Tag: perpetual war

Israel Resuming Hostage Talks After Ugly Details Emerge Of ‘Friendly Fire’ Incident

Israel’s Mossad spy agency director David Barnea has been dispatched back to Doha amid reports that the Netanyahu government is open to pursuing a second temporary truce and hostage deal. 

Axios describes it as “the first meeting between senior Israeli and Qatari officials since the collapse of the seven-day ceasefire that led to the expansion of the Israeli military operation to southern Gaza.” Looming in the background is intensifying pressure on Prime Minister Netanyahu in the wake of Friday’s ‘friendly fire’ incident which killed three hostages who had been trying to escape Hamas captivity.

Talks are “just a beginning” is is likely to be “long, difficult and complicated” – according to a source speaking to Axios. CIA director Bill Burns and Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel are also said to be part of efforts to revive talks. Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed to complete Gaza operations which have the aim of eradicating Hamas.

But already at a time that hostage and victim’s families have led huge protests demanding more be done to secure the release of the over 100 captives that remain, both domestic and international pressure is at breaking point.

The new to emerge details made known by a preliminary military investigation are very ugly and will drive controversy against military and government decision-makers into overdrive. The three young men killed by IDF troop fire were shirtless, waving a white-flag and shouting in Hebrew when they were gunned down by Israeli forces. According to the Times of Israel based on military statements:

Three hostages shot dead by Israeli troops in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood Friday were shirtless, and one of them was carrying a stick with a makeshift white flag, the IDF said Saturday after an initial probe into the tragic incident.

Yotam Haim, Samar Talalka and Alon Lulu Shamriz managed to escape Hamas captivity before they were mistakenly shot dead by troops on Friday morning at around 10 a.m.

According to a senior officer in the Southern Command, citing an initial probe, the incident began after a soldier from Bislamach Brigade’s 17th Battalion stationed in a building identified three suspicious figures exiting a building several dozen meters away.

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JOE BIDEN KEEPS REPEATING HIS FALSE CLAIM THAT HE SAW PICTURES OF BEHEADED BABIES

ON OCTOBER 11, four days after the Hamas-led attacks in Israel, President Joe Biden addressed a group of Jewish community leaders in the Indian Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” Biden said. “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.”

It was a jarring statement. And it was false.

Biden had seen no such pictures, nor received any such confirmation. He made those comments after Nicole Zedeck, a journalist for Israel’s i24 News, reported that 40 babies had been decapitated, citing Israeli soldiers at the scene of the attacks at Kfar Aza. A spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu subsequently stated that babies and toddlers had been found with their “heads decapitated.”

Three hours later, Biden promoted the claim to the world and asserted he personally saw pictures of the horrifying scene, giving the story supreme legitimacy.

Hamas denied the allegation, and other Israeli journalists at the scene began reporting they had not seen evidence such beheadings had occurred nor had they been told it had happened by any of the Israeli soldiers they spoke with. Zedeck, the reporter from i24 News who was first to spread the allegation, later tweeted that “soldiers told me they believe 40 babies/children were killed. The exact death toll is still unknown as the military continues to go house to house and find more Israeli casualties.”

An anchor at the network defended the reporter and said that three separate Israel Defense Forces officials had told i24 News “that around 40 babies & small children were murdered in Kfar Aza, some burned, some beheaded.” CBS News and CNN also spread Israeli assertions that babies and toddlers had been decapitated.

Eventually, the Israeli government was forced to admit it had no evidence to support the claim, though it continued to imply that it might be true. A military spokesperson said that the IDF would not further investigate the beheading charges because it would be “disrespectful for the dead.”

White House officials then “clarified” what they claimed Biden was actually referring to. “U.S. officials and the president have not seen pictures or confirmed such reports independently,” reported the Washington Post. “The president based his comments about the alleged atrocities on the claims from Netanyahu’s spokesman and media reports from Israel, according to the White House.” The purpose of such graphic descriptions, according to National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, was “to underscore the utter depravity and the barbaric nature with which these terrorists murdered and butchered innocent Israeli civilians.” Kirby, who dodged direct questions about whether Biden had personally seen any photos, added, “And that further underscores why — and this is what the President’s specific point was yesterday — that we got to stay with Israel. We’ve got to continue to make sure they have the support that they need.”

Biden has never publicly retracted the incendiary claims. And the Washington Post reported that the president had been urged by staffers not to make that allegation in his speech on October 11, “because those reports were unverified.”

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Zelensky’s Glory and Its Price

Zelensky’s fame and glory in the West are indisputable, and his rise to celebrity status is remarkable. The transition from a comedian who played the piano on stage with his pants down to a politician who was compared by the media to Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and many other famous politicians will earn him a noted place in history.  The big questions are what would this particular place be and at what price for achieving it.

