Tag: perpetual war

It’s all about provoking your reaction

So wise up!

With terrorism, as with all asymmetric political action, “the action is in the reaction of the opposition,” as Saul Alinsky, the leftist activist, put it in his book Rules for Radicals.

This isn’t conspiracy stuff, nor impossible “4th dimensional chess” – it’s just plain, old 2-dimensional chess. That’s all.

Hamas, al Qaeda, and similar groups slaughter civilians – beheaded babies or not, they certainly murdered hundreds and hundreds of innocent, civilian Israeli non-combatants in this one (including an extended family member of mine) just as they slaughtered thousands on September 11 – for a reason, not simply because they are angry or devils. It’s a tactic. They are trying to provoke a reaction.

They are trying to make you angry, to make you hate, even drive you crazy. Yes – yes – for the purpose of making the more powerful force (i.e. the United States, Israel) do even worse to their own people, such as getting the U.S. to invade Afghanistan and getting Israel to bomb the Gaza strip. Not that al Qaeda was from Afghanistan, but that’s where they were and that’s who they knew were gonna get it. (Also, by the way, U.S. support for Israel’s crimes in Palestine and Lebanon was a huge part of the motive for al Qaeda’s war against the United States in the first place, including for some of the most important pilot hijackers and organizers of the plot.)

This is then meant to provoke still further counter-reactions. It “heightens the contradictions” as the commies used to say. It forces leaders of Muslim states and armed groups everywhere to take a stand. It destroys stability and negotiations and progress, radicalizes new groups and forces everyone back into the fight on one side or the other. It makes every sock-puppet princeling of the Gulf take a stand in support like the Ayatollah or sell out in silence in the most embarrassing way, like Crown Prince bin Salman, etc.

It’s the same reason Bosnian Muslim forces butchered Serbs and Chechen Muslim forces butchered Russians and ISIS slaughtered Shi’ites: to provoke a worse crisis for everyone in the hopes that the overall situation changes to their advantage.

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INSTAGRAM CENSORED IMAGE OF GAZA HOSPITAL BOMBING, CLAIMS IT’S TOO SEXUAL

INSTAGRAM AND FACEBOOK users attempting to share scenes of devastation from a crowded hospital in Gaza City claim their posts are being suppressed, despite previous company policies protecting the publication of violent, newsworthy scenes of civilian death.

Late Tuesday, amid a 10-day bombing campaign by Israel, the Gaza Strip’s al-Ahli Hospital was rocked by an explosion that left hundreds of civilians killed and wounded. Footage of the flaming exterior of the hospital, as well as dead and wounded civilians, including children, quickly emerged on social media in the aftermath of the attack.

While the Palestinian Ministry of Health in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip blamed the explosion on an Israeli airstrike, the Israeli military later said the blast was caused by an errant rocket misfired by militants from the Gaza-based group Islamic Jihad.

While widespread electrical outages and Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure have made getting documentation out of the besieged territory difficult, some purported imagery of the hospital attack making its way to the internet appears to be activating the censorship tripwires of Meta, the social media giant that owns Instagram and Facebook.

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Disinformation Reporter Ben Collins Failed to Correct the Gaza Hospital Story

Ben Collins is a reporter for NBC News who specializes in coverage of disinformation and extremism, particularly on social media. His work has earned him many plaudits, including a 2023 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism.

Collins is treated as an expert in the burgeoning field of countering the spread of misinformation. Yet his error rate is noteworthy.

Take the Gaza hospital explosion, for example. On Tuesday, reports surfaced that the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza had come under attack, resulting in as many as 500 deaths. The New York Times ran with “Israeli Strikes Kill Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.” Underneath this headline was an image of an obliterated building—readers who squinted would have noticed that this was not the hospital, but a completely different target.

The Times‘ only source for information about the explosion was the Gaza Health Ministry; mainstream reporting noted that Palestinian authorities laid the blame squarely on an Israeli airstrike. Subsequent intelligence reports from both Israel and the U.S. provide credible evidence that the hospital was most probably struck by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group.

