Tag: perpetual war

The Biden administration once again bypasses Congress on an emergency weapons sale to Israel

For the second time this month the Biden administration is bypassing Congress to approve an emergency weapons sale to Israel as Israel continues to prosecute its war against Hamas in Gaza under increasing international criticism.

The State Department said Friday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had told Congress that he had made a second emergency determination covering a $147.5 million sale for equipment, including fuses, charges and primers, that is needed to make the 155 mm shells that Israel has already purchased function.

“Given the urgency of Israel’s defensive needs, the secretary notified Congress that he had exercised his delegated authority to determine an emergency existed necessitating the immediate approval of the transfer,” the department said.

“The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to U.S. national interests to ensure Israel is able to defend itself against the threats it faces,” it said.

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Israel’s Long History of Ethnic Cleansing

Senior Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are again publicly advocating the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Their proposals are being presented as voluntary emigration schemes, in which Israel is merely playing the role of Good Samaritan, selflessly mediating with foreign governments to find new homes for destitute and desperate Palestinians. But it is ethnic cleansing all the same.

Alarm bells should have started ringing in early November when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Western politicians began insisting there could be “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.” Rather than rejecting any mass removal of Palestinians, Blinken and colleagues objected only to optically challenging expulsions at gunpoint. The option of “voluntary” displacement by leaving residents of the Gaza Strip with no choice but departure was pointedly left open.

Ethnic cleansing, or “transfer” as it is known in Israeli parlance, has a long pedigree that goes back to the late-19nth-century beginnings of the Zionist movement. While the early Zionists adopted the slogan, “A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land,” the evidence demonstrates that, from the very outset, their leaders knew better. More to the point, they clearly understood that the Palestinians formed the main obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. This is for the simple reason that, to them, a “Jewish state” denotes one in which its Jewish population acquires and maintains unchallenged demographic, territorial, and political supremacy.

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For the Safety of Jews and Palestinians, Stop Weaponizing Antisemitism

For eighteen years I had the great privilege of working as Executive Director of Harvard Hillel.

As a leader of Jewish communities on campus, in New England, and around the nation, I have helped cultivate a new generation of Jewish leaders and citizens. I navigated moments of tension and war: the tumultuous 1990s, as the Oslo Accords began to crumble; the Second Intifada; 9/11 and its fallout; the Iraq War; Israel’s Second Lebanon War and its war on Gaza in late 2008.

During my long career as a Jewish educator and leader — including thirteen years living in Jerusalem — I have seen and lived through my community’s struggles. Now, as an elder leader, with the benefit of hindsight, I feel compelled to speak to what I see as a disturbing trend gripping our campus, and many others: The cynical weaponization of antisemitism by powerful forces who seek to intimidate and ultimately silence legitimate criticism of Israel and of American policy on Israel.

In most cases, it takes the form of bullying pro-Palestine organizers. In others, these campaigns persecute anyone who simply doesn’t show due deference to the bullies.

The recent effort to smear our new University President, Claudine Gay, is a case in point. I applaud the decision by the Harvard Corporation to stand by Dr. Gay amid the ludicrous charges that she somehow supports genocide against Jews, and I hope Harvard will continue to take a clear and strong stance against any further efforts by these powerful parties to meddle in university affairs, especially over personnel decisions.

The toppling of the president of the University of Pennsylvania is a sobering example of what can happen when we empower these unscrupulous forces to dictate our path as university leaders. The stakes are as high as they’ve ever been. Our vigilance must be up to the task.

As a leader in the Jewish community, I am particularly alarmed by today’s McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare, which, in effect, turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine. (A recent poll found that 66 percent of all U.S. voters and 80 percent of Democratic voters desire an end to Israel’s current war, for instance.)

What makes this trend particularly disturbing is the power differential: Billionaire donors and the politically-connected, non-Jews and Jews alike on one side, targeting disproportionately people of vulnerable populations on the other, including students, untenured faculty, persons of color, Muslims, and, especially, Palestinian activists.