Let us start with the price. As the war in Ukraine drags on every day it brings new numbers of dead and wounded, additional devastation of cities, and villages plus an increasing risk of nuclear WW3.

Presently, the number of Ukrainian victims is estimated at hundreds of thousands, but for some in Washington, this is acceptable. Cynical politicians like Senate Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and many others from both parties openly declare that supporting a proxy war in Ukraine is a very good and cheap investment. Washington’s declared goal is to weaken Russia, and this is achieved by Ukrainian soldiers perishing while Americans are not. At the same time, U.S., Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is threatening members of Congress that he will send “your uncles, cousins, and sons to fight Russia if aid to Ukraine is not approved.”

The Washington Post columnist Lee Hockstader explains that “U.S. aid for Ukraine is a bargain”, although he has to admit that nearly half of Americans now say the United States is spending too much on Ukraine.

To prove his point, Hockstader quotes Brown University researchers who studied the cost of America’s post-9/11 conflicts and found that 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria drained a whopping $8 trillion from U.S. coffers. He adds that President Biden noted that the Afghan war alone cost taxpayers more than $300 million per day for two decades. That’s about triple what the U.S. has spent daily for Ukraine, so our support here seems like an even better deal.

What Biden and Hockstader conveniently forget to mention is the other math in Brown’s report which the number of victims of the U.S. wars in these countries. Here they are:  Over 940,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence. An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting. Over 432,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting with 38 million refugees and displaced persons. At least four times as many active duty personnel and war veterans of post-9/11 conflicts have died of suicide than in combat. The wars have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the U.S. and abroad.

Who cares?  Biden, Blinken, Hockstader, McConnell, etc. certainly don’t. They and many others in the U.S. and EU don’t care that the whole country of Ukraine was engaged by the collective West in a proxy war against Russia with whom for centuries it was bound by close religious, historical, economic, cultural, and family ties. I placed religion first to underscore that those who declare their adherence to Judeo-Christian values have provoked the war between the two Christian nations, not to promote democracy, but rather to use Ukrainians as cannon fodder to preserve the geopolitical advantage of the U.S. by weakening Russia.

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HOW BIDEN’S STATE DEPARTMENT CONCEALS ITS “HUMAN RIGHTS BLACK HOLE” IN THE MIDDLE EAST

LAST WEEK, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted a meeting with leaders of human rights organizations to mark the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. But through subtle stage management, the State Department arranged for Blinken’s praise for human rights to be recorded and promulgated — while the world was not able to hear the retorts from human rights advocates who criticized America’s backing of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The Universal Declaration was a landmark in history. While it was only a statement of principles, and so did not have legal force in itself, it was broadly inspirational and has formed the basis for numerous subsequent treaties and laws. According to Guinness World Records, it’s been translated into more languages than any other document — over 550, from Abkhaz to Zulu.

After the December 7 meeting, the internet exploded in bitter laughter at Blinken, and it’s easy to understand why. At the start of the meeting at the State Department, Blinken informed the assemblage that “the universality of human rights is under severe challenge and rights are being violated in far too many places …  And of course we see atrocities in the midst of conflict.” Yes, of course. Just one day later, on December 8, the U.S. vetoed a resolution at the U.N. Security Council calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza.

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Pentagon Seeks EMP Weapon To Eliminate Drone Swarms

Faced with the reality that drones are reshaping the modern battlefields in Ukraine and Gaza, the Pentagon has been tasked with finding a budget-friendly solution to eliminate these “flying IEDs.” While missiles are too expensive, and laser beams are a distant dream, the next best cost-effective weapon US military officials are eyeing up could be electromagnetic pulse weapons to counter drone swarms.

According to the System for Award Management (SAM.gov) website, the US Air Force has published a contract opportunity for private industry titled “Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Defense Against Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS).” 

The service outlined the drone-killing features of the new EMP weapon it is seeking:

“The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL/RI) is conducting market research to seek information from industry on the landscape of research and development (R&D) for available Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) solutions towards countering multiple Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). EMP solutions could be ground and/or aerial based that provide effective mitigation against Department of Defense (DoD) UAS groups 1, 2, and smaller group 3 aircraft.” 

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US-Made Munitions Used In Israel’s White Phosphorous Attacks On Lebanon

The Israeli army used US-manufactured white phosphorous shells in a brutal attack on south Lebanon in October, the Washington Post reported Monday, citing an analysis of shell fragments found in the southern Lebanese village of Al-Dhahira. 

A Washington Post journalist came across the remnants of three 155-millimeter artillery shells near the border. Production codes found on the shells indicate that they were made by ammunition depots in Louisiana and Arkansas in 1989 and 1992.

