Tag: palestine

FBI TARGETS MUSLIMS AND PALESTINIANS IN WAKE OF HAMAS ATTACK, CIVIL RIGHTS ADVOCATES WARN

FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT agents have questioned and detained Palestinian nationals and made visits to mosques in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, according to civil rights advocates.

Abed Ayoub, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, or ADC, said that his organization has fielded multiple reports of individuals and mosques being visited by the FBI this week. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a police accountability group, also said it had received reports of federal agents intimidating Palestinians and their supporters. 

The interactions are reminiscent of surveillance and targeting of Muslim and Arab communities in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and Ayoub told The Intercept that they are contributing to a resurgence of fear among Muslim communities. “Like, ‘Oh my god, this is happening again, how are we going to protect ourselves?’”

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Israel warns Hezbollah – beware what happened to Hamas: Minister says Israel does NOT want a war in the north but if the Iran-backed militia force one ‘it will pay a very heavy price’ after rocket fired from Lebanon kills Israeli

Israel has warned Hezbollah it would pay a ‘very heavy price’ if the Iranian-backed movement enters the ongoing conflict.

The Israeli government said today it was willing to fight a war on two or more fronts as it issued a stark warning to its northern neighbour to stay out of the clashes taking place between it and Hamas.

The country’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said the Jewish state did not want a war with Lebanon and was prepared to show restraint despite shooting from both sides taking place at the border which has claimed the life of at least one Israeli so far.

It comes Israel continues its bombardment of Gaza following last week’s raids by Hamas which are confirmed to have killed hundreds of Israeli civilians and soldiers. It has confirmed that at least 155 people have also been taken hostage by the terrorist organisation.

Military leaders had warned the people of Gaza City, which is close to the border with Israel, that they should evacuate ahead of a planned ground offensive into the Palestinian territory. Officials have said at least 600,000 have done so so far. 

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Here’s What the Hamas Attack Tells Us About U.S. Immigration Policy: Nothing

In the middle of his statement responding to last weekend’s barbaric attacks in Israel, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis veered sideways into a non-sequitur about American immigration policy.

In a post to X (formerly known as Twitter), DeSantis said President Joe Biden ought to freeze all foreign aid flowing to Hamas, the terrorist group responsible for Saturday’s attacks that left more than 1,000 people dead, and freeze money “made available to Iran.” Then, DeSantis added, Biden must “immediately shut down America’s wide-open southern border to ensure we are in a position to better protect Americans here at home from these real threats.”

That is…quite the jump.

Yes, it’s true that Saturday’s attack on Israel involved people crossing a border, and that immigrants coming to the U.S. also cross a border as part of that process. That’s literally the only similarity.

To be clear: Immigrants seeking to come to the U.S. to live and work are absolutely not terrorists conducting a paramilitary operation. Mexico and the U.S. are not Israel and Palestine. And, as Saturday’s attack makes obviously clear, even the most extreme measures designed to “shut down” a border can be defeated.

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Illinois Man Killed Muslim Boy, 6, In Hate Crime Motivated By Israeli-Hamas War, Police Say

On 10/14/2023 at approximately 11:38 AM, deputies with the Will County Sheriff’s Office were sent to a residence located near the 16200 block of S. Lincoln Highway in Unincorporated Plainfield Township regarding a stabbing that occurred involving a landlord and renter. When police personnel arrived on scene they located the suspect, Joseph M. Czuba (age 71) of Plainfield sitting upright outside on the ground near the driveway of the residence. Joseph Czuba had a laceration to his forehead and was later transported to a local area hospital for treatment.

Deputies located two victims inside the residence in a bedroom. Both victims had multiple stab wounds to their chest, torso, and upper extremities. Both victims were transported to a local area hospital for treatment. The thirty-two (32) year-old female was transported in serious condition and had over a dozen stab wounds to her body. The female victim is recovering from her injuries at a local area hospital and is expected to survive this brutal attack.

It was initially reported to police personnel that the juvenile victim was eight-years-old. That initial information was incorrect, and juvenile victim is six (6) years-old. The six-year-old male was transported to the hospital in critical condition. The boy later succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced deceased by a doctor. On 10/15/2023, an autopsy was conducted on the six-year-old victim. The forensic pathologist conducting the autopsy removed the knife from the abdomen of the boy at that time. The six-year-old boy was stabbed twenty-six (26) times throughout his body. The knife used in this attack is a twelve-inch serrated military style knife that has a seven-inch blade.

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Iran Issues Dire Warning to Israel If Attacks in Gaza Continue: ‘Huge Earthquake’

On Saturday, Iran’s foreign minister called on Israel to halt attacks on Gaza, warning that the war may expand to other parts of the Middle East if Hezbollah joins the battle, saying that Israel would suffer “a huge earthquake.”

While speaking with reporters in Beirut, Hossein Amirabdollahian said that Lebanon’s Hezbollah group has taken all the scenarios of a war into consideration and Israel should stop its attacks on Gaza as soon as possible.

Hezbollah is considered by Israel to be its most serious immediate threat, with estimates suggesting that they may have nearly 150,000 rockets and missiles, including precision-guided missiles that can hit anywhere in Israel.

The group consists of thousands of fighters, many of whom were veterans of Syria’s 12-year conflict, as well as various types of military drones. Since last week’s attack by the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which left hundreds of Israeli civilians and soldiers dead, Hezbollah fighters have been on alert along Lebanon’s borders with Israel. 

