Tag: israel

The Threats are Flying! Ukraine Threatens Iran, THEN . . . Israel Threatens . . . RUSSIA!

The issue of long-range weapons for use in attacking interior, pre-war Russia, is developing into a very big – and dangerous – situation.  Threats are being hurled back and forth, very publicly.

It all began when word came out early last week, that the U.S. was “considering” allowing Ukraine to use US-supplied weapons, to attack deep interior, pre-war, Russia.

The Russians sent explicit, written warnings to the US which said “If Ukraine uses long-range weapons to attack interior Russia, it will affect both sides of the Atlantic.” (Story Here) 

A few days later, at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany,  word leaked that the question of Ukraine using NATO (West) Supplied weapons to strike deep inside Russia was being discussed!

Russia’s Ambassador to The United States, Anatoly Antonov, then repeated publicly, his government’s written warning: “If Ukraine uses long-range weapons to attack inside Russia, it will affect both sides of the Atlantic.”

Late this past week, word leaked from US and UK Intelligence Agencies claiming Russia had taken delivery of “hundreds” of IRANIAN-MADE FATH-360, short-range ballistic missiles, for Russia to use against Ukraine.   This revelation set off a firestorm of threats.

Saturday, The Defense Ministry of Ukraine (which can’t even adequately defend their own land) said that “If Russia uses Iranian Missiles to target Ukrainian Civilians, then their Response against Iran will be Severe.”   Yes, you read that correctly, Ukraine just threatened Iran!

But the really big development took place today, from Israel.   Israel announced that If Iran supplies missiles for Russia to use in attacking Ukraine, then Israel will supply “long range precision missiles to Ukraine, to strike Russia.”   Yes, you read that correctly; Israel just threatened the Russians.

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Undebatable: What Harris and Trump Could Not Say About Israel and Gaza

Kamala Harris won the debate. People being bombed in Gaza did not.

The banner headline across the top of the New York Times home page – “Harris Puts Trump on Defensive in Fierce Debate” – was accurate enough. But despite the good news for people understandably eager for Trump to be defeated, the Harris debate performance was a moral and political tragedy.

In Gaza “now an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead,” an ABC News moderator said. “Nearly 100 hostages remain… President Biden has not been able to break through the stalemate. How would you do it?”

Vice President Harris replied with her standard wording: “Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must when, end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a ceasefire deal and we need the hostages out.”

“End immediately”? Anyone who isn’t in fantasyland knows that the only way to soon end the slaughter of Palestinian civilians would be for the U.S. government – the overwhelmingly biggest supplier of Israel’s armaments – to stop sending weapons to Israel.

Meanwhile, a pivot to advocating for a cutoff of weapons to Israel would help Harris win the presidency. After the debate, the Institute for Middle East Understanding pointed out that the need to halt the weapons is not only moral and legal – it’s also smart politics. Polls are clear that most Americans want to stop arming Israel. In swing states, polling has found that a large number of voters say they’d be more likely to cast a ballot for Harris if she would support a halt.

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New Lebanon War Kicks Off As IDF Pounds Hezbollah Positions Overnight

The Israeli Defense Force struck at least 16 targets overnight against Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon, as the focus of The Jewish State turns from Gaza to the north of the country.

In four different areas in southern Lebanon: the IDF attacked about 30 launchers and military infrastructure of the terrorist organization Hezbollah that posed a threat to the citizens of the State of Israel, reported the IDF press office.

Air Force fighter jets attacked during the night in the areas of Al Jabin, A-Nakura, Deir Sirin and Zabkin in southern Lebanon, about 30 launchers and military infrastructures of the terrorist organization Hezbollah, which posed a threat to the citizens of the State of Israel.

Also, IDF forces attacked with artillery in the A-Dahira area in southern Lebanon.

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Most Americans Want to Stop Arming Israel. Politicians Don’t Care.

When Kamala Harris sat down with CNN’s Dana Bash last month, Bash asked a question: “Would you withhold some U.S. weapons shipments to Israel? That’s what a lot of people on the progressive left want you to do.” 

Harris sidestepped the question, talked about a ceasefire, and ultimately said that she would not change course from the Biden administration’s policy of arming Israel as its war on Gaza enters its 11th month. 

But polls of the American voting population show that she’s ignoring more than just the “progressive left”: A majority of voters support ending arms transfers to Israel, and support for an arms embargo is growing.

“The reality is that the public is far more in favor of stopping arms sales to Israel than opposed,” Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington D.C., told The Intercept. He pointed to a June poll from CBS that showed 61 percent of all Americans said the U.S. should not send weapons to Israel, including 77 percent of Democrats and nearly 40 percent of Republicans. 

Poll results have been consistent for months. 

Since the start of the war in Gaza, a majority of Americans have expressed support for some form of restrictions on the U.S. sending weapons to Israel in repeated public surveys. Americans are even more overwhelmingly in favor of a ceasefire.

