN YOURSELF” (caps mine), that “you must put under curse of destruction,” and not “show them any pity.” As for their kings, “you will blot out their names under heaven.”

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/29/chris-hedges-exterminate-all-the-brutes/

Exterminate All the Brutes

All settler colonial projects, including Israel, reach a point when they embrace wholesale slaughter and genocide to eradicate a native population that refuses to capitulate.  

During the siege in Sarajevo, when I was reporting for The New York Times, we never endured the level of saturation bombing and near total blockage of food, water, fuel and medicine that Israel has imposed on Gaza. We never endured hundreds of dead and wounded a day. We never endured the complicity of the international community in the Serbian campaign of genocide. We never endured Washington intervening to block ceasefire resolutions. We never endured massive arms shipments from the U.S. and other Western countries to sustain the siege. We never endured press reports from Sarajevo that were routinely discredited and dismissed by the international community, although 25 journalists were killed in the war by the besieging Serbian forces. We never endured Western governments justifying the siege as the right of the Serbs to defend themselves, although the U.N. peacekeepers sent to Bosnia were largely a public relations gesture, ineffective in halting the slaughter until forced to respond following the massacres of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica.

I don’t mean to minimize the horror of the siege of Sarajevo, which gives me nightmares nearly three decades later. But what we suffered – three to four hundred shells a day, four to five dead a day, and two dozen wounded a day – is a tiny fraction of the wholesale death and destruction in Gaza. The Israeli siege of Gaza more resembles the Wehrmacht’s assault on Stalingrad, where over 90 percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed, than Sarajevo. 

On Friday the Gaza Strip had all its communications severed. No Internet. No phone service. No electricity. Israel’s goal is the murder of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of those who survive into refugee camps in Egypt. It is an attempt by Israel to erase not only a people, but the idea of Palestine. It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial projects who believed that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make the aspirations of an oppressed people, whose land they stole, go away. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden.

Israel’s bombing campaign, one of the heaviest of the 21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are homeless. Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.

Not only are the tactics the same, but so is the rhetoric. Palestinians are referred to as animals, beasts and Nazis. They have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth. 

The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder and whose labor we exploit is coded within our DNA. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Herero in Namibia who, like Palestinians in Gaza, were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and disease. Eighty thousand of them. Ask Iraqis. Ask Afghans. Ask Syrians. Ask Kurds. Ask Libyans. Ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who we are.

Israel’s distorted, settler colonial visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves virtues and civilizing qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for stripping an occupied and besieged people of their rights, seizing their land and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, enforced poverty and murder to keep them subjugated.

Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the “inferior” races of the earth. We give these “inferior” races names that embody evil. ISIS. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. Hamas. We use racist slurs to dehumanize them. “Haji” “Sand Nigger” “Camel Jockey” “Ali Baba” “Dung Shoveler” And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel licensed, as Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party said, to erase “the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” 

Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former Prime Minister, in an interview on Sky News on Oct. 12 said, “We’re fighting Nazis,” in other words, absolute evil.

Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as “the new Nazis”.

Think about that. A people, imprisoned in the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis?

There is an historical analogy here. But it is not one that Bennett, Netanyahu or any other Israeli leader wants to acknowledge.

When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization — we are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the “wretched of the earth.” It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed.

“Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts,” Joseph Conrad, who wrote “Heart of Darkness,” reminds us. “There are only people, without knowing, understanding or feelings, who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, shout them out, imagining they believe them without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.”

Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness — although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest — are useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice-in-Wonderland fairytale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens. You can listen to them spout their pseudo-morality in the White House and in Congress. They are always wrong. And they never go away.

Maybe we are fooled by our own lies, but most of the world sees us, and Israel, clearly. They understand our genocidal proclivities, rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness. They see that Palestinians, largely friendless, without power, forced to live in squalid refugee camps or the diaspora, denied their homeland and eternally persecuted, suffer the kind of fate once reserved for Jews. This perhaps is the final tragic irony. Those who were once in need of protection from genocide now commit it.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/10/30/before-they-launch-missiles-they-launch-propaganda-campaigns/

Before They Launch Missiles, They Launch Propaganda Campaigns

Before they launch missiles, they launch propaganda campaigns. Before they roll out tanks, they roll out narratives. Everyone who helps manufacture consent for the killing in Gaza is just as culpable for the murder of those thousands of children as the people dropping the bombs.

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In case you missed it there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence that many of the horrific acts Hamas is accused of committing on October 7 (burning people alive, burning babies, mowing down concertgoers, etc) were actually the result of indiscriminate fire by Israeli forces. Here’s a link to a Grayzone article and a link to a video presentation by Propaganda & Co, both citing Israeli media reports as their evidence.

To be clear none of this means Israel killed everyone who died on October 7 or that Hamas didn’t kill noncombatants, it just means the narrative is wrong.

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Remember that murderer who took a US elementary school classroom hostage, and the US air force dropped a MOAB on the school and killed all the children, and everyone was cool with it because they needed to kill the guy and he was using the kids as human shields? 

