https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2024/02/28/whos-brain-dead-now-macron/15/
Who’s Brain-Dead Now, Macron?
French President Emmanuel Macron wants to send NATO ground troops into Ukraine to defeat Russia.
Only a delusional fool could make such a crass proposal which goes to show that Macron is brain-dead. NATO troops deployed to fight Russian forces would mean an all-out war, which most likely would spiral into a nuclear conflagration.
Ironically, the French leader made headlines a while back when he labeled the US-led NATO alliance as being “brain-dead”. He’s now competing for the same epithet.
When Macron made those harsh remarks about NATO in an interview with the Economist in November 2019, some observers thought that he was being intelligently critical of the transatlantic military organization and how it was no longer fit for purpose in the modern age.
But, no, Macron wasn’t offering constructive criticism of NATO or American leadership. He was simply being a conceited charlatan, trying to promote himself as the “strong leader” of Europe and peddling his hobby horse of building up a European army by appearing to bad mouth NATO.
This week, the former Rothschild banker was at it again, indulging in his grandiose fantasies of leading the rest of Europe.
Macron hosted 25 European heads of state or government at the Conference in Support of Ukraine. In the grandeur of the Elysee Palace, he warned that Russia “must not win the war in Ukraine” otherwise, he claimed, the whole of Europe would succumb to Russian aggression.
This is reckless and dangerous fantasy by the French president indulging in the most unhinged Russophobia. Moscow has categorically stated that it has no interest in anything beyond denazifying the NATO-sponsored regime in Kiev and protecting its national security.
To offset such a purported nightmarish outcome of Russian tanks rolling over Europe, Macron told European leaders that they should not rule out deploying NATO ground troops to assist the Kiev regime.
“Nothing should be excluded. We will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war,” the French president said in front of approving European leaders.
Among the conference attendees were German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and British Foreign Minister David Cameron. Germany and France earlier this month signed bilateral security pacts with Ukraine, which could be invoked for sending military forces officially to prosecute the U.S.-led proxy war against Russia.
NATO officers in the guise of private mercenaries are already heavily participating in the Ukraine conflict against Russia. Last month, more than 60 French servicemen were killed in a Russian missile strike near the Ukrainian city of Kharkov.
French media reported of the event in Paris this week: “The conference [in Paris] signaled Macron’s eagerness to present himself as a European champion of Ukraine’s cause, amid growing fears that American support could wane in the coming months.”
As well as calling for the deployment of NATO troops, Macron also pledged to send more long-range missiles to the Kiev regime for “deep strikes” in Russia.
French cruise missiles have already been used to strike the Russian territory of Crimea. Now the French leader wants a NeoNazi regime to have the capability to hit deep into Russia. How much longer can Moscow tolerate this outrageous provocation without reciprocal strikes?
No doubt the French president sees an opportunity for self-aggrandizement. Macron is obsessed with notions of his self-importance and restoring France’s international image to some imaginary glorious past.
With the Americans squabbling in Congress about whether to send Ukraine another $60 billion in military aid and with the possible election of NATO-skeptic Donald Trump to the White House later this year, Macron sees an opening to show Western leadership by stepping up Europe’s support for Ukraine.
Macron’s egotism and delusions of grandeur are liable to start World War Three.
He is doing all this by telling blatant lies about the conflict in Ukraine.
Macron is indulging the Kiev puppet president Vladimir Zelensky in pretending that Ukraine has a chance of defeating Russia. Zelensky also addressed the conference in Paris via video link and made his tiresome appeal for more weapons. He asserted with barefaced lies that Ukrainian military deaths amounted to 31,000 troops since the conflict erupted two years ago. The most realistic figure is that over 400,000 and perhaps as many as 500,000 Ukrainian military have been killed by far superior Russian forces.
That’s the implicit admission made by Macron. Why would NATO troops be required in Ukraine if it was not for replacing Ukrainian ranks that have been devastated?
Macron justifies his lies by compounding the more outrageous lie that Russia is intent on invading other European nations once it defeats the Ukrainian army.
This bogeyman version of geopolitics ignores the reality that the United States and NATO fomented a proxy war against Russia using a NeoNazi regime.
