Tag: israel

STATE DEPARTMENT DECLARES “ETHNIC CLEANSING” IN SUDAN BUT WON’T SAY THE SAME ABOUT ISRAEL’S WAR IN GAZA

LATE LAST YEAR, 50 humanitarian organizations asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken to make an atrocity determinationOpens in a new tab related to a conflict that was drawing global attention.

The groups requesting the designation had been lobbying the Biden administration for months. In their November letter, they zeroed in on atrocities committed by the Rapid Support Forces, one of the warring factions in a battle for control of Sudan. Six days later, Blinken responded with a determination that the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces were guilty. “Based on the State Department’s careful analysis of the law and available facts, I have determined that members of the SAF and the RSF have committed war crimes in Sudan,” Opens in a new tabhe said in a Opens in a new tabDecember 6 statementOpens in a new tab.

In the case of the RSF, Blinken went further: “I have also determined that members of the RSF and allied militias have committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.”

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CNN’s CEO Is Making Staff Churn Out Israel Propaganda

One of the noblest and most important things a western journalist can do these days is help expose the propagandistic manipulations of the mainstream western press institutions who have duped our civilization into consenting to a profoundly dysfunctional status quo which does not serve the interests of normal human beings. Unfortunately this rarely happens, because western journalists tend to view the mainstream press as allies and potential employers.

This happens to be one such rare occasion, and it happened in one of the last places you’d probably have guessed if you follow mass media propaganda with a critical eye. The Guardian has a great new article out titled “CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’” by a guy named Chris McGreal which cites multiple CNN staff members and internal documents to reveal the immense top-down pressure in the network to tilt coverage heavily in favor of Israel.

McGreal writes the following:

“CNN is facing a backlash from its own staff over editorial policies they say have led to a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza.

“Journalists in CNN newsrooms in the US and overseas say broadcasts have been skewed by management edicts and a story-approval process that has resulted in highly partial coverage of the Hamas massacre on 7 October and Israel’s retaliatory attack on Gaza.

“‘The majority of news since the war began, regardless of how accurate the initial reporting, has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,’ said one CNN staffer. ‘Ultimately, CNN’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza war amounts to journalistic malpractice.’”

McGreal’s sources say CNN’s wildly biased coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza is the direct result of edicts from the network’s new CEO Mark Thompson, who assumed his role two days after the October 7 attack. From 2012 to 2020 Thompson was the president and CEO of The New York Times, which is currently experiencing its own internal strife due to the pro-Israel bias of that outlet. 

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Defunding UNRWA: The Last Phase of Israeli Genocide

UNRWA was created by the UN General Assembly in 1950 to provide Palestinian refugees with humanitarian services including schools, health clinics and other social services. The hasty freezing of financial aid by the US and other donor countries without first conducting independent investigations into the veracity of Israeli claims against UNRWA employees is cabalistic, adds to the Israeli blockade and deepens the suffering of the Gaza civilians.

Sky News, who have reviewed the Israeli dossier on the alleged “evidence” against UNRWA’s staff, has stated that it “has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA.” Nevertheless, the Agency’s Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini summarily terminated the accused, without due process, possibly hoping to avert the very hyperbole reaction from the donor countries. 

Meanwhile, the imprudent decision to halt funding for the largest and oldest UN agency serving Palestinians would likely lead to the malnourishment of young children. This decision will also impede UNRWA’s ability to deliver crucial humanitarian assistance to the 2 million displaced civilians, including 17,000 children who are unaccompanied or have been separated from their parents as a result of the Israeli pogrom in Gaza.

After all the damage is done, it may very well be that the Israeli claims against the UNRWA employees are either exaggerated or unfounded. It wouldn’t be different than the debunked Israeli disinformation regarding decapitated children, rape, sexual violence, and mutilation of women reported by the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz on the October 7 events. 