No? 

Me neither.

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Israel apologists don’t seem to get that we’ve seen every part of their tired schtick before.

“Anti-semite”? Saw it with Jeremy Corbyn.

“Terrorist supporter”? Saw it with Bush’s wars.

“Unprovoked attack”? Saw it with Ukraine.

If you want to fool people, get an original routine.

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Every once in a while I remember that a significant percentage of the Israel apologists yelling at me on social media are American Christians who support Israel because they want Jesus to come back and cast all the unrepentant Jews into Hell.

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Western officials: Israel is defending itself.

Israeli officials: We’re doing genocide.

Western officials: They’re following the laws of war.

Israeli officials: We’re gonna do way more genocide.

Western officials: It’s a measured response to October 7.

Israeli officials: Kill their babies.

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I see people saying the US gets nothing out of its alliance with Israel and it’s all one way, which is inaccurate. The interests of the US empire are massively advanced by having a nuclear-armed intelligence proxy in a strategically crucial resource-rich region constantly inflicting violence and chaos on non-US-aligned nations. Perhaps more importantly, Israel’s existence serves as the ultimate argument against ever removing US troops from the middle east, which it doesn’t want to do because of its interest in controlling the world’s fossil fuel supply.

As Joe Biden said, “If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.”

People often point to Israel’s aggressive lobbying efforts in Washington to argue that the alliance is not mutually beneficial, but lobbying is just one of the adhesives which holds an unofficial, unacknowledged empire together. You may be certain that if Washington didn’t want Israel manipulating US politics in its own interests, it wouldn’t be happening; the US government has plenty of laws at its disposal to shut that down if it wants.

Israel has no qualms about pushing the US to give it the most it can get for the smallest possible return because it understands, quite correctly, that in the end Israel is still just an ally of convenience and the US will throw it under the bus the moment it’s in the empire’s interests to do so. Israel has an extensive history of aligning with hostile and unpredictable powers to advance its own interests, like the anti-semitic Christian Zionists and supporting the rise of Hamas. So the two power structures use each other for whatever they can get in exchange, and because of the way Israel was set up from the beginning their interests are aligned far more often than not.

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Remember everyone, before you criticize an ongoing genocidal massacre that’s being supported by your own country you must first condemn a small foreign militant group who has spotty internet access, doesn’t speak your language, and will never hear anything you say to them.

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They tell you Israel is defending itself when you can see it’s mostly killing women and children.

They tell you they’re targeting Hamas when you can see them flattening whole city blocks.

They tell you you’re an anti-semite when you know you’re not.

All they’ve got is gaslighting.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/biden-not-escape-history-judgement-failure-stop-gaza-assault-ralph-nader/5837495?utm_campaign=magnet&utm_source=article_page&utm_medium=related_articles

Biden Will Not Escape History’s Judgement for Failure to Stop Gaza Assault

If President Joe Biden were a pony, instead of a perennial warhorse (e.g., gung-ho for Bush/Cheney’s criminal destruction of Iraq), he would have his tail between his legs on his return from a one-day trip to Israel. He failed to achieve any immediate, critical objectives while the ongoing destruction of Gaza and the defenseless Palestinians continues.

Did Biden get Israel and Egypt to allow the exit of hundreds of American citizens fleeing the Gazan firestorm? No!

Did Biden open up corridors for humanitarian aid to the babies, children, women, elderly and other civilians in Gaza who had nothing to do with the October 7^th Hamas homicide/suicide attack on Israelis? No!

To the contrary, earlier in the week he cruelly ordered his UN Ambassador to veto a widely supported resolution calling for a humanitarian ceasefire.

Did he forcefully double down on his earlier counsel to the Israeli government to obey the laws of war, then and now, being openly violated? No! He continued his silence after the Israeli Defense Minister ordered his soldiers with the genocidal command, “No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water…” That death sentence includes patients in hospitals who must endure the carpet bombing of this long-time blockaded tiny strip of desert land holding 2.3 million people. (See, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).

Did Biden press for the exchange of Hamas’ hostages for the release of Palestinian prisoners, including young Palestinians, who have been in Israeli jails for years without due process or charges? No! Worse, Biden failed to object to the Israeli military stating that the release of over 200 Israeli hostages is a “secondary priority” to smashing Hamas and Gaza “into the Stone Age.” This policy flouts the moral codes of many venerable Judaic sages described in an October 19, 2023, New York Times column by Mikahel Manekin titled “The Safety of the Hostages Must Come First.” Israel conducted two prisoners for hostages’ exchanges, one in 2004 and one in 2011.

Did Biden, in strong terms, tell the Israeli politicians that they have already exacted revenge many times over on the stateless people of Gaza – in civilian lives lost, injuries, related spread of disease, destitution and destruction? Did he say it is inhumane and counterproductive to bomb hospitals, clinics, schools, mosques, churches, apartment buildings, water mains, electric networks and ambulances, all of which is in violation of civilized norms and rules of war? Of course not. He greenlighted Israel’s genocidal warfare from the beginning of the Israeli assault and sent U.S. weaponry. He is enabling other actions of “co-belligerency” against the defenseless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Did he even get the 20 trucks of humanitarian aid waiting at the Rafah crossing – also bombed by the Israelis – from Egypt into Gaza before he left? No! (Those trucks, paltry though the supplies they carried, were allowed into Gaza on Saturday.)