Residents told the journalist that the shells in question “incinerated at least four homes.” Nine people were injured in the white phosphorous attack, which reportedly took place on October 16, including three who were hospitalized. 

Photos and videos verified by Amnesty International show the white phosphorus falling on Al-Dhahira on October 16.  “Israeli forces continued to shell the town with white phosphorus munitions for hours,” trapping residents in their homes until 7:00 AM the next day, locals told the Washington Post, adding that they now refer to that evening as the “black night.”

Israel has used white phosphorous on southern Lebanon over 60 times since the war began in October, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). “The Israeli army fired artillery shells containing white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon, in military operations along Lebanon’s southern border between 10 and 16 October 2023,” Amnesty International said on October 31st, adding that the October 16 attack must be immediately investigated as a war crime.

Israel claimed its use of the banned munitions was in line with international law, given that they used them to create “smokescreens” and not for targeting, according to an army statement.

 However, the October 16 white phosphorous attack took place at night, when “smoke would have little practical use … and [when] there were no Israeli troops on the Lebanese side of the border to mask with smokescreens,” Washington Post said. 

“Residents speculated that the phosphorus was meant to displace them from the village and to clear the way for future Israeli military activity in the area,” it added. 

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AS U.S.-FUNDED WARS RAGE IN ISRAEL AND UKRAINE, PENTAGON WATCHDOG WARNS OF MILITARY FAILURES

AS CALLS GROW in Congress to condition aid to Israel and halt funding to Ukraine altogether, the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General issued a report that details widespread failures in the Pentagon’s operations. 

In a semiannual report to Congress, the watchdog found a breakdown in the process to provide care for sexual assault survivors, damaged artillery earmarked for Ukraine, and continued failures to monitor the Defense Department’s single most expensive program, the scandal-ridden F-35 fighter jet. Taken together, the inspector general’s findings paint a picture of a sprawling military-industrial complex that, while providing billions in aid to foreign militaries, has failed to solve long-standing issues that result in extreme levels of taxpayer waste. 

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Is TikTok brainwashing the kids about Gaza? No, this is just an old moral panic in a new form

In a famous two-frame meme from The Simpsons, Principal Skinner asks himself: “Am I so out of touch?” “No,” he decides, with resolve. “It’s the children who are wrong.” It’s the easiest thing, dismissing the views of young people when they question our beliefs. It’s even easier when those views are mainly expressed on a social media platform that can also be dismissed as a lawless land of misinformation and clickbaiting. And so as Palestine- and Gaza-related content explodes on TikTok, predictable responses have arrived, and some have been pretty out there.

The Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley called for the banning of TikTok altogether when she said in a primary campaign debate last week that “for every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok, every day they become 17% more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that”. Last month, a Republican congressman said that TikTok was “digital fentanyl”, brainwashing young Americans against their country and its allies. Over at the Telegraph, we are told that the app’s “threat is real”.

TikTok responded by stating that it’s just how the algorithm works. It does not “take sides” but simply personalises the user’s news feed to show more of the kind of content they interact with. And as Israel, Palestine and Gaza began to dominate the news cycle, users naturally began to search and consume more content relating to them. That has resulted in a whole churn of videos. Some informative, such as Gaza map breakdowns; some poorly sourced and propagandistic on both sides; and some competitively supportive of one party or another. Within those interactions, there are nuances, such as breakdown of support by location and age profile. The overall picture, though, shows a much higher appetite for content that is supportive of Palestine; views attached to pro-Palestine hashtags vastly outnumber those such as #istandwithisrael.

Dismissing this as “brainwashing” is to write off not only millions of young people, but also an entire social media development that is not just a fad, but a new way of consuming news and information. TikTok is the most downloaded app for 18- to 24-year-olds, and the way they use the platform to navigate their daily lives means it is no longer just for viral dance videos, but increasingly a search engine that users turn to instead of Google. Instagram has evolved in the same way. Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president, in an acknowledgment of the encroachment of these apps on Google’s territory, said that according to Google’s own studies, “almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram”.

Ignoring these developments also assumes that all information on TikTok is bad, self-generated and highly manipulable garbage. The reality is that news reports about Gaza from mainstream media are frequently clipped and circulated on TikTok, extending their window of relevance and consumption. Over the past few days the most-watched clip on CNN’s TikTok account, which has more than 3 million followers, is one of its news anchor Jake Tapper taking Mark Regev, senior adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu, to task over the killing of the family of one of CNN’s producers in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes. On the Guardian’s TikTok account, the most-watched video of the past six weeks, with more than 7m views, is of a protester interrupting the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and calling for a ceasefire.