Macron wants to start World War Three based on sheer lies and vanity. He’s not only brain-dead. He’s soul-dead too.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/conscious-unconscionable-starving-gaza/5851072
Conscious and Unconscionable: The Starving of Gaza
The starvation regime continues unabated as Israel continues its campaign in the Gaza Strip. One of the six provisional measures ordered by the International Court Justice entailed taking “immediate and effective measures” to protect the Palestinian populace in the Gaza Strip from risk of genocide by ensuring the supply of humanitarian assistance and basic services.
In its case against Israel, South Africa argued, citing various grounds, that Israel’s purposeful denial of humanitarian aid to Palestinians could fall within the UN Genocide Convention as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
A month has elapsed since the ICJ order, after which Israel was meant to report back on compliance. But, as Amnesty International reports, Israel continues “to disregard its obligation as the occupying power to ensure the basic needs of Palestinians in Gaza are met.”
The organisation’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, Heba Morayef, gives a lashing summary of that conduct.
“Not only has Israel created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, but it is also displaying callous indifference to the fate of Gaza’s population by creating conditions which the ICJ has said placed them at imminent risk of genocide.” Israel, Morayef continues to state, had “woefully failed to provide for Gazans’ basic needs” and had “been blocking and impeding the passage of sufficient aid into the Gaza strip, in particular to the north which is virtually inaccessible, in a clear show of contempt for the ICJ ruling and in flagrant violation of its obligation to prevent genocide.”
The humanitarian accounting on this score is grim. Since the ICJ order, the number of aid trucks entering Gaza has precipitously declined. Within three weeks, it had fallen by a third: an average of 146 a day were coming in three weeks prior; afterwards, the numbers had fallen to about 105. Prior to the October 7 assault by Hamas, approximately 500 trucks were entering the strip on a daily basis.
The criminally paltry aid to the besieged Palestinians is even too much for some Israeli protest groups which have formed with one single issue in mind: preventing any aid from being sent into Gaza. As a result, closures have taken place at Kerem Shalom due to protests and clashes with security forces.
Their support base may seem to be small and peppered by affiliates from the Israeli Religious Zionism party of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, but an Israeli Democracy Institute poll conducted in February found that 68% of Jewish respondents opposed the transfer of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza. Rachel Touitou of Tzav 9, a group formed in December with that express purpose in mind, stated her reasoning as such: “You cannot expect the country to fight its enemy and feed it at the same time.”
Hardly subtle, but usefully illustrative of the attitude best reflected by the blood curdling words of Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, who declared during the campaign that his country’s armed forces were “fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly” in depriving them of electricity, food and fuel.
In December 2023, the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding, among other things, that the warring parties “allow and facilitate the use of all available routes to and throughout the entire Gaza Strip, including border crossings”. Direct routes were also to be prioritised. To date, Israel has refused to permit aid through other crossings.
In February, the Global Nutrition Cluster reported that “the nutrition situation of women and children in Gaza is worsening everywhere, but especially in Northern Gaza where 1 in 6 children are acutely malnourished and an estimated 3% face the most severe form of wasting and require immediate treatment.”
The organisation’s report makes ugly reading. Over 90% of children between 6 to 23 months along with pregnant and breastfeeding women face “severe food poverty”, with the food supplied being “of the lowest nutritional value and from two or fewer food groups.” At least 90% of children under the age of 5 are burdened with one or more infectious diseases, while 70% have suffered from diarrhea over the previous two weeks. Safe and clean water, already a problem during the 16-year blockade, is now in even shorter supply, with 81% of households having access to less than one litre per person per day.
Reduced to such conditions of monumental and raw desperation, hellish scenes of Palestinians swarming around aid convoys were bound to manifest. On February 29, Gaza City witnessed one such instance, along with a lethal response from Israeli troops. In the ensuing violence, some 112 people were killed, adding to a Palestinian death toll that has already passed 30,000. While admitting to opening fire on the crowd, the IDF did not miss a chance to paint their victims as disorderly savages, with “dozens” being “killed and injured from pushing, trampling and being run over by the trucks.” The acting director of Al-Awda Hospital, Dr. Mohammed Salha, in noting the admission of some 161 wounded patients, suggested that gun fire had played its relevant role, given that most of those admitted suffered from gunshot wounds.
If Israel’s intention had been to demonstrate some good will in averting any insinuation that genocide was taking place, let alone a systematic policy of collective punishment against the Palestinian population, little evidence of it has been shown. If anything, the suspicions voiced by South Africa and other critics aghast at the sheer ferocity of the campaign are starting to seem utterly plausible in their horror.
