In reaction to the UN Security Council’s passing of a watered-down resolution instead of calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, Oxfam Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Sally Abi-Khalil said: “The failure to call for a ceasefire after five days of deliberate delays and dilutions of the resolution is incomprehensible, and utterly…
“How can we be the criminals when the perpetrators of… [what] we now know is a genocide … are free to profit and we have to spend weeks and weeks in court for an action that we took three years ago?,” asked Nicola Stickells, a mother of two who was raised in a working class family in the English county of Kent.
Many allegations against the Elbit Eight have been rejected by a jury in a London trial.
Source: Court victory for activists who disrupted Israel’s weapons trade | The Electronic Intifada
Indeed, it is terrorism. It is terrorism against Palestinians, and some of the most vulnerable Palestinians are the minority Christian population now besieged in the few churches in Gaza.
Israel is targeting this small population of Christians and they’re doing it at Christmas.
The Israeli military is bombing churches, destroying Christian community centers, and sending snipers to shoot Christian women to death while the world watches, all part of the ninth stage of genocide: Extermination.
How many Christians will be left when Israel is done?
Churches, church hospitals and cultural centers have all been targeted endangering the existence of one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.
Source: Gaza facing a Christmas genocide | The Electronic Intifada
“What have you been focussing on at work this year?”
Well, recently it’s mostly been: genocide, terrorism, kidnapping, ethnic cleansing, war, racism, systemic racism in settler colonies, sexual assault, billionaires subverting democracy, the climate crisis, the horrors of social media, the horrors of traditional media, Rupert Murdoch, the politicians I don’t like, that discombobulating time Pauline Hanson called me a racist on Twitter, and thousands upon thousand of murdered children.
“I see,” she said, clearly seeing. “And what measures do you have in place at work to deal with all that?”
The IPA is Filling the Zone with Shit and it’s tax deductible
“Rinehart said that renewable energy projects could see one-third of Australia’s agricultural land ‘taken over’ and suggested that ‘eyesore’ solar panels should be placed in ‘city parks and rivers’ rather than in rural areas,” the AFR reported.
Source: National Times – Michael Pascoe: The IPA is taking Gina Rinehart… | Facebook
The Rabbi’s rats
The victimisation by Israel of Palestinian children is so profound that Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkain, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem law professor, has described it as “Unchilding,” that is, in order to “eliminate the next generation of Palestinians, Israel treats Palestinian children as both nobodies who are unworthy of global children’s rights and as dangerous and killable bodies needing to be caged and dismembered, physically and mentally”.
“While over 90 per cent of people in Gaza cannot find their next meal, some UN Security Council member states are still toying with words rather than voting for a ceasefire.
World’s West leaders wallow in ignorance presented as wisdom
The problem is that Wallace places great significance on Hamas’s original 1988 charterOpens in a new tab, which is explicitly antisemitic and rejects any coexistence with Israel. But he doesn’t appear to know Hamas issued a new charterOpens in a new tab in 2017. In it, Hamas affirms that its “conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.” And, while the revised charter rejects the legitimacy of Zionism, it accepts “the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.” This reference to the lines of June 4, 1967 — before Israel captured the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War — is regarded as accepting the existence of Israel within the borders it had at that time.
Source: How a Top U.K. Official Displays the Terrifying Ignorance of the World’s Leaders on Gaza
Biden votes to let the killing go on
“Biden’s changes will help ensure that Israel’s slaughter in Gaza continues while minimizing the U.N.’s insight into what increasingly appears to be a genocide.”
Source: ‘Disgraceful’: US Abstains After Watering Down UN Gaza Resolution
The democratic experiment on this planet is only 250 years old, more or less, and this would signal a return to the way the world had been ruled for the 7,000 years prior to that: by kings, popes, mullahs, strongman warlords, and the morbidly rich.
Between Agenda 47 and Project 2025, Donald Trump and the rightwing billionaires who own the GOP have big plans for this nation, regardless of which Republican takes the White House next. They’re dead serious and far more well-funded than any of the groups that fight for and advocate democracy.
Dear: Good evening. Yes, it’s a shameful decision and a weak decision. I mean we’ve never turned our backs on the United States. Whenever they’ve asked us to be involved in any war anywhere we’ve always done what we were told and anything less is, well, pretty weak, frankly.
