Former President Bill Clinton has sparked outrage for his comments at a Michigan rally for Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday, in which he suggested that Israel is justified in carrying out its genocidal slaughter in Gaza and echoed the eliminationist logic of some of Israel’s most extremist politicians. In his remarks, Clinton suggested that the Hamas-led attack on October 7…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
We are joined by U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, who says Israel is committing genocide on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Facing accusations of antisemitism from Israeli and U.S. officials, Albanese is in New York to present her report, titled “Genocide as colonial erasure,” which finds that Israel’s genocide is founded on “ideological hatred”…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
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Photo credit: CODEPINK
On October 24, a U.S. presidential candidate told an interviewer, “Our day one agenda… also includes picking up the phone and telling Bibi Netanyahu that the war is over, because it’s basically our proxy war. We control the armaments, the funding, the diplomatic cover, the intelligence, etc., so we can end this in the blink of an eye with a single phone call, which is what Ronald Reagan did when Israel had gone into Lebanon and was massacring thousands of people. So we can do that right now. That’s day one.”
Tragically, the candidate who said that was not Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, but Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Most Americans have been persuaded that Stein cannot win the election, and many believe that voting for her in swing states will help elect Trump by siphoning voters from Harris.
There are many other “third-party” candidates for president, and many of them have good policy proposals for ending the genocidal U.S.-Israeli massacre in Gaza. As the website for Claudia de la Cruz, the presidential candidate for the Party of Socialism and Liberation, explains, “Our tax dollars should be used to meet people’s needs — not pay for the bullets, bombs and missiles used in the massacre in Gaza.”
Many of the principles and policy proposals of “third-party” and independent candidates are more in line with the views of most Americans than those of Harris or Trump. This is hardly surprising given the widely recognized corruption of the U.S. political system. While Trump cynically flip-flops to appeal to both sides on many questions, and Harris generally avoids committing to policy specifics at all, especially regarding foreign policy, most Americans understand that they are both more beholden to the billionaires and corporate interests who fund their campaigns than to the well-being of working Americans or the future of the planet.
Michael Moore has published a flier titled “This Is America,” which shows that large majorities of Americans support “liberal” positions on 18 different issues, from a ceasefire in Gaza to Medicare For All to getting money out of politics.
Moore implies that this should be reassuring to Democrats and Harris supporters, and it would be if she was running on those positions. But, for the most part, she isn’t. On the other hand, many third party and independent candidates for president are running on those positions, but the anti-democratic U.S. political system ensures that they can’t win, even when most Americans agree with them.
War and militarism are the most deadly and destructive forces in human society, with real world, everyday, physical impacts that kill or maim people and destroy their homes, communities and entire countries. So it is deeply disturbing that the political system in the United States has been corrupted into bipartisan subservience to a military-industrial complex (or MICIMATT, to use a contemporary term) that wields precisely the “unwarranted influence” that President Eisenhower warned us against 64 years ago, and uses its influence to drag us into wars that wreak death and destruction in country after country.
Apart from brief wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, all now many decades ago, the U.S. military has not won a war since 1945. It systematically fails on its own terms, while its nakedly lethal and destructive power only fills graveyards and leaves countries in ruins. Far from being an effective vehicle to project American power, unleashing the brutality of the U.S. war machine has become the fastest, surest way to further undermine America’s international standing in the eyes of our neighbors.
After so many wars under so many administrations of both parties, neither Republicans nor Democrats can claim to be a “lesser evil” on questions of war and peace, let alone a “peace party.”
As with so many of America’s problems, from the expansion of corporate and oligarchic power to the generational decline in living standards, the combined impact of decades of Democratic and Republican government is more dangerous, more lasting and more intractable than the policies of any single administration. On no question is this more obvious than on questions of war and peace.
For decades, there was a small but growing progressive wing in the Democratic Party that voted against record military spending and opposed U.S. wars, occupations and coups. But when Bernie Sanders ran for president and millions of grassroots Democrats rallied around his progressive agenda, the Party leaders and their corporate, plutocratic backers fought back more aggressively to defeat Bernie and the progressives than they ever fought to win elections against the Republicans, or to oppose the war on Iraq or tax cuts for the wealthy.
This year, flush with blood money from the Israel lobby, pro-Israel Democrats defeated two of the most progressive, public-spirited Democratic members of Congress, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman.
On the Republican side, in response to the U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the libertarian Republican member of Congress Ron Paul led a small group of Republicans to join progressive Democrats in an informal bipartisan peace caucus in Congress. In recent years though, the number of members of either party willing to take any kind of stand for peace has shrunk dramatically. So while there are now over 100 Congressional caucuses, from the Candy Caucus to the Pickleball Caucus, there is still not one for peace.
After the neocons who provided the ideological fuel for Bush’s catastrophic wars reconvened around Hillary Clinton in 2016, President Trump tried to “make America’s military great again” by appointing retired generals to his cabinet and characteristically staking out positions all over the map, from a call to kill the families of “terrorists” to a National Defense Strategy naming Russia and China as the “central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security,” to casting himself as a peacemaker by trying to negotiate a peace treaty with North Korea.
Trump is now running against Biden’s war in Ukraine and trying to have it both ways on Gaza, with undying support for Israel and a promise to end the war immediately. Some Palestinian-Americans are supporting Trump for not being the VP for Genocide Joe, just as other people support Harris for not being Trump.
But most Americans know little about Trump’s actual war policy as president. The unique value of a leader like Trump to the military-industrial complex is that he draws attention to himself and diverts attention away from U.S. atrocities overseas.
