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https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/01/chris-hedges-israel-reopens-the-gaza-slaughterhouse/

Israel Reopens the Gaza Slaughterhouse

 Phase One of Israel’s genocidal campaign on Gaza has ended. Phase Two has begun. It will result in even higher levels of death and destruction.  

The skies over Gaza are filled — after a seven-day truce — with projectiles of death. Warplanes. Attack helicopters. Drones. Artillery shells. Tank shells. Mortars. Bombs. Missiles. Gaza is a cacophony of explosions and forlorn screams and cries for help beneath collapsed buildings. Fear, once again, is coiling itself around every heart in the Gazan concentration camp. 

By Friday evening, 184 Palestinians — including three journalists and two doctors — had been killed by Israeli air strikes in the north, south and central Gaza, and at least 589 injured, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. Most of them are women and children. Israel will not be deterred. It plans to finish the job, to obliterate what is left in the north of Gaza and decimate what remains in the south, to render Gaza uninhabitable, to see its 2.3 million people driven out in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing via starvation, terror, slaughter and infectious diseases. 

The aid convoys, which brought in token amounts of food and medicine — the first batch was shrouds and coronavirus tests according to the director of al-Najjar hospital — have been halted. No one, least of all President Joe Biden, plans to intervene to stop the genocide. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel this week, and while calling for Israel to protect civilians, refused to set conditions that would disrupt the $3.8 billion Israel receives in annual military assistance or the $14.3 billion supplemental aid package. The world will watch passively, muttering useless bromides about more surgical strikes, while Israel spins its roulette wheel of death. By the time Israel is done, the 1948 Nakba, where Palestinians were massacred in dozens of villages and 750,000 were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias, will look like a quaint relic of a more civilized era. 

Nothing is off limits. Hospitals. Mosques. Churches. Homes. Apartment blocks. Refugee camps. Schools. Universities. Media offices. Banks. Sewer systems. Telecommunications infrastructure. Water treatment plants. Libraries. Wheat mills. Bakeries. Markets. Entire neighborhoods. Israel’s intent is to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure and daily kill or wound hundreds of Palestinians. Gaza is to become a wasteland, a dead zone that will be incapable of sustaining life. 

Israel began to bomb Khan Younis on Friday after dropping leaflets warning civilians to evacuate further south to Rafah, located on the border crossing with Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians had sought refuge in Khan Younis. Once Palestinians are pushed to Rafah, there is only one place left to flee — Egypt. The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, in a leaked report, calls for the forcible transfer of Gaza’s population to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. A detailed plan to intentionally displace the Palestinians in Gaza and push them into Egypt has been embedded in Israeli doctrine for five decades. Already, 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza have been driven from their homes. Once Palestinians cross the border into Egypt — which the Egyptian government and Arab leaders are seeking to prevent despite pressure from the U.S. — Palestinians will never return. 

This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against Palestinians.

Israeli strikes are generated at a dizzying rate, many of them from a system called “Habsora” — The Gospel — which is built on artificial intelligence that selects 100 targets a day. The AI-system is described by seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials in an article by Yuval Abraham on the Israeli sites +972 Magazine and Local Call, as facilitating a “mass assassination factory.” Israel, once it locates what it assumes to be a Hamas operative from a cell phone, for example, bombs and shells a wide area around the target, killing and wounding tens, and at times hundreds of Palestinians, the article states.

“According to intelligence sources,” the story reads, “Habsora generates, among other things, automatic recommendations for attacking private residences where people suspected of being Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives live. Israel then carries out large-scale assassination operations through the heavy shelling of these residential homes.”

Some 15,000 Palestinians, including 6,000 children and 4,000 women, have been killed since Oct. 7. Some 30,000 have been wounded. Over six thousand are missing, many buried under the rubble. More than 300 families have lost 10 or more members of their families. More than 250 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, and more than 3,000 injured, although the area is not controlled by Hamas. The Israeli military claims to have killed between 1,000 and 3,000 of some 30,000 Hamas fighters, a relatively small number given the scale of the assault. Most resistance fighters shelter in their vast tunnel system. 