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Israel’s genocide in Gaza has Biden’s green light

As Israeli warplanes resumed bombing Gaza on December 1st, putting an end to a seven-day pause, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s motorcade “sped out of his hotel in Israel on its way to the Tel Aviv airport,” the Washington Post reported.

Before exiting Israel, Blinken claimed that he had pressed its government to prioritize “minimizing harm to innocent civilians.” But according to Axios, “Blinken didn’t ask Israel to stop the operation but… said the longer the high-intensity military campaign goes on, the more international pressure will build on both the U.S. and Israel to stop it.”

Additionally, Blinken asked Israel to “make sure that a military operation in southern Gaza doesn’t lead to an even higher amount of civilian casualties.” To Blinken, “minimizing harm” to the people of Gaza apparently means murdering slightly fewer of them.

After more than one week of relentless Israeli attacks on civilian targets, Blinken has been forced to acknowledge that even his token requests were ignored. When it comes to Israel’s assault, Blinken said Thursday, “there does remain a gap between exactly what I said when I was there — the intent to protect civilians — and the actual results that we’re seeing on the ground.”

There is not merely a gap between what Blinken and his colleagues say out loud and the reality on the ground, but an endless chasm.

One month ago, the Biden administration claimed that it was pressuring Israel to use smaller bombs against the densely population Gaza Strip. “If the United States can get those smaller munitions to Israel, American officials hope Israel will use them to mitigate the risk to civilians,” the New York Times reported on Nov. 4th. That talking point is long forgotten. “In the first month and a half, Israel dropped more than 22,000 guided and unguided bombs on Gaza that were supplied by Washington,” according to US intelligence figures obtained by the Washington Post. During this same period, the US has given Israel at least 15,000 bombs, including 2,000-pound bunker busters. So much for “smaller bombs.”

The Wall Street Journal characterizes the current US approach as “urging its top ally in the region to consider preventing large-scale civilian casualties while supplying many of the munitions deployed.” The US position is therefore akin to an accomplice continuing to re-arm a school shooter’s assault rifle while asking him to consider slaughtering fewer students. The Biden administration is so committed to fueling the carnage in Gaza that it has even invoked rare emergency powers for transferring tank ammunition without Congressional review. “The arms shipment has been put on an expedited track, and Congress has no power to stop it,” the New York Times reports.

The White House’s circumvention of Congressional review is consistent with its refusal to follow US law, which bars weapons transfers to countries that commit serious human rights abuses. The Biden administration has evaded this requirement by simply pretending that it is a helpless bystander, rather than willing accomplice.  

As the first phase of Israel’s military campaign expanded to multiple hospitals in mid-November, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted to CNN that his military “is doing an exemplary job trying to minimize civilian casualties,” and “fighting according to international law.”

In an appearance on the same network moments later, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declined to endorse Netanyahu’s self-assessment. Asked if Israel is operating according to the rules of war, Sullivan replied: “I’m not going to sit here and play judge or jury on that question.” Sullivan’s non-response was a tacit admission that he does in fact know the answer: if he believed that was Israel was adhering to international (and US) law, he surely would have said so.

The US decision to not play “judge and jury” continues to this day. According to the Washington Post, administration officials now “acknowledge the United States is not conducting real-time assessments of Israel’s adherence to the laws of war.” The reason is obvious: if the White House were to conduct such assessments, it would be forced to stop supplying Israel with weapons.

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What US Got Most Crucially Wrong in UN Veto

The United States has once again voted for genocide before all the world. 

There is no government in the world that has more power to put an end to likely the worst crime of the century than the United States. 

And yet on Friday at the U.N. Security Council Washington vetoed a resolution that would have demanded an immediate ceasefire and an end to Israel’s unmitigated slaughter. The U.S. blocked the measure because it unequivocally wants the killing to continue. 

It can talk all it wants about its rejection of the resolution because it did not condemn Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7.  But the crux of the U.S. justification for a vote that has brought it worldwide condemnation is a willfully ignorant statement about the cause of this war. 

In the U.S. explanation of its veto, the U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood said: 

“Perhaps most unrealistically, this resolution retains a call for an unconditional ceasefire. I explained in my remarks this morning why this is not only unrealistic but dangerous: it would simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on October 7. …

As long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, any ceasefire is at best temporary and is certainly not peace. And any ceasefire that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza would deny Palestinian civilians the chance to build something better for themselves.”

This formulation reveals the U.S. government’s twisted thinking. The occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza are not the causes of this and previous wars, but instead Hamas’ “ideology of destruction.” Which stems from what? Just some evil DNA?

Thus for the U.S. the solution is not ending the occupation but maintaining the slaughter supposedly to destroy Hamas, even though Israel has killed relatively few of its fighters and none of its top commanders and is instead waging a war of annihilation against the Gazan people.  

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