Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing against big rewards for entrepreneurs and inventors. The possibility of making a bundle has elicited innovations that benefit us all.
The question is one of scale. Do entrepreneurs and inventors need the incentive of billions of dollars? Wouldn’t, say, a hundred million do?
The social costs of billionaires is substantial. Billionaires have purchased right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court, bought and either destroyed or subverted news organizations (such as the former Twitter), and turned their relationships with politicians into patronage troughs.
All of this has undermined the common good.
If capitalism were working as it should, billionaires wouldn’t exist. Shawn Fain is correct.
What do you think? ( Robert Reich )
Source: Do Billionaires Have a Right To Exist? | The Smirking Chimp
Remember that old saying about giving people fish and you might feed some but give them rods and they’ll feed a whole community. Abbott gifted Mundine and News Corp with money and they aren’t even private schools. The taxpayer paid but that action did little to close the gap between us and remote communities.
Australian Indigenous Education Foundation (AIEF), a Rupert Murdoch linked indigenous foundation, has been labelled a ‘game changer’. Is it?
Some experts said they weren’t opposed to boarding schools, but questioned whether an expansion of AIEF’s model was a good path to closing the gap in education.
Guenther said the AIEF was:
not a program designed to build equity or to address so-called disadvantage. It’s a program designed to justify the use of public funds … to fund a program that in some way does the opposite.
“By supporting that handful of kids, as well-deserving as they might be, they are taking money that could be going into remote schools to give a better education to those who are left behind. Those that don’t meet the eligibility criteria, those that really do need a leg-up – it bypasses those people altogether.”
“If schools were funded properly, in their communities, to deliver a quality education, then that is equally, if not more, likely to close the gap because you’re going to be then supporting those young people who need the help a lot more.”
Source: Warren Mundine wants an audit of Indigenous funding. How about the charity he chairs? – Michael West
Former federal Liberal Party staffer Bruce Lehrmann can now be revealed as the man facing rape charges in Queensland after a failed legal battle to keep his name suppressed.
Source: TV interviews fuel Lehrmann’s loss of suppression fight | The New Daily
ALP Shame
The Australian government must withhold all political support from the Israeli government while the killing of Palestinian civilians and destruction of their infrastructure continue. And yet, what hope? On 25 October when acting Prime Minister Richard Marles was asked on radio whether fuel should be allowed into Gaza to allow hospitals to function; he could not bring himself even to utter a simple “yes”.
Guess America has an excuse to bomb the shit out of Maine in order to catch that “terrorist” gunmen who killed 18 and injured 13 others. Israel has led the way and redefined the term “justice” to simply be 1000 eyes for an eye and 1000 teeth for a tooth biblical revenge trumps any commandments.
The post-October 7 vocabulary used by Israelis, but also many Americans, created the atmosphere necessary for the savage Israeli response which followed.
Source: Opinion | ‘Human Animals’: The Sordid Language Behind Israel’s Genocide in Gaza | Common Dreams
While Israel has the right to strike back at the Hamas organization in the wake of the latter’s hideous October 7 attack on Israel, it doesn’t have the right to do so in a way that recklessly endangers civilian lives. Beyond that issue, Israel is recognized by the United Nations at the occupying power of Gaza, and therefore has responsibilities under the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949 to preserve the lives and well-being of the occupied population. Finally, according to the Rome Statute that underpins the International Criminal Court, targeting a group such as “the Palestinians of Gaza” for death is a form of genocide, regardless of the number killed.
“Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you” Germany is arresting those protesting against the Israeli carnage, and Companies are sacking staff who do the same. While they act as apologists for Israel. There is something very sick in that logic.
Apologists for Israel point out that Hamas intentionally targets civilians and the Israeli military does not. That is a distinction without a difference for the people killed, maimed and terrorized by the Israeli military — commanded by leaders who know perfectly well that the likely civilian death toll will be high. The cover story about not “targeting” civilians is a comfortable rationalization for the slaughter of civilians that self-righteously denies the obvious reality.
The Hamas raid into Israel on October 7th, and pounding of the Gazan population that has followed, has seen an unholy alliance reunite: not, or not merely, between Washington and its client states resisting UN calls for a ceasefire, but also in the media, between the Murdoch and Jewish press.