Israel’s playbook is the “Dahiya Doctrine.” The doctrine was formulated by former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who is a member of the war cabinet, following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dahiya is a southern Beirut suburb and a Hezbollah stronghold. It was pounded by Israeli jets after two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. The doctrine posits that Israel should employ massive, disproportionate force, destroying infrastructure and civilian residences, to ensure deterrence.

Daniel Hagari, spokesman of the IDF, conceded at the start of Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza that the “emphasis” would be “on damage and not on accuracy.”

Israel has abandoned its tactic of “roof knocking” where a rocket without a warhead would land on a roof to warn those inside to evacuate. Israel has also ended its phone calls warning of an impending attack. Now dozens of families in an apartment block or a neighborhood are killed without notice.

The images of mass destruction feed the thirst for revenge within Israel following the humiliating incursion by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7 and the killing of 1,200 Israelis, including 395 soldiers and 59 police officers. There is a sadistic pleasure voiced by many Israelis over the genocide and a groundswell of calls for the murder or expulsion of Palestinians, including those in the occupied West Bank and those with Israeli citizenship. 

The savagery of the air strikes and indiscriminate attacks, the cutting off of food, water and medicine, the genocidal rhetoric of the Israeli government, make this a war whose sole objective is revenge. This will not be good for Israel or the Palestinians. It will fuel a conflagration throughout the Middle East. 

Israel’s attack is the last desperate measure of a settler colonial project that foolishly thinks, as many settler colonial projects have in the past, that it can crush the resistance of an indigenous population with genocide. But even Israel will not get away with killing on this scale. A generation of Palestinians, many of whom have seen most, if not all, of their families killed and their homes and neighborhoods destroyed, will carry within them a lifelong thirst for justice and retribution. 

This war is not over. It has not even begun. 

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/12/02/the-goal-is-ethnic-cleansing-not-defeating-hamas/

The Goal Is Ethnic Cleansing, Not Defeating Hamas

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The funny thing about Henry Kissinger dying at age 100 is that he lived long enough to become one of the least crazy warmongers in the DC swamp — not because he got saner, but because the US empire has gotten so much crazier. Almost everyone running the US government today is a worse warmonger than Kissinger was at the end of his life.

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Sane person: Stop murdering thousands of children.

Crazy person: You hate people because of their religion.

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Israeli officials keep openly saying again and again that the plan for Gaza is ethnic cleansing, yet the western political/media class adamantly insists on continuing to frame Israel’s actions in Gaza solely as a war against Hamas. Hamas isn’t the target, it’s the excuse.

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A damning new report from +972 Magazine published on Thursday exposes how Israel has been deliberately striking civilian targets in Gaza as a matter of policy because they believe it will “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas.” It makes it clear that the IDF is very much aware of where the civilians are, and that when they kill children it’s because they calculated that it would be strategically worthwhile to do so.

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As evidence continues to mount that a significant number of the Israelis killed on October 7 were actually killed by indiscriminate fire from the IDF, Israel has announced its plans to bury the vehicles Israelis died in — in other words to bury forensic evidence. According to the Jerusalem Post, “In order to save space and be as environment-friendly as possible… the cars may be shredded before being buried.”

Are people not tired of having their intelligence insulted?

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Israel’s western allies keep being confronted with the problem that they’ve been framing Israel all these years as a free democracy with liberal values identical to the west’s, yet it keeps acting just like the Evil Dictatorships the west always tries to distinguish itself from.

They keep running into this problem because it’s not something that Israel can actually change about itself, since it’s just the stuff that Israel is made of. The Zionist ideological framework which birthed Israel in the first place is what has been guiding its political course this entire time, and that ideology can only steer the country towards racism, apartheid, fascism, theft, murder and genocide.

This has long caused a dissonance between what Israel is seen doing and what Israel is presented as by its western allies and its own PR, and now that dissonance has soared to unprecedented heights. Westerners are taught (falsely) that their governments embody virtuous values systems prioritizing freedom, peace, justice and truth, and here’s this bizarre ethnostate glommed onto them which very clearly wipes its ass with those values without even really attempting to disguise it.

