The U.S. was not among the more than 100 United Nations member states that signed a new letter of support for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres after Israel’s foreign minister declared him “persona non grata” and barred him from entering the country. The letter, spearheaded by Chile, said Israel’s attack on Guterres would “undermine the United Nations’ ability to carry out its mandate…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday 13 October called on the UN chief to move UN peacekeepers deployed in southern Lebanon out of “harm’s way”. A dishevelled Netanyahu, speaking to camera, told the UN peacekeepers to leave “right now” – in another sign the genocidal leader of the genocidal Israeli state is growing increasingly out-of-control.
Netanyahu’s appeal to UN chief Antonio Guterres comes a day after the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) refused to withdraw from the border area despite Israel injuring five of its members as the rogue state continues to attack them.
An increasingly out-of-control Netanyahu said
Mr Secretary General, get the UNIFIL forces out of harm’s way. It should be done right now, immediately.
Your refusal to evacuate the UNIFIL soldiers makes them hostages of Hezbollah. This endangers both them and the lives of our soldiers.
We regret the injuring of UNIFIL soldiers and we are doing everything in our power to prevent this injuring. But the simple and obvious way to ensure this is simply to get them out of the danger zone.
WATCH
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “I am addressing the UN Secretary-General directly: Your refusal to evacuate the UNIFIL soldiers is turning them into Hezbollah’s hostages.”
“By you not evacuating your UNFIL “peacekeeper” you are endangering their lives, we have asked… pic.twitter.com/q2ezWHBXwH
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) October 13, 2024
A seemingly deranged Netanyahu, speaking at a cabinet meeting, said Israeli forces had asked UNIFIL several times to leave but it had “met with repeated refusals” that provided a “human shield to Hezbollah terrorists”.
UNIFIL has refused to leave its positions in southern Lebanon.
UNIFIL spokesman Andrea Tenenti told AFP in an interview on Saturday:
There was a unanimous decision to stay because it’s important for the UN flag to still fly high in this region, and to be able to report to the Security Council.
Tenenti said Israel had asked UNIFIL to withdraw from positions “up to five kilometres (three miles) from the Blue Line” separating both countries, but the peacekeepers refused.
That would have included its 29 positions in Lebanon’s south.
UNIFIL, a mission of about 9,500 troops of various nationalities that was created in 1978, is tasked with monitoring a ceasefire that ended a 33-day war in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah.
Forty nations that contribute to the peacekeeping force in Lebanon said on Saturday that they “strongly condemn recent attacks” on the peacekeepers.
“Such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated,” said the joint statement, posted on X by the Polish UN mission and signed by nations including leading contributors Indonesia, Italy, and India.
As the Canary previously reported, Israel has repeatedly attack UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.
Meanwhile, Pope Francis has intervened. He told Israel it must “respect” UN peacekeepers in Lebanon:
I am close to all the people involved, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, where I ask that the UN peacekeepers be respected.
I once again call for an immediate ceasefire on all fronts that the paths of diplomacy and dialogue be pursued to achieve peace.
I pray for all the victims, for the displaced, for the hostages… and I hope that this great and unnecessary suffering, generated by hatred and revenge, will end soon.
Brothers and sisters, war is an illusion. It will never bring peace, it will never bring security, it is a defeat for everyone, especially because you believe you are invincible. Please stop.
Featured image via screengrab
Additional reporting via Agence-France Presse
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on Canary.
At least one U.S.-supplied bomb was used by Israel in a Thursday night airstrike that killed at least 22 people and wounded over 115 more in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, according to a Guardian analysis published on Friday. The crisis, conflict, and arms division of Human Rights Watch and a former U.S. military explosives expert analyzed shrapnel from a bomb used by Israel in the strike on…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Palestinian national soccer team played a formidable South Korean side to a goalless draw in Seoul last month, an impressive result for a team looking to clinch its first ever qualification for the FIFA World Cup. The team aims to build upon an impressive showing at this year’s Asian Cup, where it captured the hearts of fans from across the continent as it reached the knockout stage for the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the “most profound crisis” globally since World War II, UN experts have warned, adding that impunity for Israel as it has killed tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of Palestinians endangers the very structure of international humanitarian rights. On Friday, the group of 37 UN experts, including UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
One of the largest and most visible contingents marching outside the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago this past August was the “U.S. Out of the Philippines.” Its participants included Malaya Movement, Chicago Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (CCHRP), AnakBayan Chicago, and AnakBayan at UIC. The contingent was calling for the end of U.S. militarism in the Philippines…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The UN peacekeepers’ headquarters in Lebanon came under Israeli attack for the second time in two days on Friday, the group reported as human rights experts raise alarm about Israel’s continued impunity for committing likely war crimes against UN staff and facilities. The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) headquarters in Naqoura, Lebanon, “was affected by explosions” on Friday morning…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
New York, October 11, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply alarmed by Israel’s arrest of American journalist Jeremy Loffredo over his reporting of Iranian missiles’ impact on Israel, calls for his immediate release, and for journalists to be allowed to do their jobs freely.
On October 8, 2024, Loffredo, an independent journalist who works with the privately owned outlet The Grayzone, was arrested “on suspicion of serious security offenses for publicly publishing… the locations of missile drops near or inside sensitive security facilities, with the aim of bringing this to the notice of the enemy and thereby assisting them in their future attacks,” according to a statement by his outlet, YNet, and The Intercept.
On October 11, Grayzone Editor Max Blumenthal and the7theye reported that “the district court in Israel has ordered US journalist Jeremy Loffredo to be released from custody but has forbidden him from leaving the country for a period of time.” The Intercept said that Loffredo was ordered to stay in the country till October 20.
“We are deeply concerned by the arrest of journalist Jeremy Loffredo in Israel, which highlights the high level of censorship in the country since the war started, and the ban on him leaving the country,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna. “All journalists should be allowed to do their jobs freely and unconditionally to provide the public with important information on an escalating war.”
The charges stem from Loffredo’s report showing the aftermath of Iranian attacks on military and intelligence targets inside Israel. The outlet added it “unequivocally rejects these outrageous accusations from Israeli police.”
YNet said that “charges against him include aiding the enemy during wartime and providing information to the enemy.” Loffredo’s attorney, Leah Tsemel, told YNet that “he published the information openly and fully, without attempting to hide anything. If this information constitutes aiding the enemy, many other journalists in Israel, including Israeli reporters, should also be arrested. A spy would not have acted so publicly and transparently.”
CPJ emailed the IDF’s North America Media Desk and the Israeli police inquiring about the charges, whereabouts and location of Loffredo, but didn’t immediately receive any response.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
As the Israeli military continues its assaults on Gaza and Lebanon, which have included the targeting of hospitals and ambulances and the killing of medical personnel, among other violations of international law, we speak to a doctor currently volunteering in Beirut. Dr. Bing Li is an emergency medicine physician and U.S. Army veteran who also volunteered at Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Calling for peace in war zones around the world and an end to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, a grassroots group organized by survivors of the United States’ atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. Nihon Hidankyo was established in 1956 after a number of local organizations of hibakusha, the Japanese name for “bomb-affected people,”…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Intense bombing by Israel is displacing hundreds of thousands of people in Lebanon. Hundreds of people have died, and Lebanese authorities has said one million others have been displaced since September 23. Othman Belbeisi, the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Middle East and North Africa director said:
With this wave of displacement, we see huge needs… the situation is devastating. Lebanon needs more support. What has been offered so far is minimal and does not match the needs.
The IOM has “verified and tracked” some 690,000 internally displaced people in Lebanon, Belbeisi said, noting about 400,000 others had reportedly fled the country, many of them for neighbouring Syria.
Around a quarter of the displaced in Lebanon, or more than 185,000 people, are in official shelters such as schools, according to the IOM.
Around another a quarter have rented accommodation, while some 47% are living in “host settings”, the IOM said.
Many people are staying with relatives, while some with nowhere to go are sleeping on the streets.
The UN has appealed for $426 million to address the humanitarian crisis in the country over the next three months, including $32 million for the IOM to assist some 400,000 people.
UN humanitarian agency OCHA said Friday the appeal was just 12% funded, with $51 million received.
We are appalled by sweeping inflammatory language on multiple sides.
Recent language threatening Lebanese people as a whole and calling on them to either rise up against Hezbollah or face destruction like Gaza, risks being understood as encouraging or accepting violence directed against civilians and civilian objects, in violation of international law.
She also decried as “unacceptable” the “ongoing denigration of the UN, in particular UNRWA”, the UN agency supporting nearly six million Palestinian refugees spread across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Israel have also fired at UN Peacekeeper headquarters in Lebanon.
However, whilst we don’t necessarily disagree with these remarks, have these people been paying attention to anything Israel has done over the last year?
Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians have often spat out goading and inflammatory remarks.
Israel have repeatedly bombed UN workers, aid workers, schools, and hospitals in Palestine. Now that they’ve turned their attentions to bombing Lebanon in earnest, we’re starting to see the same thing play out. But, we can’t forget another crucial factor that has enabled Israel to do their worst in Palestine: corporate Western media doesn’t care about the atrocities Israel is committing.
Amal Saad, an expert in Hezbollah, told Al Jazeera:
We can’t compare the severity of [south Lebanon] with Gaza, because what Gaza is going through is historically unprecedented and it is a genocide.
But it does look like Israel is adapting tactics that it used in Gaza. [The campaign] is still less than Gaza because what’s happening in [Lebanon] is not ethnic cleansing, yet. It’s not genocidal, yet.
But it could head there.
Academic Assal Rad shared headlines showing a continuation of pointed silence from mainstream media:
Israel just bombed a residential building in central Beirut killing and injuring over 130 people at least. Look how Western media tries to cover this up.
-Don’t mention Israel
-Cast doubt
-Justify with assassination storyYou have to see it, you have to see it’s all by design. pic.twitter.com/LYI7NxaK3L
— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) October 10, 2024
Just as Israel claim they’re targeting Hamas in Palestine while bombing children and hospitals, corporate media are now falling into line with Israeli lies about Hezbollah.
As the Canary has repeatedly asked over the last year: even if you accept that Israel has a right to target Hamas or Hezbollah, does that mean Israel has the right to kill indiscriminately? To tear children to shreds, to bomb hospitals and schools, to cause terror amongst fleeing people?
The headlines shown above are enabling Israel’s actions in Lebanon, just as the same outlets manufactured consent for Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.
Journalist Laila Al-Arian shared a screenshot of a New York Times quiz about Lebanon:
This is in such poor taste I don’t even know even know what to say anymore https://t.co/NvKTkWBpiO
— Laila Al-Arian (@LailaAlarian) September 27, 2024
How depraved, how morally bankrupt to turn Israel’s terror in Lebanon into a silly little pop quiz.
Rad shared another set of screenshots making the distinction that Israel is not bombing Hezbollah, but Lebanon:
This is the same framing that Israel has used (and the media parrots) to justify the slaughter in Gaza. Indiscriminate bombing that kills hundreds and injures over a thousand people in one day is not a targeted attack.
Israel isn’t “striking Hezbollah” they are bombing Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/22ZhRrtXMQ
— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) September 23, 2024
It’s no accident that Israel knows it can bring out the same set of excuses for its indiscriminate bombing in Lebanon. They’re following the playbook they’ve used for decades on Palestine, and journalists in the West are lapping it up.
Journalists have a duty to speak truth to power, and to challenge narratives. The fucking least they can do is not simply parrot the words of warmongers. Apparently, that’s too much to ask for.
But, make no mistake – Israel couldn’t carry out its path of destruction without the aid of mainstream media.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Al Jazeera English
By The Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
Israel is continuing its war on journalists. Just this week, 19 year old Hassan Hamad was killed at his home in the Jabalia refugee camp.
According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, Hassan’s death means Israel has killed 176 Palestinian journalists so far. Al Jazeera reported that:
Colleagues and the Government’s Media Office in Gaza confirmed Hamad’s death, saying the journalist’s home was deliberately attacked to silence him after he received threats.
One of Hassan’s colleagues used his Twitter account to announce his death, writing:
With deep sorrow and pain, I mourn the journalist Hassan Hamad. I testify before God that you fulfilled your duty. Hassan Hamad, the journalist who did not live past the age of 20, resisted for a full year in his own way.
He resisted by staying away from his family so they wouldn’t be targeted. He resisted when he struggled to find an internet signal, sitting for an hour or two on the rooftop just to send the videos that reach you in seconds.
His colleague described Hassan’s final moments:
Yesterday, from 10 PM, he moved between the bombed locations and then returned to search for an internet signal, only to go back and cover the scenes of the scattered remains. He endured the pain of an injury to his leg, yet continued filming.
At 6 AM, he called me to send his last video. After a call that didn’t last more than a few seconds, he said, “There they are, there they are, it’s done,” and hung up. It’s a feeling no human can bear. Hassan also resisted the occupation, leaving behind a mark and a message that we will carry on after him. We belong to God, and to Him we shall return.
As they have with many others, Israel specifically targeted Hassan because he was a journalist.
They sent him warnings that they would kill him for reporting on the genocide. He removed himself from his family, at 19 years old, in order to keep them alive.
Then, he was warned they were coming to kill him.
That in itself should be enough to shake the foundations of the West’s moral system.
But, it will do nothing. Nothing will change and more Palestinian journalists will be targeted while everyone who can stop this genocide, does nothing.
Hassan was fired upon so heavily that all that remained of his body was scattered into pieces. The following is a video posted by one of Hassan’s colleagues – Hassan himself is in the blue bag his colleagues carry.
Normally, the Canary wouldn’t publish such a graphic clip.
However, on this occasion, we feel that it’s important to show the footage, and to provide the context for it.
Let’s be clear, Israel made the choice to target Hassan. They targeted him heavily, and literally tore his body into pieces. His friends and colleagues were left to scoop up his remains into bags and boxes. They did so in order to cover as much of him as they could in a funeral shroud:
هكذا يتم تكوين جثمان الصحفي حسن حمد pic.twitter.com/pTF5iubr07
— حسام شبات (@HossamShabat) October 6, 2024
Journalist Hossam Shobat asked how many of his colleagues he would have to see so obliterated that their remains could only be scooped into bags:
I just saw my friend and colleague Hassan Hamad an hour ago Israeli occupation forces have just killed him, and what remains of his body is in pieces in a plastic bag. Why do I have to see my friends in plastic bags? Why is this world so cruel to us?
— حسام شبات (@HossamShabat) October 6, 2024
Journalist Maha Hussaini translated the threats the Israeli army sent to Hassan:
Listen, If you continue spreading lies about Israel, we'll come for you next and turn your family into […] This is your last warning".. Journalist Hassan Hamad received this message on WhatsApp, along with several calls from an Israeli officer ordering him to stop filming in… pic.twitter.com/q6SAzMj5xc
— Maha Hussaini (@MahaGaza) October 6, 2024
Hassan was killed because he refused to be silent. He refused to stop documenting the genocide and ethnic cleansing of his own people.
