You cannot understand a conflict without understanding its history. That’s why historical context is routinely suppressed by corporate media, such as in the Palestinian-Israel conflict and the war between Russia and Ukraine. They don’t want you to understand.
Israel has killed a tenth of their number — some 100 journalists — as it tries to prevent the truth of its atrocities from getting out. Israel’s has been the most deadly eruption of violence against journalists ever recorded.
Source: Why Media Have Failed Gaza
Corporate Media is pro-confusion and anti- conclusion
Last Sunday, Israel closed Al Jazeera’s office in occupied East Jerusalem, confiscating broadcast equipment and taking the channel off air. Israel’s targeting of journalists and their families, the closure of Al Jazeera’s Jerusalem office, the imprisonment and alleged torture of journalists, and the refusal to let foreign journalists enter Gaza amounts to a war on journalism.
The war behind the war we aren’t allowed to see. Information without conclusion.
But with all eyes on Gaza, violations against journalists in the West Bank have multiplied. Israel now ranks sixth among the top countries for jailed journalists, tied with Iran. Over the past seven months, 52 journalists have been detained, all but two in the West Bank, the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA) told Global Voices. Nearly all are being held without trial or charge under Israeli military law.
Source: Israeli Violations against Journalists in Palestinian West Bank Multiply
Israel yells “fooled ya”
“This would appear to be a ruse intended to make Israel look like the side refusing a deal,” said the Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Source: Celebrations in Gaza after breakthrough in ceasefire talks
![Optimism on the streets of Rafah, as Palestinians celebrate the news that Hamas has agreed to an Egyptian-Qatari ceasefire proposal [AFP]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/AFP__20240506__34R22NG__v1__HighRes__PalestinianIsraelConflict-1715031128.jpg?resize=770%2C513&quality=80)
Hamas officials have shown Al Jazeera a copy of the Egyptian-Qatari ceasefire proposal that the movement says it has agreed to.
The proposal includes three phases and would see an end to Israel’s war on Gaza as well as the release of Israeli captives held in the enclave and Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
Source: ‘War Criminals’: IDF Strikes Rafah After Hamas Agrees to Cease-Fire | Common Dreams
He believed what he was doing was lawful because he was acting in the public interest.
Source: Do a soldier’s orders trump a lawyer’s public duty? David McBride sentencing reserved – Michael West
In his 2021 annual threat assessment, the director-general of ASIO, the Australian domestic intelligence service, pointed to an active spy ring operating in the country, or what he chose to call a “nest of spies”. The obvious conclusion drawn by information-starved pundits was that the nest was filled with the eggs and fledglings of Chinese intelligence or Russian troublemakers. How awkward then, for the revelations to be focused on another country, one Australia is ingratiatingly disposed to in its efforts to keep China in its place.
Source: Nesting in Australia: Indian Spy Rings Take Root – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The militant group reiterated key demands that Israel again rejected. After earlier signs of progress, the outlook appeared to dim as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to resist international pressure to halt the war.
Source: Israel vows military operation as ceasefire talks end
The U.K. government has provided special diplomatic immunity to scores of foreign officials accused of committing serious violations of international law, Declassified has found.
Since 2013, the Foreign Office has granted over 50 “special mission” certificates to military and political figures from Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Rwanda and Iran.
Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz was granted this protection as recently as March, even after the country was put under investigation for genocide in Gaza.
It comes as the International Criminal Court looks poised to indict two names on Britain’s list: Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi.
On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives passed a bill to enshrine in law a definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionist messages. It’s an egregious attack on free speech — and one that gravely insults the memory of millions of anti-Zionist Jews.
Source: Congress’s Antisemitism Bill Is an Insult to Jewish History
It all began with the LNP and Abbott government
“serious questions about command, leadership and management all the way to the top of the defence force and government.”
Source: A third Australian General referred to the NACC. What’s the scam? – Michael West
Journalist Mehdi Hasan sardonically suggested that Smotrich’s comments will be deemed acceptable by the Biden administration, members of Congress, and the U.S. corporate media because he didn’t “say it on a college campus.”
The Israel lobby failed to take down Rep. Summer Lee. They’ve now set their sights on Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush.
May 4 2024, 6:00 a.m.
Call in the FBI
No Labels promoted the Wednesday event as a “special Zoom call” with “the leading voices in their parties” opposing student protests against the war in Gaza, which spread to more than 150 campuses in the last two weeks.
Source: Gottheimer, Lawler, University Trustees Agree: FBI Should Investigate Campus Protests
Pro-Palestine student protesters are being smeared as puppets of shadowy “outside agitators.” The presence of community members and experienced activists in the protests is nothing to be ashamed of: we need outside agitators to build a better world.