Source: An unholy alliance is defending Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians – Pearls and Irritations
Biden doesn’t believe, Netanyahu Believes Germany believes in only Israel
So WTF has belief got to do with what’s being DONE?
So, who to believe? The people who have long been oppressed by the U.S. and Israel, or those two rogue nations that each have a long and ugly history of lying to cover their war crimes and crimes against humanity? The readers can make their own decision, but this writer will always side with the evidence, which does not support the U.S.-Israel narrative.
Source: Atrocities vs. Israeli and U.S. Propaganda – CounterPunch.org
Rather than bolster Benjamin Netanyahu in a “rally around the flag” effect, the October 7 attack on Israel has destroyed his standing with voters. Netanyahu’s political career, which has fundamentally reshaped Israeli society, may be effectively finished.
Peter Foster was thrown in jail for Pyramid Schemes and the false advertising of Baylin Tea. Why are the media, politicians, and think tanks allowed to flood the zone with shit when advertisers can’t?
I do find it interesting that it’s Advance Australia has announced its opposition to any misinformation laws. After all, they were heavily involved in the “No” campaign misinformation while their IDs were hidden. Why was that?
The big problem with misinformation laws is quite simple: Who decides what’s misinformation? We don’t seem to see one with advertising do we?
Of course this doesn’t mean that no company has ever engaged in insider trading or tried to mislead the public; it simply means that if they’re found to be doing that, then there are legal consequences.
The point is that if we can have laws that prevent companies from peddling misinformation to the ASX, why is it such a threat to hold political entities to the same standards?
My apologies for adding to this letter, not the bold print, but I felt it helped clarify things in my own mind.
Considering that Australia was one of the only developed Western nations in the world to not have a treaty with its First Nations peoples. ( Why did this come about? The British Crown did after all pass protection laws for its colonized native populations. They did require treaties to be signed and they were in Canada NZ, South Africa, the West Indies etc. While all these colonies obeyed the crown The governors and administrators here neither had the balls nor the manpower to enforce protection laws or demand treaties to be signed regarding the possession of “Crown Land” freely taken by squatters and leased back to them. Beyond a line indicating the city’s limits it was simply a free-for-all. The fear of rebellion resulted in no system ever being informed or actioned)
Every minority group knows how hard it is to not only fight for your rights but also to maintain them especially so now in the post-truth period of madmen. These madmen especially don’t want diversity or equality for all because they want to create the illusion of helping those going through economic and social hardship and weaponizing differences to gain and maintain power. This was the Big Lie strategy that Joseph Goebbels in Nazi Germany used for the Third Reich for Hitler.
It’s what the LNP promised for most of this century that they will do better only to come up with closing ASTIC, cutting $500M from the Indigenous budget, closing projects, and coming up with the Cash Card, Robodebt, and greater money spent on consultants and “planning” rather than reaching those in need.
Dutton is now calling for more auditing not of admin fraud but the remote communities fraud, in the same way, he’s calling for the investigation of sexual abuse of children in Indigenous communities but not the commercial scale widespread across the rest of white Australia. That Goebbels’s Strategy of weaponizing dysfunction among minorities for political gain will be deployed, assisted, and cheered on by News Corp, 2GB and all the other usual suspects.
And, of course, by tightly controlling Trump’s public image, Fox News is doing its level best to protect him legally. These days, Trump can’t open his mouth without undermining his legal defense in the 4 separate criminal trials he’s facing. Just this week, for instance, he claimed Sidney Powell, the lawyer most closely identified with Trump’s attack on the 2020 election, “WAS NOT MY ATTORNEY, AND NEVER WAS” after she took an eleventh-hour plea deal with prosecutors in Georgia. Within minutes, this claim was immediately debunked by journalists posting clips of Trump claiming otherwise in 2020.
How is it the cartoonist gets the sack rather than the EDITORS?
Iconic British cartoonist Steve Bell has recently been sacked by The Guardian for a cartoon of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
Bell has been unknowingly found guilty of an anti-Semitic trope. Bell’s illustrious 42-year career at The Guardian has been truncated by ignorant editors because of a literary misinterpretation. The Guardian’s own illustrious 200-year history sinks further into the mire.