In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, he oversaw the climax of Obama’s war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which probably killed as many civilians as Israel has massacred in Gaza. In that year alone, the U.S. and its allies dropped over 60,000bombs and missiles on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan,Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia. That was the heaviest bombing since the first Gulf War in 1991, and double the destruction of the “Shock & Awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003.
Most chillingly, the Iraqi forces who defeated the last remnants of ISIS in Mosul’s Old City were ordered to kill all the survivors, fulfilling Trump’s threat to “take out their families.” “We killed them all,” an Iraqi soldier told Middle East Eye. “Daesh, men, women and children. We killed everyone.” If anyone is counting on Trump to save the people of Gaza from Netanyahu and Biden’s genocide, that should be a reality check.
In other areas, Trump’s back-pedaling on Obama’s diplomatic achievements with Iran and Cuba have led to new crises for both those countries on the eve of this election. By moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, bribing Arab despots with ‘Abraham’ deals, and encouraging Netanyahu’s Greater Israel ambitions, Trump primed the powder-keg for the genocide in Gaza and the new crisis in the Middle East under Biden.
On the other side, Harris shares responsibility for genocide, arguably the most serious international crime in the book. To make matters worse, she has connived in a grotesque scheme to provide cover for the genocide by pretending to be working for a ceasefire that, as Jill Stein and many others have said, the U.S. could enforce “in the blink of an eye, with a single phone call” if it really wanted to. As for the future, Harris has only committed to making the U.S. military even more “lethal.”
The movement for a Free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza has failed to win the support of the Republican or Democratic presidential campaigns. But this is not a failure on the part of the Palestinian-Americans we have listened to and worked with, who have engaged in brilliant organizing, gradually raised public awareness and won over more Americans to their cause. They are leading the most successful anti-war organizing campaign in America since the Iraq War.
The refusal of Trump or Harris to listen to the calls of Americans whose families are being massacred in Gaza, and now in Lebanon too, is a failure on the part of the corrupt, anti-democratic political system of which Trump and Harris are figureheads, not a failure of activism or organizing.
Whomever each of us votes for in the presidential election, the campaign to end the genocide in Gaza will continue, and we must grow stronger and smarter and more inclusive until politicians cannot ignore us, no matter how much money the Israel lobby and other corrupt interests throw at them, or at their political opponents.
Whomever we vote for, the elephant in the room will still be US militarism and the violence and chaos it inflicts on the world. Whether Trump or Harris is president, the result will be more of the same, unless we do something to change it. As legendary Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu famously said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”
No American should be condemned for voting for a candidate of their choice, however successfully the Democrats and Republicans have marginalized the very concept of multi-party democracy that the U.S. claims to support in other countries. Whoever wins this election, we must find a way to put peace back on this country’s national agenda, and to make our collective voices heard in ways that cannot be drowned out by oligarchs with big bags of cash.
The post A No-Win Dilemma for US Peace Voters first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
North Gaza has become Israel’s feasibility test for its version of genocide: total eradication of all life. All of Gaza north of the Netzarim Corridor, created by Israel as a barrier between the northern metropolis and the rest of the enclave, is now sealed off from any supplies, and the extinguishers of life are eliminating the remaining population and life forms, as well as all that sustains them.
Prior to October 8, 2023, northern Gaza was home to more than a million Palestinians. As recently as a few weeks ago, it was estimated to have as many as 400,000. Now, the estimates are closer to 100,000, and declining rapidly. Perhaps half of the original population fled to southern Gaza, where between 50,000 to 100,000 of their numbers have died – thousands from Israel anti-civilian weaponry, but mostly from malnutrition, disease, exposure and dehydration, predominantly women and children, especially newborns and infants. That is only among those who left north Gaza, and these are only rough estimates based on conditions and the proliferation of mass graves. The totals for the entire population of Gaza are at least double that number.
But the immediate Israeli objective is to create a wasteland in northern Gaza, where only weeds, insects and small reptiles survive. In Beit Lahia, a single bombing attack killed more than 100 civilians, mostly women and children. More than 100 such attacks took place in northern Gaza in October 2024, one of which eliminated the last remaining hospital, with its entire medical staff killed or taken prisoner. No food or medicine has entered northern Gaza for more than two weeks. Journalists have been assassinated, and few images or news have been received from inside.
Israel may achieve its goal of an empty northern Gaza as soon as the end of November. If so, it will serve as a model for the rest of Gaza, and the larger West Bank, as well. Until now, however, none of this has reduced the effectiveness of Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian resistance, even in northern Gaza. It therefore remains to be seen whether Israel’s Jewish settlers will be able to inherit the land.
In the meantime, Israelis continue to leave Israel, as many as a million or more since October 7, 2023, with long waiting lists for departure. 1300 out of 1700 reservists recently called up refused to report, and more than 100 active soldiers refuse to continue. Casualty rates of soldiers are beyond anything Israel has experienced, thwarting the ground invasion of Lebanon. The Israeli military is saying that it does not have enough soldiers. Trade with Israel has ground to a halt in many sectors, and hundreds of businesses have closed. Israel’s attempt to widen the war by attacking Iran was a near total failure. Its options are dwindling.
How many Israelis will face war crimes tribunals? Palestinians and their allies are compiling lists of murderers with incriminating evidence often placed on social media by the perpetrators themselves. Despite the inaction of most of the world, and the enormous weaponry and wealth placed by the US and a few other countries at the disposal of Israel, it is increasingly doubtful that the Zionist vision will survive any more than the Crusaders, the Nazis, neoconservatives, neoliberals, or any other delusional megalomaniacs and their visions.
