Tag: palestine

Play in Israel, just don’t pretend you didn’t know

Since October 7, scores of writers have authored scores of columns pleading – to no avail – with prominent politicians who wield transformative power to stop the genocide unfolding with such obscene lethality in the apocalyptic remnants of occupied Gaza.

The same dynamic applies to a gallery of preening artists who claim that they are not only allergic to conformity, but also reject as tantamount to censorship any call from any quarter not to entertain audiences in Israel.

Rather than beseeching Nick Cave, the Australian troubadour, or the British band, Radiohead, finally to heed the petitions of Brian Eno, Roger Waters and company and forgo performing in an apartheid state, my aim here is to challenge their, by now, discredited defences to opt to play in Tel Aviv.

After not performing in Israel for some 20 years, in 2014, Cave refrained from signing on to an artist-organised pledge – meant to show tangible solidarity with imprisoned Palestinians – to boycott touring in Israel in the aftermath of yet another Israeli killing spree in Gaza.

Cave later explained his decision this way: “There was something that stunk to me about that list. Then it kind of occurred to me that I’m not signing the list but I’m also not playing Israel and that just felt to me cowardly, really.”

The lobbying, Cave added, constituted a “public humiliation” that apparently fuelled his determination to spurn the overture and stage shows in Israel.

“It suddenly became very important to make a stand against those people that are trying to shut down musicians, to bully musicians, to censor musicians, and to silence musicians … so really you could say in a way that the BDS made me play Israel,” Cave said, referring to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.

In this flattering construct, Cave is the portrait of the principled renegade resisting the “age-old” rejectionist forces bent on muzzling him and, by extension, his art.

In a 2017 letter to his “hero” Brian Eno, the British musical savant behind the boycott drive, Cave insisted that he was not a supporter of the Israeli government to blame for the “injustices suffered by the Palestinian population”.

And yet, like the Israeli government he distances himself from, Cave recycled the stock canard to discredit the BDS movement by claiming that “the boycott of Israel can be seen as anti-Semitic at heart”.

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Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion Die in America: Zionism is Now the Only Religion Allowed in the U.S.

Protests against the genocide happening in Gaza have continued to increase across America, with thousands of students in American universities and colleges protesting against the daily mass murders of innocent civilians and children happening in Israel.

Last week, over 100 students were arrested at Columbia University in New York, with many students at other campuses all across the nation joining them in protest this past weekend.

The arrests of over 100 students at Columbia University last week came one day after Columbia University President Nemat Shafik appeared before a U.S. Federal Congressional hearing on “Antisemitism”.

She was specifically asked by Congresswoman Lisa McClain if the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” was antisemitic or not.

Dr. Shafik had obviously prepared for this question, because it was an answer to this question that resulted in the resignations of the President of Harvard University and the President of the University of Pennsylvania just a few months earlier.

Perhaps guessing that Dr. Shafik had prepared for this question, Congresswoman McClain added a new twist to the question: “or long live the intifada“, which is a completely different statement.

If Dr. Shafik had been allowed time to fully address both questions, perhaps she would have differentiated between the two, but as you will hear, she had no opportunity to fully answer the question, and was restricted to either a “yes” or “no” response.

(Also, what is that medallion that the Congresswoman is wearing around her neck that she clearly wants to display to everyone??)

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Israeli drones ‘luring people with sounds of babies crying before opening fire’

REPORTS have emerged of Israeli drones playing recordings of women and children crying to lure Palestinians to locations where they can be targeted before opening fire.

Residents of Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp – situated in the north – said they were woken up on Monday night to sounds of babies crying and women calling out for help.

When they went to help, they reported Israeli drones opening fire on them.

According to witnesses at the scene, up to ten people were injured by the drone fire overnight.

One resident told the Middle East Eye that they heard a woman screaming for help, saying, “Help me, my son was martyred”.

When people went to help the woman, they were instantly shot by drones and had to be taken to hospital as a result.

Other refugees inside the Nuseirat camp said they heard similar recordings, and that they were being played by Israeli forces to target Palestinians.

One man heard sounds of what he thought were woman and a baby calling for help from the street.

“The voice was coming from outside of the house door – it was a quadcopter with four propellers,” he said.

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Cruelty of Language: Leaked NY Times Memo Reveals Anti-Palestinian Bias of US Media

The New York Times coverage of the Israeli carnage in Gaza, like that of other mainstream US media, is a disgrace to journalism.