One commenter on social media said:
the idf is field executing journalists in their press vests and western journo culture can’t extend them even a morsel of the trumpeting solidarity they congratulate themselves for doling out to any colleague who writes a transphobic op ed
— michael wave (@SzMarsupial) October 10, 2024
Hassan’s death alone should be enough to overturn Western media. It should have journalists scrambling to report on this travesty. One of their own has been targeted for being a journalist. They should be expressing their grief, resolving to never forget.
But, grief and remembrances are for white and Western victims. Hundreds and thousands of Palestinians being killed doesn’t warrant any grief, or in fact any response at all, from these journalists that are stenographers of power.
If you can’t even gather around a colleague’s death, then what use is your journalism?
Journalist Shorouk Asaad told The New Arab:
If 176 Israeli journalists were killed elsewhere, I do not think the world’s reaction would silence, but when we talk about a Palestinian journalist, unfortunately everyone is silent.
May their silence haunt them and their useless journalism.
Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Al Jazeera English
By The Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
For over a year now, Israel has been indiscriminately carpet bombing the Middle East. In the first 60 days alone, Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza generated an estimated 281,000 metric tonnes of CO2. This is the equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal; disastrous for the climate.
In January 2023, the Social Science Research Network projected that the projected emissions from the first 60 days of Israel’s genocide in Gaza were greater than the annual emissions of 20 individual countries.
However, the picture now is likely to be a lot worse – and exacerbating the climate and biodiversity crises.
The Israeli military is a substantial contributor to carbon emissions, and its operations in Gaza are no exception. Like other modern militaries, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) rely heavily on fossil fuels to power their vehicles, aircraft, and weapons systems.
This heavy reliance on fossil fuels makes militaries one of the largest institutional emitters of greenhouse gases in the world. While precise data on the IDF’s carbon footprint is often classified, estimates suggest that military activities account for a significant portion of Israel’s national greenhouse gas emissions.
For context, the US military emits more CO2 than many industrialised nations. While Israel’s military is smaller, it still relies on similarly energy-intensive machinery, including fighter jets, tanks, drones, and other vehicles that burn large amounts of jet fuel and diesel.
Estimates suggest that Israel’s defense sector could be responsible for approximately 5-10% of the country’s overall emissions, a figure that rises significantly during times of active conflict.
This increased operational intensity leads to higher fuel consumption, producing a spike in emissions that has direct implications for the global effort to mitigate the climate crisis.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has severely impacted the region’s agricultural lands, further worsening the climate crisis. Gaza has a history of rich agricultural production, including olive trees, citrus groves, and vegetable crops.
However, repeated bombings, airstrikes, and ground operations by Israeli forces have devastated these resources. Crops have been flattened, irrigation systems destroyed, and fertile land rendered unusable.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has reported that vast tracts of agricultural land in Gaza have been laid waste by Israel’s military actions. When crops and trees are destroyed, not only are the livelihoods of thousands of Palestinian farmers ruined, but a critical carbon sink is also lost.
For example, the olive tree absorbs 11kg of CO2 per litre of olive oil produced. Israel has damaged or destroyed at least 50% of Gaza’s olive trees. Therefore, at least 165 tonnes of CO2 that was previously captured will now not be.
Trees and crops play a significant role in capturing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When they are destroyed, the carbon they have stored is released back into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.
Moreover, the loss of agricultural land exacerbates food insecurity in Gaza, which relies heavily on local food production to sustain its population. This destruction necessitates importing food supplies, which further increases carbon emissions due to transportation and logistics, compounding the environmental toll of Israel’s actions.
Beyond the destruction of crops and trees, the war in Gaza has generated extensive pollution that will have long-term environmental consequences. The use of explosive weapons in densely populated areas has created toxic remnants of war.
Buildings and infrastructure reduced to rubble release hazardous substances, including heavy metals, asbestos, and other pollutants, into the soil and groundwater.
The Israeli airstrikes have also targeted essential utilities like sewage treatment plants and water facilities in Gaza, resulting in untreated waste being discharged into the environment. This has led to the contamination of water sources, which not only threatens public health but also harms local ecosystems.
Polluted water affects marine life in the Mediterranean Sea and disrupts coastal ecosystems that are crucial to biodiversity.
The toxic pollution created by Israel further complicates Gaza’s environmental recovery. Cleanup efforts will be extensive and will require significant resources, which themselves have an environmental cost. The rebuilding process, if and when it occurs, will generate a new wave of emissions from construction activities.
Rebuilding Gaza after the destruction caused by Israel will be a massive undertaking with a considerable carbon footprint. The energy required to manufacture, transport, and assemble building materials like concrete, steel, and glass is immense.
According to estimates from post-conflict rebuilding efforts in other parts of the world, the carbon footprint of reconstructing a single residential building can be between 200-500 tons of CO2, depending on its size and the materials used.
Given that thousands of buildings, homes, schools, and hospitals have been destroyed or severely damaged in Gaza, the carbon emissions from reconstruction will be substantial. For every ton of cement produced, about a ton of CO2 is emitted, and Gaza will require millions of tons of construction materials to rebuild its infrastructure.
The largest carbon emission output cited in one analysis is estimated to be between 46.8 million and 60 million tonnes CO2e – higher than the annual emissions of more than 135 countries.
These emissions will add significantly to the already high levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, driving further climate instability.
Moreover, the destruction and subsequent rebuilding cycles in Gaza have a cumulative effect on global emissions.
Every time infrastructure is destroyed and rebuilt, the energy-intensive processes involved contribute to a larger carbon footprint. This cycle of destruction and reconstruction perpetuates not only human suffering but also the degradation of the environment.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza is more than a humanitarian crisis. It is an environmental catastrophe that fuels the global climate crisis. The emissions from military operations, the destruction of vital agricultural resources, the pollution resulting from the bombings, and the massive carbon footprint of future reconstruction all add to the cumulative impact of Israel’s genocide on our planet.
Featured image via the Canary
By The Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
The World Food Programme (WFP) has reported that it has been forced to suspend distribution of food parcels across all of Gaza, and food distribution “in any form” in north Gaza, as Palestinians across the region starve due to Israel’s humanitarian aid blockade. The group said on Wednesday that aid entry into Gaza has hit its lowest point in months and that food distribution has been halted…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on AlternativeRadio and was authored by info@alternativeradio.org.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Israeli military opened fire on UN peacekeepers and their facilities this week as part of its ground invasion of southern Lebanon, the latest example of Israel targeting UN workers amid its genocide. The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) reported that Israeli forces fired at peacekeepers in three attacks on Wednesday and Thursday, as Israel’s recent escalation causes “widespread…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Human rights groups are demanding international powers intervene to stop Israel’s creation of an “extermination zone” in northern Gaza this week, as Israeli forces are attacking hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who they have trapped in the region, and are demanding that hospitals evacuate. Several advocacy groups have raised alarm as Israel has embarked on a campaign to seemingly…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On Oct. 7, thousands of American Jews with the organization If Not Now held vigils around the US to grieve the tens of thousands of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Israeli lives collectively lost over the past year. For many anti-Zionist Jews, the past year has been a time when their political commitments and principles have been put to the test. While the Biden and Netanyahu governments continue to weaponize antisemitism to justify the genocide in Gaza, many Jewish people are instead taking up the banner of justice and equality for Palestinians. The Real News reports from DC, speaking directly with organizers working with the Jewish American community to demand an arms embargo of Israel.
Production/Post-Production: Jaisal Noor
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Eliana Golding:
Our tears are abundant enough and our hearts are big enough to grieve for every life taken, every universe destroyed, whether Palestinian, Lebanese, or Israeli. It is not either or. We need one another. Jews cannot be safe if Palestinians are not safe and free.
Jaisal Noor (Narrator):
On October 7th, hundreds of American Jews held a vigil in Washington D.C to solemnly commemorate the one-year mark since the Hamas attack that killed 1,100 Israelis, and to condemn Israel’s continued genocide in Gaza that’s killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, though one study estimated in June that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributed to the current conflict.
Lauren Maunus:
We grieve the continuing genocide in Gaza, which we as Jews, many of whom had ancestors killed in the Holocaust, recognize as an attempt to wipe a people out.
Jaisal Noor (Narrator):
Speakers also condemn the ongoing attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Eliana Golding:
We grieve for the hundreds of Palestinians killed in the West Bank by the Israeli military and settlers, many of them in violent pogroms, reminiscent of those unleashed against our ancestors. We grieve for Palestinians continually displaced through occupation and apartheid.
Jaisal Noor (Narrator):
And Israel’s escalating attacks in Lebanon.
Lauren Maunus:
It is unimaginable that a full year later we are seeing similar scenes in Lebanon to those we saw in Gaza. Residential buildings bombed to rubble, Israeli and American officials using dehumanizing rhetoric to justify massacres of civilians and no ends to the violence in sight.
Jaisal Noor (Narrator):
The action was organized by If Not Now, a Jewish organization dedicated to fighting for Palestinian equality. Organizers said 4,000 turned out for vigils across Boston, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. While they mourned each Jewish life lost over the past year, their message contrasted sharply with mainstream Jewish organizations. Speakers demanded an immediate ceasefire and an end to US weapon shipments to Israel.
Ethan Miller:
While we grieve today, we also are taking action to ensure that there’s not another sent to Israel to be used to kill any number of more innocent people, and that as American Jews, our voices need to be heard.
Jaisal Noor (Narrator):
Among the speakers was Lily Greenberg-Call, the first Jewish Biden administration appointee to resign over the U.S.’s ongoing support of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Lily Greenberg-Call:
I felt that, one, I needed to leave to be in integrity with myself, that I could not represent the President as he is making Jewish people the face of the American War machine, and using our trauma and our pain to justify slaughter of another people, and that I would actually potentially have more power to change this and to end what’s happening if I stepped out and if I resigned.
Jaisal Noor (Narrator):
Organizers emphasized that criticizing Israeli policy is not inherently anti-Semitic, and highlighted the challenge of speaking out for Palestinian rights in Jewish spaces.
Lily Greenberg-Call:
And I think the greatest threat for Jews remains white supremacy and white nationalism. And it’s very convenient for those people, especially to conflate anti-Semitism with critique of the state of Israel, because it distracts from the real threat. The only thing that will keep Jews safe is a multiracial democracy. And there’s a lot of people in this country, especially who are invested in fighting against that.
Jaisal Noor (Narrator):
Speakers emphasized Jewish safety will not be achieved through what they repeatedly named as Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Lily Greenberg-Call:
We are here to really emphasize that the only way out of this is a new politics that values every single human life as equal, as dignified. And the only way to get to a thriving future for Palestinians and Israelis is a ceasefire and an end to the occupation and apartheid.
Jaisal Noor (Narrator):
For the Real News, this is Jaisal Noor reporting from Washington.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
As support from Western governments continues to prop up Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, people of conscience continue to mobilize at the grassroots to pressure their political leaders to change course. On Friday, Sept. 27, students, NGO staff, and workers from over 200 unions across Spain waged a 24-hour general strike to demand the Spanish government cut ties with Israel and end all forms of military aid. The Real News reports from the streets of Madrid.
Producer, Videographer, Editor: María Artigas
Assistant Producer: Sato Díaz
Translation, Narrator: Pedro Rubio
Protesters: Resistance! Resistance! Long live the Palestinian people’s fight!
Reporter: Tens of thousands of people across Spain took to the streets to protest the ongoing genocide in Palestine. The CGT and Solidaridad Obrera unions called a general strike, backed by hundreds of associations and organizations. The MATS union (Health Workers Assembly Movement) joined the protests with a gathering at the 12 de Octubre Hospital in Madrid, demanding an end to the genocide and the military, commercial, and diplomatic relations between the Spanish government and Israel.
Edurne Prado: From the union we have called for this rally because we are seeing a live genocide of the Palestinian people. Now also to the Lebanese people. And we, as health workers, cannot forget not only the thousands of families and children who have died, but also that we have colleagues there risking their lives day by day, without any resources and working out of pure vocation and saving people’s lives. And for us it is also important today to call names, to denounce the complicity of all European governments, of our own government, which claims to be progressive but then does not break commercial or diplomatic relations with the state of Israel. And for us today is also a day to denounce.
Reporter: Pickets, marches, and various protests were held throughout the morning. Around 150 towns and cities across the country organized actions in support of the general strike, with notable mobilizations in cities like Barcelona, Granada, Valencia, Zaragoza, and Seville.
In Madrid, hundreds of participants gathered at the doors of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to demand action from the Spanish government.
Protesters: Boycott, boycott, boycott Israel! Military budgets for schools and hospitals! Break, break, break with Israel!
José Luis Carretero: We called for a general strike and a day of protest because we understand that, in the first place, public services must be defended. In the face of the fact that public money is being used to sustain wars, to sustain a situation of growing warlike confrontation in Europe and the Mediterranean as a whole. And we also raise it in defense of human rights, of children’s rights in Palestine, in Gaza, in Lebanon, especially in Palestine. We raise it because, at the end of the day, we workers have the right to state that our interests are not only limited to wage increases or working conditions, vacations, and leaves, but also in the defense of fundamental rights and what was traditionally known as workers’ internationalism. And in that sense we also defend the right of workers to express their solidarity with all subjugated peoples. We ask the Spanish government to do everything possible to stop this genocide. We understand the severance of relations with the state of Israel, the severance of diplomatic relations with the state of Israel and also the denunciation of the international trade treaty that it has with the European Union, with the state of Israel, we understand that it is absolutely necessary, and also to do everything possible to comply with international arrest warrants that are already on the table by the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice against those responsible for this genocide.
Protesters: It is not a war, it is genocide! No more complicity! Israel murders, Europe sponsors!
Carmen Arnaiz: We are here mainly because Palestinian workers sent a call many months ago to all European workers asking us what we were going to do about the genocide that was taking place in their land. So, based on that call, from our organization we initially decided that the biggest response we could give as a union is to call a general strike. But obviously it had to be with other comrades, because otherwise it would not have made sense for us to call a strike. In the end, 218 organizations have adhered to the call. And what we intended with this day of general strike and struggle, because they are organizing rallies, marches, as well as picket lines and other things, is to denounce that the Spanish government is spending enormous amounts of money on arms, much more than on social services, much more than on education, health, aid for dependency, fair pensions, regularization of so many comrades who are in an irregular situation, migrants, and yet it is redirecting all that money to the arms business, to the sale of arms — and, on top of that, with a genocidal state that, according to all international legislation, we should have broken off all diplomatic relations of all kinds with it. The embassy is still open here, arms are still being sold, despite the fact that they say it is not true and they have recognized the state of Palestine. But it has been an act of posturing, because at the moment of truth they continue negotiating with Israel, they continue supporting all that barbarity that is there with our taxes. They are making us accomplices of a genocide. So, as civil society, as many people around the world outraged by this, we have organized ourselves to try to raise our voices and demand, of course, that the genocide ends and for all and that, in the meantime, as a means of pressure, immediately cut off all relations with any government that is committing genocide against a people.