The western empire has destroyed nation after nation on the premise each of those nations was governed by an Evil Dictator who couldn’t be allowed to remain in power, and yet we’re being asked to look past the actions of an intimate partner of the western empire which make those Evil Dictators look like teddy bears and believe that that partner is actually entirely in alignment with the values of the virtuous west. There’s no way to reconcile these two completely contradictory perspectives, so you get cognitive dissonance.

The more cognitive dissonance there is, the harder it is for people to hold onto these contradictory views simultaneously. Eventually it gets too much to hold on to and they’ve got to let go, which is why more and more westerners are starting to open their eyes to both the depravity of Israel and of their own government.

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Israel apologia is the world’s worst people defending the world’s worst actions. You’re more likely to support Israel if you’re a shitty person, and if you weren’t a shitty person to begin with you’ll eventually have to turn into one to continue supporting Israel’s actions.

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Most Israel supporters are non-Jews, but when you talk about what awful people Israel supporters are they’ll try to claim you’re talking about Jews. Israel apologists who aren’t even Jewish will accuse you of anti-semitism for saying things that are really about them.

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Any time there’s a bombing campaign by the US-aligned power structure you see attempts being made to spin the civilians it kills as imperfect victims, and you’re seeing that with Gaza too. 

The problem here is that there’s no way to spin children as imperfect victims; they are inherently blameless. If everyone in Gaza was a Hamas fighter, or even a military-aged male, then the “imperfect victims” strategy would work fine, but Gaza happens to contain an unusually high percentage of children and Israel is killing them at a very unusual rate. You can try to say babies and small children are actually covert Hamas fighters or Hamas supporters, but all you’ll succeed in doing is making your side look worse than it already does. It’s a major obstacle for the western empire.

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-magic-moment/

The Magic Moment

“This is in my opinion, the worst thing that’s ever happened to our country in my lifetime in the world, and the government’s role cannot be denied,” — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on C-19-Vaxx

History is a trickster. It unfolds emergently with uncanny creativity, often blindsiding humanity with the unanticipated consequences and non-linear outcomes of previous unfoldings. So, here we are now in a Second Civil War. Really? “Between whom?” you might ask. Between truth and untruth. Between a sociopathic bureaucratic blob steeped in lies and a citizenry obliged to live and die by the blob’s lies.

     Case-in-point: the emergent evolution of US public health agencies, the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, the NIAID and their many fiefdoms, into a gigantic engine of death fueled by incessant and persistent lying. The people running these agencies lied to you about the creation and origin of the novel corona virus, SARS Covid-19. Then they lied about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines created as the sovereign remedy for Covid-19. They also lied about and suppressed actual effective treatments for the disease they invented and loosed on the world and then coerced the whole medical establishment into breaking its Hippocratic oath (first do no harm) to administer vaccines that killed. They lied about these things knowingly. And through the whole three-year episode, US public health has hidden the data about Covid and the vaccines while aggressively lying about it and punishing American citizens who found ways to expose the truth.

     The vaccines have killed an estimate 670,000 Americans and 17-million world-wide, consensus figures arrived at by citizens devoted to uncovering the truth. One of these is independent researcher Steve Kirsch, a Silicon Valley billionaire who invented the optical mouse. In 2021, after noticing a strange pattern of early deaths and injuries in his own circle of acquaintances, Mr. Kirsch devoted himself and his fortune to uncovering the truth about the Covid-19 vaccines. Mr. Kirsch describes himself as “a nerd,” by which he means that he is good at math and at assembling bodies of information using rigorous statistical analysis that present a coherent picture of reality, a.k.a. the truth.

      Last night, Thursday, November 30, Mr.Kirsch gave a talk at his alma mater, MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts on what the best available statistics tell us about the Covid-19 vaccines (for instance, that so far they have killed more Americans than World War Two). The talk was live-streamed on the Rumble platform (YouTube scrubbed it). There is an interesting story behind Mr. Kirsch’s event. Years before the Covid-19 fiasco, Mr. Kirsch gave MIT $2.5 million to build a new lecture hall. Then, during Covid-19, Mr. Kirsch asked MIT to allow him to stage a lecture about his findings. The MIT administrators refused to let Mr. Kirsch speak in the lecture hall that he paid for. Mr. Kirsch went public with that, embarrassing the university, and under new MIT President Sally Kornbluth, the Institute  relented.

