Israel claims to “treasure” its Holocaust survivors. All ageing, Israel provides them with an average pension of $1400 a Year, leaving some 50,000 living below the poverty line. Israel “tortures” its Holocaust survivors and showers its settlers with promises
“There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism,” said Stephen Kapos. “If you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt.
Source: Holocaust Survivor Tells Student Anti-Genocide Protesters: ‘Just Keep Doing It’ | Common Dreams
There are many shameful periods in American history. The genocide we carried out against indigenous peoples. Slavery. The violent suppression of the labor movement that saw hundreds of workers killed. Lynching. Jim and Jane Crow. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya.
The genocide in Gaza, which we fund and support, is of such monstrous proportions that it will achieve a prominent place in this pantheon of crimes.
History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.
“Princeton University, like most universities around the country, is wildly overreacting from its surveillance of student activists to its rush to criminalize the most tepid forms of dissent. This will only fuel the fires of protest. These universities are frightened, not ultimately by the students, but by the clear moral issues these students raise that expose the moral bankruptcy and complicity in mass murder by all of our leading institutions. What these institutions and those who run them have failed to realize is that there is nothing they can do now. They have been exposed for who and what they are.”
Source: Princeton U. Police Stop Chris Hedges’ Speech on Gaza
The United Nations’ human rights chief on Tuesday called for an international investigation into mass graves discovered at two Gaza hospitals that Israeli forces recently assailed and destroyed, further imperilling the enclave’s barely functioning healthcare system.
OOPS! It’s a real bummer when these antisemites get in the way of Israeli bullets
An aid worker who was part of Belgium’s development aid efforts in the Gaza Strip has died in an Israeli strike, the Belgian government says, adding it is summoning the Israeli ambassador over the incident.
Source: Israeli Gaza strike kills Belgian aid worker: Minister
Hawkish lawmakers, intelligence officials, and the Biden White House conspired to pass an updated surveillance law that not only avoided meaningful reforms but also expanded the law in a way that U.S. intelligence agencies could only dream about a year or two ago.
The myths of Israel will prove to have been a scam
Seventy thousand years ago, the sea level was much lower than today. Australia, along with New Guinea and Tasmania, formed a connected landmass known as Sahul. Around this time – approximately 65,000 years ago – the first humans arrived in Sahul, a place previously devoid of any hominin species.
Source: We reconstructed landscapes that greeted the first humans in Australia around 65,000 years ago
“The US has played a significant role in this rightward shift by ensuring Israel’s impunity for relentless illegal settlement building, thereby undercutting those within Israeli politics who warned of the consequences of unfettered expansionism,” Rahman said. “This demonstrated to the Israeli public there would be no penalty for supporting those in Israel who want all the land ‘between the river and the sea’.”
Source: Are settler politics running unchecked in Israel? | Israel War on Gaza News | Al Jazeera
“Somehow I don’t think the U.S. State Department would defer to Russia as a credible source to investigate itself if a mass grave were discovered in Ukrainian territory it had occupied,” said one legal expert.
Source: US Dodges Growing Calls for Probe of Mass Graves at Gaza Hospitals | Common Dreams
Apologists for Israel’s total war on the innocent civilians of Gaza, blinded by their ethno-nationalism, may attempt to maintain that these universities were part and parcel of the Hamas government that has ruled Gaza since 2006. This allegation, however, is laughable. Hamas military cadres only come to 37,000 persons by Israel’s own reckoning. None of them were undergraduates or professors of literature.
Backers of Israel’s war have lost the battle for hearts and minds, so they’ve ginned up a controversy over student protests — they want us talking about anything other than the genocide in Gaza.
Thousands of Jewish Americans and allies gathered in Brooklyn on Tuesday for a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the second night of Passover, held just a block from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, to protest ongoing U.S. support for the Israeli assault on Gaza. “Too many of our people are worshiping a false idol,” said award-winning author and activist Naomi Klein, one of several speakers at Tuesday’s rally. “They are enraptured by it. They are drunk on it. They are profaned by it. And that false idol is called Zionism.”
Hundreds of protesters were arrested in Brooklyn on Tuesday when Jewish New Yorkers and allies gathered for what they called a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the second night of Passover. The demonstration, held one block away from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, came just hours before the Senate overwhelmingly approved a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes about $17 billion in arms and security funding to Israel. “At the core of the Passover story is that we cannot be free until all people are free,” Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace, told Democracy Now! “The Israeli government and the United States government are carrying out a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, over 34,000 people killed in six months in the name of Jewish safety, in the false name of Jewish freedom.”
to end U.S. complicity with these grave errors that are visible throughout the world as violations of international law. This can be achieved, without abandoning Israel, by placing our promised aid to our longtime ally in an escrow account. On behalf of the majority of Americans, we ask U.S. Senators to consider this option before continuing to approve military aid for Israel.
The age of the internet and the world wide web is something to admire and loathe. Surveillance capitalism is very much of the loathsome, sinister variety. But ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Government and other agencies do not give a fig about that.
