Tag: perpetual war

UN accuses Israel of turning Gaza hospitals into ‘death traps’

The UN Human Rights Office issued a report on 31 December condemning Israeli attacks on Gaza hospitals, saying they had become “death traps.”

The 23-page report documented various Israeli attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and the destruction of the strip’s health care system between October 2023 and July 2024.

“The destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza, and the extent of killing of patients, staff, and other civilians in these attacks, is a direct consequence of the disregard of international humanitarian and human rights law,” the report said.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said the Israeli military had shown “blatant disregard for international humanitarian and human rights law.”

“As if the relentless bombing and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza were not enough, the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap,” Turk said in a statement.

In recent days, the Israeli military escalated its attack on the Kamal Adwan Hospital in north Gaza while detaining the hospital director, Hussam Abu Safia, and hundreds of others.

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The West Bank’s Men of the CIA – Why Is the PA Killing Palestinians in Jenin?

Following a ten-day siege, the Palestinian Authority began, on December 14, a violent raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank.

The PA security forces used similar tactics as used by the Israeli occupation forces in their routine attacks on the area.

The camp, which is a mere half a square kilometer in size, hosts an ever-growing population of 24 thousand refugees, mostly the descendants of Palestinians ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias during the great catastrophe, or Nakba, of 1948.

The raid began with a tight siege, followed by an attack from multiple directions that resulted in the killing of an unarmed youth, Rebhi al-Shalabi, 19, then a 13-year-old child, Muhammad al-Amer.

The PA forces also killed Yazid Ja’ayseh, the commander of the Jenin Brigades, who had evaded Israeli assassination attempts for his leadership role in unifying all Palestinian Resistance fighters under the umbrella of a single group.

Expectedly, Israel is largely pleased with the PA’s action against the Palestinian Resistance, though it expects more. “The Palestinian Authority has been acting resolutely against the Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters over the past several weeks, army and Shin Bet sources said, but the Israeli officials expressed the hope that their effectiveness could be enhanced,” Haaretz reported.

Indeed, Israel had attempted to subdue Jenin 80 times in the last year alone, killing more than 220 people, Al Jazeera reported, citing Palestinian Ministry of Health sources.

By attacking Jenin, the PA is helping the Israeli army in more than one way: it is killing and detaining anti-Israeli occupation Resistance fighters, consuming the energy and resources of the Resistance, allowing Israel to spare thousands of soldiers so that they may carry on with the genocide in Gaza, and more.

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Wilson’s Folly, The Washington Hegemon and Why There Is Still No Peace On Earth

Another Christmas has passed and there is still no peace on earth. And the proximate cause of that vexing reality is the $1.3 trillion Warfare State planted on the banks of the Potomac – along with its web of war-making capabilities, bases, alliances and vassals stretching to the four corners of the planet.

So positioned, it stands in stark mockery of John Qunicy Adam’s sage advice to his new nation 200-years ago:

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.

But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

The last bolded sentence pretty much sums up the foolish, destructive, unnecessary and fiscally calamitous Forever Wars hatched in Washington all the way back to 1950. Nearly without exception they were waged against alleged foreign “monsters” of the very kind which John Quincy Adams urged his countrymen not to pursue: Kim Il-Sung, Mohammad Mosaddegh, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno, Salvador Allende, Ayatollah Khomeini, Daniel Ortega, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Nicolas Maduro, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are but the most prominent among these targets of Washington’s relentless global-spanning search for “monsters to destroy”.

Yet without exception not one of these assorted authoritarians, dictators, tyrants, thugs and revolutionists, along with the nation’s they ruled, posed a direct threat to the American homeland. Not even Putin or Xi could actually dream of mounting the massive armada of land, air and sea-forces needed to transit the great ocean moats and lay waste to the security and liberty of 335 million Americans domiciled from “sea to shining sea”.

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The Moral Bankruptcy of the West

On 19 December 2024, Human Rights Watch issued a 179-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

On 5 December 2024, Amnesty International issued a 296-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice found that a plausible case can be made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Given the West’s presumed commitment to human rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli genocide in its tracks.

Instead, the governments in those three countries, especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this genocide.

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Pentagon Launches Fresh Assault On Houthis In Yemen Ahead Of 2025

The war in Yemen and the Red Sea continues to intensify, following several ballistic missiles launched on Israel by the Iran-backed Houthis last week and this month. The pattern is that for whatever the Western coalition throws at the Houthis in terms of bombing raids, the militant group only intensifies its assaults.

