La alquimia imperialista
November 1st, 2023 by Higinio Polo
Notre site en Français: mondialisation.ca
Nuestro sitio en español: GlobalizacionNovember 1st, 2023 by Higinio Polo
November 1st, 2023 by Dave DeCamp
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A leaked document drafted by Israel’s Intelligence Ministry proposes the ethnic cleansing of the approximately 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip as a potential solution to Israel’s war against Hamas.
The document, dated October 13, was published by the Hebrew language website Sicha Mekomit, and the Israeli government has confirmed its authenticity. According to The Times of Israel, Israeli government officials are downplaying the document, saying it only represents “initial thoughts” and that they are currently focused on the war effort.
The proposed plan would involve pushing the Palestinians out of Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. They would first live in tent cities until permanent structures are built. The plan also includes a several-kilometer-wide “sterile” buffer zone inside Egypt so the Palestinians could not live on the border.
The document proposes two other potential plans, including handing Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority once Hamas is defeated. Another proposal would involve Israel propping up a new Arab regime in Gaza. But the document says these two proposals would not sufficiently deter future attacks and that the preferred option is cleansing Gaza of Palestinians.
The writers of the document said allowing the PA to administer Gaza is the “most dangerous alternative” of the three options because it could lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
While Israeli government officials are downplaying the document and its existence does not mean it’s a policy Israel will implement, some parts of the proposal are being carried out. The document says the first phase of the plan would be to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip, which Israel has ordered, and to focus airstrikes on the north before a ground invasion.
The biggest impediment to Israel cleansing Gaza of Palestinians is opposition from Egypt and Arab and international pressure. The document says that part of the plan is for the US to exert “pressure on Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the [UAE] to contribute to the initiative either in resources or in accepting displaced persons.”
So far, the US has expressed opposition to the idea of kicking Palestinians out of Gaza. President Biden spoke with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday, and according to the White House, the two leaders discussed the importance of “ensuring that Palestinians in Gaza are not displaced to Egypt or any other nation.”
However, there are indications the US might be preparing for the possibility of an influx of Palestinian refugees leaving Gaza. In a letter to Congress requesting $105 billion to spend on the Gaza war, Ukraine, Taiwan, and other areas, the White House said some of the funding would be needed for the “potential needs of Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries.”
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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
Featured image is from The Grayzone
November 1st, 2023 by Global Research News
Is the U.S. Government the “Cash Cow” for Politicians? “How Did They Get So Rich?”
By , November 01, 2023
Right now, the witless President Joe Robinette Biden is working on his latest fraud, consisting of bundling all the money that will be dumped on Israel and Ukraine into a package with Taiwan so it will pass effortlessly through Congress given its hostility both to Russia and China and its deep abiding love for all things Israeli.
US Stands Isolated in Backing Gaza Massacre
By , October 31, 2023
On Friday, October 27, the nations of the world voted in the UN General Assembly, by a vote of 120 to 14, for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities” in Gaza. The resolution was sponsored by the government of sometime U.S. ally King Abdullah of Jordan.
By , October 31, 2023
Confirming what several experts had predicted, Tel Aviv is having many problems in its ground invasion plan in Gaza. In recent days, several reports are showing that Israel’s long-awaited ground operation has already begun, but it has been extremely frustrating for Israeli ambitions.
By , October 31, 2023
According to authentic reports, a number of African countries such as Algeria, Angola, DR Congo, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Tunisia, Uganda and Zimbabwe have expressed interest in joining BRICS. Egypt and Ethiopia have gained full-fledged membership in BRICS during the last summit held Johannesburg, South Africa.
Allied Healthcare Workers Harmed by COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines and Mandates
By , October 31, 2023
Janee Rogers Gibbs is a Speech-Language Pathologist. Dx: elevated troponins, irregular EKG and MYOCARDITIS. “Cause is unknown…haven’t had COVID that I know of but was FULLY VACCINATED.”
US Congress: Reject Bill to Support Forced Israeli Displacement of Palestinians to Third Countries
By , October 31, 2023
The United States should oppose any Israeli actions that could result in the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, said Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). The group urged Congress to reject any supplementary funding bills that propose funding humanitarian aid to Palestinians who have been displaced from Gaza to neighboring countries.
By , October 31, 2023
A year and two weeks after the Nord Stream bombings, in the early morning of 8 October 2023, a second Baltic pipeline experienced a mysterious rupture. This time it was the undersea Balticconnector, which connects the Finnish and Estonian gas grids.
Genocidal Onslaught of Gaza, Not Yet Shocking Conscience of the World
By , October 31, 2023
Israel’s Zionists in Gaza, the West Bank, and Palestine at large, continue to indifferently slaughter innocent civilian Palestinian men, women, children and babies as if they are nothing more than hated and despised beasts to be totally eradicated from off of the face of Israel and the Earth.
October 7 Testimonies Reveal Israel’s Military ‘Shelling’ Israeli Citizens with Tanks, Missiles
By , October 31, 2023
Israel’s military received orders to shell Israeli homes and even their own bases as they were overwhelmed by Hamas militants on October 7. How many Israeli citizens said to have been “burned alive” were actually killed by friendly fire?
The New Cold War in the Arctic. U.S. Military Installations in Greenland
By , October 31, 2023
Originally built following a 1951 bilateral defense agreement with Denmark — which granted the United States broad authority to operate on the island — Thule became the staging ground for a U.S. nuclear weapons program that was kept hidden from Greenland’s people.
November 1st, 2023 by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East
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Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) emphatically condemns the current Israeli ground invasion of the besieged Gaza Strip. In a major and preventable escalation, Israeli ground forces have begun operating in Gaza since October 28 after indiscriminately bombing Gaza for over 21 days. Over 8500 Palestinians have already been killed, including over 3500 children, and over 1 million people have been displaced. CJPME argues that Canada’s refusal to de-escalate the war is a major failure of diplomacy, and reiterates its call for an immediate ceasefire.
“For over 75 years Israel has tried to bomb its way to peace and security, but that strategy has failed,” said CJPME President Thomas Woodley. “This ground invasion is the continuation of Israel’s futile policies of military aggression and apartheid towards Palestinians. The international community must reject Israel’s collective punishment of the civilian population of Gaza,” added Woodley.
To date, Canada has refused to endorse calls from international civil society for an immediate cessation of hostilities in Israel and Palestine but has instead expressed its support for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” Furthermore, CJPME believes Israel has been emboldened to launch this ground war because Canada and other countries have shielded Israel from international condemnation and public outrage over ongoing violations of international law, including through Canada’s shameful abstention on last week’s United Nations resolution for a humanitarian truce. Canada has consistently worked against diplomatic accountability for Israel throughout all UN bodies, whether the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, or the International Criminal Court. This approach has prevented Canada from playing a constructive role both with Israel’s current invasion of Gaza, and with Israel’s 56-year-old belligerent occupation of Palestine more generally.
“This invasion is a failure of Canadian diplomacy,” said President Thomas Woodley. “From day one, we could have called for an immediate ceasefire. Instead, Prime Minister Trudeau has mindlessly defended Israeli violence, despite weeks of egregious breaches of international law by Israel in Gaza.” CJPME considers that Canada’s flagrant hypocrisy on Israel-Gaza demonstrates that its foreign policy is broken and its global leadership is in shambles.
CJPME points out the blatant contradiction between Canada’s touting of the international rules-based order when Russia annexes Ukrainian territory, and its disregard for this same order when Israel annexes Palestine. CJPME is deeply concerned that, unchecked by international accountability, the Israeli ground invasion will lead to the further dispossession and annexation of the northern Gaza Strip and an ever-expanding humanitarian disaster in an already unstable region. CJPME is also monitoring the human rights situation of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where over 100 Palestinians have been killed and thousands more detained since Oct 7th. In addition, CJPME warns that Canada’s lopsided pro-Israel position will lead to its increasing diplomatic isolation from the majority of the world’s governments – two-thirds of whom supported last week’s UN resolution for a humanitarian truce.
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Featured image: Trudeau and Netanyahu in 2019 (Source: Yves Engler)
November 1st, 2023 by Philip Giraldi
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The conflict in Israel-Gaza illustrates perfectly how the United States government runs on corruption, with the deep pocketed Jewish and Israeli lobbies able to buy every national level politician that matters to give the loathsome Benjamin Netanyahu a carte blanche both in terms of a free pass on committing war crimes while also having unlimited access to the US Treasury and the contents of military arsenals.
Given that the media is also in the hands of the same malefactors the poorly informed American public can only respond to the pablum that they are being fed about what is going on the world, i.e. Ukraine and Israel good, Russia and Palestine bad.
I am certainly not the first observer of politics in the United States who has noticed how this deterioration has come about in my lifetime, where a country that once upon a time believed in meritocracy has now been corrupted by money, with a ruling class, such as it is, that seems to be wallowing in the green stuff even as it pretends to be promoting policies that help the average American.
Right now, the witless President Joe Robinette Biden is working on his latest fraud, consisting of bundling all the money that will be dumped on Israel and Ukraine into a package with Taiwan so it will pass effortlessly through Congress given its hostility both to Russia and China and its deep abiding love for all things Israeli. $100 billion is all Joe wants, $10 billion for Israel immediately and the rest to be doled out, mostly to good old boy Volodymyr Zelensky and a bit for the Taiwanese.
And it might be observed that part of the vast ocean of money somehow seems to stick to the fingers of the pampered residents of Capitol Hill. How, one might ask, did Biden, a blue-collar boy from Scranton Pennsylvania who has spent his entire adult life in government employment and who is married to a school teacher wind up with a net worth in the $9 million dollar range? Of course, it now appears that he received a notable assist from a son named Hunter who is something like a one-man cocaine snorting corruption machine who was more than willing to share his largesse with dad in exchange for a little assistance with foreign despots here and there.
One recalls how back in the seventies there was at least some speculation regarding how President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who spent his entire working life in government, started out raised in poverty and wound up being worth an estimated $15 million at his death in 1973 after he left the presidency, at a time when that was serious money, equal to about $100 million today. He was known to be well-wired into Texas Jewish and pro-Israel circles and appeared to have all the right contacts for making private investments that he did not have to publicly declare.
But no one figured out how to milk the system like the Clintons and I still chuckle when I recall how they tried to take the White House silver with them when the departed the residence.
Upon leaving the presidency in 2001 they claimed to be completely broke and even in debt, but adroit manipulation of their Clinton Foundation since that time has produced a windfall of more than $300 million in today’s dollars.
It was a pattern imitated by Barack Obama who left office with more cash in hand through the usual mechanism of largely unreadable books ghost written on their behalf that were then hawked in large numbers to Democratic Party constituents to support the cause.
Barack’s cash value is now estimated to be in the $70 million range and he also owns substantial properties in Washington, Chicago and, of course, on Martha’s Vineyard, where he has a 29 acre estate valued at $12 million.
Of course, to a certain extent the misbehavior of presidents, at least while they are still in office, is not as egregious as it is for members of Congress and even Supreme Court Justices.
Presidents are very visible and surrounded by staff and media witnesses of whatever they are up to while the sins of other senior government officials are more anonymous and they can engage is practices like taking bribes and insider trading based on their prior knowledge of legislation or expenditures that are pending that might produce a windfall profit if one is canny enough to buy the right stock. Congressmen are also well placed to use family members to carry out the trades, avoiding scrutiny of their own banking and investment activities. That has, indeed, been claimed in a number of cases where government officials have been able to accumulate large fortunes while holding office.
And there is no doubt that corruption of one form or another is the game that is played in Congress and elsewhere including at state and local levels. In a sense, it is all around us. The recent exposure of Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey’s apparent tendency to accept bribes was a particularly lurid tale in part because much of the loot consisted of $480,000 in cash stuffed into jacket pockets, closets and in a safe, along with 13 gold bars, two of them marked as 1 Kilogram in weight to the value of more than $100,000.
In the garage was an upscale $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible that was a gift to Menendez’s then girlfriend, who had wrecked her own vehicle in an accident in which she had struck and killed a pedestrian. The car came from one of the New Jersey businessmen currently involved in the corruption and bribery investigation and no one can quite explain how an accident in which someone had died was never properly investigated by police. Menendez had allegedly helped the businessman by arranging to block a criminal investigation into his company’s activities.
Menendez, a Cuban American regarded as a political hardliner from his bully pulpit as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been investigated before over charges of possible corruption, but he has beaten the rap each time. He has currently resigned his chairmanship but has refused to leave the Senate and he claims he is innocent, of course. And as he is inevitably been a major promoter of Biden’s war on Russia the White House will presumably do everything it can to protect him, but only up to a certain point.
There has been some discussion of the wealth of certain congressmen due to the recent death of 90 year-old Dianne Feinstein, Senator from California, who was regarded as both the wealthiest and oldest of all Senators. She was, in fact, born into a prominent Jewish family in San Francisco and acquired even more money and property from her three husbands, all of whom were also wealthy.
It has never been suggested that she exploited her positions as Mayor of San Francisco and in Congress to illegally or otherwise obtain more money, to her credit, possibly because she was already rich. Nevertheless, her death was preceded by some high tone media coverage of the nature of her fortune and the family quarrel that is taking place regarding how all the money and the multiple high end properties will be divided up.
By some accounts, Feinstein became a billionaire upon the death of her final husband financier Richard C. Blum in 2022, though who is entitled to what remains of the estate will now undoubtedly be determined through either litigation or negotiation involving her own daughter Katherine and the three daughters sired by Blum in a previous marriage. Far from getting rich off of politics, Blum and Feinstein were major donors to the Democratic Party.
More to the point if one is asking “How did they get so rich?” is the trajectory of former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul Pelosi. Nancy was one of six children born and raised in an intensely political environment, though having otherwise modest circumstances, in Baltimore. Her father was Baltimore mayor and congressman Thomas D’Alesandro, who was at one time investigated by the FBI but never convicted regarding association with criminals.
Nancy Pelosi and Hubbie Paul moved to California in 1969 after college and six years spent in New York City.
She quickly became involved in local Democratic Party politics while he established himself as a businessman, specializing in real estate and high-tech investment, aided by his brother Ronald Pelosi who was a member of the San Francisco city and county Board of Supervisors.
Nancy and Paul have five children. Nancy, who is 83 years old, initially won her congressional seat in a special election in San Francisco in 1987.
She became first woman Speaker, though she lost her position recently as a result of the swing of the House to the Republicans in the 2020 election. She has announced that she will not be running for office in 2024 and will retire. She and her husband have indicated that they will live in their mansion in the upscale Pacific Heights district of San Francisco, though they have a vineyard in Napa Valley and additional properties in San Francisco. They are staying in the city in spite of an incident in October 2022, while Pelosi was in Washington, DC, in which an intruder entered their home demanding to know her whereabouts. He then attacked Paul Pelosi, with a hammer. Police arrested the attacker, 42-year-old David DePape, and he has been charged with assault and attempted kidnapping.
As of 2021, Pelosi’s net worth, as revealed by her government financial disclosure forms and other sources, was estimated to be at $120 million, more than doubling her $58 million valuation in 2009 and making her the 6th richest person in Congress. She indicated on her disclosure form that her principal source of income was her government salary, which peaked at $223,500 when she was speaker. She and her husband hold properties “worth at least $14.65 million, including the St. Helena vineyard in Napa Valley worth at least $5 million” and commercial properties.
According to investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, the Pelosis have traded $33 million worth of tech stocks over the past two years, including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. In May and June 2021, Pelosi’s husband purchased stocks in tech companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple, netting a gain of $5.3 million, while Nancy was working on anti-trust legislation to better regulate the tech industry, which many considered to be a clear conflict of interest as well as a case of potential insider trading.
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, had actually called Pelosi to lobby her in opposition to the new proposed regulations and, in their discussion, she openly opposed increasing regulations on stock trades by members of congress, stating that “we’re a free market economy” and congresspeople “should be able to participate in that”.
This comment attracted strong criticism including from some Democrats: “Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) tweeted: ‘No. It cannot be a perk of the job for Members to trade on access to information.’ Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) – one of the wealthiest members of Congress thanks to his business career that included leading his family’s distillery as well as the gelato brand Talenti – echoed: ‘I disagree with the Speaker.’ And Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), who represents one of the most competitive districts in the nation, wrote that ‘I disagree strongly’ with Pelosi’s stance. ‘Americans are losing trust in government and we need to show we serve the people, not our personal/political self-interest.’ Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who has said that she doesn’t hold individual stocks or digital assets, reiterated late Friday that she thinks letting members of Congress trade individual stocks is a bad look. ‘There is no reason members of Congress should hold and trade individual stock when we write major policy and have access to sensitive information,’ Ocasio-Cortez said. ‘There are many ways members can invest w/o creating actual or appeared conflict of interest, like thrift savings plans or index funds.’”
So evidently Nancy Pelosi and many other congressmen believe that it is just fine to be regulating industries and also allowing the regulators to benefit materially when it is anticipated that the measures taken will improve those industries’ stock market standing or profitability. Doing so is a well-established principle referred to as insider trading and hers is an interesting viewpoint. It perhaps explains why there are so many multi-millionaires and possibly even a billionaire or two in Congress!
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Pelosi at the LBJ Presidential Library in 2022 (Licensed under the Public domain)
October 31st, 2023 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida
Israel continua a enfrentar sérias dificuldades na condução da sua operação terrestre na Faixa de Gaza. Muitos fatores tornam o campo de batalha local extremamente difícil para as IDF, principalmente pelo fato de as tropas do Hamas utilizarem uma rede complexa de túneis para se movimentarem, armazenarem armas e realizarem ataques surpresa. Além disso, os destroços dos edifícios destruídos pelas IDF também se tornaram um obstáculo para as tropas israelenses e as unidades especiais americanas envolvidas na operação.
Confirmando o que vários especialistas previram, Tel Aviv está a ter muitos problemas no seu plano de invasão terrestre em Gaza. Nos últimos dias, vários relatórios mostram que a tão esperada operação terrestre de Israel já começou, mas tem sido extremamente frustrante para as ambições israelitas. Entre 22 e 27 de Outubro, ocorreram importantes ataques contra Gaza, mas aparentemente os movimentos foram rapidamente neutralizados pelas forças do Hamas.
Em 27 de outubro, Netanyahu fez uma declaração pública anunciando oficialmente que a “nova fase” da guerra já havia começado. Segundo ele, os objetivos dos ataques terrestres são destruir as capacidades políticas e militares do Hamas, além de resgatar cidadãos israelitas capturados.
“Ontem à noite, forças terrestres adicionais entraram em Gaza, marcando o início da segunda fase da guerra, cujo objetivo é destruir as capacidades militares e políticas do Hamas e trazer de volta os nossos cidadãos raptados”, disse Netanyahu. O chefe do estado-maior das IDF, General Herzi Halevi, aconselhou: “Não há conquistas sem riscos e não há vitória sem que os preços sejam pagos. Para expor o inimigo e destruí-lo, não há outra maneira senão entrar no seu território com grande força.”
Acredita-se que unidades especiais das forças armadas americanas estejam lutando ao lado dos israelenses nos ataques terrestres. Há relatos de que a unidade especial “Delta” dos EUA está participando das operações, mas Washington evita comentar publicamente o caso. Porém, nem com este tipo de ajuda é possível realizar uma incursão incisiva. Em 25 de outubro, o ex-conselheiro do Pentágono Douglas Macgregor disse que as tropas israelenses e americanas que tentaram entrar em Gaza foram “despedaçadas e sofreram pesadas perdas”.
Tudo isso foi previsto pelos especialistas. As tropas israelenses têm grandes dificuldades em levar a cabo o combate físico e não são habilidosas em situações de atritos prolongados. O mesmo se pode dizer das unidades especiais americanas, que não têm experiência na região de Gaza. Por outro lado, o Hamas e as milícias aliadas estão familiarizados com a geografia local, conhecem o território melhor que o inimigo e têm a vantagem de utilizar os seus túneis subterrâneos tanto para realizar ataques surpresa como para fugir quando sofrem perdas.
A única forma de a operação terrestre ser realizada com sucesso por Israel é aumentar consideravelmente os níveis de violência, oque tende a causar muitos efeitos colaterais e baixas civis. Israel depende de operações combinadas de ataques terrestres e bombardeamentos aéreos extremamente violentos, o que está a aumentar ainda mais o número de vítimas civis. Na prática, o governo israelita está a ser gravemente afetado por esta estratégia, uma vez que as reações internacionais à violência sionista são negativas, gerando pressão política e diplomática contra Tel Aviv.
Preocupados com o crescimento dessa pressão, as autoridades americanas aconselharam Israel a repensar a sua estratégia de invasão terrestre. O que foi planejado para ser uma invasão definitiva com grande número de tropas tornou-se uma sequência de pequenos assaltos terrestres com número reduzido de soldados e unidades especiais. Os relatórios mostram que as autoridades americanas estão a tentar evitar que ocorra um banho de sangue nas regiões densamente povoadas de Gaza – não porque exista uma preocupação humanitária genuína, mas porque afeta a imagem diplomática de Israel e dos seus apoiadores americanos. Isto explica por que nos últimos dias Tel Aviv tem lançado ataques em pequena escala.
O problema é que este plano também não terá sucesso, uma vez que o Hamas está a revelar-se suficientemente forte para repelir os invasores. As constantes derrotas aumentam a pressão interna na sociedade israelense e obrigam o governo a aumentar a violência com bombardeios – o que por sua vez gera pressão internacional dado o impacto humanitário. Com isto, o governo israelita parece mais uma vez estar numa armadilha da qual não pode escapar.
Há outro factor que também prejudica consideravelmente as IDF. Como resultado dos bombardeamentos, há muitos destroços de edifícios desabados nas ruas de Gaza. As estradas e aldeias estão danificadas e há todo tipo de obstáculos no terreno. Isto dificulta muito o trânsito de tanques e veículos blindados. Este tipo de equipamento apresenta sérias dificuldades de operação em áreas urbanas, especialmente com escombros nas ruas, razão pela qual as IDF necessitarão certamente de contar quase exclusivamente com a sua infantaria, aumentando substancialmente as hipóteses de atritos prolongados.
Na verdade, a escolha de Israel de travar uma guerra total em Gaza parece ter sido extremamente anti-estratégica. Qualquer passo dado pelo estado sionista terá consequências graves. Pequenas incursões serão derrotadas, grandes bombardeamentos gerarão pressão internacional e uma invasão em grande escala levará a uma intervenção do Eixo da Resistência, criando novos flancos.
Lucas Leiroz de Almeida
Artigo em inglês :
https://infobrics.org/post/39724/
Imagem : InfoBrics
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Lucas Leiroz, jornalista, pesquisador do Center for Geostrategic Studies, consultor geopolítico.
Você pode seguir Lucas Leiroz em: https://t.me/lucasleiroz e https://twitter.com/leiroz_lucas
October 31st, 2023 by Dr. William Makis
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Oct. 26, 2023 – Parsons, KS – Leah Steinle Newland is an Occupational Therapist. She just had large blood clots removed from her lungs.
Click here to read the full article.
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
Reviews
This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon
In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia
In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig
Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac
A reading of Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late. You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.
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October 31st, 2023 by Arnold August
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My task is to write articles for New Cold War. Although this multi-part series is my responsibility, it is the result of a collective effort by the six of us during and since our return to our respective countries from China. From day one, we immediately came together, with the common goal of bringing the reality of the Tibetan Plateau to international public opinion.
The Tibetan Plateau comprises the Tibet Autonomous Region and a large part of Qinghai province. It extends west to Sichuan province and south to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Why the “roof of the world”? The Tibetan Plateau has an average altitude of around 4,500 metres. It is the world’s highest and largest plateau above sea level, covering an area of 2.5 million square kilometres.
The mere mention of the word “Tibet” by Professor Radhika triggered in my mind, just two days before her invitation, the August 22, 2023 announcement by U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken of “Visa Restrictions to Address Forced Assimilation in Tibet.” The reason given by Blinken for this new sanction against individuals is “their involvement in the forcible assimilation of more than one million Tibetan children in government-run boarding schools. These coercive policies seek to eliminate Tibet’s distinct linguistic, cultural, and religious traditions among younger generations of Tibetans.” However, there is not a single source that provides facts to support this accusation.
On February 6, 2023, in a complementary statement, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote:
“We are very disturbed that in recent years the residential school system for Tibetan children appears to act as a mandatory large-scale programme intended to assimilate Tibetans into majority Han culture, contrary to international human rights standards.”
Once again, no sources, just baseless assertions.
On September 14, in Beijing, we held an exchange at the Chinese Tibetology Research Center (CTRC). The Center was represented by Zha Luo, Director of the CTRC’s Institute of Social and Economic Studies. A prolific author on Tibet, he informed us that, in August 2023, over 300 Tibetology researchers from China and abroad had gathered in Beijing for a major international seminar to promote Tibetan studies.
The seminar has been held since 1991. As one of the largest international academic events in the field of Tibetan studies, the seminar is an important platform for Tibetology scholars in China and abroad to present the latest research findings and deepen exchanges and cooperation, according to the CTRC. During the event, scholars discussed topics such as education, Tibetan Buddhism, and social transformation and change, as well as architecture and living conditions on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.
Photo Credit: H. Weldin
Zha Luo also assured us that we would visit a boarding school during our visit to the Plateau. We did indeed visit one, and as with our exchange with the CTRC in Beijing, we were able to ask any questions we might have had. And so, we did, as we shall see later in this series. Although the aforementioned complaints against China regarding boarding schools did not name any individuals, we were there. We saw and heard the reality, not only on-site, but throughout the trip: a true revelation.
Thus, the orientation of this series of articles is not at all defensive with regard to conditions on the Tibetan Plateau. In addition to frank exchanges with the CTRC and numerous on-site visits, the conclusion is that we must avoid limiting ourselves to mere refutations of the U.S.-led story. Indeed, the reality of the Tibetan Plateau that we discovered is so steeped in the promotion of Tibetan language, culture, history, heritage and religion that asserting that Tibet is not this or that, as promoted by the United States, cannot do justice to the reality of the Tibetan Plateau. If this orientation would have been adopted, this multi-part series would amount to a series of innuendoes that I would like to avoid. It is about what Tibet is, not what it is not.
What’s more, Tibetan reality is so blatantly different from the corporate media’s misinformation that the series can hopefully shed a little more light on the region’s other main issue – the neighbouring Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region – by asking the question “Now that the reality of Tibet is further revealed, can people believe the U.S. narrative of so-called oppression and genocide against the Uygurs?”
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Arnold August is an award-winning journalist and author of three acclaimed books. His three books on Cuba-US-Latin America have been acclaimed by experts in the field. In 2013, he was awarded the Félix Elmuza Award by the Association of Cuban Journalists and contributes to outlets in English, Spanish and French in many parts of the world. He serves as a Contributing Editor for The Canada Files.
Featured image is from NCW
October 31st, 2023 by Democracy for the Arab World Now
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***
The United States should oppose any Israeli actions that could result in the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, said Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). The group urged Congress to reject any supplementary funding bills that propose funding humanitarian aid to Palestinians who have been displaced from Gaza to neighboring countries.
Israeli actions, statements, and policy directives, including a leaked policy document drafted by the Israeli intelligence ministry that recommends the permanent forced transfer of Palestinians in Gaza to Sinai indicate that Israel is involved in forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza to third countries.
“The Biden administration isn’t just giving a green light for ethnic cleansing—it’s bankrolling it,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, DAWN’s Executive Director. “Gaslighting Americans into facilitating long-held Israeli plans to depopulate Gaza under the cover of ‘humanitarian aid’ is a cruel and grotesque hoax.”
On October 20, 2023, the White House sent a request to Congress for supplemental funding for the current fiscal year, which, among other things, includes logistical, infrastructure, and other material support to make possible housing displaced Palestinians from Gaza to neighboring countries. This section of the request states:
These resources would support displaced and conflict affected civilians, including Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the West Bank, and to [sic] address potential needs of Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries. This would include food and nonfood items, healthcare, emergency shelter support, water and sanitation assistance, and emergency protection. This would also include potential critical humanitarian infrastructure costs needed for the refugee population to provide access to basic, life-sustaining support. This crisis could well result in displacement across [the] border and higher regional humanitarian needs, and funding may be used to meet evolving programming requirements outside of Gaza.
“The best way to protect Palestinian civilians from the wrath of war is to announce and enforce a ceasefire,” said Raed Jarrar, DAWN’s advocacy director. “Rather than pushing Palestinians to Egypt, Israel should allow Palestinian civilians to cross the apartheid fence into Israel. Maybe Palestinians can set up tent cities in the same towns and villages they were displaced from during the first Nakba 75 years ago.”
Congress should vote no on any bill mirroring this language or any authorization for funding activities, infrastructure, or aid outside of Israel and Palestine because they effectively facilitate, fund and reward the forced transfer of Palestinians.
Supporting Israeli efforts to forcibly transfer Palestinians to Egypt would make U.S. officials liable for complicity in war crimes. Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court includes the “Deportation or forcible transfer of population” as a war crime. Article 25 of the same statute defines individual criminal responsibility and states that a person shall be criminally responsible and liable for punishment for a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court if that person “aids, abets or otherwise assists in its commission or its attempted commission, including providing the means for its commission.”
“Both by word and by deed, Israeli officials are pursuing a broader strategy to permanently remove Palestinians from their native lands, and counting on the US to pay for it,” said Whitson. “Congress should vote against any aid package that could support these acts, which amount to violations of human rights and grave breaches of the laws of war.”
Palestinian civil society organizations, prominent analysts, politicians, and many others are raising alarm bells about Israeli plans to forcibly displaced Palestinians from Gaza, the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and even Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. According to UNRWA, some 1.4 million out of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are now internally displaced, with over 613,000 taking refuge in facilities that are holding up to 12 times their design capacity.
There is ample evidence that Israel is working to ensure that Gaza is uninhabitable and to force Palestinians to flee to Egypt. Since October 10, 2023, Israel has imposed a “complete siege” on Gaza, cutting off the distribution of fuel, food, water, medicine, and electricity, in violation of the laws of war. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Israel has destroyed or damaged at least 42 percent of all housing units in the Gaza Strip. Israeli leaflets and automated phone messages have warned Gaza residents that they will be identified as accomplices “in a terrorist organization” if they don’t relocate, a move that contravenes international law on coercive displacement. Israeli airstrikes have not only targeted northern Gaza but have continued to bombard southern regions, leaving no safe havens for civilians.
A leaflet carrying the insignia of the Israeli military reading in Arabic: “Anyone who chooses not to leave from the north of the [Gaza] Strip to south of Wadi Gaza may be determined an accomplice in a terrorist organization.” (Source: Amnesty International/X)
The Israeli government appears to be implementing a plan to permanently move Palestinians in Gaza to Egypt. On October 28, 2023, a local Israeli newspaper leaked a policy memo by the Israeli Intelligence Ministry that recommends forcibly and permanently transferring the Gaza population to Sinai, and harnessing the international community for the move. The document also suggests promoting a dedicated campaign for the residents of Gaza that will “motivate them to agree to the plan.” In addition, the Misgav Institute recently published a plan for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.” The Misgav Institute is headed by former Netanyahu National Security Advisor Meir Ben Shabbat, who remains influential in Israeli security circles. Other influential Israeli think tanks have also supported the proposal, further amplifying the rhetoric surrounding the potential mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.
Recent remarks by notable Israeli officials underscore Israeli plans to ensure that Gaza is uninhabitable, forcing Palestinians to flee to Egypt. Yoav Galant, the defense minister, declared that Gaza will never return to what it was. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Palestinian population in Gaza directly, telling them to “leave now.” Former Israeli National Security Council head Giora Eiland argued that
“Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf.”
Israeli war cabinet member and minister Gideon Sa’ar stated:
“We must make the end of our campaign clear to everyone around us. Whoever starts a war against Israel must lose territory.”
“Rather than demanding a ceasefire to protect surviving Palestinian civilians from further atrocities, the Biden administration is cynically manipulating us into accepting ‘aid’ to expelled Palestinians as a consolation prize,” said Whitson.
Any forced movement of some or all Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt would be a grave breach of international humanitarian law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the individual or mass forcible transfer or deportation of protected persons to any other country, regardless of the motive. It would also constitute a grave breach of Article 17(2) of the Second Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits ordering or forcing a civilian population to be displaced. Deportation and forcible population transfer are crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has an active investigation into the situation in Palestine which includes the current war.
The international community has rightfully been calling for humanitarian corridors to ensure that vital supplies—primarily food, water, and fuel for electricity generators—are able to enter Gaza. Likewise, safe zones are an important tool for the protection of civilians in armed conflict. Palestinian human rights organizations also have pleaded for international protection against ethnic cleansing after Defense Galant cut off food and water to millions of Palestinians in Gaza.
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Featured image is from Jonathan Cook Blog
October 31st, 2023 by Hans Stehling
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***
“A time for Peace and a time for War” quotes Netanyahu, on trial for corruption in Israel, as his IDF military has now killed 3200 children in Gaza, in just three weeks up to today, Monday 30 October 2023.
These blood-soaked days will live in infamy, as very soon Netanyahu’s men will have killed over 10,000 civilians of whom all were unarmed.
It must take a lot of bravery for an IDF pilot in an F-35/-16 attack aircraft, to bomb to bits a hospital with all its patients on the basis that there were Hamas fighters therein.
These bombings by Israeli aircraft are demonstrably a crime against humanity – a war crime.
Netanyahu must be indicted and brought before the ICC in The Hague, as soon as possible. If no such action is taken, then others will emulate him, in future conflicts in London, Paris, New York or anywhere else.
All because the international community failed to prosecute those responsible for the blatant violation of international law and the provisions of the Geneva Conventions.
This is worse than in any conflict since WW2 including the current war in Ukraine.
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Hans Stehling is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Made in Israel – by Mr. Fish
October 31st, 2023 by Medea Benjamin
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***
On Friday, October 27, the nations of the world voted in the UN General Assembly, by a vote of 120 to 14, for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities” in Gaza. The resolution was sponsored by the government of sometime U.S. ally King Abdullah of Jordan.
Israel’s UN Ambassador responded with utter disdain, accusing those who voted in favor of the “ridiculous resolution” of supporting “the defense of Nazi terrorists” over Israel. In Gaza, Israel’s response to the global call for a truce was to escalate its bombing and expand its ground invasion.
The U.S. corporate media have not helped Americans understand how isolated our government is in its unconditional support and resupply of weapons for Israel’s genocidal military campaign, which has killed over 8,000 Palestinians, 30% of them women and 40% of them children, while destroying hospitals, apartment buildings, streets and schools, and turning Gaza into nothing short of hell on Earth for the bereaved survivors. According to Save the Children, Israel has killed more children in Gaza in three weeks than have been killed in all global conflicts since 2019.
The UN vote makes it clear how diplomatically isolated Israel and the United States are. The mere 12 countries that sided with Israel and the U.S. in the General Assembly were 4 from eastern Europe (Austria, Croatia, Czechia and Hungary); 2 from Latin America (Guatemala and Paraguay); and 6 small island nations in the Pacific.
Not a single country from western Europe, Africa, the mainland of Asia, the Caribbean or the Middle East voted with the U.S. and Israel. The countries that voted for a truce included many traditional U.S. allies (France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, New Zealand), while other U.S. allies like the U.K., Germany, Canada and Japan were among the 45 countries that abstained.
Israel and the United States are not only diplomatically isolated, but their governments are out of touch with their own people. As Israel prepared to launch its ground invasion of Gaza, a Maariv poll of Israelis found that public support for an immediate large-scale ground offensive of Gaza had fallen from 65% on October 17th to only 29% a week later.
Israelis, like the rest of the world, are watching the horrors of the massacre in Gaza, and have realized that their government has no real plan beyond massive, indiscriminate violence for its stated goal of destroying Hamas, which may well be unachievable no matter how many Israeli soldiers, prisoners captured on October 7 and Palestinian civilians it is ready to sacrifice.