Source: We Need “Outside Agitators”
Australian university students are setting up encampments in universities across Australia. They are not only calling for an end to the war on Gaza and freedom for Palestinians, they are calling for key changes needed in Australian universities’ relationships with Israel, including divestments in weapons research and development and sales and the cessation of links to Israeli Universities involved in the Israeli military complex.
Developments on university campuses and in Congress this week showed that the U.S. government’s top priority is not protecting students or civilian lives in Gaza, but to protect Israel’s ability to continue its unimpeded slaughter.
Source: Enforcing Silence on Genocide
Northern Gaza is experiencing a “full-blown famine”, the head of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has said, and warned that it is “moving its way south”.
What is the ethical response to witnessing a great moral crime? Turn away and allow oneself to be distracted? Pretend it doesn’t exist? Or acknowledge the crime for what it is, and take some sort of action to try to stop it?
Source: Columbia Students are Sick at Heart, just as we were in ’68
Last week, billionaire former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg released Screams Before Silence, which is being promoted as “a documentary film on the sexual violence committed by Hamas” on 7 October 2023.
But it is a total fraud. Seven months after that day, Israel has still not identified a single survivor of the alleged mass rapes on 7 October, nor a single credible eyewitness.
While Israel claims that many Israeli women and even some men were raped and sexually tortured in horrific ways on 7 October, before being killed, not one deceased victim has been identified either.
We debunked the film’s sensational but demonstrably false claims on this week’s Electronic Intifada Livestream and showed how many of the “witnesses” Sandberg interviewed are lying.
You can watch that segment in the video above or in the video embedded in this tweet:
The pro-Israel community telegraphed its intent to target Jayapal early on, primarily for suspicion that her politics on Israel–Palestine may align with her younger sister’s, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who called for a ceasefire early in the current war on Gaza.
Source: AIPAC Is Secretly Intervening in Portland’s Congressional Race
and
The violent crackdown carried out on Columbia University students protesting Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip was led by a member of the school’s own faculty, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has declared.
During a May 1 press conference, just hours after the New York Police Department [Counterterrorism unit] arrested nearly 300 people on university grounds, Adams praised adjunct Columbia professor Rebecca Weiner, who moonlights as the head of the NYPD counter-terrorism bureau, for giving police the green light to clear out anti-genocide students by force.
Source: The Israeli Connection to the Raid on Columbia University
Nahla Al-Arian lost more than 200 relatives in Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Then Eric Adams said she was the reason police raided Columbia.
Source: NYC Mayor Smears Grandmother as Columbia “Outside Agitator”
My conclusion: While protest movements are often ignited by many different things, and attract an assortment of people with a range of motives, this one is centered on one thing: moral outrage at the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people — most of them women and children — in Gaza.
To interpret these protests as anything else — as antisemitic or anti-Zionist or anti-American or pro-Palestinian — is to miss the essence of what’s going on and why.
Source: What’s Really Motivating the Protests? | The Smirking Chimp
One day, the students who are protesting the genocide in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians today will be seen as on the right side, too. History will prove it. Until then, let’s turn the discussion back to where it belongs: an end to the war on Gaza.
Final Note: This piece was written before the president and trustees of Columbia called in the riot police on the night of April 30th, against the advice of many faculty, to arrest the students in the encampment, as well as those who had occupied Hamilton Hall. Videos show considerable police violence against the students. What happens next remains to be seen.
Source: The Distortion of Campus Protests Over Gaza – ScheerPost
Before the 1940s, most Jews were offended by Zionist ideas, insisting that their religion was not a national ideology and they were loyal citizens of their countries of birth, a loyalty on which they feared the Zionists would cast doubt. Leftist Jews decried Zionism as a form of nationalist chauvinism. Some American Jews say they are Zionists in the sense of just being proud of the considerable accomplishments of the Jewish people, without necessarily buying into feelings of ethnic superiority or entitlement.
In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, however, there is only one politically successful tendency in the Zionist movement in Israel. The people in power adhere to forms of right wing Zionism. These are a witches brew of virulent ethno-nationalism and open hatred of the Other. They differ mainly in whether they are secular, as with the Likud Party of Benjamin Netanyahu or Yisrael Beitenu of Avigdor Lieberman, or whether they are rooted in Jewish fundamentalism, as with Religious Zionism and Jewish Power or Shas.
Right wing Zionism has many resemblances with the MAGA movement spearheaded by Donald J. Trump (or spearheaded by him when he was not engaging in massive real estate fraud or shtupping porn stars and then buying their silence).