This assertion should not surprise anyone. US media is driven neither by facts nor morality, but by agendas, calculating and power-hungry. The humanity of 120 thousand dead and wounded Palestinians because of the Israeli genocide in Gaza is simply not part of that agenda.

In a report – based on a leaked memo from the New York Times – the Intercept found out that the so-called US newspaper of record has been feeding its journalists with frequently updated ‘guidelines’ on what words to use, or not use, when describing the horrific Israeli mass slaughter in the Gaza Strip, starting on October 7.

In fact, most of the words used in the paragraph above would not be fit to print in the NYT, according to its ‘guidelines’.

Shockingly, internationally recognized terms and phrases such as ‘genocide’, ‘occupied territory’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and even ‘refugee camps’, were on the newspaper’s rejection list.

It gets even more cruel. “Words like ‘slaughter’, ‘massacre’ and ‘carnage’ often convey more emotion than information. Think hard before using them in our own voice,” according to the memo, leaked and verified by the Intercept and other independent media.

Though such language control is, according to the NYT, aimed at fairness for ‘all sides’, their application was almost entirely one-sided. For example, a previous Intercept report showed that the American newspaper had, between October 7 and November 14, mentioned the word ‘massacre’ 53 times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians and only once in reference to Palestinians being killed by Israel.

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Germany Buries the Evidence of Complicity in Genocide: Nicaragua Exposes It

Last Thursday, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, the British-Palestinian war surgeon, gave his first address as the newly-appointed rector of Glasgow University, chosen in recognition of his work at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. The following day he flew to Berlin, where he had been invited to address a major conference about Palestine. On arrival he was taken away by police, interrogated for several hours and eventually told he had to leave Germany and wouldn’t be allowed to return until at least the end of April. Any attempt to speak to the conference via Zoom could result in a fine or even a year’s prison sentence. By the time he was released he couldn’t have taken part in the conference anyway, since it had been already invaded by at least 900 police and closed down. Berlin’s mayor said that it was ‘intolerable’ that the conference was taking place at all.

Speaking about his experience afterwards, Dr Abu-Sittah referred to the fact that Germany had – also last week – been defending itself at the International Court of Justice against charges by Nicaragua that it is an accomplice to genocidal war. ‘This is exactly what accomplices to a crime do’ he said. ‘They bury the evidence and they silence or harass or intimidate the witnesses’.

Watching the live feed of Germany’s lawyers at the Hague a few days earlier had been an odd experience. They gave the impression of being affronted that Germany had been accused of such crimes, especially by a small country which, they argued, had no stake in the case. Also, Israel could not yet be said to be committing genocide, because the ICJ has not yet determined the case brought against it by South Africa, which Germany had supported Israel in contesting. Because Israel was not party to the new case, it should simply be thrown out.

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LEAKED NYT GAZA MEMO TELLS JOURNALISTS TO AVOID WORDS “GENOCIDE,” “ETHNIC CLEANSING,” AND “OCCUPIED TERRITORY”

THE NEW YORK TIMES instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.

The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.

The memo — written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies — “offers guidance about some terms and other issues we have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October.”

While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives.

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Google Contract Shows Deal With Israel Defense Ministry

Google provides cloud computing services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and the tech giant has negotiated deepening its partnership during Israel’s war in Gaza, a company document viewed by TIME shows.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense, according to the document, has its own “landing zone” into Google Cloud—a secure entry point to Google-provided computing infrastructure, which would allow the ministry to store and process data, and access AI services.

The ministry sought consulting assistance from Google to expand its Google Cloud access, seeking to allow “multiple units” to access automation technologies, according to a draft contract dated March 27, 2024. The contract shows Google billing the Israeli Ministry of Defense over $1 million for the consulting service. 

The version of the contract viewed by TIME was not signed by Google or the Ministry of Defense. But a March 27 comment on the document, by a Google employee requesting an executable copy of the contract, said the signatures would be “completed offline as it’s an Israel/Nimbus deal.” Google also gave the ministry a 15% discount on the original price of consulting fees as a result of the “Nimbus framework,” the document says.

