https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2024/02/03/israels-starvation-strategy/13/
Israel’s Starvation Strategy
Israel seeks to discredit the ICJ and eradicate the Palestinian population through the dispersion of 2 million Palestinians worldwide, diverting attention from its actions. Starvation and mass immigration are proposed strategies.
It’s not a coincidence that the attacks on UNRWA took place after the ICJ ruling. Israel is trying to discredit the International Court of Justice, and one way of doing that is by rubbishing UNWRA. But UNWRA has fulfilled the heroic role of providing health, education and all other services to the Palestinian refugees since 1948. And it’s really heartbreaking that Israeli propaganda is now demonizing UNWRA and leading some countries to cut off aid. So, my sympathy and support is entirely on the side of UNWRA, and I hope it can long continue to play the vital role it has always played in supporting the Palestinian victims of Israeli aggression. Avi Shlaim, Israeli historian, You Tube
UNRWA provides food and flour distribution for the entire 2.2 million population of Gaza. Defunding UNRWA will lead to mass starvation and death.
Here’s your Zionist quiz for the day: Why did Israel launch a full-blown media blitz on a United Nations relief agency (UNRWA) on the same day that the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICJ) released its historic genocide ruling?
- —To divert attention from the fact that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza
- —To inform the public that new intelligence had serviced revealing Hamas involvement in the United Nations Relief and Works Agency
- —To assure people everywhere that Israel’s main concern is fighting terrorism
- —To activate the final phase of their ethnic cleansing operation
If you answered “4” then pat yourself on the back because that is the right answer. Of course, it’s also true that Israel wanted to divert attention from the ICJ’s announcement, but that pales in comparison to the launching of the final phase of its ethnic cleansing operation. This is the real coup de grâce, the final death blow to the two-state solution and a practical remedy to Israel’s nagging demographic problem. This is also the critical puzzle piece that makes sense of the last 100-plus days of relentless bombardment, airstrikes and other forms of state terror. It’s as if Israel is boldly laying down its cards so the entire world can see the strategy it plans to employ to eradicate the native population and fulfill the Zionist dream of a Jewish state from the river to the sea.
And what might that strategy be?
To disperse 2 million Palestinians to the four corners of the earth via mass immigration.
But, how will they do that, after all, haven’t a number of countries already refused to take the Palestinians?
Indeed, they have, but that is before the (soon to-be-published) photos of starving women and children flooded social media sites around the world generating an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy for the beleaguered population. And as public sympathy leads to widespread outrage, more and more people will demand that their governments take action to relieve the suffering through mass immigration. This is how Israel intends to rid itself of its native population and create Zionist Valhalla, a Jewish majority into perpetuity.
This is why Israel has launched its ferocious attack on UNWRA, because UNWRA—more than any other humanitarian organization operating in the Middle East—helps to keep the Palestinians fed and housed which is at-odds with Israeli explicit intentions. The last thing Israel wants is for the Palestinians to establish a massive refugee camp near Rafah that will balloon in size in years to come. That phenom has already taken place in both Jordan and Lebanon where nearly 3 million Palestinians still languish in refugee camps (75 years after the creation of the Israeli state) and are still determined to return home sometime in the future. That is not what Israel wants. Israel wants the Palestinians to ‘vanish into thin air’ which is why they want them dispersed around the world so even the thought of returning home, will never enter their minds.
So, while Israeli leaders do not relish the reputational damage they are experiencing due to their treatment of the Palestinians, they are willing to endure it in order to achieve their broader strategic objectives which are the complete eradication of the Arab population and the strengthening of a permanent Jewish majority.
Israel’s overall strategy was best summarized by Daniella Weiss, a former mayor of a West Bank settlement, who said the following in a short interview on Tik Tok:
“They will move. They will move. The Arabs will move….. So, we don’t give them food, we don’t give the Arabs anything, and they will have to leave. The world will accept them.” (Middle East Eye, Tik Tok)
That’s Israel’s plan in a nutshell.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/02/05/however-bad-you-think-israel-is-its-worse/
However Bad You Think Israel Is, It’s Worse
So it turns out the IDF has been running a Telegram channel featuring homemade snuff films in which Gazans are brutally murdered by Israeli forces, captioned with celebrations of the gore and pain therein like “Burning their mother… You won’t believe the video we got! You can hear their bones crunch.” The IDF had previously denied any association with the channel, but Haaretz now reports that it was directly run by an IDF psychological warfare unit.