Source: Top Ways MAGA and Right Wing Zionism Converge, and Why Smotrich is Embracing Trump
The raid was orchestrated in unison with a newly appointed Colombia junior associated Jewish professor in unison with the NYPD’s “counter-terrorism” branch and that of Israel. The only violence witnessed was by ultra-right-wing masked Zionists who came in off-campus/
An anti-left, anti-Palestinian coalition has spent the past seven months, and the last few weeks in particular, manufacturing an entire alternate reality where the United States is in the grip of a hate movement akin to Nazi Germany.
Source: Liberals Must Resist the New McCarthyism Over Israel Criticism
Israel’s forensic cleansing
I am extremely alarmed by information that Dr. Adnan Albursh, a well-known surgeon at Al Shifa Hospital, has died while detained by Israeli forces in the Ofer military prison.
Source: No Palestinian is safe under Israel’s occupation – Pearls and Irritations
After months of Israeli attacks on agriculture and other key sectors, the “productive basis” of Gaza’s economy “has been destroyed,” the report notes.
“Unlike previous wars, the destruction in Gaza today is unprecedented in scope and scale and coupled with the loss of homes, livelihoods, natural resources, infrastructure as well as institutional capacities, may have deep and systemic impacts for decades to come,” said Rola Dashti, ESCWA’s executive secretary.
Source: Israel’s Destruction of Gaza ‘Unprecedented in Scope and Scale’: UN | Common Dreams
‘Anti-Semitism’ has been the weapon that Zionism has deployed to defend genocide in Gaza. It is not out of choice but necessity. Any manifestation of support for the Palestinians is deemed anti-Semitic for one simple reason. It is impossible to defend mass executions, starvation of a population, destruction of hospitals and mass murder of children unless you attack your critics. It is as if protesters against Apartheid in South Africa had been motivated by hatred of White people.
Source: Tony Greenstein’s Blog
Jewish Voice for Peace Action slammed what it called IHRA’s “controversial and dangerous mis-definition that does not help fight real antisemitism and is only a tool for silencing the movement for Palestinian rights.”
Source: Nearly All 600,000 Kids in Rafah ‘Injured, Sick, Malnourished,’ Says UNICEF | Common Dreams
Let me conclude by saying, I must admit, I find it incomprehensible that members of Congress are spending their time attacking the protestors rather than the Netanyahu government which brought about these protests and has created this horrific situation.
Source: On the Nationwide Student Protests and the Ongoing Humanitarian Disaster in Gaza – CounterPunch.org
Australian universities are increasingly funded by weapons manufacturers, partly driven by the AUKUS folly. They are the same companies that support Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Michael Sainsbury reports.
and
Biden and other Democrats must draw the starkest possible contrast between Trump’s unhinged childishness and Biden’s competent adulthood.
Rather than sell Biden’s policies, sell Biden’s character. Rather than dispute Trump’s arguments, condemn his temperament.
And ask Americans the following question: Do they want a sociopathic infant at the helm again, or a sane grown-up?
Source: Conflict, Emotion, and the 2024 Election | The Smirking Chimp
The entire affair is a stunning example of political entropy, a howl from an administration marching before the firing squad. With each failure, the Tories have tried to claw back respectability in the hope of appearing muscular in the face of irregular migration. They have accordingly cooked up a scheme that is not merely cruel, but one of staggering cost (each asylum seeker of the current cohort promises to cost the British taxpayer £1.8 million) and ineffectualness. Sunak, a laughably weak and unpopular prime minister, is, politically speaking, at death’s door. Despite getting the legislation through, legal struggles from potential deportees are bound to tear into the arrangements. What Britain’s judges do will prove a true test of character.
Source: When Safety is a Fiction: Passing the UK’s Rwanda Bill – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Then on Tuesday a spokesman for President Biden’s White House actually denounced the term “intifada” as “hate speech” and hinted that using it was a form of antisemitism. But Arabic is a Semitic language, so how can a Semitic word be “antisemitic”? I’m confused.
Source: “Intifada” in Arabic just means Uprising or Mass Protest; it is used for the Jewish Warsaw Uprising
Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered […] but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport. […] ‘We all threw rocks,’ said ten-year-old Ahmed Moharb. ‘Over the loudspeaker the soldier told us to come to the fence to get chocolate and money. Then they cursed us. Then they fired a grenade. We started to run. They shot Ali in the back. I won’t go again. I am afraid.’
Source: Israeli Violence against Palestinian Children is rooted in Viewing them all as Dangerous Adults
Michael West
olddogthoughts 
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