Source: War of censorship escalates as Elon Musk fires shots at Australia
Hamas has never operated outside Palestine. It was elected, in free and fair elections, by the Palestinian people in 2006. Comparisons with ISIS are nonsense and merely police state rhetoric. If anyone is responsible for ISIS and Al Qaeda it is the United States. There was no ISIS before the invasion of Iraq and there was no Al Qaeda before the West began funding Islamic fundamentalist groups in Afghanistan in order to overthrow the secular pro-Soviet government there.
During the 1980s the Israeli government was instrumental in creating Hamas, for similar reasons. It wanted a Palestinian counterweight to secular Palestinian nationalism.
Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)
“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.
Source: Tony Greenstein’s Blog
It is only through the meeting of detached cruelty and monumental ineptitude that Seven and NewsCorp defied such excellent odds and backed one of the one percent of rapists that didn’t get away with it.
One wonders now what will happen to Trump’s political ambitions if he is found guilty of one or more of the several trials against him. The whole world is expectant.
“The fact that the court has now taken this case makes it exceedingly unlikely that [Mr Trump] will be tried for his offences on January 6 before the election,” he told reporters on 24 April.
“Of course the court can decide cases quickly when it has to. It could hear this case tomorrow and could fairly easily produce an opinion one week later. That is not going to happen. The court has all but told us and assured us that that will not happen,” he said. “It was an extraordinary statement by the court to set the argument in this case for two months from the date it granted the case.”
Source: How Supreme Court delays gave Trump what he wants before 2024 elections | The Independent
Rather than the post-Cold War globalization of the 1990s, which intensified the global economic order of exploitation leading to today’s ecological calamity, we need a globalization of peace, justice, health, and ease. Rather than the globalization that is further colonizing and commodifying the world, we need one that will decolonize and decommodify it. This is the sort of globalization we need, and one way the slogan Globalize the Intifada can be interpreted.
Source: Intifada, the Origin of Democracy – CounterPunch.org
Since 1948, Israel has invoked the Holocaust to justify the forced expulsion of Arabs from Palestine to create a Jewish state, but the systematic blueprint for ethnic cleansing was being drawn up years earlier by a Zionist zealot named Yosef Weitz.
While the world’s influential governments are allowing Israel to carry on with its genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, the same governments are turning a blind eye to Zionist colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank. Alas the Palestine Authority of Mahmoud Abbas and all the Palestinian factions in the West Bank are spectators, watching as if they are neutral without even attempting to organize an effective non-violent campaign to boycott Israeli products. If things continue as they are now, it is only a matter of time before the West Bank will face an ethnic cleansing similar to what happened in the 1948 Nakbah.
A mass grave created by the IDF has been uncovered at a Gaza hospital, where Palestinian civilians appear to have been the victims of a gruesome massacre.
United Nations rights chief Volker Turk is “horrified” by the destruction of the Nasser and Al Shifa medical facilities in Gaza and reports of mass graves containing hundreds of bodies there, a spokesman says.
Source: UN rights chief ‘horrified’ by Gaza mass grave reports
Israel is as slippery as an eel. Their false claim made before Easter intentionally crippled the distribution of aid in Gaza and increased illness and starvation in the process. Why does the WEST give Israel the benefit of the doubt?
Australia has welcomed an independent report Israel failed to provide evidence members of a United Nations agency that provides humanitarian relief to Palestinians were linked to Hamas.
Source: Australia backs report on Palestine aid agency UNRWA
The media misrepresents the united front of protesters as being antisemitic when it’s fundamentally not. Mass graves are less critical than amplifying the feelings of some pro-Israel supporters.
The Guardian reported that “hundreds of members of the teaching cohort at Columbia walked out in solidarity with the students who were arrested” while “students put protest tents back up in the middle of campus on Monday after they were torn down last week when more than 100 arrests were made.”
Yonah Lieberman, co-founder of IfNotNow, a Jewish-led U.S. group that organizes against Israel’s apartheid, declared: “Solidarity with these faculty members. Shame on establishment politicians and agitators who are smearing the anti-war protest at Columbia as anything other than what it is: a courageous stand for freedom and peace.”
Source: Columbia Faculty Walk Out Over Student Suspensions, Arrest for Gaza Protests – ScheerPost
They are looking for a repeat Kent State to distract from Gaza. Waving the false flag of antisemitism. Antisemitism was specifically German, and this isn’t WW2 Zionists joined the Nazi government in WW2, and they wanted autocratic repression from the top down in America too.
The legal landscape has shifted considerably since Trump last occupied the White House: states have many more tools to go after protesters, and, as the Cop City arrests indicate, Republican officials are increasingly willing to deploy existing laws in new ways to conduct sweeping arrests of activists.
The day after I spoke to Tema Okun, who has been an activist with progressive Jewish organizations for 20 years, she emailed to say she felt she had understated the threat posed in this moment. She wanted to try again.
As more and more laws are proposed and passed to “criminaliz[e] dissent, and as we face a possible presidency by a man who admires Putin and expresses his penchant for dictatorship,” Okun writes, “we are skating closer and closer to authoritarianism.” Basic freedoms, once enshrined in the Constitution, are now at risk of being eliminated. “Congress shaves off more and more rights piecemeal until we find we are unable to speak aloud our criticisms of government policies and practices. We slowly become a police state.”