This is one of those many, many times where Israel is so awful that at first you’re not sure what you’re looking at. You think you must be misreading the report. Then you read it again and go “Oh wow, that’s SO much worse than I would have guessed.”
However bad you think Israel is, you can always be sure that information will come out later that proves it’s even worse.
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Tucker Carlson has been spotted in Moscow, generating speculation that he’s there to interview President Vladimir Putin, and the liberal commentariat are losing their minds about it.
There’s no valid basis for westerners to object to Putin being interviewed by a western pundit. There’s no moral basis because Israeli officials have had unfettered access to a wildly sympathetic western press throughout four months of administering an active genocide. There’s no basis on the grounds that it hurts US information interests, because that would be admitting that US information interests depend on hiding information from the public about matters as basic as what a foreign leader thinks about his own actions, and essentially acknowledging that the western media are supposed to function as propaganda services for US military and intelligence agencies.
Every possible objection is also a confession about what the US empire and its media actually are.
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Americans: healthcare please
US government: Sorry did you say bomb Syria, Iraq and Yemen in facilitation of an active genocide?
Americans: no, healthcare
US government: Alright you drive a hard bargain but let’s go bomb Syria, Iraq and Yemen in facilitation of an active genocide.
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Biden isn’t technically lying when he says the US does not seek conflict in the middle east. The US seeks DOMINATION in the middle east, and would prefer to receive that domination willingly from submissive subjects. Only when middle easterners refuse to submit is there conflict.
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The US has never done anything good for the middle east. All it’s brought to the region is a bunch of murderous military operations and the nonstop murderous military operation that is the state of Israel.
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Setting up a bunch of military bases in countries on the other side of the planet and then going to war with anyone who tries to kick them out is pretty much the exact opposite of how a sane and ethical military would be used.
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US foreign policy is essentially one big long war against disobedience. Bombing, regime changing, starving and destabilizing any population anywhere on earth who dares to insist on its own self-sovereignty instead of letting itself be absorbed into the folds of the global empire.
They call different parts of it the Israel-Hamas War, the Iraq War, the War on Terror, but really it’s all the same war: the war on disobedience. One long operation to brutalize the global population into obedience and submission, year after year, decade after decade.
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When it comes to Israel the main difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives support Israel because they like it when Muslims get murdered while liberals support Israel because mumble mumble something something antisemitism Israel has a right to defend itself but we have serious concerns about the humanitarian HEY LOOK OVER THERE IT’S TRUMP!
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If the Gaza genocide had happened pre-internet it would’ve been a fringe issue hardly anyone knew about. The western press would have been able to get away with exponentially more cover-ups of Israeli crimes, western politicians would’ve been able to get away with way more lies about what’s really happening, Israeli officials would have been far less careful about their statements of genocidal intent in their own media, and the IDF would’ve been vastly more blatant and obvious about its extermination campaign.
It’s only because normal people are getting eyes into what’s really happening that this issue is subject to worldwide outcry and condemnation that has placed the empire on the back foot. The political/media class never does the right thing because it wants to, it does the right thing when it is forced to by normal human beings with healthy consciences. The fate of humanity rests on the ability of ordinary people to freely circulate truth.
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https://brownstone.org/articles/the-greatest-trick-big-brother-ever-pulled/
The Greatest Trick Big Brother Ever Pulled
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” is a quote generally attributed to Charles Baudelaire – or possibly Keyser Söze depending on who you ask on the internet. Something similar can be said about Big Brother.
When you think about what our emerging surveillance state will look like, you think 1984. You imagine East Germany powered by Google and Amazon. You recall your favorite dystopian sci-fi film – or maybe horror stories of China’s social credit system. Thoughts of a frustrated middle-aged police chief from a mid-sized Midwestern town attempting to procure security cameras with innovative new features probably don’t come to mind. You definitely don’t think of a guy in a lawn chair jotting down the license plate numbers of passing vehicles in a notebook. And that’s partly how the surveillance state is going to emerge as it creeps its way into one small town at a time.
