As we speak, international law is being openly flouted by powerful actors, [the US, the UK, and Israel] with devastating results for Julian Assange, and other political prisoners, for thousands of innocent civilians slaughtered in Gaza, and for the continued viability of international human rights and international law themselves.
Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America.
Source: The American Empire in (Ultimate?) Crisis: The Decline and Fall of It All – ScheerPost
The Biden administration has been able to maintain a low profile by spreading arms provision to Israel across more than 100 smaller munitions sales — allowing the president to posture as a peacekeeper while US weapons wipe Gaza off the map.
Source: Joe Biden Is Shipping Weapons to Israel Every 36 Hours
“London’s antisemitism shame” was the headline splashed across the front page of the free commuter daily The Evening Standard on March 5, accompanied by a warning that “Jewish families plan to flee capital amid rising tide of hatred.” “London is now a no-go zone for Jews,” proclaimed the front page of the right-wing broadsheet The Daily Telegraph three days later. The liberal online news site The Independent went even further, asserting that British Jews are considering leaving the country altogether, because it “feels like Nazi Germany.”
Source: A ‘no-go zone’ for Jews? The making of a moral panic in London
“The United Nations, its personnel, premises, and assets must be protected at all times,” stressed the head of UNRWA—which says that 400 Palestinian aid-seekers have been killed since last month’s Flour Massacre.
Source: UN Staffer Among Dozens Killed, Injured by Israeli Attack on Rafah Food Center
Aid groups assert that U.S. airdrop efforts fall short in averting famine, compounded by Israel’s obstruction of aid truck access via land routes.
Source: Intercepted: Israel’s Use of Mass Starvation as a Weapon of War
A new documentary by Al Jazeera’s investigative unit has found that many of the most horrific Israeli stories about the Palestinian military assault that began on 7 October were untrue.
“Misinformation has been used, and sometimes deliberate disinformation has been used by official spokespersons,” says one commentator quoted in the documentary, October 7.
The film was viewed by The Electronic Intifada ahead of its first broadcast this week. The video containing the full Al Jazeera documentary will be added to this page as soon as it becomes available on YouTube.
Although not the comprehensive investigation by international experts that many have called for, the documentary does confirm much of the reporting done about 7 October by a small group of independent journalists, who have debunked Israeli atrocity propaganda, at the cost of being smeared and attacked by corporate media.
The Electronic Intifada, The Grayzone, Mondoweiss and The Cradle have all found that many – if not most – of the 1,154 Israelis the government claims were killed by Palestinians were actually killed by Israel itself.
The documentary confirms The Electronic Intifada’s report from January that at midday on 7 October the Israeli army invoked the Hannibal Directive.
As explained in the documentary by Israeli historian Uri Bar-Joseph, “The Hannibal Directive is an informal protocol that says, we prefer that the soldier be killed than taken alive.”
Israel killed Israelis, confirms new 7 October documentary | The Electronic Intifada
Clearly, there is growing evidence that the supposed anti-Israel bias of the UN is a myth concocted to benefit Israel. Evidently, if there’s any bias at the world’s preeminent international institution, it is against the Palestinians rather than the other way round.
However, cheering on the military is historically a dangerous practice. During the reign of Queen Victoria, the British Empire was once united around the need for Freedom of Navigation to advance its economic diplomacy against China in the two Opium Wars. The US and France joined Britain in the second round in the Opium Wars (1856-60)
. Britain once had a balance of payments problem with China during the Days of Empire. It authorized the export of opium to China to address this imbalance.
Imperial China rejected Britain’s efforts against China in the two Opium Wars.
On 7 October, the Israeli army implemented its controversial Hannibal directive, which amounts to an order to assassinate Israeli captives to avoid having to barter for their lives by freeing Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
At Kibbutz Be’eri, another Israeli colonial settlement near the Gaza boundary fence, the Israeli army attacked a home containing 14 civilian captives and several dozen Hamas fighters.