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Israeli Attacks on Journalists Stifle Reporting on Gaza Horrors

The Israeli communications minister’s attempt to shut down Al Jazeera’s bureau in Jerusalem—on the grounds that the Qatari news outlet is biased in favor of Hamas and is actively endangering Israeli troops (Reuters, 10/15/23)—should inspire some déjà vu. In the last war in Gaza, an Israeli air strike destroyed a Gaza building housing both Al Jazeera and Associated Press offices (AP, 5/15/21). And just months ago, Al Jazeera (5/18/23) reported that “the family of Shireen Abu Akleh,” a Palestinian-American AJ journalist killed by Israeli fire while on assignment, “has rebuked Israel for saying it is ‘sorry’ for the Al Jazeera reporter’s death without providing accountability or even acknowledging that its forces killed her.”

Since the launch of the network’s English service, Americans interested in Middle East news beyond what can be found in US broadcasting have often turned to Al Jazeera, and even more so as the BBC’s foreign service has declined (Guardian, 9/29/22).

But the ability of Al Jazeera and other Arab reporters to cover the assault on Gaza is jeopardized by the alarming number of newspeople Israel has killed since the crisis began. The Committee to Protect Journalists (10/18/23) has counted 13 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in Gaza since the crisis began, with two more missing or detained. Three Israeli journalists were also killed in Hamas’s October 7 attack, with another taken prisoner.

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Israel’s Violence Will Never Bring “Safety” to Anyone, Including Jews

The horror and heartbreak in Gaza reaches new proportions each minute: Israel’s siege has killed at least 3,400 people and injured more than 12,000 in the past week and a half, and a possible ground invasion threatens unspeakable levels of new violence. The Israeli forces and settlers have also killed 61 and injured 1,250 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The death tolls climb even as Palestinians and those in solidarity with them are marching and rallying worldwide in powerful and urgent protests.

For us, as anti-Zionist Jewish journalists, the past week and a half has been a flood of many griefs.

We grieve and struggle against the ongoing, now catastrophically heightened violence of Israeli colonization, occupation, apartheid and genocidal campaign against Palestinians, carried out by a government that is cynically invoking the names of Jews to intensify the oppressive policies it was already invested in.

And we watch with rising horror as the Israeli government instrumentalizes the grief of Jewish people who’ve lost loved ones in the Hamas attacks, which killed 1,400 people and injured 3,400. The Israeli government is fashioning this grief into a weapon, exploiting it to justify the annihilation of Gaza (even as some Israelis who lost loved ones in the attacks urge against taking vengeance against Palestinians).

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Ban on protests supporting Palestinians is disproportionate attack on the right to protest in France

Following the request from the Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin asking the prefects in France to ban all pro-Palestinian demonstrations, Jean-Claude Samouiller, President of Amnesty International France said:

“The ban on all demonstrations in support of the Palestinians in France constitutes a serious and disproportionate attack on the right to demonstrate.

Faced with the atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel, and also the blockade and very heavy bombings in the Gaza Strip, it is important that civil society actors can mobilize peacefully and publicly, in particular those calling on those engaged in the conflict to respect the rights of civilian populations. This is why there cannot be a systematic ban on the right to peacefully demonstrate support for the rights of the Palestinian populations.

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Nobody Knows Who Attacked the Hospital

Yesterday, the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City was struck in the single deadliest day of violence since October 7. Hundreds of people have allegedly died, with some estimates claiming as many as 500, though it is hard to confirm the exact toll at this stage. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says it was an accidental explosion by the group Islamic Jihad; the terrorist group says the IDF is deflecting blame and is actually responsible for the attack.

The IDF “was not firing in the area, Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said,” reports the Associated Press. Per Hagari, “Israeli radar confirmed a rocket barrage fired by the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad from a nearby cemetery at that time of the blast, around 6:59 p.m.”

