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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/11/09/biden-and-western-media-telling-outrageous-lies/

Biden and Western Media Telling Outrageous Lies…

Despite claims of promoting “humanitarian pauses,” the US has supplied Israel with $320 million worth of precision-guided bombs. The perceived cynical Western stance is seen as favoring Israel, enabling a genocide against Palestinians.

In the Western media, we are told the Israeli regime is giving short shrift to calls from the Biden administration for “humanitarian pauses” in its “war on Hamas” – which in reality is not a war but a mass slaughter of Palestinians.

The U.S. and Western media report that American President Joe Biden is “concerned” about the mounting civilian death toll after more than four weeks of Israel’s siege and non-stop aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip, a coastal enclave equivalent to the area of Detroit.

Biden sent his top diplomat Antony Blinken on a tour of the Middle East apparently in a bid to persuade Israel to allow “humanitarian pauses” in its offensive against a largely civilian population. Israel’s premier Benjamin Netanyahu is having none of that as his military forces proceed with a ground invasion.

The charade being presented here by the Western media is that Washington is somehow acting as a restraining influence. And not a very successful one. A sort of well-meaning hapless foreign power trying to help an ally but also apprehensive about humanitarian suffering.

That’s just utter claptrap. First off, Israel is conducting a genocide against a population of 2.3 million people, in which resides a militant group, Hamas, that comprises 1 per cent of that population. This is like blowing up a lake to kill the fish.

Hamas’s murderous attacks on October 7 against Israel which resulted in 1,400 dead Israelis (many of whom were apparently killed by Israeli security forces using excessive force) are no justification whatsoever for the subsequent annihilation of more than 10,000 Palestinians in Gaza, as well as over 130 Palestinians in the West Bank. Nearly 70 per cent of the casualties are women and children.

This is not a right to self-defense as the Biden administration and other Western governments keep repeating and thereby affording Israel a semblance of political cover. It is a license for mass murder.

This is genocide.

The notion that the United States is somehow concerned about the civilian deaths of Palestinians and is acting to restrain Israel is belied by the following:

The Biden administration has signed off on the supply of $320 million worth of precision-guided bombs for Israel. This is in addition to the bigger military aid package of $14 billion that the U.S. Congress is currently voting on.

But more than this green light largesse is the nuclear-powered military support that the United States has rushed to assemble in the region. The positioning of this fearsome power parked only a few miles away from the coastal area where Israel is carrying out a murderous blitzkrieg speaks volumes. Only the Western media are distorting the obvious monstrous criminality of what’s really going on.

U.S. Central Command which covers the Middle East region has announced the arrival of a nuclear-powered submarine. The vessel will join two nuclear-capable aircraft carrier battle groups already dispatched to the East Mediterranean.

The Pentagon also published a photo of nuclear-capable B-1 Lancer bombers newly deployed to the Middle East.

The very public announcements of these “strategic weapons” by the United States – usually locations of such assets are not disclosed – are viewed as delivering a calculated, provocative and dire threat to Iran and other Middle Eastern parties, such as Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Lloyd Austin, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, voiced the threat in a phone call with Israeli counterpart Yoav “Palestinians-are-human-animals” Gallant at the weekend. Austin “reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to deter any state or non-state actor seeking to escalate this conflict.”

CIA director William Burns is also visiting Israel this week issuing the same message of support for Tel Aviv and warning other states and parties to back off from any idea of intervening to stop the murderous offensive in Gaza.

Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, issued a similarly stark warning to Iran and others during his latest Mideast tour while allegedly seeking “humanitarian pauses”. Blinken said, “Don’t even think about” attacking American forces in the region or otherwise face overwhelming retaliation.

When Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah gave a much-anticipated speech last week, he surprised many observers by refraining from declaring open war against Israel in support of the Palestinians. It seems Nasrallah is taking heed of the threats assembled by Israel and its U.S. patron. (And who could blame him!)

Israel’s Netanyahu warned Hezbollah that any widening of war would result in a military response that “could not be imagined”. That formulation of words can only mean a threat to use nuclear weapons.