Dear: It’s just typical of you lefties! You have nothing to offer so you attack the person. It’s pathetic! It’s weak, just like the PM is weak. You resort to name-calling like when Albanese said: “Sit down, Boofhead!” to Mr Dutton. I mean, he was terribly upset and it took great courage to sit down after that. Mr Dutton is a lovely man and insults hurt him…
Source: Peter Dutton And Albo’s Special Sort Of Weakness… – » The Australian Independent Media Network
In a judgment on Thursday, the federal court judge Roger Derrington found that the former LNP president David Hutchinson had breached his duties as a director of the company, was unfit to remain in financial control and had been “prepared to misapply the company’s funds rather audaciously for his own benefit and for the benefit of his relatives”.
Source: “Money… – The Fiberal Party of Australia – Lies & Misdemeanours | Facebook
When some 10 Liberal MPs under Abbott were found either receiving undeclared Rolex’s or raiding their Government expense accounts they were all let off. Except for Peter Slipper, once Abbott’s bestie, wanted gone. Peter Slipper was the brutal victim of James Ashby in a political, LNP conspiracy of which he was ultimately proven innocent. Accused of claiming a $300 petty cab charge when the others even Abbott took 1000s and were let off unpunished.
KMPG tried has been caught trying it on for $100 million and nobody has been jailed or even made it to the front pages of the News Corp press like Peter Slipper did. These were the LNP’s most favored consultants, the moneymen regarded as more honest than our Public Service, our Treasury when it came to auditing budget figures. Just ask Joe Hockey. They were the perfect political party accountants who got caught with a fist full of Australia’s dollars. But has anyone been jailed? We sat and watched Stuart Robert untouched for slipping backhander contracts to his mates. He was a serial offender regularly caught but never charged.
A Defence data project involving a $100 million contract issued to KPMG is rife with serious governance failures, conflicts of interests and a “lack of accountability”, according to an external review.
Source: $100m Defence contract with KPMG rife with governance failures, review finds – ABC News
Australians should be wondering why the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), one of the country’s proudest think tanks, has just established a body promoting nuclear energy that appears to have little to justify it. If the CIS truly believes in the project, surely it would have sought a leader with a stellar resumé?
Dr Colette Harmsen was imprisoned for her devotion to environmental protection (Screenshot via YouTube)
My name is Dr Colette Harmsen. I am a veterinarian, wildlife defender and peaceful forest protester, and I have just spent three months in gaol at your expense for protecting Tasmania’s native forests.
Source: Government and law won’t stop us from fighting for environment
One is only humiliated if he or she internalizes that humiliation as a sense of shame and disempowerment. But Palestinians, this time around, are experiencing no such feelings. To the contrary, their ongoing sumud, and unity, have generated a sense of collective pride unequaled in history.
The perils of urban warfare, coupled with operational issues within the army, appear to be hobbling Israel’s advance.
According to our most reliable news sources, the children of Gaza are being slaughtered at a horrific rate. No, you will not find the terms “slaughter” or “horrific” in Western media accounts of Israel’s current assault on the Palestinians residents of Gaza (these terms are reserved for Israeli deaths), but nonetheless, there is little disagreement among media professionals that nearly half of the deaths resulting from Israel’s current assault on Gaza are children.
Many of these children were too young to formulate their aspirations. Who knows what wonders they could have experienced? They are snuffed out without the chance for their futures to blossom like ripe olive trees, olive trees that are now violently being cut down and destroyed by Israeli West Bank zealots and thugs who want, like most of Netanyahu’s cabinet, a Greater Israel from “the river to the sea.”
Source: If you Prick us, do We not Bleed? – Shakespeare in Gaza
Israel two two-week war against Hamas turned out to be an embarrassing split between Netanyahu and the IDF. How could these two possibly pretend to be capable of another front, Lebanon?
At the same time, Austin flew to Israel and began pressuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to change his military strategy. Otherwise, Israel faces a “strategic defeat.” This is not the first time that Washington has signaled to Israel that it is fed up with what is happening in Palestine. Indeed, the bombing of civilians in Gaza is seriously damaging to the image of Israel, the US, and the EU. The West’s collective lack of response to the thousands of Palestinian children killed is morally bankrupting Europe and America, exposing the West’s double standards and undermining all its efforts to demonize Russia in Ukraine.
Source: Is Israel ready to start a second war? — RT World News
Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor of law at Queen Mary University in London, recently explained to Anadolu on October 23, 2023 that “Israel is working hard to legitimize the war crimes it commits” in Gaza by using a “dehumanization” strategy to portray the “Palestinians” as “human animals.” After all, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant even said: “We are fighting against animals” — while “comparisons of Palestinians to `rats or snakes’” are often heard on “Israeli social media accounts.” As Gordon wrote, “Palestinians are presented as barbarian and as primitive and as people who do not understand the laws of war, people that do not make distinctions between civilians and combatants, and so forth, and therefore they are immoral, while Israel claims that it tries to protect civilians” (but in reality does just the opposite to the Palestinians).