Among the most consistent string of polls on the issue of weapons transfers to Israel has come from CBS News, which partnered with YouGov to carry out its survey. About two weeks after the October 7 attacks by Hamas, as Israel’s bombardment had already killed more than 2,000 civilians in Gaza, a CBS poll of more than 1,800 Americans found that 52 percent of American adults said the U.S. should not send weapons to Israel. The totals included large majorities among both Democrats and independents, and 43 percent of Republicans. 

In April, CBS News/YouGov asked the same question in a new poll and found that an even larger number of Americans (60 percent), including 68 percent of Democrats, said they felt the U.S. should not send arms to Israel. The poll was conducted days after an Israeli strike killed seven aid workers in a clearly marked World Central Kitchen convoy. 

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Exposed: The US and Canadian Funding Behind Israeli Soldiers Accused of Rape

Cuffed and blindfolded 24 hours a day. Confined to animal pens. Attacked by dogs. This is reportedly the treatment of Palestinian detainees at Sde Teiman, an Israeli military base in the Naqab desert. While claims of torture and abuse at the facility began circulating in December, the Israeli military did not open an investigation into the allegations until July 29, when 10 Israeli soldiers were detained on suspicion of sexually abusing a detainee.

In response to the soldiers’ detention, a mob of right-wing extremists stormed Sde Teiman and later broke into the Beit Lid military base, where the detained soldiers were being held. Among those detained were soldiers from the Force 100 unit, which was resurrected at the onset of the war and has been responsible for guarding the detainees at Sde Teiman. Masked soldiers, wearing black shirts emblazoned with the unit’s logo—a snake inside the Jewish Star of David—were seen participating in the protests.

Several Israeli lawmakers took part in the riots, including Otzma Yehudit’s (Jewish Power) Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, Religious Zionism member of parliament, Zvi Sukkot, and parliamentary members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, Nissim Vaturi and Tally Gotliv.

Protests have continued to erupt in support of the soldiers, including, most recently, outside an Israeli High Court hearing on the case on August 7, 2024.

As allegations of torture and sexual abuse at Israel’s Sde Teiman detention facility escalate and Israeli Military Police prepare to conclude their investigation and file indictments against the suspects, MintPress uncovers the financial and political infrastructure, including from the U.S. and Canada, backing these soldiers through tax-exempt organizations and crowdfunding platforms. This marks a disturbing shift in global support for human rights violations, now extending even to those implicated in the Israeli military’s acts of sexual violence.

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“Fire Away”: Florida State Rep. Randy Fine Celebrates Israel Killing an American Citizen

Jewish Florida State Rep Randy Fine (R) reacted to news that Israel killed an American peace activist in the occupied West Bank by celebrating and encouraging the Jewish state to “fire away” and kill even more.

On Friday, Israel killed Aysenur Eygi, 26, “with a bullet to the head” while she was taking part in a protest against Jewish settlement expansion (which ostensibly aligns with official US government policy opposing such settlements).

A Jewish witness from the Israeli paper Haaretz said she did not pose any threat whatsoever when she was shot.

Rep. Fine cheered her murder, writing Friday evening on X: “Throw rocks, get shot. One less #MuslimTerror ist. #FireAway.”

The post was flagged by X and Fine’s account was temporarily suspended for a few hours before being fully restored.

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Yes it Was a “False Flag”, “Murder their Own Soldiers”. Israelis Widely Used “Hannibal Directive” on Oct. 7: Israeli Report

According to a source in the Israeli forces’ Southern Command, the region was designed to become a “killing zone,” while another commanded that “not a single vehicle can return to Gaza.”

Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that during Operation al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) routinely used a command that allowed soldiers to murder their own soldiers, namely the infamous Hannibal Directive.

The Israeli Air Force targeted at least three military facilities and outposts during the operation and the IOF opened fire on the walled separation barrier dividing Gaza and “Israel,” when Israelis were being taken captive.

According to a source in the Israeli Southern Command, the region was designed to become a “killing zone,” while another commanded that “not a single vehicle can return to Gaza.”

These instructions are known as the “Hannibal Directive,” requiring the IOF to take all measures to avoid the capture of Israeli soldiers, including murdering them.

Haaretz‘s investigation was based on records and testimony from troops, mid-level, and senior army commanders and data indicated that many taken captive were subjected to Israeli gunfire and “were in danger.”

According to Haaretz, Israeli commanders took decisions early on October 7 based on unverified intelligence with one source citing “crazy hysteria,” adding that “No one had a clue about the number of people kidnapped or where army forces were.”

An Israeli source told Haaretz that any person making a decision “knew that our combatants in the area could be hit as well.”

Another order directed all units to fire mortars against the Gaza Strip, despite the occupation’s feeble knowledge of the locations of soldiers and citizens. The order was expanded later to prohibit any vehicle from entering Gaza.

