Tag: perpetual war

UN agency: There aren’t enough body bags in Gaza

As the war between Israel and Hamas escalates, the U.N.’s special agency for Palestinian refugees warned Monday that under-siege Gaza is short of body bags.

“The number of killed is increasing. There are not enough body-bags for the dead in Gaza,” the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said in a press release.

Since Hamas launched its violent surprise attack in Israel nine days ago — killing more than 1,400 Israelis and triggering retaliatory air strikes from Israel and a siege of the Gaza Strip — 2,329 Palestinians have been killed, according to the report.

“Gaza has had no electricity, pushing vital services, including health, water and sanitation to the brink of collapse, and worsening food insecurity,” the agency added in the report.

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Pentagon Officials Say US Ready to Fight War with China While Supporting Ukraine and Israel

Defense Department officials said US military assets in East Asia are sufficient to confront China as the Pentagon supplies the Israeli and Ukrainian armies with weapons. One official described 2023 as a “banner year” for Washington increasing its military presence in the region surrounding China. 

On Tuesday, the Pentagon held a press conference to discuss 180 “unsafe…unprofessional… corrosive and risky” encounters between Chinese and American aircraft over the past two years. However, reporters asked the officials, Commander of Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) Admiral John C. Aquilino and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Dr. Ely Ratner, about the Pentagon’s ability to deter China as it arms Israel and Ukraine. 

Aquilino said that INDOPACOM has not seen any reduction in military assets available in the region, and the US was ready to win a war with China. “What I’ll tell you is I haven’t had one piece of equipment or force structure depart. The US is a global power, and that means we can deliver effects and execute our deterrence responsibilities across the globe, but I don’t think any other nation can do that at this time, but the US can,” he explained. “INDOPACOM prepares every day to ensure we execute both of the missions the Secretary gave me. Number one, to prevent conflict in the Indo-Pacific; and number two, if mission one fails, be prepared to fight and win.”

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Dozens of Israelis arrested for social media posts defending Gaza, advocates say

At least 100 Israelis have been arrested for social media posts supporting Palestinians in Gaza and 70 remain in detention, according to a legal advocacy group in the country. Adalah, which represents Arab Israelis in human rights cases, said the arrests are part of an unprecedented crackdown on freedom of expression in Israel.

“We’re seeing things we didn’t see before,” Adi Mansour, an attorney in Adalah’s civil rights unit, said in an interview. “There’s a change in the perception of what is allowed and what is prevented.”

Police arrested Dalal Abu Amneh, a prominent Palestinian-Israeli singer, for “incitement” after her social media team posted a Palestinian flag with the caption: “There is no victor but God,” her lawyer told The New Arab.

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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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