The post The Test Case for Eradication of Life in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
We are joined by U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, who says Israel is committing genocide on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Facing accusations of antisemitism from Israeli and U.S. officials, Albanese is in New York to present her report, titled “Genocide as colonial erasure,” which finds that Israel’s genocide is founded on “ideological hatred” and “dehumanization” and “enabled through the various organs of the state,” and recommends that Israel be unseated from the United Nations over its conduct. She argues that Israel’s attacks on U.N. employees, including the killings of at least 230 U.N. staff in Gaza, its flagrant violations of U.N. resolutions and international law and the unique status of “the first settler-colonial genocide to be ever litigated before [an international] court” justify this unprecedented measure. Israel’s continued impunity, Albanese warns, “is the nail in the coffin of the U.N. Charter.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A high-powered U.S. official is being harshly criticized after attacking UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese as Israel steps up its attacks against the UN to advance its genocide in Gaza. On Tuesday, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said that the U.S. believes Albanese is “unfit for her role.” She baselessly accused Albanese…
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British Foreign Secretary David Lammy is facing blowback for failing to condemn the Uyghur genocide at a meeting with his Chinese counterpart in Beijing during a recent two-day trip to China.
In April 2021, British MPs passed a motion declaring that China was committing genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, a vast region in northwestern China that is home to about 12 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs.
Following Lammy‘s Oct. 18 meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing, Britain’s Foreign Office released a readout which said he raised the issue of rights abuses as a stumbling block in bilateral relations.
“Human Rights were discussed, including in Xinjiang, and the Foreign Secretary referenced this as an area which the UK and China must engage, even where viewpoints diverge,” the statement said.
But opposition members of the UK Parliament and an official from the World Uyghur Congress advocacy group blasted Lammy for not specifically addressing the Uyghur genocide.
“On human rights in Xinjiang, the House of Commons, including the Labour party in opposition, voted that genocide was taking place in Xinjiang, yet the Foreign Office readout simply said: ‘Human rights were discussed,’” Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith told Lammy during a parliamentary session on Oct. 28.
“This is a genocide taking place, with slave labor,” he said. “Why is there not more robust condemnation from the government to China?”
The United States and parliaments of other Western countries have also declared that China has committed genocide or crimes against humanity in Xinjiang based on credible evidence of mass detentions in camps, forced sterilizations of Uyghur woman, and other severe rights abuses.
Sanctions
Duncan Smith, who is also co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, went on to say that he heard there was a move in the Foreign Office to lift British sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for the genocide in Xinjiang as part of a deal to remove sanctions on British lawmakers.
“And I just simply say to the foreign secretary, I must tell him, that I, for one, would never accept such a shameful deal at any price, and I hope he will stamp on that straightaway,” he said.
In March 2021, China imposed sanctions on British organizations and politicians, including Duncan Smith and fellow Conservative MP Neil O’Brien, accusing them of spreading “lies and disinformation” about human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The sanctions came in response to Britain’s decision to implement measures against four Chinese officials.
O’Brien noted at Monday’s parliamentary session that when the Labour party was in opposition, it said there was “clear and compelling evidence” of a genocide in Xinjiang. He asked Lammy if he still believed this to be the case now that Labour is the governing party.
Responding to O’Brien and Duncan Smith during the session, Lammy said he did “raise Xinjiang in the context of human rights” and the issue of sanctioned parliamentarians with both Wang Yi and the foreign affairs spokesperson for the Chinese Communist Party.
“I raised that as a matter of huge concern,” Lammy said about the lifting of sanctions on British lawmakers, adding that he also discussed threats and aggression in the South China sea, jailed British national Jimmy Lai and curtailed freedoms in Hong Kong.
“It would be totally unacceptable for any UK Foreign Minister to go to China and not raise those issues of tremendous concern,” he said.
Lammy said he remains “hugely concerned about the human rights abuses in Xinjiang,” but added that it is a matter for the International Criminal Court and others to make a determination of genocide, “not for national government.”
Lammy ‘vocal’ on issues
When asked by Radio Free Asia about reports of a deal to remove sanctions and a clarification of how it classifies rights abuses in Xinjiang, a British government spokesperson said Lammy has been vocal on both issues.
“The Foreign Secretary has called on China to lift its sanctions on UK parliamentarians at every meeting with his counterpart, along with raising the UK’s serious human rights concerns, including in Xinjiang,” the spokesperson said.
“China’s sanctions including against parliamentarians are completely unwarranted and unacceptable and are totally incomparable to the sanctions announced by the UK in 2021, which were based on compelling and widespread evidence of serious and systematic human rights violations in Xinjiang,” the spokesperson added.
Rahima Mahmut, the UK director of the World Uyghur Congress, said she was pleased that O’Brien and Duncan Smith questioned the foreign minister about his failure to raise the Uyghur genocide with Wang Yi.
She added that it is unlikely the British Government would lift sanctions imposed on the Chinese officials.
“This is because the punishment imposed on Chinese officials is based on strong evidence that these officials have committed human rights abuses under international law,” she told RFA.
Edited by Joshua Lipes.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Adile Ablet for RFA Uyghur and Roseanne Gerin for RFA English.
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Biden administration officials are sweeping aside hundreds of reports of Israeli forces using U.S.-provided weapons to slaughter civilians in Gaza, new reporting finds, flouting the administration’s own policies regarding weapons to give Israel a pass. According to a new report by The Washington Post published Wednesday, the State Department has received nearly 500 reports of U.S.