“The misfired rocket hit the parking lot outside the hospital. Were it an airstrike, there would have been a crater there; instead, the fiery blast came from the misfired rocket’s warhead and its unspent propellant,” said the IDF spokesperson.

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Israeli Intelligence Suddenly Able To Intercept Hamas Communications

Another strange thing about Israel’s claim that its intelligence services didn’t detect preparations for the Hamas attack on October 7 is the fact that it is now releasing what it claims are intercepted conversations of Hamas fighters talking to each other about matters of high importance.

Israel has released an audio clip of two voices which it claims belong to Hamas militants speaking about the hotly disputed explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza on Tuesday. The IDF had previously told the press that it would be releasing intercepted conversations which prove Palestinian Islamic Jihad, not Israel, was responsible for the blast.

Here’s a transcript of Israel’s English translation of the dialogue:

Hamas Operative #2: I’m telling you this is the first time that we see a missile like this failing and so that’s why we are saying it belongs to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Hamas Operative #1: What?

Hamas Operative #2: They are saying it belongs to Palestinian Islamic Jihad

Hamas Operative #1: It’s from us?

#2: It looks like it

#1: Who says this?

#2: They are saying that the shrapnel from the missile is local shrapnel and not like Israeli shrapnel

#1: What are you saying (name bleeped)?

#2: But God bless, it couldn’t have found another place to explode?

#1: Nevermind, (name bleeped), yes they shot it from the cemetery behind the hospital

#2: What?

#1: They shot it coming from the cemetery behind the Al-Ma’amadani Hospital, and it misfired and fell on them

#2: There is a cemetery behind it?

#1: Yes, Al-Ma’amadani is exactly in the compound

#2: Where is it when you enter the compound?

#1: You first enter the compound and don’t go towards the city and it’s on the right side of the Al-Ma’amadani Hospital.

#2: Yes , I know it.

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Yellen Says the US Can Afford to Fund Wars in Gaza and Ukraine

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen insisted on Monday that the US could “certainly” afford to fund the war in Ukraine and Israel’s onslaught on Gaza as the White House is looking for more military aid for both conflicts.

Yellen’s comments came a day after President Biden said the US could fund both wars. “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history — not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense,” he said on 60 Minutes.

Yellen said the House needs to elect a new speaker so the new funding could be authorized. “We do need to come up with funds, both for Israel and for Ukraine. This is a priority,” she said. “It’s really up to the House to find, seat a speaker and to put us in a position where legislation can be passed.”

The White House has also discussed the possibility of rolling funding to arm Taiwan into the potential spending package. But Yellen did not mention Taiwan, and other Biden administration officials have made clear this week that Ukraine and Israel are the priority.

“America can certainly afford to stand with Israel and to support Israel’s military needs and we also can and must support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia,” Yellen said.

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Israel’s Official Ethnic Cleansing Program

The missing context for what’s happening in Gaza is that Israel has been working night-and-day to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people from their homeland since even before Israel become a state — when it was known as the Zionist movement.

Israel didn’t just cleanse Palestinians in 1948, when it was founded as a Western colonial project, and again under cover of a regional war in 1967. It also worked to ethnically cleanse Palestinians every day between those dates and afterwards. The aim was to move them off their historic lands and either expel them beyond Israel’s new, expanded borders or concentrate them into small ghettos inside those borders — as a holding measure until they could be expelled outside the borders.

[Related: Britain Is Ensuring the Death of a Palestinian State]

The “settler” project, as we call it, is a misnomer. It’s really Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme. Israel even has a special word for it in Hebrew: “Judaisation,” or making the land Jewish. It is official government policy.

Gaza was the largest of the Palestinian reservations created by Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme and the most overcrowded. To stop the inhabitants spilling out, Israel built a fence-barrier in the early 1990s to pen them in. Then when policing became too hard from within the prison, Israel pulled back in 2005 to the outer perimeter barrier.

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