Tag: israel

Israeli Airstrike Hits Iranian Consulate Building in Damascus, High-Level Iranian General Reported Killed

On Monday, an Israeli airstrike leveled an Iranian consulate building that’s next to the Iranian embassy in the Syrian capital of Damascus, marking a significant escalation in Israeli attacks on Iranians in the region.

Initial reports say at least seven people were killed, including Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Several Iranian diplomats and other IRGC members have also been reported killed, but the details and final death toll are not confirmed.

Iran has confirmed the death of Zahedi, who oversaw the IRGC’s Quds Force operations in Syria and Lebanon, and is vowing a harsh response. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani Tehran will “decide on the type of response and punishment against the aggressor.”

The bombing of the diplomatic facility comes a few days after Israel launched some of its heaviest airstrikes in Syria that reportedly killed 52 people, including Syrian soldiers and members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Israel has also killed multiple members of the IRGC since it ramped up airstrikes in Syria after October 7.

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Israel Creates ‘Kill Zones’ in Gaza Where Anyone Who Enters Gets Shot

Israel has been creating “kill zones” in the Gaza Strip in areas where the Israeli military is operating, and anyone who enters will get shot even if they’re unarmed civilians, Haaretz reported on Sunday.

The report said anyone killed in a designated kill zone is labeled a “terrorist” even if they “never held a gun in their lives,” and they are “often civilians whose only crime was to cross an invisible line drawn by the IDF.”

One Israeli reservist who was recently in north Gaza said the “feeling we had was that there weren’t really rules of engagement there.”

Other sources in the IDF told Haaretz that Israel’s claim that 9,000 out of the 32,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza are “terrorists” is not valid. “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate,” an Israeli reserve officer said.

A senior officer in Israel’s Southern Command said it was “astonishing to hear the reports after every operation regarding how many terrorists were killed.” He added that Hamas fighters don’t operate in large groups, saying, “You don’t need to be a genius to realize that you don’t have hundreds or dozens of armed men running through the streets of Khan Yunis or Jabaliya, fighting the IDF.”

Another reserve officer who spoke with Haaretz said he was tasked with telling senior IDF officers how many “terrorists” were killed in operations his men carried out and said no one “can determine with certainty who is a terrorist and who was hit after entering the combat zone of an IDF force.”

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EASY TIGER! GOP Rep. Tim Walberg Suggests Ending War in Gaza and Russia ‘Like Nagasaki and Hiroshima’

Michigan Congressman Tim Walberg appeared to get somewhat carried away with his rhetoric during a town hall meeting with constituents this week.

The event, which was held at Dundee Village Hall in Michigan, allowed attendees to ask Walberg his view on various hot button issues of the day.

One man said he knew a soldier who was travelling to Gaza to help build a port at the request of the Biden administration as Israel carries out its war against Hamas.

“Why are we spending our money to build a port for them?” the man asked, according to a video posted on the X platform.

“It’s Joe Biden’s reason; we need to get humanitarian aid into Gaza,” Walberg responded. “I don’t think any of our aid that goes to Israel to support our greatest ally, arguably maybe in the world, to defeat Hamas and Iran and Russia, and probably North Korea’s in there, and China, too, with them helping Hamas — we shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid.”

The Congressman then brought up the example of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, when the allies dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities, which together killed over 100,000 people.

Although the bombings did bring a swift end to the war with the surrender of the Axis powers, debate over the ethics of the decision is debated to this date.

“It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima,” he continued. “Get it over quick. The same should be in Ukraine. Defeat Putin quick.”

In a statement to Detroit News, Walberg’s spokesman Mike Rorke insisted that he “vehemently disagrees with putting our troops in harm’s way.”

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Israel’s Holocaust trauma is a myth

Responding to a journalist’s question in October, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett fumed: “Are you seriously … asking me about Palestinian civilians? What’s wrong with you? Have you not seen what happened? We’re fighting Nazis.”

Bennett had been asked what would happen to babies in incubators and other patients who would die after Israel cut off the power to the Gaza Strip.