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On Tuesday, the Israeli Knesset passed legislation banning the main aid group for Palestinians from operating in the occupied Palestinian territories — a move that world leaders, humanitarian groups and the agency itself have warned will spell certain death for those starving amid Israel’s genocide and vastly erode Palestinians’ rights in the long term. The two bills passed with overwhelming…
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Over 1,000 authors and literary industry workers have signed a letter vowing to boycott any Israeli literary institutions that are complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestine, in an effort that organizers say is the largest cultural boycott of Israel in history. In the open letter, signatories say they “cannot in good conscience” work with Israeli institutions that have…
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Israeli forces have arrested all but one of the medical staff at the only operational hospital left in north Gaza, the Gaza Health Ministry said on Monday, after a days-long siege left the facility in ruins. Only one pediatrician remains at the Kamal Adwan Hospital, which was treating hundreds of patients and serving as a shelter to more than 600 Palestinians, after Israeli forces “arrested…
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Israel could kill everyone left in Northern Gaza if its assault on the enclave continues, a United Nations relief official warned on Saturday. U.N. Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Joyce Msuya also called for an end to the Israeli attack. “What Israeli forces are doing in besieged North Gaza cannot be allowed to continue…
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This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The US presidential election is only a dozen days away and the Biden-Harris complicity in the mass murder of Gazans by Jewish Israelis should be the key issue for decent Americans. However, the expert UK estimate of 335,500 Gaza dead (mostly children) is ignored by legacy media, Trump and Harris. Only Dr Jill Stein (Greens), Dr Cornel West (independent) and Chase Oliver (Libertarian) would stop the Kid-Killing Kamala (KKK) Harris-complicit Gaza Genocide.
A widely-reported mainstream estimate is of about 40,000 Gazans killed since 7 October 2023 (1,139 Israelis killed) in the Jewish Israeli-imposed Gaza Genocide or 50,000 including 10,000 dead under rubble. Thus Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (6 October 2024): “Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army, including around 42,000 recorded by the Gaza Ministry of Health, the majority being women and children”.
However, these estimates do not consider indirect deaths from Jewish Israeli-imposed deprivation through war criminal siege involving deprivation of life-sustaining water, food, shelter, sanitation, medicine and medical care in gross violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that unequivocally state that an Occupier must provide its conquered Subjects with life-sustaining food and medical services “to the fullest extent of the means available to it”.
I have been researching avoidable mortality from deprivation for 3 decades (see my huge book Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950). Thus, for example, I estimated 9.5 million deaths from violence and deprivation in the Iraq and Afghan wars as compared to the 4.7 million estimate by the “Cost of War” project of a huge team at prestigious Brown University.
Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf in the leading medical journal The Lancet (10 July 2024): “Collecting data is becoming increasingly difficult for the Gaza Health Ministry due to the destruction of much of the infrastructure… Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”.
Professor Devi Sridhar (chair, global public health, University of Edinburgh) taking deaths from deprivation (indirect deaths) into account (5 September 2024): “For several decades, methods have been developed to build up datasets in situations with poor or damaged health and monitoring systems…Using the method, the total deaths since the conflict began would be estimated at about 335,500 in total”.
Because Global South under-5 year old infant deaths are 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation this 335,500 deaths in 11 months can be translated (based on reported child, adult female and adult male proportions of the 50,000 violent deaths) to deaths from violence and imposed deprivation in the first year of the Gaza Massacre totalling about 366,000, including 267,000 children, 31,000 women and 71,000 men.
This horrific and utterly unforgivable killing in the US- and US Alliance-complicit Gaza Massacre and Gaza Genocide should be the key issue in all Western elections but is not. Indeed the horrific estimated numbers (e.g. 335,500 dead) are overwhelmingly not reported by racist, mendacious and genocide-ignoring US and Western Mainstream journalist, editor, politician, academic and commentariat presstitutes. I have ranked the 5 US presidential candidates for decency as follows:
#1. Dr Jill Stein (the Greens candidate) tops the list of candidates because she ticks all boxes – an end to the killing, genocide, occupation and human rights denial. (In addition she wants strong action on climate change, and war and no doubt is opposed to nuclear weapons.)
#2. Dr Cornell West (Independent) comes equal first with Dr Stein on Palestinian human rights and ending war and occupation, but Dr Stein as a Green is in addition more strongly active on climate change.
#3. Chase Oliver (Libertarian candidate) comes third because he opposes war and thus would want the violence in Gaza and Lebanon to end. However he supports the Mainstream American position by support (albeit non-military) for Apartheid Israel and hence is seriously morally compromised over Palestinian human rights. Indeed he “would allow private parties, including defense contractors, to voluntarily contribute funds and sell weapons to our friends without fear of violating any Federal laws”. Those supporting Apartheid Israel are supporting the vile crime of Apartheid and are thus severely morally compromised in a one-person- one-vote democracy like America.
#4. Donald Trump (Republican) is awful in fervently supporting Apartheid Israel and hence the vile crime of Apartheid. He enthusiastically supports the Apartheid Israeli war on Gaza but thinks that the devastation and killing is a bad look. A serious flaw is his appalling and continuing record of blatant lying (over 30,000 lies during the 4 years of his administration) – this seriously questions his judgement, his amenability to expert scientific opinion, and hence his suitability for high office. On the other hand his lying could be regarded as political gamesmanship , noting that his opponent Kamala Harris also lies but in a less obvious and hence more plausible and more dangerous fashion. 2 big pluses of Trump over Kamala Harris are (1) he is against wars, talks to his international enemies and will stop the Ukraine War to end the horrific killing, and (2) he is not actually involved in the Gaza Massacre.