Protesters: From the river to the sea, Palestine shall overcome!
Reporter: Universities also responded to the strike call. After the sit-ins in May, students and professors organized again for this day of action. Under the slogan “We will no longer study to the sound of bombs,” the Complutense Professors’ Network and the students from the Madrid sit-in took to the streets to condemn the genocide in Gaza. The day featured roundtable discussions, campus walkouts, rallies, and protests.
Rub: We have come out to argue against the responsibility of the Spanish government for continuing to send economic and military support to the genocidal state of Israel, and also to denounce the complicity of our university, which continues to maintain relations with Israeli universities. It continues to keep companies that finance Israel’s genocide on the social councils and university boards of directors. Following the internationalist wake that the encampments were having and also picking up the fighting spirit of the students who were already going out to fight directly against governments as in the case of Sri Lanka, we decided to have an encampment also in Madrid, which denounced the complicity of our universities and, again, Spanish imperialism and how our government participates in it. And I think it is important to reemphasize all the struggle against the repression that took place in our encampment, but above all in the United States and in France and in Germany, where the repression was terrible, people were arrested, they tried to charge them as terrorists. And I think it is very important that we recover that spirit of struggle in the student movement and in the Spanish workers’ movement.
Eva Aladro: The University cannot stand still in the face of a genocide of the size we are witnessing, which we are also seeing spreading to other countries and which continues with the same line of massacring civilian populations under the excuse of wanting to put an end to terrorism, as more terrorist acts are carried out by Israel. We professors started mobilizations together with the students, and our idea is to continue in the same line, because we believe that both the academics and the students, as well as the whole youth community in our country, which is mobilized, are the social conscience. And they are the ones who really have to make an effort in some way to awaken society, so that they refuse to accept a situation such as we are living, of hundreds of dead human beings, children, women, etc. every week. Unfortunately, the only way to stop the war is to make the war unprofitable. So there are three things to achieve this that are the key. The first is to disinvest in the companies, businesses, and universities that are contributing to a massacre like the one in Gaza. There is another option, which is also to block all the activities that have to do with and whose interest is based on that massacre. And another very important thing is to mobilize society and public sensibility not to accept products, etc. from communities or countries that are carrying out genocide. There is a very important legislative initiative that we, the professors of all the public universities of Madrid, are carrying out, which is a letter that we have sent to the high commissioners of both the European Parliament and the Committee on Research and Innovation, asking them to respect their own Euro-Mediterranean Cooperation Agreement, which states that no treaties or agreements or principles of cooperation can be established with countries that are violating democratic rights and democratic principles.
Therefore, the European Union has very specific legislation that must prevent any treaty of friendship and cooperation, with a country that is committing genocide. So we, the professors, have received a response letter in which they tell us that they are going to try to convene a meeting with Israel, but we want to force that, really, if the Euro-Mediterranean agreement itself is not complied with, we are going to take it to the European courts. And from there we will continue, because we believe that this is one of the initiatives that we believe must be developed, because it is at the legislative and court level where perhaps we will achieve the respect for international legality that we do not achieve at the political level or at the level of institutions.
Protesters: Gaza, hang on, Madrid rises up!
Reporter: Thousands attended the afternoon mass march through the heart of the capital, from Atocha Station to Callao Square. The organizing unions put the number of participants in the afternoon marches nationwide at more than 150,000 people. And more than 200 trade union and social organizations supported the strike call.
Deva Mar Escobedo: I came here today with my colleagues from trans in fight quite excited about the strike. I was following the picket lines and the marches in other cities. I think they can be the most powerful things of today and of this new political course, that we can do more pressure, get a real change of positions in the government and stop this genocide. Because I think it is very important as citizens that we come to all protests, all mobilizations that we can, because, after all, we are witnessing a genocide live. I believe we have a duty as individuals to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Italy’s defence minister on Thursday 10 October slammed Israel’s “shooting” at the headquarters of the UN peacekeepers force (UNIFIL) in Lebanon as “intolerable”, after the force said it had been hit by Israeli tank fire.
The UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon said Israeli tank fire on its headquarters in the country’s south Thursday wounded two of its members, accusing Israel of “repeatedly” hitting its positions.
It is the most serious incident reported by the mission since it said last week it had rejected Israeli demands to “relocate” from some of its positions.
UNIFIL said in a statement:
This morning, two peacekeepers were injured after an IDF Merkava tank fired its weapon toward an observation tower at UNIFIL’s headquarters in Naqura, directly hitting it and causing them to fall.
The two peacekeepers did not suffer serious injuries, “but they remain in hospital,” it said.
According to UNIFIL, the Israeli military also hit another position in Ras Naqura, further to the south, on Thursday.
The peacekeeping force said it hit “the entrance to the bunker where peacekeepers were sheltering, and damaging vehicles and a communications system”.
“An IDF drone was observed flying inside the UN position up to the bunker entrance,” it said. The UN then accused Israel of breaking international humanitarian law.
So, Italy’s defence minister Guido Crosetto said he “protested” to Israel’s defence minister and summoned the Israeli ambassador over the incident.
“The shooting at the UNIFIL headquarters” and other incidents involving “small arms fire” are “intolerable, they must be carefully and decisively avoided”, Crosetto said in a statement:
For these reasons, I protested to my Israeli counterpart and the Israeli ambassador to Italy.
Italy has more than 1,000 troops in the 10,000 strong UNIFIL force in south Lebanon that said Israeli tank fire on its headquarters wounded two members.
Crosetto said he told Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant:
that what is happening… starting from the shooting at the UNIFIL headquarters is, for me and for the Italian government, unacceptable. Any possible error that could put the soldiers, both Italian and UNIFIL, at risk must be avoided.
Italian fascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s office said the government:
has formally protested to the Israeli authorities and has firmly reiterated that what is happening near the UNIFIL contingent base is unacceptable.
UNIFIL has called for a ceasefire since an escalation between Israel and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah on September 23, after a year of cross-border fire.
Crosetto said there had been other incidents, including the deliberate disabling of perimeter-monitoring cameras and the shooting at a lighting and a relay station, all of which were “in clear contrast to international law:
This morning I sent a formal communication to the United Nations to reiterate the unacceptability of what is happening in South Lebanon.
Thursday’s incident is the most serious reported by UNIFIL since it said last week it had rejected Israeli demands to “relocate” from some positions.
Featured image via the Canary
By The Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
The global humanitarian group Save the Children said Thursday that roughly 30% of the kids killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since last October were under the age of 5 — likely a significant undercount given that thousands of the child victims of Israel’s U.S.-backed assault have yet to be identified. Citing a recent list published by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, Save the Children noted that of…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israel is deliberately targeting health facilities and killing and torturing medical personnel in Gaza, UN investigators said on Thursday 10 October, accusing the country of “crimes against humanity” and war crimes.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry said in a statement that:
Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza… committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities.
The three-person commission, established by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021 to investigate alleged international law violations in Israel and the Palestinian territories, was publishing its second report since Hamas’s 7 October attack a year ago.
The report also highlighted abuse of Palestinian detainees in Israel and of hostages in Gaza, accusing both Israel and Palestinian armed groups of “torture” and sexual and gender-based violence.
Israel has accused the commission of “systematic anti-Israeli discrimination” and flatly rejected the findings of its June report, which also accused Israel of committing crimes against humanity, including of “extermination” in Gaza.
Commission chair Navi Pillay, a former UN rights chief, said in the statement that:
Israel must immediately stop its unprecedented wanton destruction of healthcare facilities in Gaza… Israel is targeting the right to health itself with significant long-term detrimental effects on the civilian population.
The report found that Israeli security forces had “deliberately killed, detained and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles” in Gaza and restricted permits to leave the territory for medical treatment.
Such actions constitute numerous war crimes and “the crime against humanity of extermination”, the commission said.
Israel’s actions had caused “incalculable suffering” among child patients and were “resulting in the destruction of generations of Palestinian children and, potentially, the Palestinian people as a group,” it said.
The report highlighted the death of Hind Rajab in January as “one of the most egregious cases”.
The young girl called the Palestinian Red Crescent, pleading to be rescued, after her family’s car came under fire in Gaza City. Her body was eventually recovered along with six relatives and two Red Crescent rescue workers sent to find her.
The commission said it determined that the Israeli army’s 162nd Division was responsible for the deaths, which constitute war crimes.
The report also examined the treatment of Palestinians held in Israeli military camps and detention facilities. It found that thousands of detainees, including children, have been subjected to:
widespread and systematic abuse, physical and psychological violence, and sexual and gender-based violence.
This amounts:
to the war crime and crime against humanity of torture and the war crime of rape and other forms of sexual violence.
Male detainees were subjected to rape and attacks on their sexual organs, they added.
Detainee deaths as a result of abuse or neglect also amount to the war crimes, the commission said.
The report found the “institutionalised mistreatment of Palestinian detainees” took place “under direct orders” from national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, fuelled by Israeli government statements “inciting violence and retribution”. Pillay said the “appalling acts of abuse” against detainees required accountability and reparations.
The report also accused Hamas of war crimes and crimes against humanity – but on a far lesser scale than that of Israel.
Turning to the Israeli and other hostages held in Gaza by Palestinian armed groups, the report found that many had been subjected to “physical pain and severe mental suffering”, including violence, abuse, sexual violence, humiliation and limited food and water:
Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed the war crimes of torture, inhuman or cruel treatment, and the crimes against humanity of enforced disappearance and other inhumane acts causing great suffering or serious injury.
On Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity, Pillay said:
Children in particular have borne the brunt of these attacks, suffering both directly and indirectly from the collapse of the health system.
Israel has killed over 42,000 people in Gaza, including at least 16,500 children.
Featured image via the Canary
Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on Canary.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.
“We are waiting for you to arrive tomorrow!” my sister told me in our call on Saturday, October 6, 2023. It was midnight, the perfect ending to a beautiful and calm day. “We will spend such an enjoyable weekend together.” Then it was 6 am October 7, and my life turned into an indescribable nightmare. Rockets whistled everywhere, and no one understood why. Crying and trembling with fear…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
War is a daily fixture of American life—the US military occupies at least 750 overseas bases, and it has executed military operations in nations around the globe over the past 20 years. But most Americans have remained unaware of this, thanks to a coordinated effort by politicians, corporate media, and the military-industrial complex to make the realities of American militarism invisible to the public. As author Norman Solomon writes in his new book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine, “America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ever really knowing what they’re doing to people we’ll never see.” TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Solomon about his book, the political crisis that decades of invisible war have generated in US domestic politics, and how images of the ongoing carnage in Gaza have exposed the horrors of war that the US worked to make invisible in the post-9/11 era.
Norman Solomon is the cofounder of RootsAction.org, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of numerous books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine.
Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Maximillian Alvarez: In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell famously observed, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face.
“Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck, or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.
“Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
Now, Orwell never could have imagined the ways the 21st century media ecosystem would enable powers narrators to deploy the thought-corrupting and reality-skewing force of language to instigate, justify, muddle or invisibilize the horrors perpetrated in our name.
But what he understood nearly a century ago about the relationship between power, language, and the visibility of atrocity has proven to be grimly timeless. Defending the indefensible is the proven modus operandi of the same consent manufacturing machine that propelled us into an unwinnable, illegal, and globally destabilizing war on terror over 20 years ago.
And, “Euphemism, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness,” have been the tried and tested tools of first resort, employed by corporate media and US political and military officials looking to justify Israel’s US-backed genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, its invasion of Lebanon, and its reckless, nihilistic campaign to embroil the Middle East in an all-out regional war.
In his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, the great Norman Solomon, co-founder of rootsaction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy writes, “America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ever really knowing what they’re doing to people we’ll never see. Patterns of convenient silence and deceptive messaging are as necessary for perpetual war as the Pentagon’s bombs and missiles. Patterns so familiar that they’re apt to seem normal, even natural.
“But the uninformed consent of the governed is a perverse and hollow kind of consent. While short on genuine democracy, the process is long on fueling a constant state of war. To activate a more democratic process will require lifting the fog that obscures the actual dynamics of militarism far away and close at home.”
As we commemorate the grim anniversary of Oct. 7 and reflect on a year of what has been called the most documented genocide in history, as working people around the world struggle to get by and live their lives while bombs and guns obliterate our fellow human beings in Palestine, Ukraine, Lebanon, Sudan, and beyond. When it feels for many of us, like we’ve already seen too much: too much war, too much death, too much carnage, it is important to stop and ask ourselves, how much are we still not seeing? And has the increased visibility of war over the past year changed who we are and how we act to stop it?
To help us break this all down and to discuss his vital book, War Made Invisible, I’m honored to be joined by Norman Solomon himself.
Brother Norman, thank you so much for joining me today on The Real News Network. I really appreciate it.
Norman Solomon: Well, thank you, Max, and you posed such a key question: What are we still not seeing? And we’re encouraged to have this sort of conceit that if we look at the mainline mainstream news and we pay attention to that, that somehow, for instance, we have a grasp, an understanding, intellectually and emotionally, what’s going on in Gaza. And that is basically preposterous, but the conceit that is encouraged compounds the deception. And the whole idea that we understand a war because we watch the news, we listen to it, we read it, is part of the propaganda system itself.
Maximillian Alvarez: I already have explosions of thoughts in my head just hearing that opening salvo from you, and I really can’t recommend Norman’s book enough to everyone watching. Please, go read it, it is vital in these times.
And Norman, I want to build on that, because the paperback version of your book begins in the post-9/11 moment, a little over 20 years ago, and it concludes with an afterword on Gaza. I want those two points to frame our discussion today.
And I was wondering if you could take us there in those immediate months and years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and talk us through what you were seeing and would then write about in War Made Easy. The ways that the carnage was being invisibilized, the ways the public was being manipulated, and the relationship that we had to the war that was being perpetrated in our name.
Norman Solomon: What’s going on now is really a continuation in various permutations of what began after 9/11. We had, essentially, a preemptive absolution for the US government because of the crime against humanity on 9/11, that whatever the United States did after that, in ostensible response, which was really just displaced rage and nationalism and militarism, that that was okay, that it was justified. And we’ve seen that echo today in terms of what the US and Israeli government are saying about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, and now, increasingly, in Lebanon as well.
So for instance, at the end of 2001, you had then Defense Secretary — And it’s uppercase D, I wouldn’t say it’s about defense — But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he said, every death in Afghanistan, whether it is American, whether it is Afghan civilians, every single death is the result of and the culpability of Al-Qaeda. So that was like a blank, bloody check for whatever the US was to do was justified by citing the initial crime.
And I think this is a paradigm from that day to this. When you look at the numbers — And of course people are not numbers, but they are ways for us to understand magnitude — 3,000 deaths from the atrocity on 9/11. And then, according to the Brown University Cost of War project, the direct deaths as a result of the ensuing US so-called war on terror, 950,000 deaths, about half of them civilians. And then you go to the indirect deaths, and the Brown University study says 4.5 million deaths as a result of the US-led so-called war on terror.