Having said that, even if Israeli allegations against a handful of low-level individuals held some validity, why should UNRWA be responsible for a conduct carried out by employees outside their working hours, and not associated with their work duties? In fact, in the more than 100 days of the Israel orgy of slaughter, UNRWA has lost 152 employees, a staggering 1300 percent more than the number of the accused staff. Keeping this in mind, one must question whether donor nations and UNRWA’s Commissioner considered the possibility that these allegations could be an Israeli gambit to deflect from its responsibility for murdering 152 UNRWA employees.

Now, let’s examine how donor nations responded to a sister UN organization, the Peacekeeping force, when staff faced accusations of misconduct. In 2021, the UN Secretary-General concluded that it was credible that 450 members of the Peacekeeping force in Gabon were guilty of child rape and sexual exploitation.  Unlike UNRWA, however, the US and other donors did not suspend funding to the UN agency when reports of sexual abuse emerged, more importantly, they continued the funding even after the allegations were verified. Canada, for example, did not freeze its aid even after its own investigation accused the UN of “‘glaring’ accountability gaps” in handling sexually abusing people they’ve been sent to protect.” 

Yet, immediately after Israel raised, yet to be verified, allegations against a very few of UNRWA staff, Canada and other donors preempted any investigation and froze funding to an organization that currently provides vital humanitarian assistance to a population enduring siege and relentless bombing.

As in the Western hypocrisy case on the war of genocide in Gaza, the incongruence response to the two UN Agencies reveals that Western virtue is gaged by the identity of the victim and victimizer. In response to the more than 2000 allegations of sexual abuse, the accusers were from Africa and Haiti. In the second case, the unverified allegations against the 12 individuals came from Israel. The disparity in the two UN cases is a stark illustration of the evident Western bias, and how it’s driven by the victims/victimizers’ racial characteristics rather than a commitment to genuine fairness.

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Western Officials Warn of War-Crimes Complicity

More than 800 government officials in the United States and Europe released a letter Friday criticizing their countries’ leaders for providing unconditional military and diplomatic support to Israel as it inflicts disaster on Gaza’s population.  

[The 800-plus figure is ascribed to an organizer of the letter who is quoted anonymously, for fear of reprisal, in a report in The New York Times.] 

The authors of the letter, who remain anonymous, wrote that their attempts to voice concerns internally about their governments’ support for Israel’s assault on Gaza “were overruled by political and ideological considerations.”

“We are obliged to do everything in our power on behalf of our countries and ourselves to not be complicit in one of the worst human catastrophes of this century,” the letter reads. “We are obliged to warn the publics of our countries, whom we serve, and to act in concert with transnational colleagues.”

“Israel has shown no boundaries in its military operations in Gaza, which has resulted in tens of thousands of preventable civilian deaths,” the letter continues.

“There is a plausible risk that our governments’ policies are contributing to grave violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes, and even ethnic cleansing or genocide.”

The letter was coordinated by government officials in The Netherlands, the U.S., and European Union bodies and endorsed by civil servants in 10 countries, including Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Josh Paul, a former U.S. State Department official who resigned in October over the Biden administration’s decision to continue arming Israel as it pummeled Gaza, called the new letter “a remarkable statement from hundreds of individuals who have devoted their lives to building a better world.”

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Poison gas new Israeli weapon threatening lives of captives in Gaza

The Israeli army knows that bombs exploding inside tunnels can disperse toxic gases such as carbon monoxide, capable of killing Palestinian resistance fighters within them, two defense sources told the Israeli magazine Mekomit.

In a report published on 2 February, the sources said that despite this knowledge, the army aimed bombs at the entrances of tunnels in Gaza during its “Operation Guardian of the Walls” in May 2021, also known by Palestinians as the battle of “Sayf al-Quds.”

One source said that during the operation, members of Hamas military wing, the Qassam Brigades, were killed not just “because they were hit by a bomb, but also because they were in the tunnels, and the bomb emitted gas.”

A second source added that the Israeli military conducted internal tests which concluded the poison gases released from bombs in such situations are fatal.

Gadi Eisenkot, the chief of staff at the time, said that the purpose of bombing tunnel entrances to the tunnels built by Hamas in Gaza was to “turn the tunnels into a death trap” and kill hundreds of Qassam fighters who would be trapped inside.