In the United States, a Data for Progress poll, published on October 20, found that 66% of Americans wanted their government to “call for a ceasefire and a deescalation of violence in Gaza,” and to “leverage its close diplomatic relationship with Israel to prevent further violence and civilian deaths.”
Support was across party lines, but, for a Democratic administration and Democratic members of Congress, the 80% of Democrats who agreed with the poll’s statement should have been a wake-up call. Evidently they slept through the alarm, as Congress passed a bill promising unconditional military support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza by 412 votes to 10 on October 24, a green light for the anticipated escalation that followed.
By October 30, only 18 members of Congress had signed the resolution introduced by Rep. Cori Bush calling for an “immediate de-escalation and ceasefire.” The new House Speaker Mike Johnson has pledged that the first piece of binding legislation he will put to the floor is one to spend $14 billion to resupply Israel with weapons, a bill that is likely to sail through with overwhelming support from both parties.
The impotence of the U.S. government to contain the chaos its policies have unleashed can hardly be exaggerated. The U.S. embassy in Beirut has posted a message to all U.S. citizens to leave Lebanon immediately. It says, “You should have a plan of action for crisis situations that does not rely on U.S. government assistance,” and tells them they will have to sign a promissory note to reimburse the U.S. government if it helps to evacuate them.
So the results of the U.S. government’s massive investments in the power to kill and destroy have left it unable to protect or help its own citizens around the world. It instead directs them to a State Department web page titled “What the Department of State Can and Can’t Do in a Crisis.”
The current international isolation of the United States stands in sharp contrast to the way that Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020 was welcomed around the world. Biden promised a new era of U.S. diplomacy, an end to U.S. wars in the Middle East, and renewed international cooperation on the most serious problems facing the world.
Instead, his policies are the worst of all worlds, continuing Trump’s ratcheting up of military spending and his illegal sanctions against Iran, Cuba and a dozen other countries, while shifting Trump’s Cold War with Russia and China into overdrive, and now fueling and escalating catastrophic proxy wars in Ukraine and Palestine.
But alternatives to American “leadership” are finally emerging. The UN Security Council is immobilized by self-serving U.S. and Russian vetoes, and exclusive rich boys’ clubs like the G7 and the World Economic Forum have only further entrenched neocolonialism and inequality. But now the world is turning to more representative fora like the UN General Assembly, the G20, G77, BRICS and regional groupings like the African Union, ASEAN and CELAC to more honestly debate our common problems and find new ways to solve them.
As the world comes together to build a post-neocolonial, multipolar world, U.S. propaganda is losing its power to shape the way people look at each new crisis. Israeli and U.S. officials, including Biden, have done their best to cast doubt on the death toll in Gaza, but these numbers are meticulously documented by Palestinian health authorities and accepted by the World Health Organization, UN agencies and NGOs that work there.
U.S. officials and media are more inclined to listen to Israeli officials than Palestinian ones, but this only increases U.S. isolation by making it complicit in Israeli propaganda, both in fact and in the eyes of people and governments around the world.
King Abdullah of Jordan, President Sisi of Egypt and Palestinian leader Abu Mazen canceled a meeting with Biden after Israel apparently killed hundreds of people with what appeared to be an air-burst bomb, as they sheltered at the Anglican Church’s Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. Biden validated Abdullah, Sisi and Abu Mazen’s decision by doing exactly as they feared and publicly claiming that “the other team” was responsible for the hospital bombing.
Al-Ahli Hospital medical personnel in the aftermath of the bombing
While Palestinian officials have identified over 8,000 people killed in Gaza, Israeli officials have so far only identified 933 of the 1,300 or 1,400 people they say were killed in the Palestinian attack on October 7th.
The Ha’aretz newspaper in Israel has a web page with photos, names, ages and some personal details of the people killed in Israel who have been identified. At the prompting of the Israeli military, many Western politicians and media have painted the Palestinian attack as a massacre of civilians, so it may come as a surprise to see that at least 361 of the 933 dead so far identified were in fact soldiers, police and security officers.
But Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian fighters also killed hundreds of civilians on October 7, as surely as Israel’s air strikes have killed thousands of civilians in Gaza. The prisoners they took back to Gaza also included both soldiers and civilians.
Ha’aretz’s records also raise questions about another story that has been widely repeated by Western media and politicians, including President Biden, which is that Israeli soldiers found 40 dead babies who had been decapitated by Hamas. There are 7 children below the age of 10 among the 572 civilian dead identified in Ha’aretz, but the youngest was 4 years old, not a baby. As with all these questions, we don’t know the answers, but we should be skeptical of unverified atrocity claims, especially since Israel has lied about previous war crimes and resisted independent, international investigations of them.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union left the United States with no rival to act as a check on its leaders’ unbridled and often unrealistic ambitions for global power, the U.S. has squandered a historic chance to build a peaceful, just and sustainable country, with shared prosperity for us and our neighbors around the world.
Our leaders’ illusion of military superiority has been a poison pill that has undermined every aspect of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy. It has led them down a dead end from where they can no longer imagine alternatives to fighting and killing or arming their proxies to fight and kill, even as the consequences of these policies have become so deadly and destabilizing that they undermine the position of the United States in the world and leave it increasingly isolated.
Apart from the United States, the world is remarkably united behind the goal of ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967. The United States should stop fueling the occupation with an endless supply of weapons, and stop diplomatically shielding Israel from international efforts to end the occupation. Since the United States has utterly failed in its role as a mediator and honest broker between Israel and Palestine, acting instead as a party to the conflict on Israel’s side, it must now step aside to allow real mediators to take on that role.
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Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.
Featured image is from Mideast Discourse
October 31st, 2023 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida
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***
Israel continues to face serious difficulties in conducting its ground operation in the Gaza Strip. Many factors make the local battlefield extremely difficult for the IDF, most notably the fact that Hamas troops use a complex network of tunnels to move, store weapons and carry out surprise attacks. Furthermore, the debris from buildings destroyed by the IDF also became an obstacle for Israeli troops and American special units involved in the operation.
Confirming what several experts had predicted, Tel Aviv is having many problems in its ground invasion plan in Gaza. In recent days, several reports are showing that Israel’s long-awaited ground operation has already begun, but it has been extremely frustrating for Israeli ambitions. Between October 22nd and 27th, there were important raids against Gaza, but apparently the moves were quickly neutralized by Hamas forces.
On October 27, Netanyahu made a public statement officially announcing that the “new phase” of the war had already begun. According to him, the objectives of the ground raids are to destroy Hamas’ political and military capabilities, in addition to rescuing captured Israeli citizens.
“Last night, additional ground forces entered Gaza, marking the beginning of the second stage of the war, whose goal is to destroy the military and political capabilities of Hamas and to bring our kidnapped citizens back”, Netanyahu said.
In the same vein, IDF’s Chief of Staff, General Herzi Halevi, advised:
“There are no achievements without risks, and there is no victory without prices being paid. In order to expose the enemy and destroy it, there is no other way but to enter its territory with great force.”
Special units of the American military are believed to be fighting alongside the Israelis in the ground raids. There are reports that the US “Delta” special unit is participating in the operations, but Washington is avoiding commenting on the case publicly. However, not even with this type of help is it possible to carry out an incisive incursion. On October 25, former Pentagon adviser Douglas Macgregor said that Israeli and American troops who attempted to enter Gaza were “shot to pieces and took heavy losses”.
All of this was predicted by the experts. Israeli troops have great difficulties in carrying out physical combat and are not skilled in situations of prolonged frictions. The same can be said about American special units, which have no experience in the Gaza region. On the other hand, Hamas and allied militias are familiar to the local geography, know the territory better than the enemy and have the advantage of using their underground tunnels both to carry out surprise attacks and to evade when they suffer losses.
The only way for the land operation to be carried out successfully by Israel is to considerably increase the levels of violence, which tends to cause many side effects and civilian casualties. Israel is relying on combined operations of ground raids and extremely violent aerial bombardments, which is further increasing the number of civilian casualties. In practice, the Israeli government is being severely affected by this strategy, as international reactions to Zionist violence are negative, generating political and diplomatic pressure against Tel Aviv.
Concerned about the growth of this pressure, American officials reportedly advised Israel to rethink its land invasion strategy. What was planned to be a definitive invasion with a large number of troops became a sequence of small ground assaults with a reduced number of soldiers and special units. Reports show that American officials are trying to prevent a bloodbath from occurring in the densely populated regions of Gaza – not because there is a genuine humanitarian concern, but because it affects the diplomatic image of Israel and its American supporters. This explains why in recent days Tel Aviv has been launching small-scale raids.
The problem is that this plan is also unlikely to be successful, as Hamas is proving strong enough to repel the invaders. The constant defeats increase internal pressure in Israeli society and force the government to increase violence with bombings – which in turn generates international pressure given the humanitarian impact. With this, the Israeli government once again appears to be in a trap from which it cannot escape.
There is another factor that also harms the IDF considerably. As a result of the bombings, there are many debris from collapsed buildings in Gaza’s streets. The roads and villages are damaged and there are all sorts of obstacles on the ground. This makes the transit of tanks and armored vehicles very difficult. This type of equipment has serious difficulties operating in urban areas, especially with debris on the streets, which is why the IDF will certainly need to rely almost exclusively on its infantry, substantially increasing the chances of prolonged frictions.
In fact, Israel’s choice to wage an all-out war in Gaza appears to have been extremely anti-strategic. Any step taken by the Zionist state will have serious consequences. Small incursions will be defeated, large bombing will generate international pressure and a large-scale invasion will lead to an intervention by the Axis of Resistance, creating new flanks.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
Featured image is from InfoBrics
October 31st, 2023 by Adam Federman
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***
In the spring of 1953, when Regina Kristiansen was 14, she and her family were forced to leave their village of Uummannaq in northwestern Greenland, hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle. At the behest of Danish authorities, who promised them new homes, they were given just a few days to gather their belongings. Kristiansen drove a dogsled across the ice for two days before reaching a barren island in Baffin Bay. Along with seven other families, they lived in makeshift tents for months as storms lashed the shore and winter approached. One woman gave birth in the tents. Another, a village elder, died before Denmark finished building their homes.
Altogether, 116 people from 26 families left Uummannaq, and their homes were burned to the ground. At the time, the Danish government — then a waning colonial power — characterized the move as voluntary. But in fact, the families were evicted to allow for the expansion of a U.S. Air Force base called Thule. The 233,000-acre base and deepwater port is one of the largest U.S. military installations in the world, and it played a prominent role in North American missile defense during the Cold War. It has also been a source of some of the U.S. military’s most closely held secrets.
Originally built following a 1951 bilateral defense agreement with Denmark — which granted the United States broad authority to operate on the island — Thule became the staging ground for a U.S. nuclear weapons program that was kept hidden from Greenland’s people. A missile launch facility, code-named “Project Iceworm,” was built deep under the ice sheet east of Thule, and, in 1968, a B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear bombs crashed a few miles from what had been Uummannaq. At one point, America had 17 military installations in Greenland, reflecting the Pentagon’s long-held view of the country as the “world’s largest stationary aircraft carrier.”
Kristiansen, 85, now lives in the mainland village of Qaanaaq, where many of the families driven from Uummannaq eventually settled. From her modest two-story home, she can see the island where her family first landed in 1953. Like her father and many others in this remote village — Greenland’s northernmost settlement — Kristiansen once worked at Thule. She has relatives in Texas. But she recalls with anger and grief how they were treated.
Before leaving Uummannaq, the families gathered at the cemetery to say goodbye. “We are leaving our graves behind,” her parents told her. “We are leaving our loved ones behind. We are leaving because the Americans are coming.”
This April, 70 years later, the U.S. military held a ceremony at the base during Greenland Heritage Week and acknowledged the “hardship and pain” caused by the relocation. The purpose of the event was to unveil a new name for the facility: Pituffik, a Greenlandic word that refers to the larger region, where Inuit hunters have lived for millennia, since Greenland’s first inhabitants traveled over the ice from Canada some 4,500 years ago. But despite the gesture of a name change, the ceremony, attended by top Danish and U.S. defense officials, also signaled America’s return.
Regina Kristiansen, 85, was among those evicted from Uummannaq, Greenland, in 1953, so the United States could expand Thule Air Base (now known as Pituffik Space Base). PHOTO BY ADAM FEDERMAN
Over the past 15 years, a quiet race has been underway among the world’s superpowers to gain control over the Arctic, with the United States, Russia and China all vying for dominance in a region with enormous strategic and economic value.
In 2019, President Donald Trump was widely ridiculed for offering to buy Greenland, which is still a Danish territory. But his ham-fisted bid, and the headlines it generated, aligned with decades of thinking that Greenland is essentially European real estate or an extension of North America. (President Harry Truman similarly tried to purchase Greenland in 1946, and first Norway, then Denmark have claimed the country since the 13th century.)
Although Trump’s offer was rebuffed, a number of behind-the-scenes efforts to exert U.S. influence followed. Some were soft-power moves to bolster Greenland’s economy through investments in trade, tourism and mining. Since 2019, the State Department has been working with Greenland’s government to survey the island’s resource-rich southern tier and streamline its regulatory and permitting system. In 2020, the United States reopened its consulate in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, after an absence of nearly 70 years.
Some efforts are more akin to hard power, though, like the U.S. military’s imminent plans to spend millions of dollars on upgrades at Pituffik and its hopes to expand surveillance capabilities elsewhere in the nation.
The United States’ efforts to reclaim Greenland were precipitated by Russia’s military buildup in the Arctic and China’s push to become a regional power broker. Since 2005, Russia has revived more than a dozen Cold War-era military bases across the Arctic and, as sea ice diminishes, is ramping up use of the Northern Sea Route to ship oil and gas to Asia. As the war in Ukraine depletes Russia’s conventional forces, the Russian military has doubled down on its nuclear presence along the Kola Peninsula, which borders Finland and Norway. Then there’s the fact that the shortest route for a nuclear missile from Russia to America is over the North Pole, making Greenland the first land-based opportunity to detect an incoming missile.
But it’s not just Russia the United States is worried about. As the world seeks to develop the supply chains needed to produce the minerals used in batteries, electric vehicles, fighter jets and missile guidance systems, Greenland has become particularly attractive, given its proximity to North America and the fact that, by one estimate, the country holds a quarter of the world’s rare earth elements.
China, which currently dominates the rare earth market, declared itself a “near-Arctic state” in 2018, signaling its intent to expand its reach in Greenland through mining and infrastructure investments. But the United States has worked hard to keep China out. After a Chinese state-owned firm bid on three new airports in Greenland in 2018, Secretary of Defense James Mattis told his Danish counterpart to block the deal, making clear, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, that “Beijing must not be allowed to militarize this stretch of the Arctic.”
“The United States is not here just to make Greenland happy,” says Jørgen Hammeken-Holm, permanent secretary for Greenland’s natural resources and justice ministries. “They’re here on their own agenda. We know that very well.”
In many ways, Greenland finds itself at the center of a familiar story, one that the roughly 600 residents of Qaanaaq continue to live with. Earlier this year, a United Nations special rapporteur visited Greenland to outline threats facing the indigenous population. Recalling what happened 70 years ago, he wrote, “I remain preoccupied with the adverse environmental and social effects of military activities carried out in Greenland without the free, prior and informed consent of the Inuit people.”
But Greenlanders are equally preoccupied with the future and what a new Cold War in the Arctic will bring.
Approaching Nuuk by plane, the uniformity of the ice sheet has a mesmerizing effect. Its terminus, about 70 miles from the city, reveals a dazzling network of glacial rivers that form one of the largest fjord systems in the world. Scale is disorienting here. With three times the land of Texas and a population just under 57,000 people, Greenland is the most sparsely populated nation on earth. No roads connect its towns and villages, some of which are accessible only by boat. Most of the country is covered in ice.
Yet parts of Greenland are booming.
In 1953, when the United States was preparing to establish an embassy in Copenhagen, it closed its consulate in Nuuk, then a small village of 1,600 people. Today, at close to 20,000 people, Nuuk is a bustling diplomatic hub, expected to grow rapidly over the next decade. When I arrived in June, I shared a cab from the airport with a military analyst from the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence, in town to attend a NATO conference on Arctic security and surveillance. The week prior, the U.S. Coast Guard had participated in naval exercises with Denmark’s Joint Arctic Command, headquartered in Nuuk and responsible for the maritime defense of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, another former Danish colony. When the U.S. Consulate reopened in 2020, it was originally housed in the same building as the Joint Arctic Command, fueling talk among the diplomatic corps that Denmark was aligning itself too closely with U.S. interests. (The U.S. Consulate has since moved down the street.)
There are signs of construction everywhere in Nuuk, beginning with its airport, which is currently upgrading its terminal and runway. A conspicuous new “satellite town,” built on the hills just outside of the city, houses a large cadre of diplomats and Danish military personnel. The European Union announced plans to open an office in Nuuk in 2023. And 13 other countries, including Russia, have opened honorary consuls in the city, many recently established.
“It’s not accidental that our renewed interest in Greenland’s economic security coincides with the reopening of our diplomatic presence in Nuuk and the renewed desire [for our military] to operate more routinely out of northern Greenland,” says Joshua Tallis, an expert in maritime security with the Center for Naval Analyses, the Navy’s federally funded research center. “Those things are directly related to one another.”
While Greenland remains part of Denmark, it has far more autonomy today than it did during the height of the Cold War. In 1979, Greenland’s majority Inuit population voted in favor of home rule, establishing a parliamentary system and gaining control over internal affairs, initially including education and the environment and later natural resources too. In 2004, the U.S.-Denmark defense agreement was updated to provide assurances that Greenland would be included in discussions of U.S. military policy in the country. But Denmark — which provides more than half of Greenland’s budget — retains control of security and foreign policy.
To Sara Olsvig, a former member of both the Danish and Greenlandic parliaments and current chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council — an international nonprofit that advocates for indigenous rights — America’s objectives in Greenland are obvious: Its military wants to maintain access to existing U.S. and Danish military bases (and possibly expand them), while its government wants Greenland’s mineral riches.
“There’s a clear interest to the U.S., which is shared by other NATO members,” says Olsvig. “That there’s a huge island with lots of resources that is geopolitically in a very important spot. And everyone around the table knows that. Including Greenland.”
The village of Qaanaaq lies about 70 miles from Thule Air Base and is the settlement closest to a proposed titanium mine. PHOTO BY ADAM FEDERMAN
Russia’s recent revival of its Arctic military presence is part of why the Pituffik base is, once again, a U.S. priority. A top official at the base recently told Inside Climate News that Pituffik’s radar installation covers “the entirety of Russia” and plays an important role in current U.S. operations, given the “heightened state” of affairs stemming from the war in Ukraine. After decades of comparative neglect, the United States is planning to spend $3.95 billion on maintenance and upgrades to the base through 2034. But there are indications the United States has more ambitious plans.
In January, the Air Force deployed F-35 fighter jets from Alaska to Pituffik for the first time ever, as part of a joint U.S. Canadian military exercise. In late July, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced it was seeking contractors capable of constructing new runways, aircraft fueling facilities and munitions storage at the base, renovations estimated to cost nearly $99 million.
The military has been tight-lipped about these developments. Asked if there are plans to expand the base, a spokesperson for Space Operations Command responded, “We can’t speculate on the future military presence at Pituffik Space base.” The Army Corps didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
But among military analysts, it’s well known that the United States would like to strengthen its surveillance capabilities in Greenland, particularly along the country’s less-developed eastern flank, improving U.S. and NATO capacity to monitor the straits through which Russian nuclear submarines must pass to reach the North Atlantic. In May 2022, a U.S. delegation traveled to Greenland to explore the possibility of establishing new radar installations elsewhere in the country. And there’s been academic discussion (including at a Danish military academy) about building a new deepwater port in the south that could support U.S. submarines and commercial ships, says Rasmus Leander Nielsen, head of the University of Greenland’s Center for Foreign and Security Policy.
The United States isn’t keeping its ambitions entirely secret, though. This summer, a nuclear-powered U.S. submarine made a port visit to Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands — something Denmark didn’t allow during the Cold War — following a similar visit to Iceland in April. According to the Navy Times, it was a demonstration “of the U.S. military’s ability to project power throughout the North Atlantic region.” At the same time, the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency, which manages military supply chains, has been working to expand maritime refueling capabilities in the region, with Navy Cmdr. Joshua Fischer explaining, “Endeavors such as this will lay the groundwork for future mission success in the High North and Arctic as our Navy expands into more northern operations.”
Since 2020, the United States has also begun sending bombers on missions near the Kola Peninsula, where Russia’s largest fleet of nuclear-armed submarines is based. It’s a clear signal that the United States is prepared to attack Russia’s major military installations, says Michael Klare, a peace and world security studies professor for the Five College Consortium in Massachusetts, who has written extensively on U.S. military activity around the world.
Illustration by Derik Hobbs
All of these developments are happening in the shadow of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has upended regional power dynamics.
Since the war began, the Arctic Council, the region’s premier forum for diplomacy, has paused nearly all engagement with Russia. In April, Finland became a member of NATO, with Sweden expected to follow suit, meaning every Arctic nation except Russia will soon be part of the military alliance. Denmark — which recently pledged to increase military spending to $21 billion, with significant earmarks for Arctic initiatives — is currently negotiating a new bilateral defense agreement that could allow U.S. military forces to deploy on Danish land. U.S.-Russian relations have reached a new low, with Russia suspending participation in its last remaining nuclear arms treaty with the United States and America ceasing to share information about its nuclear stockpiles with Russia. And in early October, an analysis of satellite imagery by the New York Times suggested that Russia may be preparing to resume testing of a new nuclear-powered missile in the Arctic, which some have dubbed a “flying Chernobyl.” Days later, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to confirm that Russia has completed a “successful test” of the missile and warned the country’s parliament could pull out of a treaty banning nuclear tests.
“Supposedly we live in an era of MAD — mutual assured destruction — with no incentive for either side to start a nuclear war,” says Klare. “But that’s being eroded.”
Not all signs of a Cold War revival are so obvious. In 2021, the U.S. Army published a policy blueprint, “Regaining Arctic Dominance,” that identified four primary drivers of this great northern power competition. After military developments, which focused on Russia and China, the second strongest driver was the Arctic’s “vast deposits” of mineral and energy resources. These include base metals, such as copper and nickel, as well as highly coveted rare earth metals, which are used in everything from electric vehicles and wind turbines to aircraft engines and advanced weaponry.
Thomas Qujaukitsok prepares for a narwhal hunt at the mouth of the North Water Polynya in Baffin Bay on the west coast of Greenland. PHOTO BY ADAM FEDERMAN
Greenland is at the heart of this battle as well, spurring talk of a “rare earths gold rush.” Billionaire investors Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg have lined up to fund exploration efforts for nickel and cobalt near Disko Bay, a UNESCO world heritage site known for its natural beauty and ice fjords. Greenland’s southern coast is believed to have some of the largest rare earth deposits in the world, which have attracted a flurry of investment.
Greenland’s left-leaning ruling party, which came to power in 2021, has effectively banned uranium mining and suspended new oil and gas exploration, declaring that “the future does not lie in oil.” But the government appears far more bullish about mineral development, which is often touted as the means for full Greenlandic independence. At this March’s Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) meeting in Toronto, Greenland’s then-minister of mineral resources and justice, Aqqaluaq B. Egede, repeated several times, “We’re aiming at unlocking large-scale mining in Greenland.”
The annual gathering, billed as the “world’s premier mineral exploration and mining convention,” featured a “Greenland Day,” emceed by Qupanuk Olsen, Greenland’s self-described “biggest influencer,” who also happens to be the in-country director for Australian mining company Ironbark Zinc Limited. In Egede’s keynote address, he pointed out that Greenland has 22 of the 50 “critical minerals” the U.S. Geological Survey has identified as essential to U.S. economic and national security. The United States seems well aware.
Since 2021, through a $6.3 million contract with the consulting firm Deloitte, the U.S. State Department has been quietly advising Greenland’s Ministry of Mineral Resources on “resource sector governance and capacity building.” A source who worked on the contract (but was not authorized to speak on the record) said the focus has been on cataloging data, with “substantial interest in the rare earth potential.”
The State Department declined, on multiple occasions, to make anyone available for this story, and the omertà even followed me abroad. Before traveling to both Nuuk and Toronto, I asked the State Department for interviews. Even its email denying my request was marked “off the record.” And at the PDAC conference, a member of the Greenlandic delegation said the State Department had “warned” them I’d be there.
But the State Department’s engagement, and the prospect of broader federal interest in the country, was a major topic of discussion during coffee breaks and a cocktail reception after Greenland Day, and with good reason: The U.S. government is moving closer to making direct investments in Greenland’s mining sector.
The U.S. Export-Import Bank, an executive branch agency that finances American development projects around the world, has its eye primarily on a titanium deposit roughly 50 miles south of Qaanaaq, not far from Pituffik. The black sand beaches in the former village of Moriusaq contain high levels of ilmenite, the source rock for most of the world’s titanium, a lightweight metal widely used in military aircraft, including Lockheed’s F-22 and F-35fighter jets, as well as naval ships and submarines. China and Russia are among the world’s largest producers of refined titanium, controlling about 70% of the market — an imbalance the United States feels acutely. A recent op-ed in the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes lamented, “Titanium is the next Cold War battle — and the U.S. is already losing it.”
In 2021, the Export-Import Bank issued a letter of intent to Bluejay Mining, the British company seeking to develop the titanium deposit, stating that it was considering investing $208 million in the project. And in June 2022, the bank’s president met with Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Egede in Washington, during a visit where Egede also met with the U.S. deputy secretary of state.
Not all of the Export-Import Bank’s prospects make as much sense. In July 2022, representatives from the bank traveled to Greenland’s remote northern coast to visit a major zinc deposit known as Citronen Fjord. Unlike the Moriusaq titanium project, U.S. interest in the Citronen Fjord mine baffled industry experts.
John Thompson, former chief geoscientist at Teck Resources — which operates Alaska’s Red Dog mine, one of the world’s largest suppliers of zinc — was astonished to learn the United States was considering the investment. Unlike other base metals, there is no near-term supply crunch for zinc, nor is it a key metal for new technology. And there are large reserves closer to home, including Red Dog and several active mines in Canada.
“There are things in Greenland that might be worth mining,” agrees Murray Hitzman, former associate director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s energy and minerals program. “But zinc is not one of them.”
What’s more, Thompson says, the concentration of zinc at Citronen Fjord is comparatively low and would not be considered economically viable, even in easier-to-reach places. The project has struggled to obtain the financing needed to move forward, possibly because of its extreme northern location and very limited shipping season — the fjord is only ice-free for six weeks each year. “It’s a mystery to me why they would think that is the best place to put their money,” Thompson says.
Unless, of course, U.S. mining investments in Greenland are designed not just to capture resources for the United States but to thwart China’s Arctic ambitions. When the Export-Import Bank first expressed interest — proposing, in 2020, to invest $657 million in Citronen Fjord — the Australian company behind the project, Ironbark Zinc Limited, had been partnering with a Chinese state-owned firm. If approved, the Export-Import Bank’s investment will come from a new $27 billion initiative known as the China and Transformational Exports Program, mandated by Congress in 2019. The program is clearly designed to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive global infrastructure project that seeks to expand China’s influence around the world. Ironbark’s Citronen Fjord project was the first to qualify under the new U.S. program.
“It’s been increasingly clear and increasingly public that the U.S. doesn’t want any Chinese investment, any Chinese infrastructure in Greenland,” says Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher with the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. “End of story.”
Ironbark and the Export-Import Bank declined to comment for this story.
Even projects that make more fiscal sense seem to have a secondary motivation. While titanium has more obvious benefits than zinc, U.S. interest in the Moriusaq project seems as tied to geography as securing access to resources. The site is fewer than 25 miles from Pituffik, and allowing China to get involved in a project so close to a U.S. military asset would be a strategic blunder.
“When I’m standing on the beach at the Dundas ilmenite project,” Bluejay Mining CEO Bo Møller Stensgaard told me, “I can see the radar installation at Thule.”
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Adam Federman is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations whose work has appeared in Politico, the Washington Post, Wiredand other publications. He is the author of Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray.
Featured image: Panigpak Daorana, resident of Qaanaaq, says the village itself is unlikely to benefit from new mining developments in Greenland. PHOTO BY ADAM FEDERMAN
October 31st, 2023 by Stephen M. Lepore
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Our thanks to Daily Mail Online for having brought this article to our attention
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Israel’s ambassador to the UN displayed a yellow star reminiscent of Holocaust victims on his chest Monday, provocatively pledging to wear the badge until members of the Security Council condemn Hamas ‘atrocities.’
The state has previously called for Secretary General Antonio Guterres to resign after he said last week that the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,400 ‘didn’t happen in a vacuum.’
‘Some of you have learned nothing in the past 80 years. Some of you have forgotten why this body was established,’ envoy Gilad Erdan said.
Erdan denounced the Security Council for ‘staying silent’ over the unprecedented deadly attacks by Hamas Palestinian militants against Israel.
The deeply divided 15-member council has not adopted a single resolution on the three-week-long war between Israel and Hamas.
‘So, I will remind you. From this day on, each time you look at me you will remember what staying silent in the face of evil means,’ the ambassador said.
‘Just like my grandparents, and the grandparents of millions of Jews, from now on my team and I will wear yellow stars,’ he said, standing up to affix one on the breast of his suit inscribed with the words ‘Never Again,’ in reference to the yellow stars Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis.
But Erdan will wear it ‘as a symbol of pride,’ he said.
‘We will wear this star until you wake up and condemn the atrocities of Hamas.’
His wearing of the badge, which has come to symbolise the oppression of Jews since its imposition in Nazi-occupied Europe, was swiftly criticised by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, which urged him to wear the Israeli flag instead.
‘This act disgraces the victims of the Holocaust as well as the state of Israel,’ Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan said in a Hebrew-language post on X, formerly Twitter.
‘The yellow star symbolises the helplessness of the Jewish people and their being at the mercy of others. We now have an independent state and a strong army. We are the masters of our own fate.
‘Today we will fasten to our lapel a blue and white flag, not a yellow star.’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the October 7 attacks the worst against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
For weeks the Security Council has been riven by divisions over the war and its impact, rejecting four draft resolutions about the conflict.
Some texts were blocked by the United States, a close Israel ally, because they did not mention Israel’s right to defend itself.
Another presented by the Americans was stymied by Russia and China in particular because it did not clearly call for a ceasefire.
Jews wearing Star of David badges, Lodz Ghetto, Poland, World War II, 1940-1944
A gold Star of David with the words ‘Never Again’ is worn by Israel United Nations Ambassador Gilad Erdan as he speaks during a Security Council meeting
In light of the impasse, the UN General Assembly last Friday adopted by a large majority a nonbinding resolution requesting an ‘immediate humanitarian truce,’ but not mentioning Hamas.
Israel, through Erdan, blasted the text, saying it will ‘go down as infamy.’
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Featured image: UN Envoy Gilad Erdan and his mission wearing a yellow Star of David at the UNSC, October 30, 2023. (Source: Twitter)
October 31st, 2023 by Yaroslav Lissovolik
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As stipulated by the guidelines, Russia takes over the rotating chairmanship of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) from January 2024. There are high hopes a lot more will change, especially towards widening its numerical strength and increase support for the Global South. In addition, there is also the expectation that BRICS will consolidate its role within the emerging geopolitical processes and global competition for Africa. China and Russia are currently making efforts to assert influence more aggressively, despite the challenges and obstacles, in cooperating with Africa.
According to authentic reports, a number of African countries such as Algeria, Angola, DR Congo, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Tunisia, Uganda and Zimbabwe have expressed interest in joining BRICS. Egypt and Ethiopia have gained full-fledged membership in BRICS during the last summit held Johannesburg, South Africa.
In this insightful interview, Kester Kenn Komegah attempted to find out more about the future relationship of BRICS with Africa, and aspects of Russia’s policy towards Africa from Yaroslav Lissovolik, who is the founder of BRICS+ Analytics – a think-tank that explores the potential of the BRICS+ format in the global economy. Lissovolik, previously worked as chief economist and head of research in Deutsche Bank Russia, the Eurasian Development Bank as well as Sberbank. He also worked as an Advisor to Russia’s Executive Director in the International Monetary Fund. Here are excerpts of our wide-ranging discussion:-
Kester Kenn Komegah (KKK): As Russia prepares to take over the rotating chairmanship of BRICS group in January 2024, what are some of the expectations?
Yaroslav Lissovolik (YL): The expectation is that Russia will likely pursue a broad agenda with closer connectivity of BRICS to Africa being one of its key items. one of the possible directions in Russia’s chairmanship may be the path of “integration of integrations” — the creation of a cooperation platform for the regional organizations of the Global South such as the Eurasian Economic Union and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as well as BRICS. This may be complemented by efforts to add more economic weight to the BRICS grouping via developing the payment mechanisms within BRICS to conduct settlements in national currencies. There may also be the continuation of the BRICS expansion process with possible further steps to expand the core as well as to create a group of BRICS partners from among the leading members of the developing world community.
KKK: Can China and Russia (both BRICS members) halt the current U.S. global dominance? What mechanisms are available for effecting this process?
YL: Within BRICS both China and Russia will likely cooperate towards creating those financial and economic mechanisms that are lacking in the global economy. The purpose of BRICS is not to undermine any economy, but to create cooperative platforms for economic cooperation among developing countries. In fact, the BRICS and BRICS+ formats may in the future be complemented by what I called the BRICS++ format that could include the participation of developed economies, regional blocs and their development institutions. My view is that BRICS will develop along a path of becoming the most inclusive and open platform in the global economy that may serve as the basis for a revitalized and more sustainable globalization effort. Such a platform may with time include the participation of the Bretton Woods institutions and other key players of the global economy from the Western world.
Overall, there are not too many economic mechanisms created thus far by the BRICS — the main economic contribution of the BRICS has been the creation of the New Development Bank (NDB) and the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA). The BRICS NDB is set to expand its membership to include more developing economies. There are also plans within BRICS to widen the mandate of the BRICS CRA to make it more effective in supporting member countries. What is lacking at this stage is a financial mechanism that would facilitate the payments in national currencies among the BRICS economies — discussions on the creation of such a mechanism (widely referred to as BRICS Pay) have been ongoing since at least 2017, but progress in this area has been moderate at best. Furthermore, the issue of the creation of a common currency or an accounting unit for all BRICS countries has also progressed slowly.
KKK: What are your views about the key challenges confronting BRICS in pursuit of leading the emerging reconfiguration and new political and economic architecture?
YL: The main challenges facing the BRICS grouping have to do with a lack of an ambitious economic agenda. Thus far the strong momentum exhibited by BRICS on the international stage is mostly political/geopolitical as reflected in the sizeable number of developing countries expressing their desire to join the grouping. This widening of the ranks of the BRICS bloc renders the attainment of consensus even more difficult — something that will be critical in adopting decisions on economic cooperation. And on the economic front there are still a lot of issues that are yet to be addressed — apart from the financial track related to the common payment systems and a potential common currency/accounting unit, another crucial theme is trade liberalization among the BRICS economies and across the economies of the Global South more broadly. The BRICS need an ambitious trade liberalization agenda that would favour developing economies, especially Africa. At this stage, import tariffs in BRICS countries are relatively high, especially on agricultural products — there is significant scope for the BRICS economies to lower trade barriers to support the modernization of Africa and other regions of the Global South.
KKK: There has been much talk on Global South and Africa is geographically located there. What are Africa’s weaknesses and strengths in this rising multipolarity?