Such crazed talk about using nuclear weapons was openly articulated by one of Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers, Amichai Eliyahu, at the weekend during a radio interview. Netanyahu later reprimanded his minister but the rebuke seemed to be for public relations show, nothing else.

The drastic positioning of U.S. nuclear weapons in the East Mediterranean and the issuing of unprecedented threats to Iran, Hezbollah and others has nothing to do with American concern to prevent escalation of war in the region. That’s how the Biden administration and the Western media are portraying it.

How preposterous to even consider that notion. No, the blunt truth is that the U.S. is weaponizing the Israeli fascist regime to carry out its genocide against Palestinians with as little opposition as possible. The threats – including the use of nuclear weapons – are to ensure that the genocide is not impeded in any way by nations and parties that might legally assist the Palestinians.

Like the rhetoric about self-defense, humanitarian pauses, and so on, the Biden administration’s purported concern to stop a regional war is another cynical ruse. It’s not about stopping a wider conflict. It’s a grotesque verbal cover for nuclear-powered genocide.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/08/chris-hedges-letter-to-the-children-of-gaza/

Letter to the Children of Gaza

Dear child. It is past midnight. I am flying at hundreds of miles an hour in the darkness, thousands of feet over the Atlantic Ocean. I am traveling to Egypt. I will go to the border of Gaza at Rafah. I go because of you.

You have never been in a plane. You have never left Gaza. You know only the densely packed streets and alleys. The concrete hovels.  You know only the security barriers and fences patrolled by soldiers that surround Gaza. Planes, for you, are terrifying. Fighter jets. Attack helicopters. Drones. They circle above you. They drop missiles and bombs. Deafening explosions. The ground shakes. Buildings fall. The dead. The screams. The muffled calls for help from beneath the rubble. It does not stop. Night and day. Trapped under the piles of smashed concrete. Your playmates. Your schoolmates. Your neighbors. Gone in seconds. You see the chalky faces and limp bodies when they are dug out. I am a reporter. It is my job to see this. You are a child. You should never see this.   

The stench of death. Rotting corpses under broken concrete. You hold your breath. You cover your mouth with cloth. You walk faster. Your neighborhood has become a graveyard. All that was familiar is gone. You stare in amazement. You wonder where you are.

You are afraid. Explosion after explosion. You cry. You cling to your mother or father. You cover your ears. You see the white light of the missile and wait for the blast. Why do they kill children? What did you do? Why can’t anyone protect you? Will you be wounded? Will you lose a leg or an arm? Will you go blind or be in a wheelchair? Why were you born?  Was it for something good? Or was it for this? Will you grow up?  Will you be happy? What will it be like without your friends? Who will die next? Your mother? Your father? Your brothers and sisters?  Someone you know will be injured. Soon. Someone you know will die. Soon.  

At night you lie in the dark on the cold cement floor. The phones are cut. The internet is off. You do not know what is happening. There are flashes of light. There are waves of blast concussions. There are screams. It does not stop.  

When your father or mother hunts for food or water you wait. That terrible feeling in your stomach. Will they come back? Will you see them again? Will your tiny home be next? Will the bombs find you? Are these your last moments on Earth?  

You drink salty, dirty water. It makes you very sick. Your stomach hurts. You are hungry. The bakeries are destroyed. There is no bread. You eat one meal a day. Pasta. A cucumber. Soon this will seem like a feast. 

You do not play with your soccer ball made of rags. You do not fly your kite made from old newspapers.      

You have seen foreign reporters. We wear flak jackets with the word PRESS written on it. We have helmets. We have cameras. We drive jeeps. We appear after a bombing or a shooting. We sit over coffee for a long time and talk to the adults. Then we disappear. We do not usually interview children. But I have done interviews when groups of you crowded around us. Laughing. Pointing. Asking us to take your picture. 

I have been bombed by jets in Gaza. I have been bombed in other wars, wars that happened before you were born. I too was very, very scared. I still have dreams about it. When I see the pictures of Gaza these wars return to me with the force of thunder and lightning. I think of you. 

All of us who have been to war hate war most of all because of what it does to children.

I tried to tell your story. I tried to tell the world that when you are cruel to people, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, when you deny people freedom and dignity, when you humiliate and trap them in an open-air prison, when you kill them as if they were beasts, they become very angry. They do to others what was done to them. I told it over and over. I told it for seven years. Few listened. And now this. 