The first source told Mekomit that the army was not using chemical or biological explosive warheads. Detonating conventional explosives inside a closed space like a tunnel was enough to spread lethal toxic gas released as byproducts. The gas can travel “a great distance in a closed area.”

Mekomit reported it is unclear whether Israel is deliberately bombing tunnels to kill Qassam fighters using poisonous gas in this way in its current war on Gaza that began on 7 October.

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Israel, the US, and the Endless War on Terror

In a New Yorker piece published five days after the attacks of Sept.11, 2001, American critic and public intellectual Susan Sontag wrote, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.” Sontag’s desire to contextualize the 9/11 attacks was an instant challenge to the narratives that President George W. Bush would soon deploy, painting the United States as a country of peace and, most importantly, innocent of any wrongdoing. While the rhetorical strategies he developed to justify what came to be known as the Global War on Terror have continued to this day, they were not only eagerly embraced by Israel in 2001, they also lie at the heart of that country’s justification of the genocidal campaign that’s been waged against the Palestinian people since Oct. 7, 2023.

On Sept. 20, 2001, President Bush delivered a speech to Congress in which he shared a carefully constructed storyline that would justify endless war. The United States, he said, was attacked because the terrorists “hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” In that official response to the 9/11 attacks, he also used the phrase “war on terror” for the first time, stating (all too ominously in retrospect): “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

“Americans are asking,” he went on, “why do they hate us?” And then he provided a framework for understanding the motives of the “terrorists” precluding the possibility that American actions prior to 9/11 could in any way have explained the attacks. In other words, he positioned his country as a blameless victim, shoved without warning into a “post-9/11 world.” As Bush put it, “All of this was brought upon us in a single day — and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.” As scholar Richard Jackson later noted, the president’s use of “our war on terror” constituted “a very carefully and deliberately constructed public discourse… specifically designed to make the war seem reasonable, responsible, and inherently ‘good.’”

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Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters dropped by music publisher BMG over Israel comments

Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has reportedly been dropped by music rights company Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) over his inflammatory remarks about Israel, Ukraine and the United States.

The news was reported by Variety, which notes that Waters’ antisemitic statements “infuriated his former bandmates, as they have driven off several suitors interested in acquiring the wizening band’s recorded-music catalog, which was said to be on the market for half a billion dollars.”

The Berlin-based company signed a deal with Waters, 80, back in 2016 and planned to release a newly re-recorded version of Pink Floyd’s seminal 1973 album ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ in 2023, but the new CEO Thomas Coesfeld dropped the contract. The album was eventually released by the UK label Cooking Vinyl.

Since the start of the Israel Hamas war, Rogers has made multiple remarks that have been deemed antisemitic, and has been the subject of multiple controversies in recent years.

Waters, a longtime supporter of Palestine and a critic of Israel, has vehemently denied these accusations, but caused uproar last year after wearing a “Nazi-style” uniform onstage in Berlin.

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Adult Son of Israeli Diplomat Accused of Deliberately Running Over Florida Police Officer — Lawyer Claims He Has ‘Diplomatic Immunity’

The adult son of an Israeli diplomat has been accused of purposefully running over a Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, police officer on his motorcycle — and his lawyer claims that he is protected under diplomatic immunity.

Avraham Gil, 19, hit a police lieutenant who was conducting a traffic stop on Saturday afternoon.

Avraham is the son of Eli Gil, a diplomat at the Israeli consulate in Miami.

Local 10 News reports:

An arrest report states that as the officer approached the vehicle he pulled over, Gil came up on his motorcycle, weaving in between vehicles. The officer motioned at Gil and yelled at him to stop, police said, but instead he kept riding towards the lieutenant and “intentionally ran him over.”

The officer, who suffered an “incapacitating” injury to his left leg, grabbed Gil and brought him to the ground to stop him, the report states. Police arrested Gil on a first-degree felony charge of aggravated battery on a law enforcement officer and resisting an officer with violence.

