https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/12/27/in-unprecedented-slaughter-of-gaza-civilians-us-claims-israel-is-the-victim/
In unprecedented slaughter of Gaza civilians, US claims Israel is the “victim”
In a news conference this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken lashed out at global criticism of US support for Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza.
“I hear virtually no one saying, demanding of Hamas that it stop hiding behind civilians, that it lay down its arms, that it surrender. This is over tomorrow if Hamas does that,” Blinken complained. “How can it be that there are no demands made of the aggressor, and only demands made of the victim?”
Blinken’s statement is an outright endorsement of state terrorism. Its underlying logic affirms that Israel is free to massacre Palestinian civilians until the armed resistance in their midst offers up a “surrender.”
The chief US diplomat’s indigitation at the supposed absence of any “demands” on Hamas is also based on a false premise. As Blinken is well aware, the multiple UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions that his government has vetoed demanded that Hamas grant the unconditional release of all hostages. But because these resolutions also demanded that Israel end its attack on Gaza and allow the unfettered delivery of humanitarian aid, the US has blocked them.
Committed to defending Israeli violence at all costs, Blinken is accordingly willing to cast Hamas as the “aggressor” and Israel – an occupying power that has now reportedly murdered a well over 20,000 people in Gaza – as the “victim.”
Even if we were to pretend that history began on Oct. 7th, and forget that the Hamas militants who attacked Israel on that day were caged inside the world’s largest concentration camp under the world’s longest-running military occupation, Blinken’s statement would be just as mendacious. Hamas’ atrocities came in a one-day guerilla operation against Israel. That does not give Israel the right to wage a nearly-three month military campaign that is causing historic levels of carnage and destruction.
With Israel routinely blocking life-saving aid, a new United Nations report finds that more than 500,000 people in Gaza – one-quarter of the entire population – are starving. “It doesn’t get any worse,” says Arif Husain, chief economist for the World Food Program. “I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed.”
Israel has drastically reduced aid by insisting that it inspect every shipment going into Gaza, even goods that arrive through Egypt. This means that before entering Gaza at Egypt’s Rafah crossing, aid trucks must first drive for an inspection in the Israeli border town of Kerem Shalom before returning to Rafah. While claiming to be working strenuously on the aid deliveries, the Biden administration has played its traditional role of enforcing Israel’s dictate. As one US official told the New York Times of the Biden administration’s latest stonewalling of a UNSC resolution, “Washington would not approve a measure that removed Israel from the inspection process.”
When it comes to military tactics, Israel’s wanton recklessness was newly underscored when its forces killed three unarmed Israeli hostages after mistaking them for being Palestinian civilians. Had they been the latter, as Israeli troops believed when they shot them, the murders would have been routine and likely unnoticed.
Meanwhile, even President Biden has been forced to admit that Israel is carrying out an “indiscriminate bombing” of the besieged enclave. “By some measures, destruction in Gaza has outpaced Allied bombings of Germany during World War II,” the Associated Press reports. Whereas the Allies destroyed about 10% of buildings across Nazi Germany between 1942 and 1945, in Gaza that figure stands at 33%.
“Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” US military historian Robert Pape observes. “It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.” The campaign has relied on the steady provision of US weapons. According to a recent US intelligence assessment, almost half of the munitions that Israel has dropped on Gaza have been unguided or “dumb” bombs, which are known for their inaccuracy and wholesale destruction.
In the war’s first weeks, “Israel routinely used one of its biggest and most destructive bombs in areas it designated safe for civilians,” a New York Times analysis concludes. Although Washington has given free rein to use its 2,000-pound bombs, they “are almost never dropped by U.S. forces in densely populated areas anymore.” Their lethality extends to 1,000 feet from impact, a large-scale death sentence for what CNN notes is a Gaza population “packed together much more tightly than almost anywhere else on earth.”
Under Israel’s US-backed indiscriminate bombardment, Gaza’s official death toll has passed 20,000, an unusual if not unprecedented figure for a 21st century war that is less than three-months old. Given that only one side has a military and air power, it was also entirely predictable. The 20,000 figure is also assuredly an undercount. “We don’t know how many are buried under the rubble of their homes,” notes the World Health Organization’s Director General. Health data expert Benjamin Q. Huynh adds that there is “no evidence” that Gaza’s health ministry has inflated the Palestinian death toll. Beyond those buried under the rubble, an additional reason why the “true death toll is probably higher than what’s being reported,” he observes, is a “diminished capacity from the hospital system.”