#5. Kamala Harris (Democrat) must be ranked last if you believe in the sanctity of life of born children. Child-killing geriatric Genocide Joe and Kid-Killing Kamala (KKK) Harris are still supplying the funding, the bombs and the weapons that in the first year alone have killed 366,000 Gazans including 267,000 children, 31,000 women and 71,000 men. The Bible states “An eye for eye, tooth for tooth” but the bombs-supplying Biden-Harris Administration has killed 366,000 Gazans in the first year alone in Jewish Israeli reprisals for the deaths of 1, 139 Israelis on 7 October 2023 (97.5 % adults and hence mostly present or former Occupier IDF soldiers, and many killed in the IDF response under the IDF “Hannibal Directive”). Indeed Jesus stated: “And whosoever shall offend ONE of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea”.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
X/Twitter screen cap from Almog Cohen. He is perpetuating lies about the 10/07 attack to justify targeting and killing of Palestinian children.
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The UN’s human rights chief has warned that Israel’s siege of north Gaza is the “darkest moment” of Israel’s year of genocide and suggested that Israeli forces may be violating the UN’s Genocide Convention as reports emerge of Israel seizing a hospital in the region. In one of the UN’s strongest statements on the assault so far, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said that…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The post May Golan, Isreali Minister, Calls for a Nakba on Israeli News first appeared on Dissident Voice.Israeli Minister May Golan Calls for a Nakba
byu/tanget_bundle inPalestine
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When writer and disability justice activist Alice Wong received a MacArthur Fellowship earlier this month, she shared a statement about accepting it “amidst the genocide happening in Gaza.” The backlash was swift, with a deluge of posts on X attacking Wong’s character and accusing her of antisemitism. This conflation of opposition to Israel’s military action with hatred of Jewish people is…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israel’s genocide has so devastated every aspect of Gaza’s infrastructure and economy that it would take centuries just to restore the Gaza Strip’s GDP back to the already-depressed level from 2022, the UN has found in a report. Based on the growth rate of Gaza’s economy under Israeli blockade between 2007 and 2022, it would take 350 years to restore Gaza’s GDP from before the genocide…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
First responders have been forced to completely halt operations in north Gaza, officials have announced, as Palestinians say that there is nothing left but death in the region as a result of Israel’s horrific siege. The Gaza Civil Defense agency, the government’s first responders, said that recent Israeli attacks on its workers have forced it to suspend its operations in the north.
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As Israel’s campaign of mass killing in Palestine enters its second year and extends to Lebanon, the collective sense of urgency felt by people around the globe has inspired a shift in organizing strategy. Activists in the U.S. have been organizing to quell the Israeli war machine by turning their attention to logistics companies that physically deliver munitions to Israel.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
It’s been a long time but worth remembering, if you can, that when the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001, the whole world watched in horror. The events of that day were repeated on television over and over and over again, to the point where they became afterimages lodged in people’s minds.
As a result, although the buildings were not brought down by the impact of planes (no plane hit Building 7) but by explosives planted in the buildings (see this and this, among extensive evidence), most people thought otherwise, just as they thought that the subsequent linked anthrax attacks were directed by Osama bin Laden when they were eventually proven to have originated from a U.S. military lab (thus an inside job), and, as a result of a massive Bush administration/corporate media propaganda campaign, most Americans supported the invasion of Afghanistan, the subsequent invasion of Iraq, and decades of endless wars that continue to this day, bringing us to the edge of nuclear war with Iran and Russia.
It is impossible to understand the United States’ full-fledged support today for Israel’s genocide in the Middle East without understanding this history. Israel’s genocide is the United States’ genocide; they cannot be separated.
All these wars involve the machinations of the neo-conservative clique that in 1997 formed the Project for the New American Century that ran George W. Bush’s administration and whose protégées have come to exert great control of the foreign policies of Democratic and Republican administrations since. It is not that they lacked power before this, as a study of American foreign policy as far back as the Lyndon Johnson administration and its non-response to Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty confirms.
Contrary to the widespread claims that Israel runs U.S. Middle East foreign policy, I think it is important to emphasize that the reverse is true.
It is convenient to claim the tail wags the dog, but it is false.
Israel’s war crimes are U.S. war crimes. If the U.S. wanted to stop Israel’s genocide and expansion of war throughout the region, it could do so immediately, for Israel is totally reliant on U.S. support for its existence – as they like to say, “It’s existential.”
All the news to the contrary is propaganda. It is a sly game of responsibility ping-pong: shift the blame, keep the audience guessing as they hit their little hollow ball back and forth.
Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time. Such geo-political control is linked to the United States’ endless war on Russia and the control of natural resources throughout the vast region (a look at a map is requisite), stretching from the Middle East to southwest Asia up through the Black and Caspian Seas through Ukraine into Russia.
In both cases, the attacks of September 11, 2001 and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians whose ultimate target is Iran (America’s key enemy in the region as far back as the CIA’s 1953 coup d’état against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh), savage wars of extermination have been promoted through decades of carefully orchestrated propaganda. In the former case, through the mainstream corporate media’s magic of repetitive cinematic images, and in the latter, through their absence. To be shown photos of many thousands of dead and mutilated Palestinian children does not serve the U.S./Zionist’s interests. Propaganda’s methods must be flexible. Show, conceal.
