What democracy would accept a member of parliament agreeing that it was permissible and acceptable for its soldiers to sexually abuse political prisoners by “putting a stick up their rectum” and reinforcing this torture and war crimes by saying, “Yes, with these people everything is acceptable. Everything”. That so called “democracy” is Israel. It has for years boasted about it’s military being the “most moral army in the world” when in fact it is now the most immoral army in the world run by a fascist, brutal, extremist, rogue government dominated by messianic settlers.
The Israeli leader had hoped to press the reset button and return to his silly theories about the irrelevance of Palestine to the Middle East, and the world. He was proven wrong, again, making him a false prophet or, at best, a failed leader.
U.S. politicians have been able to undercut such logic by touting vague notions of “national security” in response. But that excuse won’t work with respect to Israel. Let Israel worry about its “national security” while Americans focus on funding our needs.
Not only could antiwar and pro-Palestinian activists center the financial costs of gifting weapons to Israel as an election issue, but Harris could use it as political cover for doing the morally right thing.
The U.S. is vowing to defend the state of Israel from all security threats “from Iran and its proxies.” But what’s it’s really doing is committing to help Israel attack other countries.
And so does the slaughter. If Washington and Tel Aviv have their way, the slaughter could well expand in ways we can only imagine. Lindsey Graham’s resolution to attack Iran and its oil refineries must be stifled. Those who support Israel without reservation should be challenged wherever they go. Israel must be boycotted, divested from and sanctioned. The war profiteers and their bankers cannot be let off the hook. Business as usual should not include accepting the genocide of the Palestinians. The occupation must end.
So some quadcopter with a video attachment connected to an Amazon or Google database saw someone going into a school shelter that looked at least vaguely like one of the fighters in the massive Israeli database. So whether this individual was a fighter or not, the Israeli Air Force scrambled to strike the shelter, at a robot’s orders.
That is a ridiculous situation and one that makes a mockery of US propaganda declaring the US to be a “leader of free nations” or “the world’s most powerful country.”
At a minimum, the New York Times should be honest about that, and not blithely claim that US “seems not in control’ of its purported ‘“ally” Israel.
While the Left has received criticism for Trump’s rise in popularity, it’s important to look at the true nature of the Republican Party and its agenda of inequality.
No Israeli military goal requires the total destruction of Gaza. Killing 40,000 Palestinians – a death toll that could reach 186,000 per some estimates – and injuring many more serves no clear strategic purpose. Nor does the systematic and wholesale destruction of Gazan universities, schools, hospitals and neighbourhoods. If Israel wants to occupy and annex Gaza, presumably it would want to inherit something more than a blast zone.
Gone is the rhetoric of “peaceful coexistence” and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promises instead “total victory”.
History can give a clue as to what he might mean by that phrase. It is eerily similar to the German word Endsieg, which literally translates to “final victory” and described the full realisation of the Nazi regime’s genocidal ambitions. The parallels are chilling.
The region braces for growing confrontation after a string of Israeli assassinations.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be considered the “chief arsonist in the Middle East”, American journalist Jeremy Scahill says.
Scahill tells host Steve Clemons that Netanyahu “smells blood right now because [United States President] Joe Biden is a lame duck president”. This allows Israel to make bigger moves against the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and also to drag the US into confrontation with Iran, Scahill argues.
He spoke after Israel claimed responsibility this past week for the killings of Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s military chief, in Beirut and Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, in Gaza. Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, the chief negotiator in the talks to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza, was also assassinated in Tehran. Israel is suspected in his killing but hasn’t claimed responsibility for it.
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Iranian spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Nasser Kanani, condemned Israel on Saturday on “X” Saturday for practicing “medieval forms […]
The U.N. report found evidence of sexual violence, waterboarding, and the use of dogs against detainees, many of whom were deprived of food, water, sleep, and toilet access.
A standoff at Israel’s Sde Teiman military base this week has thrown longstandingabuses against Palestinian detainees and the Israeli military’s history of impunity for torture into stark relief.
Israel’s allies should increase pressure to end grave abuses against Palestinians in custody, stop detaining them without charge or trial, and allow independent monitors access to detention facilities.
Last month, the International Court of Justice issued a damning assessment of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and the apartheid system it has built. All states now have a clear obligation to impose sanctions on Israel until the occupation ends.
The Israeli army is using Amazon’s cloud service to store surveillance information on Gaza’s population, while procuring further AI tools from Google and Microsoft for military purposes, an investigation reveals.
The London School of Economics has admitted it discriminated against a professor based on his opposition to Israel’s state ideology Zionism.
In November last year, the LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog rejected an article by James Hughes, who has taught at the university since 1994.
The piece referred to the strong connections between the Conservatives, then Britain’s ruling party, and the pro-Israel lobby. The pressure group Conservative Friends of Israel was supported by most lawmakers in the party, it noted.