All but one of the Qassam fighters and all but two of the captives were killed in the intense crossfire. At least three of the civilians, including 12-year-old Liel Hatsroni, were incinerated by Israeli tank shells fired at the house.
As The Electronic Intifada previously reported, Barak Hiram, the Israeli general who gave the order to fire at the house, told a fabricated story in an attempt to cover up this incident, when Channel 12’s Ilana Dayan interviewed him in October.
The families of the Israeli civilians killed by Israeli army fire at Kibbutz Be’eri have demanded that the military immediately investigate the incident and the decision to use overwhelming firepower at the cost of the lives of their loved ones.
Israeli military sources have revealed that on 7 October attack helicopters, along with armed drones, swarmed the skies above southern Israel and around Gaza.
Israeli news outlet Ynet reported in November how “28 fighter helicopters shot over the course of the day all of the ammunition in their bellies, in renewed runs to rearm.”
Ynet mentions in particular Lieutenant Colonel A., the commander of Squadron 190, who around mid-morning of 7 October “instructed the other fighters in the air to shoot at everything they see in the area of the fence.”
Source: Released captive tells how Israeli fire killed kibbutz resident | The Electronic Intifada
Itamar Ben Gvir—Never forget Israli Terrorist
A settler in Kiryat Araba, one of the most radical settlements in the occupied West Bank (illegal under international law), Ben-Gvir has been convicted of incitement to racism, destroying property, possessing a “terror” organisation’s propaganda material and supporting a “terror” organisation – Meir Kahane’s outlawed Kach group, which he joined when he was 16.
Source: Far-right Ben-Gvir emerges as key player in Israel | Elections News | Al Jazeera
Israel has now killed 426 Palestinians, mostly in Tulkarem and Jenin, including 113 children and 14 who were killed by paramilitary colonizers, in the occupied West Bank since the beginning of the Israeli military onslaught against the Gaza strip, on October 7, 2023.
Source: Updated: Israeli Undercover Kill Two Palestinians In Tulkarem | – IMEMC News
The scale of deliberate Israeli cruelty against the Gazan people over the past five months is still difficult for Australians to absorb. But internationally, a key political fact has clearly emerged: that Israel, the US and their supportive Western allies (like Australia, to our nation’s shame) have now shredded any moral standing on the issue of the war in Gaza.
Source: Gaza’s agony: the hinge point in the loss of Western dominance – Pearls and Irritations
It is obvious that in the United States, where this debate is most significant, there are Zionists who are not Jewish, while a very large proportion of the Jewish population is highly critical of Israel and has nothing to do with the Lobby.
The government in Jerusalem proclaiming itself “the Jewish State” as it slaughters native Palestinians is responsible for any current rise in misguided anti-Jewish feelings, which that government blatantly exploits to attract Jewish immigrants from France and New Jersey, in particular.
“Five months of violence, displacement, starvation, and disease on top of nearly 17 years of a blockade have caused relentless mental harm to children in Gaza,” said Save the Children.
Source: Israeli Genocide Causing ‘Complete Psychological Destruction’ of Gaza Children
Palestinians in Gaza marked the first day of Ramadan on Monday amid rising hunger and desperation, with Israel continuing to restrict aid shipments into the besieged territory. United Nations officials have complained that even basic items like medical scissors have resulted in trucks being stopped by Israeli forces at the border. This comes as countries such as the United States conduct dangerous airdrops of essential supplies and have announced plans to build a pier off the coast of Gaza to deliver aid. “It’s going to be more simple, more realistic and more efficient if the United States has pushed the Israelis to allow the aid truck to go into the north of Gaza and Gaza City,” says Yousef Hammash, advocacy officer with the Norwegian Refugee Council, speaking to us from Rafah. “The only issue that we are facing on delivering the aid on the ground is the restrictions the Israelis put on it.” Hammash also describes “living day by day” amid “madness, violence [and] bombardment.”