A Special Relationship Born in Hell: The US Should Cut all Ties with War Criminal Israel

Biden did come back with a bill for the American taxpayers – who for decades have been forced to pay for these Israeli wars. Now Biden wants Congress to approve $14 billion for Israel to address the colossal failure of Netanyahu’s extremist coalition to protect its own citizens on the border. (Adding only $100 million for Palestinian relief).

That sum of money, to be authorized without any Congressional hearings or Congressional oversight, is greater than the combined annual budgets of the FDA, OSHA, NHTSA and the section of HHS, whose missions are to reduce the loss of hundreds of thousands of preventable American fatalities in the workplace, on the highways, and in the marketplace and the hospitals. (See, the 2016 peer-reviewed study from the John Hopkins University of Medicine).

Lastly, still not calling a ceasefire, Biden is disregarding his own military’s private advice against an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza as raising the risk of a larger war in the Middle East that would clearly be against the national interests of the American people and U.S. security.

He could have done what President Eisenhower did in 1956, when he demanded that the Israeli, British and French attack on Egypt stop immediately.

And stop, they did!

After all, the U.S. has some influence over Israel, to put it mildly. The U.S. endorses all Israeli aggressions (including Israel’s admission to bombing hundreds of sites in Syria, mired in its civil war and no threat, in addition to striking Damascus International Airport). All with U.S. advanced weapons, and billions of dollars in annual aid to Israel, a prosperous military, technological and economic superpower. In fact, Israel’s social safety net is better than that of the U.S.!

Biden provides total diplomatic cover in the U.S. with Washington’s automatic UN vetoes, and pressures allies to follow the party line.

Moreover, Biden seems unwilling to recognize the historical origins of this conflict that now has mighty Israel occupying, colonizing, brutalizing and stealing land and water from the twenty-two percent of the original Palestine left for millions of Palestinians under Israeli daily control.

Biden should take a moment in the Oval Office to read page 121 of the book “The Jewish Paradox” by Nahum Goldman (January 1, 1978), the head of the World Zionist Organization. He quotes the leading Founder of the Israeli state, David Ben-Gurion as candidly saying to him: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”

Today’s Israeli leaders refuse to demonstrate this degree of empathy. Instead, they provoke and deny the creation of a Palestinian state, envisioned by the Oslo Accords they signed in 1993, hurl the most racist epithets (“animals,” “vermin,” “snakes,”), and make sure the politicians in the U.S. Congress never utter the words “Palestinians also have a right to defend themselves” as violently subjugated victims of Israel the superpower.

Many members of Congress who demand giving Israel whatever money and weaponry it wants for whatever it does, violating human rights under international law in its illegal occupations and blockade, turn around and vote against the child tax credit, worker health and safety, universal healthcare, paid family leave and daycare for Americans. Their viciousness – as with the homicidal outburst of Gen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) against all Palestinians, and Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) a Harvard Law graduate, saying “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza…” set new levels of depravity.

A few Senators see it differently, especially Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) who noted

“…it is no secret that Gaza has been an open-air prison” with “horrendous living conditions,” and that “children and innocent people do not deserve to be punished for the acts of Hamas.”

Little known is that Israel and the U.S. fostered and funded the rise of Hamas as a religious counterpoint to the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). It was established in 1987 following the first intifada uprising. A 2009 The Wall Street Journal article titled: “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas” noted:

“Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction…”

To Biden and the Congressional “howlers” for the death of civilian innocents, historical facts matter little. Hamas’ lethal attack on October 7^th was preceded by far greater numbers of Israeli violent attacks over the past decades taking four hundred times the number of innocent Palestinian lives, injuries and other casualties than inflicted on innocent Israelis.

Image: Some of the wounded at al-Shifa hospital (Gaza Health Ministry)

Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza will take twenty times or more lives of innocent Palestinians than those killed by Hamas on October 7^th with the casualty toll of direct fatalities and the loss of life from the devastation of life-sustaining water, food, medicine, shelter and other hospital/clinic emergency infrastructure.

Also conveniently forgotten is the detailed peace offer to Israel in 2002, by 22 member states of the Arab League to establish diplomatic and trade relations with a recognized Israel in return for its retreating to the 1967 borders and creation of a Palestinian two-state solution. The Israel extremists in Congress and President G.W. Bush declined even to respond to this proposal. (See, the March 29, 2002 New York Times article: Mideast Turmoil; Text of the Peace Proposals Backed by the Arab League).

It is incumbent on the supreme military superpower in the region to take the initiative for peace over the powerless victims under its thralldom. That country is, of course, high-tech Israel, bristling with the latest weapons and nuclear atomic bombs.

