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Tag: israel
Israel is deliberately obliterating media buildings in Gaza to cover up the war crimes that will follow
The destruction of two important Gaza buildings housing 20 media outlets was both shocking and predictable. History shows that if the media aren’t around to document Israel’s war crimes, it’s a lot easier for it to commit them.
On Tuesday, Israel bombed the 10-storey Al-Jawhara Tower, causing it to collapse. Before doing so, it had ‘benevolently’ warned that the airstrikes were coming. The following day, it bombed the 14-storey Al-Shorouk Tower, also giving warning it was going to do so.
Most reports have the buildings as evacuated before being levelled. But without these media offices, reporting on Israel’s other war crimes will be left largely to what little media remain and citizen journalists.
The buildings were significant. A statement by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) noted the Al-Jawhara building housed the offices of 13 media institutions and NGOs. And an advisory by the Committee to Protect Journalists noted that the Al-Shorouk building housed at least seven media outlets.
A further statement by the same committee said that the Israeli military had defended its bombing of the building via email, bizarrely claiming it had “acted within international law,” alleging the Al-Jawhara building housed Hamas’ intelligence and military offices, and saying the Al-Shorouk building was a base for Hamas’ military intelligence offices and “infrastructure to communicate tactical-military information.”
Pfizer CEO’s Israel visit canceled because he is not fully vaccinated
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has canceled his expected visit to Israel after it turned out he has not been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, N12 reported Friday.According to the channel, Bourla, as well as members of the delegation that was meant to accompany him during his visit, have not received the second dose of the vaccine.As a result, it was decided to delay the visit by several days, which also posed a logistic challenge because of the upcoming Israeli elections. Bourla said in December that he has not yet received the vaccine yet because he does not want to “cut in line,” and would wait until his age group is next in line for getting vaccinated. As such, he has received the first dose, but not the second one yet. Pfizer did not respond to The Jerusalem Post‘s request for comment.
The Israel Narrative Is Crumbling Because Of Phone Cameras And The Internet
The mass media are working furiously to spin this in a way that rivals my satire piece from the other day. The New York Times has been cartoonishly re-writing its own reporting in a desperate attempt to make Israel look like an innocent victim of unprovoked attacks instead of the obvious aggressor against people protesting a brutal apartheid regime backed by an entire empire. The New York Post falsely reported that the deaths on Monday were caused by “Airstrikes from Hamas militants” (when did Hamas get an air force?) when sharing an article which falsely implied that those fatalities were inflicted by both sides. DW News framed its headline in a way that suggested the nine children killed had been involved in “fighting” against Israeli forces, and the word “clashes” is being thrown about willy nilly to describe a very one-sided assault.
But it isn’t working.
Social media is teeming with viral video footage of police assaulting peaceful worshippers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, of Israelis cheering and chanting “Yimach shemam (may their names be erased)” at the sight of a fire near the mosque, of Israeli soldiers arresting Palestinian protesters using the signature knee-on-neck maneuver made famous by the murder of George Floyd, many of which have millions of views. Mainstream politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are putting out statements explicitly condemning Israel as the aggressor in these attacks, and the White House is facing some actual adversarial journalism for once regarding its refusal to denounce the killing of Palestinian children and its absurd position that Palestinians have no right to defend themselves.
Your tax dollars at work…
93 Israeli doctors: Do not use Covid-19 vaccine on children
The doctors addressed the letter “to the chiefs of the Ministry of Health, to our fellow doctors around the country, and to the entire public.”
They noted that “the increasingly prevalent opinion within the scientific community is that the vaccine cannot lead to herd immunity, therefore there is currently no ‘altruistic’ justification for vaccinating children to protect at-risk populations.”
They added that even today it is unclear whether the vaccine prevents the spread of the virus and for how long it confers protection, and noted that new variants “that may be more resistant to vaccination are popping up all the time.”