So you look at 3,000 deaths, and then you look at direct close to one million, indirect adding up to more than four million. What is that about? What kind of culture, what kind of political system will engage in collective punishment of people who are guilty of breathing while Afghan, breathing while Iraqi? Or fast-forward more than two decades, what kind of political culture in the United States will continue to arm an Israeli government that is killing people for the transgression of breathing while Palestinian?
So this is a culture of mass murder that has emanated from or certainly got a huge boost from the response to 9/11. And here we are, what, more than two decades later, and the baseline continues to drop, so the standards continue to be degraded.
I recently saw an excerpt from a film by the wonderful folks at the Media Education Foundation from their film The Occupation of the American Mind, it’s been recirculated now online. And they chronicle the coverage of the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1982, making possible the Israeli-backed right-wing massacre into the thousands of refugees at Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut.
And to see the footage of the US networks in 1982 and compare it to what generally we have seen in 2024 in terms of the coverage of the current Israeli slaughter going on, it is shocking because, as inadequate as the coverage was in 1982 on the US networks, it was much better, it was more candid, it was more willing to call out Israel than what we’re getting now.
So I think a challenge as independent journalists, as progressive media institutions that The Real News Network and others are stepping onto to really step up to the challenge is to say, we don’t put up with this. We don’t accept a propaganda system that is consistent with what Martin Luther King Jr. called the madness of militarism. And Max, you referred to the consequences of the warfare state at home domestically, and it’s really what we know, what goes around comes around.
Dr. King referred to it, and these were his words, he said it was, “A demonic, destructive suction tube,” that was taking billions of dollars worth of resources for healthcare, education, housing, elderly care, neonatal care, you name it, and it was siphoning those resources to kill people in Vietnam.
And we’re talking now towards the end of 2024, and that dynamic is in full force, is ripping off. It is literally depriving lives of existence here at home while that funding, including most recently $20 billion with a B, dollars green-lighted by the White House, more weapons to Israel, that money, our tax dollars courtesy of US taxpayers, is paying to slaughter Palestinian people.
Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, man. I mean, the marquee out in front of The Real News Network building currently reads the bar from Tupac Shakur, “They got money for wars but can’t feed the poor.” And I dream of the day when we can change the marquee and that slogan will no longer be relevant, but I feel we’re going to be waiting for a long time.
But Vietnam feels like a great example to bring up, not only because visibility and truth telling did play a critical role in public opinion on the war, the protest movement, so on and so forth, with images of My Lai Massacre and so on and so forth. Those images are burned into people’s minds. And there was also, of course, a draft. There were more tangible connections that people had to the machinery of war that, as you said, in the 21st century, those tangible connections have been severed, invisibilized, buried underground.
So, what was it about the 21st century US approach to war that made it so much easier to not only perpetrate but to do so at industrial scale the way that we have? What changed in the 21st century that enabled the US and other countries to make war so much easier?
Norman Solomon: Well, really, the disconnection has increased over time. It’s been an evolution of distancing people in the United States from the wars that are perpetrated with their tax dollars in their names. It is so much easier for elites to start wars than for people then to stop them. And, certainly, during escalation of the Vietnam War, it was considered by those in power to be, per se, fairly easy to do.
And contrary to myth, it wasn’t the US media, the TV networks that stirred up the protests. It was the protests that changed the political climate that compelled, along with the longevity of the war and the failure to “win” that brought, kicking and screaming, reluctantly, the networks to show, actually, not very much of the carnage. But it was part of a tone that changed that ultimately had some political effect.
There’s much ballyhoo about when Walter Cronkite in 1968 said the war was in a stalemate and could not be won. What is often forgotten is that Cronkite never made a principled objection to the war. His objection was that it wasn’t being won.
And if you look at the paradigms of the last several decades, when there has been a war that the United States can wage routinely, I have to say, and my books have documented and many others have documented, based on falsehoods, if the wars can be “won quickly”, they remain popular.
And so in 1991 when the first President Bush launched a war on Iraq, and that war included the notorious, so-called horrible word, horrible phrase, “turkey shoot” of retreating Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait, literally gunned down in huge quantities from the air.
Bush had tremendous popularity. He had been in the low 50, 60% approval rating right before that because of the economy. Right after this triumph of the US war, what’s called the Gulf War in 1991, Bush’s popularity rating went up to 91%. Why? Because the war just took six weeks.
And this is embedded in US media and politics, and, unfortunately, to a large extent, in the public perception, if the war can be a triumph, it can be done early, not a lot of Americans die, then that’s considered to be a good thing. So the underlying militarism can vary in terms of how it plays out.
I think in also another aspect of the answer to your question, in this century, the immediate aftermath of 9/11, within a couple of years, the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. First, it was a lot of cheerleading. The bombing of Afghanistan that was launched in October of 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11, it’s stunning when you look at the Gallup polls.
90% of the US public supported the US attack on Afghanistan, 5% opposed, the other five said they weren’t sure. Well, that’s Soviet Union-style approval. That is like dictatorship, propaganda system approval levels, sky high.
And then in 2003, the US invasion and then war on Iraq essentially… Well, at least at that stage, we had media coverage. It didn’t mean it told us much about war at all, but there were US troops who were on TV, there were photographs, there were countless stories about them. They were fighting, they were doing a lot of killing, especially from the air, and some of them were dying. And the invisibility of US wars has been escalating as the number of US troops directly involved has been drastically decreasing.
And now more than ever, these are push button wars. The US is still engaged in dozens and dozens of different countries under the rubric of war on terror, counterinsurgency, a lot of it is secret, special ops going on.
And so we’re in a warfare state but, to a large extent, there’s virtually no media coverage of it except from independent, progressive, anti-war oriented media outlets. And the net result is that we have a huge military budget and it goes virtually unchallenged. I mean, the official, so-called Defense Department budget is now around $900 billion with a B a year, heading very close to $1 trillion with a T. That doesn’t include nuclear weapons, some veterans benefits as a result of trying to mitigate these terrible results of these wars.
Some of the invisibility layers include, for instance, I had to triple check this number because I was working on War Made Invisible, and I saw, oh, US soldiers who were involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when they came home to the US, how many of them had traumatic brain injury? 300,000. Can you imagine, 300,000 men and some women walking around the United States with traumatic brain injury? That’s an invisibility. All kinds of trauma.
In War Made Invisible, I talk about the much higher rates of spousal abuse and violence from veterans, especially those who have seen combat. The moral corrosion, what’s been called moral injury, involved.
And also, I would say in the current context — And I tried to get into this in the afterword of the paperback of War Made Invisible — The moral corrosion to live in a country that is subsidizing mass murder and genocide and not calling it that at all.
Max, when you were quoting that powerful excerpt from George Orwell, it made me remember as well, I think it was him that said that telling the truth can be, is actually, a subversive act.
And so our challenge now living in a warfare state based on lies, approving of and even glorifying slaughter by the US military and its allies. Now, in the Middle East most of all, of course, Israel, we have this challenge to subvert the warfare state. And we’re very much swimming upstream, but at the same time, while the mainstream is trying to cascade to tell us to be quiet, we know that, in history, we have been and are part of a tradition of Cassandras.
We’re linked to, in the last many decades, people, organizations, and movements who said the escalation of the Vietnam War is wrong. The response to 9/11 to create the so-called war on terror was insanity. What has now been done to Afghanistan because of the US war, what was done to Iraq, we tried to warn the elites.
And I think it’s important for us to augment our mission from we want to speak truth to power, which is, that’s okay, but power knows what they’re doing. It’s not a revelation to them, in most cases, what they’re doing. We also need to speak truth about power. So it’s not a vertical, it’s a horizontal, because that’s about education, agitation, organizing, and building movements.
Maximillian Alvarez: I want to talk about the process of invisibilization and the role that the Obama years played in that. Because I think this, what you write so brilliantly about in your book, when I was reading it, I was thinking, this could apply to a lot of different political subjects that did not go away during the Obama era, but in many ways were just pushed under the radar.
So I feel like the Obama years, in terms of the political sentiments that were fomenting in this country, the underlying economic processes that were creating an even vaster gulf of inequality between the haves and have-nots, and also the reality of militarism, US-perpetrated militarism.
To say nothing of Obama being called the deporter -in-chief, not because he was doing the more visible workplace raids and home raids of the Bush era and previous eras, but because he was using “paper deportations”, the unseen methods, which were proved to be much more efficient at expelling undocumented people from this country.
So in so many ways, the Obama era was characterized by its ability, its deft ability to invisibilize so many of these nefarious forces.
And I wanted to ask if you could talk a bit about what that looked like on the side of the military-industrial complex. Because like I said, there was a visibility component to the war on terror. There was the shock and awe, there were boots on the ground, there were displays of military pride. Again, I remember, I was there. I was one of the guys who didn’t know shit from shit and was cheering it on at that time.
But then we really, in a few short years, really transition to drone warfare, like you said, the warfare of button clicking, and the invisibilization of the carnage. Talk us through a little more what was happening in that first decade of the 21st century that was creating a war machine that could make itself so thoroughly invisible to a public that was back here at home, none the wiser, seemingly?
Norman Solomon: In foreign policy, President Obama made the so-called war on terror bipartisan. And there had been a negative energy from a lot of people who identified as Democrats, and certainly as progressives, that President George W. Bush had taken the country off the rails, that the invasion of Iraq, again, what so many anti-war progressive people had warned against, actually turned out to be a horrific disaster on virtually any level.
And so when Obama came in in early 2009, it was an opportunity to truly turn the page. Instead, he actually sent more troops into Afghanistan. He kept the war going in Iraq, and, ideologically and culturally, really pushed to say that militarism should be not only bipartisan, but considered to be identical with patriotism and standing with your country.
And he was part of a trend that is so sad. I’m old enough to remember when the Congressional Black Caucus was just inspiring. They had an annual alternative budget. We had Ron Dellums, we had Shirley Chisholm, we had John Conyers. These were visionaries who were in step with what Martin Luther King Jr. talked about. They were drum majors for peace. They really made the connections explicit between the militarism and spending for killing overseas, and the deprivation and oppression of poor people, the rainbow, and especially people of color disproportionately in this country.
There cropped up posters during the Obama presidency. And there’s a picture of him and Dr. King, and over Dr. King’s picture was, “I have a dream”, and over Barack Obama’s picture, “I have a drone”.
And I document in War Made Invisible how he just talked the usual nonsense. You would talk to the troops in Afghanistan, and gratuitously, it was unnecessarily politically or anywhere else. It normalized the idea that the best thing you can do is die for your country. It became some oratory, that I mentioned, that was macabre.
Imagine going to Bagram Air Base and telling the troops there that you may join the others who are buried in the special plot at Arlington Cemetery. You really have an opportunity to give for your country. This is a sort of a, dare I say necrophilia. It’s a worship of death in the ostensible service of your country when, actually, it’s in service of the military contractors.
And I talk about in the book, we have gotten so propagandized that often even those of us who oppose the militarism of the US government, we call it a defense budget. We talk about defense spending, a lowercase d, and that is part of the triumph. We’re giving ground to the militarism culture. Very little of the Pentagon budget has anything to do with defense. They can capitalize D, Defense Department, that doesn’t make it real in terms of it’s about defending this country.
And meanwhile, we have this tremendous climate emergency, and we have, as you’ve been referring to Max, this tremendous range of deprivation in our own country. It’s been said that the federal budget is a moral document, or could be, and right now we have a very immoral budget.
And so, as we speak, we have a crossroads of this election. In foreign policy, it’s hard to see very specific differences between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. But with domestic policy, there are huge differences because if Trump is elected and his coterie is brought in with fascistic politics, then the left, then progressives, then anti-war forces, we’ll be back on our heels. We’ll be defending the meager gains that have been achieved by progressives — Important gains, but definitely insufficient gains that have been achieved in the last 10, 20 years.
So I think we’re facing this paradox. No matter what, we should speak truthfully, and that means not pulling our verbal punches, that means challenging those in power, whoever they might be.
Maximillian Alvarez: But over the past year, the visibility of carnage has been one of the most profound forces shaping people’s understanding of what’s happening right now. The social media images of Palestinian men, women, children, elderly people blown apart. Body parts, visceral carnage on people’s social media feeds.
I wanted to ask how the visibility of Israel’s war on Palestine over the past year, how, if at all, that has changed the political dynamics that you were writing about in 2006?
Norman Solomon: Well, the fact that younger people, say under 40, are much more opposed to what Israel is doing than the older demographics speaks, in part, to just less years being propagandized about Israel and more willingness to just look at human rights as human rights, to be consistent about it. And of course, more orientation towards what they see in social media rather than in so-called legacy media.
I think that, ultimately, and this sort of connects to your previous point, is that if we’re going to face a fascist or neo-fascist regime, and I think it’s fair to say that’s what a Trump regime would look like if it comes in, then the capacity to respond to the horrors that we do know about, that we have seen through video and narratives and accounts, that capacity is to hit a brick wall. That’s one of, I think, the most worrying, to put mildly, specters ahead, that fork in the road.
Whereas if we flip it over, yes, the greater awareness — And this is a big change — The awareness of the need to support Palestinian rights and to challenge the terrible joint militarism of the US and the Israeli governments, that has begun to chip away at the foundation of automatic support of US for Israel.
We got a long way to go. I am absolutely, fully aware that that’s true. But if you’re dealing with a wall, which is the Republican Party, then you’re going to just keep hitting the wall. If you’re dealing with a wall that has some cracks in it and there’s a possibility to utilize what we have learned about the murderous qualities of the Israeli government vis-a-vis Palestinian people, the apartheid, the exclusionary policies, the ethnic cleansing, then are we going to have some space to work in, to organize in?
And as you know, Max, from reading War Made Invisible, I have no sparing of words for Joe Biden. I think his policies have been outrageous. I think he’s an accomplice to mass murder. There’s no question about that in terms of his role vis-a-vis Israel.
We don’t know what’s coming up, but we do know that we have to organize and we need to and want to organize in the best possible conditions to build further momentum for the movements that are really necessary.
Maximillian Alvarez: In many ways, I remember looking one time when I was cleaning my kitchen, I found one of those potatoes that had been sitting there for a long time, and it had the sprouts grown out of it. And the sprouts had grown long, the potato had shriveled. And I stared at it thinking, that’s America, basically. We are an international war machine with a domestic government attached to it at this point, but it is increasingly a vestigial domestic body politic, it feels like.
And people feel that. The people I interview, working people, red states, blue states union, non-union. People are not stupid, they know and feel and see that, as we already mentioned. People devastated by Hurricane Helene in the same week that we’re learning about more military aid being sent to Israel. So that is creating a political rage that has nowhere to go.