In this sense, Israel’s “brutality” to Palestinians is a “curse of extremist emotion,” which is not rational in policy evaluation; therefore, for this reason, it ends up being “self-defeating” by “harming” its own security (and also the security of its main supporter, the U. S.), as well as the security of Jews worldwide.
Source: Why Israel’s Brutality to Palestinians Endangers itself and Jews Worldwide
But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianised fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.
With the entire Fourth Estate controlled by so few, Michelle Pini and Dave Donovan examine the media’s role in setting the default position on some of the top stories of 2023.
Source: Murdoch-led media’s relentless stranglehold won’t deter fearless truth-tellers — like IA
The good news is electricity prices are falling, decarbonisation is accelerating, and there should be little need for public subsidies for fossil fuel companies, despite their demands. Michael West speaks with energy finance analyst and renewable energy export Tim Buckley.
I realize my own gaping hypocrisy if I were to say that when an Israeli child is killed by a zealot’s rocket it is terrorism, but when a Palestinian child is killed by a government’s carpet bomb, it is justice.
Source: Opinion | If Israel’s Assault on Gaza Isn’t Terrorism, What Is? | Common Dreams
Israel admits to “Mowing the Grass” breaking the cease-fire by crossing borders and killing anyone in their way. After, their publicity machines blame Hamas and their Palestinians victims for their carnage. Years later investigative reports proved Israel was the peace breaker.
Israel has aggressively and illegally occupied the West Bank running it as an Apartheid State. Currently, they’re even advertising beachfront homes for sale in Gaza. The land is free, and the construction subsidized the process the same as the West Bank, why? They need an influx of 2M Jews to immigrate and colonize Palestine to become and be the Jewish majority. Meanwhile, they intend to continue to further dispossess, depopulate, and shrink the areas as they have always intended to invade like cockroaches since 1948
Israel created Hamas. There was no Hamas, per se, until the Israelis took land from established Palestinian landowners and then constructed walls to keep them out. The UN has decreed that this land theft is illegal, but Israel persisted and Hamas was born.
Source: Israel war a display of hypocrisy and de facto terrorism
That’s us. That’s western civilization. We say we value freedom, justice, truth, peace and free expression, but our actions paint a very different picture. The real western values, the actual product inside the box underneath the attractive label, are the ones you see acted out in Gaza today.
Source: The atrocities in Gaza are the perfect embodiment of ‘Western Values’ – Pearls and Irritations
A peaceful resolution isn’t impossible, it just isn’t desired. It isn’t desired because Israel has long sought to further expel Palestinians from their land, and the “war on Hamas” provides cover for that goal. The claim that Israel has no other choice but to snuff out tens of thousands of lives in the name of fighting Hamas is patently false; it doesn’t need to, it just wants to. Ultimately their argument is “We need to kill all those people because we really really want to,” which is not a valid defense.
As Israel excels in massacring civilians and destroying Gaza’s infrastructure, its ground offensive against Hamas is becoming a quagmire.
Source: Industrial Killing of Civilians in Gaza Won’t Defeat the Armed Insurgency
The U.S. government provides support for Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s costly and cruel attack on October 7.
Source: US Military May be Endorsing Harsh Israeli Plan for Gaza Occupation – CounterPunch.org
Admittedly, under the best of circumstances, this transition would be challenging and, according to the United Nations, will certainly require more investments than the countries of the world are now making, but it still appears eminently achievable. As for ExxonMobil and other oil majors, every day they resist investing their obscene profits in truly innovative green energy technology is a day they come closer to future financial ruin. In the meantime, they are, of course, wreaking historically unprecedented harm on the planet, as was all too apparent with the serial climate disasters of 2023, now believed to be the hottest of the last 125,000 years.
Did the Morrison Government try and cover up the rape of a 24-year-old staffer? Or did key players in Reynolds and Morrison’s offices simply hope like hell the whole thing would go away, offering minimal support to a vulnerable victim while being too quick to move on to the political priority of a looming Federal election, leaving the young staffer with nowhere to turn as she struggled desperately with the after-effects of a life-changing assault?
Source: Did the Morrison Government cover up an alleged in-house rape? – The Shot
Also listed as an attendee is Adam Goldstein, managing director at Harvard Management Company, which helps oversee Harvard University’s over $50 billion endowment — the largest on Earth. The endowment investment fund has been accused in the past of investing nearly $200 million in companies that profit off Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. (The Harvard Management Company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Source: Investors, Business Execs on “Tech Mission” Solidarity Trip to Israel
What’s the scam with war profiteering, with the Future Fund investing in Israeli defence contractor Elbit Systems? The scam is they are making a killing, literally.