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PROPAGANDA BLITZ: HOW MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS PUSHING FAKE PALESTINE STORIES

After Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, IDF forces responded with airstrikes, leveling Gazan buildings. The violence so far has claimed the lives of more than 2,500 people. Western media, however, show far more interest and have much greater sympathy with Israeli dead than Palestinian ones and have played their usual role as unofficial spokespersons for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

One case in point is the claim that, during their incursion into southern Israel, Hamas fighters stopped to round up, kill and mutilate 40 Israeli babies, beheading them and leaving their bodies behind.

The extraordinary assertion was originally reported by the Israeli channel i24 News, which based it on anonymous Israeli military sources. Despite offering no proof whatsoever, this highly inflammatory claim about an enemy made by an active participant in a conflict was picked up and repeated across the world by a host of media (e.g., in the United States by Fox News, CNN, MSN, Business Insider, and The New York Post).

Meanwhile, the front pages of the United Kingdom’s largest newspapers were festooned with the story, the press outraged at the atrocity and inviting their readers to feel the same way.

Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence, and a story like this should have been met with serious skepticism, given who was making the claim. The first question any reporter should have asked was, “Where is the evidence?” Given multiple opportunities to stand by it, the IDF continually distanced itself from the claims. Nevertheless, the story was simply too useful not to publish.

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CIA Warned of Escalated Violence Against Israel Days Before Hamas Attack

A New York Times report says that in late September and early October the CIA produced analyses that suggested violence would be coming from Gaza but did not predict the large-scale attack on Israel stemming from Hamas militants just days into October.

Intelligence collected by the CIA and other partner agencies was used by analysts to create the reports, which cited a recent wave of protests in Gaza that could turn violent.  

However, the CIA has not prioritized intelligence in the Gaza Strip for several years, due to other threats in the region that were seen as larger or more concerning, which gives a possible explanation as to why U.S. and Israeli intelligence was apparently caught off guard by the surprise attack on Oct. 7.

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The US Is Just As Culpable As Israel For The Atrocities Committed In Gaza

The Israeli government dropped thousands of leaflets on Gaza telling everyone who lives in the northern part of the strip that they have 24 hours to evacuate to the southern part, and then bombed the people who were trying to evacuate.

United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric denounced the evacuation order, saying the UN “considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences.” Many Palestinians have said they’re going to stay where they are because they have nowhere safe to go, despite being told by Israel they must leave if they want to “save their lives”.

We’re about to see the death and destruction get much, much worse in Gaza, and it’s already very, very bad. As of this writing the official death toll from Israeli airstrikes in Gaza is speeding past 1,900, a number which includes 614 children. The primary job of Israel apologists in the coming days will be producing and circulating narratives explaining why this self-evidently terrible thing is actually perfectly fine and acceptable.

It’s so incredibly obvious what we’re looking at here. The only thing putting a wobble on people’s perception is the immense amount of propaganda distortion the media is churning out on this issue, plus the fact that the demographics look a bit different from what history has conditioned people to watch out for. If there were two million Jewish people trapped by Christians in a giant concentration camp and placed under total siege, being told that half of them had 24 hours to relocate into the other half or be killed, nobody would have any confusion about what they were witnessing.

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America’s Broken, Lurid View of Foreign Wars

The English-language media has spent a lot of time debating whether Israeli babies were beheaded. An Israeli newscaster had reported that a soldier found decapitated children at the scene of an attack on Kfar Aza by the Palestinian group Hamas. The story made it to front pages around the world. Other journalists began to scrutinize the claim and heard different accounts from different officials in the Israeli government. U.S. President Joe Biden implied that he had seen photos of the beheadings, then the White House backtracked.

All this debate around beheadings seemed to miss a more fundamental point: that children were killed. The existence of a massacre should be enough to shock and horrify. Hamas killed or took hostage hundreds of Israelis. (Clearly frustrated with media skepticism, the Israeli government posted pictures of burned Israeli children to social media.) The Israeli military has killed hundreds of Palestinians with bombs in retaliation. The intense focus on one gruesome detail amid a pile of dead and maimed bodies shows there is something fundamentally wrong with the way American society approaches war in foreign countries.

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BEFORE THEY VOWED TO ANNIHILATE HAMAS, ISRAELI OFFICIALS CONSIDERED IT AN ASSET

ISRAELI PRESIDENT ISAAC Herzog said this week that, as far as the military is concerned, there is little difference between Gaza’s civilian population and Hamas, which has governed the besieged territory since 2007. “It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians [being] not aware, not involved,” Herzog said in the middle of an unprecedented Israeli bombing campaign in retaliation for Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians last week. “They could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”

Herzog’s remarks represent Israeli policymakers’ longtime conflation of Hamas with all Palestinians in Gaza and often with all Palestinians everywhere. Such attitudes have hardened in the past week. The Israel Defense Forces, for example, posted that “you either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism.” Many U.S. politicians have issued similar claims. “Anyone that is pro-Palestinian is pro-Hamas,” tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.

Hamas, in that sense, has been a convenient presence for Israel, whose leaders have favored the militant group over the Palestinian Authority, or PA, the pseudo-government established during the Oslo peace process to administer the Palestinian territories until the details of a sovereign Palestinian state could be negotiated. While Hamas has been enemy No. 1 in Israeli rhetoric for years, offering a cover for Israel to maintain its blockade and periodically kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, it has also offered Israel an alibi to avoid abiding by its supposed commitment to Palestinian statehood.

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