For five months now, our screens have been bombarded by images depicting Israel’s air and ground assault on Gaza. This extraordinary footage, this apocalyptic scene, shows just how widespread that destruction has been. Israel is still denying foreign journalists independent access to Gaza. We’re in Israel, about a kilometre from the border, reports the ABC’s John Lyons.
The ABC’s Managing Director, David Anderson, has at least admitted that funding obtained through its arrangements with Meta has been useful in supporting 60 journalists. News Corp, Nine Entertainment and Seven News Media have been less than forthcoming, ever keen using the shield of commercial confidentiality. In terms of employees, Nine Entertainment reported a fall in the number of employees from 5254 at the end of the 2022 financial year to 4753 at the end of 2023. “It is likely,” suggests Kim Wingerie in Michael West Media, “that the A$50 million or more they receive annually from Meta and Google is used predominantly to prop up their net profit.”
Australia’s old media companies and their propagandists the ABC, News Corp and Nine’s Neil Mitchell have joined forces to a attack and defame independent journalist Antoinette Lattouf.
Descartes “I think therefore I am” However Zionists police your thinking. If they think you’re a terrorist or antisemite you are and any criticism proves you are. The Bethlehem Doctrine allows them to kill on presumption. However not so anybody else. If an action or “doing is being” then I’m free to think you’re a turd “Free” is the operative word and criticise surely? Aren’t the 10 commandments about “doing” isn’t International law about “doing”? Israelis see fit to break all the rules. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is a template for honesty. Yet Israel’s Rabbis call for mothers of unborn babies to be killed because of what they might grow to think. Sounds to me like the voice of the guilty or a Fascist rather than the wise
Slow, terrifying months into Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestine and every day the moral weakness of our political and cultural systems is discovered.
Source: Silence over Israeli genocide provokes social media backlash
AIPAC has become the key force against progressives in Democratic primaries, but a new coalition is seeking to protect the party’s left flank.
Source: “Reject AIPAC” Fights Pro-Israel Attacks on Progressive Democrats
Mary Kostakidis and Quentin Dempster explore the Australian mainstream media’s blind eyes on the humanitarian catastrophe now unfolding in Gaza.
Source: Accessory to genocide in Gaza – Pearls and Irritations
President Biden owes an apology to fellow American Furkan Doğan, whom Israeli commandos murdered on May 31, 2010, as he videoed their illegal attack in international waters on the aid ship Mavi Marmara. At the time, Biden justified the massacre.
Doğan and other volunteers were trying to bring food and medical aid to Gaza. After their cargo was seized by the Israelis, the latter actually delivered it to the UN for distribution in Gaza. This act served as an admission that the cargo was inoffensive, and there had been no reason to kill all those volunteers.
Source: Biden owes an Apology to the Volunteers of the Mavi Marmara, the First Aid Flotilla to Gaza
A rally held in Melbourne saw speakers unite against the political system that has imprisoned Julian Assange and crippled free speech, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.
Australia is licensed to produce “unguided dumb missiles” which explode shrapnel, killing all soft targets within 50m of the blast, and causing lethal harm to those within a 150m blast radius. Farah Abdurahman confronts the shroud of secrecy over weapons sales to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of Israel.
Source: Client State: Australia the “51st state of the US” for deadly weapons production – Michael West
Trump Republicans want us to be discouraged. They want us to despair. That’s part of their strategy. They figure that if we’re pessimistic enough, we won’t even fight — and they’ll win everything.
But I believe their backlash is doomed. The Republican Party has become a regressive cesspool, headed by increasingly unmoored people who are utterly out of touch with the dominant and emerging values of America. And most Americans are catching on.
I don’t mean to be a Pollyanna. We’re in the fight of our lives. It will demand a great deal of our energy, our time, and our courage. But this fight is critical and noble. It will set the course for America and the world for decades. And it is winnable.
The point is: It’s appropriate to be nauseously optimistic.