Both the brave Israeli human rights groups and those courageous human rights Israelis standing shoulder to shoulder over the years striving to conduct non-violent civil disobedience at the besieged Palestinian village level, only to be dispersed by Israeli soldiers, know the real obstacle to peace. It is the plan by the right-wing Israeli parties to annex the entire Palestinian West Bank (nearly attempted under Donald Trump) and forcefully drive Palestinians into Jordan and Egypt.

Joe Biden is skilled at shedding tears at memorials of grief in this country. But he runs dry when the recurring catastrophes befalling Palestinians beg for his presidential compassion and actual deeds.

He will not escape history’s judgment.

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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/10/25/israels-war-of-self-deceit/

Israel’s war of self-deceit

Already in its third week, Israel’s war on Gaza has so far killed more than 5,600 Palestinians, injured thousands more, and displaced more than one million. Despite calls from some quarters for a ceasefire, there seems to be no end in sight for the suffering of Gaza’s two million residents.

Having long embraced the dehumanisation of the Palestinians, Israeli society is filled with rage and the primordial drive for revenge over the killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas fighters on October 7.

This blind fury is now channelled into a genocidal drive by the narcissism and extremism of one man: Benjamin Netanyahu, a doubled-faced, pathological liar, who has done everything and anything to stay in power.

Netanyahu’s arrogance, corruption and callousness are to blame for the country’s political and military failures that led to the October 7 attacks. He thought he could just transform all of historic Palestine into a Greater Land of Israel, by making the occupation of the Palestinian territories permanent and keeping millions of Palestinians in an open-air prison in Gaza and segregated bantustans in the West Bank – all with no repercussions.

On October 7, his arrogance finally caught up with him, because arrogance breeds stupidity. Hubris turned into humiliation, and the fiasco into farce, or as Israelis say, using Arabic words, the fashla (failure) turned fadiha (scandal).

And while Israel’s military and intelligence heads have accepted responsibility for their failures to prevent the attacks, Netanyahu has refrained from taking any responsibility, even though most Israelis blame him for their national tragedy.

Instead of resigning, the shamed and shameless prime minister cum wartime leader has gone on to wage a sadistic war with no clear strategy or endgame.

In his genocidal offensive, Netanyahu has been aided and abetted by his former Western detractors, who until recently were expressing “concern” about his plans to undermine Israel’s judiciary, through his coalition of fanatics and fascists, in order to stay out of jail.

First and foremost among them is US President Joe Biden, who went from snubbing Netanyahu for much of the year to embracing and shielding him from the wrath of Israelis and Arabs alike.

Biden has committed America to Netanyahu’s genocidal war on Gaza, offering American arms, tactical assistance in urban warfare, and diplomatic leverage. He has ordered the deployment of two aircraft carriers in the Eastern Mediterranean to protect Israel and deter the likes of Iran from intervening in the conflict.

Likewise, European leaders, who had also given Netanyahu the cold shoulder for much of the year, are now clamouring to show their support for his government and his war on Gaza. They have refused to call for a ceasefire and continued to justify the mounting Israeli war crimes as an exercise of “the right to self-defence”.

Israel’s Western stooges love to evoke international law in all the wrong ways. Israel, indeed, has the right to self-defence, but not to defend its decades-long brutal military occupation, long enabled by Western powers. It is rather the occupied and victimised Palestinian people living under the Israeli racist system of apartheid that have the right to resist their tormentor under international law.

The ongoing genocidal war – spearheaded by a failed prime minister and supported by his morally suspect Western allies – is not one of self-defence; rather, it is a war of self-deceit. Israel falsely believes that it could attain security by the sword.

But when has killing more Palestinians ever resulted in better security for Israeli society? It never has; it never will.

Imposing a hermetic blockade on Gaza and unleashing a bombing rampage to pave the way for a land invasion, Israel will face dangerous regional blowbacks. In its genocidal drive, it may, as some fear, drag the US into World War III.

The “war on terror” the US unleashed on the world killed even more Americans than the 9/11 attacks did, along with hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim victims. It sowed chaos that more war and more troops could not stop for the past two decades.

If anything, the “war on terror” proves that war crimes, collective punishment and other violations of international law do not mitigate extremism; they perpetuate it as they fuel the cycles of violence – something UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism Fionnuala Ni Aolain emphasised during a recent news conference focusing on the Israeli war on Gaza.

As the Israeli army commits more war crimes against the Palestinians of Gaza, Israelis need to have a good look at where colonialism and occupation have gotten them. Perpetual Israeli oppression, racism and killings of the Palestinians have created the conditions for greater instability, extremism and violence in Palestine and the region.

A genocidal war on Gaza will not bring peace and quiet to the Israeli society, nor to those in the West abetting it.

....

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/10/27/one-mistake-before-armageddon/

One Mistake Before Armageddon

Each of us faces each day threats to our health, happiness, and life. Overarching it all, we collectively face death from nuclear weapons.