YL: One of the most significant strengths wielded by Africa on the international stage is its rising solidarity and rising coordination of the continent’s economies on the international stage. This is vividly exemplified by the rising prominence of the African Union (AU) in some of the key international fora. The AU in 2023 became a member of the G20, while also becoming increasingly active in international mediation efforts and discussions on economic cooperation with other regional blocs. The AU has been also successful in advancing the project of Africa’s regional integration via the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Again, the best way in which the BRICS could contribute towards the success of this regional integration project is via greater trade openness to African economies. The success of the AfCFTA would go a long way towards overcoming the limitations faced by Africa’s economy in terms of low intra-continental regional connectivity and trade.
KKK: Let’s finally talk about some specific tangible roles Africa could play in the geopolitical changes and process. Do you think the African Union also need some urgent reforms to perform effectively?
YL: In my view, Africa could play a crucial role in the coming years both at the level of the developing world and globally. In particular, the African Union given its membership in the G20 and South Africa’s presidency in the G20 in 2025 could launch important initiatives aimed at boosting the resiliency of the global economy. One such initiative could involve the creation of a platform for regional blocs such as the AU, MERCOSUR, ASEAN, EU and other blocs in which G20 countries are members. Such a platform for regional arrangements could be launched as a G20 engagement group, the R20 or regional 20 — in effect it would represent a new level of global governance formed by regional integration arrangements and their development institutions. Thus far there is no mechanism for a horizontal coordination of regional integration groups and their development institutions in the world economy. A similar effort could be undertaken by the African Union within the realm of the Global South — the AU could lead the establishment of economic linkages with other regional blocs from the developing world, including MERCOSUR, SCO, EAEU and ASEAN. Such a platform could serve as a basis for an expanded BRICS+ circle that would encompass the majority of developing economies.
In the longer term, the AU could also participate in the reconstruction and the reform of the main global institutions and fora such as the WTO, the G20 and the UN Security Council. With respect to both the WTO there may be a case for the African Union becoming a member of this organization, just like it did in the case of the G20 alongside the EU as a regional bloc. In this scenario, the AU could represent the developing world in both the WTO and the G20 with initiatives countering protectionism and beggar-thy-neighbour policies that have become so prevalent over the course of the past decade. As the role of the AU gains traction in the world economy, there may be a stronger case for Africa’s greater representation in the UN governing bodies such as the UN Security Council. Overall, the main potential for Africa and the African Union in my view lies in pursuing the path of «integration of integrations», i.e. the building of cooperative linkages and platforms between Africa’s regional integration projects and development institutions with regional peers elsewhere in the world economy. This process of greater cooperation among the regional integration blocs is only starting and the African Union could lead this important process that opens up new communication lines and possibilities for cooperation in the world economy.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), Weekly Blitz and InDepthNews, is now a regular contributor to Global Research. He researches Eurasia, Russia, Africa and BRICS. His focused interest areas include geopolitical changes, foreign relations and economic development questions relating to Africa. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.
Featured image is from the author
October 31st, 2023 by Ahmed Adel
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At a time when European Union leaders have just met to address the crises in Eastern Europe and Gaza, Budapest and Bratislava threaten to break the bloc’s unity over military support for Ukraine, reported the Financial Times newspaper on October 27. The article comes as EU member states disagreed on a budget allocating €50 billion to Kiev and, according to a statement issued after the first day of the EU leaders’ summit, they will try and reach an agreement before the end of the year.
Financial and military support from Brussels has been essential for Kiev since the start of the conflict in February 2022. Nonetheless, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his newly elected Slovak counterpart, Robert Fico, have spoken out against maintaining that support, which requires the unanimity of the 27 member states of the European bloc.
Image: President Putin meeting with Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico in June 2015 (Source: President of Russia/Twitter)
According to the British newspaper, Fico said before the EU summit that his country would not vote in favour of any new measures to help Ukraine or to impose more sanctions on Russia without a full assessment of how those could affect decisions in Slovakia. Not only Fico but Orban’s longstanding position on the war has irked Brussels, too.
“This is a very worrisome development and changes the dynamic,” a senior bloc official involved in arms supply projects to Ukraine told the Financial Times when commenting on Hungary and Slovakia. “It could be a real problem.”
EU support to Kiev is delivered bilaterally but can be reimbursed by a fund managed by Brussels and financed by Member States, which requires unanimous consent to complete. The last increase to that fund occurred in January, and Hungary’s veto has blocked subsequent attempts to complete it. However, Orban has now found a new ally in Fico and is no longer the sole sane voice of the EU.
It is recalled that Orban met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on October 26 in China and said he was “proud” of his country’s commitment to Moscow. In fact, upon arrival at the European summit, Orban stated that Hungary has a “clear and transparent policy” of engagement with Russia and Putin.
“We would like to keep open all the communication lines to the Russians, otherwise there will be no chance of peace,” he said.
Budapest cited the situation with the OTP bank as the main grievance of this initiative, on which the unlocking of a tranche of 500 million euros for Ukraine from the EU Peace Fund will depend. Orban stressed to the Kossuth radio station that he was waiting for a delegation from the Office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Hungary to discuss the current problem.
In Orban’s opinion, Western countries do not dare to recognise Ukraine’s inability to win on the battlefield, saying,
“It is absolutely clear that the Ukrainians won’t win on the front lines. All military experts talk and write about it, but politicians dare not admit they have chosen a flawed strategy. You fight, you shed blood — many people died, Ukraine’s losses are enormous — in return, we give you money and military equipment.”
In turn, Fiсo pointed out the high level of corruption in Ukraine. Earlier, he informed European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that Slovakia was only willing to provide humanitarian aid to the country. The Prime Minister stressed that the head of the European Commission respected the sovereign right of member states not to provide military support to Kiev.
It is likely that Brussels will put more pressure on Orban and Fiсo for their defiance. Both central European countries will most likely eventually agree on a certain amount of money to the Ukrainian Armed Forces for some concessions, but over time, more EU countries will begin to oppose financing, just as Slovakia’s recent turn has demonstrated.
Until that time arrives, though, the fact that Hungary and Slovakia have exercised their right of veto could have serious consequences, and they will likely face threats of being deprived of money from development funds. As expected, Baltic leaders especially received the news of the lack of agreement with negativity.
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda described Orban’s rapprochement with Putin as “regrettable” and said that it sent a “very wrong message” not only to Kiev but to the entire European continent.
For her part, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas stated that the lack of effort by some member states to support Ukraine militarily could send “a signal that we do not take defence seriously enough.”
“I am very concerned that some are giving signals that we cannot do it and that we do not even aspire to do it,” she said.
However, this is expected from the Baltic minnows, which are amongst the most rabid Russophobes in Europe. More importantly, they do not wield great influence in Europe, and rather, the more important countries have been more restrained in their criticisms of Orban, once again demonstrating how fractured the bloc is.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
October 31st, 2023 by eugyppius
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***
On 26 September 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines bringing Russian gas to Germany via the Baltic Sea were attacked in a series of clandestine bombings. According to Seymour Hersh, the sabotage was planned by the Biden administration in late 2021, and carried out by U.S. Navy divers in collaboration with Norway. While Hersh’s report remains unconfirmed, the sabotage was almost surely a NATO operation.
A recent report in The Washington Post, detailing the assistance the CIA has provided to the Ukrainian SBU in their attacks on high-profile targets like Darya Dugina, Valery Gerasimov (who narrowly survived) and the Kerch Bridge, contains a buried denial by anonymous “Ukraine officials” that their agents were “directly involved in the … attack on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline,” while repeating that Western intelligence assessments hold “that Ukraine was linked to the plot.” I take this to mean that Ukrainian intelligence was responsible for planting the false trail of evidence pointing to the Andromeda, while other NATO parties carried out the actual bombing.
A year and two weeks after the Nord Stream bombings, in the early morning of 8 October 2023, a second Baltic pipeline experienced a mysterious rupture. This time it was the undersea Balticconnector, which connects the Finnish and Estonian gas grids. The sudden pressure collapse occurred around the same time that sensors detected damage to undersea telecommunications cables running from Estonia to Finland and Sweden. The damage to the cables was minor, but the Balticonnector will take at least until April 2024 to repair. Since Finland stopped importing Russian gas in 2022, the country relies heavily on LNG imports from the United States, and the pipeline outage is not projected to have serious implications for the gas supply in either Estonia or Finland.
The timing of the damage aligned with the movements of a Hong Kong-flagged container ship named NewNew Polar Bear, on its 3–8 October voyage from the Russian naval base at Baltiysk (near Kaliningrad) to St. Petersburg:
This useful graphic from Welt. The orange/yellow line represents the path of the NewNew Polar Bear, the green line the telecommunications cables, and the blue line the Balticconnector. The purple circles indicate the points of damage.
On Tuesday, Finnish authorities confirmed suspicions that the damage was caused by a 6-tonne anchor, which they have recovered from the seabed:
The National Bureau of Investigation stated at the press conference today that it has made progress in the investigation of the gas pipeline damage. …
General Head of Investigation Detective Superintendent Risto Lohi described that on the seabed, a 1.5 to 4 metre-wide dragging trail is seen to lead to the point of damage in the gas pipeline.
In the distance of a few metres from the gas pipeline damage point, there was an anchor which is believed to have caused the wide dragging trail and the damage itself.
Early this morning the anchor was lifted up. There are traces in it which indicate that it has been in contact with the gas pipeline, Lohi says.
From the finding point of the anchor onward, a narrow dragging trace is to be seen and it matches size-wise with the part connecting the anchor to the chain.
These observations in connection with data analysed on the traffic of the vessels have corroborated the main line of investigation concerning the role of the vessel Newnew Polar Bear of a Chinese shipping company and flying the flag of Hong Kong in the incident.
From the Finnish press release. See also these photos of the trench which the anchor dragged into the seabed.
While Finnish authorities remain noncommittal on the question of sabotage, Swedish investigators insist that the damage to their telecommunications cables was intentional. Analysts also have a hard time understanding how a container ship could have unknowingly dropped a 6-tonne anchor, let alone dragged it over many kilometres without anybody noticing:
“I’ve never seen an anchor manoeuvre under eight knots of speed,” says [Stefan Krüger, Professor for Shipping Security at TU Harburg]. He also considers it unlikely that the anchor could have dropped unnoticed due to a technical problem, based on his experience of ships of this size.
“When an anchor blows out of the winch, it will awaken half the ship. It makes a hell of a noise,” says Krüger, adding that in such cases the anchor chain usually breaks completely. “You don’t drag a fallen anchor across the seabed for kilometres.”
But this is exactly what the furrow found by divers points to … “If these accounts turn out to be accurate, the most plausible explanation would be that the captain knew exactly what he was doing,” Krüger says.
The Russian maritime journalist Mikhail Voytenko, on the other hand, argues that the damage was accidental, though his reasoning is far from convincing, and seems even to suggest the opposite scenario of a symbolic reprisal for Nord Stream:
Intentional sabotage is highly improbable, for just one sound reason – this NewNew Polar Bear ship is a darling of Russia and China, both shipping and media. She’s the first to launch a new direct China-Russia container service via the Northern Sea Route, hailed by national media as a breakthrough and a blow to Western attempts to blockade Russian sea trade. It’s just unthinkable, that of all ships, this one could be used for bombardment of pipeline with her anchors (that in itself being a rather stupid idea).
The captain of the NewNew Polar Bear docked his vessel at St. Petersburg on 8 October, hours after allegedly rupturing the Balticconnector. Then, as Finnish investigators scrambled to figure out what had happened to their pipeline, he steered his ship back through the Baltic.
More from the Finnish press release:
…Lohi stated that NewNew Polar Bear was contacted several times, but they were not willing to cooperate.
The police had no competence to take any coercive measures against the vessel, since it sailed in the exclusive economic zone of Finland, which is out of the police competence in this respect, Lohi says.
While the Finns watched, the NewNew Polar Bear sailed north around the Scandinavian peninsula into the Russian waters of the White Sea, docking at the port of Arkhangelsk on 21 October. The next day, this press photo of the ship made the rounds, showing a pointedly missing port anchor:
If you look closely, you’ll notice another oddity, namely the collapsing starboard-side containers. Apparently, NewNew Polar Bear’s escape was not uneventful.
The ship’s owners have obtained permission from Russia to take the Northern Sea Route east into the Pacific, with assistance from a state-owned Russian ice-breaker. As the Barents Observer reports, a prior permission had listed the NewNew Polar Bear’s operator as Hainan Xin Xin Yang Shipping Co., but the current license reveals the vessel is now being run by Torgmoll, “a Russian-registered company with offices in Moscow and Shanghai.”
According to Torgmoll’s website, the company is specialising on logistics between China and Europe, and is keenly interested in developing Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. The company is represented with a member in the Russian-Chinese Business Forum, and is headed by Yelena V. Maksimova.
Judging from a Russian business registry, Maksimova is connected with Ke Jin, a representative of the NewNew Shipping Line in Russia.
Speaking at a conference in Moscow this summer, Ke Jin said that NewNew Shipping Line planned to put five ships to sea on a container route between ports in Russia and China in 2023 with transit through the Northern Sea Route (NSR).
One of these ships, Ke Jin said, would sail from Arkhangelsk to China. This would be the NewNew Polar Bear. If this is a backhanded reprisal for Nord Stream, then we can say it was planned since at least last summer, months after Finland officially joined NATO on 4 April 2023.
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Featured image is from eugyppius
October 31st, 2023 by Jerome Irwin
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***
Israel’s Zionists in Gaza, the West Bank, and Palestine at large, continue to indifferently slaughter innocent civilian Palestinian men, women, children and babies as if they are nothing more than hated and despised beasts to be totally eradicated from off of the face of Israel and the Earth.
Yet the mass conscience and consciousness of the world’s humans hasn’t yet become shocked enough to drop everything they’re doing – flocking instead by the hundreds of thousands in America and around the globe to:
–Attend the latest competitive, corporately promoted sports event, while using all their creative human energies to idly argue about who is going to win or loose;
–plan their upcoming fantasy Halloween costumes for yet another anticipated bacchanalian
–Trick-or-Treat night-out-on-the-town; plan for a sumptuous, bountiful Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends, or;
–ready themselves for yet another year’s anticipated imagined fantasy arrival of Santa Claus down the chimney of their gayly-decorated cozy homes .
Meanwhile, in the United States, poor wretched sods, like Robert Card, a U.S. Army Reservist weapons instructor and fired worker at a recycling centre, decided the best action he could take for himself to address the woeful state of the world was to become a mass killer and just recycle 18 innocent Americans, and then recycle himself along with them by committing suicide.
Yet another sad, pathetic, minor punctuation mark to the real 2023 crisis in human affairs underway in Gaza, the West Bank, the whole of Palestine and the world.
While the only thing the mass total of politicians in its U.S. House of Representatives and United Nations Security Council can think to do to stop the on-going massacre in Gaza is to vote or not vote again, like they repeatedly did in their war against Russia in Ukraine, against any ceasefire or diplomatic negotiations.
Instead, they can only think to do is send thousands more assault weapons so Israel’s radical Zionist Nationalist Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, can pass them out to crazed Zionist Jewish settler-colonists to use, willy-nilly, against still more innocent, unarmed Palestinian civilians they hate with a passion with no one in authority willing or able to stop them.
While yet another Carrier Battle Group, filled with battle-trained Marines, is sent into the waters around Israel, ready to assist the Zionist Israeli’s in their, once and for all, utter annihilation of their “Palestinian Problem” that has plagued them ever since the Zionist Jews violent mass occupation [in 1948] of the ancient holy lands of Palestine. Isn’t that a nice solution to yet another ugly human disaster in the world?
With Israel’s clearly blatant. patently genocidal war against the Palestinian peoples arrogantly, grotesquely, unfolding before all of humanity’s eyes, the world clearly is at a critical crossroads in evolution of the homo sapiens species. Either it is fast completely reverting to its earlier very primitive, fascist, might makes right, state of previous centuries, or the human species is now entering into a very difficult birthing process of something that’s screaming to we humans to become more advanced and evolved.
So far, however, its the old male cretin thugs like Biden, Netanyahu and their ilk, and gross propaganda lies and manipulations by their clever wordsmiths, who still rule the roost, because the people still, basically, are too primitive, stupid and unaware to see beyond their own crude, dumb noses.
At any rate, two excellent examples of an always higher feminine consciousness constantly at work that seeks to combat this old male nemesis, are rightly aghast, as we all should be, at what is happening at present in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, who, like many of us, almost can’t believe the grotesqueness of all is actually happening. At Listen to the conversation of two such evolved feminists with one another.
Abby Martin since her formative days as a radical activist at the University of California, Santa Cruz is a genuine Keeper of the Truth, as the old saying goes, who unabashedly speaks truth to power, as does Rania Khalek of Dispatches From the Underclass.
Another fellow humanist who also questions the madness of what we humans are currently doing in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere in the world at large, is Michael Brenner, Professor Emeritus in International Affairs at the University of Pittsburg and a Fellow of the Center of Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/John Hopkins.
Brenner has authored what he calls the Final Scene: “America – its vassal train in tow”, Brenner contends, “is committing moral suicide in Palestine.” Brenner goes on in the Final Scene to say:
‘The political consequences will be profound, and as enduring as the complete discrediting of the country’s standing as a positive presence in world affairs. Encouragement of, and participation in the murderous Israel assault on Gazans has been accompanied by a torrent of lies and deceptions which discredit anything we shall do or say. The reference points for this harsh judgment are not the mythic image of “the city on the Hill;” the last, best hope of mankind; the indispensable nation for achieving global peace and stability: the Providential people born in a state of Original Virtue destined to lead the world down the path of Enlightenment. None of those idealistic standards. No, we are debased when measured against the prosaic standards of human decency, of responsible statecraft, of a decent respect for the opinions of humankind.”
Brenner further contends:
“Some might rightly say that America has behaved in similarly atrocious ways in the past – and that it always restored its sense of self-respect and effectiveness abroad. Decimation of the native population; the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the wanton killing and destruction in Vietnam, and – more recently – the horrendous consequences of our interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. The last two mentioned being highlighted by the razing of Falluja (twice), Mosul and Raqqa that can be seen as the template for what we and the Israelis are now doing in Gaza. The practical difference – as opposed to the moral one – is the unique attention focused on events there. After all, this is the Holy Land for the three Abrahamic religions, the main protagonist is the Jewish state of Israel founded in the wake of the Holocaust, the conflict’s powerful resonance with large communities of co-religionists in Western capitals. It is a Passion Play with rival scripts. Ours will not be the anointed one.
Moreover, it is occurring at a time when the tectonic plates of the political world are shifting, when the old constellations of power and of influence are being successfully challenged, when America has responded to feelings of self-doubt as the ordained global guide and overseer by compulsive, futile displays of muscle flexing. Anxiety and self-doubt masked by false bravado is the hallmark sentiment among the country’s political elites. That is a poor starting point for a reengagement with reality. Americans are too attached to their exalted self-image, too narcissistic – collectively and individually, too lacking in self-awareness, too leaderless to make that wrenching adaptation. Instead, we are about to see an epic act to prove that reality is only what the United States wills it to be: the girding of loins for war on Iran. It will end badly – very badly. Leaving a diminished, aggrieved but unrepentant America.”
The little bells are tinkling. Bow down
They are bringing the sacrament to a dying God
Meanwhile, the carnage befalling Palestine, Palestinians & the World, grows worse with every passing minute, hour and day:
Finally, in closing, what follows is this writer’s own “kick at the can” entitled, “We Humans Continue To Indifferently Massacre the Earth & One Another.”
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The writer Jerome Irwin is a Canadian-American writer who originally was a Criminology student working in one of America’s local police departments. For decades, Irwin has sought to call world attention to problems of environmental degradation and unsustainability caused by a host of environmental-ecological-spiritual issues that exist between the conflicting world philosophies of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples.
Irwin is the author of the book, “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle Island Odyssey” (www.turtle-island-odyssey.com), a spiritual odyssey among the native peoples of North America that has led to numerous articles pertaining to: Ireland’s Fenian Movement; native peoples Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance Movement; AIPAC, Israel & the U.S. Congress anti-BDS Movement; the historic Battle for Palestine & Siege of Gaza, as well as; the many violations constantly being waged by industrial-corporate-military-propaganda interests against the World’s Collective Soul. The author and his wife are long-time residents on the North Shore of British Columbia.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from UNRWA
October 31st, 2023 by David Rosenberg
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***
Last Saturday’s huge demonstration against the war on Gaza and for justice for Palestine was remarkable. Overwhelmingly young, multicultural, energetic and united, it had another striking phenomenon, missing from mainstream media reports.
Despite the rhetoric of politicians, media commentators and Jewish community “leaders” claiming that a pro-Palestine march through central London would be a huge affront and danger to Jews, right there among the marchers was a large Jewish bloc, mobilised by several different groups.
This wasn’t the first time that Jews from different organisations were marching for Palestinian rights and justice, but the scale, demography, and spirit was different.
The bloc comprised people from their twenties to their eighties, with the balance tipped much more towards the younger age group.
There was an assertiveness and self-confidence in their political views expressed on hand-made placards:
“Jews Against Genocide,”
“Jews against War Crimes,”
“Not in our Name” (with a star of David),
“Jews Stand for Palestine.”
It took place in a period when Israel has officially declared itself at war, and there is tremendous pressure within the Jewish community to keep any dissent safely behind closed doors.
Two days earlier, though, Na’amod (Hebrew for “We will stand”) UK Jews against the Occupation, held a solemn event in Parliament Square mobilising 400 Jews.
They condemned both the horrific Hamas action against Israeli civilians on October 7 and the continued revenge attacks by Israel’s military that within a few days exceeded those numbers, with many deaths of children, the toll from which is still rising.
Source: Democracy Now!
Na’amodniks held banners that plainly said:
“UK Jews demand: Stop the Genocide. End the Siege.”
Knowing that Israel’s government and self-proclaimed “leaders” of Britain’s Jews do not speak for you is one thing. Saying so publicly and so starkly, is much harder. And it’s not just here. In the US, thousands of young Jews have mobilised around the message:
“We refuse to let our grief be used as a justification for further bloodshed and a second Nakba.”
Jewish activists call for Gaza ceasefire in DC. October 18, 2023 (JVP Twitter)
Younger Jewish radicals are crossing lines that go beyond criticising the occupation with its daily human rights abuses, towards a broader critique of zionism as a whole.
Before WWII, zionism was a minority opinion in most Jewish communities around the world. The Holocaust and its aftermath changed that, irrevocably it seemed.
Large numbers of survivors languishing in Displaced Persons (DP) camps had no wish to return to countries where the Nazis had murdered their families but the doors to Western nations were hard to prise open.
Many in the DP camps looked towards Palestine as a place of refuge. Jewish minorities in Western countries, unable to help those refugees, became emotionally drawn towards zionism, and didn’t question what Israel’s creation would mean for people already living in Palestine.
Especially from the 1960s onwards, zionism became a dominant ideology in Jewish life in Britain. This coincided with a relative improvement in the material lives of many Jews who became more suburbanised and middle-class.
In Jewish educational institutions, synagogue Sunday schools, summer camps and Jewish schools, pro-zionism and Hebrew culture became the norm during the 1950s and ‘60s.
The “Jerusalem Programme” adopted in 1968 sought to turn a generalised sympathy towards Israel among ordinary diaspora Jews into an imperative. It promoted a political stance asserting the “centrality of Israel” in Jewish life and the “unity of the Jewish people” through “its bond to its historic homeland Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel).”
Official zionist bodies, resourced by the Israeli state, set up cultural programmes to reinforce this identification within diaspora communities.
The first Jerusalem Programme of the early 1950s had spoken mainly of “ingathering the exiles” (regarding Jews in the diaspora as “exiles” rather than fully fledged citizens of their countries). It encouraged emigration to the new state, “aliyah,” which means “ascending,” and spoke of fostering Jewish consciousness “by propagating the zionist idea,” stressing “Hebrew education” and “Hebrew language.”
The 1968 programme went much further, declaring zionism to be “the National Liberation Movement of the Jewish people.”
The zionist project in Palestine had set about the erasure of Palestinian history through building on and renaming Palestinian villages, ethnically cleansed in the wars of 1948 and beyond.
More widely the zionist project began to downgrade and ideologically erase longstanding Jewish diaspora cultures and languages and powerful Jewish alternatives to zionism that rose within them.
The self-confident challenge to zionist imperatives, epitomised by the Jewish bloc last week, was an expression of the growing interest in reviving those alternatives.
From political zionism’s inception in 1897 until WWII, zionists struggled to make headway in overwhelmingly working-class Jewish communities. This was the case both in the US and Europe, especially in inter-war Poland, home to Europe’s largest Jewish community.
Activists who rejected Jewish nationalism in favour of class politics joined communist and socialist parties in different countries, and largely became less attached to Jewish identity.
But the most powerful secular left-wing alternative to zionism, born in the very same year as the conference that proclaimed political zionism, was Bundism – a Jewish socialist workers’ movement with an internationalist and anti-nationalist outlook.
Its philosophy of doykayt (here-ness), stated in Yiddish, was:
“Dortn vu mir lebn, dort is undzer land” — “There where we live, that is our country.”
It saw a Jewish future as minorities in the diaspora, not in a fortress-style Jewish nation state.
The Bund promoted a sophisticated multicultural model for ensuring that minority rights were enhanced as fully as possible within the states where they and other minorities lived.
More than an orthodox political programme for winning a better future, Bundism specifically advanced a modern secular Jewish cultural identity, especially through Yiddish language, libraries, sports clubs, schools, newspapers, discussion circles, children’s and youth movements, a women’s movement, in which they gave agency to the grassroots.
Within the socialist movement they put great stress on inner democracy and clashed with advocates of more centralist models, including communists, not just with Lenin in 1903, but in Poland in the 1930s and other arenas.
In Britain, before WWI, anarchists and Bundists, who opposed Jewish nationalism, were the beating heart of progressive campaigns, especially in Britain’s largest Jewish community in London‘s East End.
Between the wars, the Communist Party attracted many Jewish members there. Despite sharp differences, the ABC of Anarchists, Bundists and Communists shared an emphasis on class politics and rejection of Jewish nationalism.
The Bund was decimated in the Holocaust, during which its members played a key role in ghetto resistance. Its postwar remnants were scattered in several countries and continued activities within their means, including in Britain, but were politically marginalised by the dominance of zionism.
Bundists in New York issued a statement in 1947 against partition of Palestine:
“The peaceful coexistence of Jews and Arabs must be brought about by the renunciation of the zionist goal of an independent Jewish state on the part of the Jewish community (and)…by the Arabs’ recognition of the democratic principle that a country belongs to its entire population.
“Palestine should thus be regarded as belonging both to the Arabs and the Jews. Palestine should become an independent state. Its freedom and equal rights of its two communities should be internationally guaranteed.”
The Jewish Socialists’ group has recently published a pamphlet: The Jewish Workers’ Bund Past, Present Future which includes articles by individual Bundists who were members or close to our group, and combines these with those of present-day activists influenced by Bundism. It also includes rare documentation on the terrible treatment by zionists of Bundists in the DP camps who were resisting pressure to become part of the war in Palestine.
Today in Israel, Mesarvot — the Refuser Solidarity Network — operate as a support network for Israeli conscientious objectors.
It is heartening that Bundist ideas are attracting renewed interest and providing an anti-nationalist frame of reference among Jewish radicals today.
Older and more progressive ideas are finding a renewed life and relevance and a new audience in our dangerous and unpredictable times.
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Featured image: NOBLE ASPIRATIONS: (Left) ’Where we live, there is our country! Vote List 9, Bund’ and ‘A democratic republic! Full national and political rights for Jews!,’ Bund election poster in Kiev, 1917; (below) Group portrait of the first-grade class of the Bundist school in Kalisz, central Poland, 1930-1934 Photo: Public Domain
October 31st, 2023 by Tim Llewellyn
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***
Israel to cut Gaza links after war, said a Financial Times headline last weekend, with no attribution or quotation marks. As if such a cut could happen.
What Israel says goes.
This sums up much of western mainstream media coverage of Israel and Palestine over the past 22 years, and especially the BBC’s. This is because, since the Second Intifada in 2001, the realities and origins of Israel’s 75-year campaign to oust or subdue the Palestinians have never been properly explained.
The long displacement of the Palestinian nation and its reduction by means of expulsion, attrition, containment and violence have rarely been granted corrective context in our media.
Now, it seems the BBC and others are making desperate attempts to put this right, with background analysis and explanatory programmes, such as the series last week on BBC Radio 4, Understand: Israel and the Palestinians. But it is all much too late.
Israel, after the 7 October attack by Palestinian fighters, has been able to grasp the moral high ground and portray the breakout and killings as “unprovoked”, with western reporters’ acceptance. It became, in the eyes of the West, simply a robust response to terrorism.
In the same FT, HA Hellyer, from the Royal United Services Institute, a London military think-tank, is quoted repeating points by analysts such as Greg Philo and Mike Berry, in their two books Bad News from Israel and More Bad News from Israel, and myself, in the Guardian and elsewhere, made during and after the Second Intifada.
“There are scores of international journalists in Israel who can cover every detail of every atrocity,” Hellyer said. “But there is nothing of similar depth available when it comes to the incredible civilian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.”
This, crucially, he went on, has the effect of dehumanising Palestinian victims.
“This means… ” he said, “that westerners are more immune to Palestinian civilian suffering than to Israeli suffering.”
So, basically, Israelis are “people like us”, and Palestinians are an incoherent and anonymous mass.
The BBC news teams and their producers and editors also have to fight a pervasive and often vicious campaign against them by pro-Zionist interests and a print media almost uniformly pro-Israel.
Pro-Israel groups choose to see the tragedies in Palestine and Israel through the lens of atrocities against Israelis. For various reasons, these groups are eager to do the BBC down, destroy it if possible, so that the debate about whether the BBC should call Hamas fighters “terrorists” or not has consistently been of far greater import than the unprecedented slaughter of trapped civilians in Gaza.
This way, the corporation will, it is reckoned, bend under the weight of public and political opprobrium. It often does.
The BBC is vitally important in any media reckoning because of its European and global reach and its reputation for fair and objective news and analysis.
I have been a strong and vocal critic of BBC Israel/Palestine coverage for 23 years, since the outbreak of the Second Intifada, not so much for its reporting but the way the coverage is shaped and introduced from London.
This manipulation, sometimes unknowing and cultural, but often done under great political pressure – and echoed by ITN, Sky and, to a lesser extent, Channel 4 – has broadly held that the violence in the region is an Israeli response to Palestinian attack. The reporting of this latest calamitous turn of events started that way, and Israel has largely kept the initiative. But is it beginning to change?
BBC and other mainstream TV and radio journalists have started to grill Israeli spokespeople.
Mishal Husain, on the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme on 18 October, at 08:16, insisted to an Israeli colonel that an independent investigation would be the best way to find out who really attacked al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on 17 October (he was outraged).
BBC outlets have featured prominently strong and reasoned Palestinian voices, such as Mustafa Barghouti, of the Palestinian National Initiative; the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot; and Ghada Karmi, the British-Palestinian academic and activist forced as a child from West Jerusalem early in the Nakba.
Nour Odeh, from Ramallah, articulately explained why she was not going to be hustled into condemning the Hamas attacks of 7 October, a favourite trope of western interviewers.
“They are already overwhelmed”
Former spokeswoman for the Palestinian Authority Nour Odeh says she fears there will be a “complete breakdown” at hospitals in Gaza following Israeli bombings. #Newsnight https://t.co/EUeNjaVuOc pic.twitter.com/g7TBNmh6el
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) October 10, 2023
The bombing of the al-Ahli hospital is a prime example of what the BBC faces in terms of overwhelming Israeli and domestic Zionist pressure.
In my view, as a former BBC Middle East Correspondent who many times had to make instant live reporting judgements based on knowledge, experience and observation, the BBC reporter Jon Donnison, was justified in reporting that
“the Israelis are investigating… but it is hard to see what else this could be [than an Israeli strike]… given the size of the explosion… when we have seen rockets fired out of Gaza we have never seen explosions of that scale… but it is still to be verified”.
What he said bore the weight of available evidence and was carefully caveated.
The BBC immediately criticised Donnison after Zionist and government outcry.
Had Donnison said that, against all experience, Hamas might have hit the hospital by accident, no one would have said a word. It is ingrained, still, in the western psyche that, in the final analysis, the state, in this case Israel, has the benefit of the doubt, not its victims.
Even during a broadly sensible inquest into coverage on BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show on 18 October, the BBC’s bias peeped through.
The presenter asked a journalist who had managed to film Hamas inside Gaza, in its tunnels, in the past, whether she would do the same after “the horrors of 7 October”? The implication was that only Hamas provides horror. Why did he not ask his own news team, Jeremy Bowen, for example, if after what Israel has repeatedly done in Gaza since 2007 he would still be prepared to talk to an Israeli military spokesman?
The UK government and opposition statements of unflinching support for Israel – “We want you to win,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in Jerusalem, on camera – gave the British right-wing print media cover as they largely toed that line.
The more liberal-ish press wavered. The I ran a prominent story saying that government ministers believed the BBC was undermining diplomacy in the Middle East (the al-Ahli hospital story).
The Guardian published Palestinian reaction and supportive analysis and comment, and, like the FT, carried moving stories about the women TV reporters who, under enormous danger, brought the stories of Gaza’s stricken people to the screens of Al Jazeera and the Arabic-language, US-owned TV station Alhurra.
The BBC also reported well and vividly on the surge in settler and Israeli army killings and attacks on civilians in the West Bank, one in Qusra, near Nablus, where four Palestinians were shot dead and the subsequent funeral was attacked. Seventy-five West Bank Palestinians were killed in the week after 7 October.
But trepidation remains. The Guardian reportedly commissioned then dropped a piece by US lawyer Dylan Saba on the suppression and censorship of the Palestinian voice in the US. Saba received no explanation. The piece eventually was published by N+1.
The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, in London, asked Mandy Turner, a professor of conflict, peace and humanitarian affairs at the University of Manchester and a Palestine-Israel expert, for an article on “why ‘peace’ had been shattered between Palestinians and-Israelis?” (as if there was “a peace”.) Unhappy with the edits that this “independent voice” had insisted on, Turner withdrew her article.
She eventually published it elsewhere.
Then came the Guardian’s sacking of Steve Bell, its noted cartoonist of more than 40 years’ standing, for a cartoon showing Netanyahu preparing to excise surgically from his belly a portion of flesh with an outline shaped like the Gaza Strip.
When I saw it, I channelled David Levine’s 1966 cartoon in the New York Review of Books of then-US President Lyndon Johnson showing off a Vietnam-shaped scar on his abdomen. This was exactly what Bell said he was inspired by.
But the Guardian saw, or chose under pressure to see, a reference to Shylock, the much put-upon Jew in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. How this might be seen as antisemitic is a long discussion for another article. Anyway, Bell lost the argument in what appears to have been a fit of Guardianesque trepidation.
This is not a definitive moment to sum up the trends in the UK’s mainstream media, but there are indications that sense is starting to prevail, at least in some quarters.
On 20 October, Philip Stephens (who was part of the BBC board of governors panel which reported very fairly on impartiality in the BBC’s Israel-Palestine coverage in April 2006) asked in a Financial Times opinion piece:
“When does a determination to destroy Hamas bleed into indiscriminate violence against the trapped Palestinians… unlike the buildings of Gaza, the Palestinian aspiration to statehood cannot be bombed to dust. Israel’s long-term security demands it sets off again on the path to a political solution.”
In a leader, the same newspaper raised the question of “a grave violation of international law” in holding a population under siege. Other respectable voices have cited “collective punishment”. All these and more are war crimes.
These are not questions that have been at the forefront of British media coverage since the effective collapse of any chance of a two-state solution 23 years ago. Nor has there been much honest reporting about the many excesses of violence and dispossession the Palestinians have endured at the hands of Israel and its western supporters since 1948.
For our media, Israel’s security and its alliance with the West always trump Palestinian rights, freedom, justice and self-determination.