“The real competition now is to see who is a bigger drag on the Liberal vote, Dutton or Ley. Either way it’s a race to the bottom.” (Dee Madigan).
Source: Floozy Sussie and the racist gambit – » The Australian Independent Media Network
At the end of its first full year, the economic data confirms Labor is again emerging as a financial global leader through effective management of the economy, reports Alan Austin.
THE PICTURE OF LIFE in Australia
Source: Despite media frenzy, Labor continues to lead economic metrics worldwide
Conservatives do not act conservatively in this country. What they really want is a form of anarchy, an expression of the attitude that government’s only role is to pave roads, protect the border, and then get the hell out of the way. We are supposed to rely on our own “rugged independence” to succeed, a concept whose notional value is utterly worthless. Nobody really makes it on their own.
Accepting responsibility is not a part of who we have become in this country. Our disfunction will lead to our end, if not corrected. The party out of power refuses to cooperate with the party in power and fires accusations of blame for every crisis. When the public finally listens, there is a new party in the majority and the displaced officeholders have no reason to cooperate with those who lied them out of office. Little in the way of governance is achieved.
Source: A Broken Land – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Israel and America bypassed the UN and allowed for the killing of Palestinians. Israel found it convenient to pass its own directives to legitimize whatever it wanted to do. The Hannibal Directive, The Bethlehem Doctrine, The Dahiya Doctrine, Administrative Detention, and Extrajudicial execution are all Israel’s imaginary light sabres to protect them from the UN, ICJ and ICC
We have to start claiming collective responsibility for the wrongs of our governments, which means confronting the dehumanization they use to justify atrocities.
Source: Opinion | Call Them ‘Terrorists’ and You Can Kill as Many as You Want | Common Dreams
The most moral looters on the planet
As Israeli historian Adam Raz describes in his recent book, Looting of Arab Property in the War of Independence, Jewish fighters and civilians looted everything from jewellery, books, and embroidered gowns to food and livestock to furniture, kitchenware and even floor tiles.
Source: Israel is pillaging not just Gaza’s cities but also its waters | Israel War on Gaza | Al Jazeera
Israel persistently shirks responsibility for Gaza despite subjecting it to closures, permits, and assaults. Returning to those policies is not an option.
Source: Strangled by Israel for decades, Gaza’s future must begin with free movement | +972 Magazine
Netanyahu also said “If you protest you will be jailed” and 500,000 Israelis left the country
“I don’t know exactly what the president meant, but if he meant by that that I’m pursuing private policies against the majority, the wish of the majority of Israelis, and that this is hurting the interests of Israel, then he’s wrong on both counts,” Netanyahu told Springer.
Western Media Concocts ‘Evidence’ UN Report On Oct 7 Sex Crimes Failed to Deliver Western media promoted a UN report as proof Hamas sexually assaulted Israelis. Yet the report’s authors admitted they couldn’t locate a single victim, suggested Israeli officials staged a rape scene, and denounced “inaccurate forensic interpretations.”
Source: Western Media Concocts ‘Evidence’ UN Report On Oct 7 Sex Crimes Failed to Deliver – ScheerPost
An honourable way out of complicity in genocide does not exist. Certainly, governments may be able to rely on the fact that Israel has, so far, failed to provide credible evidence to justify its allegations that UNRWA staff members were involved in the 7 October incursion into Israel. But genocide is a war crime, and starvation as a weapon of genocide is not only dishonourable, but intentional.
Source: Gaza Aid and the West: An Honorable Way out of Complicity in Genocide Does not Exist
“Hungarians of my generation fled for the US and Canada to get the hell away from authoritarianism,” Adler said. “Now this decaying Mar-A-Lago conman is huckstering Hungarian authoritarianism. It’s as if [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is producing this s—show.”