The Pentagon announced Tuesday that forces under US Central Command (CENTCOM) have launched fresh attacks on Yemen after the Houthi militants targeted American warships and commercial ships earlier the same day.

US Navy ships and aircraft conduced the new attacks, striking Houthi-controlled coastal regions of Yemen, according to the CENTCOM statement.

American warplanes had destroyed “seven cruise missiles and one-way attack UAVs over the Red Sea,” the statement continued. “There were no injuries or damage to U.S. personnel or equipment in either incident,” it said.

Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam denounced the strikes as “an American aggression” and “a blatant violation of the sovereignty of an independent state and a blatant support for Israel.”

CENTCOM has justified the new action as necessary “to degrade Iran-backed Houthi efforts to threaten regional partners and military and merchant vessels in the region.”

Earlier on Tuesday the Houthis had also launched two more missiles at Israel. These direct attacks on Israel out of Yemen are coming almost daily at this point, and Israeli forces have also stepped up aerial attacks on Yemen in coordination with the Western coalition in the Red Sea.

Just days ago, on Thursday, Israel conducted some of the largest attacks on Yemen to date, hitting the international airport in Sanaa and other facilities. 

But the Houthis have clearly remained undeterred. Short of a full-scale ground invasion, these Western coalition aerial attacks are unlikely to do anything but prolong the war, which the Houthis say is a response to the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip.

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Zionism’s Colonial Heritage and Transatlantic Reach

The mainstream media and almost all of the American political elite class refuse to acknowledge reality: The crisis in Gaza did not begin on October 7, 2023.

Neither did the annihilation of Native Americans begin following the battle of the Little Bighorn. There is a continuous 120-year history of Zionism, whose foundational belief from the outset was colonial and racist. There was no place for Palestinians in Palestine.

This was straightforwardly put forth by its founders who believed in the sacred biblical right of Jews to take over Palestine and remove its indigenous inhabitants.

The U.S. “Indian Removal” policies of the 19th century and the brutal European imperial landgrabs in Africa in that era provided clear models of how this could be done. As in the Americas, Africa, and other colonized regions, Zionism was borne of a white settler colonial heritage.

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, the dislocation and suffering of the Palestinian people perpetrated by the U.S.-Israel colonial alliance has prompted questions about the sanity of both governments and exposed the racist underpinnings of Zionist propaganda. There are multiple intersections between the West and the Zionist movement that have led to the gradual century-old destruction of a people, the Palestinians, reaching the full realization of the genocide policy in 2023 in which the U.S. acts as its main material accomplice.

As a project co-founded by European Jewish leaders, with the encouragement of European and American evangelicals and the backing of the British state, Zionism emerged from an intense period of nationalism and colonialism in the late 19th century.[1] These twin forces rested on a bedrock of Judeo-Christian notions of white supremacy sanctified in biblical scripture that justified the subjugation of non-white peoples. Its “civilizing mission” impelled the British “mandate” over Palestine, then an almost wholly Arab territory, formally established from the spoils of the Great War and the demise of the Ottoman empire.

One of the prominent Zionists, Chaim (aka Charles, his publishing name) Weizmann, then a chemist and professor of some renown at the University of Manchester, approached the British government and helped procure in 1917 the “Balfour Declaration.” This document promised the Zionists a “national home” for the Jewish people in what would become a post-war League of Nations-sanctioned British-administered “mandate.” British state elites and Arthur Balfour himself, then foreign secretary and former prime minister, had specific interests in reaching this accord with the Zionists.

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Going Nuclear Is a Bad Option for South Korea

Robert Kelly and Min-hyung Kim support South Korean nuclearization:

With South Korea better able to handle the North Korean problem on its own, the United States could devote more attention to its top priority in East Asia—competition with China. But first, Washington needs to stop getting in its ally’s way and start letting Seoul make its own decisions. A South Korean decision to nuclearize could, on balance, be good not just for South Korea but also for the United States.

South Korea should not develop nuclear weapons, and the U.S. must remain firm on this point. Washington should not encourage South Korea to do this, and it should not look the other way if it happens. The last thing that East Asia needs is yet another nuclear weapons state. More proliferation will only make the region more unstable and dangerous than it is now.