Gil is crying and red-eyed in his mug shot and has been charged with two felonies.

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‘Dangerous’: Pelosi calls for FBI to investigate cease-fire supporters

As The New York Times reported Sunday that more than 1,000 Black American pastors have joined the widespread call for a cease-fire in Gaza, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi suggested the demand was “Putin’s message” and said the FBI should investigate groups that are speaking out about Biden’s pro-Israel policies.

On CNN, the former House speaker, a California Democrat, told Dana Bash that the “call for a cease-fire is [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s message,” and said she thinks some of the protests that have erupted across the U.S. since October to demand the U.S. push for an end to Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza “are connected to Russia.”

“I think some financing should be investigated and I want to ask the FBI to investigate that,” Pelosi said.

A number of progressives pointed out that the demand for a cease-fire is hardly coming from the fringes of American society, but rather from more than two-thirds of Americans in a November poll by Reuters/Ipsos. Three-quarters of Democrats in the survey backed a cease-fire, along with half of Republicans.

The Times detailed calls from more than 1,000 Black pastors who represent hundreds of thousands of congregants across the U.S. and who have written open letters and spoken to White House officials at sit-down meetings in support of a cease-fire, warning that “it’s going to be very hard to persuade our people to go back to the polls and vote for Biden.”

The Intercept reporter Prem Thakker pointed to other groups supportive of the call, including the Democratic parties of Arizona and Texas; the United Auto Workers, which endorsed Biden last week; and Doctors Without Borders.

Writer and researcher Abdullah Shihipar denounced Pelosi’s comments as “stupid,” but was among those who cautioned against dismissing her plan to ask the FBI to “investigate” certain pro-Palestinian rights protesters and groups.

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The Killing of 3 American Troops Was an Avoidable Tragedy

American blood has been drawn in a Middle Eastern war for the first time in a while. Iraqi guerrillas allied with Iran killed three U.S. troops and wounded dozens more along the Jordanian-Syrian border on Sunday, using an explosive drone. President Joe Biden has promised to “all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing.” Members of Congress have called for a harsh response, with some Republicans demanding a full-on war against Iran.

The government of Jordan, clearly not keen on getting dragged into the conflict, has denied that the attack happened on its side of the border. Iran shrugged off responsibility for the bombing, insisting that the issue is entirely between the United States and “resistance groups in Iraq and Syria.” The Iraqi fighters may have indeed been acting on their own accord. Iraqi commander Qais al-Khazali had complained about U.S. airstrikes on Iraq in a speech last November: “You are cautious when it comes to Iranian blood, but you pay no regard to Iraqi blood. Therefore, Iraqis should teach you a lesson for what you have done.”

The immediate cause of the violence is the war in Gaza, which prompted Iraqi militias to break a truce they had with the U.S. military. But this particular attack was a long time coming. The target was Tower 22, an extension of al-Tanf, a base that the U.S. military maintains in Syria for murky and confusing purposes. Over the past few years, Israeli aircraft have used al-Tanf’s airspace to strike Iran’s forces, and Iranian forces have struck back at the base. It was only a matter of time before Americans were dragged into the proxy war, with tragic results.

U.S. Special Forces had first set up shop in al-Tanf during the war against the Islamic State. Their plan was to support the Revolutionary Commando Army, a friendly Syrian rebel group. That project failed embarrassingly. The Revolutionary Commando Army suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Islamic State in 2016, and one of its leaders ran off with American-made guns after he was accused of drug trafficking in 2020. Kurdish-led forces elsewhere in Syria became a much more reliable partner for the U.S. military.

Meanwhile, Russia—which is allied with the Iranian and Syrian governments—agreed to enforce a 55 kilometer “deconfliction zone” around al-Tanf. The zone also included Rukban, an unofficial refugee camp built by Syrians fleeing government persecution. (The Syrian government reportedly tortured two former Rukban residents to death in October 2022.) No country wanted to take responsibility for the camp, and it took almost a decade for the U.S. military to begin providing food aid to Rukban.

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