There are many other examples of prominent Israeli politicians making similar statements. South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice documented many of them, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloody invocation of “Amalek.”

In the wake of the 7 October attack, an exterminationist mood swept Israel. Israeli peace activist Adam Keller described how Roy Sharon, a radio and TV commentator on the main broadcasting corporation, spoke of his desire to see “a million dead bodies in Gaza.”

Keller wrote that “the streets of Tel Aviv are flooded with red stickers reading ‘Exterminate Gaza!’ Not ‘Destroy!,’ not ‘Flatten!’ – but clearly and explicitly ‘Exterminate Gaza!’ ‘Le-Ha-Sh-Mid!’ – ‘Exterminate!’ Every Hebrew-speaking Jewish Israeli knows from a young age exactly what this word means.”

The lazy explanation for Israel’s genocidal and exterminationist mentality is “Holocaust trauma.” Using the Holocaust as a catch-all explanation is convenient, because it absolves people of the need to look for the real cause of Israeli Zionist violence.

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Speaker Johnson Wants to Pass Bill Sending Billions in Arms to Ukraine and Israel

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) says he will work to pass a massive military aid bill for Ukraine and Israel once Congress returns to session next week, a move that could trigger a backlash from his party. House Democrats have vowed to shield the speaker from a GOP rebellion should he support the legislation.

Johnson has underscored the urgency of providing aid to Ukraine and Israel, declaring it a top priority upon the House’s return from Easter recess. “We’ll turn our attention to it and we won’t delay on that,” he told reporters last week.  

Sending billions more in aid to Ukraine is a volatile issue within the Republican Caucus. Johnson won his role as leader of the House, in part, because of his past votes opposing aid to Ukraine. However, since taking over as speaker, Johnson has repeatedly stated that he supports President Joe Biden’s $61 billion aid package for Kiev. 

The issue facing Johnson is how the aid to Ukraine is currently packaged. Initially, the GOP sought to include the funding in a bill that would also supply arms to Israel and Taiwan, as well as devote billions to border security. Last month, the Senate stripped the border funding and immigration reform from the legislation and passed a $95 billion foreign aid bill, including $61 billion for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel. 

After passing the Senate over a month ago, Johnson has prevented the legislation from coming to a vote in the House. Some Republicans in the chamber say if Johnson brings the bill to the floor, they will vote to remove him as speaker. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he spoke with the speaker by phone on Thursday and pressed Johnson to pass the bill. “In this situation, quick passage of US aid to Ukraine by Congress is vital. We recognize that there are differing views in the House of Representatives on how to proceed, but the key is to keep the issue of aid to Ukraine as a unifying factor,” Zelensky wrote on X.

To overcome the threat from a small number of Republicans, Democrats in the House have hinted that they would support Johnson’s continued role as speaker if he brings the bill for a vote. “If the choice is between Ukraine aid and providing a vote to stop a motion to vacate, or no Ukraine aid, I think there’s a lot of Democrats who would be willing to assist in getting it done,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) told the Hill. 

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18 Killed In Gaza Trying To Reach Aid As Pentagon Vows More Airdrops

The Biden administration announced this week that it plans to resume humanitarian aid drops into Gaza amid reports that large-scale famine is looming. However, critics have said that the airdropped crates from large military transport planes are dangerous given the cramped and desperate conditions on the ground below. 

So far the Pentagon has delivered at least 17 airdrops of nearly 500,000 meals, but the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry has said that just on Monday alone 18 people died trying to desperately access the aid, much of which landed in the sea.

Airdropping supplies just off the coast is an apparent safety precaution, after earlier this month Palestinian civilians died after apparently being impacted by falling crates amid parachute failure.

But 12 of the deceased drowned on Monday while trying to access the aid which landed in the Mediterranean. “The aid airdrops pose a real threat to the lives of hungry Palestinians,” Gaza’s government media office warned. Others reportedly perished during stampedes as the aid arrived on land.

The statement further described that some of the recent aid has fallen into active war zones, which presents the risk of hungry civilians getting caught in the crossfire trying to reach it. “This all put the lives of people in real danger,” the office added.