The September 11 attacks and the current genocide, each in its own way, have been justified and paid for with similar but different credit cards without spending limits, the so-called wars on terror waged on the visual credit card of planes hitting buildings preceded and followed by endless pictures of Osama bin Laden, and the genocide of Palestinians on the holocaust credit card minus images of slaughtered Palestinians or any awareness of the terrorist history of the Zionist’s century-long racial nationalist settler movement of “ethnically cleansing” Palestinians from their land.
To know this, one has to read books, but they have been replaced by cell phones, functional illiteracy being the norm, even for college graduates who are treated to four years of wokeness education and anti-intellectualism that reduces their thinking to mush and graduates them with sciolistic minds at best. I am being kind.
The eradication of historical knowledge and the devaluation of the written word are key to ignorance of both issues. Digital media and cell phones are the new books, all few hundred words on an issue conveying information that conveys ignorance. Guy DeBord put it succinctly: “That which the spectacle ceases to speak of for three days no longer exists.” Amnesia is the norm.
To which I might add: that which the mass media spectacle continues to speak of or show images of for many days exists, even if it doesn’t. It exists in the minds of virtual people for whom images and headlines create reality. The electronic media is not only addictive but hypnotically effective, producing cyber people divorced from the material world. News and information have become a form of terrorism used to implode all mental defenses, similar to the floors at the World Trade Center that went down boom, boom, boom.
The war crimes of US/Israel are readily available for viewing outside the coverage of the corporate mainstream media. Most of the world views them, but these are the unreal people, the ones who don’t count as human beings. These war crimes are massive, ruthless, and committed proudly and without an ounce of shame. To face this fact is not acceptable.
Those who pretend ignorance of them are guilty of bad faith.
Those who support either Harris or Trump are guilty of bad faith twice over, acting as if either one does not support genocide or that genocide is a minor matter in the larger scheme of things.
Choosing “the lesser of two evils” is therefore an act of radical evil hiding behind the mask of civic duty.
That it is commonplace only confirms these words from the English playwright Harold Pinter’s extraordinary Nobel Address in 2005:
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El
Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
Little has changed since 2005, except that these crimes have increased along with the propaganda denying them, together with vastly increased censorship – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Russia via Ukraine, etc. – all targets of U.S. bombs, just like Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, etc. Now the U.S. has brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and the voting public is all worked up over choosing between candidates supporting genocide and the massively expanded Israel attack on neighboring countries. It is a frightening spectacle of moral indifference and stupidity as we await the Israel/U.S. bombing of Iran and Iran’s response.
Yet I ask myself and I ask you: Is there a connection between the voting public’s support for these war criminals and attention deficit disorder, amnesia, and dementia?
Or is this embrace of the demonic twins’ – US/Israel – foreign policy a sign of something far worse? A death wish?
Soul death?
The post Soul Suicide in the Ballot Box as Palestinians Are Butchered first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
“The capitalist system also doesn’t care if we die. So insisting on the value of human life, insisting on grieving, particularly grieving publicly and collectively, is a real statement against this entire death-making system,” says author Sarah Jaffe. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Jaffe and host Kelly Hayes talk about the lessons of Jaffe’s latest book, From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israeli forces are only allowing a handful of aid trucks to enter north Gaza each day after weeks of a total aid blockade, the UN reports. With crucial supplies depleted, the estimated 440,000 Palestinians still trapped in the region are simply “waiting to die,” one UN official said. According to World Food Programme (WFP) country director for Palestine Antoine Renard, Israel is allowing a…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
More than a year since Israel launched its war on Gaza in response to the October 7 attack, we speak with the award-winning author, journalist and activist Naomi Klein, who says a “trauma industry” has emerged to keep Israeli society permanently in crisis in order to justify the country’s expansionist wars and human rights abuses. “Though the Israeli government likes to frame everything that is…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Dozens of House Democrats are urging President Joe Biden to end Israel’s ban on foreign journalism and attacks on journalists in Gaza, saying that press freedom in the Strip is “more critical than ever” as Israel embarks on a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign against all Palestinians left alive in north Gaza. In a letter sent to Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this month…
Israeli forces are blocking humanitarian missions aimed at rescuing people who are trapped under the rubble due to Israeli strikes in north Gaza, the UN has reported. The development comes as Israel wages a horrific ethnic cleansing campaign in the north that has killed hundreds of Palestinians so far. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the occupied…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
To continue its genocide Israel must first convince the world that it is fighting a war. It targets civilians and claims they are “human shields” who have become collateral damage. It leaves Palestinians with no choices, demanding of them the impossible, and then claims that they are choosing war. Israel simulates war to commit genocide.
The “thinking” behind Israel’s tactics of genocide in Gaza is not directly practical. In practical terms it would be easier to simply name a “final solution” of extermination and work from that basis. Yet the current modalities of genocide are crucial in creating a fiction of war, a lie that the one-sided violence of genocide is warfare in the sense characterised by Clausewitz as being “policy carried out by other means”, which is often quoted with the word “policy” replaced by “diplomacy”. In the case of Israel we can also say that diplomacy is genocide carried out by other means. Israeli diplomacy invariably aims to create the fiction of war – a sense that the violence inflicted by Israel is a form of two-sided “conflict” rather than the one-sided murder that it is.
None of this is without precedent. Genocide is always a process, not an event. Colonial genocides in particular are seen at the time as a series of asymmetric wars, each treated by the aggressor as having separate causes and aims.