There are very brave Palestinian journalists. Thirty-nine of them have been killed since this bombing began. They are heroes. So are the doctors and nurses in your hospitals. So are the U.N. workers. Eighty-nine of whom have died. So are the ambulance drivers and the medics. So are the rescue parties that lift up the slabs of concrete with their hands. So are the mothers and fathers who shield you from the bombs. 

But we are not there. Not this time. We cannot get in. We are locked out. 

Reporters from all over the world are going to the border crossing at Rafah. We are going because we cannot watch this slaughter and do nothing. We are going because hundreds of people are dying a day, including 160 children. We are going because this genocide must stop. We are going because we have children. Like you. Precious. Innocent. Loved. We are going because we want you to live. 

I hope one day we will meet. You will be an adult. I will be an old man, although to you I am already very old. In my dream for you I will find you free and safe and happy.  No one will be trying to kill you. You will fly in airplanes filled with people, not bombs. You will not be trapped in a concentration camp. You will see the world. You will grow up and have children. You will become old. You will remember this suffering, but you will know it means you must help others who suffer. This is my hope. My prayer.

We have failed you. This is the awful guilt we carry. We tried. But we did not try hard enough. We will go to Rafah. Many of us. Reporters. We will stand outside the border with Gaza in protest. We will write and film. This is what we do. It is not much. But it is something. We will tell your story again. 

Maybe it will be enough to earn the right to ask for your forgiveness.

Comments to article:

" Chris, Your voice is a glimmer of light in all the darkness we face these days. I hope and pray you stay safe while bearing witness to the horror inflicted upon the children (and the adults) in Palestine. Your words break my heart every time I read them, but I must read them to hold onto my humanity. Thank you for all you do. "

" Thank you Chris, you are a shining example of humanity! The suffering of children you describe goes right to the heart. This sad state of affairs virtually guarantees a deepened cycle of violence and Israel now sows the seeds of its dissolution which may be for the best. Hopefully, from these ashes there can be some kind of reconciliation to heal the deep, pain, fear, and hate. I am at a loss! "

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/censorship-imperils-us-we-forbidden-speak-without-threats-insults-free-thinking-dies-people-die/5839419

Censorship Imperils Us When We Are Forbidden to Speak. Free Thinking Dies and People Die. Propaganda Buries the Truth

Censorship imperils our cultures and our civilization. When we are prohibited from speaking or writing without threats, shaming, or epithets meant to shut down discussion, free thinking dies. People also die.

A censorship industrial complex grew around Covid hysteria, which began as a war on a virus.

New full-blown wars, with guns, bombs, tanks, and planes, and thousands dead now explode around us as free speech is lost in wars’ rubble, and propaganda buries truths.

With their money, power, and massive influence, private for-profit industries like pharmaceutical companies, influence and capture U.S. agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, that taxpayers task with regulating products for public safety.

Because of this capture, agencies often fail to protect public while bolstering industry profits. Similarly, with the capture of politicians and policymakers, corporations and contractors profit from wars, as Marine Corp Brigadier General Smedley Butler notes in his book, War is a Racket and as Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in his 1961 Farewell Address. Corporate and government elites get rich from wars based on lies, such as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – and they sit rich now in retirement.

What truths might we uncover as we sift through wars’ rubble?

Children and young people didn’t need Covid shots as they were at little risk from serious illness from Covid, and some countries stopped recommending them; the shots may even harm them.

Yet, vaccines are a main source of revenue for pediatricians. A “pandemic of the unvaccinated” never happened though entertainers, highly paid media figures, and politicians viciously maligned those who waited or declined a Covid shot.

Most people contracted Covid anyway, whether they got multiple shots or not. Shots did not prevent transmission. Most dying from the disease now also had multiple shots.

Thousands of Covid vaccine-injured people have been bullied into silence and rendered invisible.

These are all statements we have been forbidden from making in the last few years; those who dare to utter them have faced rancor or ridicule or worse.