There might be a few encouraging signs, with the British media at last asking: how did this begin? What comes after?
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Tim Llewellyn is a former BBC Middle East Correspondent, based in Beirut from1976-80 and Nicosia 1987-92, and reported for the Corporation on Middle East matters as a freelance until 2002. He has since, inter alia, written a book, Spirit of the Phenix: Beirut and the Story of Lebanon, published by I.B.Tauris, and acted as a persistent critic of the British mainstream media, especially BBC TV and radio coverage of the Israel-Palestine issue. Llewellyn is also an Executive Committee member of the Balfour Project, which advocates equal rights for all in Israel-Palestine.
Featured image is from Jewish Voice for Labour
October 31st, 2023 by Shehab Al Makahleh
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In the geopolitical theatre, the intricate interplay between sovereign states and international law forms the bedrock upon which global order rests. However, a troubling pattern has emerged, raising questions about the accountability of powerful nations in adhering to international resolutions and laws. At the centre of this discourse lies the state of Israel, whose actions have often skirted the boundaries of international norms with apparent impunity. The recurring narrative of Israel’s non-compliance with international resolutions and its apparent disregard for global legal frameworks raises significant concerns about the sanctity of international law.
Israel’s continued defiance of international and United Nations resolutions has eroded the efficacy of these institutions, casting a shadow over their ability to ensure compliance and foster global stability. The persistent occupation of Palestinian territories, in contravention of multiple UN Security Council resolutions, has not only led to a protracted conflict but has also set a dangerous precedent for other nations to flout international norms with impunity. The absence of meaningful consequences for Israel’s actions not only undermines the credibility of the UN but also emboldens other nations to flout international law when it suits their interests.
In recent developments, the UN General Assembly approved a resolution calling for a humanitarian truce in Gaza, underscoring the urgent need for alleviating the dire humanitarian situation in the region. However, the pressing question remains: Will Israel abide by this resolution? The history of Israel’s responses to similar calls for ceasefire and humanitarian aid leaves room for skepticism. The absence of concrete mechanisms to enforce compliance raises doubts about the efficacy of such resolutions and the ability of the international community to compel Israel to adhere to them.
Israel’s track record of selectively adhering to international resolutions and its persistent defiance of UN mandates pose a formidable challenge to the implementation of the newly proposed humanitarian truce. The absence of accountability mechanisms has emboldened Israel in the past, allowing it to operate with relative autonomy despite widespread international condemnation. The lack of tangible consequences for non-compliance has created an environment where Israel’s actions are often met with little more than diplomatic reprimands, failing to yield any substantial change in behaviour.
Given the influential backing of certain global powers, the prospects of meaningful enforcement mechanisms being imposed on Israel remain slim. The unwavering support from powerful allies has shielded Israel from significant repercussions, thus creating an environment where international resolutions and calls for humanitarian aid are often met with calculated indifference. This shield of protection renders the prospects of outside forces compelling Israel to comply with the humanitarian truce resolution even more daunting.
Moreover, the absence of a unified and concerted approach from the international community further undermines the effectiveness of the UN resolution. The lack of a consolidated stance among member states weakens the UN’s ability to exert meaningful pressure on Israel, allowing the nation to operate with a sense of immunity from external intervention. The fractured nature of the international response not only dilutes the impact of the resolution but also perpetuates the cycle of non-compliance with international law.
Despite the prevailing challenges, the need for concerted international action to enforce the humanitarian truce in Gaza remains paramount. The urgency of the humanitarian crisis demands a unified and resolute response from the international community to ensure the protection of innocent civilian lives. By fostering a cohesive and unwavering approach to compelling Israel’s compliance with the resolution, the global community can send a strong message about the sanctity of international law and the imperative of safeguarding human rights, even in the face of political complexities and power dynamics.
Only through a resolute and collective commitment to upholding the principles of humanitarian aid and the sanctity of human life can the global community hope to foster a world order that is characterised by empathy, justice, and respect for international law. The success of the resolution hinges on the global community’s ability to transcend geopolitical interests and work in unison to hold all nations accountable for their actions, regardless of their power and influence.
The complex web of international law, carefully woven to safeguard the sovereignty and rights of nations and individuals, is rendered ineffective in the face of Israel’s continued transgressions. From settlements in the West Bank to the controversial annexation of East Jerusalem, Israel’s actions have consistently defied the provisions laid out in various international agreements, including the Fourth Geneva Convention. The flagrant violation of these agreements not only deepens the chasm of mistrust between Israel and Palestine but also undermines the spirit of cooperation and diplomacy that the international community strives to foster.
The influence of powerful allies and their vested interests further complicates the enforcement of international law. The unwavering support extended to Israel by influential global powers has shielded the nation from meaningful repercussions, effectively granting it carte blanche to act with apparent impunity. This bolstering of Israel’s position on the global stage has created an imbalance of power that undermines the principle of equality among nations, further eroding the foundations of international law.
Furthermore, the prevalence of a selective approach to enforcing international resolutions and law calls into question the integrity of the global community. The dichotomy between the swift enforcement of sanctions and embargoes on certain nations and the leniency extended to Israel paints a picture of a fragmented and skewed international legal system. This skewed approach not only fosters disillusionment among nations striving to adhere to global norms but also erodes the credibility of international institutions that are tasked with upholding the sanctity of international law.
The repercussions of Israel’s unchecked power reverberate far beyond the borders of the Middle East, casting a pall over the efficacy and relevance of the United Nations and international law. As we navigate the complex landscape of global diplomacy, the need for an equitable and impartial approach to enforcing international law has never been more critical. It is imperative that the global community takes concerted and unwavering steps to ensure that no nation, regardless of its power or influence, remains above the reach of international law. Only through a collective commitment to upholding the tenets of international law can we foster a world order that is characterised by justice, equity, and peace for all nations.
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Featured image is from National File
October 31st, 2023 by Middle East Monitor
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Spain’s acting social rights minister on Sunday urged Europe to act urgently against “planned genocide” in Palestine, reports Anadolu Agency.
Ione Belarra’s remarks came in a video shared on her X account, in which she spoke to reporters during a pro-Palestine protest in Madrid.
“Today we are here accompanying all the decent people of our country and also all those people throughout Europe who want to ask and demand an end once and for all to this planned genocide, this ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine that is being carried out by the State of Israel,” Belarra said.
The European leaders, including the Spanish, are “not up to the gravity of the circumstances,” she said and stressed:
“We do not want to be complicit in this planned genocide and we think that Europe must act urgently. I believe that Europe is going to pay dearly for this hypocrisy.”
She continued:
“The public is astonished to see how the whole position of the European Union is subordinated to the interests of the United States and the State of Israel.”
Saying that such a position can change today, the minister called on European countries once again to suspend diplomatic relations with Israel, and apply exemplary economic sanctions against Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the entire political leadership, as well as an arms embargo.
“Of course, (we should) take Netanyahu to the International Criminal Court to be judged as what he is, a war criminal,” she said and added: “I insist, not with our silence and not with our complicity. We need the European Union to act.”
Israel has heavily bombarded Gaza since October 7 when the Palestinian group Hamas carried out a cross-border attack, killing 1,400 people, and taking many hostages.
The number of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza has risen to 8,005, including 3,342 children, 2,062 women, and 460 elderly, according to the Health Ministry.
The Israeli army’s spokesperson, Daniel Hagari, on Saturday announced “expanding its operations,” and moving to the “next phase of our war against Hamas,” which includes ground operations.
Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are also grappling with shortages of food, water, fuel, and medicine due to Israel’s blockade of the enclave.
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October 31st, 2023 by Max Blumenthal
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Israel’s military received orders to shell Israeli homes and even their own bases as they were overwhelmed by Hamas militants on October 7. How many Israeli citizens said to have been “burned alive” were actually killed by friendly fire?
Several new testimonies by Israeli witnesses to the October 7 Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel adds to growing evidence that the Israeli military killed its own citizens as they fought to neutralize Palestinian gunmen.
Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that as desperation began to set in,
“the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
A separate report published in Haaretz noted that the Israeli military was “compelled to request an aerial strike” against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza “in order to repulse the terrorists” who had seized control. That base was filled with Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers at the time.
These reports indicate that orders came down from the military’s high command to attack homes and and other areas inside Israel, even at the cost of many Israeli lives.
An Israeli woman named Yasmin Porat confirmed in an interview with Israel Radio that the military “undoubtedly” killed numerous Israeli noncombatants during gun battles with Hamas militants on October 7.
“They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she stated, referring to Israeli special forces.
As David Sheen and Ali Abunimah reported in Electronic Intifada, Porat described “very, very heavy crossfire” and Israeli tank shelling, which led to many casualties among Israelis.
While being held by the Hamas gunmen, Porat recalled,
“They did not abuse us. We were treated very humanely… No one treated us violently.”
She added,
“The objective was to kidnap us to Gaza, not to murder us.”
According to Haaretz, the army was only able to restore control over Be’eri after admittedly “shelling” the homes of Israelis who had been taken captive.
“The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri residents were killed,” the paper chronicled. “Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble.”
Much of the shelling in Be’eri was carried out by Israeli tank crews. As a reporter for the Israeli Foreign Ministry-sponsored outlet i24 noted during a visit to Be’eri,
“small and quaint homes [were] bombarded or destroyed,” and “well-maintained lawns [were] ripped up by the tracks of an armored vehicle, perhaps a tank.”
Apache attack helicopters also figured heavily in the Israeli military’s response on October 7. Pilots have told Israeli media they scrambled to the battlefield without any intelligence, unable to differentiate between Hamas fighters and Israeli noncombatants, and yet determined to “empty the belly” of their war machines.
“I find myself in a dilemma as to what to shoot at, because there are so many of them,” one Apache pilot commented.
Video filmed by uniformed Hamas gunmen makes it clear they intentionally shot many Israelis with Kalashnikov rifles on October 7. However, the Israeli government has not been content to rely on verified video evidence. Instead, it continues to push discredited claims of “beheaded babies” while distributing photographs of “bodies burned beyond recognition”to insist that militants sadistically immolated their captives, and even raped some before torching them alive.
The objective behind Tel Aviv’s atrocity exhibition is clear: to paint Hamas as “worse than ISIS” while cultivating support for the Israeli army’s ongoing bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which has left over 7000 dead, including at least 2500 children at the time of publication. While hundreds of wounded children in Gaza have been treated for what a surgeon described as “fourth degree burns” caused by novel weapons, the Western media’s focus remains trained on Israeli citizens supposedly “burned alive” on October 7.
Yet the mounting evidence of friendly fire orders handed down by Israeli army commanders strongly suggests that at least some of the most jarring images of charred Israeli corpses, Israeli homes reduced to rubble and burned out hulks of vehicles presented to Western media were, in fact, the handiwork of tank crews and helicopter pilots blanketing Israeli territory with shells, cannon fire and Hellfire missiles.
Indeed, it appears that on October 7, Israel’s military resorted to the same tactics it has employed against civilians in Gaza, driving up the death toll of its own citizens with the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons.
Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood at 6 AM on October 7, quickly overwhelming the military bases from which Israel maintain its siege of the Gaza Strip. Chief among the objectives outlined by Hamas and PIJ was the release of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, including as many as 700 children passing through the system each year along with 1264 Palestinians currently being held without charges.
The 2011 swap for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured five years prior and released in exchange for 1027 prisoners, provided clear inspiration for Al-Aqsa Flood. By storming military bases and kibbutzes, the Palestinian militants aimed to capture as many Israeli soldiers and civilians as possible, and bring them back to Gaza alive.
The lighting assault immediately overwhelmed Israel’s Gaza Division. Video recorded from GoPro cameras mounted on the helmets of Palestinian fighters shows Israeli soldiers cut down in rapid succession, many still dressed in underwear and caught off guard. At least 340 active soldiers and intelligence officers were killed on October 7, accounting for close to 50% of confirmed Israeli deaths. The casualties included high ranking officers like Col. Jonathan Steinberg, the commander of Israel’s Nahal Brigade. (Many first responders and armed Israeli civilians were also killed).
The Erez Crossing is the home of a massive military and Coordination of Government Activities in the [Occupied] Territories (COGAT) facility which functions as the nerve center of Israel’s siege on Gaza. When it was overrun by Palestinian fighters on October 7 with droves of army bureaucrats inside, the Israeli military flew into a panic.
According to Haaretz, the commander of the Gaza Division, Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld,
“entrenched himself in the division’s subterranean war room together with a handful of male and female soldiers, trying desperately to rescue and organize the sector under attack. Many of the soldiers, most of them not combat personnel, were killed or wounded outside. The division was compelled to request an aerial strike against the [Erez Crossing] base itself in order to repulse the terrorists.”
Video released by Israel’s COGAT ten days after the battle – and the Israeli airstrike – shows severe structural damage to the roof of the Erez Crossing facility.
🔴 Israeli officials returned to the Erez Crossing on Israel's border with Gaza today for the time since the war's outbreak
Ministry of Defense personnel assessed the damage caused by Hamas terrorists to the crossing's infrastructure pic.twitter.com/Ax5t0UDGNR
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) October 17, 2023
By 10:30 AM, according to an account the military gave to the Israeli news outlet Mako, “most of the [Palestinian] forces from the original invasion wave had already left the area for Gaza.” But with the rapid collapse of the Israeli military’s Gaza Division, looters, common onlookers and low-level guerrillas not necessarily under the command of Hamas flowed freely into Israel.
By this point, Israel’s two Apache helicopter squadrons had 8 choppers in the air, “and there was almost no intelligence to help make fateful decisions,” Mako reported. The squadrons did not reach full strength until noon.
As the wave of infiltrations from Gaza drove chaos on the ground, discombobulated Israeli pilots unleashed a frenzy of missile and machine gun salvos: “The Apache pilots testify that they fired a huge amount of munitions, emptied the ‘belly of the helicopter’ in minutes, flew to re-arm and returned to the air, again and again. But it didn’t help and they understand it,” Mako reported.
The Apache helicopters appear to have focused on vehicles streaming back into Gaza from the Nova electronic music festival and nearby kibbutzes, attacked cars with apparent knowledge that Israeli captives could be inside. They also fired on unarmed people exiting cars or walking on foot through the fields on the periphery of Gaza.
🇮🇱⚔️🇵🇸Israeli AH-64 Apache attacking Hamas fighters with it's cannon and missiles. pic.twitter.com/flzwHYP7dg
— Heyman_101 (@SU_57R) October 9, 2023
In an interview with Israel’s Mako news outlet, one Apache pilot reflected on the tortuous dilemma of whether to shoot at people and cars returning to Gaza. He knew that many of those vehicles may have contained Israeli captives. But he chose to open fire anyway.
“I choose targets like that,” the pilot reflected, “where I tell myself that the chance that I am shooting here on hostages as well is low.”
However, he admitted that his judgment “was not 100%.”
“I understand that we have to shoot here and quickly,” the commander of the Apache unit, Lt. Col. E., told Mako in a separate report. “Shooting at people in our territory – this is something I never thought I would do.”
Lt. Col. A., a reserve pilot in the same unit, described a fog of confusion:
“I find myself in a dilemma as to what to shoot at, because there are so many of them.”
A report on the Apache squadrons by the Israeli outlet Yedioth Aharanoth noted that
“the pilots realized that there was tremendous difficulty in distinguishing within the occupied outposts and settlements who was a terrorist and who was a soldier or civilian… The rate of fire against the thousands of terrorists was tremendous at first, and only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow down the attacks and carefully select the targets.”
A squadron commander explained to Mako how he nearly attacked the home of an Israeli family occupied by Hamas militants, and wound up firing next to it with cannon rounds.
“Our forces hadn’t had time to reach this settlement yet,” the pilot recalled, “and I’ve already run out of missiles there, which is the more accurate weaponry.”
With the family inside a fortified bomb shelter,
the pilot “decided to shoot a cannon 30 meters from this house, a very difficult decision. I shoot so that if they are currently there, they will hear the bombs inside the house, that they understand that it is known they are there, and with the hope that they will leave that house. I am also telling you the truth, it crossed my mind that I was shooting at the house.”
Ultimately, the Israeli helicopter pilots blamed clever Hamas tactics for their inability to distinguish between the armed militants and Israeli non-combatants.
“The Hamas army, it turns out, deliberately made it difficult for the helicopter pilots and the operators of the UAVs,” Yedioth Aharanoth claimed.
According to the Israeli paper,
“it became clear that the invading forces were asked in the last briefings to walk slowly into the settlements and outposts or within them, and under no circumstances to run, in order to make the pilots think they were Israelis. This deception worked for a considerable time , until the Apache pilots realized that they had to skip all the restrictions. It was only around 9:00 a.m. that some of them began to spray the terrorists with the cannons on their own, without authorization from superiors.”
And so, without any intelligence or ability to distinguish between Palestinian and Israeli, the pilots let loose a fury of cannon and missile fire onto Israeli areas below.
One of many homes in Kibbutz Be’eri which appears to have been shelled with heavy weapons
Photos of the aftermath of the fighting inside kibbutzes like Be’eri – and of the Israeli bombardment of these communities – show rubble and charred homes that resemble the aftermath of Israeli tank and artillery attacks inside Gaza. As Tuval Escapa, the security coordinator at Kibbutz Be’eri, told Haaretz, Israeli army commanders had ordered the “shelling [of] houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
Yasmin Porat, an attendee of the Nova music festival who fled into Kibbutz Be’eri, told Israeli Radio that when Israeli special forces arrived during a hostage standoff,
“They eliminated everyone, including the hostages because there was very, very heavy crossfire.”
“After insane crossfire,” Porat continued, “two tank shells were shot into the house. It’s a small kibbutz house, nothing big.”
Destroyed homes in Kibbutz Be’eri following the fighting on October 7, which included Israeli tank shelling of residences
A video posted by the Telegram account of Israel’s South Responders shows the bodies of Israelis discovered below the rubble of a home destroyed by a powerful explosive blast – likely a tank shell. The right-wing New York Post ran a report on a similar incident about a boy’s body found scorched beneath the ruins of his home in Be’eri.
The phenomenon of charred corpses whose hands and ankles had been tied, and who were found in groups beneath the rubble of destroyed homes, also raises questions about “friendly” tank fire.
Yasmin Porat, the hostage who survived a standoff at Be’eri, described how Hamas militants tied her partner’s hands behind his back. After one militant commander surrendered, using her as a human shield to ensure his safety, she saw her partner lying on the ground, still alive. She stated that Israeli security forces “undoubtedly” killed him and the other hostages as they opened fire on the remaining militants inside, including with tank shells.
Israeli security forces also opened fire on fleeing Israelis whom they mistook for Hamas gunmen. A resident of Ashkelon named Danielle Rachiel described nearly being killed after escaping from the Nova music festival when it was attacked by militants from Gaza.
“As we reached the roundabout [at a kibbutz], we saw Israeli security forces!” Rachiel recalled. “We held our heads down [because] we automatically knew they’d be suspicious of us, in a small beat-up car… from the same direction the terrorists were coming from. Our forces began shooting at us!”
“When our forces fired at us, our windows shattered,” she continued. It was only when they shouted in Hebrew, “We’re Israelis!” that the shooting stopped, and they were taken to safety.
Some Israelis were not as lucky as Rachiel. Adi Ohana was shot dead by Israeli police near his home after being mistaken for a Palestinian guerrilla.
“An innocent man was killed in the most negligent way possible,” his niece complained.
Israeli media is now filling up with reports of the military gunning down fellow Israelis, even as they were defending their homes from Palestinian gunmen.
Among the most gruesome videos of the aftermath of October 7, also published on the Telegram account of South Responders, shows a car full of charred corpses (below) at the entrance of Kibbutz Be’eri. The Israeli government has portrayed these casualties as Israeli victims of sadistic Hamas violence. However, the melted steel body and collapsed roof of the car, and the comprehensively scorched corpses inside, evidence a direct hit from a Hellfire missile.
It is also possible that the male occupants of the car were Hamas activists who had streamed in after the fences were breached. They may have also been returning to Gaza with Israeli captives inside their car.
Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, appears to have promoted photos showing dead Hamas fighters during his October 26 tirade at the United Nations. Erdan gesticulated angrily at the podium, bellowing that “we are fighting animals” before whipping out a paper displaying a QR code captionioned, “Scan to see Hamas’ atrocities.”
When I scanned the code that day at noon, I found around 8 grisly images of burned bodies and blackened body parts. One showed a pile of completely charred male corpses piled into a dumpster. Would Israeli rescuers and medics have disposed of dead Jewish Israelis in such a fashion?
All Israelis killed on October 7 appear to have been collected in individual body bags and transported to morgues. Meanwhile, numerous videos recorded by Israelis showed them defiling the corpses of Hamas gunmen killed by security forces – stripping them naked, urinating on them, and mutilating their bodies. Throwing their bodies in a dumpster would seem to be a part of the de facto policy of corpse abuse.
Just over twelve hours after Ambassador Erdan promoted the supposed Hamas atrocity photos at the UN, the Google Drive file contained only one brief video. Among the mysteriously disappeared photos was the image of the dumpster filled with burned bodies. Had it been deleted because it showed Hamas fighters torched by a Hellfire missile, and not Israelis “burned to death” by Hamas?
Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan at the UN, October 26. The QR code he displayed currently leads to a 404 notice.
Some rescuers who arrived at sites of carnage in southern Israel after October 7 said they had never seen such destruction. For those who have borne witness to Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip, however, the images of bombed-out homes and burned cars should have been familiar.
While reporting on Israel’s 51 day-long assault on Gaza in 2014, I came across a destroyed vehicle in central Gaza City belonging to a young taxi driver named Fadel Alawan who had been assassinated by an Israeli drone after he unwittingly dropped a wounded Hamas fighter off at a nearby hospital. Inside the car, the remains of Alawan’s sandal could still be seen melted into the gas pedal.
By the afternoon of October 7, placid settlements and desert roads across southern Israel were charred and lined with bombed-out cars that looked much like Alawan’s. Were the lightly-armed Hamas fighters actually capable of exacting destruction on such a comprehensive scale?
Fadel Alawah drove a wounded man to a hospital, not knowing he was a fighter. Here's what a drone did to his car: pic.twitter.com/84GTpgPxSo
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 16, 2014
This October 23, Israel’s government gathered members of the international press for an off-the-record propaganda session. Inside a closed military base, officials bombarded the press with snuff films and a collection of lurid allegations of “harrowing scenes of murder, torture and decapitation from Hamas’s October 7 onslaught,” according to the Times of Israel.
Hundreds of journalists and photographers from media companies all over the world attended today the screening of a film of assorted footage showing the extent of the horrors committed by Hamas.
Footage was taken from numerous sources, including from bodycams worn by the… pic.twitter.com/c2HRdI98Lh
— (((Emanuel Miller))) 🌻 (@emanumiller) October 23, 2023
In perhaps the most unsettling document presented by the Israeli government, reporters were treated to video showing “a partially burned woman’s corpse, with a mutilated head… The dead woman’s dress is pulled up to her waist and her underpants have been removed,” according to the Times of Israel.
Daniel Amram, the most popular private news blogger in Israel, tweeted the video of the woman’s burned corpse, claiming that “she was raped and burned alive.”
Dear @GretaThunberg, please watch this family who just found her sister after she was raped and burned alive,
they can't even recognize her. their own sister.
They do it in the name of "free palestine" today you gave them a reason and justification to continue. Be proud. pic.twitter.com/UDh1a1pz9g— daniel amram – דניאל עמרם (@danielamram3) October 20, 2023
In fact, the young woman appeared to have been killed instantly by a powerful blast. And she seemed to have been removed from the car in which she was seated – and which may have belonged to a captor from Gaza. The vehicle was comprehensively destroyed and situated on a dirt field, as many others attacked by Apache helicopters were. She was scantily clad with her legs spread apart.
Though she had attended the Nova electronic music festival, where many female attendees dressed in skimpy attire, and her bent limbs were typical of a body that had been seated in a car after rigor mortis, Israeli pundits and officials ran with the claim she had been raped.
But the allegations of sexual assault have so far proven baseless. Israeli army spokesman Mickey Edelstein insisted to reporters at the October 23 press briefing that “we have evidence” of rape, but when asked for proof, he told the Times of Israel, “we cannot share it.”
Was this young woman yet another casualty of the Israeli military’s friendly fire orders? Only an independent investigation can determine the truth.
Inside Gaza, where some 200 Israeli citizens are held hostage, there is little doubt about who is killing the captives. On October 26, the Hamas armed wing known as the Al-Qassam Brigades announced that Israel had killed “almost 50 captives” in missile strikes.
If Israel’s military had intentionally targeted areas where it knew the captives were held, its actions would have been consistent with Israel’s Hannibal Directive. The military procedure was established in 1986 following the Jibril Agreement, a deal in which Israel traded 1150 Palestinian prisoners for three Israeli soldiers. Following heavy political backlash, the Israeli military drafted a secret field order to prevent future kidnappings. The proposed operation drew its name from the Carthaginian general who chose to poison himself rather than be held captive by the enemy.
The last confirmed application of the Hannibal Directive took place on August 1, 2014 in Rafah, Gaza, when Hamas fighters captured an Israeli officer, Lt. Hadar Goldin, prompting the military to unleash more than 2000 bombs, missiles and shells on the area, killing the soldier along with over 100 Palestinian civilians.
Whether or not Israel is intentionally killing its captive citizens in Gaza, it has proven strangely allergic to their immediate release. On October 22, after refusing an offer from Hamas to release 50 hostages in exchange for fuel, Israel rejected an offer from Hamas to free Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old Israeli peace activist, and her 79-year-old friend, Nurit Cooper.
When Israel agreed to their release a day later, video showed Liftshitz clasping hands with a Hamas militant and intoning “Shalom” to him as he escorted her out of Gaza. During a press conference that day, she recounted the humane treatment she received from her captors.
Following her release from Gaza by Hamas, 85 year old Yosheved Lifshitz is interviewed about her experience in captivity. pic.twitter.com/MOTEJ82BmB
— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) October 24, 2023
The spectacle of Lifshitz’s release was treated as a propaganda disaster by the Israeli government’s spinmeisters, with officials grumbling that allowing her to speak publicly was a grave “mistake.”
The Israeli military was no less displeased by her sudden freedom. As the Times of Israel reported,
“The army is concerned that further hostage releases by Hamas could lead the political leadership to delay a ground incursion or even halt it midway.”
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October 31st, 2023 by Rima Najjar
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We repost this incisive article by Rima Najjar, first published in 2018, which focusses on the plight and courage of the Palestinian people and the history Israeli bombings of Gaza.
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Despite Israel’s intensive cover-up of its ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people, stark images and indisputable facts continue to seep through from the Gaza Strip.
The world has never witnessed a braver, more steadfast and resolute people than the en-caged Palestinians of Gaza — and that goes for every man, woman and child, from Hamas down, enduring unspeakable conditions and saying, in a voice that should be familiar to most Americans, give me liberty or give me death.
We have all witnessed what Israel’s response to this anguished cry has been and the ultimate sacrifices the Palestinians in Gaza continue to pay, most recently with the life of a young paramedic, Razan Najjar (21).
Razan Najjar’s hometown of Salama, five kilometers east of Jaffa, is now on Visualizing Palestine’s map “Short Walk Home; Long Walk to Freedom” – revealing what Haaretz hides by insidiously (given the context of the Great March of Return) referring to her “hometown” as Khuza’a, instead. More than 70 percent of the Palestinian population on the Gaza Strip are refugees from their hometowns, now usurped by Jews.
That any person with an ounce of human empathy would write about Israel’s so-called “humanitarian aid” to the Palestinians of Gaza or deny the misery of their human condition as exiles and refugees from their homes and lands just a few kilometers away fills me with an unbearable sorrow and rage.
Western media continue to use the Jewish state of Israel as a foil to Islam by saying very little about Israel’s avowedly religious character and a lot about Hamas’s.
Now, more than ever, Israel’s “security” has become an automatic euphemism for fending off Islam [currently in the shape of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran], and perpetuating Western hegemony.
The reality, though, is that Israel’s modernization is skin deep, as the reigning paradigm for its continued existence is not a simple secular nationalism for all who live in it but an ideologically exclusionary social and political policy toward non-Jews based on an ancient tribal identity.
Israel’s worldwide hasbara machine continues to deny the fundamental human rights of Palestinians, and in doing so, dehumanizes them. As this headline says, ‘When Tel Aviv goes to war, universities and activists are organized to beat back the bad news.’
“Israel not to blame for Palestinian deaths; Hamas is to blame” are the links I found on Google from every conceivable source for the first few pages of an inquiry into the legality of the blockade. It was only on page five (in my own search) that I came to: Don’t Blame Hamas for the Gaza Bloodshed from Human Rights Watch.
Israeli propaganda deflects the situation and blames the victim even as reports, such as the following on Israel’s horrific blockade of the Gaza Strip by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, continue to detail the disastrous situation there:
“Despite widespread recognition that the situation in Gaza is unsustainable, unliveable, and in many ways horrific, little progress has been made in improving the humanitarian situation of the people there.”
Israel has a long history of running afoul of international law and then trying to “talk away” its violations by employing lawyers to find legal technical loopholes to squeeze itself through and avoid complying with various international conventions to which it is a party. If you search the Internet, you will find many examples of this unconscionable legal “disputation”.
A quick example is Israel’s 1967 military occupation of the rest of the territory of Arab Palestine. In 1948, as many people are now aware, the European settler-colonial Zionist movement set up shop on 78 percent of historic Palestine as a Jewish state by ethnic cleansing most of the non-Jewish Palestinian Arab population.
Israel now claims that it does not “legally” occupy the remaining 1967 territory it invaded, and therefore it does not have to abide by the Geneva Convention.
In fact, you will find people all over the internet still “disputing” all kinds of facts related to the violent establishment of Israel on most of the territory called Palestine and described on maps as Palestine for centuries.
The disputations include preposterous statements denying both the existence of Palestine as a geographic region as well as the existence of non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs and their claim to the land on which they had existed for millennia.
The legal semantics regarding Israel’s siege of Gaza revolve around whether “Israel and Hamas” are involved in an “international armed conflict” (IAC) or not. If they are, that supposedly gives Israel the right to blockade Gaza. The legality of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, according to this version of events,
“seems to depend on its willingness to concede that it is occupying Gaza and is thus in an IAC with Hamas. But Israel does not want to do that, because it would then be bound by the very restrictive rules of belligerent occupation in the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
In an alternative strategy, when Israel finds itself under international attack on a certain issue, it uses its powerful ally, the U.S., to veto or influence outcomes involving UN “panels” in its favor.
In the case of the siege of the Gaza Strip and the question of the legality of that siege, here is a Haaretz headline that sums up the situation:
“Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip violates international law, a panel of human rights experts reporting to a UN body said on Tuesday, disputing a conclusion reached by a separate UN probe into Israel’s raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship.”
In an honors dissertation (2011), Elisha A. Kemp argues that
“The blockade is disproportionate and therefore illegal under international law. In assessing proportionality, the harm to the civilian population must be looked at as a whole. The combined harm the land blockade and naval blockade cause the civilian population in Gaza greatly outweigh any military advantage Israel derives from the naval blockade. Under the Oslo Accords, Israel already has the power to prevent missiles from being imported. The naval blockade is an unnecessary measure.”
When will the West learn that its allegiance to a Jewish state in Palestine is devoid of all human decency and compassion?
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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
October 31st, 2023 by Global Research News
By , October 30, 2023
The United States government exists to wage war. In its present form, it would crumble without it; and in its present form, it will crumble with it. Only a radical structural change will prevent this. For war-making is at the core of its budget, its raison d’être – 816.7 billion for the Fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act alone – a deficit-financed sum that tells only part of the story.
Did Russia Really “Steal” American Hypersonic Technology? Or Does the U.S. “Lag Far Behind”?
By , October 30, 2023
On October 23, former US President Donald Trump held a rally in Derry, New Hampshire. During the speech, Trump made several accusations on the account of his predecessor Barack Obama. Among other things, he claimed that the latter was responsible for Russia’s ability to build “super-duper rockets”, a colloquialism of Trump’s mint that broadly refers to hypersonic weapons.
COVID Vaccines: Cardiac Damage by LNPs, mRNA and Spike Protein
By , October 30, 2023
Lipid Nanoparticles (LNPs) with mRNA are delivered throughout the body, including the heart, and they can be found throughout the heart, in cardiac cells as well as non-cardiac cells. LNPs increase certain inflammatory cytokines that may contribute to heart inflammation (varies with type of LNP and mRNA inside).
Muddled Interventions: Haiti, the UN and Resolution 2699
By , October 30, 2023
A country broken by constant foreign interventions, its tyrannical regimes propped up by the back brace of the United States (when it wasn’t intervening to adjust it), marred by appalling natural disasters, tells a sad tale of the crippled Haitian state.
Alleged “Democracies” and Middle East Kingdoms Share Responsibility for Gaza Massacre
By , October 30, 2023
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu indeed is heading the most right-wing government of ultranationalist Jews in Israeli history. His top aides want to tighten the country’s control on the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, Israel captured in 1967 and Palestinians aspire to make their future state.
By , October 30, 2023
Five of the top six global defense corporations are based in the U.S. They are Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, Boeing and General Dynamics. All five have long sold weapons to Israel that are used against Palestinians, and they have been mentioned in the news recently as being tied to weapons sales or potential weapons sales around the current assault on Gaza.
US Secretly Expands Classified Military Base in Occupied Territories: Report
By , October 30, 2023
In a report on Saturday, the American news organization The Intercept said that the Pentagon was quietly moving ahead to construct facilities for American troops at its secret military base – codenamed Site 512 – deep within the Negev Desert, just 20 miles from the Gaza Strip.
By , October 30, 2023
Where were you on March 9, 2022, when President Biden signed the death warrant on American freedom? On that day, in a hushed ceremony at the White House without the approval of Congress, the states or the American people, Biden signed into law Executive Order 14067.
10 Questions for US Media Covering Gaza War. Ralph Nader
By , October 30, 2023
Why is Congress preparing to appropriate over $14 billion to Israel in military and other aid without any public hearings and without any demonstrated fiscal need by Israel, a prosperous economic, technological, and military superpower with a social safety net superior to that of the U.S.?
By , October 30, 2023
Along the border wall separating Israel and the Gaza Strip, tens of thousands of soldiers are making the final preparations for a full-scale ground invasion. But soon, the sight of massed troops might seem as much a relic of the past as knights on horseback appear to us now.
October 30th, 2023 by Drago Bosnic
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***
On October 23, former US President Donald Trump held a rally in Derry, New Hampshire. During the speech, Trump made several accusations on the account of his predecessor Barack Obama. Among other things, he claimed that the latter was responsible for Russia’s ability to build “super-duper rockets”, a colloquialism of Trump’s mint that broadly refers to hypersonic weapons.
“Russia stole the super. We call them the super-dupers, right? They go superfast. They stole that during the Obama administration. They stole the plans. It was all very highly classified. They stole the plans and they built it,” he said at the rally.
Trump didn’t go into details about the supposed “intellectual property theft” and given the rather rudimentary phraseology he used (or the complete lack thereof), he probably couldn’t.
Trump’s extremely limited understanding of advanced military technology, combined with an attempt to appease his potential voters resulted in an “unfortunate” choice of words. While it’s true that the United States has a number of hypersonic weapons programs, the reality is that the country lags far behind both Russia and China in terms of deployment and weapons capabilities. Worse yet, even regional powers such as North Korea and Iran are now either on par with the US or have even eclipsed it in both the deployment and the overall performance of such weapons.
Currently, the weapons Washington DC can field are nonexistent. As previously mentioned, the Pentagon is working on several programs, but is nowhere near an operational weapon, despite claims and futile attempts to present itself as a global leader in such technologies.
