https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-10-08/west-hypocrisy-gaza-breakout/
The West’s hypocrisy towards Gaza’s breakout is stomach-turning
There will be little sympathy in the West as, yet again, besieged Palestinians are bombed by Israel, their immense suffering justified by the term ‘Israeli retaliation’
The current outpouring of sympathy for Israel should make anyone with half a heart retch.
Not because it is not awful that Israeli civilians are dying and suffering in such large numbers. But because Palestinian civilians in Gaza have faced repeated rampages from Israel decade after decade, producing far more suffering, but have never elicited a fraction of the concern currently being expressed by western politicians or publics.
The West’s hypocrisy over Palestinian fighters killing and wounding hundreds of Israelis and holding dozens more hostage in communities surrounding and inside besieged Gaza is stark indeed.
This is the first time Palestinians, caged in the coastal enclave, have managed to inflict a significant strike against Israel vaguely comparable to the savagery Palestinians in Gaza have faced repeatedly since they were entombed in a cage in 2007, when Israel began its blockade by land, sea and air.
Western media are calling the jailbreak and attack by Palestinians from Gaza “unprecedented” – and the most dismal intelligence failing by Israel since it was caught off-guard during the Yom Kippur War exactly 50 years ago.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Hamas, which nominally runs the open-air prison of Gaza, of starting “a cruel and evil war”. But the truth is that the Palestinians have “started” nothing. They have managed, after so much struggle, to find a way to hurt their tormentor.
Inevitably for the Palestinians, as Netanyahu also observed, “the price will be heavy” – especially for civilians. Israel will inflict on the prisoners the severest punishment for their impudence.
Watch how little sympathy and concern there will be from the West for the many Palestinian men, women and children who are killed once again by Israel. Their immense suffering will be obscured, and justified, by the term “Israeli retaliation”.
The real lessons
All the current analysis focusing on Israel’s intelligence “blunders” distracts from the real lesson of these rapidly evolving events.
No one really cared while Gaza’s Palestinans were subjected to a blockade imposed by Israel that denied them the essentials of life. The few dozen Israelis being held hostage by Hamas fighters pale in comparison with the two million Palestinians held hostage by Israel in an open-air prison for nearly two decades.
No one really cared when it emerged that Gaza’s Palestinians had been put on a “starvation diet” by Israel – only limited food was allowed in, calculated to keep the population barely fed.
No one really cared when Israel bombed the coastal enclave every few years, killing many hundreds of Palestinian civilians each time. Israel simply called it “mowing the lawn”. The destruction of vast areas of Gaza, what Israeli generals boasted of as returning the enclave to the Stone Age, was formalised as a military strategy known as the “Dahiya doctrine“.
No one really cared when Israeli snipers targeted nurses, youngsters and people in wheelchairs who came out to protest against their imprisonment by Israel. Many thousands were left as amputees after those snipers received orders to shoot the protesters indiscriminately in the legs or ankles.
Western concern at the deaths of Israeli civilians at the hands of Palestinian fighters is hard to stomach. Have not many hundreds of Palestinian children died over the past 15 years in Israel’s repeated bombing campaigns on Gaza? Did their lives not count as much as Israeli lives – and if not, why not?
After so much indifference for so long, it is difficult to hear the sudden horror from Western governments and media because Palestinians have finally found a way – mirroring Israel’s inhumane, decades-long policy – to fight back effectively.
This moment rips off the mask and lays bare the undisguised racism that masquerades as moral concern in western capitals.
Hypocrisy distilled
Distilling that hypocrisy is Volodymr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president. At the weekend, he issued a lengthy tweet condemning Palestinians as “terrorists” and offering Israel his unwavering support.
He averred that “Israel’s right to self-defense is unquestionable”, adding: “The world must stand united and in solidarity so that terror does not attempt to break or subjugate life anywhere and at any moment.”
The inversion of reality is breath-taking. The Palestinians cannot “subjugate life” in Israel. They have no such power, even if a few briefly managed to break out of their cage. It is Israel that has been subjugating Palestinian life for decades.
Not all forms of “terrorism”, it seems, are equal in the eyes of Zelenskiy, or his patrons in Western capitals. Certainly, not the state terrorism of Israel that has made Palestinian lives a misery for decades.