• Don’t talk about Covid shots, school and business closings, or the many beloved businesses and churches that closed for good because of bureaucratic mandates.
• Don’t talk about vaccine injuries or deaths or children’s learning losses or epidemics of addictions; don’t talk about child and teen suicides.
• Don’t talk about Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s astute observations that Haiti and Nigeria had the some of the least restrictive Covid policies on earth, had about a one percent Covid vaccine rate, and have had some of the lowest Covid death rates in the world, observations noted in his book, Letter to Liberals.
• Don’t talk about how Covid shots may cause Covid, or how Pfizer’s own product literature states that Covid is one of the side effects of the shot.

When we talk about these topics, listeners often stiffen and bristle, their eyes may go blank as they dismiss us with pity or contempt before we even complete a spoken paragraph.

Now, new disasters and traumas affect the world, and many insist we not talk about them to avoid snarling and insults or worse.

Violence and war have exploded in the Middle East

More unutterable statements come to mind. For instance, criticizing the policies of the Israeli government does not equal anti-Semitism.

Israel is an apartheid state with separations and denials of rights based on race, as Jimmy Carter noted in his 2007 book, Peace Not Apartheid.

Great Britain, the same colonial power that colonized and divided the African continent and other countries like poker chips among winners, made The Balfour Declaration in 1917 that declared a “home for the Jews” in Palestine, where Palestinians already lived.

This was presumptuous and elitist for the British to declare. It was not their place to make such a declaration.

A single, open, and democratic state in Israel with equal rights for all may be the best solution to the conflicts and violence, as Israeli American writer and activist Miko Peled has stated. Peled is the son of an Israeli general and grandson of one of the signers of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. His father was an Israeli war hero turned peace maker. He changed his thinking on Israel; so did Miko Peled. Peled writes his story in his book, The General’s Son and shares his views in talks and interviews, such as this one on the Katie Halper program.

In spite of how propaganda bombards us, we may note as Miko Peled does, that Palestinians are not simply evil barbarians, beheading babies and raping, but rather young men, desperate after years of violence and humiliation, after perhaps losing parents, crushed under the rubble of their apartment building, destroyed by an Israeli bomb, many paid for by U.S. taxpayers, or they may have siblings whose legs had to be amputated after damage from Israeli sniper fire. In what many call an open-air prison, Gazans endure lack of food, water, and electricity.

Islam is not a religion of fanatics and terrorists, in Palestine, or anywhere else, as the media often portrays it. It is one of the world’s major religions. The word Islam means “submission to the will of God.”  The Arabic word “salaam,” which means peace, is part of the common greeting among Muslims all over the world. Spreading peace is a requirement of the faith. Similarly, sharing God’s peace is expected among Christians and Jews.

Christians have been criticized for their views on Israel. An older and much more well-read peace activist friend shared with me that some evangelical Christians who support Israel, stand with Israel, do so because they believe Israel is the final launching pad for the Rapture when Christians will be zapped up to Heaven, and Jewish people will be too if they convert to Christianity. Jewish people who do not will perish. What do Jewish people think of this scenario? What if they do not want to “accept Jesus,” but simply wish to remain Jewish? It is confusing. Plenty of the world’s worst violence has been committed and continues in the name of or under the cover of religion.

Statements we are not supposed to make call us to make them now. Statements I make above could be wrong. Many may disagree with them. However, censorship kills with its shaming epithets meant to shut down discussion and thought, like the labels “anti-Semitic” or “conspiracy theorist,” “science denier” or “anti-Vaxxer.” Censorship imperils us when we are forbidden to speak without threats and insults, such as when we were told, “You don’t care if others die of Covid” if we decided not to wear a mask or to move about freely in 2020 and 2021. Similarly, we were told, “You deserve to be excluded from society if you decline a vaccine” even when some of us had natural immunity or didn’t think we needed it.  Even worse, some of us were told, “You deserve to die – or lose your job or friends or education — if you don’t comply.” Many said such horrible things in the last few years.

In many contexts, we are not permitted to say plainly and openly that Covid shots don’t work; that lockdowns didn’t work; that bureaucrats and politicians should never have closed schools and other community gatherings in 2020 and 2021; and that keeping children out of school was a grave injustice, as writers of The Great Barrington Declaration stated.