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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2024-03-01/corbyn-british-public-smeared-gaza/
First it was Corbyn. Now the whole British public is being smeared over Gaza
Under cover of fear for MPs’ safety, Labour leader Keir Starmer has helped the ruling Tories paint as villains anyone opposed to Israel’s slaughter of children
For the best part of a decade now, the British establishment has been weaponising antisemitism against critics of Israel, claiming as its biggest scalp the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
He lost the 2019 general election – and stepped down as leader – amid a barrage of smears that he had indulged, if not stoked, antisemitism in the party’s wider ranks.
Corbyn is the only major British party leader to have prioritised the rights of Palestinians over Israel’s oppression of them. He was finally drummed out of the parliamentary party by his successor, Keir Starmer, in 2020 for pointing out that antisemitism in Labour had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons”.
Last week, that same establishment campaign plumbed new depths. Now it is not just the left wing of the Labour Party – traditionally critical of Israel for its decades of oppressing Palestinians – facing demonisation. Large parts of the British public are finding themselves being smeared too – and for the same reason.
The inciting cause is a parliamentary crisis precipitated last week by Starmer’s refusal to identify Israel’s slaughter and starvation of the 2.3 million people of Gaza as “collective punishment” – a war crime.
The House of Commons speaker, who is supposed to be strictly neutral, defied convention to allow Starmer to water down a ceasefire motion on Gaza promoted by the Scottish Nationalists, all so he could avert a rebellion in his party’s ranks.
But while a bitter row ensued between Labour and the ruling Tories over the abuse of parliamentary protocol, it also brought the two sides together on a separate matter.
For different reasons, they exploited the crisis over the ceasefire vote to imply, without a shred of evidence, that demonstrations against Israel’s flagrant, months-long atrocities in Gaza constituted not just antisemitic behaviour but a threat to the democratic order and the safety of MPs.
As a result, the consensus of the English political and media establishment has swiftly shifted onto even more dangerous, and anti-democratic, terrain than the earlier antisemitism smears.
Wilfully deaf
According to a recent survey, two-thirds of Britons support a ceasefire in Gaza – with many of them blaming Israel for killing and maiming at least 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza and imposing an aid blockade that is gradually starving the rest of the population.
Only 13 percent of the public share the two main parties’ view that Israel is justified in continuing to take military action.
For months, many hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of London each week to demand that the UK stop its complicity in what the World Court ruled recently is plausibly a genocide being committed by Israel.
Britain is supplying Israel with arms, giving it diplomatic cover at the United Nations, and has effectively joined Israel in its aid blockade. The UK has frozen funds to the UN’s main aid agency, Unrwa, a last lifeline to the enclave.
But those demanding that international law be upheld – and castigating the political class for failing to do the same – are now finding themselves demonised as potential terrorists.
Already, the talk on both sides of the Commons – and in the media – is of the need for new police powers, curbs on the right of the public to protest, and further security measures to keep politicians shielded from the people they are supposed to represent.
This week, a committee of MPs used pressures placed on the police to manage regular mass marches in London against the slaughter in Gaza as grounds for introducing tighter limits on the right to protest.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took up the refrain, calling for greater police powers against what he described as “mob rule” that was supposedly “replacing democratic rule”.
Separately, he insinuated that this so-called “mob” – those troubled by the killing of at least 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza over the past five months – may not “belong here“, in Britain. Notably, he made these remarks during an address to the Community Security Trust, which was at the forefront of promoting the smearing of Corbyn and his supporters as antisemites.
But the fearmongering is far from restricted to the ruling Tories.
Labour’s shadow international development secretary, Lisa Nandy, publicly complained at the weekend about members of the public shouting “genocide” at her, linking it to the greater security measures she has been taking.
Opposition to Israel’s behaviour is a majority view among the public, but neither major party is prepared to listen or respond. Both are wilfully deaf to public concern that Britain needs to stop actively enabling one of the greatest crimes in living memory.
As Labour MP Diane Abbott, a Corbyn ally and long-time target of death threats, noted, Britain is taking “the first step towards a police state“.
Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza is tearing the mask off Westminster. By the day, Britain is looking more overtly like an oligarchy.
Israel partisans
The full import of last week’s events – when the Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle did a grubby backroom deal with Starmer, effectively sabotaging the Scottish National Party’s ceasefire motion – has been obscured by subsequent politicking and point-scoring.
The real story is to be found in the aftermath.