The development of nuclear weapons was a human stupidity. They cannot be used, but their existence threatens the life of the planet.  So why have them?  Accident, emotional response, loss of reason are all human faults that can come into play at any time.  

During the 20th century Cold War these dangers were underlined by the Cuban Missile Crisis.  President Nixon led the way to sanity with arms control agreements with the Soviet Union and his opening to China. Presidents Carter and Reagan kept the momentum going for reduced tensions and peaceful coexistence.  

The turnaround came with the Soviet collapse.  The neoconservatives took advantage of Russian weakness and prevailed on President Clinton to break the promise given by the George H.W. Bush administration to Gorbachev not to move NATO to Soviet borders if Gorbachev permitted the reunification of Germany.  The George W. Bush and Obama administrations continued the hostile policy that Clinton renewed.  

Today all the arms control agreements that reduced tensions and the danger of nuclear confrontation are erased.  The last one–never ratified by the US–was revoked by the upper house of Russia’s parliament last Wednesday https://tass.com/politics/1696519 .  Tass, the Russian news agency, reported that “Achieving the goal of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons is not deemed possible in the current international situation, given the destructive position of the United States.”

Also last Wednesday Gilbert Doctorow reported from the Russian media that Russia had just completed a successful test of its land, sea, and air launched nuclear missile triad. “Considering the location of the missile launches and the radius of possible strikes, it does not take much imagination to conclude that the enemy being attacked was the U.S. of A.  . . . The capability being tested was for a massive retaliatory strike.” https://gilbertdoctorow.substack.com/p/breaking-news-russia-tests-its-nuclear?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1203055&post_id=138284634&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=dx5km&utm_medium=email 

The White House fool, his insane neoconservative regime, mindless European puppets and whore Western media have convinced Russia that there is neither intelligence nor reason to be found in the Western World and Russia has no alternative but to prepare for war.  I have long warned that this was the conclusion toward which our irresponsible leaders were driving the Russians.  What this means is that the slightest mistake, the slightest false warning can now ignite nuclear Armageddon.

Meanwhile the media focuses on political gossip, Americans scroll their cell phones and complain about inflation, and the threat to the existence of life on earth goes unremarked.

The War Begins

US Launches Strikes in Syria

Washington is illegally in an act of aggression occupying a part of Syria and calls an attack on its occupying forces “terrorism.”

https://sputnikglobe.com/20231027/us-launches-strikes-in-syria-after-targeted-attacks-against-american-troops-1114515416.html

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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-10-27/israel-plan-gaza-sinai/

Israel’s long-held plan to drive Gaza’s people into Sinai is now within reach

As the UK and US back the carnage in Gaza, including an imminent ground invasion, are they also about to assist Israel’s ethnic cleansing plan for a “Greater Gaza” – in Egypt?

As Israel masses its forces along the fence encaging Gaza, waiting for a green light from the United States for a ground invasion, the question few are asking is: What is the ultimate endgame for Israel?  

Instead, British and US politicians, backed by their media, have limited themselves to amplifying Israel’s bogus rationales for indiscriminately bombing men, women and children in the tiny coastal enclave and preparing to send in troops. Only 80 or so British MPs, out of 650, have so far called for a ceasefire.  

Israeli strikes are known to have killed more than 7,000 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, with many times that number seriously injured. They are being treated in hospitals without medicines or electricity. The United Nations estimates at least 600,000 Palestinians are homeless from the bombing.

At first, Western establishments justified the carnage as Israel’s “right to defend itself” – a right Palestinians had been denied for the previous 16 years while Israel enforced a brutal military siege of the enclave that prevented basic goods and medicines from entering. 

Israel’s supposed “right to self-defence” – the official line from both sides of the political aisle in Britain – serves as western cover for, and complicity in, the crimes against humanity Israel has been committing: mass killing and wanton destruction; a “complete siege” of Gaza, starving it of food and water; and attacks on community infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, mosques, and UN compounds.  

But now, as the death toll becomes increasingly obscene, the rationale has shifted. In chorus, British and US politicians say Israel must be given the time and space to “destroy Hamas”.

That requires a ground invasion by Israeli troops – many of them religious extremists from illegal settlements in the West Bank – who are certain to be seeking vengeance for Hamas’ attack on October 7. The atrocities are only likely to intensify.

Military madness

But there is method in Israel’s military madness. And the main goal is not the one being promoted. Israel has much larger ambitions than “destroying Hamas”.

Israel knows enough history to understand that occupied and oppressed peoples never come to accept their subjugation. They continue to find ways to resist. Even if Hamas can be wiped out, a new, more fearsome adversary will emerge among the next generation currently being traumatised by Israel’s bombs.

In fact, after Israel removed its physical presence from Gaza by pulling out settlers and soldiers in 2005, it began to understand that it had boxed itself into a strategic corner.

It was still occupying the enclave, but at arm’s length. This was the rationale for the blockade that tightly limited what was allowed in and out of the strip. Gaza had been turned into an open-air prison, controlled by Israel through intensive surveillance via drones, eaves-dropping and local collaborators.