This finding is yet another indication that global heating is proceeding at least as fast as climate scientists projected at the beginning of our century, and in many cases much faster. Climate risks becoming chaotic if we heat up the earth’s surface more than 2.7° F. (1.5° C.) above the preindustrial average. We’ve already heated it up to around 2.1° F. higher than that 18th century average, by spewing billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, into the atmosphere. We’re wrecking the earth by burning coal for heat and electricity, or fossil gas, or by burning petroleum in automobiles and trucks. We still aren’t reducing the amount of CO2 we put into the atmosphere annually, though its increase has leveled off. We have to cut it out. Now.
Source: America’s Red Snow: Hottest Winter on Record, Largest Wildfires in Texas History
One only needs head into the city on a Sunday in order to hear it: loud and vociferous condemnation of Israel and – together with it – the evils of Zionism as a political philosophy. But what is Zionism? I would imagine that many of those who so loudly condemn it would be hard placed to give it a definition.
if Zionism is to be equated with Jewish nationalism in Palestine, why do so many Zionists live in the diaspora?
![Anti war protest in Tel Aviv during municipal elections on October 27 [Al Jazeera/Mat Nashed]](https://olddogthoughts.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/20240227_131857-1709045472.jpg)
Many anti-Zionists like Maya and the people she works with view Zionism as a Jewish supremacist movement which has ethnically cleansed most of historic Palestine and systematically discriminates against the Palestinians who remain, either as citizens of Israel or residents of the occupied territories.
Maya, a Jewish Israeli, travelled to Greece to help Syrian refugees. At the time, she was an exchange student in Germany and she had been deeply moved by the pictures she saw of desperate people arriving there in small boats.
That was where she met Palestinians who had been born in Syria after their parents and grandparents fled there during the founding of her own country in 1948.
They told her about the Nakba – or “catastrophe” – in which 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to make way for the newly established Israel. Maya, 33, who had been taught that her country was born through “an independence war” against hostile Arab neighbours, decided that she needed to “unlearn” what she had learned.
“I never heard about the right of return, or Palestinian refugees,” she told Al Jazeera.
“I had to get out of Israel to start learning about Israel. It was the only way I could puncture holes in what I was taught.”
Maya, who asked that her full name not be used for fear of reprisals, is one of a small number of Israeli Jewish activists who identify as “anti-Zionists” or “non-Zionists”.
The current tenuous leadership in Israel today has turned the light on the history of the State and making of Israel
The vengeful, scheming, genocidal response unleashed since October last year in Gaza, by Israel, has prompted a profoundly intensified global review of the punishing history related to the establishment of the State of Israel and its colonial-settler expansion ever since 1948.
Source: Thinking intensely about the holocaust, Israel and Gaza – Pearls and Irritations
The Palestinians, facing down the most powerful countries in the world, left virtually alone even by their allies, have suffered immeasurably. But they have won this war. Arundhati Roy Mar 08, 2024 Common Dreams 19
A minimum target for trucks entering Gaza every day should be the pre-war average of 500. Given the scale of destruction and destitution, the aim for combined traffic of commercial vehicles as well as those operated by the United Nations and other non-government organisations should now be even higher.The Conversation
Source: Joe Biden’s Gaza Aid Pier isn’t Enough: 6 More Things that Must be Done
U.S. President Joe Biden was recorded saying he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu they are going to have a “come to Jesus moment” in a conversation on the sidelines of the State of the Union address on Thursday.
Source: Biden To Bibi: ‘You And I Are Going To Have A Come To Jesus Moment’ | Crooks and Liars
Trucks get in but the IDF is stopping them. Israel hasn’t provided sufficient entry points near the areas most needed. So to self-congratulations is stands out and shines a spotlight on their real intent to continue to weaponize starvation.
“The work that UNWRA does cannot be overstated,” said Canadian lawmaker Salma Zahid. “It will save lives as we have seen the visuals of children dying of hunger in Gaza. The need for immediate aid is non-negotiable.”
Source: Canada, Sweden Restore UNRWA Funds as Report Accuses Israel of Torturing Agency Staff
olddogthoughts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.