Whether a surveillance state is the end goal is hard to say. The police chief of Pawnee, Indiana probably isn’t plotting the development of his own mini-Oceania. But, 18,000-plus mini-Oceanias operating across multiple platforms with varying degrees of integration, both locally and nationally, is undoubtedly the direction in which we are heading as salespeople peddle shiny new surveillance gadgets to cities big and small, making often unverified but intuitively appealing claims of how their devices will decrease crime or prove to be useful investigative tools.
Facial recognition tends to be the surveillance gadget that receives the most attention these days. You’ve seen it in movies and maybe feel some unease over visions of government agents sitting in a penumbrous room illuminated only by the faint glow of countless monitors with little boxes tracking the faces of every person walking down a busy city street. Likely, by now, you’ve also probably heard of facial recognition being used for relatively petty purposes or leading to incidents in which innocent people were harassed or arrested because a program made a mistake. Maybe you’ve even been following the efforts to ban the technology.
Yet, other surveillance gadgets that aren’t quite as sexy or as prevalent in pop culture manage to remain under the radar of even the most privacy-conscious as they are promoted through law enforcement peer referral programs organized by surveillance gadget companies seeking to have their devices in every town in America.
Some, such as gunshot detection devices, may seem relatively benign, although there have been concerns they might pick up bits of conversation on quiet streets. Others, such as cell site simulators, are quite a bit more intrusive as they can be used by law enforcement to monitor the location of people through their cell phones, as well as collect metadata from their calls and a considerable amount of other information.
Automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, can be used to log a person’s movements through the license plates of their vehicles. Given the exponential increase in their use over the past few years and the ease with which data from the cameras of some vendors are integrated, they also pose a threat to privacy on par with facial recognition and cell site simulators.
Often positioned on street lights, traffic lights, independent structures, or police vehicles, ALPRs are a type of camera that captures the license plate and other identifying information of passing vehicles before comparing the information in real time to “hot lists” of vehicles actively being sought by law enforcement and transmitting the information to a searchable database. ALPRs sold by some companies are even said to be able to assess a car’s driving patterns to determine whether the person behind the wheel is “driving like a criminal.”
Depending on the vendor and the particulars of their contract with a municipality or private entity leasing the cameras from them, the information the cameras collect is maintained usually for thirty days but sometimes for a period of months or even years.
Although on the surface this may sound relatively unintrusive, leading to places such as Nashville approving ALPRs while rejecting facial recognition, what this ultimately does is create a searchable database for the timestamped rough location of any individual who regularly travels using a single vehicle – in other words, most Americans especially those living outside of major cities.
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s national office, who has written extensively on matters pertaining to technology, privacy, and surveillance, stated in a 2023 phone interview, “There’s no question that if you get enough license plate readers and you got one on every block, that put together…can create a GPS-tracker-like-record of my movement and even if there’s, you know, only one every ten miles and [I’m] driving around the country, I’m driving from Texas to California or what have you, that can be very revealing as well.”
Subsequently, organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group, and the Brennan Center for Justice, a self-described “non-partisan law and policy institute,” have expressed concerns that the devices could be used to track the activities of protesters and activists.
If ALPRs were as prevalent during lockdowns as they are now, it’s not difficult to imagine at least some governors or mayors using them to track and reprimand those who dared violate Corona law.
Furthermore, sometimes the devices do make mistakes, leading to claims by individuals and families that they were psychologically traumatized after they were pulled over, held at gunpoint, searched, and handcuffed by police essentially due to a computer error.
As for the benefits they provide in terms of making communities safer, quantitative data demonstrating their success tends to be lacking.
The University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights released a report in December 2022 indicating hit rates for ALPRs, or the percentage of license plates photographed by ALPRs within a municipality that are associated with a vehicle being sought by law enforcement, tend to fall below 0.1%, meaning a lot of data have to be collected on a lot of law-abiding citizens in order for the devices to be of any use. Moreover, even when they do aid law enforcement in finding a wanted vehicle, the end results still can be somewhat underwhelming.