On the other hand, Russia has already deployed HGVs (Hypersonic Glide Vehicles) and HCMs (Hypersonic Cruise Missiles), both ship and ground-based, as well as air-launched hypersonic missiles that aren’t based on either, but a highly maneuverable propulsion technology derived from earlier ballistic missiles (primarily the legendary Soviet-era “Oka-U”). Thus, the claim that Russia “stole” the required technology from the US under the Obama administration is completely illogical, given that Washington DC is the one significantly lagging behind Moscow, not vice versa.
Another important thing to note is that it’s also impossible to just “give” someone such advanced technology as if it were a physical object that one loses the moment they part ways with it.
This laughable claim has been parroted by many US officials in an attempt to support the myth of America’s supposed “technological superiority”.
In order to better understand just how far behind the US is, we’ll use the example of HGVs only, without going into details about other types of weapons that the belligerent thalassocracy is years away from deployment. Publicly available stats of deployed and prospective strategic HGVs are certainly not conclusive, as the actual data is indeed highly classified. However, the information published so far indicates the following.
Russian “Avangard” HGV: maximum speed – Mach 28 (34301.23 km/h or 9.6 km/s). Operational status – Active (2019).
China’s DF-ZF HGV: speed – classified, presumed to be between Mach 5 (6,173 km/h or 1.7 km/s) and Mach 10 (12,360 km/h or 3.4 km/s). Operational status – Active (2019).
American AGM-183A ARRW: maximum speed – claimed to be Mach 8 (9,541 km/h; 2.7 km/s). Operational status – initially planned for deployment in 2023, canceled after repeated failures and/or falsely reported “successful” launches.
It should be noted that the cancelation of the air-launched AGM-183A was a major setback for the US, as it came the furthest in the development of at least nine R&D programs currently underway. It’s unclear if the US was motivated by the sheer embarrassment of being so far behind or some other reasoning, but the US Army officially announced it would induct the land-based LRHW (Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon) into service, even though the weapon had no successful operational tests.
What’s more, in early September, the Pentagon canceled testing for the third time in a row and announced it would be postponing it, which is wholly unheard of for a weapon system that’s already supposed to be “operational”.
Worse yet, American military experts keep parroting that the missile is “far more advanced” than the Russian 9-A-7660 “Kinzhal” because its range and speed are 2,875 km and Mach 17 (20,275 km/h or 5.8 km/s), respectively. Indeed, on paper, the LRHW’s speed is approximately 50-70% greater than the “Kinzhal’s”. However, in reality, those numbers mean nothing, because they are based on program calculations, not actual tests. As previously mentioned, not a single operational LRHW has been fired so far. Also, it’s important to understand that there is a vastly different technological approach in the development of two weapons. The “Kinzhal” is not an HGV, meaning that LRHW should be compared to “Avangard” or DF-ZF.
Firstly, HGVs are not exactly missiles. Namely, they are unpowered and require a launch vehicle or a booster. The AGM-183A ARRW that the United States recently canceled went through a rather rocky R&D process, with the weapon initially being unable to go past the Mach 5 mark, which is the bare minimum required to attain hypersonic speed (5+ times faster than the speed of sound). Lockheed Martin’s R&D team projected that the weapon is capable of speeds of up to Mach 20, but encountered insurmountable obstacles while trying to achieve it. The problem mainly involves the HGV’s (in)ability to survive extreme heat generated during hypersonic flight, probably resulting in the destruction of its highly sensitive microelectronics.
While the US is struggling to make a functioning HGV, which is by far the highest level of hypersonic technology a country could possibly develop, Russia is quite literally decades ahead, both in weapon capabilities and deployment. Namely, Moscow recently rearmed half of its ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) with HGV warheads. On the other hand, Russia is also even further ahead in the development of hypersonic missiles such as the “Kinzhal” and the scramjet-powered “Zircon”, in addition to a plethora of other types such as SAMs (surface-to-air missiles) and AA (air-to-air) hypersonic missiles it uses on its unrivaled air defense platforms and superb fighter jets.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Featured image is from InfoBrics
October 30th, 2023 by Dr. William Makis
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***
Image Source: Sep.19, 2023 – Nakahara et al
Oct. 12, 2023 – Schreckenberg et al – Cardiac side effects of RNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines: Hidden cardiotoxic effects of mRNA-1273 and BNT162b2 on ventricular myocyte function and structure
Aug. 17, 2023 – Parry et al – ‘Spikeopathy’: COVID-19 Spike Protein Is Pathogenic, from Both Virus and Vaccine mRNA
May 5, 2023 – Barmada et al – Cytokinopathy with aberrant cytotoxic lymphocytes and profibrotic myeloid response in SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine–associated myocarditis
These four studies, all published in the last 4 months, add to the growing body of evidence of COVID-19 Vaccine Injury to the heart.
I will summarize the key findings as follows:
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
Reviews
This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon
In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia
In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig
Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac
A reading of Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late. You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.
We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page.
October 30th, 2023 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
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***
A country broken by constant foreign interventions, its tyrannical regimes propped up by the back brace of the United States (when it wasn’t intervening to adjust it), marred by appalling natural disasters, tells a sad tale of the crippled Haitian state. Haiti’s political existence is the stuff and stuffing of pornographic violence, the crutch upon which moralists can always point to as the end, doom and despair that needs change. Every conundrum needs its intrusive deliverer, even though that deliverer is bound to make things worse.
Lately, those stale themes have now percolated through the corridors of the United Nations to renewed interest. The staleness is evident in the menu: servings of failed state canapes; vicious, murderous, raping, pillaging gangs as the main musical score; collapse of civic institutions as the dessert. It’s the sort of menu to rile and aggravate any mission or charity, and yet, military-security interventions continue to capture the feeble imagination.
Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, the constant theme in reporting from Haiti is that of rampant, freely operating gangs. Sophie Hills, a staff writer of the Christian Science Monitor, offered this description in October last year: “Armed gangs have immobilized the capital, Port-au-Prince, shutting down the already troubled economy and creating fear among citizens to even walk the streets.”
This October 23, the UN special envoy to Haiti, María Isabel Salvador, reported to the UN Security Council that the situation had continued “to deteriorate as growing gang violence plunge the lives of the people of Haiti into disarray and major crimes are rising sharply to new record highs.” These included killings and sexual violence, the latter marked by instances of rape and mutilation.
To add further complexity to the situation, vigilante groups such as the “Bwa Kale” movement have responded through resorting to lynching (395 alleged gang members are said to have perished in that gruesome way between April 24 and September).
Image is from Haiti Libre
Moïse’s opportunistic replacement, Ariel Henry, has served as acting prime minister, persistently calling for foreign intervention to right the worn vessel he is steering into a sunset oblivion.
The past presidential elections were last held in 2016, but Henry has not deemed it appropriate to stage elections, preferring the bureaucratic formula of a High Transition Council (HTC) tasked with eventually achieving that goal. When the announcement establishing the body was made in February, Henry loftily claimed that this was “the beginning of the end of dysfunction in our democratic institutions.”
These weak assertions have not translated into credible change on the ground. The contempt with which the HTC has been viewed was indicated by the news from the UN envoy that its Secretary General had been kidnapped by gang members posing as police officers.
In September, Henry addressed the UN hoping to add some mettle to the Haitian National Police, urging the Security Council to adopt measures under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to “authorize the deployment of a multinational support mission to underpin the security of Haiti”.
The measure can be read as a stalling measure to keep Henry and his Haitian Tèt Kale Party (PHTK) ensconced. This is certainly the view of the National Haitian-American Elected Officials Network (NHAEON) and the Family Action Network Movement (FANM). In their September letter to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the organisations warned that,
“Any military intervention supporting Haiti’s corrupt, repressive, unelected regime will likely exacerbate the current political crisis to a catastrophic one.” The move would “further entrench the regime, deepening Haiti’s political crisis while generating significant civilian casualties and migration pressure.”
In its eternal wisdom, the United Nations Security Council felt that an intervention force consisting of Kenyan police, supplemented by assistance from other states, would be required for this mission. Resolution 2699, establishing a Multinational Security Support Mission led by Kenya, received a vote of 13 in favour, with Russia and China abstaining. This would entail a co-deployment with Haitian personnel who have melted before the marauding gangs. Thus, history continues to rhyme (the US occupation, 1915-1934 and the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) from 2004-2017).
Armed gangs feature as a demonic presence in the UN deliberations, regularly paired with such opaque terms as “a multidimensional crisis”. It is telling that the cliché-governed reasons for that crisis never focus on how the gang phenomenon took root, not least those mouldering state institutions that have failed to protect the populace. Little wonder then, that the Russian representative Vassily Nebenzia felt that sending in armed elements was “an extreme measure” that unnecessarily invoked the provisions of Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations.
Undeterred by such views, the US representative Jeffrey Delaurentis noted that the mission would require the “inclusion of dedicated expertise in anti-gang operations, community-oriented policing, and children and women’s protection.” That Washington approved the measure can be put down to endorsing a policy which might discourage – if only in the short term – the arrival of Haitian asylum seekers which have been turned around en masse.
Despite claiming a different tack from his predecessor in approaching the troubled Caribbean state, President Biden has sought to restrict the influx of Haitian applications using, for instance, Title 42, a Trump policy put in place to deport individuals who pose a pandemic risk, in spite of any asylum credentials they might have. Within 12 months, the Biden administration was responsible for expelling more than 20,000 Haitians – or as many as the combined totals of three different presidents over two decades.
Resolution 2699 also suffers from another glaring fault. Kenya’s dominant contribution to the exercise has raised searching questions back home. Opposition politician Ekuru Aukot, himself a lawyer who had aided in drafting Kenya’s revised 2010 constitution, saw no legal basis for the government to authorise the Haitian deployment. In his view, the deployment was unconstitutional, lacking any legal backbone or treaty.
In granting Aukot an interim injunction, this point was considered by the Nairobi High Court worthy of resolution. Judge Enock Mwita was “satisfied that the application and petition raise substantial issues of national importance and public interest and require urgent consideration.” The judge accordingly issued a conservatory order “restraining the respondents from deploying police officers to Haiti or any other country until 24th October 2023.”
On October 24, Judge Mwita extended the duration of the interim order till November 9, when an open session is scheduled for the petition to be argued. “This court became seized of this matter earlier than everyone else and it would not make sense for it to set aside or allow the interim orders to lapse.” The whole operation risks being scuttled even before it sets sail.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
Featured image: It took Haiti 122 years to pay off its debt of independence, a neocolonial strategy that remains in place and leads to chronic underdevelopment. Photo: Juvenal Balán
October 30th, 2023 by Azhar Azam
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***
A spree of Israeli merciless bombings on Gaza Israel’s attacks has slaughtered more than 7,000 Palestinians including 3,000 children. The situation is gruesome for 1.4 million internally displaced, 50,000 pregnant women and thousands of injured, being crucified over fast-depleting water, food, fuel, electricity and health necessities and deadly infectious diseases.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu indeed is heading the most right-wing government of ultranationalist Jews in Israeli history. His top aides want to tighten the country’s control on the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, Israel captured in 1967 and Palestinians aspire to make their future state. Extreme rightist Zionists have unvaryingly used dehumanizing language against Palestinians and Arabs by calling them as “drugged cockroaches” and seeking to make their life “unbearable.”
After Hamas’ deadliest Oct 7 attacks since the 1973 Yom Kippur (Arab-Israel) War, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant promised “no gas, no food, no electricity” to Palestinians, describing them as “human animals.” Israeli General Ghassan Alian sought same treatment and said “you wanted hell, you will get hell.”
Netanyahu’s fellow party member Ariel Kallner demanded a neo-Nakba, launching a much stronger mass displacement and ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians than that of 1948. Israeli President Isaac Herzog suggested civilians were legitimate targets. Palestinians are sought to flee to Jordan or face a “Great Nakba.”
Ruthless Israeli regime is getting unreserved diplomatic and military support from Washington to implement its horrific agenda. US President Joe Biden immediately pledged to send ammunition to Israel. During his visit to Israel, he told Netanyahu “I’m a Zionist.” Presidential hopeful Nikki Haley patted Netanyahu “finish them.” We are in a religious war…Level the place,” said Senator Lindsey Graham. Anthony Blinken ignited controversy by posing himself as “not only as the United States Secretary of State but also as a Jew.”
Many evangelical Christians believe the existence of Israel is crucial for “fulfilling the prophecy” vis-à-vis Armageddon.
Baptist preacher and Fox News contributor Robert Jeffress, who once insisted “God gave Jerusalem – and the rest of the Holy Land – to the Jewish people,” cited the Bible to declare it a “worldwide conflict.” As this year marks 50th anniversary of the Arab-Israeli War, some in the US even want Israel to end this war in Iran.
US unflinching support to Israel’s brutality reached the tipping point once latter devastated al-Ahli Hospital. Biden singled out an “errant rocket fired by a terrorist group” and wailed about Israel’s victimization. His counterparts such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau and UK’s Rishi Sunak back his stance, saying Israel has no role in the blast; one wonders how they will discharge Israel of 76 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza, affecting 34 including 19 hospitals per WHO.
On top of $3.8 billion of military assistance to Israel every year, Biden has asked Congress to approve $14 billion for his ally’s war chest as part of a $105 billion aid package. Next day, the Pentagon announced it would send missile defense systems to the Middle East. The US has also scaled up its naval power through two aircraft carriers and 2,000 Marines.
Biden’s assertion not to back a ceasefire, until all hostages are released, is telling. The US State Department is rather emphatic:
“Any ceasefire would give Hamas the ability to rest.. get ready to continue launching terrorist attacks against Israel,” indicating Washington has permitted Tel Aviv to kill Palestinians with absolute impunity.
What a turnaround! Washington, London and most European capitals that championed human rights and stood with Ukraine against Russia have suddenly become more pronounced in defending Israeli human rights violations in Gaza, termed as a “flagrant and obvious” western hypocrisy by Human Rights Watch. Ironically, same day Biden announced $100 million in aid to Palestinians, Israel besieged them and snapped them of water, basic human right, food and other services.
By funding Israel’s savagery and rejecting aid agencies’ calls of ceasefire, Biden and Western leaders share responsibility of Israel’s willful and systematic domicide and genocide of Palestinians. After Israel’s shelling on a refugee camp in Gaza, the Obama administration in 2014 had at least called out Israel, demanding it avoid stocking humanitarian disasters.
This administration deserves more condemnation also because just this year, it has passed a revised Conventional Arms Transfer Policy to ensure these weapons don’t facilitate or contribute to “violations of human rights or international humanitarian law,” which requires to spare civilians and protect hospitals.
Biden’s policy sparked a dissent within the White House, resulting in senior State official resignation since he saw the approach of arming Israel “shortsighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory,” and chided Congress for not taking human rights issues “seriously.” America’s iniquitous use of veto power to deny “humanitarian pauses” will be instructive to analyze its eccentric approach to human rights.
US discrimination of Palestinians enraged the Arab and Muslim world. A furious Amman, following the hospital blast, panned Tel Aviv for pushing the region to “brink of the abyss” and shelved a four-way summit comprising leaders from US, Egypt, Jordan and Palestinian, hinting at US aversion to end “war and massacre against Palestinians.”
Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and UAE too strongly reproached and held Israel responsible for the detonation of the hospital. Blinken, by making it “clear” to Amman, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Cairo “the United States stands with Israel” helped fuel anti-Israel sentiment.
When a Wall Street Journal report alleged that Iran had “helped plot” attacks on Israel, Tel Aviv rejected the claim. Biden endorsed Israel and witnessed “no clear evidence.” Israel and the US ostensibly didn’t want to open new war fronts. Iran too exercised caution to prevent escalation with either; Hezbollah, notwithstanding launching small-scale attacks on Israel, assured Lebanese government it will not enter the war.
Despite extreme rhetoric, Iran has avoided a direct military standoff with Israel or US and it’s highly unlikely they will engage in a conflict except for trading barbs. Israel’s attack on Gaza rather allows Iran to gain leverage in negotiations with America such as gaining access to its $6 billion, already transferred to Qatar but are staved off by Washington, as part of a US-Iran prisoner swap deal.
Possibility of war spilling over and gripping the region is however real. US warnings to Iran and deployment of two aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean raise the prospects of such a tragedy. Blinken says they are “meant as a deterrent”; it serves twin US objectives: bolster Israel security and strengthen America’s posture in gas-rich zone. But at the same time, it could further spell crisis across the region and beyond for Turkey’s Erdogan has cautioned this hinders his efforts to promote peace and will lead to “serious massacres” in Gaza.
Biden contends Hamas attacks aim to disrupt normalization process between Israel and Saudi Arabia; his marked tendency toward Israel undermines likelihood of any deal. Due to Israeli onslaught, Riyadh – which “every day” was getting closer to Tel Aviv and with whom Netanyahu preempted a deal as “within reach” – was forced to take a jab at western “double standards” and Israeli “criminal practices.”
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in his meeting with Sunak, described Israeli targeting of Gazans “heinous crime.” Nevertheless, Riyadh is also pursuing to normalize ties with Israel. Just last month, Saudi Arabia alongside Jordan and UAE agreed to join Biden’s plan to build India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor that also included Israel.
Most countries in the wider Mideast have developed relations with Israel. UAE in 2021 – after normalization in 20220, which Palestinians branded as “despicable,” “betrayal,” and an expected “poison dagger” from an Arab country – opened an embassy in Tel Aviv and became only the third major Arab state to maintain full diplomatic relations with Israel. Cairo and Amman signed peace treaties with Israel in 1979 and 1994.
After Erdogan last year characterized Herzog’s visit to Ankara as “historic” and a turning point” in the bilateral relationship, Turkey restored formal ties with Israel. Qatar cut ties with Israel in 2009 over the Gaza war and has held Israel “solely responsible” for the escalation, condemning Israeli strikes on al-Ahli Hospital; it’s diplomatically and militarily too weak to be heard internationally.
Palestinians would see these developments anxiously since they could force Arab states to moderate their criticism of Israel, encouraging it to mete out more severe punishment to them including through “new Nakba”. Their suspicions aren’t unfounded given UAE in 2021 deplored west’s failure to designate Hama as terrorist organizations and recently called its attack a “serious and grave escalation.”
About 1.4 million Palestinians – including one million children, facing “critical and protection and humanitarian crisis”– need an immediate ceasefire and assistance. These kids are shaking with fear as Israeli bombs keep hunting them to enforce the principle of Israel’s right of self-defense. While western leaders must not give an unfettered authority and allow Israel to quench its bloodthirst by killing Gazans, regional countries should also stop weighing up their selfish interests before the situation spirals out of control and heat of war reaches their palaces.
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Azhar Azam is a geopolitical analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from Mideast Discourse
October 30th, 2023 by Isabella Arria
October 30th, 2023 by Molly Gott
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At the time of this publication, over 6,500 people have been killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, including more than 2,700 children, with many thousands more people injured or missing. Israel has told 1.1 million people to flee northern Gaza, which many fear is a pretext for ethnic cleansing. Thousands of buildings and homes have been obliterated. Palestinians in Gaza are being choked of water, fuel and other supplies by the Israeli government. With a ground invasion by Israeli forces imminent, and fears of a wider war, there may be no end in sight to the bombardment for Palestinians.
Voices across the world are sounding the alarm over the barbarous and catastrophic scope of the assault. One expert has called the situation “a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.”
A UN official stated that the transfer of Palestianians in Gaza would be “the largest instance of ethnic cleansing in the history of this tormented land.”
Amnesty International has documented “damning evidence of war crimes,” stating that Israel’s “cataclysmic assault on the occupied Gaza Strip” has seen “indiscriminate attacks” that have “caused mass civilian casualties and must be investigated as war crimes.”
All of this is being abetted by top U.S. defense corporations who profit from selling weapons to the Israeli government that have been used relentlessly against Palestinian civilians. In his October 20 speech calling for billions in weapons shipments to Israel and Ukraine, President Biden invoked “patriotic American workers” who are “building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom,” but it’s the defense company CEOs who rake in tens of millions a year, and Wall Street shareholders, who are the real beneficiaries of warmongering. Just a few days ago, RTX (formerly Raytheon) executives raved about billions in weapon sales, set only to increase with the current wars, noting that “[a]cross the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see the benefit of this restocking.”
Moreover, the current onslaught is also enabled by billionaires who donate huge sums to rightwing pro-Israel Super PACs pushing for continued violence — and the elected officials who eagerly accept their donations.
This primer maps out some of the major defense companies propping up and profiting from, and some of the billionaire donors enabling, the ongoing war against Palestinians in Gaza.
Five of the top six global defense corporations are based in the U.S. They are Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, Boeing and General Dynamics. All five have long sold weapons to Israel that are used against Palestinians, and they have been mentioned in the news recently as being tied to weapons sales or potential weapons sales around the current assault on Gaza. Most of their stock prices shot up with the onset of the current war.
These five companies took in an astounding $196 billion in military-related revenue in 2022. Their five CEOs rake in huge amounts of compensation. From 2020 to 2022, these five CEOs together have taken in around $318 million in total compensation — salary, stock awards, and other forms of payment. Moreover, the CEOs own massive amounts of corporate stock, meaning they profit handsomely when stock prices go up. These CEOs are powerful figures, often also serving as company chairs and presidents, and having influential ties to the wider corporate and political world.
Click here for the interactive graph.
The top shareholders in these five defense companies largely consist of big asset managers, or big banks with asset management wings, that include BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, Capital Group, Wellington, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Newport Trust Company, Longview Asset Management, Massachusetts Financial Services Company, Geode Capital, and Bank of America.
Lockheed Martin is the world’s top defense company by revenue. In 2022, it took in $66 billion in revenue, of which 96%, or $63.3 billion, was in defense revenue.
Lockheed Martin has supplied weapons to Israel for decades to use against Palestinians. According to the watchdog site Investigate, Lockheed’s weapons have been used in attacks that “include war crimes that Israel has committed during several major military offensives against the Gaza Strip.” According to the Financial Review, Israel is currently seeking Hellfire missiles, which are made by Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed Martin’s stock price soared with Israel’s war on Gaza.
Lockheed Martin’s CEO Jim Taiclet took in over $66 million in total compensation from 2020 to 2022. As of February 24, 2023, he owned 56,054 total common shares and stock units with the company. As of the closing of the U.S. stock market on October 23, 2023, Lockheed’s share price was $446.16, meaning his stock holdings could be worth $25 million. Taiclet is a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations, perhaps the most influential U.S. foreign policy establishment think tank.
According the business data website Whalewisdom, Lockheeds’s top five shareholders are:
All told, these five asset managers together own more than a 34% stake in Lockheed Martin. The next top five shareholders are Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Geode Capital, Bank of America, and Capital Research Global Investors.
Lockheed Martin’s Lead Independent Director is Daniel F. Akerson, a former Vice Chairman of private equity giant Carlyle Group and former CEO of General Motors. Lockheed’s board also includes a slew of revolving door and influential figures, such as former Obama Secretary of Homeland Security and current Paul Weiss law firm partner, Jeh Johnson, as well as Vicki A. Hollub, the President and CEO of oil giant Occidental Petroleum.
RTX (formally Raytheon Technologies) is the second-top defense company in the world by revenue. In 2022, it took in $67.1 billion in revenue, of which 59%, or $39.6 billion, was in defense revenue.
According to the watchdog site Investigate, Raytheon has consistently and extensively supplied Israel with weapons used in Gaza over the past two decades. For example, “[i]n its frequent military offensives against Gaza,” says Investigate, “the Israeli military uses Raytheon’s 5,000-pound GBU-28 “bunker buster” and laser-guided Paveway bombs, as well as AGM-65 Maverick air-to-ground missiles, AIM-9X missiles, AIM-120 Sidewinder missiles, and TWO long-range missiles.”
On October 17, the New York Times reported that the Biden administration was “already moving to send additional ammunition and Iron Dome interceptor missiles” made by Raytheon. Like many other weapons companies, Raytheon’s stock also jumped with the war on Gaza.
RTX’s CEO Gregory J. Hayes took in over $63 million in total compensation from 2020 to 2022. As of February 8, 2023, he beneficially owned 801,339 total shares of RTX stock. Hayes sits on the boards of both the Business Roundtable and fossil fuel giant Phillips 66.
According the business data website Whalewisdom, RTX’s top five shareholders are:
All told, these five asset managers together own a nearly 32% stake in RTX. The next top five shareholders are Wellington, JPMorgan Chase, Dodge & Cox, Morgan Stanley, and Geode Capital.
RTX’s board contains revolving door figures such as former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work, and former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, James A. Winnefeld Jr.
Northrop Grumman is the world’s third biggest defense company in the world by revenue. In 2022, it took in$36.6 billion in revenue, of which 89%, or $32.4 billion, was in defense revenue.
According to the watchdog site Investigate, Northrop Grumman “supplies the Israeli military with a wide variety of weapons, including various missile systems. The company’s technologies are also integrated into Israel’s main weapon systems, including its fighter jets, missile ships, and trainer aircraft.” The company has provided Israel weapons for decades and, says Investigate, “these weapons have repeatedly been used against Palestinian civilians, resulting in numerous casualties as well as mass destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and water and electric systems.”
With Israel’s current war on Gaza, Northrop Grumman’s stock price boomed.
Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy J. Warden took in over $61 million in total compensation from 2020 to 2022. As of March 15, 2023, she owned 161,231 shares of company stock, currently worth around $78 million. Warden also sits on the board of pharmaceutical giant Merck, and she is a member of the Business Roundtable
According the business data website Whalewisdom, Northrop Grumman’s top five shareholders are:
All told, these five asset managers together own a nearly 35% stake in Northrop Grumman. The next top five shareholders are FMR LLC (Fidelity), Bank of America, Massachusetts Financial Services Company, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley.
Northrop Grumman’s Lead Independent Director is Madeleine A. Kleiner, who is also on the board of fastfood chain Jack in the Box. Northrup compensated her with $361,122 in 2022. Kleiner is also on the board of the Ladies Professional Golf Association. Other Northrup board members include David Abney, former Chairman and CEO of UPS; Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO of IBM; and Thomas M. Schoewe, a former top executive for Walmart, and a former director of private equity giant KKR, and a current director of General Motors.
Boeing is the world’s fifth biggest defense company in the world by revenue. In 2022, it took in $66.6 billion in revenue, of which 46%, or $30.8 billion, was in defense revenue.
On October 17, 2023, the New York Times reported that “[n]ew shipments of small, 250-pound guided bombs made by Boeing are… being sent to Israel, as are additional gear that converts older, crude bombs into precision-guided “smart” munitions.” The Financial Review reports that “joint direct attack munitions (JDAMs)… and small diameter bombs (SDBs)” produced by Boeing are being sought by Israel. The watchdog site Investigate has documented Boeing extensive weapons shipments to Israel that have been used against Palestinians over the years.
Boeing CEO David Calhoun took in over $64 million in total compensation from 2020 to 2022. He currently holds 193,247 shares of Boeing stock, worth nearly $35 million. Calhoun is a former executive of the private equity giant Blackstone Group. He sits on the board of directors of Caterpillar and is a member of the Business Roundtable. Calhoun is also the Vice Rector of the Board of Trustees of Virginia Tech.
According the business data website Whalewisdom, Boeing’s top five shareholders are:
All told, these five asset managers together own more than a 27% stake in Boeing. The next top five shareholders are Capital World Investors, Loomis Sayles, Capital Research Global Investors, Geode Capital, and Morgan Stanley.
Boeing’s board chair is Lawrence W. Kellner. In his role, Boeing compensated him with $616,000 in 2022. Kellner is also on the board of ExxonMobil. Boeing’s board also includes, among others, Lynn J. Good, the chairman and CEO of utilities giant Duke Energy; Sabrina Soussan, the chairman and CEO of water privatization giant Suez; and Ronald A. Williams, the former chairman and CEO of healthcare giant Aetna.
General Dynamics is the world’s sixth biggest defense company in the world by revenue. In 2022, it took in$39.4 billion in revenue, of which 77%, or $30.4 billion, was in defense revenue.
The Financial Review reports that, currently, “Israel will also need 120mm-calibre tank rounds, made by General Dynamics.” The watchdog site Investigate documents General Dynamics extensive business with Israel. For example, it notes that “General Dynamics’ MK-84 2,000-pound bombs have been used extensively by the Israeli Air Force during its frequent assaults on Gaza, including in 2021 and in multiple suspected war crimes in 2014.”
General Dynamics stock shot up with Israel’s attacks on Gaza
General Dynamics CEO Phebe N. Novakovic took in over $64 million in total compensation from 2020 to 2022. As of March 8, 2023, she held 1,616,279 shares of total common stock and equivalents. Novakovic sits on the board of banking giant JPMorgan Chase. She is a member of the Business Roundtable and a trustee of the foreign policy think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.
According the business data website Whalewisdom, General Dynamic’s top five shareholders are:
All told, these five asset managers together own a nearly 35% stake in General Dynamic. The next top five shareholders are State Street, Capital Research Global Investors, Bank of America, Massachusetts Financial Services Company, and JPMorgan Chase.
General Dynamics’ Lead Independent Director is Laura J. Schumacher, who is also a director of CrowdStrike Holdings, a cyber security company. General Dynamics compensated Schumacher with $330,336 in 2022. General Dynamics board also includes Jim Mattis, former Secretary of Defense for Donald Trump and a commander during the invasion and occupation of Iraq who investigative news sources have suggested could be tied to war crimes in Iraq.
Click here for the interactive graph.
In the early weeks of Israel’s war on Gaza, lobbying groups including The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Democratic Majority for Israel have been active in Washington, calling on lawmakers to send money and weapons to Israel. AIPAC was pushing for a funding package even before President Biden introduced his proposal to lawmakers. Democratic Majority for Israel, which was launched by AIPAC operatives in 2019 to shore up support for Israel within the Democratic Party, has been holding briefings for members of Congress, including one that featured former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett as a guest speaker.
In 2022, AIPAC was far and away the biggest spender among pro-Israel organizations in the U.S. According to OpenSecrets, AIPAC gave $12 million to candidates and parties during the 2021-2022 election cycle. $7.9 million went to Democrats and $4.7 million went to Republicans. AIPAC’s Super PAC, United Democracy Project, also spent $26 million in a massive push to influence the 2022 Democratic primaries by spending against progressive Democratic candidates that AIPAC considered to be not supportive enough of Israel. The group spent an additional $2 million in lobbying last year.
The chart below shows the top five Congressional recipients of Pro-Israel campaign contributions in the 2022 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets.
To read the complete “Eyes on the Ties” article click here
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Featured image: Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City, October 9, 2023. (Source: CGTN)
October 30th, 2023 by Abby Martin
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has shocked the conscience of the entire world, with an endless flow of videos and images of Palestinian children cut into pieces by American bombs dropped by Israeli warplanes deliberately intended to destroy a civilian population.
Despite the explicitly genocidal rhetoric of Israeli officials, Western leaders continue to proclaim their support for Israel’s right to “defend itself.”
But this war on Gaza is different from past wars, not only in the level of Israeli aggression, but in the reaction on the street, from the Middle East to the United States.
Israel is losing the narrative war. Most people want to see a ceasefire and tens of thousands have protested across the US to demonstrate their opposition to Biden’s unconditional support for this genocide.
To discuss Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza ahead of a looming ground invasion and how it has the potential to snowball into a catastrophic regional war, Rania Khalek was joined by journalist Abby Martin, creator and host of The Empire Files.
October 30th, 2023 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida
A atitude irresponsável de algumas autoridades americanas em relação aos atuais acontecimentos na Ucrânia e em Israel pode ter razões que vão além da política. As emoções pessoais e os sentimentos de vingança podem ajudar a explicar as ações irracionais de algumas figuras públicas importantes na política dos EUA.
Em várias declarações recentes, o secretário de estado dos EUA, Anthony Blinken, deixou clara a sua posição etnicamente motivada de total apoio a Israel, ignorando as nuances políticas específicas do caso e deixando uma espécie de revanchismo anti-palestino guiar as suas atitudes. Não foi por acaso que durante o seu discurso em Tel Aviv sobre a atual crise em Gaza, Blinken afirmou que falava não apenas como secretário de estado dos EUA, “mas também como isralense”.
Um detalhe curioso e digno de nota nas palavras de Blinken durante sua viagem a Tel Aviv é que ele também menciona que seus ancestrais foram perseguidos “na Rússia”, deixando claro que a Ucrânia fazia parte da Rússia e confirmando a obviedade histórica de que a Ucrânia nunca existiu como um país antes do fim da URSS. Mais uma vez, discursos contraditórios de responsáveis ocidentais refutam as próprias narrativas de Kiev e da OTAN.
“Apresento-me a vós não apenas como secretário de estado dos Estados Unidos, mas também como israelense (…) O meu avô, Maurice Blinken, fugiu de perseguições na Rússia. O meu padrasto, Samuel Pisar, sobreviveu aos campos de concentração – Auschwitz, Dachau, Majdanek”, disse.
Na verdade, esta origem étnica também pode explicar a postura irracional de apoio irrestrito à Ucrânia, amplamente promovida por Blinken. Num artigo recente, um importante jornal ocidental descreveu Blinken como “um símbolo de solidariedade entre os EUA e os israelo-ucranianos”, elogiando as raízes familiares do secretário e o seu papel atual na política de apoio dos EUA a Kiev.
Na mesma postagem, o autor faz alguns comentários adicionais sobre a história pessoal de Blinken, mostrando detalhes sobre as origens de sua família. De acordo com a biografia, os antepassados do secretário fugiram da Ucrânia russa para os EUA nos primeiros anos do século XX – e a razão para isso foram precisamente os sentimentos anti-semitas dos ucranianos.
“Em 1904, um judeu ucraniano de 25 anos chamado Meir Blinken e a sua jovem família começaram a estabelecer uma nova vida no Lower East Side de Nova Iorque. Embora estivessem longe de casa, não estavam de forma alguma sozinhos. Na verdade, eram apenas uma entre milhares de famílias que chegaram à América depois de fugirem da Ucrânia para escapar ao terror anti-semita”, lê-se no artigo.
Aparentemente, sem querer, o autor parece confirmar que as tendências antissemitas já eram fortes na Ucrânia naquela época. Estas tendências provêm historicamente da influência da Europa Ocidental em algumas regiões ucranianas e foram fortemente encorajadas durante a segunda guerra mundial, quando organizações ultranacionalistas adotaram o anti-semitismo e o racismo anti-russo como parte da sua ideologia fascista. A Rússia Soviética destruiu estes movimentos, abolindo as organizações fascistas ucranianas, minando a influência ocidental e integrando as diferentes etnias da região na sociedade soviética.
No entanto, após o fim da URSS, o Ocidente começou a encorajar o ressurgimento do nacionalismo ucraniano e a reabilitar o fascismo como ideologia, resultando na situação atual em que um regime neonazista funciona como proxy da OTAN numa guerra contra a Rússia. Ironicamente, Blinken está cooperando com este regime. Enquanto os seus antepassados fugiram do anti-semitismo ucraniano, Blinken está agora a ajudar a aumentar ainda mais a hegemonia de uma mentalidade racista na Ucrânia.
Não é novidade que israelenses confusos por emoções pessoais e desconhecedores dasua história comecem a apoiar ideologias anti-semitas e fascistas. O próprio presidente ucraniano, Vladimir Zelensky, é judeu e mesmo assim lidera uma junta neonazista. No mesmo sentido, Blinken faz todos os esforços possíveis para garantir que os EUA continuem a apoiar a política racista e genocida de Kiev, apesar de ele próprio ser descendente de uma família que sofreu com o anti-semitismo ucraniano.