“The expansion of that lobby has been nurtured by Israel over recent years,” Hughes stated. “This explains the almost unanimous pro-Israel positioning of the current Conservative government and its mirroring of the policy of the Israeli state itself by fusing criticism of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism, and attempts to ban anti-Israeli political expression.”
After the article was censored by the LSE, it was published by The Electronic Intifada.
As the editor handling its publication, I contacted the LSE seeking an explanation for why the piece had been rejected.
A spokesperson replied at that time by alleging that Hughes’ piece “did not meet the blog’s editorial guidelines.”
The LSE has now sent The Electronic Intifada a fresh statement retracting that accusation. The LSE accepted that the comments provided in November last “could have been viewed as misleading.”
The retraction follows a grievance procedure initiated by Hughes.
Is politics in America so corrupt and cynical that Netanyahu, the thuggish Likud Mafioso now in control in the Holy Land, gets repeated standing ovations from the representatives of small town America?
The Biden administration wants a ceasefire deal but is not prepared to put pressure on Israel to make it happen. Netanyahu knows this and is pushing forward with the genocide of the Palestinians, and regional war with the Axis of Resistance.
As assiduously as Israel seeks war with Iran is precisely the extent to which it will seek to draw the U.S. into it. That is what made Congress’ insanely intemperate recent reception of Netanyahu so dangerous.
Juan Cole In a 2011 exposé , Mike Stobbe of NBC news revealed a long history of federal physicians from the US deliberately infecting challenged persons or prisoners with diseases so as to experiment on them.
Killing an Australian was an unintended accident. Killing Palestinian Civilians is a pleasure that Politicians celebrate but don’t and won’t keep Israelis safer
At least 15 people have been killed in Israeli air raids on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in central Gaza, Gaza’s Government Media Office said.
Many others were injured in the attack on the Hamama school in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood in Gaza City, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported on Saturday.
For many, the spectacle of those in power rioting on behalf of sadistic thugs evinced the “deep moral deterioration” of a nation already deemed barbaric by much of the world – ghastly proof, writes Nesrine Malik, that despite rulings and protests, the war “has found its place, nestled within the status quo” of an apartheid Israel where there are no innocents in Gaza and “the most abject Palestinian suffering (is) normalized as just a part of life.” This “dissolution (of) a fundamental human law…seems to say: Yes, this is the world we live in now. Get used to it,” says Malik. “What does getting used to it look like? It looks like accepting that there are certain groups of people who can be killed…That it is, in fact, reasonable and necessary that they should die in order to maintain a political system (built) on the inequality of human life, (where) we exist and deserve freedom from hunger, fear and persecution (and) others have demonstrated some quality that shows they are not owed the same.””Justice, justice shall you pursue,” Judaism teaches. In Genesis 18:19, “We are called to be just and righteous.”God, if She’s implausibly watching, weeps.
Will Israel call them HAMAS and summarily imprison and assassinate them?
Israeli soldiers, like soldiers in other countries, bask in the self-serving effusive praise showered upon them by politicians, but privately they know BS when they hear it.
Right from the start on October 7th, the soldiers knew that the sudden collapse of Netanyahu’s state-of-the-art multi-tiered border defense system left the door open for the Hamas attack. Still denied an official investigation by Netanyahu, people know that had the border defense been in place, all the terrible consequences never would have occurred. (See, the open letter by six very prominent Israelis in the New York Times on June 26, 2024: “We Are Israelis calling on Congress to Disinvite Netanyahu.”)
The soldiers also know that the small Hamas militia of some 25,000 fighters hidden in tunnels, having only small arms with dwindling ammunition, is up against the 465,000–person military armed with 1,500 F-16 fighter pilots and nuclear weapons. The Israeli military is also equipped daily by Biden with the most modern weapons. All this makes Netanyahu’s absurd description of Hamas as an existential threat sheer propaganda designed to protect his job.
The New York Times, that reliable organ of establishment politics and anti-Trump mania, has also aired the view that the Democratic Party, in not endorsing a competitive process, had adopted “the playbook of ruling parties in authoritarian states.” From the top, the choice has been dictated; the rank and file had to accordingly “fall in line and clap enthusiastically.” The “manifest weaknesses” of Harris – her unpopularity, her poor campaigning, her abysmal management and tendency towards favouritism, her “penchant for excruciating banality,” and her Bay Area standing – were to be religiously ignored.
A Trump-Vance administration would likely enthusiastically embrace the Project 2025 agenda. No surer path exists for the fracturing of American society.
UAW Region 9a leader Brandon Mancilla says in an interview with Jacobin that he and his union are not impressed with Republicans’ supposed pro-worker turn — and he explains what a real progressive, working-class agenda would look like.