How does Israel have an “unquestionable right” to “defend itself” from the Palestinians whose territory it occupies and controls? To apply Zelenskiy’s logic, how does Russia then not have an equal claim to be “defending itself” when it kills Ukrainians trying to liberate territory from Russian occupation?
Israel, the much stronger, belligerent party, is now laying waste to Gaza “in retaliation”, as the BBC puts it, for the latest Palestinian attack.
So on what grounds will Zelenskiy or his officials be able to condemn Moscow when it fires missiles “in retaliation” for Ukraine’s strikes on Russian territory? How, if Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation of Gaza is terrorism, as Zelenskiy asserts, is Ukrainian resistance to Russian occupation not equally terrorism?
No hiding place
By indulging Israel in its deceptions, Israel’s allies have allowed it to perpetrate ever more outrageous lies. At the weekend, Netanyahu warned Palestinians in Gaza to “leave now” because Israeli forces were preparing to “act with all force”.
But Netanyahu knows, as do his Western enablers, that Gaza’s population has nowhere to flee. There is no hiding place. Palestinians have been sealed into Gaza since Israel besieged it by land, sea and air.
The only Palestinians able to “leave Gaza” are the armed factions who broke out of their Israeli-imposed jail and are being denounced as “terrorists” by Western politicians and media.
Western governments so horrified by the Palestinian attack on Israel are also the governments that are remaining silent as Israel turns off the electricity to the prison that is Gaza – again in supposed “retaliation”.
The collective punishment of two million Palestinians in Gaza, dependent on Israel for power because Israel surrounds and controls every aspect of their lives, is a war crime.
Strangely, Western officials understand it is a war crime when Russia bombs power stations in Ukraine, turning off the lights. They scream for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be dragged to the International Criminal Court in the Hague. So why is it so difficult for them to understand the parallels of what Israel is doing to Gaza?
Daring escape
There are two immediate, and contrasting, lessons to be learnt from what has happened this weekend.
The first is that the human spirit cannot be caged indefinitely. Palestinians in Gaza have been constantly devising new ways to break free from their chains.
They have built a network of tunnels, most of which Israel has located and destroyed. They have fired rockets that are invariably shot down by ever more sophisticated interception systems. They have protested en masse at the heavily fortified fences, topped by guntowers, Israel surrounded them with – only to be shot by snipers.
Now they have staged a daring escape. Israel will batter the enclave back into submission with massive bombardments, but only “in retaliation”, of course. The Palestinians’ craving for freedom and dignity will not be diminished. Another form of resistance, doubtless more brutal still, will emerge.
And the parties most responsible for that brutality will be Israel and the West that supports it so lavishly, because Israel refuses to stop brutalising the Palestinians it forces to live under its rule.
The second lesson is that Israel, endlessly indulged by its Western patrons, still has no incentive to internalise the fundamental truth above. The rhetoric of its current government of facists and Jewish supremacists may be particularly ugly, but there is a broad consensus among Israelis of all political stripes that the Palestinians must continue to be oppressed.
Which is why the so-called opposition will not hesitate to support the military pounding of the long besieged enclave of Gaza, killing yet more Palestinian civilians to “teach them a lesson”, a lesson no one in Israel can articulate beyond asserting that Palestinians must accept their permanent inferiority and imprisonment.
Already, the “good Israelis” – opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz – are in discussions with Netanyahu to join him in an “emergency unity government”.
What “emergency”? The emergency of Palestinians demanding the right not to live as prisoners in their own homeland.
Israelis and Westerners can continue their mental gymnastics to justify the Palestinians’ oppression and refuse them any right to resist. But their hypocrisy and self-deceptions stand exposed for the rest of the world to see.
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http://themostimportantnews.com/archives/we-have-reached-the-terminal-phase-of-the-greatest-debt-spiral-in-the-history-of-the-human-race
We Have Reached The Terminal Phase Of The Greatest Debt Spiral In The History Of The Human Race
If you are going to go out, you might as well do it with a bang. At the beginning of June, our national debt was sitting at $31,467,639,287,894.39. Today, it has risen to $33,442,148,619,617.43. That means that we have added almost two trillion dollars to the national debt in just three months. It is the largest single debt in the entire history of our planet, and it will never be paid off. Our debt spiral has reached a terminal phase, and all we can do now is prolong the agony. If we keep taking on more debt at an exponential rate, we may be able to extend our seemingly endless party for a little while longer. As for the bright future that our children and grandchildren were supposed to have, we destroyed that a long time ago, and so it doesn’t really matter what we do now.