In practice, however, Israel found it much harder to police Gaza from afar. Hamas managed to create a much more sophisticated resistance movement in the small spaces left inside the prison that Israel could not surveil, such as a network of underground tunnels.

The results became fully apparent in the preparation and execution of Hamas’ attack on 7 October.

Israel’s strategic problem was compounded by the humanitarian crisis it had created by penning such a large and growing population into a tiny area with no resources.

Poverty, malnutrition, unclean water, overcrowding and lack of housing, as well as the trauma of being encaged and intermittently bombed by Israel to subdue any resistance, was slowly turning Gaza from a prison into a death camp. The UN had warned that the enclave would be effectively “uninhabitable” by 2020.

The solution to this – one that accorded with Israel’s long settler colonial ambitions to replace the Palestinians in their own homeland – was clear. Israel needed to create a consensus in the West justifying the expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza.

And the only realistic place for them to go was into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai.

‘Greater Gaza’

Behind the scenes, Israeli officials term their latest ethnic cleansing proposal a “Greater Gaza Plan”. Details first leaked in the Israeli media in 2014, although reports indicate that the origins date to 2007, when the Bush administration was apparently brought on board following Hamas’ election victory in Gaza a year earlier.

At the time, Israel’s secret plan relied on carrots more than sticks. The idea was to attach Gaza to Sinai, erasing the border between the two. Washington would help secure international funding for a free trade zone in Sinai.

With unemployment at over 60 per cent, massive overcrowding in the enclave and little clean water to drink, the expectation was that Palestinians in Gaza would gradually move the centre of their lives to Sinai, settling there or moving to distant Egyptian cities.

Following the leaks, Egyptian and Palestinian officials hurriedly denounced the plan as “fabricated”. However, there were plenty of clues that Egypt had begun facing pressure from 2007 onwards.

In response to the Israeli media leaks of 2014, an official close to former president Hosni Mubarak admitted that the screws had been turned on him in 2007 to agree to annex Gaza.

Five years later, according to the same source, Mohamed Morsi, who led a short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government, sent a delegation to Washington. There, the Americans proposed that “Egypt cede a third of the Sinai to Gaza in a two-stage process spanning four to five years”. Morsi too refused.

Suspicions that Egypt’s current president, Sisi, was close to capitulating in 2014 were fuelled at the time by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. In an interview on Egyptian TV, he said Israel’s Sinai plan had been “unfortunately accepted by some here [in Egypt]. Don’t ask me more about that. We abolished it.”

The Greater Gaza plan received another boost in 2018 when it was reportedly consideredfor inclusion in Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” Middle East “peace” plan. The hope was it would be financed by Gulf states as part of their normalisation with Israel.

That summer, Hamas even sent a delegation to Cairo to learn about the proposals.

Crushing Hamas

The gains for Israel in moving Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai, whether voluntarily under the Greater Gaza Plan or by force during a ground invasion, are obvious.

Egypt’s military dictatorship would inherit the problem of crushing Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas – largely out of view – rather than Israel. Hamas would not be likely to fare well, given the Egyptian military’s repression of the country’s own political Islamist movements.

The costs of confining and policing Gaza would shift from Israel to the Arab world and international community.

Once inside Sinai, ordinary Palestinians could be expected to seek alleviation from their poverty and suffering by integrating into wider Egyptian society, eventually moving to big cities like Cairo and Alexandria. They would be stripped of their right in international law to return to their homes.

In a generation or two, their children would identify as Egyptian, not Palestinian.

Meanwhile, the West Bank would be even more isolated and vulnerable to attacks from Jewish settlers, backed by Israeli soldiers. And Abbas would no longer be able to claim to represent the Palestinian cause, undermining his campaign to win recognition for statehood.

Very large stick

The problem is that no Egyptian leader has dared to accept such a plan, however much international arm-twisting and bribery was involved.

None wanted to be seen conspiring in Israel’s ethnic cleansing and final dispossession of the Palestinian people, one of the gravest and longest-running grievances shared by populations across the Middle East.

Which brings us to Israel’s current bombing campaign, which accords with no conceivable principle of proportionality, and its imminent ground invasion. Far from targeting Hamas, Israel has every incentive to use the Hamas attack of October 7 as a pretext to wreak as much damage on Gaza as possible.

Israel’s goal is to speed up the process of making Gaza uninhabitable.

Israel needs Palestinians in Gaza so desperate to leave that they will ethnically cleanse themselves, and Egypt under so much opprobrium for not opening the border to Sinai that it finally relents.

With its current bombing campaign, Israel has moved from carrots to a very large stick.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is aware that he has only a limited time-window to effect enough carnage to realise Israel’s plan.

Notably, back in 2018, veteran Israeli reporter Ron Ben-Yishai revealed that the Israeli military was considering a new strategy towards Gaza that involved invading it and dissecting it in two, with Israel occupying the northern half.

At the same time the US was said to be willing to deepen Gaza’s humanitarian crisis by withholding funds from UNRWA, the UN’s relief agency. 