Initially only Jordan was engaged in airdrops, later joined by the US military. Since then and into this week the countries of Germany, Britain, Egypt, Singapore, and UAE have joined and cooperated on airdrops. 

Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh has noted there have been recent instances of parachute malfunctions when delivering the aid. “As always, safety is a top priority when planning these airdrops,” Singh said. “Of note, during [Monday’s] humanitarian airdrop, which included approximately 80 bundles, three bundles were reported to have had parachute malfunctions and landed in the water.”

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Close-up of Death Culture: 1,000 in Entertainment Biz Proclaim Support for Gaza Slaughter

Last week, Variety reported that “more than 1,000 Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals have signed an open letter denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest’ Oscar speech.” The angry letter is a tight script for a real-life drama of defending Israel as it continues to methodically kill civilians no less precious than the signers’ own loved ones.

A few ethical words from Glazer while accepting his award provoked outrage. He spoke of wanting to refute “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people,” and he followed with a vital question: “Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Those words were too much for the letter’s signers, who included many of Hollywood’s powerful producers, directors and agents. For starters, they accused Glazer (who is Jewish) of “drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”

Ironically, that accusation embodied what Glazer had confronted from the Academy Awards stage when he said that what’s crucial in the present is “not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’”

But the letter refused to look at what Israel is doing now as it bombs, kills, maims and starves Palestinian civilians in Gaza, where there are now 32,000 known dead and 74,000 injured. The letter’s moral vision only looked back at what the Third Reich did. Its signers endorsed the usual Zionist polemics – fitting neatly into Glazer’s description of “Jewishness and the Holocaust” being “hijacked by an occupation.”

The letter even denied that an occupation actually exists – objecting to “the use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years.” Somehow the Old Testament was presumed to be sufficient justification for the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, most of whose ancestors lived in what’s now Israel. The vast majority of 2.2 million people have been driven from their bombed-out homes in Gaza, with many now facing starvation due to blockage of food.

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If You’re a US Reporter, Anything but Rabidly Pro-Israel Coverage Is Dangerous to Your Career

Early in 2003, Ashleigh Banfield was a star in the making. A rising journalist at MSNBC, she covered the opening stages of the Iraq War. Before that, she’d made a name for herself covering the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. Smart, pretty, highly skilled, she was heading nowhere but up. Until she gave an honest lecture on her experiences in Iraq and the Middle East on April 24, 2003.

I’ve written before about Banfield’s honest and heartfelt critique of Iraq war coverage in the U.S. mainstream media, which won her no friends at NBC News. In fact, the NBC brass sidelined and essentially exiled her. I recently reread her Landon Lecture at Kansas State University and realized NBC wasn’t just angry about her critique of mainstream media war coverage: they were likely even more incensed at how she humanized and empathized with Palestinians and other Middle Eastern peoples and groups, including organizations like Hezbollah.

Here’s some of what she had to say back then in 2003:

But it’s interesting to be able to cover this [Israel and Palestine]. There’s nothing in the world like being able to cross a green line whenever you want and speak to both sides of a conflict. I can’t tell you how horrible and wonderful it is at the same time in the West Bank and Gaza and Israel. There are very few people in this world who can march right across guarded check points, closed military zones, and talk to Palestinians in the same day that they almost embedded with Israeli troops, and that’s something that we get to do on a regular basis.

And I just wish that the leadership of all these different entities, ours included, could do the same thing, because they would have an eye opening experience, horrible and wonderful, all at the same time, and it would give a lot of insight as to how messages are heard and how you can negotiate. Because you cannot negotiate when someone can’t hear you or refuses to hear you or can’t even understand your language, and that’s clearly what’s happening in a lot of places in the world right now, the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, not the least of which there’s very little listening and understanding going on. Our language is entirely different than theirs, and I don’t just mean the words. When you hear the word Hezbollah you probably think evil, danger, terror right away. If I could just see a show of hands. Who thinks that Hezbollah is a bad word? Show of hands. Usually connotes fear, terror, some kind of suicide bombing. If you live in the Arab world, Hezbollah means Shriner. Hezbollah means charity, Hezbollah means hospitals, Hezbollah means welfare and jobs.