O apoio de Blinken a Israel mostra algo semelhante. O estado sionista utiliza o sofrimento histórico do povo judeu de uma forma oportunista, a fim de justificar políticas de limpeza étnica, apartheid e genocídio contra os palestinos– fazendo com que pareçam práticas nazistas, tanto na Alemanha passada como na Ucrânia actual. Blinken elogia a sua ascendência como o principal fator de apoio a Israel, quando na verdade ele deveria, como judeu, sentir-se compelido a combater todas as formas de racismo e supremacismo ideológico, já que o seu povo foi vítima deste tipo de mentalidade muitas vezes na história.
Na verdade, em vez de usarem o elevado orgulho racial para justificar o ódio e a vingança, os líderes ocidentais, ucranianos e israelitas deveriam procurar uma melhor compreensão dos problemas do racismo e da supremacia. Discursos confusos e contraditórios como o de Blinken mostram como a irracionalidade toma conta do processo de tomada de decisão ocidental, levando a uma política externa desastrosa que está a conduzir o mundo para uma catástrofe.
Lucas Leiroz de Almeida
Artigo em inglês : Blinken praises his Jewish ancestry while contradicts Western narratives about Ukraine, 28 de Outubro de 2023.
Imagem : InfoBrics
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Lucas Leiroz, jornalista, pesquisador do Center for Geostrategic Studies, consultor geopolítico.
Você pode seguir Lucas Leiroz em: https://t.me/lucasleiroz e https://twitter.com/leiroz_lucas
October 30th, 2023 by Pars Today
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In a report on Saturday, the American news organization The Intercept said that the Pentagon was quietly moving ahead to construct facilities for American troops at its secret military base – codenamed Site 512 – deep within the Negev Desert, just 20 miles from the Gaza Strip.
It added that the longstanding Site 512 is in fact a radar facility, whose mission is monitoring the skies for missile attacks against Israel, yet it failed to detect thousands of rockets fired by the Palestinian Hamas resistance group on October 7 as it focused on possible incoming missiles from Iran, more than 700 miles away.
The Pentagon awarded the $35.8 million US troop facility contract to add barracks-like structures for US personnel to Site 512, which is atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, almost two months before the current war between Israel and Hamas began, it said.
The report comes as US President Joe Biden and his administration claim that Washington has no plan whatsoever to deploy US troops inside the Occupied Palestine to engage in the current war but an [alleged] secret US military presence in the Occupied Territories already exists, and government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently increasing.
“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather [because] the US government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counter-terrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept.
“In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in West Asia in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit,” he added.
The Pentagon claims to have prepared 2,000 personnel and a range of units on a heightened standby for potential deployment to the Occupied Palestine, stressing that these forces are not intended to serve in combat roles and are purportedly tasked with advising and medical roles.
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Featured image is from PT
October 30th, 2023 by Dr. William Makis
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Oct. 26, 2023 Wilkinson et al – A Brighton Collaboration standardized template with key considerations for a benefit/risk assessment for the Novavax COVID-19 Vaccine (NVX-CoV2373), a recombinant spike protein vaccine with Matrix-M adjuvant to prevent disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 viruses
June 7 2022 – U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Novavax COVID-19 vaccine (NVX-CoV2373) VRBPAC briefing document. Updated 2022
Oct. 26, 2023 Wilkinson et al – A Brighton Collaboration standardized template with key considerations for a benefit/risk assessment for the Novavax COVID-19 Vaccine (NVX-CoV2373), a recombinant spike protein vaccine with Matrix-M adjuvant to prevent disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 viruses.
Feb. 2023 Saint-Gerons et al – Myopericarditis Associated with the Novavax COVID-19 Vaccine (NVX-CoV2373): A Retrospective Analysis of Individual Case Safety Reports from VigiBase.
October 30th, 2023 by Centre for Research on Globalization
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More than 8,000 Palestinians have been killed in the last three weeks in Gaza.
Every day of this atrocious and ever-expanding Israeli onslaught at least a 1,000 more will be murdered.
Schools and hospitals are being targeted. The unspoken yet deliberate objective is to kill Palestinian children.
More than 40% of the casualties are children.
Mosques, churches, residential areas, bakeries, communications infrastructure are targeted. Water, electricity and fuel have been cut off to Gaza and more than 200,000 housing units have been destroyed.
“Hundreds of besieged Palestinians, mostly children, are writing their names on arms, legs, in case they lose life in Israeli bombing…
Al-Saba is one among hundreds of Palestinians, especially children, who are marking their body parts with names, so they can be identified in case they lose their life in the ongoing conflict, which began on Oct. 7…”
Last image: Some of the wounded at al-Shifa hospital (Gaza Health Ministry)
Referencing Palestinian Health authorities, the report stated that at least 3,324 children have been murdered so far and 36 were killed in the West Bank.
In comparison, reports from the UN Secretary-General on children and armed conflict show that a total of 2,985 children were killed in 24 countries in 2022, 2,515 in 2021, and 2,674 in 2020 across 22 countries.
[Al Mayadeen English, October 30, 2023]
CBC Radio Report, October 30, 2023
Please stand up, call on the conscience of the decision makers in your governments to find ways to stop Israel’s genocide and to help rescue, heal and feed the people of Gaza.
Ignore the abhorrent war orders from the European Union and from Washington.
Take matters in your own hands and do what your heart and conscience say.
The Centre for Research on Globalization, October 30, 2023
Forward this message far and wide.
This short text was prepared by Peter Koenig, Michel Chossudovsky and Jezile Torculas.
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October 30th, 2023 by James G. Rickards
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Where were you on March 9, 2022, when President Biden signed the death warrant on American freedom?
On that day, in a hushed ceremony at the White House without the approval of Congress, the states or the American people, Biden signed into law Executive Order 14067.
Buried in his order are a few paragraphs, titled Section 4. The language in Section 4 makes Order 14067 the most treacherous act by a sitting president in the history of our republic.
That’s because Section 4 sets the stage for legal government surveillance of all U.S. citizens, total control over your bank accounts and purchases and the ability to silence all dissenting voices for good.
In this new war on freedom, they aren’t coming for your guns. No, they’re thinking much bigger than that.
They’re coming for your money.
And it’s already started. These efforts are stepping up and taking on a nefarious tone that also involves surveillance and loss of our freedoms under the guise of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), or Biden Bucks as I call them.
If you had asked me about this two years ago, I would have said the U.S. is taking a rather studious approach to it. It was too important to not be involved in, but the U.S. did not seem to be in any hurry to actually implement it.
There were studies, and I would have said my estimate at the time would have been, “OK, China has it. Europe, maybe another year. The U.S. might be three or four years down the road because the dollar’s too important. They don’t want to race into it. They want to get it right. There are a lot of ways to mess it up.”
But that’s changed under Joe Biden.
Biden has now fast-tracked this thing. We’ve moved pretty quickly from what I would call a research phase to an implementation phase. So I give it the name Biden Bucks, because Joe Biden will prove to have been responsible for actually implementing this at a very quick tempo in the United States.
CBDCs are digital money, not cryptocurrencies. The differences between CBDCs and crypto are important.
Cryptocurrencies are recorded on a blockchain, which is a particular type of ledger that shows every transaction ever made in each currency.
Cryptos also claim to offer anonymity and decentralization, which are said to be virtues but are actually fatal flaws because the “anonymity” is a greater cover for crime and fraud.
I worked with the U.S. Strategic Command to unravel crypto ownership when Isis was using digital tokens to finance its caliphate in 2015–2016. It’s not easy to pierce the veil, but it can be done.
By contrast, CBDCs do not use blockchain; they have a digital ledger accounting system, but it’s not a blockchain. They’re the opposite of decentralized; they are highly centralized under the control of a single issuer, usually a central bank.
There’s no anonymity. The issuer knows every account holder and every transaction — that’s the whole idea.
CBDCs are promoted on the idea that transactions are faster, cheaper and more secure when all money is digital and controlled by a government.
Compared with credit cards, debit cards, wire transfers, Venmo and PayPal, that may be true. Those systems have multiple intermediaries and layers of fees, so CBDCs may actually be able to streamline payments and make the payment system more efficient.
But while the government positions CBDCs as a benefit to consumers in performing transactions, including faster settlements, better security, ease of use and transaction costs that are lower than with cash, it’s also crucial to think through the implications of the technology and how it could negatively affect the economy and our individual rights.
The first part of the hidden agenda is to eliminate cash. If you’re the government and you want the central bank digital currency to succeed, you have to eliminate cash because it’s your competition.
Cash is anonymous. If you pay for something with cash, the purchase can’t be directly tied to you. That’s not true of Biden Bucks.
The government knows exactly what you’re buying, to whom you’re making donations and (by extension) what you’re reading based on which books you buy, etc.
That means we’ve come very far down the road toward thought control, censorship and selective law enforcement against political enemies.
It’s a government that looks like the state ruled by Big Brother in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The government might want to freeze your account, they might want to seize your assets, they might want to put an expiration date on your money.
Imagine you get paid and the government says, “OK, you got the money. Nice job, but that money is going to evaporate or disappear if you don’t spend it in the next six months.” How’s that for a stimulus program?
None of these things is possible if there’s cash around. But if you get rid of cash and force everyone into a digital system, then you can do these kinds of things.
That means fiscal policy can actually be dictated by Biden Bucks. With total control of your money, the government can conduct fiscal policy at will.
What if the government wanted to stimulate the economy and increase the amount of consumer spending? They could simply send you a letter that states, for example, “You must spend $200 in the next 30 days or we will take $100 out of your account as a penalty.”
As most citizens will not want to risk losing $100, they will spend the amount requested and create stimulus in the economy as the government had wanted.
This could also work in the opposite direction. Say the government wanted to cool down the economy and not have as much money in circulation. They could encourage savings by requesting a certain balance in your account be kept and not spent.
If you went under that set balance, a penalty would be triggered.
All that being said, the digital takeover of the financial system is not an all-or-nothing event, and it will happen in stages and not all at once. When the CBDCs are finally rolled out, it may be a bit of an anticlimax if private companies have already eliminated cash and invaded privacy on their own.
For example, the Italian bank Intesa SanPaolo has begun forcing customers to use an all-digital mobile phone service with no ability for customers to visit a branch or interact with a human bank official.
This is exactly what the world of CBDCs will be like except that a private bank will be doing the dirty work and not waiting for a government mandate. The CBDC effort in Europe will inevitably involve the European Central Bank (ECB) since they are the issuer of the euro and will be in charge of the digital ledger of transactions.
Still, private banks are not waiting for the ECB and are laying the groundwork today for a world without cash or human bankers.
All that’s left is a digital ledger and total surveillance of everything you do.
Again, the endgame for CBDCs would closely resemble George Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four. It would be a world of negative interest rates, forced tax collection, government confiscation, account freezes and constant surveillance.
You might not be able to fight back easily in the world of Biden Bucks, but it can be done.
There is one nondigital, nonhackable, nontraceable form of money you can still use.
It’s called gold (and silver). I urge you to get your hands on some while you still can.
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James G. Rickards is the editor of Strategic Intelligence, Project Prophesy, Crash Speculator, and Gold Speculator. He is an American lawyer, economist, and investment banker with 40 years of experience working in capital markets on Wall Street. He was the principal negotiator of the rescue of Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) by the U.S Federal Reserve in 1998. His clients include institutional investors and government directorates.
Featured image is from DR
October 30th, 2023 by Amnesty International
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Amnesty International is issuing an urgent call for an immediate ceasefire by all parties in the occupied Gaza Strip and Israel to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid for people in Gaza amidst an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.
“Over the past two and a half weeks we have witnessed horror unfolding on an unimaginable scale in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. More than 2 million people in the Gaza Strip are struggling to survive amidst a catastrophic humanitarian crisis and the level of civilian casualties has been unprecedented. Over 6546 people have been killed in Gaza and at least 1,400 in Israel and thousands more have been injured. More than 200 people have been taken hostage by Hamas. Serious violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes, by all parties to the conflict continue unabated. In the face of such unprecedented devastation and suffering, humanity must prevail,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.
“Urgent action is needed to protect civilians and prevent further staggering levels of human suffering. We urge all members of the international community to come together to demand an immediate humanitarian ceasefire by all parties in the conflict.”
Amnesty International joins the Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, the UN agencies working in Palestine, and many human rights experts, represented by a long list of UN special procedures, who are also calling for a ceasefire, along with the UN Secretary General and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Since the horrific attacks in southern Israel on 7 October, in which Hamas and other armed groups killed at least 1,400 people and took over 200 hostages, most of them civilians, according to Israeli authorities, Israeli forces have launched thousands of air and ground strikes on the Gaza Strip, killing more than 6,546 people, mostly civilians, including at least 2,704 children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. More than 17,439 have been injured and over 2,000 bodies are still trapped beneath the rubble while the health sector is on its knees.
The looming ground offensive by Israeli forces into Gaza is likely to have cataclysmic consequences for Gaza’s civilians, as foretold by the ominous threats issued by the Israeli military to civilians remaining in northern Gaza. Civilians in Israel also continue to come under attack from indiscriminate rocket fire from Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza.
“In the face of the unprecedented humanitarian disaster in Gaza that is growing worse by the day, an immediate ceasefire by all parties is vital to enable aid agencies to get sufficient relief into the Strip and to distribute it safely and unconditionally. It would give hospitals an opportunity to receive life-saving medicines, water and equipment they desperately need as well as to repair damaged wards,” said Agnès Callamard.
“An immediate ceasefire is also the most effective way to protect civilians as warring parties continue to commit grave violations. It could prevent the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza and could also provide an opportunity to secure the safe release of hostages.”
Amnesty International has documented evidence of war crimes by Israeli forces and Hamas and other armed groups. A ceasefire could also enable independent investigations into human rights violations and war crimes by all parties to be carried out, including by the International Criminal Court and the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Their work is vital as ending the longstanding impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity and securing justice and reparation for victims are essential to prevent recurrence of these atrocities and to address the root causes of the conflict, such as Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians.
Amnesty International also reiterates its calls for:
Demand a ceasefire by all parties to end civilian suffering, sign your name here.
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Featured image is from Craig Murray
October 30th, 2023 by Ralph Nader
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In the midst of extensive coverage of the war in Gaza, there are questions that the U.S. mass media should address:
1. How did Hamas, with tiny Gaza surrounded by a 17-year Israeli blockade, subjected to unparalleled electronic surveillance, with spies and informants, and augmented by an overwhelming air, sea, and land military presence, manage to get these weapons and associated technology for their October 7 surprise raid?
2. What is the connection between the stunning failure of the Israeli government to protect its people on the border and the policy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Recall The New York Times (October 22, 2023) article by prominent journalist, Roger Cohen, to wit:
“All means were good to undo the notion of Palestinian statehood. In 2019, Mr. Netanyahu told a meeting of his center-right Likud party: ‘Those who want to thwart the possibility of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy.’” (Note: Israel and the U.S. fostered the rise of Islamic Hamas in 1987 to counter the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)).
3. Why is Congress preparing to appropriate over $14 billion to Israel in military and other aid without any public hearings and without any demonstrated fiscal need by Israel, a prosperous economic, technological, and military superpower with a social safety net superior to that of the U.S.? USDA just reported over 44 million Americans struggled with hunger in 2022. This, in the midst of a childcare crisis. Should U.S. taxpayers be expected to pay for Netanyahu’s colossal intelligence/military collapse?
4. Why hasn’t the media reported on President Joe Biden’s statement that the Gaza Health Ministry’s body count (now over 7,000 fatalities) is exaggerated? All indications, however, are that it is a large undercount by Hamas to minimize its inability to protect its people. Israel has fired over 8,000 powerful precision munitions and bombs so far. These have struck many thousands of inhabited buildings—homes, apartments buildings, over 120 health facilities, ambulances, crowded markets, fleeing refugees, schools, water and sewage systems, and electric networks—implementing Israeli military orders to cut off all food, water, fuel, medicine, and electricity to this already impoverished densely packed area the size of Philadelphia. For those not directly slain, the deadly harm caused by no food, water, medicine, medical facilities, and fuel will lead to even more deaths and serious injuries.
Note that over three-quarters of Gaza’s population consists of children and women. Soon there will be thousands of babies born to die in the rubble. Other Palestinians will perish from untreated diseases, injuries, dehydration, and from drinking contaminated water. With crumbled sanitation facilities, physicians are fearing a deadly cholera epidemic.
Israel bombed the Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border. Only a tiny trickle of trucks are now allowed there by Israel to carry food and water. Fuel for hospital generators still remains blocked.
5. Why can’t Biden even persuade Israel to let 600 desperate Americans out of the Gaza firestorm?
6. Why isn’t the mass media making a bigger issue out of Israel’s long-time practices of blocking journalists from entering Gaza, including European, American, and Israeli journalists? The only television crews left are Gazan-residing Al Jazeera reporters. Israeli bombs have already killed 26 journalists in the Gaza Strip since October 7th. Is Israel targeting journalists’ families? Gaza bureau chief of Al Jazeera Wael Al-Dahdouh’s family was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday.
7. Why isn’t the mainstream U.S. media giving adequate space and voice to groups advocating a cease-fire and humanitarian aid? The message of Israeli peace groups’ peaceful solutions are drowned out by the media’s addiction to interviews with military tacticians. Much time and space are being given to hawks pushing for a war that could flash outside of Gaza big time. Shouldn’t groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Arab-American Institute, Veterans for Peace, and associations of clergy have their views and activities reported?
8. Why is the coverage of the war overlooking the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations Charter, and the many provisions of international law that all the parties, including the U.S., have been violating? (See the October 24, 2023 letter to President Biden). Under international law, Biden has made the U.S. an active “co-belligerent” of the Israeli government’s vocal demolition of the 2.3 million inhabitants in Gaza, who are mostly descendants of Palestinian refugees driven from their homes in 1948. (See, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).
9. What about the human-interest stories that would be revealing? For example: How do Israeli F-16 pilots feel about their daily bombing of the completely defenseless Gazan civilian population and its life-sustaining infrastructures? What are the courageous Israeli human rights and refuseniks thinking and doing in a climate of serious repression of their views as a result of Netanyahu’s defense collapse on October 7?
10. Where is the media attention on the statements from Israeli military commentators, who, for years have declared high-tech U.S.-backed, nuclear-armed Israel to be more secure than at any time in its history? Israel is reasserting its overwhelming military domination of the entire region, fully backed by U.S. militarism.
Historians remind us that in a gridlocked conflict over time, it is the most powerful party’s responsibility to lead the way to peace.
Establishing a two-state solution has been supported by Palestinians. All the Arab nations, starting with the Arab League peace proposal in 2002, support this solution as well. It is up to Israel and the U.S., assuming annexation of what is left of Palestine is not Israel’s objective. (See, the March 29, 2002 New York Times article: “Mideast Turmoil; Text of the Peace Proposals Backed by the Arab League”).
More media attention on this subject matter is much needed.
[From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.]
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Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of “The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future” (2012). His new book is, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All” (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).
October 30th, 2023 by Riyaz ul Khaliq
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If Shakespeare were alive today, he might rethink his famous line “What’s in a name?” after witnessing Israeli bombing in the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza.
Sitting inside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, amid wails and mourning, Ahmed Abu Al-Saba, 35, is inscribing his name on his arm.
“We write our names on our hands and the names of our children on their hands to enable our bodies to be identified if the (Israeli) occupation planes bomb us,” Al-Saba told Anadolu.
In the famous tragedy, Juliet asks Romeo “What’s in a name?” to convey the idea that the naming of things is irrelevant: “A rose is a rose by any other name.”
But in Gaza today, hundreds of children are lining up in hospitals to register their names on their hands.
Al-Saba is one among hundreds of Palestinians, especially children, who are marking their body parts with names, so they can be identified in case they lose their life in the ongoing conflict, which began on Oct. 7.
At least 2,055 children have been killed by Israeli attacks since Tel Aviv began its bombardment of the besieged Palestinian enclave two weeks ago.
Running for their lives amid the ruins of their houses and properties, suffering Palestinians have been making sure they are identified in case they are next in the targeted attacks by Israeli forces.
Al-Saba said: “There are many martyrs, especially children, whose families are difficult to reach.”
The scenes of bombarded neighborhoods in Gaza reveal a story of catastrophe and devastation. Over a million people have been forcibly displaced, and hundreds are taking refuge in hospitals and UN-run schools.
“The occupation does not discriminate between anyone and bombs everywhere,” Al-Saba said.
At least 5,087 Palestinians, including 1,023 women and 2,055 children, have been killed by Israeli attacks on Gaza, while 15,273 others have been injured.
“The families wrote their names on their hands and legs so they could be identified after being bombed by Israel, using American-made and American-supplied death bombs,” Palestinian academic Sami Al-Arian wrote on X.
“Their innocent blood is on the hands of (US President Joe) Biden and his bloodthirsty friends. In their world, Palestinian children don’t deserve to live, while Israeli criminals are protected and praised,” Al-Arian said, adding: “Damn your racism and hypocrisy!”
The conflict in Gaza, which has been under Israeli bombardment and a blockade since Oct. 7, began when Hamas initiated Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, a multi-pronged surprise attack that included a barrage of rocket launches and infiltrations into Israel by land, sea and air.
It said the incursion was in retaliation for the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque and growing violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians.
The Israeli military then launched Operation Swords of Iron against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip.
Around 1,400 Israelis have been killed since Oct. 7.
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Featured image: A woman holding a girl reacts after Israeli airstrikes hit Ridwan neighborhood of Gaza City, Gaza on October 23, 2023. (Source: AA)
October 30th, 2023 by Ken Klippenstein
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Two months before Hamas attacked Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named “Site 512,” the longstanding U.S. base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel.
On October 7, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512 saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away.
The U.S. Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a “life support facility”: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel.
Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a secret U.S. military presence in Israel already exists. And the government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing.
The $35.8 million U.S. troop facility, not publicly announced or previously reported, was obliquely referenced in an August 2 contract announcement by the Pentagon. Though the Defense Department has taken pains to obscure the site’s true nature — describing it in other records merely as a “classified worldwide” project — budget documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that it is part of Site 512. (The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather [because] the U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept. “In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in the Middle East in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit.”
Rare acknowledgment of the U.S. military presence in Israel came in 2017, when the two countries inaugurated a military site that the U.S. government-funded Voice of America deemed “the first American military base on Israeli soil.” Israeli Air Force’s Brig. Gen. Tzvika Haimovitch called it “historic.” He said, “We established an American base in the State of Israel, in the Israel Defense Forces, for the first time.”
A day later, the U.S. military denied that it was an American base, insisting that it was merely a “living facility” for U.S. service members working at an Israeli base.
The U.S. military employs similar euphemistic language to characterize the new facility in Israel, which its procurement records describe as a “life support area.” Such obfuscation is typical of U.S. military sites the Pentagon wants to conceal. Site 512 has previously been referred to as a “cooperative security location”: a designation that is intended to confer a low-cost, light footprint presence but has been applied to bases that, as The Intercept has previously reported, can house as many as 1,000 troops.
Site 512, however, wasn’t established to contend with a threat to Israel from Palestinian militants but the danger posed by Iranian mid-range missiles.
The overwhelming focus on Iran continues to play out in the U.S. government’s response to the Hamas attack. In an attempt to counter Iran — which aids both Hamas and Israel’s rival to the north, Hezbollah, a Lebanese political group with a robust military wing, both of which are considered terror groups by the U.S. — the Pentagon has vastly expanded its presence in the Middle East. Following the attack, the U.S. doubled the number of fighter jets in the region and deployed two aircraft carriers off the coast of Israel.
Top Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have nonetheless castigated Biden for his purported “weakness on Iran.” While some media accounts have said Iran played a role in planning the Hamas attack, there have been indications from the U.S. intelligence community that Iranian officials were surprised by the attack.
The history of the U.S.–Israel relationship may be behind the failure to acknowledge the base, said an expert on overseas U.S. military bases.
“My speculation is that the secrecy is a holdover from when U.S. presidential administrations tried to offer a pretense of not siding with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts,” David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University, told The Intercept. “The announcement of U.S. military bases in Israel in recent years likely reflects the dropping of that pretense and a desire to more publicly proclaim support for Israel.”
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Featured image: U.S. Air Force airmen hand off cargo to the Israeli military at Nevatim Air Base, Israel, on Oct. 15, 2023. Photo: Edgar Grimaldo/U.S. Air Force
October 30th, 2023 by Al Mayadeen
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A report by Save the Children states that more children have been killed in Gaza since the attacks on October 7 than those killed in conflicts around the world every year since 2019.
Referencing Palestinian Health authorities, the report stated that at least 3,324 children have been murdered so far and 36 were killed in the West Bank.
In comparison, reports from the UN Secretary-General on children and armed conflict show that a total of 2,985 children were killed in 24 countries in 2022, 2,515 in 2021, and 2,674 in 2020 across 22 countries.
Jason Lee, Save the Children’s country director for the occupied Palestinian territory, explained,
“One child’s death is one too many, but these are grave violations of epic proportions,” adding, “A ceasefire is the only way to ensure their safety. The international community must put people before politics – every day spent debating is leaving children killed and injured. Children must be protected at all times, especially when they are seeking safety in schools and hospitals.”
As of yet, 1,000 children remain missing in Gaza and may be under the rubble. It is worth noting that children constitute over 40% of the more than 8,000 people confirmed dead in Gaza.
A typical 15-year-old in Gaza has lived through five periods of intensive bombardment: 2008-9, 2012, 2014, 2021, and now 2023.
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Featured image source
October 30th, 2023 by Luis Britto García
October 30th, 2023 by Global Research News
By , October 30, 2023
In the current context, Israel’s “All Goes to Plan” option consists in bypassing Palestine and “Wiping Gaza off the Map”, as well confiscating ALL Gaza’s maritime offshore gas reserves, worth billions of dollars.
The Afterlife: A Trick or a Treat? Halloween Celebrations Past and Present
By , October 30, 2023
Halloween is creeping up on us again replete with all its ghostly traditions celebrated all over the world. Also known as All Saints’ Eve, it is the time in the liturgical year or Christian year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed.
By , October 29, 2023
The main press stable was keen to see the scrappy benefits of the 31-hour visit to Israel by US President Joe Biden. On National Public Radio (NPR), Scott Neuman expressed the view that the “largely symbolic” visit did yield a few “concrete accomplishments” including an announcement of $100 million in Palestinian aid, convincing Israel to permit humanitarian aid into Gaza and persuade Egypt’s strongman president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to open up an access route via land into southern Gaza.
Operation False Flag to Set the Middle East on Fire
By , October 28, 2023
The bombs Israel is using on Gaza were supplied by the United States: there are about 10 thousand powerful small-diameter bombs guided on targets via the U.S. GPS system.
By , October 28, 2023
A representative from the non-profit organization Palestine Legal, which provides legal support to the Palestine solidarity movement, found that they had received a surge in requests for assistance in the last two weeks. Many of these individuals, including university students, professors, and journalists said they faced negative consequences in their workplaces for statements they made on their social media posts in support of Palestinian rights!
Widening the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Yellow Journalism Stoking Potential War on Iran
By , October 29, 2023
On October 8, The Wall Street Journal accused Iran of helping to plan the Tribe of Nova massacre; a Hamas terrorist attack on an Israeli music festival that has triggered renewed outbreak of war in the Middle East.
Pro-Israel War Propaganda and Censorship
By , October 30, 2023
Israel’s rationale for indiscriminate bombing in Gaza is collective punishment by its own admission. Regardless of what acts were committed by Hamas forces on October 7, killing entire Palestinian families in retaliation is indefensible under international law.
Israel-Palestine War: Israel Plans to Flood Hamas Tunnels with Nerve Gas, Source Says
By , October 30, 2023
Palestinian groups expect Israel to flood Hamas tunnels with a type of nerve gas or chemical weapon under the surveillance of US Delta Force commandos as part of a surprise attack on the Gaza Strip, a senior Arab source familiar with the Palestinian groups told Middle East Eye.
Thou Shalt Not Kill. Dennis Kucinich
By , October 30, 2023
As a member of the US Congress for 16 years, I gave over 500 speeches warning about the consequences of US wars against Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria. I spoke for the imperative of peace in the Middle East, on behalf of Israelis and the Palestinians alike. I met with leaders of many countries who were grappling to keep their nations out of conflict and I came to understand the role some in the US government have played to intentionally catalyze war, fueling arms sales globally, without regard for the consequences.
By , October 27, 2023
28 year old Danish rider Niklas Eg has been forced to retire due to inexplicable instances of irregular heart rate during his training sessions. His medical team has still not determined the cause of the irregular heart rate.
October 30th, 2023 by William Hunter
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Along the border wall separating Israel and the Gaza Strip, tens of thousands of soldiers are making the final preparations for a full-scale ground invasion.
But soon, the sight of massed troops might seem as much a relic of the past as knights on horseback appear to us now.
That’s because the wars of the future will not only be fought by humans, but also by machines.
Already, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has developed and deployed a staggering arsenal of robotic and autonomous weapons which may soon see their first deployment at scale.
From AI-powered turrets and drones to robotic tanks and boats these terrifying weapons will soon play a critical role in the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Already, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has developed and deployed a staggering arsenal of robotic and autonomous weapons which may soon see their first deployment at scale (Source: Daily Mail Online)
The Harop is a loitering suicide drone capable of carrying a 35lbs (16kg) explosive warhead to strike a target up to 620 miles (1,000km) away.
Developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Israel’s state-owned weapons manufacturer, the Harop is able to autonomously search for, identify, and attack targets.
While measuring 8ft (2.4 metres) long and almost 10ft (three metres) across, the drone can fold its wings to be launched from a container on land or sea.
The operator can designate a ‘holding area’ where the drone will automatically fly to and wait, as well as a set of criteria for targets.
When the Harop identifies a target meeting its criteria, it will automatically attack, diving at speeds of up to 250 miles/hour, slamming directly into the target and detonating the explosives.
The enormous drone uses a ‘man-in-the-loop’ operating system aimed at reducing collateral damage.
This means that while the attack sequence is largely autonomous, a human controller can intervene at any point to call off the attack or take direct control of the drone.
The man-in-the-loop system is a major change from the earlier ‘Harpy’ drone, which struck targets without any human control or intervention.
The Harop is also enormously expensive with costs for foreign nations ranging around $800,000 to $1 million (£659,760-£824,700) per drone.
In 2022, the residents of a large Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank felt first-hand the ways that autonomous weapons systems are changing the nature of war.
In the Al-Aroub refugee camp – a frequent flashpoint for protests – Israel installed AI-powered turrets capable of firing sponge-tipped bullets, tear gas, and stun grenades.
Created by weapons firm, Smart Shooter, the turrets use an AI system which automatically identifies, tracks, and locks on to targets considered hostile.
The autonomous fire-control system, called SMASH, still requires a soldier to open fire even if they no longer aim the weapon.
In the firm’s marketing, this system is called ‘One Shot—One Hit’ and claims that it ‘combines simple to install hardware with advanced image-processing software to turn basic small arms into 21st century smart weapons’.
The turret uses less-than-lethal munitions, however, these have also been controversial due to the level of harm they can cause.
Sponge-tipped bullets have reportedly caused fractured skulls and serious injuries, while death or long-term injury due to tear gas inhalation is possible.
A spokesperson for the IDF said in a statement that the system would not be extended to use live fire.
‘As part of the army’s improved preparations for confronting people disrupting order in the area, it is examining the possibility of using remotely-controlled systems for the employment of approved measures of crowd dispersal,’ the spokesperson told Haaretz.
Light enough to be carried in a backpack, but strong enough to punch through two feet of armour plating; the Rotem suicide drone is a formidable threat in urban warfare.
The Rotem, also designed by IAI, is operated in the same way as a commercial quadcopter drone.
The operator can see from the drone’s perspective via a tablet and use an onboard array of sensors to find targets.
Light enough to be carried in a backpack, but strong enough to punch through two feet of armour plating; the Rotem suicide drone is a formidable threat in urban warfare (Source: Daily Mail Online)
The Rotem, also designed by IAI, is operated in the same way as a commercial quadcopter drone (Source: Daily Mail Online)
Able to manoeuvre in tight spaces and equipped with automated obstacle avoidance, Rotem has been tailored to the IDF’s requirements for precision urban combat.
The drone is also able to return safely if not detonated, a vital feature for a piece of kit costing tens of thousands of dollars.
Much like other drones used by the IDF, the Rotem is also a loitering suicide munition.
The drone can ‘perch and stare’, automatically landing on buildings or hills and waiting to ambush targets.
According to the drone’s product page, the drone ‘autonomously detects and locates enemy hostile fire sources like artillery, rockets, and missiles launchers, then investigates and engages a direct attack.’
It is not specified how much human control is involved in this process though it likely is a human-in-the-loop system.
Designed to ‘keep troops out of harm’s way’ the Rex MKII is one of the most advanced autonomous combat robots in the world.
Equipped to be both a transport or reconnaissance vehicle and a weapons platform, this hybrid vehicle can operate silently for up to 43 miles (70km) and up to 248 miles (400km) using its onboard generator.
Controlled by IAI’s proprietary AI Machine Learning software, the Rex completes tasks with complete autonomy.
It can be loaded with weapons including a 7.62mm machine gun, 50 calibre heavy machine gun, or 30mm cannon.
According to IAI, the onboard technology uses ‘sensor-to-shooter loops’ to select targets autonomously in real-time.
However, a human soldier is required to press the trigger and authorise firing on targets.
RoBattle forms part of a series of robotic and semi-autonomous weapons being rolled out by the IDF on the Israel-Gaza border.
Weighing seven tons and about the size of a small car, the RoBattle is designed to perform tasks that otherwise would be carried out by human soldiers.
Part of the IDF’s growing robotic arsenal, RoBattle is meant to take on dangerous tasks that would have otherwise been assigned to human soldiers (Source: Daily Mail Online)
For maximum flexibility, it can be equipped with a range of different payloads including sensors and radars, manipulator arms, or remotely controlled weapons.
Weaponised versions of the robot use the Pitbull remote weapons systems designed by Israeli weapons developer General Robotics.
According to IAI, the RoBattle autonomously performs ‘Advance Guard, ambushes, acts as a decoy, convoy & force protection, combat Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition & Reconnaissance (ISTAR), and advance attack capabilities.’
Sensors combined with onboard AI allow the robot to respond to threats around it, although it is not clear how much human authorisation is required for the use of lethal force.
The first unmanned surface vessel developed for the Israeli Navy, the Protector is a highly independent remote control vehicle.
The protector has been in service since 2014 as part of patrols along Israel’s coast, although it has mainly been used by the Republic of Singapore Navy in anti-piracy missions.
The Protector is a rigid inflatable boat capable of cruising at 55 miles/hour (88km/h).
Equipped with both a water cannon for non-lethal use and remote-controlled weapons systems, this robot can be deployed in several different roles.
Initially only armed with small weapons, the Protector has also test-fired missiles in trials.
However, the Israeli Navy has now terminated the programme to use unmanned surface vessels.
The Guardium is one of the few robotic weapons that is directly developed by the IDF for their use in conflict with Gaza.
Since 2008, this semi-autonomous scout vehicle has been patrolling Gaza’s border fence as part of anti-terror and anti-smuggling operations.
While not equipped with any weaponry, the Guardium is a vital source of surveillance for Israeli forces.
The Guardium was designed specifically to patrol the Gaza border and uses a 360-degree camera and loudspeaker to search for potential terrorist threats (Source: Daily Mail Online)
With 360-degree cameras and a loudspeaker, this highly mobile vehicle can hit 50 miles/hour (80km/h) and operate for days at a time without a recharge.
The Guardium can be either controlled remotely or operate autonomously for long periods.
According to the IDF, the vehicle is operated with joysticks, gear pedals, a steering wheel, and monitors which broadcast a live feed from the field
The IDF also notes that all Guardium drivers are women.
Lt. Avidav, head of the Guardium Division, wrote in an IDF blog post: ‘Applicants must be able to focus intensively since the job demands being glued to a screen without interruption for six hour shifts.’