Israel is currently achieving both through its bombing rampage and its demand that northern Gaza’s population “evacuate”, supposedly for their own safety, to southern Gaza.

The aim appears to be to squeeze Palestinians into the tiny space of Gaza’s south, next to the border with Sinai, destroy all civilian infrastructure, and bomb and terrorise Palestinians in the south too.

Palestinians are already clamouring to be allowed into Sinai, while Sisi is presumably coming under the severest pressure behind the scenes to back down and open the border.

In Israel’s cold, cynical calculations, its military is rolling the toothpaste tube tightly, before opening the top to see the toothpaste pour out.

If Gaza can be emptied, Israel will hope to establish a precedent the international community will condone. West Bank Palestinians will be pressured to join family or compatriots in Sinai.

Having been embarrassed by the festering wound of the Palestinians’ dispossession for more than 75 years, the West and Arab world will be only too happy finally to bury the Palestinian cause for good.

....

https://www.globalresearch.ca/joe-biden-armageddon-gaza-ukraine/5837968

Joe Biden’s Armageddon, from Gaza to Ukraine

The White House newly prioritizes hegemony over humanity.

At a private Manhattan fundraiser one year ago this month, President Joe Biden shared an assessment that he had not told the public. From his vantage point, Biden told the room of Democratic Party donors, the world faces “the prospect of Armageddon” for the first time “since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

At the time, Biden was referring to the conflict in Ukraine, which had just intensified with the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines and Russia’s declared annexations of four Ukrainian regions. Despite noting the dangers of a proxy war against Russia, the world’s other top nuclear power, Biden has nonetheless pursued the higher priority of enforcing US hegemony by attempting to “weaken” it. Accordingly, Biden has continued the proxy war with a signature policy of flooding Ukraine with weapons, encouraging a failed counter-offensive, and blocking diplomatic off-ramps.

One year later, Biden is not only doubling down on his apocalyptic approach in Ukraine, but adding a second front in the Middle East. The White House has asked Congress for a new spending package that would provide over $14 billion for Israel’s assault on Gaza and more than $61 billion for Ukraine – the largest such request since Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Concurrently, the US is directly assisting Israeli atrocities and standing virtually alone to block global calls for a ceasefire – all while risking a wider regional confrontation.

In an Oval Office address last week, Biden dusted off George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” playbook to draw a direct tie between the Ukraine proxy war and Israel’s assault on Gaza. “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to annihilate a neighboring democracy,” he said.

In another nod to neoconservative dogma, Biden appropriated Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s pitch to voters on funding the war in Ukraine. The weapons sent to Ukraine and now Israel, Biden explained, are “made in America” – including, he stressed, the election swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio. “You know, just as in World War II, today patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.” According to Biden’s budget office, nearly half of his $106 billion request, $50 billion, will be spent on “the American defense industrial base.”

Beyond hegemony and war profiteering, Biden’s mention of states vital to his 2024 re-election chances underscores another reason for his record spending request. In bundling the two conflicts together, Biden is hoping to entice pro-Israel Republicans skeptical of more funding for the Ukraine war – thereby giving him $61 billion to prolong the fight against Russia until after the November 2024 election.

As it has done in Ukraine, the Biden administration is declining to use its significant leverage over Israel to end the carnage. If it wanted to, the White House could call on Israel to accept a ceasefire and pursue a negotiated release of Hamas’ captives, on top of the four that have already been freed. But according to the Washington Post, one US official “said it was clear that Netanyahu was not going to wait until the hostage crisis was resolved to initiate a ground offensive and that there was little Washington could do to change that calculus.”

A major factor, the Post adds, is that Biden “officials are loath to create a public spat as Republicans on Capitol Hill search for any sign of the president being insufficiently pro-Israel.” To avoid looking “insufficiently pro-Israel,” therefore, Biden must be sufficiently pro-mass murder – even at the expense of endangering the hostages that he insists are his top priority.

Biden Will Not Escape History’s Judgement for Failure to Stop Gaza Assault. Ralph Nader

As for the argument that there is “little” Biden could do to impact Israel’s behavior, even top Israeli officials admit that to be false. At a recent meeting with Israeli lawmakers, Defense Minister Yaov Gallant acknowledged that his government agreed to allow some humanitarian aid into Gaza after US pressure. “The Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them,” Gallant said. “We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”

Luckily for Israeli leaders, they will not have to tell Biden “no” on an immediate end to the bombardment of Gaza, and a negotiated return of Hamas’ captives there. After Gaza’s health ministry reported the deadliest night of Israeli airstrikes so far – over 700 Palestinians killed – Secretary of State Antony Blinken allowed himself to declare at the United Nations that “humanitarian pauses must be considered.” In other words, the mass killing of Palestinians with US weaponry may proceed, so long as a pause to the slaughter is “considered.”

Having previously deemed ceasefire proposals “repugnant”, the Biden administration is openly embracing more Palestinian civilian deaths.

“This is war, it is combat, it is bloody, it is ugly, and it’s going to be messy,” spokesperson John Kirby said at the White House, just as Blinken appeared at the United Nations. “And innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward.”