Slogans and advertising language often replace free speech and obliterate open thought, as they did during the Covid period, as they do during all wars. Should we be wary of sloganeering and pre-packaged language like “wiped off the map,” “Israel’s 9-11,” “rid the world of evil,” “mushroom cloud,” “weapons of mass destruction,” “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” – sloganeering that stops empathy and reflection, closes debate, and whips populations into war frenzies? Should we question slogans and manipulative phrases? Are lies and machinations operating behind our unreliable mainstream media reports, as they were during Covid hysteria and during the run-up to the Iraq War — as well as past wars? Retired U.S. CIA Officer Dr. Phillip Giraldi notes possible lies about the war in Israel in a recent Global Research article. Did violence begin with attacks from Gaza in early October? How might we question and what might we learn, seeking varied sources like American Friends Service Committee, an organization that has been present in Israel and Palestine for many years? What questions might we ask about slogans like Israel’s “right to exist”? What does that mean? After a suicide bomber killed his niece in Israel years ago, Miko Peled asked questions. He joined dialogue groups of Israelis and Palestinians and changed his thinking.

U.S. military veteran suicides have been at epidemic levels after soldiers returned from multiple deployments in disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ignited by sloganeering after 9-11 and the launch of the so-called “war on terror,” which was to “rid the world of evil.” How might those veterans react now, hearing this same kind of language about “Israel’s 9-11”? This past week, I learned of another veteran who committed suicide.

Can we keep our minds opened, our hearts softened to alternative perspectives?

During Covid lockdowns, rigid thinking and censorship caused the U.S. to harm its own children relentlessly as their suicides, addictions, developmental delays, learning losses, and despair increased. Children around the world starved, were abused, exploited, and enslaved because of lockdown policies we were forbidden to question. Has an entire generation of young people been harmed?

Free societies do not ban statements and opinions. Free societies permit questions and debate. Statements above may be phrased as questions as well.[2] For instance, do Covid shots work? Have they worked to stop transmission and illness and death? Are Covid vaccine-injured people silenced? Where may we find their stories? Should western cultures have shut down in 2020 in an attempt to avoid a single pathogen? By what authority did bureaucrats suspend the U.S. Constitution in 2020 and forbid assembly, speech, protest, group worship, and community gatherings? What were the harms? Who benefitted from lockdowns and Covid shots and how? How much money changed hands? Who wrote the checks and who got paid?

Why are Palestinian young men fighting now? How do we end the violence and build peace? What has life been like in Gaza and the West Bank of Palestine for the last few decades? Could lockdowns have made life there worse? Israel has been criticized as one of the most repressive countries in the world for Covid restrictions and Covid shot mandates. Even protesting Covid policies is a privilege Palestinians in Gaza would not have had. They have lacked basic medicines, clean water, and schools free of bombings for years.

Was the Balfour Declaration a good idea? Conservative Jewish Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, speaking at a Let the Quran Speak conference, supports Palestinians and criticizes leaders of the state of Israel on religious grounds.

Documentary films like Occupation 101 and Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land provoked my thinking. I helped organize public showings of them when working with peace groups. We led discussions of these films along with War Made Easy, a film based on Norman Solomon’s book by the same name, and The Ground Truth, a film about the horrific effects on the eight-ten percent of the population sent on multiple deployments to fights those wars. In the last few years, the same U.S. government that sent military members to fight and die in catastrophic wars forced Covid shots on them until refusers struck down the unlawful mandates.

Over years, I learn from others’ stories, especially from outsiders and whistleblowers, who were former insiders in the military, in industry, in governments. For example, soldiers sent to fight in wars that most now agree were mistakes speak out against those wars now.

They may have lost limbs or memory or cognitive function from IEDs. They learned and changed and spoke – what we were not allowed to say. Describing this latest violence as “Israel’s 9-11” is especially dangerous as we recall the unfathomable destruction and carnage that such language unleashed on the world more than twenty years ago [3] with the launch of the so-called “war on terror”. What did we learn?  Outsiders and independent thinkers — who have said what was forbidden — have often changed history. From the so-called “war on terror,” the war on a virus, the current war in Israel and Palestine, perhaps they will now.