And that’s where I wanted to end up with, which is where does this go if it is not channeled into a grassroots, coalitional movement, a people-led movement to bend power to our will? If people don’t have that outlet, then that rage turns sideways, it festers or it turns to nihilism.
And therein lies the question about the efficacy of visibility here in fighting the war machine. People have seen more of Israel’s war on Palestine and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians than many had… It’s been more carnage that people have seen over the past year than they have perhaps in their whole lives that has propelled so many people to protest on the streets. Largest Palestine solidarity protests in the history of our country in DC multiple times in the past year. And yet, power persists with its current program under a Democratic administration. Republican administration is not going to change that, just look at their past policies.
So when people are both made aware by the increased visibility, their hearts are opened up to the human toll of this war because of the visibility of the carnage they’re seeing, but they are left a year later feeling like we’ve made no progress in changing the dynamics of power and influencing the people in power to stop this, then you have people who just give up. You have people who turn to figures like Trump in the hopes that he could be a big enough battering ram to shake something loose.
So I ask you, brother Norman Solomon, I want to give you the final word here. Has the increased visibility of war brought us closer to doing something to stop this suicidal path that we are currently on? And if it hasn’t, what else needs to happen to get us there?
Norman Solomon: As you referred to, there’s tremendous rage, anger, and pain that a lot of people are feeling in a lot of dimensions. And that certainly applies to the Israeli war on Gaza. That pain, that rage that people feel, whether it’s their own economic situations or about US foreign policy, it can be a seedbed for all sorts of responses. It can be one for the fascistic approach and analysis such as it is from the Trump people, or it can be a genuine progressive response.
And I often think of a saying I heard from a musician, “You might feel like you’re getting lost, but you won’t if you know the blues.” And I think that applies to having a single standard of human rights and empathy for all people and holding to principles that are not just affirming for me and my loved ones, but people I don’t even know.
The phrase human rights, it might be sometimes abused, but I think it’s a very profound one, whether it’s access to housing and healthcare and education down the block or across the United States, or whether it’s people on other continents that we should hold to those principles. And I think that’s a pathway forward to invoke that, to talk about.
I was very impressed by the book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, and he ends up talking about that the messaging about the Middle East should definitely include emphasis on equality, that we oppose apartheid, that we oppose discrimination and relegation of people to second or third or fourth class citizenship, that we believe in a single standard of equality and human rights for everybody. And that’s sort of like, you might say, a Swiss Army knife. It applies in a lot of situations, home and abroad, many different places.
In terms of war, the visibility of war is not sufficient, but it’s necessary. And as I mentioned in the book, it’s possible for people to see on their TV screens or they’re scrolling images and video of war and horrors of war and conclude, well, that’s the way war is, or we gotta get it done quickly. Or, as Donald Trump said, we should help Israel “finish the job.”
That’s one conclusion because it doesn’t have a grounding in human rights, and it doesn’t have a context provided as to the suppression of some people over decades and centuries, even, in many cases.
So I would sum up a single standard of human rights, when we hold to it, when we insist on it, and we put a context — Not only insist that the suffering from war be made explicitly visible, but we put a historical context around it so that we don’t have the situation of simply empathy human rights stories, which, again, are necessary but insufficient to show the suffering, for instance, in Gaza.
Yes, it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient because we don’t want to go with victims without victimizers. They are victims, they’re human beings, just as precious as the people you’re going to see at the shopping center near where you live. That has to be made crystal clear.
What also has to be crystal clear is that they are not victims of an act of God or a hurricane or a flood that came as an act of nature. They are victims with victimizers. And in the case of Gaza, the victimizers are at the top of the governments of Israel and the United States.
Maximillian Alvarez: So that is the great Norman Solomon, co-founder of rootsaction.org, and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of the vital new book War Made Invisible. Norm, thank you so much for joining us today on The Real News Network, brother. I really, really appreciate it.
Norman Solomon: Hey, thanks a lot, Max.
Maximillian Alvarez: And to all of you watching, please, before you go, head on over to therealnews.com/donate, support our work so we can bring you more important coverage and conversations just like this, as well as all the vital on-the-ground documentary reporting that we have been publishing from Gaza, the West Bank, and around the world. Please support our work. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
War is a daily fixture of American life—the US military occupies at least 750 overseas bases, and it has executed military operations in nations around the globe over the past 20 years. But most Americans have remained unaware of this, thanks to a coordinated effort by politicians, corporate media, and the military-industrial complex to make the realities of American militarism invisible to the public. As author Norman Solomon writes in his new book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine, “America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ever really knowing what they’re doing to people we’ll never see.” TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Solomon about his book, the political crisis that decades of invisible war have generated in US domestic politics, and how images of the ongoing carnage in Gaza have exposed the horrors of war that the US worked to make invisible in the post-9/11 era.
Norman Solomon is the cofounder of RootsAction.org, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of numerous books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine.
Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Maximillian Alvarez: In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell famously observed, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face.
“Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck, or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.
“Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
Now, Orwell never could have imagined the ways the 21st century media ecosystem would enable powers narrators to deploy the thought-corrupting and reality-skewing force of language to instigate, justify, muddle or invisibilize the horrors perpetrated in our name.
But what he understood nearly a century ago about the relationship between power, language, and the visibility of atrocity has proven to be grimly timeless. Defending the indefensible is the proven modus operandi of the same consent manufacturing machine that propelled us into an unwinnable, illegal, and globally destabilizing war on terror over 20 years ago.
And, “Euphemism, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness,” have been the tried and tested tools of first resort, employed by corporate media and US political and military officials looking to justify Israel’s US-backed genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, its invasion of Lebanon, and its reckless, nihilistic campaign to embroil the Middle East in an all-out regional war.
In his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, the great Norman Solomon, co-founder of rootsaction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy writes, “America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ever really knowing what they’re doing to people we’ll never see. Patterns of convenient silence and deceptive messaging are as necessary for perpetual war as the Pentagon’s bombs and missiles. Patterns so familiar that they’re apt to seem normal, even natural.
“But the uninformed consent of the governed is a perverse and hollow kind of consent. While short on genuine democracy, the process is long on fueling a constant state of war. To activate a more democratic process will require lifting the fog that obscures the actual dynamics of militarism far away and close at home.”
As we commemorate the grim anniversary of Oct. 7 and reflect on a year of what has been called the most documented genocide in history, as working people around the world struggle to get by and live their lives while bombs and guns obliterate our fellow human beings in Palestine, Ukraine, Lebanon, Sudan, and beyond. When it feels for many of us, like we’ve already seen too much: too much war, too much death, too much carnage, it is important to stop and ask ourselves, how much are we still not seeing? And has the increased visibility of war over the past year changed who we are and how we act to stop it?
To help us break this all down and to discuss his vital book, War Made Invisible, I’m honored to be joined by Norman Solomon himself.
Brother Norman, thank you so much for joining me today on The Real News Network. I really appreciate it.
Norman Solomon: Well, thank you, Max, and you posed such a key question: What are we still not seeing? And we’re encouraged to have this sort of conceit that if we look at the mainline mainstream news and we pay attention to that, that somehow, for instance, we have a grasp, an understanding, intellectually and emotionally, what’s going on in Gaza. And that is basically preposterous, but the conceit that is encouraged compounds the deception. And the whole idea that we understand a war because we watch the news, we listen to it, we read it, is part of the propaganda system itself.
Maximillian Alvarez: I already have explosions of thoughts in my head just hearing that opening salvo from you, and I really can’t recommend Norman’s book enough to everyone watching. Please, go read it, it is vital in these times.
And Norman, I want to build on that, because the paperback version of your book begins in the post-9/11 moment, a little over 20 years ago, and it concludes with an afterword on Gaza. I want those two points to frame our discussion today.
And I was wondering if you could take us there in those immediate months and years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and talk us through what you were seeing and would then write about in War Made Easy. The ways that the carnage was being invisibilized, the ways the public was being manipulated, and the relationship that we had to the war that was being perpetrated in our name.
Norman Solomon: What’s going on now is really a continuation in various permutations of what began after 9/11. We had, essentially, a preemptive absolution for the US government because of the crime against humanity on 9/11, that whatever the United States did after that, in ostensible response, which was really just displaced rage and nationalism and militarism, that that was okay, that it was justified. And we’ve seen that echo today in terms of what the US and Israeli government are saying about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, and now, increasingly, in Lebanon as well.
So for instance, at the end of 2001, you had then Defense Secretary — And it’s uppercase D, I wouldn’t say it’s about defense — But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he said, every death in Afghanistan, whether it is American, whether it is Afghan civilians, every single death is the result of and the culpability of Al-Qaeda. So that was like a blank, bloody check for whatever the US was to do was justified by citing the initial crime.
And I think this is a paradigm from that day to this. When you look at the numbers — And of course people are not numbers, but they are ways for us to understand magnitude — 3,000 deaths from the atrocity on 9/11. And then, according to the Brown University Cost of War project, the direct deaths as a result of the ensuing US so-called war on terror, 950,000 deaths, about half of them civilians. And then you go to the indirect deaths, and the Brown University study says 4.5 million deaths as a result of the US-led so-called war on terror.
So you look at 3,000 deaths, and then you look at direct close to one million, indirect adding up to more than four million. What is that about? What kind of culture, what kind of political system will engage in collective punishment of people who are guilty of breathing while Afghan, breathing while Iraqi? Or fast-forward more than two decades, what kind of political culture in the United States will continue to arm an Israeli government that is killing people for the transgression of breathing while Palestinian?
So this is a culture of mass murder that has emanated from or certainly got a huge boost from the response to 9/11. And here we are, what, more than two decades later, and the baseline continues to drop, so the standards continue to be degraded.
I recently saw an excerpt from a film by the wonderful folks at the Media Education Foundation from their film The Occupation of the American Mind, it’s been recirculated now online. And they chronicle the coverage of the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1982, making possible the Israeli-backed right-wing massacre into the thousands of refugees at Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut.
And to see the footage of the US networks in 1982 and compare it to what generally we have seen in 2024 in terms of the coverage of the current Israeli slaughter going on, it is shocking because, as inadequate as the coverage was in 1982 on the US networks, it was much better, it was more candid, it was more willing to call out Israel than what we’re getting now.
So I think a challenge as independent journalists, as progressive media institutions that The Real News Network and others are stepping onto to really step up to the challenge is to say, we don’t put up with this. We don’t accept a propaganda system that is consistent with what Martin Luther King Jr. called the madness of militarism. And Max, you referred to the consequences of the warfare state at home domestically, and it’s really what we know, what goes around comes around.
Dr. King referred to it, and these were his words, he said it was, “A demonic, destructive suction tube,” that was taking billions of dollars worth of resources for healthcare, education, housing, elderly care, neonatal care, you name it, and it was siphoning those resources to kill people in Vietnam.
And we’re talking now towards the end of 2024, and that dynamic is in full force, is ripping off. It is literally depriving lives of existence here at home while that funding, including most recently $20 billion with a B, dollars green-lighted by the White House, more weapons to Israel, that money, our tax dollars courtesy of US taxpayers, is paying to slaughter Palestinian people.
Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, man. I mean, the marquee out in front of The Real News Network building currently reads the bar from Tupac Shakur, “They got money for wars but can’t feed the poor.” And I dream of the day when we can change the marquee and that slogan will no longer be relevant, but I feel we’re going to be waiting for a long time.
But Vietnam feels like a great example to bring up, not only because visibility and truth telling did play a critical role in public opinion on the war, the protest movement, so on and so forth, with images of My Lai Massacre and so on and so forth. Those images are burned into people’s minds. And there was also, of course, a draft. There were more tangible connections that people had to the machinery of war that, as you said, in the 21st century, those tangible connections have been severed, invisibilized, buried underground.
So, what was it about the 21st century US approach to war that made it so much easier to not only perpetrate but to do so at industrial scale the way that we have? What changed in the 21st century that enabled the US and other countries to make war so much easier?
Norman Solomon: Well, really, the disconnection has increased over time. It’s been an evolution of distancing people in the United States from the wars that are perpetrated with their tax dollars in their names. It is so much easier for elites to start wars than for people then to stop them. And, certainly, during escalation of the Vietnam War, it was considered by those in power to be, per se, fairly easy to do.
And contrary to myth, it wasn’t the US media, the TV networks that stirred up the protests. It was the protests that changed the political climate that compelled, along with the longevity of the war and the failure to “win” that brought, kicking and screaming, reluctantly, the networks to show, actually, not very much of the carnage. But it was part of a tone that changed that ultimately had some political effect.
There’s much ballyhoo about when Walter Cronkite in 1968 said the war was in a stalemate and could not be won. What is often forgotten is that Cronkite never made a principled objection to the war. His objection was that it wasn’t being won.
And if you look at the paradigms of the last several decades, when there has been a war that the United States can wage routinely, I have to say, and my books have documented and many others have documented, based on falsehoods, if the wars can be “won quickly”, they remain popular.
And so in 1991 when the first President Bush launched a war on Iraq, and that war included the notorious, so-called horrible word, horrible phrase, “turkey shoot” of retreating Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait, literally gunned down in huge quantities from the air.
Bush had tremendous popularity. He had been in the low 50, 60% approval rating right before that because of the economy. Right after this triumph of the US war, what’s called the Gulf War in 1991, Bush’s popularity rating went up to 91%. Why? Because the war just took six weeks.
And this is embedded in US media and politics, and, unfortunately, to a large extent, in the public perception, if the war can be a triumph, it can be done early, not a lot of Americans die, then that’s considered to be a good thing. So the underlying militarism can vary in terms of how it plays out.
I think in also another aspect of the answer to your question, in this century, the immediate aftermath of 9/11, within a couple of years, the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. First, it was a lot of cheerleading. The bombing of Afghanistan that was launched in October of 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11, it’s stunning when you look at the Gallup polls.
90% of the US public supported the US attack on Afghanistan, 5% opposed, the other five said they weren’t sure. Well, that’s Soviet Union-style approval. That is like dictatorship, propaganda system approval levels, sky high.
And then in 2003, the US invasion and then war on Iraq essentially… Well, at least at that stage, we had media coverage. It didn’t mean it told us much about war at all, but there were US troops who were on TV, there were photographs, there were countless stories about them. They were fighting, they were doing a lot of killing, especially from the air, and some of them were dying. And the invisibility of US wars has been escalating as the number of US troops directly involved has been drastically decreasing.
And now more than ever, these are push button wars. The US is still engaged in dozens and dozens of different countries under the rubric of war on terror, counterinsurgency, a lot of it is secret, special ops going on.
And so we’re in a warfare state but, to a large extent, there’s virtually no media coverage of it except from independent, progressive, anti-war oriented media outlets. And the net result is that we have a huge military budget and it goes virtually unchallenged. I mean, the official, so-called Defense Department budget is now around $900 billion with a B a year, heading very close to $1 trillion with a T. That doesn’t include nuclear weapons, some veterans benefits as a result of trying to mitigate these terrible results of these wars.