The pair proferred a dangerous cover story to justify Starmer’s determined efforts to avoid naming Israel’s egregious violations of international law as “collective punishment”.
Hoyle apologised for breaking with long-established convention and allowing Starmer’s watered-down amendment. But he justified his move on the grounds that Labour MPs would have been put in danger if they had been forced to reject the SNP ceasefire motion on their leader’s orders.
He declared: “I don’t ever want to go through the situation of picking up a phone to find that a friend, of whatever side, has been murdered by terrorists.”
The speaker produced no evidence to support this unprecedented claim, one that sounded like it was intended to bring to mind the scenes of the Capitol building being invaded by Trump supporters in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.
Notably, both Starmer and Hoyle are among the many MPs on each side of the aisle who have consistently and proudly demonstrated partisanship towards Israel.
Large numbers of MPs continue to belong to their parties’ Friends of Israel groups, including Starmer, even as the international human rights community has reached a consensus that Israel is an apartheid state – and now that it is committing mass slaughter and starving Gaza’s population.
Hoyle even took time out in November to head off to Israel – now on trial for genocide at the world’s highest court – to be briefed by the very army doing that genocide. He was accompanied by Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, who has repeatedly sought to justify the slaughter.
Starmer himself trumpeted the fact that, before drafting his amendment to the SNP motion, he had called Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, for advice. That is the same Herzog who had earlier argued that Gaza’s entire population, including its children, were legitimate targets for Israel’s military attacks on the enclave.
Moral panic
During the Corbyn years, opposition to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians was denounced as antisemitism.
And in just the same way, reality is being turned on its head once again. Now, the call for an end to Israel’s slaughter of children is being variously denounced as extremism, an attack on democracy, and the stifling of free speech.
Last week, as the Tories dogpiled Hoyle for tearing up the parliamentary rulebook, Sunak warned that the lesson was “we should never let extremists intimidate us into changing the way in which parliament works”.
What could he possibly mean? That the right to protest could not be tolerated within a parliamentary democracy? That free speech was now equivalent to “intimidation”?
Starmer has opened the floodgates to a moral panic in which the people of Gaza are forgotten, except as bit players in a smear campaign to silence those calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal bombing and starvation policies.
In the current climate, it was largely unremarkable that Paul Sweeney, a Labour member of the Scottish parliament, made headlines accusing Gaza protesters of “storming” his offices and “terrifying” his staff – until Scottish police investigated and found no evidence for his claims.
The police described the demonstration as “peaceful”, an assessment confirmed by a reporter for the Scotsman newspaper who was present.
Senior journalists are sticking their oars in too.
The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg claimed the dangers extended beyond politicians to journalists like herself. The current crisis, she suggested, could be traced back to Corbyn’s supporters, who were wont to “boo and jeer” as she and the rest of the media promoted evidence-free claims that Labour was beset by antisemitism.
True charlatans
Sudden concern about the dangers caused by public protest against the slaughter of Palestinians should be ridiculed as the self-serving nonsense it is.
The political and media establishment now whipping up fears for the safety of MPs – so they can continue ignoring Israel’s genocide – is the same establishment that endlessly vilified Corbyn for highlighting Israel’s ugly rule over the Palestinians.
For many years, Corbyn had warned that Israel was brutalising the Palestinian people and stealing their land to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state. His 2019 manifesto promised to end the UK’s arms sales to Israel and recognise a Palestinian state.
History has now proven his stance as warranted, while also demonstrating that the political and media class – and most of all Starmer, a human rights lawyer – are the real charlatans.
But more to the point, no one expressed concern for the safety of Corbyn, Labour’s elected leader, or his supporters when they were being subjected to a years-long campaign of vilification. He was variously painted as an antisemite, a Soviet-era spy, and a traitor.
When the Daily Mail presented Corbyn as Dracula above the headline “Labour must kill vampire Jezza”, everyone chuckled. As they did when Newsnight transposed his face onto the Dark Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter franchise.
When British soldiers were shown using Corbyn’s face as target practice, it made fleeting headlines before being forgotten.
There were no demands for soul searching then, as there are now. There was no panic about the stoking of a dangerous public mood. There was no concern about the threat to democracy or the safety of Corbyn and other MPs who spoke out against Israel.
Why? The question hardly needs answering. Because it was the establishment political and media class doing the smearing and inciting. It was the same people whining now about their safety who were actively endangering elected representatives like Corbyn.
‘Barrage of racist abuse’
This is not just about history, of course.