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US Announces $250 Million Arms Package for Ukraine

The Biden administration announced a new $250 million weapons package for Ukraine that the White House said will be the last until Congress approves new spending for the proxy war.

The arms package uses the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which allows the US to ship weapons straight from US military stockpiles. The Pentagon still has over $4.1 billion in PDA funds for Ukraine but lacks the funds to replenish the arms as US stockpiles have been significantly depleted.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last week that once the new arms package was announced, “We will have no more replenishment authority available to us, and we’re going to need Congress to act without delay.”

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Secrecy shrouds British military actions in Lebanon

On 8 October, veteran British reporter Robert Peston published a remarkable post on the social media platform X. Citing insider information from “government and intelligence sources,” Peston asserted that the Palestinian resistance operation Al-Aqsa Flood would inevitably evolve into a full-blown regional war, one that will be “as destabilizing to global security as Putin’s attack on Ukraine.” The journalist forewarned:

“We are in the early stages of a conflict with ramifications for much of the world.”

What makes this revelation even more astonishing is the speed at which British intelligence gained certainty about imminent upheaval in West Asia, just over 24 hours after the unprecedented strike by Palestinian freedom fighters on Israel. 

The urgency to prepare western audiences for the impending crisis hints at a deeper narrative — that London may have had a hand in igniting conflict across the region, a macabre plan that has been unfolding ever since.

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Biden Tells Congress He Launched Airstrikes in Iraq to ‘Deter’ Future Attacks

In a letter to Congress, President Biden said he launched Christmas Day airstrikes in Iraq to deter future attacks on US troops in Iraq and Syria, but the attacks have continued since then.

The Pentagon said the airstrikes targeted three facilities used by Kataib Hezbollah, one of the main Iran-aligned militias in Iraq, and came in response to an attack on a US base in Erbil that wounded three US troops. The Iraqi government slammed the US for carrying out the airstrikes, saying the bombings killed one serviceman and wounded 18 people, including civilians.

“On the night of December 25, 2023, at my direction, United States forces conducted discrete strikes against three facilities in Iraq used by Iran-affiliated groups for training, logistics support, and other purposes,” Biden said in his letter to Congress. “The strikes were taken to deter future attacks and were conducted in a manner designed to limit the risk of escalation and minimize civilian casualties.”

Al Mayadeen reported that since the US airstrikes were launched, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Shia militias, has claimed five more attacks on US forces in Iraq and Syria. An attack on Wednesday again targeted US troops based in Erbil, Iraq.

Biden said the approximately 2,500 US troops based in Iraq are there under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which was passed in the wake of 9/11. On paper, US troops are stationed in Iraq to assist the Iraqi government in its fight against ISIS, a group that did not exist when the 2001 AUMF became law. Biden also claimed that he could bomb Iraq using authorities granted to him by the Constitution.

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Over 100 Journalists Killed in Less Than Three Months

Nearly 100 journalists have been killed in less than three months in Palestine. And that’s not by accident. They aren’t collateral damage. They weren’t human shields. Most were targeted deliberately. Their offense: exposing the deceit behind the propaganda flushed out by the Israeli government, and our own government, our president, and the mainstream media, many of whom don’t function as journalists. Instead, they act like stenographers for the state, for the military-industrial complex. Which is profiting massively off of this slaughter, banking on people being uninformed and indifferent to it.

Well, real journalists are preventing that, because the real journalists are standing in defiance of power, standing in the face of the war machine, and are bravely documenting its crimes. Documenting the daily horror raining down on millions of civilians trapped on a small slice of land.

So the powerful want these journalists silenced, by any means necessary, because they are proving to be very powerful themselves. I’ve gone to many rallies for Palestine over the years, and I’ve never seen the groundswell like we are witnessing now.

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US Is Shifting Strategy on Ukraine

The US and its European allies are quietly shifting their strategy in Ukraine from supporting Kyiv’s unrealistic goal of driving Russian forces out to encouraging a defensive posture with future negotiations in mind, POLITICO reported on Wednesday, citing US and European officials.