The most complete sequence of colonial genocide can be seen over the centuries violent expansion by the English, then British, then USA killing and dispossessing the indigenous people of what is now the continental USA. This genocide (or these genocides) began as discrete events of massacre and warfare, becoming increasingly more asymmetric. Treaties and interregna of “peace” became means of ethnic cleansing and periods of “[d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (a punishable act of genocide as described in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide). Through this time clearly genocidal non-warfare acts such the slaughter of bison and the promulgation of genocidal ideology were ongoing. The genocide grew in sophistication as it moved West, reaching California as a combination of bureaucratised and systematic mass-murder that would be a direct inspiration for Adolf Hitler’s genocidal policies.
When the victims are reduced to a tiny fraction of the original population with an even tinier fraction of the dominion that they once held the genocide does not end. Genocidal policies enter new phases. Some tribes are declared extinct so that survivors have no recognised identity nor historical claim against dispossession. Children are taken then sent to residential schools to “kill the Indian, and save the man” (frequently without achieving the latter). Other policies aim to destroy languages and other foundations of cultural identity. This leads to the last phase, that of assimilating the remnants. This phase is perhaps better exemplified in Aotearoa, Canada and Australia but is broadly indicative of the sequence of genocide in the US. In the last phase the surviving population is inducted at the bottom of the class system. The systems of class oppression are used on them as inherited from British class society, but enhanced by a racial element into “structural racism”. In this phase (which may still be considered genocidal) state instruments of coercion fall unevenly on the remaining indigenous population. Ideologically, like the lower classes, it is made to seem natural that they would need to be subject to greater surveillance, control and correction by the state. This expresses itself through the violence of policing and criminal justice and through the violent and prescriptive aspects of the state “welfare” apparatus. One indication that this can legitimately be thought of as genocide is the sobering fact, for example, that more Canadian indigenous children are taken from parents now by the state than were taken at the height of the acknowledged “genocide” enacted through the residential school system.
I have gone on this digression regarding genocide in the US because it is such a comprehensive example of genocide. It is not only complete but it is fractal, such that different pieces can be carved out and will still show much the same thing an a smaller scale in time and space. The elements of genocide tend to follow a progression, but when one modality is to the fore it does not mean that others are absent. This is true of the genocide against Palestinians which is expressed differently for Palestinians in Gaza, those in Areas A, B, and C of occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and those Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. All of the elements of colonial genocide that I have described are there.
The dominant modality or idiom of genocide against Palestinians we see at the moment is akin to that of nineteenth century California such as described in Benjamin Madley’s eye-opening 2017 book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. The most obvious differences come from the vastly expanded capabilities that technology gives the state of Israel, but the basic structure is the same – the maximum amount of surveillance, control and categorisation juxtaposed with systematic mass killing. The killing can be linked to open espousal of extermination by some elements of the Israeli state (military, government, capital and ideological/media) but the exterminatory nature is deniable in that it is not implemented in a direct comprehensive manner. The logic of extermination is there in the totalising nature of the choice of whom to kill. Though Israel often effects genocide by eliminating crucial people, such as medical or educational staff, we have ample evidence now that on the whole Israel’s violence is aimed at all Palestinians as such. The fact that there is no “final solution” does not mean that it is not a process of extermination. Over time, however, if not ended this genocide will follow the same path that other colonial genocides have followed, destroying Palestinians as such. If the current upsurge in genocidal violence becomes a new norm (like Operation Cast Lead which became a precedent for systematic mass-murder carried out with impunity) then Palestinians will effectively be cleansed from the occupied territories in one or two decades at most.
This genocidal slaughter is all underwritten by fake peace processes, the fake “two-state solution” and a form of diplomacy that (as I already stated) amounts to genocide carried out by other means. In the recently published What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? author Raja Shehadeh tells of personally attending a fake peace conference at which he was scolded for calling the occupied territories “occupied”. Shehadeh concludes that “[r]eal peace would mean a reconfiguration of the myth….” A peaceful democratic Jewish state is no longer possible and the actual apartheid state that exists cannot and could never survive without conflict.
Fake “peace” diplomacy is in fact conflict diplomacy designed to ensure that a plausible state of conflict always exists as cover for a genocidal process (which has a clear direction of travel along a road towards total erasure of Palestinians as such from the occupied Palestinian territories). I have referred to this as Israeli diplomacy, but in truth it is US diplomacy also. The Oslo process was designed by the US and it led to an impossible situation for Palestinians. There was literally nothing real that they could concede in return for peace and statehood, but Israel was able to create and maintain a façade of making demands for security. It is a paper-thin pretence that is completely belied by their settlement activities and much else besides. There is no legitimate reason why the US would accept any of this if they were at all invested in the “Oslo process”, the “peace process”, or the “roadmap for peace”. On the contrary, the US spent decades repeatedly insisting that “final status issues” (i.e. those that actually lead to peace) are an exclusively bilateral concern and did not shift that position as Israel systematically and ostentatiously made any promised resolution impossible. The consistency of the US in this regard reveals the bad faith in which they drew up the parameters of this “peace process”. This means, ipso facto, that they are the knowing architects of the fake peace process, which is to say the permanent conflict process that is a crucial foundation of the ongoing genocide. Therefore, this is a US genocide.
It is by no means abnormal for those committing genocide to use a pretext of armed conflict as cover for their activities. When Lemkin invented the term genocide he stated that: “For the German occupying authorities war thus appears to offer the most appropriate occasion for carrying out their policy of genocide.” This sentiment seems to be echoed in the words of another person – Adolf Hitler (also, in a way, an authority on genocide). Hitler wrote: “This partisan war has its advantages as well. It gives us the opportunity to stamp out everything that stands against us.” As a rule, if armed conflict is serving as a pretext for another undeclared policy, that policy must certainly be genocide.