The Israeli attacks on Gaza’s hospital system have targeted more than two dozen health facilities in Gaza, another milestone in the conduct of modern warfare.
When it comes to last month’s Israeli assault on Gaza’s largest hospital, al-Shifa, a new report in the Washington Post concludes what was obvious from the start: Israeli-US claims of a Hamas “command and control” center there were yet another pro-war fabrication.
After seizing the hospital, Israel claimed that five buildings were used by Hamas, and sat above tunnels that were used to direct the group’s militant activity. But according to the Post, rooms that were connected to the tunnel network underneath the hospital “showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas.” Additionally, neither al-Shifa’s hospital wards or the five hospital buildings were accessible to the tunnels. Accordingly, the Post concludes, “the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center.”
The Biden administration was equally complicit in Israel’s al-Shifa deception, aided as usual by reliable media stenographers. Before Israel attacked al-Shifa on Nov. 15th, White House spokesperson John Kirby assured reporters that he could “confirm” that Hamas and Islamic Jihad were using al-Shifa’s tunnels “to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages.” One day after Israel launched the assault, President Biden doubled down. “Here’s the situation: You have a circumstance where the first war crime is being committed by Hamas by having their headquarters, their military hidden under a hospital,” Biden said on Nov. 16th, “And that’s a fact. That’s what’s happened.”
Biden’s grasp of this “fact” is as reliable as his false claim to have seen photographs of beheaded babies, which he nonetheless continues to repeat despite Israeli and US admissions that no such photographs exist.
Anonymous US officials also informed the New York Times that “they are confident that Hamas has used tunnel networks under hospitals, in particular Al Shifa, for command and control areas as well as for weapons storage.” The Times additionally cited “senior Israeli intelligence officials,” who “allowed the Times to review photographs that purported to show secret entrances to the compound from inside the hospital.” In other words, these Israeli officials “allowed” the Times to launder their lies.
As Israeli forces attacked al-Shifa, anonymous US intelligence officials informed the Wall Street Journal that they had “independently” obtained “intercepted communications of fighters inside the compound.” Predictably, the Journal’s sources “declined to provide more details about the U.S. intelligence on Al-Shifa,” citing the familiar excuse of protecting “sources and methods.” The claim of sourcing “intercepted communications” happens to be a tried and tested method of US war propaganda, deployed to sell the fabrications about Iraq WMDs or claims of chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government.
Although the Journal acknowledged that the US “hasn’t been able to determine details of Hamas’s alleged operations at Al-Shifa,” it left room for even more Israeli attacks by claiming that the US “has also picked up intelligence about other hospitals.” When reporters pressed Kirby to provide even a shred of evidence, the White House spokesperson refused. But not to worry: yet another anonymous “knowledgeable source” emerged to inform Reuters that the intelligence “is definitive.”
The Israeli siege of al-Shifa caused the deaths of several dozen patients in intensive care, as well at least four premature babies. In heralding the operation, an Israeli official even dispensed with the pretext about a Hamas command post or rescuing hostages. “The entrance to Shifa is first of all a symbol that there is no place we will not reach,” the official said. “We did not think we would find hostages, but we will definitely locate and dismantle Hamas capabilities.”
For its part, the Biden administration still defends the al-Shifa assault. “This was a very precise and targeted military operation that Israel carried out with a range of efforts to reduce any civilian casualties,” a senior U.S. administration official told the Post.
The operation was indeed targeted. In attacking Gaza’s largest hospital with US assistance, Israel laid the foundation to destroy and disable even more health facilities across the besieged enclave. This unprecedented barbarism can only have one goal: to maximize civilian casualties, and destroy the basic institutions of a functioning society.
The assault on al-Shifa is also perfectly in line with Israeli officials’ open calls for genocide and ethnic cleansing, and the high-level effort undertaken for those goals.
According to the newspaper Israel Hayom, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top aide, cabinet member Ron Dermer, has been tasked to “thin” the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip “to a minimum.” A new account in the Washington Post claims that in the days after Oct. 7th, Netanyahu even personally asked President Biden to pressure Egypt into accepting a massive influx of Palestinian refugees. Aides claims that Biden rebuffed Netanyahu, but evidence suggests otherwise. On Oct. 20th, the White House submitted a Congressional budget request that included funding for the “potential needs of Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries,” given that the “crisis could well result in displacement across border and higher regional humanitarian needs.”