These are not the same organizations we’re dealing with. How can you negotiate when you’ re talking about two entirely different meanings? And until we understand – we don’t have to like Hizbullah, we don’t have to like their militancy, we don’t have to like what they do on the side, but we have to understand that they like it, that they like the good things about Hizbullah, and that you can’t just paint it with a blanket statement that it’s a terrorist organization, because even when it comes to the militancy these people believe that militancy is simply freedom fighting and resistance. You can’t argue with that. You can try to negotiate, but you can’t say it’s wrong flat out.

And that’s some of the problems we have in dealing in this war in terror. As a journalist I’m often ostracized just for saying these messages, just for going on television and saying, “Here’s what the leaders of Hezbullah are telling me and here’s what the Lebanese are telling me and here’s what the Syrians have said about Hezbullah. Here’s what they have to say about the Golan Heights.” Like it or lump it, don’t shoot the messenger, but invariably the messenger gets shot.

We hired somebody on MSNBC recently named Michael Savage. Some of you may know his name already from his radio program. He was so taken aback by my dare to speak with Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade about why they do what they do, why they’re prepared to sacrifice themselves for what they call a freedom fight and we call terrorism. He was so taken aback that he chose to label me as a slut on the air. And that’s not all, as a porn star. And that’s not all, as an accomplice to the murder of Jewish children. So these are the ramifications for simply being the messenger in the Arab world.

Emphasis added. Original spelling retained. You can watch her speech here.

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Israel’s Trojan Horse

Piers allow things to come in. They allow things to go out. And Israel, which has no intention of halting its murderous siege of Gaza, including its policy of enforced starvation, appears to have found a solution to its problem of where to expel the 2.3 million Palestinians. 

If the Arab world will not take them, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken proposed during his first round of visits after Oct. 7, the Palestinians will be cast adrift on ships.

It worked in Beirut in 1982 when some eight and a half thousand Palestine Liberation Organization members were sent by sea to Tunisia and another two and a half thousand ended up in other Arab states. Israel expects that the same forced deportation by sea will work in Gaza.

Israel, for this reason, supports the “temporary pier” the Biden administration is building, to ostensibly deliver food and aid to Gaza – food and aid whose “distribution” will be overseen by the Israeli military.  

“You need drivers that don’t exist, trucks that don’t exist feeding into a distribution system that doesn’t exist,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior aid official in the Biden administration, and now president of the Refugees International aid advocacy group told The Guardian. 

This “maritime corridor” is Israel’s Trojan Horse, a subterfuge to expel Palestinians. The small shipments of seaborne aid, like the food packets that have been air dropped, will not alleviate the looming famine. They are not meant to. 

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How the Western Media Helped Build the Case for Genocide in Gaza

The past five months have been clarifying. What was supposed to be hidden has been thrust into the light. What was supposed to be obscured has come sharply into focus.

Liberal democracy is not what it seems.

It has always defined itself in contrast to what it says it is not. Where other regimes are savage, it is humanitarian. Where others are authoritarian, it is open and tolerant. Where others are criminal, it is law-abiding. When others are belligerent, it seeks peace. Or so the manuals of liberal democracy argue.

But how to keep the faith when the world’s leading liberal democracies – invariably referred to as “the West” – are complicit in the crime of crimes: genocide?

Not just law-breaking or a misdemeanor, but the extermination of a people. And not just quickly, before the mind has time to absorb and weigh the gravity and extent of the crime, but in slow motion, day after day, week after week, month after month.

What kind of system of values can allow for five months the crushing of children under rubble, the detonation of fragile bodies, the wasting away of babies, while still claiming to be humanitarian, tolerant, peace-seeking?

And not just allow all this, but actively assist in it. Supply the bombs that blow those children to pieces or bring houses down on them, and sever ties to the only aid agency that can hope to keep them alive.

The answer, it seems, is the West’s system of values.

The mask has not just slipped, it has been ripped off. What lies beneath is ugly indeed.

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