Political repression is on the rise as the state finds new ways to criminalize dissent and collective action.
Source: The War on Protest – ScheerPost
Death threats, arrests, and self-censorship are creating a repressive environment for Palestinian cultural figures and institutions in Israel.
‘The goal is to crack down on celebrities to send a message’
“I felt frustrated seeing what was happening in Gaza, and also afraid to freely express my views and feelings because of the risk of persecution or jail — look what happened to Dalal Abu Amneh,” he said. “I received anonymous threats on my social media. In Berlin, I can at least connect with the Arab cultural sphere, and the city embraces you artistically — which is impossible where I was before.”
Source: Palestinian artists stifled as Israel ‘weaponizes fear and fame’
Can we be clear about a few things? Protesting this slaughter is not expressing antisemitism. It is not engaging in hate speech. It is not endangering Jewish students. It is doing what should be done on a college campus — taking a stand against a perceived wrong, at least provoking discussion and debate.
Source: The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students | The Smirking Chimp
One wonders how the Australian mainstream media will react to the news that India, the so-called biggest democracy in the world, has thrown out ABC correspondent Avani Dias from the country.
Dias was denied a visa after her program Sikhs, Spies and Murder: Investigating India’s alleged hit on foreign soil was aired on the ABC ‘s weekly Foreign Correspondent slot.
Anyway, there’s heaps more strange things like Tony Abbott being Minister for Women or Peter Dutton having perfect eyesight until he lost his hair but there’s a limit to how much strangeness you can have in a day… It’s true: the communist Albanese government has imposed it and I read it on X!
Joe Biden has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to scale back attacks on civilian areas in Gaza, or risk a barrage of empty statements, the likes of which have never been seen before.
U.S. law prohibits “arms transfers that risk facilitating or otherwise contributing to violations of human rights or international humanitarian law,” according to a White House memo issued in February.
The U.S. State Department has said repeatedly that it has not found Israel to be in violation of international law, a position that runs directly counter to the findings of leading humanitarian organizations and United Nations experts.
Source: IDF Kills 18 Kids Hours After House Votes Billions to Israel
Unless a ceasefire is called, it appears certain that Gaza’s hospitals and medical workers will be subjected to further attacks, that disease will spread and that more people will die from conditions that are both preventable and curable.
Source: No protection from illness in Gaza | The Electronic Intifada
$26 B Israel aid, $14.5 B Military $11.5 B free to do as they want Vs Gaza and Bidn threatening nonsense
The blanket suspension of student protesters casts “serious doubt on the University’s respect for the rule-of-law values that we teach,” 54 law professors wrote.
Source: Columbia Law School Faculty Condemn Administration for Mass Arrests
International law today remains incomplete and in need of drastic structural changes, e.g., a reform of the UNSC membership and power structure, a revisiting of the adjudication power of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) and its ‘compulsory’ jurisdiction, the World Trade’s provisions for labor and environmental protection, and a serious re-commitment to empower UN and its functional agencies with necessary resources. The United States unconditional support for Israel and its lack of attention to the welfare of peoples in the MENA region, as well as elsewhere in the developing world, in pursuit of peace, human security, and good governance, is detrimental to the universal compliance and voluntary adherence to the norms and rules of international law.
Source: Is Washington’s Defense of Israel’s War destroying the Edifice of the Liberal International Order?
Israel has yet to provide evidence for its accusations that hundreds of staff with the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) are members of terrorist groups, according to a review of the agency’s neutrality that could prompt some donor countries to review funding freezes.
UNRWA provides education, health and aid to millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The review said UNRWA shares staff lists annually with the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
On Monday, the review said Israel had not raised any concerns with UNRWA, based on those staff lists, since 2011. Then in March 2024, “Israel made public claims that a significant number of UNRWA employees are members of terrorist organisations.”
“Israeli authorities have to date not provided any supporting evidence nor responded to letters from UNRWA in March, and again in April, requesting the names and supporting evidence that would enable UNRWA to open an investigation.”
The groups are the Swedish Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, the Norwegian Chr Michelsen Institute, and the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
The Australian public has bought a big-long gas pipeline from foreign tax cheats – but there’s no gas. It’s a white elephant! Jemena and sleepy regulators AEMC are the culprits. Energy consumers and taxpayers the victims.
Even the most relative right-wing elements in the ALP should be relatively Left on the broader spectrum. We all need to see ourselves as part of a ‘broad Left’, and in this sense having common cause. Once we agree on this perhaps we can truly ‘move forward together’.
Source: The ALP – Arguing for a Minimum Program – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Even in times of low official unemployment levels, the latest polling from the Freshwater Group (AFR 15 April 2024) shows that Labor’s primary vote has dropped to 31 per cent after just two years in government.
This is a crucial loss of 1.8 per cent in Labor’s support base or 2 per cent after preferences. Only Peter Dutton’s flat preferred prime ministerial ratings are keeping Labor two-party preferred vote at 50 per cent within the usual margin of error in all responsible polling.
olddogthoughts 
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