Some of the invisibility layers include, for instance, I had to triple check this number because I was working on War Made Invisible, and I saw, oh, US soldiers who were involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when they came home to the US, how many of them had traumatic brain injury? 300,000. Can you imagine, 300,000 men and some women walking around the United States with traumatic brain injury? That’s an invisibility. All kinds of trauma.
In War Made Invisible, I talk about the much higher rates of spousal abuse and violence from veterans, especially those who have seen combat. The moral corrosion, what’s been called moral injury, involved.
And also, I would say in the current context — And I tried to get into this in the afterword of the paperback of War Made Invisible — The moral corrosion to live in a country that is subsidizing mass murder and genocide and not calling it that at all.
Max, when you were quoting that powerful excerpt from George Orwell, it made me remember as well, I think it was him that said that telling the truth can be, is actually, a subversive act.
And so our challenge now living in a warfare state based on lies, approving of and even glorifying slaughter by the US military and its allies. Now, in the Middle East most of all, of course, Israel, we have this challenge to subvert the warfare state. And we’re very much swimming upstream, but at the same time, while the mainstream is trying to cascade to tell us to be quiet, we know that, in history, we have been and are part of a tradition of Cassandras.
We’re linked to, in the last many decades, people, organizations, and movements who said the escalation of the Vietnam War is wrong. The response to 9/11 to create the so-called war on terror was insanity. What has now been done to Afghanistan because of the US war, what was done to Iraq, we tried to warn the elites.
And I think it’s important for us to augment our mission from we want to speak truth to power, which is, that’s okay, but power knows what they’re doing. It’s not a revelation to them, in most cases, what they’re doing. We also need to speak truth about power. So it’s not a vertical, it’s a horizontal, because that’s about education, agitation, organizing, and building movements.
Maximillian Alvarez: I want to talk about the process of invisibilization and the role that the Obama years played in that. Because I think this, what you write so brilliantly about in your book, when I was reading it, I was thinking, this could apply to a lot of different political subjects that did not go away during the Obama era, but in many ways were just pushed under the radar.
So I feel like the Obama years, in terms of the political sentiments that were fomenting in this country, the underlying economic processes that were creating an even vaster gulf of inequality between the haves and have-nots, and also the reality of militarism, US-perpetrated militarism.
To say nothing of Obama being called the deporter -in-chief, not because he was doing the more visible workplace raids and home raids of the Bush era and previous eras, but because he was using “paper deportations”, the unseen methods, which were proved to be much more efficient at expelling undocumented people from this country.
So in so many ways, the Obama era was characterized by its ability, its deft ability to invisibilize so many of these nefarious forces.
And I wanted to ask if you could talk a bit about what that looked like on the side of the military-industrial complex. Because like I said, there was a visibility component to the war on terror. There was the shock and awe, there were boots on the ground, there were displays of military pride. Again, I remember, I was there. I was one of the guys who didn’t know shit from shit and was cheering it on at that time.
But then we really, in a few short years, really transition to drone warfare, like you said, the warfare of button clicking, and the invisibilization of the carnage. Talk us through a little more what was happening in that first decade of the 21st century that was creating a war machine that could make itself so thoroughly invisible to a public that was back here at home, none the wiser, seemingly?
Norman Solomon: In foreign policy, President Obama made the so-called war on terror bipartisan. And there had been a negative energy from a lot of people who identified as Democrats, and certainly as progressives, that President George W. Bush had taken the country off the rails, that the invasion of Iraq, again, what so many anti-war progressive people had warned against, actually turned out to be a horrific disaster on virtually any level.
And so when Obama came in in early 2009, it was an opportunity to truly turn the page. Instead, he actually sent more troops into Afghanistan. He kept the war going in Iraq, and, ideologically and culturally, really pushed to say that militarism should be not only bipartisan, but considered to be identical with patriotism and standing with your country.
And he was part of a trend that is so sad. I’m old enough to remember when the Congressional Black Caucus was just inspiring. They had an annual alternative budget. We had Ron Dellums, we had Shirley Chisholm, we had John Conyers. These were visionaries who were in step with what Martin Luther King Jr. talked about. They were drum majors for peace. They really made the connections explicit between the militarism and spending for killing overseas, and the deprivation and oppression of poor people, the rainbow, and especially people of color disproportionately in this country.
There cropped up posters during the Obama presidency. And there’s a picture of him and Dr. King, and over Dr. King’s picture was, “I have a dream”, and over Barack Obama’s picture, “I have a drone”.
And I document in War Made Invisible how he just talked the usual nonsense. You would talk to the troops in Afghanistan, and gratuitously, it was unnecessarily politically or anywhere else. It normalized the idea that the best thing you can do is die for your country. It became some oratory, that I mentioned, that was macabre.
Imagine going to Bagram Air Base and telling the troops there that you may join the others who are buried in the special plot at Arlington Cemetery. You really have an opportunity to give for your country. This is a sort of a, dare I say necrophilia. It’s a worship of death in the ostensible service of your country when, actually, it’s in service of the military contractors.
And I talk about in the book, we have gotten so propagandized that often even those of us who oppose the militarism of the US government, we call it a defense budget. We talk about defense spending, a lowercase d, and that is part of the triumph. We’re giving ground to the militarism culture. Very little of the Pentagon budget has anything to do with defense. They can capitalize D, Defense Department, that doesn’t make it real in terms of it’s about defending this country.
And meanwhile, we have this tremendous climate emergency, and we have, as you’ve been referring to Max, this tremendous range of deprivation in our own country. It’s been said that the federal budget is a moral document, or could be, and right now we have a very immoral budget.
And so, as we speak, we have a crossroads of this election. In foreign policy, it’s hard to see very specific differences between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. But with domestic policy, there are huge differences because if Trump is elected and his coterie is brought in with fascistic politics, then the left, then progressives, then anti-war forces, we’ll be back on our heels. We’ll be defending the meager gains that have been achieved by progressives — Important gains, but definitely insufficient gains that have been achieved in the last 10, 20 years.
So I think we’re facing this paradox. No matter what, we should speak truthfully, and that means not pulling our verbal punches, that means challenging those in power, whoever they might be.
Maximillian Alvarez: But over the past year, the visibility of carnage has been one of the most profound forces shaping people’s understanding of what’s happening right now. The social media images of Palestinian men, women, children, elderly people blown apart. Body parts, visceral carnage on people’s social media feeds.
I wanted to ask how the visibility of Israel’s war on Palestine over the past year, how, if at all, that has changed the political dynamics that you were writing about in 2006?
Norman Solomon: Well, the fact that younger people, say under 40, are much more opposed to what Israel is doing than the older demographics speaks, in part, to just less years being propagandized about Israel and more willingness to just look at human rights as human rights, to be consistent about it. And of course, more orientation towards what they see in social media rather than in so-called legacy media.
I think that, ultimately, and this sort of connects to your previous point, is that if we’re going to face a fascist or neo-fascist regime, and I think it’s fair to say that’s what a Trump regime would look like if it comes in, then the capacity to respond to the horrors that we do know about, that we have seen through video and narratives and accounts, that capacity is to hit a brick wall. That’s one of, I think, the most worrying, to put mildly, specters ahead, that fork in the road.
Whereas if we flip it over, yes, the greater awareness — And this is a big change — The awareness of the need to support Palestinian rights and to challenge the terrible joint militarism of the US and the Israeli governments, that has begun to chip away at the foundation of automatic support of US for Israel.
We got a long way to go. I am absolutely, fully aware that that’s true. But if you’re dealing with a wall, which is the Republican Party, then you’re going to just keep hitting the wall. If you’re dealing with a wall that has some cracks in it and there’s a possibility to utilize what we have learned about the murderous qualities of the Israeli government vis-a-vis Palestinian people, the apartheid, the exclusionary policies, the ethnic cleansing, then are we going to have some space to work in, to organize in?
And as you know, Max, from reading War Made Invisible, I have no sparing of words for Joe Biden. I think his policies have been outrageous. I think he’s an accomplice to mass murder. There’s no question about that in terms of his role vis-a-vis Israel.
We don’t know what’s coming up, but we do know that we have to organize and we need to and want to organize in the best possible conditions to build further momentum for the movements that are really necessary.
Maximillian Alvarez: In many ways, I remember looking one time when I was cleaning my kitchen, I found one of those potatoes that had been sitting there for a long time, and it had the sprouts grown out of it. And the sprouts had grown long, the potato had shriveled. And I stared at it thinking, that’s America, basically. We are an international war machine with a domestic government attached to it at this point, but it is increasingly a vestigial domestic body politic, it feels like.
And people feel that. The people I interview, working people, red states, blue states union, non-union. People are not stupid, they know and feel and see that, as we already mentioned. People devastated by Hurricane Helene in the same week that we’re learning about more military aid being sent to Israel. So that is creating a political rage that has nowhere to go.
And that’s where I wanted to end up with, which is where does this go if it is not channeled into a grassroots, coalitional movement, a people-led movement to bend power to our will? If people don’t have that outlet, then that rage turns sideways, it festers or it turns to nihilism.
And therein lies the question about the efficacy of visibility here in fighting the war machine. People have seen more of Israel’s war on Palestine and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians than many had… It’s been more carnage that people have seen over the past year than they have perhaps in their whole lives that has propelled so many people to protest on the streets. Largest Palestine solidarity protests in the history of our country in DC multiple times in the past year. And yet, power persists with its current program under a Democratic administration. Republican administration is not going to change that, just look at their past policies.
So when people are both made aware by the increased visibility, their hearts are opened up to the human toll of this war because of the visibility of the carnage they’re seeing, but they are left a year later feeling like we’ve made no progress in changing the dynamics of power and influencing the people in power to stop this, then you have people who just give up. You have people who turn to figures like Trump in the hopes that he could be a big enough battering ram to shake something loose.
So I ask you, brother Norman Solomon, I want to give you the final word here. Has the increased visibility of war brought us closer to doing something to stop this suicidal path that we are currently on? And if it hasn’t, what else needs to happen to get us there?
Norman Solomon: As you referred to, there’s tremendous rage, anger, and pain that a lot of people are feeling in a lot of dimensions. And that certainly applies to the Israeli war on Gaza. That pain, that rage that people feel, whether it’s their own economic situations or about US foreign policy, it can be a seedbed for all sorts of responses. It can be one for the fascistic approach and analysis such as it is from the Trump people, or it can be a genuine progressive response.
And I often think of a saying I heard from a musician, “You might feel like you’re getting lost, but you won’t if you know the blues.” And I think that applies to having a single standard of human rights and empathy for all people and holding to principles that are not just affirming for me and my loved ones, but people I don’t even know.
The phrase human rights, it might be sometimes abused, but I think it’s a very profound one, whether it’s access to housing and healthcare and education down the block or across the United States, or whether it’s people on other continents that we should hold to those principles. And I think that’s a pathway forward to invoke that, to talk about.
I was very impressed by the book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, and he ends up talking about that the messaging about the Middle East should definitely include emphasis on equality, that we oppose apartheid, that we oppose discrimination and relegation of people to second or third or fourth class citizenship, that we believe in a single standard of equality and human rights for everybody. And that’s sort of like, you might say, a Swiss Army knife. It applies in a lot of situations, home and abroad, many different places.
In terms of war, the visibility of war is not sufficient, but it’s necessary. And as I mentioned in the book, it’s possible for people to see on their TV screens or they’re scrolling images and video of war and horrors of war and conclude, well, that’s the way war is, or we gotta get it done quickly. Or, as Donald Trump said, we should help Israel “finish the job.”
That’s one conclusion because it doesn’t have a grounding in human rights, and it doesn’t have a context provided as to the suppression of some people over decades and centuries, even, in many cases.
So I would sum up a single standard of human rights, when we hold to it, when we insist on it, and we put a context — Not only insist that the suffering from war be made explicitly visible, but we put a historical context around it so that we don’t have the situation of simply empathy human rights stories, which, again, are necessary but insufficient to show the suffering, for instance, in Gaza.
Yes, it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient because we don’t want to go with victims without victimizers. They are victims, they’re human beings, just as precious as the people you’re going to see at the shopping center near where you live. That has to be made crystal clear.
What also has to be crystal clear is that they are not victims of an act of God or a hurricane or a flood that came as an act of nature. They are victims with victimizers. And in the case of Gaza, the victimizers are at the top of the governments of Israel and the United States.
Maximillian Alvarez: So that is the great Norman Solomon, co-founder of rootsaction.org, and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of the vital new book War Made Invisible. Norm, thank you so much for joining us today on The Real News Network, brother. I really, really appreciate it.
Norman Solomon: Hey, thanks a lot, Max.
Maximillian Alvarez: And to all of you watching, please, before you go, head on over to therealnews.com/donate, support our work so we can bring you more important coverage and conversations just like this, as well as all the vital on-the-ground documentary reporting that we have been publishing from Gaza, the West Bank, and around the world. Please support our work. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
While the genocidal assault on Gaza continues, Israel has stepped up a campaign of terror in the Occupied West Bank. Fearing for his life, Waleed Samer, a linguistics student who has helped The Real News film an original documentary in the West Bank over the past year, documents the day-by-day reality of living under Israel’s occupation and tells the story of his family’s harrowing escape from their Nur Shams refugee camp in the West Bank city of Tulkarm. This is his story.
Filmed by Waleed Samer
Production, voice-over, and editing by Ross Domoney
Waleed Samer:
Hi everyone. How are you? My name is Waleed Samer, 20 years old.
Ross Domoney [Narrator]:
Life in Waleed’s refugee camp has become unbearable.
Waleed Samer:
Ok there is a lot of snipers around me. If I open my door they will kill me. Why I will try [to go outside]? I will not try. I will stay in my house.
They [the Israeli army] took my grandfather’s land in 1948. So maybe this is the second chance to take my land [here] in the camp.
Ross Domoney [Narrator]:
With only a handful of armed Palestinian fighters left, Waleed fears his camp is about to be overtaken by the army.
Waleed Samer:
Are you worried about your cat?
Waleed’s little sister:
Yeah.
Waleed Samer:
Because of the army?
[Waleed’s little sister nods.]
Ross Domoney [Narrator]:
Over a period of ten days, Waleed sent us footage from his phone. The Israeli army is raiding his camp on a near daily basis. Small windows of time allow for him to go outside.
Waleed Samer:
It’s like a battle here. Look what they are doing.
Ross Domoney [Narrator]:
Nur Shams refugee camp was established by Palestinians who fled their native lands in the 1948 Nakba, where Zionist militias displaced and killed thousands to create what is today known as the state of Israel.
This is Ross Domoney reporting for The Real News. In April this year, myself and my colleague Antonis Vradis met Waleed in his camp whilst filming a documentary. He helps connect journalists like us to stories in his community so that he can fund his education. Now, months later, his ability to study or even to eat has been severely restricted as the army cuts off food and water to his camp.
Waleed Samer:
This is my brother. He wears a black t-shirt. He’s going to get some hummus and falafel.