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A Succinct History of The US Bioweapons Program

The United States didn’t have a bioweapons program after World War II, but certain Deep State actors really, really wanted one. So what did they do? They recruited German and Japanese scientists from both countries which had quite an extensive bioweapons program. It was called Operation Paperclip.

Now, before you utter the words “conspiracy theory”, please know that RFK Jr. just mentioned Operation Paperclip in a recent speech. He certainly did. Because it’s real. You can watch the full clip here.

Who recruited these evil scientists? The CIA of course, placing them as the heads of research labs, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. RFK Jr. then proceeds to tell us about the experiments they did on the unwitting American people. They sprayed toxins everywhere, from airports to the Pentagon air conditioning system, just to see what happened. They poisoned the water at NIH. They filled light bulbs with bacteria and placed them in the New York City subway system. When the bulbs broke, which they inevitably did, harmful microbes filled the space. RFK Jr. says some of the microbes are still there today. He says that 200 aerial dosing tests were done in seaside cities as well as Midwestern cities.

We’ve all heard of German and Japanese ingenuity and efficiency, and by 1969, the US had a bioweapons program that RFK Jr. describes as “equivalent to a nuclear program.” The scientists even bragged at how cost effective their program was, saying that they could kill at a cost of 29 cents per person.

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Pretending Your Partners Aren’t Who They Are

Maybe Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), who is now the leader of Syria, really has changed. Maybe he has matured, as he told CNN, as if his years as an al-Qaeda terrorist leader were a youthful indiscretion.

But the world cannot simply take the pragmatic rebel at his word. On December 8, after Asaad fell and Jolani took over control of Syria, U.S. President Joe Biden said “We’ve taken note of statements by the leaders of these rebel groups in recent days and they’re saying the right things now. But as they take on greater responsibility, we will assess not just their words but their actions.”

But judge them just by their words is precisely what the Biden administration did. HTS is designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, and the State Department has a $10 million reward for information leading to the capture of Jolani. Despite the designation and the bounty, U.S. State Department officials met with Jolani on December 20, at which time, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf told Jolani that “based on our discussion,” the U.S. “would not be pursuing the Rewards for Justice reward offer that has been in effect for some years.” The decision was based, not on Jolani’s actions, but on his words, on “our discussion.”

In proxy wars and regime changes, there are always three parties: the country undertaking the action, the government or country the action is aimed at, and the domestic group that is being used or that is intended to replace the current regime. The history of overt and covert U.S. operations is littered with disasters that resulted from a third party that was as, or more, nefarious than the regime it replaced. In order to avoid immersing itself in the turbulent seas of direct action, the U.S. has dipped its toes into some pretty fetid proxy waters. The challenge after is to rebrand the proxy group to sell it to the international community.

Abu Mohammad al-Jolani has traded his al-Qaeda name for his given name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and his rebel clothes for Western style clothes. The founder of the al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda, has renamed and rebranded his organization. He has made politically pragmatic promises to the United States. But terrorists are not always to be trusted. And whether he is al-Jolani or al-Sharaa, must be judged by his actions, as Biden and Leaf insist, and not by his words.

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UN Expert Urges Medical World to Cut Ties With Israel Amid Attacks on Gaza Hospitals

As Israeli forces stand accused of war crimes during attacks on multiple Gaza hospitals in recent days, Francesca Albanese – the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories – on Monday implored the global medical community to respond by cutting ties with Israel.

“I urge medical professionals worldwide to pursue the severance of all ties with Israel as a concrete way to forcefully denounce Israel’s full destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza, a critical tool of its ongoing genocide,” Albanese wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Albanese amplified a post by Dr. Rupa Marya – one of the most vocal defenders of Palestinian human rights in the U.S. medical community – calling on Israeli forces to release Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia.

Abu Safiya, who documented Israel’s siege and attack on Kamal Adwan and who reported last week that nearly 50 people including five hospital staff members were killed by an Israel Defense Forces airstrike on a nearby apartment tower, was among dozens of other medical staffers abducted by IDF troops on Saturday.

After besieging and attacking the hospital for weeks, Israeli forces raided the facility and rounded up 240 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel claimed without evidence that Kamal Adwan was being used as a Hamas command center. With the facility shut down and badly damaged, critical patients and their caregivers were forced to evacuate to the nearby Indonesian Hospital.

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