     Prior to the November 30 talk, Mr. Kirsch sought to share his data with eminent MIT professor Robert Langer, winner of countless awards for advances in the biotechnological sciences. Dr. Langer runs a research program that his MIT webpage describes as follows:

The group’s work is at the interface of biotechnology and materials science. A major focus is the study and development of polymers to deliver drugs, particularly genetically engineered proteins, continuously at controlled rates and for prolonged periods of time.”

      Sounds like Dr. Langer would be intimately acquainted with the mechanisms of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, especially the development of lipid nanoparticles that facilitate the delivery of the mRNA message into their targeted cells. Dr. Langer declined to see the data or to meet with Mr. Kirsch. At the beginning of his talk, Mr. Kirsch offered some speculation as to why Dr. Langer might demur to see the data or meet with him. Turns out it is because Dr. Langer sits on the Moderna board of directors. If Dr. Langer were exposed to “record level” data in a structured format that indicated the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine was killing a lot of people, Dr. Langer would be required legally to insist that the company take it off the market. Now you see how the venal mendacity of Big Pharma intersects with the perfidy of Academia, and at the highest levels. Dr. Langer has been called out, and publicly disgraced by Mr. Kirsch. Will Dr. Langer sue Mr. Kirsch for defamation? I doubt it. It is a fact that Dr. Langer is on the Moderna Board, and his obligations to the public are clear vis-à-vis Moderna’s flagship product. It will be interesting to see how MIT and Dr. Langer handle this quandary.

     Today’s morning news (Friday, Dec 1) contains nothing about Steve Kirsch’s landmark talk at MIT, which essentially laid out evidence of a crime against humanity. One feature of the assembled data is that it can take a long time for the vaccines to kill people — six months being only an average. CDC director Mandy Cohen is still pushing the Covid-19 vaccines, as did her predecessor Rochelle Walensky, who resigned just this past June, so expect a continued incidence of excess and early deaths. Did both of them somehow miss the massive accumulating data and news reports about the danger of mRNA vaccines? Could they be that dumb? Or did they knowingly lie to the public, pushing vaccines that are obviously unsafe? At some point, they may have to answer these questions.

     Also yesterday, independent reporters Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The two journalists had previously published the “Twitter Files,” an investigation into the government’s infiltration of social media for the purpose of censorship and manipulating news that would affect the outcome of recent elections. In this new chapter, the two, along with Substack blogger Alex Gutentag, have released a report based on whistleblower testimony about the sweeping censorship framework called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League that the Department of Homeland Security cooked up in 2018, and whose coordinated activities metastasized through the so-called “intelligence community,” the White House, and agencies of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The same tyrannical programming has been adopted by many of the governments in the EU.

      The net result of all this is Western Civilization saturating itself in lies. It appears that Covid-19 was well into development when it was adopted by the blob and its protectors in the Democratic Party to use as a means for finally getting rid of President Trump in 2020 after RussiaGate and a fake impeachment failed. The introduction of poorly-tested mRNA vaccines — actually developed by the US Department of Defense and licensed out to Pfizer and Moderna — looks like it was intended to mitigate Covid-19 after it had accomplished its task of enabling election ballot fraud to get a patsy president, “Joe Biden,” into the White House. But the vaccines turned out to be a gigantic and deadly botch. And once they were sold to the public, and the vaccine companies made billions, and people started dying and getting gross illnesses, everybody involved in the vast blob network had to keep on lying to cover up their crimes.

      What follows from here in this new civil war of truth against untruth is that untruth will lose because untruth is fundamentally unsound and can’t stand on its own. The US bureaucratic blob, like the fictional product Soylent Green, is people. There are, obviously thousands of them, virtually a whole army, guilty of crimes. The whistleblowers are popping out all over now. We’re approaching the magic moment when the whole blob army flips and rats out each other in the attempt to save their asses. Wait for it.