“We believe that not even a handful of children should be endangered through mass vaccination against a disease that is not dangerous to them,” they wrote. “Furthermore, it cannot be ruled out that the vaccine will have long-term adverse effects that have not yet been discovered at this time, including on growth, reproductive system or fertility. Children should be allowed a quick return to routine; the many tests and broad isolation cycles should be stopped, and no separation between the vaccinated and unvaccinated should be created in the public sphere. Vaccination of at-risk populations should be allowed, and under the almost complete vaccination of this population – it is possible to return to full routine (with periodic adjustments) even in the presence of COVID-19 virus.”
Leaked Texts From Israeli Consulate Employee Show More Details In Gaetz-Levinson Funding Scheme
Three screenshots of texts between Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, and Jake Novak, media director of the Israeli consulate in New York City were shared with TAC. The messages were authenticated by one of the parties to them.
In the first screenshot, Novak messaged Adams last Saturday to tell him about the investigation into Gaetz. The New York Times story on the Gaetz investigation was not published until Tuesday.
In the second, Novak appears to represent himself as deeply involved in the efforts to free Bob Levinson from Iran, telling Adams “this is screwing up my efforts to free Bob Levinson.”
“Gaetz’s dad was secretly finding [sic] us,” he continues. “So I’m very much wanting this to be untrue. I’ve got a commando team leader friend of mine nervously waiting for the wire transfers to clear.”
In the third screenshot, Novak casts doubt on Gaetz’s claims that he is being extorted. “The real documents do not extort,” he writes, “And we only asked for $25 million as an estimate at first. We came way down.”
BIDEN SPOKESPERSON JEN PSAKI WORKED FOR ISRAELI SPY FIRM
President Joe Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki worked for an Israeli firm accused of involvement in surveillance of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation.
Psaki’s public financial disclosures show that she earned at least $5,000 as a “crisis communications consultant” for AnyVision.
The disclosure forms for executive branch officials can be requested from the White House. Psaki’s disclosure obtained by The Electronic Intifada is included below this article.
The exact date of the work is not specified, but it occurred between the time Psaki left the Obama administration in 2017 and her new role in the Biden White House.
Psaki has operated a communications firm called Evergreen Consulting since a month after President Barack Obama left office.
This covers the period when AnyVision faced a public relations crisis over its alleged complicity in Israel’s abuses of Palestinian rights.
Israel adopts law allowing names of unvaccinated to be shared
Israel’s parliament passed a law Wednesday allowing the government to share the identities of people not vaccinated against the coronavirus with other authorities, raising privacy concerns for those opting out of inoculation.
The measure, which passed with 30 votes for and 13 against, gives local governments, the director general of the education ministry and some in the welfare ministry the right to receive the names, addresses and phone numbers of unvaccinated citizens.
The objective of the measure — valid for three months or until the Covid-19 pandemic is declared over — is “to enable these bodies to encourage people to vaccinate by personally addressing them”, a parliament statement said.
Israel, a country of nine million people, has administered the two recommended jabs of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against the coronavirus to roughly a third of its population.
Saturday Night Live Controversy Hides Greater Issues Around Israeli Apartheid
Saturday Night Live (SNL) has come in for a storm of criticism after airing a joke critical of Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout policy. The show’s anchor Michael Che quipped that “Israel is reporting that they vaccinated half of their population. And I’m going to guess it is the Jewish half.” Despite addressing the topic for fewer than seven seconds before moving on, Che’s words sparked a chorus of denunciations from conservative Jewish groups and supporters of the Middle Eastern nation.
“We find the use of age-old anti-Semitic tropes on last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live to be deeply troubling,” wrote the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who accused the show of “propagating Jew hatred under the guise of comedy.” The American Jewish Committee claimed that Che’s words were “a modern twist on a classic antisemitic trope that has inspired the mass murder of Jews.” Meanwhile New York radio host and pro-Israel activist Dov Hikind claimed that SNL has a “long record of anti-Semitism” and that Israel was vaccinating its Arab citizens at the same rate as its Jewish ones.
Even progressive figures expressed their unease with the joke. “I watched that and cringed. Enough that the Israeli govt does is worthy of legitimate criticism; lying about what they do is just as bad,” reacted Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson.
Hellbound and Down 
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