Elbit Systems’ share price has gone up. The Future Fund has made a profit on its investment in Elbit Systems. Elbit supplies the IDF with bombs to kill civilians in Gaza. Death toll is now more than 20,000, almost half of which are children. The beneficiaries of the Future Fund are retired and existing politicians and public servants. Ergo they are benefitting from war crimes.
Source: Future Fund profits from bombing of Gaza thanks to Elbit investment – Michael West
“The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is continuing to operate against Hamas terrorist infrastructure and operatives in the Gaza Strip,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
The Gaza health ministry said on Monday that 19,453 Palestinians had been killed and 52,286 wounded since October 7.
“There is no food, no water, no medicine and no hospitals to take the wounded and patients too. People die in their homes and in the streets,” he added.
Source: Israel pounds Gaza, as Houthis vow more Red Sea attacks
How else is genocide defined?
Evidence Indicates Civilians Deliberately Denied Access to Food, Water
The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians
The Israeli army has, however, gone on to damage or decommission most of the hospitals in Gaza, with no further comment on American cable news.
There is no military justification for the Israeli military campaign against the hospitals, which is apparently the army’s only real success on the battlefield to date. The Israeli government party line that the hospitals are terror command centers has become wholly implausible and is clearly just a cover story. It is amazing what you can get apparently hard-boiled cynical American journalists to believe without a scintilla of evidence.
Source: Bloodbath: Israel’s War on Gaza’s Hospitals and their Patients
From the rate and scale of civilian slaughter to the killing of protected groups and the type of munitions, Israel’s war on Gaza is an exceptionally brutal campaign unlike almost anything we’ve seen.
Source: Israel’s Assault on Gaza Is Unlike Any War in Recent Memory
The world once made Palestine pay for the crimes against Europe’s Jews. The holocaust played heavily on their minds. Now the world should not be made to pay for the crimes Israel’s Zionists have foisted on the Palestinians and have done since 1948 and their consistent “mowing of the grass”
The chief political obstacle is that Israelis won’t want Gazans within Israel itself. And for good reason. A recent a survey by a respected Palestinian polling institute found that almost 75% of Palestinians believe that the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel was correct. The same survey also found that the Gaza war has lifted support for the Islamist group both in Gaza and the West Bank.
Moreover, an earlier opinion poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University’s Peace Index found that more than 60% of Israelis believe that the military operation in Gaza should continue until Hamas is completely defeated. Only 10% said they would support a pause in fighting. Israeli opinion is more hawkish than ever.
Source: How to stop a Gaza apocalypse – Pearls and Irritations
Recent research shows that we have reached a stage of shocking inequality. Australia’s wealthiest 20% are now worth 90 times the country’s poorest 20%. Australians of all ages are feeling the pain. In October 2022, a Parliamentary Inquiry found the “face” of homelessness is ‘an older person aged over 55 — particularly women’.
Source: Universal basic income for a more prosperous Australia
It is no accident that the Australian “conservative” movement has transformed into an echo of the toxic American Right. Fossil fuel money and a giant international network of junktanks bear much of the blame.
Dr Jeremy Walker’s research into the Atlas Network’s Australian partners brought that American body to prominence over the referendum campaign. The media coverage of his academic study into the influence of “think” tankssuch as the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) carrying Atlas strategies into the Australian civic discourse raised Atlas’s profile.
The latest attack by Atlas partner organisations, including (unofficially) News Corp, is a strategic campaign against offshore wind farms.
The former prime minister is charged with compromising Pakistan’s secret communications, but a document leaked to The Intercept says that didn’t happen.
After a long delay, Pakistan is expected to hold elections early next year, though Khan, who polls show would likely win a free vote, is unlikely to participate thanks to his compounding legal challenges. Prominent among these is the charge that Khan’s alleged mishandling of the cypher document risked compromising Pakistan’s encryption systems — notwithstanding the ISI’s own internal conclusion that no such risk existed.
While his state secrets trial continues, there is no public indication that the ISI has turned this exculpatory evidence over to Khan’s defense team.
Source: Secret Pakistan Document Undermines Espionage Case Against Imran Khan
With Australia joining other nations in favour of a Gaza ceasefire, it’s time to put more pressure on our leaders to take further action in ending Palestinian suffering, writes Tom Tanuki.
olddogthoughts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.