The Spike Firefly is the very latest in the IDF’s arsenal of remote weapons, having been first used in combat earlier this year.
About the size of a carton of milk and weighing only 6.6lbs (3kg), the Spike Firefly is a suicide drone designed specifically for use in dense urban environments like Gaza.
The weapon is placed on its end, armed, and then piloted by a soldier using a tablet.
With a flight range of about 15 minutes, the drone is designed to bring small amounts of explosives to enemy combatants otherwise hidden out of sight.
IDF soldiers flew six of these drones into houses around the Jenin refugee camp to destroy terrorist targets including a command centre that housed dozens of explosive charges.
Crucially, the IDF claims that no Palestinian civilians were killed during the operation.
The drone can also operate autonomously and explode over predesignated targets, although a human operator is always able to call off the attack at any point.
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Featured image: The Harop is a loitering suicide drone capable of carrying a 35lbs (16kg) explosive warhead to strike a target up to 620 miles (1,000km) away (Source: Daily Mail Online)
October 30th, 2023 by Margaret Kimberley
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“I have been informed that I am being replaced as the Editor in Chief of @eLife for retweeting a @TheOnion piece that calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians.” —Michael B. Eisen
Michael B. Eisen is just the latest victim of unrelenting pro-Israel war propaganda spread by the state and by its friends in corporate media. The scorched earth policy is operating in the United States and in its allied nations such as Canada, where physician Dr. Ben Thomson was suspended from his job after posting on the X platform,
“No babies were beheaded, there have been no confirmed reports of rapes. You repeat this nonsense out of racism. In the meantime, Palestinians are experiencing genocide and war crimes and you are silent. History will judge you very badly.”
Everything Thomson said is true. The beheaded baby trope was made up out of whole cloth and Palestinians are the group being subjected to war crimes.
War crimes are very clearly defined in international law. Geneva Conventions IV, Article 33 explains, “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”
Israel’s rationale for indiscriminate bombing in Gaza is collective punishment by its own admission. Regardless of what acts were committed by Hamas forces on October 7, killing entire Palestinian families in retaliation is indefensible under international law. Yet this clearly documented doctrine that is ordinarily upheld as an international norm no longer applies because the U.S. finds doing so to be a great inconvenience.
Foreign policy under the Biden administration has reached its nadir as fantasies about breaking up Russia or containing China are unchecked by a president who truly believes that U.S. power is unlimited and can accomplish anything he wants it to. When asked on the program 60 Minutes if the U.S. will have difficulty carrying on proxy wars in Ukraine and Israel simultaneously, Biden’s reply exposed his simple minded and dangerous belief about U.S. power. “No. We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history– not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.”
Biden thinks that U.S. power can create any outcome that he may dream up, that Russia will allow Ukraine to be used as a point of attack or that the rest of the world will stand by passively and silently as the U.S. gives Israel carte blanche to kill thousands of people.
Joe Biden’s recent trip to Israel was an unmitigated disaster because of his arrogance and stupidity. He was originally scheduled to meet King Abdullah of Jordan and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt along with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But the bombing of the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza was an affront to every Arab country, even those like Egypt and Jordan who maintain friendly ties with the U.S.
Biden’s incompetence and his ill-considered decision to go to Israel at all and to publicly agree with the Israeli claim that a misfired Hamas rocket hit the hospital and not the Israeli air force, made the king and the president look bad in the eyes of their people. It is one thing to be perceived as a U.S. puppet, it is quite another to be seen with a U.S. president who sides with Israel as atrocities are being committed.
The foreign policy debacle was not described as such in U.S. corporate media. His failure to engage Arab leaders was swept under the rug and disappeared into a black hole. The president’s televised address was replete with trite platitudes and was devoid of anything other than unquestioned support of Israel with an odd swipe at Vladimir Putin thrown in for good measure. Actually the Putin reference was not so odd. The point of the speech was to announce a request to congress to allocate $61 billion to Ukraine and $14 billion to Israel and $7 billion to Taiwan. Why Taiwan? Biden’s calculus is to antagonize China in the process of creating more bloodshed in Gaza and Ukraine. Apparently the most powerful country in the history of the world believes that the more risks to world peace the better.
This full court press of a pro-Zionist narrative that connects the white house to the television networks and national newspapers has also given a green light to Israel’s supporters to practice their own form of collective punishment. A social media post can end a job or as Harvard and Columbia University law students discovered, even the prospect of a job offer.
The 1950s McCarthy era is remembered for the blacklists which effectively deprived anyone of a public life if they were said to be a communist or a leftist of any stripe. Now 70 years later the same imperative to silence those who stray from official doctrine is being whipped up again. The U.S. and Canada are not alone as European allies France and Germany banned any pro-Palestine protests from taking place. A French official said,
“Pro-Palestinian demonstrations must be prohibited because they are likely to generate disturbances to the public order.”
He was correct in one sense. Public denunciations of imperialist policies do disturb the public order and that is a good thing for anyone who believes in democratic rights. But democracy is the last thing that the U.S. and its friends want. It is difficult to support Israeli government carnage if people don’t fear being beat down. Intimidation is the whole point of the exercise and anyone who dares to show even a little empathy with Palestine is quickly used to make an example.
Writer Viet Thanh Nguyen had the temerity to sign a letter which expressed sympathy for Israeli and Palestinian deaths but which added,
“But the unprecedented and indiscriminate violence that is still escalating against the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, with the financial and political support of Western powers, can and must be brought to an end.”
That sentiment was enough for his speech at the 92nd Street Y in New York City to be canceled.
The censorship begins at the very top. The State Department told employees that they were not to use phrases containing the words
in any press materials. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre labeled congressional calls for de-escalation as “repugnant” and added for good measure, “There are not two sides here. There are not two sides.”
From the president on down, people in this country have been told that there is only one side, the side of Israel, and that anyone who says otherwise is to be ignored or shouted down. Of course big law firms and hospitals can fire people who dare to break the spell of American exceptionalism when a presidential administration gives even tacit permission to punish those who speak up.
Yet people are speaking up. The corporate media may give little attention to or smear the thousands of people who protest Israel’s war crimes all over the country.
They have done so in the thousands despite the threats lodged against them. Biden and his team of amateurs may think that the U.S. cannot suffer any setbacks, but history shows that power is not unlimited. Billions of dollars and press collusion notwithstanding, U.S. policy of supporting Israel threatens that region and the whole house of cards of bad U.S. foreign policy decisions from Ukraine to Taiwan. Perhaps they know that and realize that they must enforce conformity. But history shows that can’t last forever either.
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Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on the Twitter and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at margaret.kimberley(at)blackagendareport.com.
Featured image is from BAR
October 30th, 2023 by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin
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***
“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” – Stephen King
Halloween is creeping up on us again replete with all its ghostly traditions celebrated all over the world.
Also known as All Saints’ Eve, it is the time in the liturgical year or Christian year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed. It is followed by All Saints’ Day, also known as All Hallows’ Day on the 1 November, and All Souls’ Day, a day of prayer and remembrance for the faithful departed, observed by certain Christian denominations on 2 November.
However, it is also believed that Halloween is rooted in the ancient pagan Gaelic festival of Samhain which marks the change of seasons and the approach of winter. Samhain begins at sunset on October 31 and continues until sunset on November 1, marking the end of harvest and the start of winter. This Celtic pagan holiday followed the great cycle of life as part of their year-round celebrations of nature along with Imbolc (February 1), Beltane (May 1) and Lughnasadh (August 1).
During Samhain people would:
“bring their cattle back from the summer pastures and slaughter livestock in preparation for the upcoming winter. They would also light ritual bonfires for protection and cleansing as they wished to mimic the sun and hold back the darkness. It was also a time when people believed that spirits or fairies (the Aos Sí ) were more likely to pass into our world. […] Dead and departed relatives played a central role in the tradition, as the connection between the living and dead was believed to be stronger at Samhain, and there was a chance to communicate. Souls of the deceased were thought to return to their homes. Feasts were held and places were set at tables as a way to welcome them home. Food and drink was offered to the unpredictable spirits and fairies to ensure continued health and good fortune.”
Dancing around the bonfire. The Graphic | 7 January 1893
The Celts believed in an afterlife called the Otherworld which was similar to this life but “without all the negative elements like disease, pain, and sorrow.”
Therefore, the Celts had little to fear from death when their soul left their body, or as the Celts believed, their head.
As Christianity spread in pagan communities, the church leaders attempted to incorporate Samhain into the Christian calendar. The Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic lands by A.D. 43 and combined two Roman festivals, Feralia and Pomona with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. Feralia was similar to Samhain as the Romans commemorated the passing of their dead, while Pomona, whose symbol was the apple, was the Roman goddess of fruit and trees, and may be the origin of the apple games of Halloween.
Some centuries later the church moved again to supplant the pagan traditions with Christian ones:
“On May 13, A.D. 609, Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1. By the 9th century, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted older Celtic rites. In A.D. 1000, the church made November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead.”
While on the surface the changes from the Celtic Otherworld to the Christian concepts of Heaven, Purgatory and Hell may not seem very radical yet when one looks further into the different beliefs about the afterlife a very different story emerges.
The Celtic Otherworld is “more usually described as a paradisal fairyland than a scary place” and sometimes described as an island to the west in the Ocean and “even shown on some maps of Ireland during the medieval era.” It has been called, or places in the Otherworld have been called, “Tír nAill (“the other land”), Tír Tairngire (“land of promise/promised land”), Tír na nÓg (“land of the young/land of youth”), Tír fo Thuinn (“land under the wave”), Tír na mBeo (“land of the living”), Mag Mell (“plain of delight”), Mag Findargat (“the white-silver plain”), Mag Argatnél (“the silver-cloud plain”), Mag Ildathach (“the multicoloured plain”), Mag Cíuin (“the gentle plain”), and Emain Ablach (possibly “isle of apples”).”
As can be seen from the names given to the places of the Otherworld there are two important, salient points. One is the positive, almost welcoming aspect of the descriptions implied, and secondly their close relationship with nature and places in the real world. The Otherworld is described “either as a parallel world that exists alongside our own, or as a heavenly land beyond the sea or under the earth,” and could be entered through “ancient burial mounds or caves, or by going under water or across the western sea.”
We may then ask who could enter the Otherworld in the afterlife?
“Although there are no surviving texts from the continent which comment on this, on the basis of comparisons with comparable societies and burial practices we can guess that both the gods and the ancestral dead were believed to inhabit the Otherworld. The earliest literary texts in Irish reflect exactly this idea.”
These deductions about the afterlife then reflect the nature-based ideology of pagan religion which is focused on the cycles of nature, and also the fact that we ourselves are part of that nature, thus both the ancestral dead and the gods inhabited the Otherworld. It seems that the dead entered the Otherworld fairly quickly and could even return to visit the living when the darkness started to take over from the light at Samhain. Even the living could visit the Otherworld but these visits would have their own drawbacks, for example, Oisín discovers that what had only seemed a short stay in Tír na nÓg had been hundreds of years in the real world.
Ghosts walk the night in Brittany by F. De Haenen | The Graphic | 5 November 1910
The differences between nature-based paganism and the Master and Martyr ethics of Christianity mean that entry to heaven is not guaranteed and may even be delayed for a long time in purgatory. For example:
“Christianity considers the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to entail the final judgment by God of all people who have ever lived, resulting in the approval of some and the penalizing of most. […] Belief in the Last Judgment (often linked with the general judgment) is held firmly in Catholicism. Immediately upon death each person undergoes the particular judgment, and depending upon one’s behavior on earth, goes to heaven, purgatory, or hell. Those in purgatory will always reach heaven, but those in hell will be there eternally.”
Hell is often depicted with fire and torture of the guilty. Thus, Christianity brings a strong element of fear into perceptions of the afterlife. The people whose behaviour needs to be controlled are frightened into being good and given long promises about eventual eternal bliss at the end of time.
The patriarchal element of Christianity and its desire to control and direct the remnants of pagan religion gave rise to other important aspects of Halloween. The dark symbolism of witches on broomsticks with black cats are an essential element of the Halloween imagery. By late medieval/early modern Europe, fears about witchcraft rose to fever pitch and sometimes led to large-scale witch-hunts. The Church saw these women (whose knowledge of nature was transformed into healing homoeopathic treatments) as a threat to their authority and demonised them before their own communities.
The witches “occasionally functioned as midwives, assisting the delivery and birth of babies, aiding the mother with different plant-based medicines to help with the pain of childbirth. […] The word Witch comes from the word for ‘wise one’ that was ‘Wicca’, and who were once considered wise soon became something to be feared and avoided.”
“Halloween Days”, article from American newspaper, The Sunday Oregonian, 1916
Like many traditional festivals Halloween has different historical sources, pagan and Christian, that have come together to form the holiday as we know it today.
Jack-o’-lantern represents the soul caught between heaven and hell who can know no rest and must wander on the earth forever. It is believed to originate in an old Irish folk tale from the mid-18th century which tells of Stingy Jack, “a lazy yet shrewd blacksmith who uses a cross to trap Satan.”
A plaster cast of a traditional Irish Jack-o’-Lantern in the Museum of Country Life, Ireland. Rutabaga or turnip were often used.
Jack tricks Satan who lets him go only after he agrees to never take his soul. When the blacksmith dies he is considered too sinful to enter heaven. He could not enter hell either and asks Satan how he will be able to see his way in the dark. Satan’s response was to toss him “a burning coal, to light his way. Jack carved out one of his turnips (which were his favorite food), put the coal inside it, and began endlessly wandering the Earth for a resting place.”
The Irish emigrants to the United States are believed to have switched the turnip for a pumpkin as it was more accessible and easier to carve. Ironically, in Ireland now, pumpkins are grown and sold to make modern Jack-o’-lanterns.
Modern carving of a Cornish Jack-o’-Lantern made from a turnip.
Another American tradition, trick-or-treating, has also taken root in Ireland in recent decades. As a child growing up in the United States, I also went trick-or-treating in Boston. However, after our move to Dublin, our trick-or-treating questions at Halloween were met with bewilderment as Irish people were used to a simple request for ‘anything for the Halloween party’.
The tradition of going door to door on Halloween may come from the belief that supernatural beings, or the souls of the dead, roamed the earth at this time and needed to be appeased. In Europe, from the 12th century, special ‘soul cakes’ would be baked and shared. People would pray for the poor souls of the dead (in purgatory) in return for soul cakes. In Ireland and Scotland “mumming and guising (going door-to-door in disguise and performing in exchange for food) was taken up as another variation on these ancient customs. Pranks were thought to be a way of confounding evil spirits. Pranks at Samhain date as far back as 1736 in Scotland and Ireland, and this led to Samhain being dubbed ‘Mischief Night.’”
Antrobus Soul Cakers at the end of a performance in a village hall in or near Antrobus, Cheshire, England in the mid 1970s. The Soul Cakers are a traditional group of mummers, who perform around All Soul’s Day (October 31st, Hallowe’en) each year. The characters are (left to right) Beelzebub, Doctor, Black Prince, Letter-In, Dairy Doubt, King George, Driver, Old Lady, and Dick, the Wild Horse in the foreground.
Antrobus Soul Cakers at the end of a performance in a village hall in or near Antrobus, Cheshire, England in the mid 1970s. The Soul Cakers are a traditional group of mummers, who perform around All Soul’s Day (October 31st, Hallowe’en) each year. The characters are (left to right) Beelzebub, Doctor, Black Prince, Letter-In, Dairy Doubt, King George, Driver, Old Lady, and Dick, the Wild Horse in the foreground.
It has also been suggested that trick-or-treating “evolved from a tradition whereby people impersonated the spirits, or the souls of the dead, and received offerings on their behalf.” It was thought that they “personify the old spirits of the winter, who demanded reward in exchange for good fortune”. Impersonating these spirits or souls was believed to protect oneself from them.
Thus, while Halloween may have become highly commercialised in recent years it is still an important custom that brings people and families together in their communities. It still marks an important part of the annual cycles of nature as the bountifulness of harvestime is contrasted with the bareness of winter. It prepares us psychologically for the dark days ahead. In the past Halloween allowed people to celebrate the completion of the work of life (the production of food) to having the time to contemplate the absence of their forebears: the people who gave them life, nurtured them, and taught them the skills of survival. It is a time to make the young generation aware of their parents’ temporary existence too, in a fun way.
Halloween is a time for confronting our basic fears about death and darkness. It is a time to remember the ancestral spirits of past generations who have ‘passed’ (a word that has become more popular than ‘died’ in recent years) through the thin veil between life and death. And, most importantly, a time to rethink our relationship with nature.
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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here. Caoimhghin has just published his new book – Against Romanticism: From Enlightenment to Enfrightenment and the Culture of Slavery, which looks at philosophy, politics and the history of 10 different art forms arguing that Romanticism is dominating modern culture to the detriment of Enlightenment ideals. It is available on Amazon (amazon.co.uk) and the info page is here.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image: Snap-Apple Night, painted by Daniel Maclise in 1833, shows people feasting and playing divination games on Halloween in Ireland. It was inspired by a Halloween party he attended in Blarney, Ireland, in 1832.
October 30th, 2023 by Craig Murray
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***
The Guardian’s main headline today is the Israeli propaganda framing of last night’s huge massacre.
The Zionist grip on the political and media class is stark. Ordinary citizens are left with feelings ranging from rage to deep sorrow, but with a feeling of helplessness at having no power and no genuine voice in the country where they live. The bought-and-paid-for politicians intone “Israel’s right to self-defence” as justifying the slaughter of any number of Palestinian children.
They pretend they do not see the obvious genocide which is happening before their eyes. The Guardian’s framing of the death of hundreds, probably thousands, of young children last night, as destruction of Hamas tunnels, ought to be astonishing. Sadly it is entirely unsurprising.
Here is a reminder of how it works. Joan Ryan MP secretly filmed talking to Shai Masot of the Israeli Embassy in London.
Labour MP Joan Ryan discussing a £1M "donation" from the Israeli Embassy with Shai Masot, an Israeli agent plotting to "take down" MPs hostile to Israel.
No biggie. It's not as if Joan helped "take down" Jeremy Corbyn or anything.
Oh, hang on. She did.pic.twitter.com/5doWEquCri
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush🥀🇵🇸🇾🇪 (@OwenPaintbrush) September 8, 2023
Last night, well after the latest extreme massacre phase had started, the BBC 10 o’clock evening news presented a single volley of Hamas no-warhead popgun missiles – which as usual killed nobody – as equivalent to the massive Israeli high explosive bombardment. They then featured a lengthy interview with a “heroic” clean-cut Israeli soldier who fought a Hamas attack on a military base on 7 October despite being wounded, and who explained that the attacks on Gaza are justified as they will free Israel from terrorism.
All this while the massive massacre was in progress in Gaza. The strange thing is, the BBC and the Guardian, and nearly the entire rest of the MSM, pump out their propaganda as though we have no other access to information or understanding of what is happening.
More than that, there seems to be a presumption that the general population harbour the same Zionist assumptions which the journalists are paid to promote. Well, we don’t. It feels like something has snapped, not only in Palestine but in the UK and much of Europe, where the process of alienation between the governed and the ruling classes has been accelerated.
Democracy has been failing in the West for a while – to take the UK as an example, the idea that a “choice” between Sunak and Starmer offers any kind of democratic alternative is risible. There are key moments in societal breakdown, and this is one.
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Featured image: Official portrait of Joan Ryan (Licensed under CC BY 3.0)
October 30th, 2023 by David Hearst
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***
Palestinian groups expect Israel to flood Hamas tunnels with a type of nerve gas or chemical weapon under the surveillance of US Delta Force commandos as part of a surprise attack on the Gaza Strip, a senior Arab source familiar with the Palestinian groups told Middle East Eye.
Israel and the US hope to achieve the element of surprise in order to penetrate Hamas tunnels, rescue an estimated 220 hostages, and kill thousands of soldiers belonging to Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigades, the source said, noting that the information they received came from a leak originating in the US.
Middle East Eye cannot independently verify the information in the leak.
“The plan hinges on the element of surprise so as to decisively win the battle, using internationally forbidden gases, particularly nerve gas, and chemical weapons. Large quantities of nerve gas would be pumped into the tunnels,” the source said.
The source added that the US Delta Force will oversee “large quantities of nerve gas being pumped into Hamas tunnels, capable of paralysing the bodily movement for a period of time between six and 12 hours.
“Inhaled or absorbed through the skin, most nerve gases can kill in anywhere between one to 10 minutes by crippling the respiratory centre of the central nervous system and paralysing the muscles around the lungs.
Symptoms of exposure to the agent include nausea and violent headaches, blurred vision, drooling, muscle convulsions, respiratory arrest and loss of consciousness.
“During this period, the tunnels would be penetrated, the hostages rescued and thousands of al-Qassam soldiers killed,” the source added.
US Department of Defense Spokesperson Sabrina Singh commented on the leak saying, “This is not true and this reporting is inaccurate.”
MEE reached out to the White House for comment but did not receive a response by time of publication.
The US is coordinating with Israel ahead of its expected invasion of Gaza, with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin holding near-daily phone calls with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, to discuss operations.
Senior US military officials with knowledge of urban warfare have also been dispatched to Israel.
The source said that Israel’s delay in its ground invasion was misinformation aimed at gaining the element of surprise in a multifaceted attack that will include Israeli commandos landing in northern Gaza and along the coast.
The operational details of the attack have already been agreed upon, according to the source.
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israel had agreed to delay its expected ground invasion to allow the US more time to place air defence systems in the region.
Netanyahu said later on Wednesday that Israel is preparing a ground invasion but gave no indication of timing or other details.
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October 30th, 2023 by Ahmed Asmar
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***
The International Federation of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) on Friday described the situation in Gaza as “catastrophic” as the lack of fuel, it said, would turn the hospitals into graves.
“The humanitarian situation in Gaza is more than catastrophic in the light of 12 hospitals and 32 healthcare centers becoming out of service due to lack of fuel or being bombed,” Mey Sayegh, head of IFRC communications, told Anadolu.
She added that the amount of aid that has entered Gaza since late last week, when Israel started letting in a trickle of aid trucks, does not even meet 4% of the needs of the people of Gaza.
She warned that Gaza has been without drinkable water and electricity for three weeks, and Palestinians each are getting per day an average of one to three liters of water, far away from the UN declared average of 15 liters per day for each person in times of catastrophes.
Sayegh also warned that the lack of fuel in Gaza would affect the security of water for people, might lead to diseases and epidemics, and would affect the humanitarian operations across Gaza.
“We, as IFRC, which is comprised of 191 Red Cross and Red Crescent societies worldwide have appealed since the start of the conflict to the necessity of allowing fuel entry into Gaza,” the IFRC official said.
Sayegh also called for protecting the civilians who deliver the humanitarian aid, as she said four staff from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society were killed while on duty.
The conflict in Gaza began when the Palestinian group Hamas initiated Operation Al-Aqsa Flood – a multi-pronged surprise attack on Oct. 7 that included a barrage of rocket launches and infiltrations into Israel by land, sea, and air.
Hamas said the incursion was in retaliation for the storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and growing violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians.
The Israeli military then launched a relentless bombardment of Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip.
Over 8,700 people have been killed in the conflict, including at least 7,326 Palestinians and 1,400 Israelis.
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Featured image: International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) vehicles transport Palestinians whose homes were destroyed in the attacks to safe areas (Source: AA)
October 30th, 2023 by Dennis Kucinich
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***
When will we ever learn?
As a member of the US Congress for 16 years, I gave over 500 speeches warning about the consequences of US wars against Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria. I spoke for the imperative of peace in the Middle East, on behalf of Israelis and the Palestinians alike. I met with leaders of many countries who were grappling to keep their nations out of conflict and I came to understand the role some in the US government have played to intentionally catalyze war, fueling arms sales globally, without regard for the consequences. The consequences are here!
We are cartwheeling towards a massive East v. West war with religious and ethnic overtones. This seemingly inexorable March of (nuclear) Folly, will ultimately pit the United States militarily against China, Russia and their allies.
The US, with its political divisions on full display, functions now only for purposes of funding wars. Otherwise, the government will shut down over its inability to balance the books from the expenses of previous wars which were put on the national credit card.
The polarization of US politics, the cognitively impaired and failing executive branch, the instability of the congressional leadership, the purblind partisanship, the ideologically, click-bait driven media has produced a mad blood lust for war against Iran and acceleration toward the abyss.
Through illegal war after illegal war, the US has demoralized and demonized itself against the rest of the world. It is the US and Israel against the Arab, Muslim, Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Turks, et al. The probability of nuclear war is higher than it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 16-28, 1962, when President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev found an off ramp averting annihilation. Today, the price of nuclear vengeance and retribution would be the deaths of at least five billion people, and the end of life on planet Earth.
The Biden foreign policy has always been a shambles. It has been based on military domination, economic coercion, and ideological arrogance which has swept up in its maw the Democratic party. The war in Ukraine, for example, meant to weaken Russia, has strengthened it economically and politically at the cost of the lives of 350,000 of the flower of Ukrainian youth. The US has rattled China over Taiwan, pretending we can intimidate the Chinese Navy and Coast Guard in their own front yard.
The latent virus of megalomania has so excited America’s leaders that it has accelerated the formation of an alliance against our nation, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
Diplomacy has become an abattoir. Blood lust blinds, sweeping aside primal human sympathies, exciting those ancient emotions to declare enemies, take up the cudgel and beat those enemies to death.
We are at an exceedingly dangerous moment of world crisis when the fragile bonds which connect us, each to the other, are being torn asunder by acts of mass murder, the miasma of apartheid, oppression and occupation, stereotyping, racism, bigotry, accelerating mistrust, desire for vengeance and retribution, compelling a dialectic of conflict which could lead to the destruction of the world.
Our survival as a species depends upon surmounting moments such as these, making of human relations a science, and human and ecological security the highest purpose of the work of people everywhere. When our brothers and sisters are killing each other, it is imperative, in the name of all humanity, that we intervene to stop the killing so that all may survive.
Like an unruly child, our government is out of control. We must call out now, hastened by whatever survival instinct that yet resides in us, and say STOP IT!
Stop the escalation.
Stop the militarization.
Stop the race toward the abyss.
It bears reflection at this moment that some of the same individuals, including President Biden, who led us into the disastrous Ukraine war and before that into devastating wars which killed over a million people in Iraq and Libya, are now leading the US into war against Iran … and World War III.
The US is now defending itself by bombing sites assumed to be Iranian proxies in Syria. The panoply of offensive materiel which the US is pouring into the region suggests preparations are being made to attack Iran, which in turn will prompt other nations to respond.
Now comes the Middle East conflict between Hamas and Israel. Instead of playing peacemaker, a role which ultimately protects Israel from destruction, the US is enabling the wholesale slaughter of Gazans, naively warning all others to step aside while standing guard with aircraft carriers and planes, emplacing US troops, and putting all US service personnel in the region at grave risk.
This is the Netanyahu-Ben Gvir government has fearfully approached a ground invasion while collective punishment having been previously meted out from the air to over 7,000 of Gaza’s civilian population. The air attack and the ground invasion are retribution for Hamas’ horrific attack on October 7th, which resulted in the murder of 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians. Under such circumstances, the hostages in Gaza are damned from above and below.
On October 7th, shattered were the myths of the omni-competent Mossad and the technologically superior Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) which were powerful deterrent factors against attacks. Israeli movements into Gaza will find synchronous advancement in the north, by Hezbollah, across the Lebanese border and attacks soon coming from many directions.
The continued bombing of the Palestinians in Gaza is inciting hundreds of millions of Muslims in the region who were already on edge because of the desecration of the Al Aqsa Mosque on October 4th, 2023, which could have played a role inciting Hamas’ Oct. 7th unjustified planned massacre.
Masked in the attack on Gaza is the agenda of Israel’s far-right ultranationalist government to establish an ethnically-pure religious state, removing the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, and the realization of the establishment of the prophesied Third Temple, which means razing Al Aqsa, the third holiest site in Islam.
I believe in the protection and survival of Israelis and Palestinians. I believe in the protection and survival of all people.
The protection and survival of Israel or Palestine is not furthered by the bombing, starvation, and mass killings of innocents. It is a form of suicide presenting as homicide.
It is time to stop taking sides and start working instead for the goal of a just peace.
I oppose the killing of innocents whatever their race, color, creed, nationality or nation. There are hundreds of millions of Muslims and Arabs in the neighborhood now seething at the injustices of the massacre of innocents, and only nine million Israelis…
The whole world is watching. The region is waiting. The Times of Israel reports today that as of October 29th, Israeli citizens who happen to be Palestinians, will be shot at public protests. Does anyone think the murders of Palestinians in the West Bank, together with those who will be shot for protesting, will not result in a sharp upcycling of violence in the region?
Hamas’ charter calls for the destruction of Israel through Jihad. Those on both sides who advocate kill or be killed are on the ascendant. Let us stand, then, in the place where all this killing leads, to northern Israel, on Mount Megiddo, (original Hebrew Har Megiddo, Anglicized to Armageddon).
The final battle awaits with nuclear missiles as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, then the Second Coming of Christ on the Mount of Olives, and the establishment of the Third Temple supplanting Al Aqsa.
Frankly, I’d rather watch the Netflix version.
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Featured image: “Peace Dove” by Jose Trujillo
October 29th, 2023 by Peter Koenig
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***
Al Jazeera is reporting (27 October evening) utterly massive and continuous bombardments of the northern Gaza Strip; unlike anything seen so far. They believe a ground offensive has begun.
ALL COMMUNICATIONS WITH GAZA CUT OFF: phones, fax, internet, cellular – all off.
Biden sends “war powers” notification to Congress over Gaza situation (27 October PM).
All communications by cell phone, internet, were blocked or destroyed by Israeli bombing. Gaza is fully cut off from the rest of the world. Mass killing, extermination style may be expected.
Israeli naval vessels have begun shelling the northern tip of the Gaza Strip. This is in ADDITION to ongoing air strikes and artillery shelling.
IDF is set to expand ground operations in Gaza tonight; Israel considers giving up on hostage deal and plans to fully invading Gaza.
WHO, whose mandate is to implement the Covid mRNA killer vaccine, – Great Reset / UN Agenda 2030 — hypocritically laments that they cannot access their staff on the ground in Gaza, therefore are unable to help.
Other UN Organizations with the “intention to help”, – UNICEF et al – make similar statements.
The Rafah border crossing to Egypt is again closed, meaning no water, no food, no fuel, no electricity – in addition to no communication.
A Nuremberg-type tribunal must be set up not only for the criminals behind this genocide, but also for the organizations which execute these orders.
Palestinian Red Crescent says it has lost contact with its operations headquarters in Gaza.
See this.
Sounds like a death knell for Gaza. That is Israel’s intention – full eradication of Gaza of the Gaza population. Wiping Gaza off the map. Possible only because the West is totally supporting Israel.
Yesterday’s (27 October) UN Resolution for a cease fire [one of some 200-300 unheeded UN Resolutions on Israel aggressions against Palestine in the past 70 years, peace negotiations, release of hostages and prisoners, plus Antonio Guterres’s statement a couple of days before — condemning Hamas for the October 7 “surprise” assault, adding that the attack did not happen in isolation, but after 57 years of Israeli oppression — is a full travesty.
The media expressly say that these Resolutions are only symbolic and have no legal meaning – repeatedly drummed into people’s minds, said yesterday on the hour by the hour news, by the fully bought Swiss and most certainly also EU media.
The only half-way worthy declaration by the UNSG in his 6 ½ year career was smashed by Israel – and most of her Western allies – calling on Guterres to resign.
Imagine, where do Western non-leaders, converted into soulless gnats but pretending to rule the world, get their orders, threats and money, much much money, to march the killing?
At the same time, ZeroHedge reports that the US has started attacking Syria and Iraq (Iran proxies) with airstrikes, where Iran-linked militants and installations in eastern Syria are located, the US claims.
The US Secretary of War, Lloyd Austin, stated,
“Today, at President Biden’s direction, U.S. military forces conducted self-defense strikes on two facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated groups.”
The attacks were reportedly carried out by US F-15 and F-16 warplanes, likely operating out of either the Gulf or Mediterranean areas, where new US naval assets have recently been positioned, keeping a watch on fast moving events in Gaza.
Fox News also reports on the Israeli ground incursion into Gaza, with tanks crossing the Gaza border. What the situation looks like on the ground right now, is difficult to say – as communication between Gaza and the outside world is totally shot. From all that, may be expected an Israeli and western supported genocide drive, God forbid, indescribable massacres may take place.
Israel has again warned that the population remaining in Gaza City and the north of the Gaza Strip will be indiscriminately bombed – or rolled over, given the number of tanks moving across the northern border areas.
Gaza inhabitants, including reporters, doctors, and nurses – and the related medical equipment still left — will be slaughtered, and destroyed as there is nowhere to flee. The Rafah border being closed.
The next step in this wanton war escalation, maybe a US attack on Iran – from the US military armada in the Gulf and Mediterranean areas – still being completed. This is what Col. MacGregor fears in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, “WW3 will start in Israel and end up Iran…” See below.
Let us pray that such catastrophe can be stopped before it is too late. Once it breaks loose, nothing is predictable and most likely Russia will get involved, as Russia will not leave Iran defenselessly exposed to US assaults. If that happens, Europe may become for the 3rd time in little over 100 years, part of a word war theatre.
The ruthless, soulless, conscienceless and worst, spineless, cabal-appointed “leaders” in Europe, EU’s Ursula von der Leyen, President of EU Commission, and German Chancellor’s Olaf Scholz, naturally scholars of Klaus Schwab’s WEF, and all their corrupted entourage, would largely be to blame.
Atlantic Council Hosts Von Der Leyen, September 2023
They have it in their power to call Israel and the west off, to call for ceasefire, to call for peace talks – if they cannot, they ought to resign, showing the world their disagreement with the WEF and the Financial-Military-IT-Media-Pharma might behind the WEF.
Large-scale waking-up is the name of the game.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
Featured image: Made in Israel – by Mr. Fish
October 29th, 2023 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
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***
The main press stable was keen to see the scrappy benefits of the 31-hour visit to Israel by US President Joe Biden. On National Public Radio (NPR), Scott Neuman expressed the view that the “largely symbolic” visit did yield a few “concrete accomplishments” including an announcement of $100 million in Palestinian aid, convincing Israel to permit humanitarian aid into Gaza and persuade Egypt’s strongman president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to open up an access route via land into southern Gaza. If these were seen as achievements, one dare not look at the picture of bright success.
On an individual level, sharing the same stage with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was always going to be an awkward exercise. A figure reviled and loathed for attacking the judicial system in his own country, and one self-touted as “Mr Security”, things looked rather shoddy. Given that Israel’s own security was premised on a de facto encirclement and suffocation of Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank, and a virtual hibernation of talks about Palestinian sovereignty – the Israeli PM’s competence has been irreparably damaged.
To that, can be added the entire Israeli approach to Hamas, which was dubbed, in a research brief by the RAND Corporation from 2017 as “mowing the grass” – a less than grand strategy which accepted Israel’s “inability to permanently solve the problem and instead repeatedly targeting the leadership of Palestinian militant organizations to keep violence manageable.”
Biden was there to serve as prop and stay for a war that is moving into a phase of unceasing slaughter. Slipping into hopeless locker room argot, he whispered his view that the “other team” (to be clear, not Team Israel) had been responsible for the attack on the al-Ahli Arab Hospital that killed hundreds. This is from the same world leader who has made it a habit to use cue cards when conducting business. (That business is made particularly easier at press conferences, where Biden is seemingly receiving questions in advance from reporters.)
Things were also made that more interesting by a casual observation made at Ramstein Air Base en route back to Washington that, while he did not necessarily thumb Hamas as responsible for the intentional bombing of the hospital, “It’s that old thing: got to learn how to shoot straight.”