Resistance from Egypt and Jordan has thwarted, for now, Israel’s effort to enlist their help in trying to “thin” out Gaza. Accordingly, the Israeli army is settling for exterminating as many Palestinians as possible, and making the death camp uninhabitable for those who survive.
White House support for Israel’s war on Palestinian civilians goes beyond any act of US barbarism in recent memory. Complicit in mass murder, Biden and his principals are also engaging in unprecedented levels of deceit, from lying about civilian hospitals to pretending that the perpetrator of a genocide is in fact the victim.
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https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/28/patrick-lawrence-to-retrieve-history/
To Retrieve History
I am still reading, at this late date, that Russian soldiers kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children early in Washington’s proxy war in that perversely cursed country and brought them to Russia to teach them to hate Ukraine. You would think The New York Times and other Western media would drop this topic, given evidence of this narrative, when not so stupid it is embarrassing, is flimsy such that it requires quotation marks: It is “evidence,” not more.
The Times’s reliably Russophobic correspondent, Carlotta Gall, is now down to quoting Lyudmyla Denisova, who was fired as the Kyiv regime’s senior human rights official last year because her accounts of Russian soldiers raping infants were so ridiculous as to discredit the Kyiv regime’s propaganda op. Gall’s report also relies on the Reckoning Project—without telling readers what this outfit is. Let me finish the work Gall left undone: The Reckoning Project is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. It is, pulling back the curtain, a Central Intelligence Agency front.
I do not customarily link to junk this transparently dishonest, but I do so here so readers can get a taste of how inexcusably The Times and all the pilot fish that follow it have left behind their responsibilities as media in favor of “perception management.” The year now passing marks a new low in this line. (As did the previous year and the year before that, it must be said.)
I do not know with certainty what went on last year in the matter of children removed from battle zones—this for the simple reason it is impossible to know the facts of the case on the basis of what Western media report. Gall, icing on this cake, does not quote a single Russian official and appears to have interviewed none. But, given how open Russian officials have been about this program, I do not see that we can summarily dismiss their many-times-repeated explanation when they say the intent was to keep children—a lot of them living in orphanages or on the street—out of harm’s way. This is not, after all, the Israel Defense Forces.
A new year is about to begin. What do we see as we peer across the great divide on our calendars into the other side of midnight, Dec. 31, 2023? As the case of Ukrainian children makes plain, the first thing we see is that we cannot see very well, so thoroughly have our media blurred our vision. “The only thing that can save the world,” Allen Ginsberg remarked in 1973, “is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world.” This seems as true and urgent now as it was 50 years ago. Let us, then, look through the blur to see as best we can.
The Kyiv regime and its backers in Washington and the European capitals have lost their war against the Russian Federation, we can now read. But only obliquely, as this truth must be obscured. In the service of this obscuring, the U.S. will continue indefinitely to squander military aid to the extent Congress allows, as more human lives are profligately wasted. In the meantime, we must read again about the children and about how “Putin’s Russia,” or simply “Putin,” failed in its or his objective of taking over the whole of Ukraine. And we must read again and again, of course, that the prominent presence of neo–Nazis in the Ukrainian military and up and down the regime’s ranks is a fiction the Russians conjured to justify their military operation.
All of this amounts to a burying of truths. And the greatest of these interred truths is that the Russian military intervention was provoked—systematically, with intent, over a period of many years. The war began when Russian forces crossed the Russian–Ukrainian border two years ago come February: With this lie, eight years of the Kyiv regime’s shelling of its own people is also buried. Three decades during which Moscow attempted to negotiate a post–Cold War security settlement along its western flank with Europe: Those years are buried. The draft treaties Russia sent Westward in December 2021: You will never hear of them again.
I would say it is the same in the case of Israel except that it is worse. Israel has already lost the war in Gaza—the war that is not, in fact, a war but a murder spree. It will succeed tactically, on the ground, but its strategic defeat is a fait accompli. It is strong language, but I will use it: These months of barbarity, with more to come, mark out Israel as a failed state. It is a chaotic entity that depends on violence toward others for its existence, and the violence depends on an irresponsible sponsor. It is inherently, institutionally discriminatory and adopts the apartheid system from white South Africa.