The University of Illinois’ Community Data Clinic, for example, in a preliminary report dated Fall 2023, indicated that of 54 instances law enforcement in Champaign, one of the two cities U of I calls home, accessed data from their ALPRs within a particular period, only 31 of those instances likely involved felonies, most of which did not involve a firearm. The University of Illinois report went on to indicate only ten of those instances led to an arrest or an arrest warrant and only two of those arrests led to formal charges.
As demonstrated at an October 2021 town hall regarding ALPRs in Urbana, IL, Champaign’s sister city, even proponents of the devices struggle to produce a single study showing that the cameras deter or prevent gun violence, which is often one of the main reasons communities turn to ALPRs in the first place.
However, when vendor reps and local law enforcement are trying to gain approval from city councils and assuage the fears of wary citizens, the surveillance potential of the devices, along with their questionable effectiveness and the devastating consequences that can follow when one makes a mistake, tend not to be what they lead with.
Instead, proponents emphasize how common they are in surrounding cities, cite anecdotal evidence of their utility, and try to present ALPRs as non-threatening, normal, and perhaps even a little old-fashioned.
You have nothing to worry about, you’re told. The town down the road brought them in six months back. Chief Jones over there said they helped solve that murder from the news. And, by the way, they’re not really that much different from a concerned citizen just keeping an eye on things.
At the town hall in Urbana, for example, then-police chief, Bryant Seraphin, worked to dismiss the notion that ALPRs actually pose a threat to privacy or even constitute a surveillance tool.
“They [ALPRs] are not surveillance cameras,” stated Seraphin early in the event. “I cannot pan, tilt, [or] zoom them. There’s no live looking to see what’s happening at the corner…” he explained.
Repeatedly, he emphasized that ALPRs do not capture any information about the person driving a car or automatically link to information about the person to whom a vehicle is registered. Their ubiquity in the area was accentuated. Supposed success stories were shared.
To allay any remaining notion that there might be something scary about ALPRs, Seraphin described them with a folksy metaphor: “One of the things that I’ve talked about with these things is that if you pictured somebody sitting in a lawn chair writing down every plate that went by, the date, and the time when they wrote ‘red Toyota ABC123’, and then they would make a phone call and check the databases and then hang up and then go on to the next one – that’s what [an ALPR] does automatically and it can do it over and over again…with incredible speed.”
Yet, when Anita Chan, the director of the University of Illinois Community Data Clinic, proceeded to raise concerns regarding “the potential violation of civil liberties” and how a license plate alone is sufficient for the police to not just find out “where you live and where you work but also…who potentially your friends are, what religious affiliation you might have, essentially where you get medical services…[and] suss out essentially who’s traveling and where,” Seraphin acknowledged all this is possible. However, he assured her with a frustrated chuckle, ALPRs simply provide a notebook that would only be referenced when investigating serious crimes.
By the same logic, facial recognition simply provides a notebook as well. As do cell site simulators. As do any surveillance device. Yet, there is a fundamental question of whether such a notebook should exist. Does the chief of police in Urbana or the sheriff in Pawnee need a notebook containing your approximate location three Thursdays ago at 8:15pm, as well as a record of who attended last week’s political rally, in order to solve a murder? Should he be allowed to keep such a notebook if it might help solve an extra murder in his town each year? If the answer is yes, then what are the limits to the tools he and his department should be afforded?
Furthermore, there is also something a little off about the disarming metaphor of a guy who spends his days sitting around in a lawn chair jotting down the license plate numbers of passing vehicles. Something a little insidious. Something that perhaps Anita Chan was piking up on.
One guy in a lawn chair jotting down license plate numbers is a nosy neighbor, maybe even a neighborhood crank, but not someone to whom you would pay much attention. When he starts following you around though to the point of knowing who your friends are, where you worship, and when you go to the doctor, he kind of becomes a stalker. But, when he develops the ability to gather this kind of information on everyone, he starts to develop a level of omnipresence and omniscience with which no one should be comfortable – which may be why you’re told he’s just a guy in a lawn chair.
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