“He’s like, ‘Go play with your bitcoins,’ like they’re little toys or something,” one man said indignantly. When I asked him and his companions whether they would vote for Trump, they looked at me like I was stupid. Of course they would.
“Everything’s quiet until it’s not,” Arab al-Aramshe resident Kareem Suidan told me while we walked through the village in late July. Three months earlier, the apparent calm had been broken when Hezbollah targeted an Israeli command center inside the village, killing one soldier and injuring 16 other people, including four civilians. In the wake of the April 17 drone strike, the targeted building was described in news reports as a “community center,” but according to Suidan and the aftermath of the bombing that I observed, the building was in fact a school.
“It’s an academy for the children, but the soldiers were inside,” the 33-year-old Suidan said. The kids “go there to learn, for activities, and the soldiers during the war go to sleep there.” For the village’s Arab community, the school is incredibly important, as it allows a degree of autonomy relative to sending their children to schools in nearby kibbutzim.
The United States is largely acting like it’s business as usual in the Middle East and Iran right now. But Israel’s assassinations of top leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah have brought us to the precipice of an absolutely disastrous war throughout the region.
[The New York Times’s Ronen] Bergman, whose ties to Israeli intelligence are an open secret, could scarcely hide his glee at the successful assassination.
The New York Times and others are nowhere explaining the context, history, and possible motivations behind these assassinations. Among them that Benjamin Netanyahu may have ordered the attacks for his own selfish political reasons and to put off his trial for corruption — even though other media don’t hesitate to make that connection, including a leading newspaper in Israel itself.
What’s more, most U.S. coverage frames Israel’s killings as heroic actions of self-defense, instead of the truth — that the assassinations are violations of international law and an enormous threat to global security.
It is no longer possible to categorise the nihilistic violence of the Israeli state. It appears to have no objective other than violence and an urge for desolation.
In 24 hours Israel has murdered the man with whom it would need to negotiate hostage release in the short term and political settlement in the long term, and a key figure in its most dangerous potential military enemy which has refrained from full-on war.
In doing so it has violated the territory, indeed the capitals, of two crucial regional states.
Australian politicians – lately, Peter Dutton – have enjoyed political junkets to Israel more than any other destination. Very few of them go to Gaza to see what’s really happening.
A detail of a mailer paid for by AIPAC’s super PAC, left, and a detail of the original photo, right, reversed to match the mailer’s orientation. Mailer image obtained by The Intercept. Photo: Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent
The photo of Bush used in the AIPAC mailers was taken from a Missouri Independent article. In the mailers, part of Bush’s forehead has been photoshopped and appears sloped. The photos are also color altered.
The Missouri Independent said AIPAC’s use of the photo violated its site rules.
“As a nonprofit news organization we do not allow campaigns or political groups to use our photography,” said Jason Hancock, the editor-in-chief of the Missouri Independent. “We would never give a PAC permission to use our photos, and doing so without our knowledge or permission violates our terms of use.”
AIPAC, the leading pro-Israel lobbying group, has been one of the single largest outside spenders in an election cycle that’s broken records for the most expensive House primaries in history. According to Sludge, AIPAC helped raise two-thirds of the campaign funding for Bush’s Democratic opponent, St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell. (Neither United Democracy Project nor Bell’s campaign responded to requests for comment.)
The companies and individuals linked to the owners of now-defunct Bonza Airlines are part of a complex global web used to whitewash billions of dollars.
Since being enforced federally in 1924, compulsory voting is now seen as a community event — a common, civic enterprise and one in which Australians are happy to participate, even if it is compulsory, writes history editor Dr Glenn Davies.
The United States government regularly decries authoritarian press crackdowns around the world. Yet that same government gives billions to Israel as it makes no attempt to hide its policy of killing journalists.
During its war on Gaza, Israel has claimed its bombings of journalists and civilian targets were strikes against Hamas.
“Journalists are civilians and should never be targeted. Israel must explain why two more Al Jazeera journalists have been killed in what appears to be a direct strike,” CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg said in a statement on Wednesday.
From Ismail Haniyeh to Imad Mughniyeh, Israel’s policy of assassinations is a great example of winning the battle but losing the war, writes Emad Moussa.
Israel may have rationalised and justified extrajudicial murder as a way to provide security. But doing so augmented the very antagonism that makes it insecure. Instead of tackling the root of the problem, the occupation and colonialism, Israelis can only see and deal with the symptoms of their deeds.
This headhunting never worked and will not work in the future, unless repeating the same thing over and again and expecting a different result is no longer the definition of insanity.
Ismail al-Ghoul had become a household name for anyone following the war on Gaza. When he went to Ismail Haniyeh’s hometown to cover a commemoration of his killing, Israel assassinated him too.
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