It’s my [first] breakfast [in] two days. We must have bread to eat [with] that. But we are really hungry.
Ross Domoney [Narrator]:
Another day, another raid. Waleed Films from his balcony.
Waleed Samer:
Many people in the camp now if you can listen… Many people are in a stress[ful] situation and they are just trying to get out [of] the camp but they can’t. So the situation now is very dangerous.
Ross Domoney [Narrator]:
A brief lull in the Israeli assault allows for a funeral. The leader of the camp’s battalion is buried. A farewell gun salute… A chance to go out again and signs that the army is still facing resistance.
Back at home, his parents grow increasingly worried for the safety of their children and discuss the possibility of leaving Palestine. Waleed, like any other 20-year-old, would like to relax and enjoy life.
Waleed Samer:
I don’t have any dreams here. My future here [is not] clear. I don’t know what will happen [to] me in the next one hour maybe. No one knows what will happen [to] him. So I [imagine] I have a good future in my life: I can go out and continue my study in good universities, see the people [outside] of Palestine, [outside] of the West Bank. I can move freely. No one can attack me. No one can arrest me.
Hello?
Antonis Vradis – Lecturer at St Andrew’s University:
Waleed!
Waleed Samer:
Hi habibi how are you?
Ross Domoney [Narrator]:
Waleed gets a call from Antonis about a program that might be able to help him study.
Antonis Vradis – Lecturer at St Andrew’s University:
My university here in Scotland has a scholarship that is specifically for Palestinian students.
Waleed Samer:
That’s nice.
Antonis Vradis – Lecturer at St Andrew’s University:
Yeah.
Waleed Samer:
Just imagine I finish my bachelor’s and go to Scotland university and take the masters. Oh that would be great. Every woman in life would come and marry me. The life in the last maybe three-four months has become worse here. [There is] no work or money. I don’t have the costs to pay my university, this is the hardest thing [for] me. Many things have happened. I have just started thinking I have a big future ahead of me.
Someone [came] into my house and was asking about my dad and [I told] him my dad is not home. He told me take these two cartons of water because the IDF at the last [raid] cut off the water.
Sitting in my house, opening my phone [to] see what is going on [outside] my house. I need some bread or something to eat. Maybe I was having some bread [or] something to eat yesterday but today I don’t have anything.
I’m just now trying to go out from my house. When I open the door, I listen if there are any planes [drones] or something like that. I swear there is a plane [drone] above my head just filming me and quickly I close my door and come back to home. I cannot do anything. Really, the situation here is really, really bad.
Ross Domoney [Narrator]:
Waleed sends me a picture of a charred body. It’s the last remaining fighter from his camp. After that, his messages fall silent. Despite the hardship of life in the West Bank, he would rather stay than leave. But the occupation’s violence left him no choice. Waleed leaves his homeland like his grandfather did in 1948.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has now surpassed a year, and is quickly spiraling into a regional war that now includes a ground front in Lebanon. As the world reels from the horrors witnessed in the past year alone, how are members of Israeli society justifying those horrors to themselves? In part two of this two-part episode commemorating the solemn anniversary of Oct. 7, Canada-based Israeli filmmaker and journalist Lia Tarachansky joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss the dark psychological forces shaping Israelis’ support for the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: David Hebden
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us.
And we are once again going to look at what’s happening in the war in Gaza, where we see now, how many people have been killed? Over 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza. 96,000 people have been wounded or hurt. At least 10,000 are missing. In Israel, 1,200 people have been killed. At least 8,700 are injured. And it’s escalating into Lebanon, and we don’t know where this is going to take us.
But for many of us, it’s deeply personal, and it’s also a war that we have to work to end. I’m talking today with Lia Tarachansky, who has worked here at The Real News. She’s been a colleague for a long time, an incredible journalist and filmmaker, multimedia artist, born in the Soviet Union, lived in Israel, now lives in Canada. She produced this incredible film On The Side of the Road, among others, and joins us now.
Lia, welcome. Good to have you with us.
Lia Tarachansky: Thanks, Marc. Thanks for having me back.
Marc Steiner: It’s always good to talk to you, always. I want to start with this quote that I found on your webpage, and it was written before, but it just spoke to me so deeply about where we are now. And I just want to start there before we get into any political social analysis of where we’re going because it’s so deeply personal and upsetting, watching what’s going on.
As I said to you before we went on the air, the kibbutzim that were attacked is where my family lives. Some are dead, some are hostages, from what I understand, people I don’t know. My best friend in the Palestinian world had his nephew shot and killed by settlers in the West Bank.
And this is what you wrote: “My rage is sadness. My rage is fear. My rage is fire. My rage is silence. I am so much rage. I don’t know what to do with the rage. I turn it into sadness, but the sadness feels endless. Bottomless. They can’t even call. They can’t even text their loved ones to tell them they’re still alive.”
There’s something, just for me, and I know it must be for you because you lived it, deeply troubling and emotional about this war. There’s something really different here.
Lia Tarachansky: Yeah. We’ve never lived through anything like this.
Marc Steiner: Just talk for a moment just about you. All the stuff you’ve been through, the work you’ve done, standing up and saying what has to be said, living and growing up in Israel. Can you talk just for a moment about Lia Tarachansky and where you are at this moment?
Lia Tarachansky: Well, I was a correspondent for The Real News for many years in Israel and Palestine. It was an experience that formed my understanding to a very deep level by being in the West Bank several times a week and then going home to Israel and back and forth over years, over many wars.
And then I started to work on a documentary that investigated a group of Israeli and American rabbis that were trying to bring back biblical Judaism and transform the political conflict into a religious conflict.
And it was part of an ongoing investigation, including a murder investigation I was covering for another film of seeing this rise of extreme ideas in Israel, what we nicknamed the Jewish ISIS, this group of people that are pushing towards regional war, pushing towards the return of a very kind of ancient, biblical, and very repressive understanding of Jewishness.
And I remember thinking, wow, this is so crazy. These people are growing, but we are… There’s no way we’re going to go through what they’re advocating for.
But the confluence of the increase in the movement from a few little groups of people who even the Israeli police, at some point, sent to jail for their extreme views and for their attacks on Palestinians, some of them killed Palestinians. They had long track records with the police. Today, they’re a third of the Israeli Parliament.
The confluence of those ideologies becoming so mainstream that they entered the Parliament to such an extent with our prime minister’s absolute dedication to not go to jail for his corruption means that there’s a lot of very powerful people whose interest is to go deeper into war. And it’s not just on the Israeli side.
The last year has been shocking, unbelievable. The level of mourning that we are constantly in is unparalleled in our history, with the exception of, I think, maybe for Israelis, the time before the state was created.
As a human being, I’m speechless. The idea that after a year of almost constant bombardment and attack on Gaza, the Israeli government is now escalating into Lebanon, and escalating the very fragile stalemate with Ira is horrifying. It’s terrifying. There’s no other words for it.
Marc Steiner: I understand what you said completely. I am not Israeli, but I feel the same. Watching this is just emotionally overwhelming.
And politically, the question, where do you think this goes? Where do you think this takes us? You have this very right-wing Israeli government with a huge religious fundamentalist faction in the government pushing these words you were just describing. It’s not so different, in some ways, on the Palestinian side with Hamas.
When you grew up Jewish, Masada is one of the things you talk about, when the Jews all committed suicide and the war that killed the Jews. And it feels like we are collectively, in Israel, committing that same suicide while we’re destroying everything around us.
Lia Tarachansky: I don’t know what happened in Masada. I only know the story of the people who got to tell the story, but we don’t know what happened there.
Marc Steiner: No, not really. Right.
Lia Tarachansky: I can tell you Israelis don’t want to commit suicide. The vast majority of Israelis don’t want what is happening, but they perceive this as the way to survive. Oct. 7 was a shocking event for Israelis. And while you’re reading the American and European news, we’re reading the Hebrew news. And at every war, Israelis don’t have coverage of what’s going on in Gaza, and they don’t really know.
And you can argue, well, they should know. But unfortunately, these kind of echo chambers that we are siloed in mean that we don’t listen across ethnicities, across nations, across political ideas, and certainly not across war.
And so, as shocking as it is, the vast majority of Israelis don’t know what’s going on in Gaza, don’t understand, exactly, the impact of what is going on in Lebanon, a country that was already devastated by so many challenges, to now drag the country into this. Just like the hundreds of thousands of fleeing Lebanese, the average Israeli doesn’t want war, but there are political forces a lot stronger than us.
And with an entire country built on military service and on very censored media coverage and a very censored education in schools, this is what you get.
Marc Steiner: Is it censorship? Is it the government? The military says, no, you can’t print this? Is it that the Israeli press doesn’t want to print it? I mean, why is that happening?
Lia Tarachansky: Well, certainly the Israeli government is very deeply involved in what is covered in the Israeli press through a network of gag orders. There’s very little that is allowed to be printed in the Israeli press about how the war is actually going on.
The truth is that the Israeli war in Gaza has been a failure for the Israeli military, which is shocking considering how powerful the Israeli military is, how many weapons it has, and how much surveillance it has of Gaza. It’s still not succeeding because the objective that is stated to the Israeli public is an unachievable objective.
And so there is no way to destroy Hamas. There’s no way to destroy a political party. The only thing that brutality is going to cause is more brutality. And so the war as presented to the Israeli public is very curated. The Israeli public very rarely looks at international press.
And anyway, the international press is not really covering what’s going on in Gaza anymore. They talk about casualties and they talk about access to water and food, but they don’t have people on the ground. And Palestinian journalists, so many of them have been killed that there’s very little accurate information coming out.
So yeah, there’s a lot of official censorship on behalf of the Israeli government, both through the military censor and through the gag orders. There’s even more self-censorship on behalf of Israeli journalists that are, at the end of the day, Israelis, and are keenly aware of the fact that their future as journalists is dependent on them not covering certain things.
The vast majority of Israeli journalists don’t speak Arabic, don’t have contacts in Gaza. Khalil Abu Yahia who was a person who spoke quite a bit and was interviewed quite a bit was killed very shortly after Oct. 7. So many journalists have been killed that even if you had contacts, which most journalists don’t, there’s a good chance that they didn’t make it.
So it’s a mess. There’s no other way of putting it. It’s a complete mess, and it’s a train wreck that’s being driven by drunk and self-obsessed narcissists. And we are being dragged into this train wreck with them.
Marc Steiner: We, being the entire world, or we being… Who’s the we?
Lia Tarachansky: I mean, obviously, I’m looking at my community.
Marc Steiner: Yes, right, right.
Lia Tarachansky: But it’s not just Israelis and Palestinians, and Lebanese and Iranians, it’s also now the entire region. The whole world is involved in arming and profiting from this fight. So you can say you as Americans are, I would say, even more implicated than Israelis and what’s going on. And if you were to stand up to your government, this war would end tomorrow. But when you have these kinds of periodic genocides, you lose your motivation for political action, and this is the result of it.
Marc Steiner: What you just said I think is really critical, which is that the American government is key to this. It’s probably the only force on the earth at this moment that can stop the war.
Lia Tarachansky: Yes. Well, the American government has always been lukewarm on stopping Israeli wars.
Marc Steiner: It’s true. Now, we’re in the midst of an election, which makes it even more difficult because people are afraid to take a position because they’re afraid to lose the election. So all that is complicating what’s happening at the moment.
Lia Tarachansky: Completely, yes.
Marc Steiner: The reason I was looking forward to talking to you is because I know all the things you’ve written, all the things that you’ve produced, this film, you have a deep sense of the place and what’s going on. And I think that what you’re saying now is that what we’re witnessing now in Gaza, in Israel, the attack in Lebanon, this could really affect the entire planet very shortly if it’s not stopped.
Lia Tarachansky: It is affecting the entire planet right now. But I think that when you become complacent, maybe you need a gun in your face until you actually open your eyes.
Marc Steiner: Yes. I mean, it’s true. People don’t feel that yet.
Lia Tarachansky: Oct. 7 was a wake-up call. An act of such brutality has a way of clarifying things. Gaza has been an open-air prison for many, many years. And in the minds of most Israelis, it is someplace over there where we don’t talk about it. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a bunch of terrorists. Out of sight, out of mind.
When Oct. 7 happened, the brutality of Oct. 7 breached those mechanisms of denial in a way that I don’t know if anything else could have. So call this our wake-up call. And when you have a system that is so brutal like the Israeli occupation, that’s what you get. This is what you get.
Marc Steiner: Is there any light? Is there any hope? Is there any way this ends? I mean, it seems to me that the United States has to step in on some level to make it happen. The last, but I don’t know how that… Go ahead. I’m sorry.
Lia Tarachansky: And Kamala Harris will not get involved. She can’t afford in her first months and years of leadership to get involved. It’s not going to happen. Not with your American current political system.
Marc Steiner: I mean, it just seems to me that however this ends in the next six months to a year, however long it is, that this is a critical turning point for the Middle East, for Europe, for the United States.
Lia Tarachansky: The only way this can end is if through, even pure lies, you can convince Israelis that they have won and that they are safe. Like any small country, especially a country that’s been through so many wars and that has a self-narrative of being a victim of history, you have to act in extremely brutal ways in order to fight overwhelming enemies. We know this from basic military strategy.
Why does Daesh or ISIS, as you call it, why do they behead people? Because you have to appear to your enemy to be completely crazy and brutal to a point that they will not screw with you because you are actually much more powerless than you portray yourself.
Israeli military, the Israeli policy towards Palestinians has always been to appear as brutal and insane and genocidal as you can so that everyone assumes that you’ll do whatever it takes to the end. That’s the military strategy if you are surrounded by Lebanon, and Syria, and Jordan, and Egypt, and we’ve had wars with all of them. And of course, Oct. 7 is just the latest in many, many, many decades of Palestinian resistance, or what Israelis would call attacks on civilians.
And in that kind of environment, your only option is to appear more crazy, more brutal, more willing to kill than the next guy. If you make Israelis feel or appear as though they have somehow succeeded in achieving some sense of safety, you can end this war tomorrow. But I think that the vast majority of people are either busy in reactionist condemnation that may be justified, but doesn’t lead to much on the ground. No real change on the ground or with the program.
So we’re seeing little bits here and there. In Canada, we did a little bit of an arms embargo, but it’s only partial, and it’s not a real arms embargo. The contemporary arms market is incredibly complex and decentralized, and so you would have to get basically the entire world on board to end it.
Marc Steiner: Hearing both your deep understanding of the situation politically and historically, and also the pain I hear in your voice at the same time talking about where we are. I had a conversation the other day with a Palestinian who said in our conversation, all the Israelis have to leave for this to be over.
Lia Tarachansky: Yeah. There’s a very messy understanding of decolonization and anti-colonialism, in a lot of the pro-Palestinian left, unfortunately. There’s a very thin understanding of Israel and Israeli society. Where are the Israelis going to go?