On the domestic side, Israel is riven with centrifugal divisions that the Gaza crisis has temporarily pushed to the background as the IDF hands out automatic rifles to any (Jewish) Israeli who lines up for one. Its leadership will destroy the judiciary’s independence the first chance it gets, and, as argued previously in this space, when the judiciary goes, failed-state status is typically not far behind.
We read about this, some of it, but, once again, only obliquely. And never, but in independent and non–Western media, do we read about the 75 years of abuse, imprisonments, torture, forced removals and all else that preceded and indeed produced the events of October 7. That is all buried now. The 1948 Nakba is very rarely even mentioned now and is never cast as pertinent to the present. History started not quite three months ago.
If ever an emperor had no clothes, it is apartheid Israel as it parades across the West as the innocent victim of “terrorists” who have no cause.
During his controversial presidency of the Islamic Republic, 2005–2013, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a right-wing populist who spoke for Iran’s unmodernized millions, famously asserted that Israel had no place on a map of Middle East nations. I mention this because I do not want to be misunderstood on this following point. Does Israel as currently constituted and as it currently conducts itself have a right to exist? Does it honor the responsibilities that come with nationhood? I do not have answers to questions so complex as these, but it seems to me time, as the killing goes on in Gaza and as Israelis are radicalized rightward, to pose them.
To rotate the gaze briefly, I wonder if there is another nation on earth whose circumstances are so blurred as America’s on the eve of 2024. The judiciary, in plain sight, is even further than Israel’s along on the path to fatal compromise. But we must not mention this. If that preposterous Colorado Supreme Court decision has anything to tell us, it is that those opposed to a presumed presidential candidate are abusing the law—not superior ideas or policies, not the preferences of voters—to keep him out of office. This cannot be mentioned, either—not in the polite company of the liberal authoritarians responsible for these abuses.
Atop all this sits a president whose obvious mental incompetence is spoken of only when the topic cannot be avoided and most of the time apologetically. Joe Biden is just short of his “I am not a crook” moment, and corporate media now take to saying this for him. Since he seems to be incapable of competing for his own reelection, the corporate press and the broadcasters are apparently prepared to campaign for him.
I describe a world we have made of blur, of denial, of erasure. How shall we respond to this circumstance, once we have understood it?
It has been said many times that those without a past have no future. Or that without a past one is marooned in an eternal present with no prospect other than repetition of the what is, as I call it. There is the famous line from Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, quoted so often it is cliché, but there seems no avoiding it given its merciless pertinence to our condition: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
This is the struggle it is essential to undertake in 2024, given where 2023 drops us off. It is to be waged on two fronts, it seems to me. Straight off the top, there is protecting the present from blur and the burial grounds. Events, for anyone wishing to escape the eternal present just mentioned, must be represented as they are, for what they are, and for what they mean. I suppose I advocate simple vigilance as I propose this, and good enough. Plain, clear language is our best friend in this.
Independent journalists, the best of them, are vigilant in this way. But it takes a collective effort to succeed. There is the not-fooling people and the not-being-fooled. We owe this to ourselves, to others in the world, not least Palestinians, and also to those who will record the events of our time when they become passages in history: We owe it to the future, in other words. It seems to me we are getting there in this cause. If comment threads and altogether the steadily increasing readership of independent publications are any indication, our collective capacity to transcend the Big Blur is growing.
Protecting the present is the way into protecting history. At this point we must think in terms of retrieving history from the slag heap of erasure, of coerced forgetting, of coerced never-knowing. We need our history, all histories, to be told well precisely as Palestinians, to take the largest example, need theirs so urgently now. If guarding the present from distortion and worse is how we begin to retrieve history, retrieving history is how we honor the present and begin to build a different future.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the exquisitely principled German pastor who gave his life to resisting the Reich, wrote, in The Cost of Discipleship, of cheap grace and its opposite, costly grace. “Cheap grace means grace sold in the market like cheapjacks’ wares,” he wrote. “Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing.” As Ray McGovern told me when he introduced me to Bonhoeffer, cheap grace is grace without putting your neck on the line.
Of costly grace, Bonhoeffer said simply, “Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price.”
I identify retrieving history as the project to which we dedicate ourselves in 2024. Readers may have other ideas as to how to think of 2024 and what to do in the year to come. However we look forward, Bonhoeffer, Kundera, Ginsberg: Shall we include the thoughts of these three in ours?
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