The establishment campaign that claimed to be outing antisemitism – and that maliciously conflated opposition to Israel’s military oppression of Palestinians (anti-Zionism) with antisemitism – has simply metamorphosed into something even uglier.
Now it seeks to tar those it smeared as antisemites as worse: as a supposed menace not just to Jews but to MPs and democracy. Those trying to stop the slaughter of children are potential terrorists.
One of Corbyn’s few surviving allies – not yet purged by Starmer from the parliamentary party – is the Labour Muslim MP Zarah Sultana.
A tweet of hers that went viral at the weekend read: “Whenever I speak up for the rights of the Palestinian people, I am subjected to a barrage of racist abuse, threats and hate. Things have been particularly bad in recent months.”
As she noted, the prime minister used an Islamophobic trope against her last month, as did another Tory MP, when she urged a ceasefire. Neither apologised. Once again, these incidents barely made ripples, let alone elicited an outpouring of concern.
Though Sultana was careful not to allude to Starmer’s role, she warned that this cynical moral panic must not be allowed to become “a pretext to demonise the Palestine solidarity movement specifically or attack our democratic rights more broadly”.
But the truth is, that boat sailed some time ago.
Plot on parliament?
From the start, Palestine solidarity demonstrations were demonised as “hate marches” by the then-home secretary, Suella Braverman.
Plumbing new levels of disingenuousness, she and other politicians – backed by the media – pretended a longtime leftwing Palestinian solidarity slogan chanted at marches that demands equality for Jews and Palestinians “between the river and the sea” was a call for genocide against Jews.
At the weekend, the Times newspaper turned the flame higher. A front-page article headlined “Plot to target parliament” was meant to evoke in the public’s mind Guy Fawkes’ infamous gunpowder plot in the 17th century to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
But all the stories described were entirely legitimate efforts by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) to lobby parliament to uphold international law and press for a ceasefire.
The Times insinuated that Ben Jamal, leader of the PSC, was behaving in a sinister fashion by calling on the public to “ramp up pressure” on MPs – that is, exercise the most basic of democratic rights.
Meanwhile, Braverman’s successor as home secretary, James Cleverly, insisted that MPs must not be subjected to “undue pressure” – as though it was threatening behaviour for members of the public to give their elected representatives vocal warning that they would refuse to vote for them based on actions such as refusing to oppose a genocide.
Two nasty parties
There is little doubt where this is all designed to lead.
Weaponised antisemitism was always about silencing those protesting against British foreign policy – a foreign policy that prioritises Israel’s pivotal role in promoting western control over the oil-rich Middle East above ending Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
Previously, that chiefly meant smearing Corbyn and the anti-imperialist, anti-war Labour left.
But with public outrage growing at Israel’s genocide, the stakes have risen dramatically. Now the political and media establishments are desperate to shift attention away both from Israel and their complicity in the slaughter of children.
Their preferred method has been pretending that it is only Muslims and leftwing, antisemitic extremists opposed to the genocide. Normal people, apparently, should be invested exclusively in the impossible task Israel claims to have set itself: of “eliminating Hamas”, however many Palestinian children die in the process.
Evoking King Canute trying to hold back the tide, Nandy denounced Tory MP Lee Anderson – and the wider Conservative party – for Islamophobia after he claimed “Islamists” were in control of London and its mayor, Sadiq Khan.
In the Daily Telegraph last week, Braverman advanced similar racist paranoia, arguing that Britain was becoming a country where “Sharia law, the Islamist mob, and anti-Semites take over communities”.
Giving Starmer a taste of Corbyn’s medicine – and illustrating the way career-minded politicians are kept in line – she accused the Labour leader of being “in hock to extremists” and that the party was “still rotten to the core”.
Two nasty parties, each complicit in a genocide of the Palestinian people, are now competing to stoke Islamophobia – one explicitly, the other implicitly.
With no place to hide for his political cowardice, Starmer has opened the gates to the bipartisan vilification of Muslims, not just in Gaza but at home too. Will he get away with it?
He may find it tougher going than he expects. With the slaughter in Gaza playing out on TV screens and social media accounts, many millions of Britons are incensed. Whatever the political class claims, it is not just Muslims and the anti-war left angry at the complicity of British politicians in genocide.
The smearing of Corbyn over his criticisms of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians largely worked. But gaslighting much of the public as a dangerous “mob” for opposing even more egregious Israeli crimes may yet backfire.
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