What our politicians are doing to us is truly a crime against humanity.And I am not just talking about the United States. All over the world, politicians have been on the greatest debt binge in the history of the human race, and for quite a few years it seemed like they were getting away with it.
But now interest rates are rising and there is great turmoil in the bond markets. The following comes from CNN…
A slump in government bonds around the world has pushed up the cost of some nations’ debt to levels not seen in more than a decade. That’s bad news for governments in the red but also for the wallets of millions of mortgage borrowers, stock investors and businesses.
The sell-off has been fueled by expectations among investors that the world’s major central banks will keep interest rates “higher for longer” to bring inflation down to their targets.
It works like this: Governments looking to raise cash for public services and investments issue bonds. A bond provides a way to borrow money from investors for a set length of time, with the obligation to make regular interest payments.
In recent weeks, bond yields have reached very alarming levels.
If this continues, governments all over the world will soon be facing enormous problems…
When official interest rates rise, so do investors’ expectations for returns on bonds, known as yields. This creates an incentive for investors to sell the bonds they currently hold and buy newly issued ones that offer higher interest payments. Selling bonds reduces prices. So, in short, when yields rise, bond prices fall.
And yields have most definitely been rising: The yield on 30-year US government bonds, also known as Treasuries, hit 5% on Tuesday for the first time since 2007. In the United Kingdom, the yield on 30-year bonds also reached 5% this week, the highest level in more than two decades.
Yields on German long-dated bonds are back to levels last seen on the eve of the eurozone debt crisis in 2011. Yields on Italy’s 10-year bonds hit 5% on Wednesday, the highest level since 2012, when that crisis was in full swing.
There is no way out of this mess now.
If we would have acted responsibly all along, we would have gotten a much different outcome.
But at this point our fate is pretty much sealed.
Of course our politicians never intended to change course. In fact, they continue to spend money like drunken sailors.
As Zero Hedge has aptly noted, the U.S. government recently added 275 billion dollars to the national debt in a single day…
The US added – checks notes – $275 billion in debt in, uh, ONE DAY
Total US debt is now $33.442 trillion, hit $33 trillion just 2 weeks ago, and on pace to rise by $1 trillion in 1 month.
What makes all of this even more frustrating is that they aren’t even spending the money efficiently.
And in many instances, it is being wasted on extremely frivolous things…
Federal officials have been criticized after splashing $3.3 billion on swanky new office furniture during the pandemic, when almost all staff worked from home.
The egregious spending habits of the US government included almost $250,000 on solar-powered picnic tables for the CDC, and $120,000 on plush Ethan Allen leather chairs.
We are borrowing and spending money at an exponential pace, and we all know how this is going to end.
It is going to end with the U.S. dollar becoming worth little more than toilet paper.
This is a point that author Robert Kiyosaki made very eloquently during a recent interview…
Robert Kiyosaki, renowned author of the phenomenal personal finance book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” shared a piece of his mind on how to decentralize from the fiat currency in these scary times of a broken banking system. According to him, the dollar has been losing its purchasing power and not long from now, it would just be worth less than “toilet paper.”
During his appearance on the recent episode “Decentralize.TV” hosted by Mike Adams and Todd Pitner, Kiyosaki pointed out how the lack of financial education in the United States blinds the people and even President Joe Biden’s administration in tackling the current economic downturn. “Just recently they raised the debt ceiling again… and because our schools have no financial education, no idea of credit rating, our debt increased by $1.8 trillion. The United States via Fitch Rating services downgraded the U.S. debt from AAA to AA-plus. We are on a collision course for disaster.”
It is true.
We really are on a “collision course” with disaster, but most Americans don’t realize what is happening.
Most Americans seem to believe that there will never be any serious consequences for all the borrowing and spending that we have been doing.
And that is because most Americans don’t understand basic economics.
When your debt rises much faster than your income does for an extended period of time, it is always going to result in pain.
Every single time.
If you have ever found yourself drowning in debt, you know exactly what I am talking about.
Well, now our entire country is drowning in debt, and our politicians are adding hundreds of billions more to that debt every single month.