The US and its close allies have discouraged peace talks throughout the conflict, including in March and April of 2022, when a peace deal was on the table that would have left Ukraine territorially intact in exchange for the country’s neutrality, something that was recently confirmed by Ukraine’s lead negotiator.

Instead of pushing for peace, then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Ukraine to keep fighting, and the US declared one of its war goals was to “weaken” Russia. Now, Moscow has made it clear any future peace deal must recognize the territory it has annexed as Russian, and Russia has the upper hand and time on its side.

The POLITICO report said that US and European officials are discussing deploying Ukrainian forces in a defensive posture instead of continuing the failed counteroffensive. The New York Times reported earlier this month that the US was suggesting Ukraine should dig in to protect the territory it still has.

The shift in strategy comes as both the US and Europe are struggling to come up with more funding for the proxy war. Part of the Biden administration’s long-term strategy is to help build up Ukraine’s own military-industrial complex so the country is not so reliant on foreign aid.

The Biden administration has not publicly outlined its shift in strategy, but there are signs that the US is thinking about winding down the proxy war. A mantra commonly repeated by US and NATO officials was that they would support Ukraine against Russia for “as long as it takes.” But when President Biden met with Ukrainian President VOlodomyr Zelensky earlier this month, he said the US would continue supplying Ukraine with weapons for “as long as we can.”

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Break the Cycle: In 2024, Say No to the Government’s Cruelty, Brutality and Abuse

“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.”—Edmund Burke

Folks, it’s time to break the cycle of abuses—cruel, brutal, immoral, unconstitutional and unacceptable—that have been heaped upon us by the government for way too long.

Here’s just a small sampling of what we suffered through in 2023.

The government failed to protect our lives, liberty and happiness. The predators of the police state wreaked havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government didn’t listen to the citizenry, refused to abide by the Constitution, and treated the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers shot unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—were armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies were allowed to fleece taxpayers. Government technicians spied on our emails and phone calls. And government contractors made a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

The president became more imperial. Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill. The powers amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability. The presidency itself has become an imperial one with permanent powers.

The cost of endless wars drove the nation deeper into debt. Policing the globe and waging endless wars abroad hasn’t made America—or the rest of the world—any safer, but it has made the military industrial complex rich at taxpayer expense.

The courts failed to uphold justice. Time and time again, the Supreme Court failed to right the wrongs being meted out by the American police state. A review of critical court rulings over the past decade or so, including some ominous ones by the U.S. Supreme Court, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order and protecting the ruling class and government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

The Surveillance State rendered Americans vulnerable to threats from government spies, police, hackers and power failures. Thanks to the government’s ongoing efforts to build massive databases using emerging surveillance, DNA and biometrics technologies, Americans became sitting ducks for hackers and government spies alike. Billions of people have been affected by data breaches and cyberattacks. On a daily basis, Americans were made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world. The Department of Homeland Security, which has led the charge to create a Surveillance State, has continued to deploy mandatory facial recognition scans at airports and gather biometric data on American travelers. Police were gifted with new surveillance gadgets. The Corporate State tapped into our computer keyboards, cameras, cell phones and smart devices in order to better target us for advertising. Social media giants such as Facebook granted secret requests by the government and its agents for access to users’ accounts. And our private data—methodically collected and stored with or without our say-so—was repeatedly compromised and breached.

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Biden orders strike on Iranian-aligned group after 3 U.S. troops injured in drone attack in Iraq

President Joe Biden ordered the U.S. military to carry out retaliatory strikes against Iranian-backed militia groups after three U.S. servicemembers were injured in a drone attack in Northern Iraq.

National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said one of the U.S. troops suffered critical injuries in the attack that occurred earlier Monday. The Iranian-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups, under an umbrella of Iranian-backed militants, claimed credit for the attack.

Biden, who is spending Christmas at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, was briefed on the attack. and ordered the Pentagon to prepare response options.

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