A source in the Southern Command told Haaretz that “Everyone knew by then that such vehicles could be carrying kidnapped civilians or soldiers,” adding that “everyone knew what it meant to not let any vehicles return to Gaza.”

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University of California Rolls Out New Free Speech Policies To Curtail Pro-Palestine Protests on Campus

The term ‘Orwellian’ is rapidly losing its gravitas with how often we make recourse to it in trying to explain global society’s piecemeal tumble into neofascism (same as the old fascism), but a recent batch of policy changes at the University of California, Los Angeles, rolling out this fall in retaliation for students and faculty’s pro-Palestine, anti-genocide protests last spring, truly deserves the epithet.

Reeling in the wake of frequent anti-genocide protests, rallies, and marches last year, the occupation of Royce Quad by a pro-Palestine student encampment in April, and three major graduate student strikes since 2019 (this one, which was at UC Santa Cruz but threatened credibly to spread to UCLA, this one, and the most recent one), UCLA administration is scrambling to enact new campus-wide policies aimed at preventing student movements, activism, protests, and other forms of free expression and free association from taking place on campus, which is public land owned by the State of California.

The most desperate change takes the form of sweeping updates to the (also Orwellian-sounding) Time, Place, and Manner Policies, reported on today by the student paper, the Daily Bruin. Under the new regulations, campus administration redefines “​​publicly accessible spaces” (on a publicly-owned campus on public land with no gates or physical barriers to entry from the street) to include just two locations: a thin strip of walkway known as Bruinwalk, colloquially known by some as “the gauntlet” of leafletters, solicitors, canvassers, and undergraduate clubs seeking to boost their membership; and the area outside Murphy Hall, the main administrative building on campus. According to Daily Bruin, “Separate rules exist for events that receive administration approval 10 days in advance,” such as marches, rallies, and using a megaphone. Other heinous acts that students are no longer allowed to commit include ordering food delivery between midnight and 6a.m., walking outside during the same timeframe, and refusing to identify oneself to campus staff.

Next, a new, ironically stupid “Workplace Violence Prevention Plan” that is to be imposed on all campus employees this fall could have been in the works since before the pro-Palestine spring uprising, but the timing of its release is at best pure bureaucratic tone deafness and at worst another mechanism designed to clamp down on freedom of speech and association on campus. This is especially true because in the legal code to which it refers, ‘violence’ is defined broadly to include threats that result in ‘psychological trauma’. No matter what the boomers say, mental trauma is a genuine form of harm, so there is no issue there. The problem here, as with many of the University of California’s reactionary new policies, lies in the potential for – the likelihood of – selective enforcement. Furthermore, the concept of psychological harm was weaponized by Zionist counterprotesters last spring, led by their on-campus posterboy, who actively antagonized peaceful anti-genocide protesters and then was quoted in this Times of Israel article saying the encampment made him feel ‘not safe’.

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American Citizen Fatally Shot by IDF Soldier During Pro-Palestine Protest in West Bank

US citizen Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was fatally shot by IDF soldiers during a pro-Palestinian protest that took place near Nabulus in the northern West Bank on Friday.

According to AP News, protests started out as peaceful, but turned violent when activists began throwing stones at Israeli Defense Force soldiers, prompting them to fire live ammunition into the crowd.

One of the IDF bullets tragically struck Eygi in the head, killing her on site.

From AP News:

“The Israeli military said it was looking into reports that troops had killed a foreign national while firing at an ‘instigator of violent activity’ in the area of the protest.

The killing came amid a surge of violence in the West Bank since the Israel-Hamas war began in October, with increasing Israeli raids, attacks by Palestinian militants on Israelis, attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians and heavier military crackdowns on Palestinian protests. More than 690 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian health officials.”

Biden State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller confirmed that the U.S. government was aware of the death in statements he made on Friday.

“We offer our deepest condolences to her family and loved ones,” he said. “We are urgently gathering more information about the circumstances of her death, and will have more to say as we learn more.”

The White House also responded to the reports stating it was “deeply disturbed” by the death while urging the IDF to open an investigation into the incident.

Another activist who was at the protest told reporters that there were “two separate shots of live ammunition,” that were fired by officers into the crowd.

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Warning of ‘Genocidal Violence’ on the West Bank

An independent U.N. expert warns that “Israel’s genocidal violence risks leaking out of Gaza and into the occupied Palestinian territory as a whole” as Western governments, corporations, and other institutions maintain support for Israel’s military, which stands accused of grave war crimes.

Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories, said in a statement that “there is mounting evidence that no Palestinian is safe under Israel’s unfettered control.”

“The writing is on the wall, and we cannot continue to ignore it,” said Albanese, who released a detailed report in May concluding that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza.

Albanese’s statement came as the Israeli military’s largest assault on the West Bank in decades continued into its second week on Monday. At least 29 Palestinians have been killed during the series of military raids, according to Al Jazeera, including at least five children.

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