There are good reasons for believing that Israel cannot achieve its aims through genocide because the world has changed since similar colonial genocides succeeded. But that is only true if we make it true. Those people lost to historic genocides were almost voiceless, but the problem now is not voicelessness, it is deafness. The deafness of Western leaders and those of certain lackey countries. They cling to a malicious malevolent mendacious obtuseness. It is violent genocidal racism that hides behind specious arguments and a phony concern for Jewish safety. Central to all of this toxic hatred is the fiction of war – the pretence that a stateless impoverished people pose a threat to the 6th most powerful military in the world – a contention based on the racist notion that Palestinians reject peace because they have an irrational hatred that drives them to perpetuate a conflict in which they lose much more than their powerful enemies.
It is foul fascist nonsense, this victim-blaming fiction of war. There are no half-measures left to us in response. We need to drive the genocide supporters and genocide deniers off the air and out of office. Moreover, the genocide will not end until Palestine is free. A ceasefire will not bring real peace, just a different phase of genocide. Only a single democratic state and an international commitment to reparation and stability will bring peace, justice and an end to genocide.
The post A Fiction of War first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
From the time the Europeans arrived on American shores, the U.S. government authorized more than 1,500 wars and attacks on Indigenous people and at the conclusion of the “Indian wars” in the late 19th century, of the estimated 10 million to 15 million native peoples, fewer than 238,000 remained. In the past I’ve written about these efforts in the Great Plains and upper Midwest. I’m now spending some time in Santa Barbara, California which has prompted my looking into that state’s role in the great American genocide. The Santa Barbara region was inhabited by Chumash people for at least 11,000 years and before the European invaders arrived the population was some 18,000. By 1900 it had declined to less than 500 and today it’s leveled off at about 5000.
A new California law, which takes effect on January 1, 2025, requires that public schools begin teaching about the state’s treatment of Indigenous peoples. The State Department of Education must consult with tribes when updating the social studies curriculum and several tribes are advocating the inclusion of material contained in UCLA professor Benjamin Madley’s book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. This is the first comprehensive account of the state-sanctioned murder of California’s Native People. Madley documents how state and federal governments employed their legitimizing authority for the genocide and Congress financially underwrote California’s extinction campaign.
The new legislation was set in motion five years ago when California Gov. Gavin Newsome publicly apologized for the “war of extermination” pronounced by Peter Burnett, the state’s first governor in 1851. Newsome said that at time, state law required that Indigenous peoples be removed from their land, children separated from their families, native people stripped of their language and culture and a system of indentured servitude was begun. Under Gov. Burnett, California’s Indigenous population was reduced by 80 percent.
In 1846, U.S. troops took control of California from Mexico and in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war with Mexico. Mexico ceded California and its other northern territories for 15 million dollars. On January 6, 1851, the new governor of California said the following about the “Indians” in his inaugural address: “That war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian is extinct. While we cannot anticipate this result with painful regret, the inevitable destruction of a race is beyond the power of wisdom of man to avert.” California Senator John B. Weller declared of the Indigene, “Humanity may forbid, but the interests of the white man demands their extinction.” This “myth of inevitable extinction” fueled the ideology that Indigenes were destined to vanish, that it was simply their fate and unstoppable.
And in case there remains any doubt that this was not official policy, we know that the men who “killed thousands of Indians from the 1840s to the 1870s were paid by the state of California and the federal government…they filed expenses and were reimbursed.” (Tom Fuller, “Hastings Law Grapples with the Founder’s Involvement with Native Massacres,” NYT, (pay wall, updated November 4, 2021). It should be noted that with the outbreak of the Civil War, California sent 15,725 volunteers to serve in the Union Army. However there so many volunteers that enough remained at home to serve as the primary agent of the killing machine. Furtherduring the Civil War the Union government’s treasury was running perilously low but Congress still allotted major funding to the California Volunteers for their Indigene-hunting operation. Madley calculates that at the end of the Civil War, only 34,000 Indians remained from from 150,000 in 1845. Limited attacks continued until 1871 when it was beginning to find any more Inidigenes left to kill. The decline was caused by killings, disease, starvation and massacres. Madley estimates that the “state spent 1.7 million — a staggering sum in its day — to murder some 16,000 people.”
My hope (perhaps a fantasy) is that Indigenous and non-Indigenous public school kids in California will be deprogrammed and learn that genocide, like slavery, was part of the inherent capitalist logic of dispossesion. Will they be exposed to the truth that there exists a glaring contemporay parallel to this history in Israel’s “plausible genocide” (ICJ) in Gaza and the future ethnic cleansing of the West Bank? Young Indigenous peoples understand that they are the descendants of genocide as the banner flown by the Oglala Lakota’s Youth Council in South Dakota reads, “From Pine Ridge to Palestine.” Will school chidren learn, as Middle East Eye‘s Jonathan Cook points out, that Israel is now finishing the job it began in 1948? At least as important, will they be encouraged to understand that, as in the 1840-1871 period in California, the U.S. government is not only backing this modern day war of extermination but its actions are wholly consonant with the objective of U.S. imperialism in its efforts to maintain America’s global empire? Will they learn that both Israel and the United States were settler-colonial state projects and not as the official narratives proclaim, “nations of immigrants.”
The post California Law Mandates That Public School Children Be Taught About State’s Genocide of Indigenous Peoples first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