Half the Israelis are descendants of refugees from the Arab world and the Muslim world. I don’t see Algerians and Egyptians and Iraqis offering the descendants of Jewish refugees their properties back. I don’t see the Moroccan government offering citizenship to Moroccan Jews. Not that they would go back at this point. A third of us, or sorry, excuse me, 20% of Israeli Jews are Soviet refugees, soviet immigrants.
Marc Steiner: Like your family.
Lia Tarachansky: Yeah. We came to Israel, we didn’t even have status because we fled the Soviet Union. We have nowhere to go back to. What, am I going to go back to the middle of another war in Ukraine?
The vast majority of us have nowhere else to go. And when you corner someone, they fight by any means necessary. The Ashkenazi elites that have roots in the founding fathers and all that shit, they have another citizenship. They could go to Germany. They could go to Portugal. They could go elsewhere. I got very lucky. I ended up in Canada and I have options. But the vast majority of Jews in Israel don’t have those options, don’t have another home to go to.
The history of decolonization has to do with a metropole, a European country that goes into another country, colonizes, and sends its settlers to that country to take over.
This is a different story with Israel. I’m not saying settler colonialism is not a major part of what led to the current fight. Absolutely it is. But there’s many different things as well. There is no metropole. The people that founded the state may have had some colonial ideas, but the people who made up the bulk of the state are refugees.
This is the reality. We are not going to solve this by living in the what-if world of 1947 of what if we abandon Zionism? What if we think about decolonization? Okay, Israel exists. This is where we are. Israel exists. Israel has existed for four generations. There is now an Israeli culture, a Hebrew language that’s spoken. There’s a way of life. It is. Deal with the reality as is.
You want all the Israelis to go somewhere else? [Inaudible], give them a piece of whatever other place, and then we can do the intellectual and cultural and psychological war of convincing them. That’s not going to happen. So in the reality of today, what do we do to end this? This is the only question we should be thinking about.
Marc Steiner: So before we close out here, what you just said, just to ponder what you just said, how do we end this? It makes me think of what happened that I covered intensely in South Africa. At the end of Apartheid, everybody stayed in South Africa. Very few people left.
Lia Tarachansky: As they succeeded to convince the white people that the end of Apartheid will not bring about their media death, [inaudible] did in other parts of Africa. In Zimbabwe, after the revolution, there was a systemic killing of white settlers. We can sit here and debate the morality of decolonization until the cows come home but you’re not going to create change until you make people feel safe, until you make them understand. You are in the Middle East, Israelis. Be part of the Middle East.
Marc Steiner: It feels intractable, but I can’t believe it is intractable, that there’s got to be…
Lia Tarachansky: Well, people like us, Marc, don’t have the luxury of hopelessness.
Marc Steiner: [Laughs] it’s true. It’s true. But people like us, even inside the Jewish world, that group is growing.
Lia Tarachansky: Sure. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, we’re the only ones who are going to be able to convince the Israelis that they are safe.
Marc Steiner: To me, it’s always deeply important to talk with you about these things because you have a deep analysis laced with serious passion about what’s going on at the moment. And I think it needs to be heard, which is one of the reasons I called you and said, would you come on today? Because I think you need to be heard.
Lia Tarachansky: I feel like I have nothing to say anymore. Those words that I wrote a year ago when we still thought that Vivian Silver was alive, and before I knew the Hayim Katsman was dead, and before we knew that Haya Bokchev was dead, and before Khalil Abu Yahia was dead, those words, I have nothing left to say. There’s nothing to be said. It is so big. The level of destruction and violence and brutality and cruelty is so enormous.
The fact that tens of thousands of Israelis in the middle of a war are still protesting this corrupt government is a miracle. The fact that people still go out on the streets in Germany where it’s essentially illegal to be pro-Palestinian at this point, it’s… You’re seeing bravery in moments like these, and we need to hold each other up in these moments of uncertainty because people like us don’t have the luxury of hopelessness.
But if you want a kernel of hope, and I’m very cautious of optimism. As a political journalist, I think optimism is a very dangerous thing to have. Optimism is an emotion. Optimism is a feeling. Optimism is an outlook on life. And it’s destructive in situations like these where we are struggling so hard to see the reality.
Because let’s not fool ourselves, this war is going on because we are not seeing reality, because we are not tackling our denials and because we are not allowing ourselves to see. So hope, to me, is a different animal. Hope is a set of actions. You don’t hope out of optimism, you hope out of necessity.
And there’s this incredible Ugandan scholar, world-class scholar, Mahmood Mamdani. And he’s a scholar also, amongst other things, of colonialism. He wrote a remarkable book called Neither [Settler nor Native].
Marc Steiner: Called what?
Lia Tarachansky: Neither [Settler nor Native]. And this is the latest book in many, many, many years. He was in Rwanda and he was in South Africa in 1984. And he was covering and looking at all these peace initiatives in Rwanda about reconciliation in 1984. And in 1984, it looked like South Africa was going to descend into total civil war and chaos, and it looked like Rwanda was moving towards [crosstalk].
Marc Steiner: Right.
Lia Tarachansky: And as we know, 10 years later in 1994, there was a genocidal civil war in Rwanda that had colonial roots that left so many people dead, and South Africa ended Apartheid.
So the way things look does not often have bearing on the future. Many, many, many people have tried to predict what’s going to go on in Israel and Palestine, and then something happens and it all goes sideways. All of us were saying the escalation with Iran is going to lead to a nuclear war, nuclear winter. And then when it actually led to escalation to the point where Iran and Israel were lobbing weapons at each other, it led to nothing because there are other factors at play, and we as outsiders to those factors can only see a small fraction of the surface.
So you don’t know what the impact of your work is, you don’t know how you are connected to other people, and you don’t know what is actually happening on the ground unless you’re fighting it on the ground.
So considering our limited access, I think, just do what you can do that you can live with. I can’t ignore what’s going on. I feel a deep responsibility to be involved, to be informed, to sponsor refugees to Canada out of this place, to do anything that is going to make this even a tiny little fraction better. And I know that you do the same, and I hope that your audience does too.
Marc Steiner: Lia Tarachansky, A, let me just, again, thank you for everything you do, and I appreciate you taking the time today. I really thought this was a very important conversation, and a very difficult one. And I want to thank you for being willing to take the time and joining us here today at The Real News on The Marc Steiner Show. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.
Lia Tarachansky: Thanks, Marc.
Marc Steiner: Once again, thank you to Lia Tarachansky for joining us today. And thank you to all of you for listening. And thanks to Dave Hebden for running and editing the program, our producer, Rosette Sewali, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making the show possible. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Israel colonial settlers and Knesset members celebrated on social media the de facto deportation of two German citizens, who were imprisoned by the Israeli authorities, from the occupied Palestinian territories to Jordan on Sunday 6 October.
Itamar Ben Gvir and Tzvi Sukot posted about the expulsion of German activists as an achievement for their special task force and governmental committee, which was created to deal with what they call “dangerous anarchists” in the West Bank.
Israel’s criminal right-wing government uses the term “anarchists” to refer to all Israeli and international human rights defenders who are supporting Palestinians living under illegal occupation in the West Bank.
According to eyewitnesses, on the morning of 2 October, the two activists were arbitrarily arrested by Israeli forces in Masafer Yatta (South Hebron Hills) as they accompanied a Palestinian farmer to his garden in the village of Tuwani.
The Palestinian farmer they were accompanying faces daily harassment, attacks, and invasions of his private land by Israeli settlers and occupation forces, which all make it difficult for him to access his land, to cultivate it, and even to remain in his home.
Police claimed in court that the activists had entered a settlement, confronted a soldier and disturbed him in fulfilling his duty. These claims contradict video footage of the arrest.
The onslaught of harassment against Palestinian residents of the region of Masafer Yatta extends beyond Tuwani. Every village in the area is affected.
In the village of Zanuta in this same region, residents have been forcibly displaced multiple times despite a court ruling in their favor. Residents of Um Durit have had their livestock and property stolen and destroyed, and their land abused by settlers.
Last July, around 200 settlers launched a coordinated attack in which they destroyed vehicles, burned fruit trees and beat up residents in Khalet Al Daba’a and Um Fagarah. In the past year, at least 19 Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank have been forcefully displaced by Israel settlers with the support of the Israeli occupation forces.
The activists were transferred to the central unit in the occupied West Bank near the Malleh Adumim colonial settlement. The police illegally broke into the phone of one of the activists and questioned them about photos on their phones of signs and stickers condemning the genocide in Gaza and supporting Palestinian rights.
The police alleged that this proved that they supported terror and were terrorists. They were also questioned on whether they knew about the International Solidarity movement (ISM), and were shown a presentation on the organisation with pictures of Israelis and internationals and asked if they knew them.
The activists were taken to court and accused of three offenses: disturbing a police officer/soldier performing his responsibilities, membership in an illegal association, and “sympathising and identifying with a terror organisation”.
According to the police, the illegal association they are members of is ISM, which they claimed has been designated as forbidden to work in Israel and the West Bank.
It is important to note that while many respectable human rights organisations have been designated as terror organisations by Israel, the ISM has not yet been designated as forbidden, nor has any international ISM activist ever been indicted and charged with a crime in Israeli courts.
The German citizens were imprisoned in harsh conditions from Wednesday to Sunday and then given the option of leaving through the King Hussein bridge, and they are now in Jordan.
For similar vague and unsubstantiated accusations, Palestinians are frequently arrested and tortured in the West Bank, and in Gaza the accused are murdered along with their families.
This most recent set of arrests is part of the ongoing barrage of harassment by Israeli settlers and soldiers of Palestinians and of human rights activists in area, and comes in the wake of the murder of ISM volunteer Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi in the village of Beita during a protest against settlement expansion on the village’s land.
Featured image supplied
By The Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.
On 8 October, the New York Jets fired head coach Robert Saleh. This came only two days after he was seen sporting the flag of Lebanon attached to his team hoody:
BREAKING: Two days after proudly displaying the Lebanese flag on his sleeve, Head Coach Robert Saleh has been fired by the New York Jets. pic.twitter.com/xXhIxKCL7r
— 𝓙𝓲𝓶𝓶𝔂 𝓙
(@JimmyJ4thewin) October 8, 2024
Just 2 days after coach Robert Saleh wore the Lebanese flag on his sleeve, he’s been fired as the head coach of the NY Jets.
Definitely not a coincidence. https://t.co/WizERbKEfS pic.twitter.com/Cv0CflKotM
— Leyla Hamed (@leylahamed) October 8, 2024
According to NBC Sports, security escorted him out of the building. Importantly, this didn’t happen last time the Jets fired their head coach:
We commend Coach Robert Saleh for making history as the first American Muslim head coach in @NFL history. Although no one should jump to conclusions about why the @nyjets fired Coach Saleh, the report that Jets security physically escorted Saleh out of the building does raise… pic.twitter.com/JdlBslko1m
— CAIR National (@CAIRNational) October 8, 2024
My understanding is that Robert Saleh was fired this morning and then escorted out of the building by team security. There was no meeting with players to inform them or anything like that. He was in the building for work, and then he was out of the building and out of a job. https://t.co/syDwzCiXZn pic.twitter.com/BH7YjnvRN0
— Jordan Schultz (@Schultz_Report) October 8, 2024
The owner of the Jets – Woody Johnson – previously served as the US ambassador the United Kingdom during the Trump administration. He is also an heir to his family business, Johnson & Johnson. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires index, his net worth is an estimated $8.77bn. The Senate also investigated him in 2006 over his sketchy tax arrangements:
And owner, Woody Johnson of Johnson and Johnson, is a big Trump and Israel supporter. Any coincidence? https://t.co/RBDiXzTxkz
— J. C. Martin (@blackangelband2) October 8, 2024
According to CNN, back in 2020 the State Department’s watchdog investigated Johnson after allegations that he made both racist and sexist comments to staff.
Whilst many online are arguing that the Jets fired Saleh due to their recent results – having won just two out of five recent games, it is very uncommon for teams to fire NFL coaches mid-season. According to The Athletic, Johnson has never fired a coach mid-season before now:
.@NFL coaches DON’T get fired mid-season, esp after only 5 games & when QB @AaronRodgers12 is just back from injury, so let’s be direct: @nyjets & @woodyjohnson4 are racist & zionist for firing Robert Saleh after displaying #Lebanon flag–& should be boycotted!#GazaGenocide https://t.co/umd6hCAoQW pic.twitter.com/gsRkgDRuiN
— US Palestinian Community Network (@uspcn) October 8, 2024
Saleh was the NFL’s first Muslim, Lebanese head coach. Last season he also wore Lebanon’s flag as part of the NFL’s heritage program. This encouraged players and coaching staff to wear flags from their countries of origin on helmets and jackets. Notably though, this weekend was the first time Saleh had worn the flag since Israel started indiscriminately bombing Lebanon. Still sounding like a coincidence?
They fired a Lebanese guy for *checks notes* wearing a Lebanese flag in support of his people who are getting murdered https://t.co/pnhSL2LkbX
— Shirien (@ShirienEG) October 8, 2024
So now people can’t display a country’s flag on themselves? This is literal fascism we should be up in arms about this https://t.co/apHC9xTnss
— H (@caprickhan) October 8, 2024
Back in 2011, Johnson visited Israel with former Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. During the visit, they met with Benjamin Netanyahu – Israeli prime minister and genocidal maniac. They also visited an illegal Israeli settlement. Clearly, now Israel are carpet bombing Lebanon as well as Gaza – Saleh’s Lebanese flag became a problem for him:
Robert Saleh got fired because he showed support for Lebanon, you cannot change my mind or convince me otherwise. Woody Johnson (owner) is a life long republican donor and a staunch Zionist. Johnson and Johnson also has a long historical tie with Israel. #jets #lebanon #zionist pic.twitter.com/bcqepSHz94
— Nadim Korkmaz (@NadimKorkmaz) October 8, 2024
But remember, folks, Zionists don’t control western society, and you live in a free country to express your views in. https://t.co/evCrKcr2Mj
— Kevy B @YoContextKev@mastodon@social .bsky.social (@YoContextKev) October 9, 2024
Normal American Citizens, are you guys not worried about how much power Israel has over your country ?
From where we are standing you look like their little bitches meanwhile you are funding their insanity.
Doesn’t that concern you guys ? https://t.co/j4mEdumlNo
— The Answer (@Codex_ink) October 9, 2024
Of course, Saleh isn’t the first person showing solidarity with a country Israel is ruthlessly bombing who has lost a job. Multiple corporations have fired, or withdrawn job offers to, people who’ve expressed support for Palestine whilst Israel has mounted its genocidal assault in Gaza.
Sports professionals – as with any employees – should be able to mark their heritage, and their solidarity with countries in which Israel is committing murderous atrocities. They should be able to do so without fear of retribution.
Had Saleh adorned the Israel flag – a country which is ethnically cleansing Palestinians and now Lebanese people – I very much doubt he would be in the same position.
Feature image via Mail News/Youtube
By HG
This post was originally published on Canary.