This is not going to end well, and that should be obvious to everyone.
For the moment, our politicians are doing their best to keep the debt spiral humming, but the clock is ticking and time is quickly running out…
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https://brownstone.org/articles/dont-believe-your-lying-eyes/
Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes
If you have not yet read the book 1984 by George Orwell, you absolutely must.
I loathed that novel when I read it as a teen, because I hated the entire idea of an authoritarian government controlling its people so deftly. The dystopian world it described was just so depressing, so wrong, from the first page to the last. And yet, here we are, almost 75 years after Orwell first penned the book, and we see how that hellish science fiction novel is now playing out before us.
Even the left-leaning Wikipedia describes the book as a “cautionary tale” whose theme centers on “the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society.” Modeled on the authoritarian states of Stalin’s Soviet Union and of Nazi Germany, the book takes a deep dive into the role of truth within a society, and the ways in which truth and facts can be manipulated by government to control the population.
What you saw and heard with your own eyes and your own ears, the government denied and demanded you cast it aside and not believe it.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Through the Ministry of Truth, the government (referred to in the book as “Big Brother” or “the Party”) engages in endless propaganda, intense surveillance, and the open and obvious negating of historical fact. Individual thought, and questioning of authority led to immediate persecution. Why deny facts and rewrite history? Well, as Orwell says in the book,
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Now let’s fast-forward to the present day. I will begin with this profound statement that keeps churning over in my head:
They must really think we are stupid!
The “they” is our government (federal and state). The “we” is you and me, and the other 300+ million Americans across our country.
Alas, here we are, entering the final quarter of 2023, and we have the United States government, and many state governments (including New York’s former Governor Andrew Cuomo, current left-wing Governor Kathy Hochul, and the super-majority Dem legislature) proclaiming for all to hear that they did not force anyone to do anything detrimental these past 3.5 years. UNBELIEVABLE! Did you hear this? They are actually saying with straight faces that they didn’t force you to wear a mask, or lock down and shutter your businesses, or choose between taking an experimental drug or losing your job… Nope! They did none of that. And you – well, you are flat out crazy if you think they did. You are lying. You are exaggerating and totally overreacting.
Unfortunately for Big Brother, ooops, I mean unfortunately for our 100 percent reliable, never-lies-to-us government, we have actual documents (including lawsuits), news stories, social media posts, and videos of the government at all levels mandating and forcing us to do all of those things, and more. Here’s just one example of Biden himself, the “Big Guy,” mandating the C19 shot:
Biden is not alone. No, no. His entire administration is right there with him. His head of OSHA, Douglas Parker, is also now lying through his teeth about the OSHA mandate that REQUIRED (not suggested) that all employers in the entire nation with 100 or more employees force their employees to get the C19 shot, otherwise they had to wear a mask and test constantly for C19. (That OSHA mandate was struck down by SCOTUS last year because it was unconstitutional, by the way). Then there’s the head of HHS, Xavier Becerra, saying there was never a mask mandate. What?! Another blatant lie.
Please take the 2 minutes to watch this Congressman Kevin Kiley clip. You truly won’t believe your ears with the bullsh#* these Biden agency heads are spewing! As Congressman Kiley says in the video, the government is trying to tell us that “2 + 2 doesn’t equal 4.” You don’t get much more Orwellian than that!
Why are they backtracking now?
Easy answers: 1) they didn’t have the authority to do any of it (all of it was unconstitutional) so they can’t justify and defend it now, and 2) if they can convince you they didn’t do it before, then you won’t mind as much when they do it again.
This should make your blood boil. It’s particularly infuriating to those of us who were speaking out from basically day one trying to tell people that the lockdowns, the masking, the shots, the limited number of people at your wedding or at your Thanksgiving table were all violations of the Constitution and our basic human rights! My colleague, Jeffrey Tucker, who is the founder and President of Brownstone Institute, where I am a Fellow, wrote an article the other day on this topic. At the end of it, he concluded:
The major media is tacitly conspiring with the political establishment, the corporate sector, and the administrative state to pretend like that fiasco was completely normal and also entirely forgettable, not even worth naming. We did the best we could with the information we had so just stop complaining about it!
This is not going to work. It is too close to living memory for this level of gaslighting to be effective. The more these official institutions engage in this crazy form of denialism, the more they discredit themselves.
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