Kirby’s callous indifference to the deaths of more Palestinian civilians contrasts with his response to Hamas’ killings of Israeli civilians on October 7^th, which led him to weep on live television.

Israel will thus have free rein to bombard Gaza with no concern for the civilian population or the Hamas captives.

“Hostages and civilian casualties will be secondary to destroying Hamas,” ABC News reports of the prevailing Israeli government view. Economy Minister Nir Barakat explained the strategy further: “We shall do all efforts to bring our hostages, to bring our hostages [back] alive,” but destroying Hamas is the “first and last priority.”  

A non-existent priority is the fate of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, who are facing what Martin Griffiths, the UN’s top humanitarian official, describes as a crisis that “has reached catastrophic levels.”

When it comes to the meager amounts of aid that the US and Israel have allowed into Gaza, even that is subject to constraints. The first delivery of 20 trucks did not include any fuel, which powers hospital, water pumps, and everything else needed for survival – including the incubators for premature babies.

“Without fuel, there will be no water, no functioning hospitals and bakeries,” the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees warns. “Without fuel, aid will not reach those in desperate need.”

But Israeli needs negate such concerns. “The move to exclude fuel from the first delivery was an apparent concession to Israel, which worries that Hamas and other armed groups could divert it for military purposes,” the Washington Post notes. This follows the previous “concession” to Israel that created the need for these trucks in the first place: the Biden administration’s green light for Israel to shut off Gaza’s water and electricity supplies.

As Dr. Michael Ryan of the UN’s Health Emergencies Programme notes, the small fleet of trucks allowed so far “is a drop in the ocean of need right now in Gaza,” where over 1.4 million people – more than 60% of the population – have been displaced. Before Israel’s current assault, Gaza was already in such need that “several hundred trucks had been arriving in the enclave daily,” Reuters notes.

The Biden administration also acknowledges that its touted aid packages do not meet the bare minimum for Gazans’ survival. In an interview touting the first deliveries, the newly appointed US special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues, David Satterfield, said that the White House goal is to “build that flow up to the levels necessary to begin to meet Gaza’s needs.” Left unstated is that many Palestinians will die due to a lack of medical equipment and other vital supplies before the US-approved aid deliveries can “begin to meet” their life-saving needs.

The US is also actively involved in Israel’s military operation against Gaza. The White House has sent a Marine three-star general, Lt. Gen. James Glynn, and several other military officers to advise the Israeli military, including for its planned ground invasion. According to the New York Times,

US officials “have become increasingly concerned that a ground invasion in Gaza could lead to a huge loss of civilian lives,” but nonetheless insist that they have “not told Israel what to do and still supported the ground invasion.”

Biden’s commitment to protecting Israel’s carnage in Gaza and broader regional hegemony creates dangers far beyond the besieged territory. Since the assault began, Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire along the south Lebanon border. In preparation for a potential regional conflict, the US has deployed air defense missiles and two aircraft carriers to deal “with threats to American troops throughout the Middle East,” the Wall Street Journal notes. According to the Pentagon, US forces in Iraq and Syria have come under fire at least 13 times in the past week, leaving at least 24 soldiers wounded. Meanwhile, Israel continues its routine airstrikes on Syrian territory, including the country’s two major airports.

The attacks on US forces from Iranian-backed groups are understood to be a direct result of the Gaza slaughter.

“For more than six months,” the Journal reports, “Iranian-backed militia groups refrained from launching drones or rockets against American troops in Iraq and Syria, as part of what appeared to be an undeclared truce between Tehran and Washington.”

Just as the lives of Palestinian civilians and US-Israeli hostages are subordinate to the imperatives of US-Israeli hegemony, so are US forces’. In Iraq, the US has retained its military contingent despite a 2020 vote from the Iraqi parliament calling for a full withdrawal. In Syria, the US remains all while ignoring government demands for both a withdrawal and compensation for looted oil reserves.

Although the US claims that its “sole purpose” in Syria is fighting ISIS, the US military has in fact barely done any fighting against the militant group. In 2019, now-senior Biden official Dana Stroul explained that occupying the “resource-rich”, “economic powerhouse” region in Syria’s northeast — which contains the country’s “hydrocarbons” and is its “agricultural powerhouse” — gives the U.S. government “broader leverage” to influence “a political outcome in Syria” in line with US dictates. Jennifer Cafarella of the Institute for the Study of War, a neoconservative Washington think tank, has likewise explained that the US military occupation gives it “direct influence over the vast majority of Syria’s most productive oil fields,” thereby controlling “Syrian national treasures that, when added up amount to brute geopolitical power for the US.”

As of this writing, more than 5,000 Palestinian civilians have become the latest casualties of the United States and Israel’s brute geopolitical power. This includes more than 2,300 children, a calamity that UNICEF calls a “growing stain on our collective conscience.” Not that of the Biden White House, content to sacrifice countless more civilian lives from Gaza to Ukraine in its dogged embrace of Armageddon.