Project Nimbus is a controversial $1.2 billion cloud computing and AI agreement between the Israeli government and two tech companies: Google and Amazon. Reports in the Israeli press have previously indicated that Google and Amazon are contractually barred from preventing specific arms of the Israeli state using their technology under Project Nimbus. But this is the first time the existence of a contract showing that the Israeli Ministry of Defense is a Google Cloud customer has been made public. 

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Israel Lets AI Decide Who Dies in Gaza

The Israeli military has employed yet another AI-based system to select bombing targets in the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine has revealed. The new system has generated sweeping kill lists condemning tens of thousands of Palestinians, part of the IDF’s growing dependence on AI to plan lethal strikes.

Citing six Israeli intelligence officers, the Tel Aviv-based magazine said the previously undisclosed AI system, dubbed ‘Lavender,’ has played a “central role in the unprecedented bombing” of Gaza since last October, with the military effectively treating its output “as if it were a human decision.”

“Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets,” the outlet reported, adding that “during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants – and their homes – for possible air strikes.”

However, while thousands have been killed in the resulting air raids, the majority were “women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting,” the officers told the magazine, noting that Israeli field commanders often rely on the AI system without consulting more substantial intelligence.

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World War III Is Now Inevitable – Here’s Why It Can’t Be Avoided

If you’re getting the feeling like the globalists are really pushing hard for WWIII these days, you’re not alone.

In the past few months there has been multiple instances of European and US officials hinting at the possibility of a new military draft, the EU has talked openly about boots on the ground in Ukraine, NATO officials have stated unequivocally that they WILL NOT accept a loss in Ukraine to the Russians and the Kremlin has warned once again that nuclear weapons are on the table if western troops enter the war. The US government has recently asserted that Ukraine will be joining NATO, a red line in the sand for Russia.

Then there’s Israel and Gaza. I warned months ago in my article ‘It’s A Trap! The Wave Of Repercussions As The Middle East Fights “The Last War”’ that the war in Gaza would expand into a multi-front conflict that would probably include Iran. I also warned that it would be to Israel’s benefit if Iran entered the war because this would force the US to become directly involved. To be sure, Iran has already been engaging in proxy attacks on Israel through Lebanon, but Israel’s attack on the Iranian “embassy” or diplomatic station in Syria basically ensures that Iran will now directly commit to strikes on Israeli targets.

In other words, much like WWI, the situation is being escalated by the political elites despite the fact that the general public in the west is increasingly opposed to participating in the conflict. The globalists want to send us to war whether we like it or not.  Every decision they have made so far makes peaceful resolution impossible.

One saving grace that is perhaps new in the entire history of geopolitics is that the public is far more awake and aware of the fact that it’s not necessarily their “duty” to blindly go fight when their government calls on them to do so. Social media has also given a platform for people to widely voice their concerns about war, whereas in the past objectors felt isolated.

Obviously, some of this is based purely on fear – A large percentage of Gen Z is unequipped mentally or physically to go to war, which is why more than 70% of potential military recruits today are rejected before they even get to boot camp. These are many of the same young people who post Ukrainian flags to their social media profiles and jump headfirst into anti-Russian rhetoric, but now that they are faced with the possibility of having to sacrifice themselves for Ukraine they are angry and terrified.

However, there is also a large contingent of capable (and mostly conservative) men with the background and the aptitude for combat that still want nothing to do with Ukraine. The reason is simple: They believe that far-left western governments and globalists want to use them as cannon fodder to get rid of them. Once they are used up in war, there will be no one left to oppose the leftist takeover at home.

For most of us in America, Ukraine is irrelevant and we grow tired of wars in the Middle East. Whether left or right, we have no interest in fighting for them. But that’s not going to matter much, at least in terms of preventing a global war.

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GOOGLE WON’T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT ISRAEL USING ITS PHOTO SOFTWARE TO CREATE GAZA “HIT LIST”

THE ISRAELI MILITARY has reportedly implemented a facial recognition dragnet across the Gaza Strip, scanning ordinary Palestinians as they move throughout the ravaged territory, attempting to flee the ongoing bombardment and seeking sustenance for their families.

The program relies on two different facial recognition tools, according to the New York Times: one made by the Israeli contractor Corsight, and the other built into the popular consumer image organization platform offered through Google Photos. An anonymous Israeli official told the Times that Google Photos worked better than any of the alternative facial recognition tech, helping the Israelis make a “hit list” of alleged Hamas fighters who participated in the October 7 attack.

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