There was, however, a note of warning from the President, delivered while in Tel Aviv. Remarking on comparisons of the Hamas attacks on Israel as the country’s own version of 9/11, Biden accepted that,
“Justice must be done. But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11 we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
Given that these mistakes involved a two-decade war in Afghanistan and a disastrous, destabilising invasion of Iraq that constituted a crime against peace while releasing the monster of sectarianism, the remark must surely win an award for understatement.
Biden’s Israel gambit also lends itself to the prospect for further mistakes. To take the position that Israel is essentially above reproach, certainly publicly, is to flirt with a power potentially engaged in acts of genocide. The line between rogue state and ennobled avenger becomes blurry.
While international law is exacting about the bar on what constitutes genocide (there can be no other inference, essentially, of an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group), statements made by Israeli officials, the chilling dehumanising rhetoric towards Palestinians, the collective punishment of the siege, and the evacuation orders of over a million Gaza residents do not auger well for the historical record.
That record is already bulking, aided by suggestions that the Gaza Strip we emptied. Calcalist, an Israeli business daily, was first to report on a plan from Israeli Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel to forcibly transfer Gazans into the Sinai Peninsula. Doing so would “yield positive and long-term strategic results”. While the paper cautions readers about the influence Gamliel exerts in the government, the idea of relocating and ensuring a “final settlement of the entire Gaza population,” is something the Misgav institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy finds entirely palatable.
In an emergency briefing paper published this month expert lawyers of the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights asserted that there was a “plausible and credible case, based on factual evidence, that Israel is attempting to commit, if not actively committing, the crime of genocide in the occupied Palestinian territory, and specifically against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.”
The authors also warned that the US “is not only failing to uphold its obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, but there is a plausible and credible case to be made that the United States’ actions to further the Israeli military operation, closure and campaign against the Palestinian population in Gaza, rise to the level of complicity in the crime under international law.”
These policies have all been subsumed under the elastic netting of “self-defence”, a term that solidly binds Israel and the United States to an expansive use of retaliatory force. It has assumed the standing of holy writ in US foreign policy, shielding Israel from its more exuberant uses of violence. On October 18, for instance, the US rejected a Brazil-sponsored resolution calling for a “humanitarian pause” as it, in the words of US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, “made no mention of Israel’s right of self-defence.” Every nation of the world had “the inherent right to self-defence, as reflected in Article 51 of the UN Charter.” If so inherent, why expressly mention it?
On October 25, sharing the podium with his Australian counterpart, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the Rose Garden, Biden reiterated the position that Israel not only had the right but a “responsibility to respond to the slaughter of their people. And we will ensure Israel has what it needs to defend itself against these terrorists. That’s a guarantee.”
Sophistically, he sought to separate Hamas from the Palestinian people, a chaff-from-wheat exercise that Israeli politicians and a number of security personnel have distinctly refused to do. “Hamas is hiding behind Palestinian civilians, and it’s despicable and, not surprisingly, cowardly as well.” The task for Israel, then, was positively Sisyphean: “to do everything in its power, as difficult as it is, to protect civilians.”
With such a gulf between rhetoric and reality, the world’s most powerful cue card reader also made sure he would partake in the finest traditions of the IDF public relations effort, disputing the casualty lists released by the Hamas-run health ministry. “I have no notion that Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.” At a tag of over 7,000 dead and rising, that’s a considerable amount of expended innocence.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
Featured image: President Joe Biden participates in a restricted bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Hotel Kempinski in Tel Aviv, Israel, Wednesday, October 18, 2023. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)
October 29th, 2023 by Fayha Shalash
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***
Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank have distributed threatening leaflets on cars and left bloodied dolls at schools, warning Palestinians to leave or be killed.
“By God, we will descend upon your heads with a great catastrophe soon. You have the last chance to escape to Jordan in an organised manner,” said one leaflet circulated on Friday in the West Bank city of Salfit.
“After that, we will destroy every enemy and forcefully expel you from our holy land … Load your bags immediately and leave wherever you came from. We are coming.”
The leaflet also warned of a new “major Nakba”, referencing the 1948 displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland.
In the occupied Al-Ma’rajat area near Jericho, dolls covered in red paint, ostensibly to look like blood and scare young students, were left at the entrance of a school after settlers vandalised it.
Before Hamas’s suprise attack on 7 October, settlers harassed and assaulted Palestinians on a daily basis under the protection of the Israeli army, acts that have escalated in the past 20 days.
In the town of Deir Istiya, west of Salfit, olive farmers have become accustomed to annual attacks during harvest season.
But this year, local journalist Abdel Qader Aql told Middle East Eye that settlers are much more active and seem to be couching their attacks as revenge for Hamas’s assault.
“This week alone, there were more than 10 attacks on farmers, threats, shouting, intimidation and expulsion of them from their land,” he said.
One farmer was injured after settlers hit his head with a baton.
“He fainted, and when he woke up, he found the settlement guard pointing a knife at him,” Aql said.
Olive pickers in the same town were surprised to find leaflets pasted on their car windows saying:
“You wanted war, wait for displacement.”
“They also published pictures of families picking olives and incited them for no reason. Because of these threats, the people started heading to their lands in whole groups to protect themselves,” Aql said.
In Al-Ma’rajat area, where settlers attacked the Arab Al-Kaabna School and left the bloodied dolls, human rights defenders say residents in the Bedouin community are repeatedly attacked as settlers aim to displace residents and seize their lands.
Hassan Malihat from the Al-Baidar Organization for Defending Bedouin Rights said that settler groups have repeatedly attacked the community with the aim of displacing its residents and seizing their lands.
On Thursday evening, Malihat told MEE, settlers threw stones at the residents’ homes in this community where 1,200 Palestinians live, and seized their livestock.
“Attacks on the Kaabna Arabs are repeated, and they filed complaints with the Israeli police to no avail,” he said.
*
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Featured image: Israeli settlers left dolls at the entrance of the Arab Al-Kaabna School after vandalising it (Social media)
October 29th, 2023 by Jeremy Kuzmarov
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***
During the late 1800s, the Hearst yellow press ran stories falsely accusing Spain of sinking the U.S.S. Maine in order to help mobilize public opinion in support of the Spanish-American War that resulted in the U.S. colonization of Cuba and the Philippines.
In the 100+ years since, the same formula has been followed time and again. The latest target appears to be Iran, whose Islamist government neoconservatives in Washington and Tel Aviv have long dreamed of overthrowing.
On October 8, The Wall Street Journal accused Iran of helping to plan the Tribe of Nova massacre; a Hamas terrorist attack on an Israeli music festival that has triggered renewed outbreak of war in the Middle East.
The Wall Street Journal’s article entitled “Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks” was written by Summer Said, Benoit Faucon and Stephen Kalin, with assistance by by Michael Gordon, a former New York Times reporter who was the lead author of a September 2002 piece hyping the idea that Iraq was trying to procure special aluminum tubes for its nuclear weapons program.
In 2007, Gordon—an advocate for bombing Iraq—also wrote articles relying heavily on anonymous U.S. sources alleging that the Iranian government was sending weapons into Iraq.
The Wall Street Journal piece was also based on anonymous sources, specifically un-named senior members of Hamas, Hezbollah and officer’s of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard.[1]
They claimed that the Tribe of Nova massacre—in which Hamas militants attacked an all night concert in a field near a kibbutz on the Israeli-Gaza border and killed hundreds of Jewish concert goers—was planned in meetings in Beirut attended by Iranian officials who allegedly gave the green light for the attacks.
Mahmoud Mirdani, a senior Hamas official was quoted in the piece, however, stating that Hamas planned the attacks on its own, which makes the articles’ headline misleading
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken furthermore told CNN that
“we have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
Blinken’s comments undercut The Wall Street Journal’s headline, though subtly insinuate that Iran was or could have been behind the attacks and that evidence would emerge about this.
In 2003, the neoconservatives thought that Iraq would be a cakewalk and that the U.S. could quickly move on to overthrow Iran’s Islamic regime, which in 1979 had overthrown the Shah, a close U.S. and Israeli ally who had been installed in a CIA coup.
A popular saying among members of the Bush administration during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was: “Forget Baghdad, real men go to Tehran.”
Tehran not Baghdad was the ultimate prize for the neocons. [Source: impiousdigest.com]
The October 9th Wall Street Journal article suggested that since April, when China brokered a diplomatic alliance between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Iranian regime had begun training, arming, and financing militias antagonistic to Israel, including Hezbollah and Hamas.
A primary concern was that Israel’s improved relations with Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf Arab states would create a chain of U.S. allies linking three key choke points of global trade—the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb connecting the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea.
Source: ajot.com
Ismael Qaani, the leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and commander of its Quds force, a division responsible for extraterritorial military and clandestine operations, allegedly began attending biweekly meetings in Beirut where the Tribe of Nova massacre was planned along with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Islamic jihad leader Ziyad al Nakhalah, and Saleh Arouri, Hamas’ military chief.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Iranian Foreign Minister Hussein Amir Abdollahian attended at least two of the meetings also.
Lina Khatib, director of the University of London’s Middle East Institite was quoted in the Wall Street Journal article stating that
“an attack of such scope [Tribe of Nova massacre] could only have happened after months of planning and would not have happened without coordination with Iran.”[2]
The Wall Street Journal’s pattern of yellow journalism continued when it published an editorial on October 10 blaming the Biden administration for the Tribe of Nova massacre by failing to enforce oil sanctions on Iran, thus helping Iran to finance Hamas.
Entitled “How Biden’s Policy Enriched Iran,” the editorial suggested that the previous day’s report that Iran had “signed off on the Hamas assault on Israel should jolt President Biden from his failed Iran strategy”—which was one of appeasement.[3]
While technically true that the $6 billion the Biden administration unfroze in exchange for the release of five American prisoners wasn’t used to attack Israel, there was no question that “the U.S. decision to ease enforcement of oil sanctions against Iran aided Israel’s enemies (ie. Hizbollah and Hamas).”
According to The Journal, Iran may not have directly spent any money from the unfrozen $6 billion account but would have anticipated the increase cash flow, and so could plot the attacks.
The problem with this logic is that there is no proof of any direct use of U.S. funds nor that Iran was actually involved in the planning. The Journal’s editors furthermore never question whether there was any legitimate and legal reason in the first place for the U.S. to have applied oil sanctions on Iran or to have frozen its assets.
For years, The Wall Street Journal has provided a platform for neoconservative war hawks who have accused Iran of all kinds of crimes, including developing a nuclear program that allegedly serves as an existential threat the U.S. and Israel, though this program does not actually exist.[4]
The brazenness of the Tribe of Nova massacre has many people questioning the source of the Israeli intelligence failure.
Robert Morningstar asked on Substack how it was possible that the “presumably omniscient all-seing eye spies of Mossad missed the massing of weapons and people to mount this assault? And why didn’t their super high-tech seismic ground detectors (listening 24/7 for terrorists digging tunnels into Israel) hear the crunch or swooshing sounds of long convoys of trucks hauling 5,000 rockets into position?”[5]
How did he go undetected? [Source: richardgage911/substack.com]
The answer is not clear.
The massacre comes at a convenient time for the Netanyahu government, which had triggered mass protests against its attempt to destroy the independence of Israel’s judiciary. (Netanyahu is also facing corruption charges)
And convenient for the U.S. too in the creation of a crisis that could turn public attention away from the unfolding debacle in Ukraine and growing domestic ills.
Better ultimately to blame Iran to deflect critical questioning and avoid scrutinizing Israeli policies over the last decades which have fueled Gazans desire for revenge.
*
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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].
Notes
Summer Said, Benoit Faucon and Stephen Kalin, with assistance from Anas Baba and Michael Gordon, “Israel and Hamas Battle, Death Toll Rises: Iran Security Officials Helped Plan Assault at Meeting Last Week, Militant Group Says,” The Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2023, A1.
Another blogger wrote: “how did the Iron Dome fail in Israel and allow these rockets through? How did so many Hamas soldiers get past the most militarized and protected border in the world to slaughter innocent civilians? Israel is incredibly advanced with some of the best military and surveillance technologies in the world. Is there any chance this is like Operation Northwoods and the attack was orchestrated or allowed to justify an escalation of war? Could forces above both the U.S., Israel and Palestine be manipulating them both for an agenda ahead of the elections?” Another question is as to why Hamas, which in the past has been funded by Israel in an attempt to undercut secular Palestinian opposition to Israeli occupation, would initiate the massacre of unarmed Israelis if they knew it would invite the destruction of their own society.
Featured image is from timetoast.com
October 29th, 2023 by Centre for Research on Globalization
As of Saturday morning October 28, Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza have killed more than 7,300 Palestinians including about 3,000 children according to Al Jazeera.
Another 1,650 Palestinians are trapped under the demolished remains of their homes and buildings destroyed by Israeli bombing, with half of them being children.
This is an Israeli war which specifically targets Palestinian civilians especially children as the IDF has bombed:
Water, electricity and fuel have been cut off to Gaza and more than 200,000 housing units have been destroyed entirely or partly by Israel. 1.4 million Palestinians about half the population of Gaza, have been displaced.
The Netanyahu government has instructed Palestinians to leave Northern Gaza for the south but it continues to indiscriminately bomb both parts so that there is no safe place for the Gaza population.
Israel escalated its war even more on Friday night with the imposition of a total communications blockade on Gaza making medical rescue efforts impossible.
This is designed to provide cover for even more atrocities by Tel Aviv as its aerial bombing has intensified to an unprecedented degree and a ground operation by Israeli soldiers has commenced in Gaza.
The bombing is so extreme that it has turned Gaza into “a ball of fire” according to Al Jazeera. “Pure horror” is what Palestinians are living through says the NGO Save the Children.
“Situation is now catastrophic” emphasizes Shehab Younis, a Palestinian photographer who managed to send a WhatsApp voice note message to the BBC’s correspondent Tom Bateman based in Jerusalem. “We have lost contact with people who have been targeted or injured.” According to Bateman, ambulances cannot be called for people injured in Israeli airstrikes due to the communications blackout.
On Saturday morning, Shehab posted a video of a “badly wounded man being rushed out of a building.” An ambulance cannot be brought for him so he has to be put in a truck.
Shehab highlights the dire plight of Palestinian civilians by explaining that
“When there is bombardment of houses the situation has become really very hard because of the lack of communications, of internet services. All this is negativity impacting a large number of medical facilities and public service buildings when there are bombings in their areas.”
With almost half the casualties of Israel’s bombing being children, Palestinian parents are resorting to “desperate measures” (according to Al Jazeera) “so that children or at least their memories survive.”
Doctors at Al-Shifa hospital are writing the names of children killed on their bodies. Sara Al-Khalidi, mother of four children, says “The world should know about these children who were murdered by Israel because they are not numbers but names, stories and dreams killed by the Israeli occupation in Gaza.”
As the Al Jazeera article by Lina Alsaafin and Ruwaida Amer explains
“writing the names of children on their arms or legs is an attempt to bring the families closure in case their children are killed so that they are able to bury them in marked graves as opposed to mass graves.”
Israeli attacks on homes have torn apart bodies making identification impossible.
According to the Gaza health ministry, 200 bodies are “mangled beyond recognition” and so “impossible to identify”. Gazan Mohammad Abu Odeh believes Israel deliberately targets children. Indeed this Israeli policy has been well-documented by Chris Hedges during his time as correspondent for the New York Times in Israel and Palestine.
“parents should not have to live through the painful reality of trying to identify the bodies of their children which have been disfigured in the most gruesome way by Israeli missiles.”
He asks “Can anyone in the world bear the thought of what our children are going through?”
Image Bombing of Church
On Thursday, October 26, six U.N. special rapporteurs accused Israel of committing crimes against humanity in Gaza. “There are no justifications for these crimes and we are horrified by the lack of action by the international community” they wrote in a statement.
The U.N. General Assembly has overwhemingly approved a non-binding resolution calling for a truce in the Gaza war with 120 countries backing this including France, Spain, Ireland and Belgium. This has marginalized the United States which opposed the resolution along with only 13 other countries including the U.K.
John Kirby, speaking for the Biden administration, stated that “Israel had every right and responsibility to defend itself and take the fight to Hamas and its leaders [who were] sheltering behind civilians in Gaza.”
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza and said that Turkey is preparing to declare Israel “a war criminal.”
Erdogan has called the west “the main culprit” responsible for the deaths of civilians in Gaza.
“Nakba is ongoing” in October 2023, and the United Nations Secretary General remains “Deaf Mute”.
In his presentation, UNSG Antonio Gueterres (October 24), casually dismisses the issue of war crimes:
“He does not condemn Tel Aviv for the massive killings of Palestinian civilians (in the carpet bombing of Gaza) which so far have resulted in more than 5,000 Palestinian deaths, nor does he raise the issue of a “cease fire” (Global Research Report)
According to Guterres in a twisted statement:
“the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
The self-proclaimed “international community” as well as the Western media (with some exceptions) have failed to acknowledge that extensive war crimes are being committed in violation of the UN Charter, international law including the Four Basic Principles of The Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC):
“….respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.” [Additional Protocol 1, Article 48]
Civilian population (children) and civilian objects (schools, hospitals, residential areas) are the deliberate object of Israeli attacks in blatant violation of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC).
The president of the I.C.C. Piotr Hofmanski does not have the foggiest understanding of Article 48. of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). Is this an issue of incompetence? Or has Piotr Hofmanski been co-opted into endorsing crimes against humanity?
.
In 2021, the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) opened an investigation on the situation in Palestine:
This came in the wake of the OTP’s determination that “war crimes have been or are being committed by Palestinian and Israeli actors in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip”. (emphasis added)
This text was written by Dr. Asad Ismi and Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
October 28th, 2023 by Hedelberto López Blanch
October 28th, 2023 by Prof. Anthony J. Hall
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First published on October 18, 2023
***
As I am writing, a massive genocidal assault is underway on the stateless people of Gaza. Most of the 2.3 million people in Gaza were born into this open air prison where Israel is using its absolute control over what can be brought in and carried out to deny the inhabitants food, water supplies, electricity, and fuel.
The inmates of this tightly packed urban space are being bombed, killing tens of thousands with the promise of a ground invasion to eliminate those trapped inside the densely packed and foul urban strip of Mediterranean coast line.
The US Armed Forces are backing up the many violations of international law that are underway in an unfolding abomination that clearly belongs in the very Big Leagues of terrible war crimes. The attack is being pushed forward on the basis of what is clearly described below as a “pretext” for genocide.
Prof. Michel Chossudovsky cites numerous sources to explain that the government of Israel has conspired with Hamas, a Muslim entity created and funded by Israel to advance an imperial strategy of divide-and-conquer among the Palestinians.
That strategy is meant to divide the government of Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the area of the West Bank sometimes described as the Occupied Territories.
Chossudovsky sees the complicity between Hamas and the Netanyahu government as the basis of the engineered murder and torture of Israeli soldiers and civilians.
The aim of this diabolical scheme is to realize the agenda of clearing out the inhabitants of Gaza as well as bringing about a US war with Iran.
The creation of the basis for such a war has for decades been a primary geopolitical objective of Netanyahu.
Part of the provocation causing Hamas fighters to break through the Gaza Walls— a permitted piercing of what is perhaps the most closely monitored barrier in the world— was the purposeful defilement by Israeli settlers of the al Aqsa Mosque in the days leading up to October 7.
A subject of much speculation is what happened during the period of many hours when Israeli security forces were held back from protecting Israeli lives. Much remains unknown about who did what to whom, and why.
The purpose of false flags, which will be discussed below, is to create the basis for mistaken perceptions about what is real and what is contrived.
About half of the inhabitants of Gaza are children. Christian and Muslim families in Gaza have large numbers of children to compensate for their propensity to have short life spans. In a society of huge unemployment, few options are available to young people seeking a way forward.
When the activities of the local Hamas government are one of the only work options available in Gaza, it is hardly surprising that this organization attracts many who might picture themselves as freedom fighters. Such fighters might well lack a sense of fair play when confronting those that have jailed them and assailed them since their birth.
As I think about the media fabrications concerning 40 beheaded Israeli babies that never were, I can’t help imagining a huge bombed out area with dead bodies of hundreds of thousands of Gaza babies and children. For some reason I imagine these exterminated children nailed up on row after row of crucifixes.
I picture this obscenity with the knowledge that there happens to be huge reserves of natural gas off the shores of Gaza. To eliminate the people of Gaza would be to eliminate a competing claim to the huge treasure trove of potential energy.
We are living through such a tumultuous time in history that it is hard to find comparisons and metaphors that do justice to what is unfolding at this very moment. As fraught with global danger as is the Russia-NATO confrontation in Ukraine, the opening up on 7 October of a new frontiers of conflict in the Middle East, has immensely upped the ante.
The ruthless Israeli assault on the 2.3 million prison inmates of the GAZA concentration camp, along with the sudden expansion of potential theatres of global conflict, are putting the future prospects of all life on earth on the edge of an abyss.
There is no precedent for the kind of global catastrophe facing all of humanity right now. At this moment, however, the global ground zero of the catastrophe is GAZA.
What can we learn by comparing Auschwitz and GAZA?
I’ll start with a focus on the Auschwitz concentration camp in working my way towards what is going in GAZA. Many will be well aware that Auschwitz has been widely memorialized as the site of the most notorious system of mechanized mass murder ever mounted.
IG Auschwitz began in Poland as a wartime business enterprise bringing together slave labour with the commercial exploitation of cutting-edge edge technologies under the auspices of the National Socialist government led by Adolf Hitler. The aim of the enterprise was to transform coal into aviation fuel as well as into synthetic rubber.
IG Auschwitz was spawned by the corporate leviathan, IG Farben, a giant in the research and development of chemical and pharmaceutical products. This conglomerate, with extensions throughout much of the world, is often referred to as the corporate foundation supporting the political economy animating the Hitlerian Third Reich.
One of the main investors in both IG Farben and IG Auschwitz was Standard Oil of New Jersey, the core corporate asset of the Rockefeller family. The role of the Rockefeller conglomerate in the German oil and gas industry as well as in the pharmaceutical industry, was one part of a wide spectrum of collaboration between Germany and Wall Street.
For Wall Street brokers, one of the most lucrative stock plays they could recommend to their clients, was to invest in the build up of Germany’s military-industrial complex. The US investments in Germany involved companies like Ford, GM, IBM, ITT, Alcoa, Kodak and Coca-Cola. This list provides just a small sample of the extent of the collaboration.
The Gaza concentration camp can be seen as an outgrowth of the way the history of Auschwitz and related Hitlerian operations have been depicted, misrepresented, and covered up. At the end of WWII, Auschwitz became a symbol, central to establishing the basis for the creation of Israel.
The symbolism associated with Auschwitz, of course, strategically excluded in most cases, the important role of the Rockefeller financial empire in the genesis of the concentration camp.
As described in the Jewish Virtual Encyclopedia, Auschwitz was just the tip of the iceberg.[1]
The article on concentration camps in the Encyclopedia seemingly inflates astronomically the number of German camps incarcerating many categories of people considered unfit or deviant.
With Auschwitz along with its related operations placed in the forefront of publicity, a significant portion of public opinion was made to line up behind the position that Jews have been subjected to such horrors during the European reign of Hitlerian Germany, that a great act of atonement was called for.
The case was made that Jews the world over required a permanent place of sovereign refuge in a dangerous and unpredictable world. As this discourse developed, apparently no one thought to consult with the indigenous Arabs of Palestine to see what they thought of the proposition that they should be made to pay a very heavy price for the bad things said to have transpired in Europe.
The Zionist project of creating a Jewish State was advanced by the British imperial government in 1917. Foreign Affairs Minister Lord Balfour expressed in a declaration to Lionel Walter Rothschild his government’s favourable view of a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine.
In the secret Sykes-Pico Agreement between France and Great Britain in 1916, it was agreed that Britain would acquire control of Palestine. This arrangement was confirmed by the League of Nations when it was created in 1920.
Britain’s commitment to the Zionist Jews became lukewarm in the decades which followed as the demands and complexities of the Arab world grew. In 1947 both the United States and the Soviet Union got behind Resolution 181 of the General Assembly in the nascent United Nations. The aim of the Resolution was to create two new countries, one a Jewish state and the other, an Arab state.
The Arab state in Palestine has not been created until this day. Instead, the land for this polity has been illegally taken through military conquest and other means that have contributed to the hideous spectacle presently unfolding in Gaza.
Portions of the Semitic Arab population of Palestine attempted through military resistance in 1948 to prevent the apprehension of their lands by the military forces of the nascent Jewish state. The Israeli Defence Force was composed initially from the Jewish militias that had fought against the British in exercising their Mandate to govern Palestine.
This Jewish fighting contingent overpowered their Arab opponents causing sufficient horror to motivate about 800,000 Palestinians to flee their homes. This episode in Palestinian history is remember as the “Nakba.” Nakba means “the catastrophe” in Arabic.
The Nakba carries a meaning much like the term, “Shoah,” in Hebrew. The Shoah is the term used to describe the experience of European Jews during the period of Hitlerian rule in Europe.
The origins of GAZA in its present form go back to the Nakba of 1948. Moreover, the origins of the human-rights abomination presently underway go back to the creation and expansion of the Jewish state of Israel without the Arab state meant to accompany it as outlined in Resolution 181.
The creation of Israel as a land open to Jews from throughout the world have transformed a large part of the Palestinian population into stateless people. They have become trapped in this non-identity identity, with all the impediments to the exercise of civil liberties that this negative category of non-personhood creates.
After 1948 some Palestinian people were able to hold their their ground inside Israel. By and large they were extended the status of Israeli citizens. Their descendants make up about 20% of Israel’s population.
Many of those that underwent this transition were initially subjected to military oversight and various forms of discrimination. This discrimination involving, for instance, certain kinds of land transaction continues to this day.
Those who ended up in GAZA circa 1948 go back to those uprooted from their homes in the course of the Nakba. Those who ended up in the GAZA reserve could not or would not leave the region.
Between 1948 and 1967 the stateless inhabitants of Gaza were passed from the military governance of Egypt and the Arab League. This League created something called the All-Palestine Government.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Middle East also asserted jurisdiction, not only over Palestinians in GAZA but over Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and the West Bank.
The agency has tended to reinforce the stateless condition of millions of Palestinian refugees rather than ease people out of this category. For instance by creating a kind of passport for the travels of stateless people, their stateless status is, in a way, reinforced. Over seventy years after the Nakba, stateless status has now been passed along to three distinct generations of Palestinian people.
In 1967 in the Six Days War, the Israel Defence Force made military gains throughout the region that United Nations Resolution 181 had set aside for the Arab Nation including the Gaza strip.
Resolution 181 also stipulated that Jerusalem was to be an international zone where the UN would assure equality of treatment for Muslims, Jews, and Christians. That principle is presently being severely violated in the regular Jewish defilement of the al Aqsa mosque.
The Israeli takeover in 1967 of the territories to be relegated for the creation of a new Arab country, spelt trouble. This illegal military conquest was embraced by successive Israeli governments to fend off any sincere attempt to create a two-state solution.
The issue of the uprooted Palestinians and the growth of the Jewish settler state gathered much attention in the era of Yasser Arafat’s leadership of the Fatah and then of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Arafat’s approach was nationalist and secular.
On this basis, the PLO gathered international interest and political momentum especially in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Some of this attention was gained through spectacles of terror like the hijacking in 1969 by Leila Khalid of TWA Flight 840.
In 1987 a series of Intifadas beginning with the actions of disenfranchised Palestinians, often with nothing but stones for weapons, added spectacle to the drama culminating in the negotiation of the first Oslo accord in 1993.
This Oslo peace process was the closest that Israel-Palestinian conflict ever got to a two state solution. The effort was not successful. It was not grounded on a solid basis of realistic political and logistical compromise.
The deal led to the assassination in 1995 of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. He was murdered by a strident opponent of any kind of peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Since Rabin’s assassination, the spectrum of Israeli political culture has moved away from the realm of collectivist Kibbutzes and Labour Party dominance in the Israeli Knesset.
The twenty-first century has seen, instead, the politics of well armed Jewish settlers and settlements in the West Bank to the point that any territorial basis has been eliminated for the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.
In Gaza, the Israeli government asserted in 2007 absolute control of the movements of goods and people into and out of the concentration camp. Almost no exports can get out so the open air prison lacks the basis of a viable economy.
The Israeli government played a big role in founding and funding Hamas to steer Palestinians away from the secular politics of Yasser Arafat and away from solidarity with the Palestinian Authority.
Periodically Gaza was bombed in a process that came to be known within Israel as mowing the grass. Such an operation took place in 2008. It was entitled Cast Lead. In 2014, Operation Protective Edge was the means of mowing (diminishing) the human population of Gaza.
In 2018 attempts were made to conduct peaceful demonstrations aimed at dramatizing the demand by the people of Gaza to return to their homes inside Israel. This attempt to express peaceful opposition to Israeli policies was met with violent recriminations by the IDF.
Israel’s move rightward was amplified by the false flag event that took place on September 11 of 2001. In two previous Substack posts I introduced a large body of scholarship pointing to what really happened in Manhattan and the Pentagon on the fateful day.
The weight of evidence points to the fact that Israel First partisans, many of them deeply involved in the power dynamics of both the Jewish state and of the United States of America, were the primary planners, implementers and cover up agents of the 9/11 debacle.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who grew up largely in the United States, is a telling embodiment of Zio-American character of 9/11 false flag. In acting on the misrepresentation of this event, the US Armed Forces went to war with several Muslim-majority countries.
Zionist pre-eminence in the political culture of the United States was thus demonstrated, consolidated and extended to the outlandish extremes presently on display as the protagonists go in for the kill in Gaza.
Phillip Giraldi, a retired CIA official who describes himself as a “a former on-the-ground intelligence officer” has come to a startling conclusion. He alleges the current massacre of the stateless habitants of Gaza was mounted on the basis of fraud.
He sees the incursions of the Hamas fighters throughout Israel as being based on “something more like a false flag operation rather than a case of institutional failure on the part of the Israelis.”
Prof. Michel Michel Chossudovsky agrees with Giraldi. Chossudovsky argues that the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu not only let Hamas attack Israeli soldiers and civilians. He alleges that the Netanyahu government actually conspired to make the violence spree happen with the object of creating the pretext for a well-prepared genocidal assault to eliminate the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza.
Prof. Chossudovsky cited the following to illustrate Netanyahu’s complicity with Hamas. Netanyahu told the Likud Party Knesset members in 2019,
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas…..This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
*
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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Looking out at the World from Canada.
Dr. Anthony Hall is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Note
[1] This article from the Jewish Virtual Encyclopedia is in my view a good example of the kind of fabricated and exaggerated nonsense produced by the Israel Lobbies. The effect is to undermine and disable serious discourse about what really happened in World War II. Tony Hall
“Most people are familiar with the names of the major concentration camps – Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Treblinka, for example – but few realize that these were not the only places where Jews and other prisoners were held by the Nazis. Each of the 23 main camps had subcamps, nearly 900 of them in total. These included camps with euphemistic names, such as “care facilities for foreign children,” where pregnant prisoners were sent for forced abortions.
The Nazis established about 110 camps starting in 1933 to imprison political opponents and other undesirables. The number expanded as the Third Reich expanded and the Germans began occupying parts of Europe. When the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum first began to document all of the camps, the belief was that the list would total approximately 7,000. However, researchers found that the Nazis actually established about 42,500 camps and ghettoes between 1933 and 1945. This figure includes 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettoes, 980 concentration camps; 1,000 POW camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm; Germanizing prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers. Berlin alone had nearly 3,000 camps.
These camps were used for a range of purposes including: forced-labor camps, transit camps which served as temporary way stations, and extermination camps, built primarily or exclusively for mass murder. From its rise to power in 1933, the Nazi regime built a series of detention facilities to imprison and eliminate so-called “enemies of the state.” Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused of “asocial” or socially deviant behavior. These facilities were called “concentration camps” because those imprisoned there were physically “concentrated” in one location.
Millions of people were imprisoned, abused and systematically murdered in the various types of Nazi camps. Under SS management, the Germans and their collaborators murdered more than three million Jews in the killing centers alone. Only a small fraction of those imprisoned in Nazi camps survived. As many as 15-20 million people may have died in the various camps and ghettoes.”
Featured image is from Khamenei.ir
October 28th, 2023 by David Hearst
TFF Associate professor Farhang Jahanpour in Oxford writes:
“Anyone who wants to learn the truth about what is going on in Gaza and Israel should watch this short video which not only deals with the carnage in Gaza but also puts forward a solution to the conflict.
David Hearst is not an “anti-Semite”. As he says in this video, half of his family were killed in the Holocaust. He is as an eminent author and journalist dealing with the Middle East with an honourable record of fairness and impartiality. He is the Editor in Chief of Middle East Eye. We must listen to him.
The continuation of this long conflict will only cause more death and misery for Arabs and Israelis and more conflict in the Middle East and beyond.”
October 28th, 2023 by Manlio Dinucci
I fatti, e non le opinioni, dimostrano in modo sempre più evidente che l’attacco effettuato da Hamas il 7 ottobre in Israele ha fatto da detonatore a una operazione False Flag, simile a quella dell’attacco dell’11 Settembre 2001 negli Stati Uniti. Notevoli sono le analogie, che sintetizziamo in questa scheda a corredo della puntata di Grandangolo.
Nel 2001 militanti islamici di Al Qaeda riescono a far crollare le Torri Gemelle e a colpire il Pentagono senza che la CIA abbia avuto sentore della preparazione di un attacco di tale portata. Nel 2023 militanti islamici di Hamas riescono a penetrare in massa in Israele, occupando oltre 20 centri abitati, senza che il Mossad abbia avuto sentore della preparazione di un attacco di tale portata.
Nel 2001, le Torri Gemelle crollano come in una demolizione controllata per il calore sviluppato dall’impatto degli aerei, cosa tecnicamente impossibile anche perché il carburante brucia per la maggior parte all’esterno, e la Torre 7 crolla come in una demolizione controllata senza essere stata colpita da un aereo, mentre l’aereo che colpisce il Pentagono penetra interamente all’interno aprendo un foro circolare, cosa tecnicamente impossibile perché le ali avrebbero dovuto spezzarsi lasciando rottami all’esterno. Nel 2023 la barriera che circonda Gaza – dotata dei più sofisticati sensori, radar, telecamere e sistemi d’arma automatici collegati a un centro di comando – viene sfondata con bulldozer senza che scatti nessun allarme, cosa tecnicamente impossibile.
Nel 2001, mentre gli aerei dirottati sono in volo verso gli obiettivi, il sistema statunitense di difesa aerea, uno dei più efficienti del mondo, dà prova di catastrofica inefficienza facendo decollare i caccia intercettori in ritardo. Nel 2023, mentre i militanti di Hamas attaccano gli abitanti e i partecipanti al festival musicale, le forze speciali israeliane, tra le più efficienti del mondo, danno prova di catastrofica inefficienza intervenendo in ritardo.
Nel 2001 l’attacco dell’11 settembre e le vittime che esso provoca servono a giustificare l’apertura di un vasto fronte di guerra con l’invasione statunitense dell’Afghanistan e quindi dell’Iraq, in regioni di primaria importanza strategica nei confronti di Russia e Cina. Nel 2023 l’attacco del 7 ottobre e le vittime che esso provoca servono a giustificare l’apertura di un vasto fronte di guerra nella regione strategica del Medioriente con il duplice obiettivo di cancellare i Territori Palestinesi, rendendo impossibile la creazione di uno Stato Palestinese, e di innescare, mirando all’Iran, una reazione a catena di conflitti in un Medioriente dove Stati Uniti, Israele e le potenze europee stanno perdendo terreno, come dimostra il prossimo ingresso di Iran e Arabia Saudita nei Brics insieme a Russia e Cina.
Manlio Dinucci
VIDEO (italiano):