Source: Guardian cartoonist fired over accusation of anti-Semitism
It is a strange feature of the conservative and right-wing response to antisemitism both in the United Kingdom and the United States, that the form it largely takes is not that of identifying actual cases of antisemitism and acting on them, but of criminalizing solidarity with Palestine.
It won’t be long before we hear politicians arguing about the “Democracy of Nth Korea” the way this term has come to be bandied about. After the referendum and with the LNP declaring Australia a Christian State calling Israel a Democracy seems more a smoke screen to stall us from questioning ours.
Jacinta Price demanded without acknowledging her mother to be funded an extra $ 12 M to set up a “re-education camp” (boarding school) for indigenous kids. It’s so like Abbott’s policy after he deducted $500M from their promised budget. He too cried for the need to re-educate “them” by getting them to school on time. Nothing akin to those Chinese camps the LNP claimed were against “human rights”. Price insists those at risk be defined by the government. The LNP do sound Democratic don’t they? In a very Israeli way.
The logic of a racial contract that overtly and unapologetically relegates colonised Indigenous peoples to “a position defined by violence, exploitation, poverty, and denial of … full humanity” is precisely that which we see being exercised in that act of collective punishment in which Alaa and her children were killed. Thousands more in Gaza, children and adults, have been killed in the last few weeks, even as the West ritually reiterates its support for the democratic state of Israel. But what price democracy in a state premised on the unequal humanity of Indigene and settler?
Source: The racial contract of settler colonialism – Pearls and Irritations
If we are looking for historical parallels to the current destruction in Palestine, then the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis is unfortunately one that comes readily to mind. While we would all agree that this was appalling, inhuman and unfathomable, is blowing women and children to pieces in Gaza any less so?
So we may as well begin chewing on that question right now so we can get settle on a number as soon as possible. How much is enough? It’s a question that demands an answer. And the answer we come to collectively will say a lot about our species, and about where it is headed.
Source: How much killing is enough killing? – Pearls and Irritations
To where will they be sent? Do the Egyptians know? That Israel would turn a part of Egypt into Palestine the way Palestine was turned into Israel but the Palestinians paid rather than were paid.
The think tank advocates a bizarre scheme in which Israel would ethnically cleanse the entirety of Gaza and pay Egypt to house its former inhabitants in currently empty apartments near Cairo. (The paper was first reported and translated from Hebrew by Mondoweiss.)
National Security & Zionist Strategy, an Israeli think tank, published a paper last week stating that thanks to the vicious Hamas attacks of October 7, “There is currently a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip.”
Source: Israeli Think Tank Says Hamas Attack Provides “Rare Opportunity”
The Fate of the Referendum shows that in Australia Critical thought remains a foreign language. That failure alone suggests we will face hardship far longer than necessary. Until the echoes of Nope Nope Nope fade into the far distance the voice of reason and the struggle for a Common Good won’t be ahead of us.
In fact, latest polls are indicating fast and significant changes of opinion in the US. Even the corporate controlled social media outlets are failing to manipulate and suppress information. More people are inclined to subscribe to critical thinking. All these are indications of the triumph of Socratic moral values. For many, the Qur’anic verse “Surely with hardship comes ease (94:5),” offers hope. The faster the rest of the world wakes up to take care of the oppressed, the earlier that ease will come.
Source: Is the One-Sided US Response to the Gaza Crisis a Sign of our Civilizational Decline?
Zionist oppression of Arab peoples since World War II is not the result of the will of Jews, but of a willingness of a section of Jews who embrace a racist ideology to shape the Israeli state to the needs of imperialism. Many Jews opposed this and still do. This number of anti-Zionist Jews is growing, but the overwhelming power lies with the imperialist nations. They must be called to account for their crimes! They and their Netanyahu-ist partners in Israel must be stopped from committing further crimes against the Palestinian people.
The struggle for a new, just social order centered on human commonality and cooperation—the not narrow, ugly, brutal sectarian madness of Zionism or a Hamas— is the urgent task for Jews, Palestinians, and all humanity.
Rupert (like his father before him) embraced culture wars to sell the news, it seems (in) the 21st century Lachlan intends to embrace the media to sell the culture wars. (In a quid pro quo arrangement with only some of us)
It’s about reimagining today’s Australian community out of a narrow colonial nationalism that sees Australia’s rise as “a new Brittania in another world”,…. it’s a narrative that legitimizes the modern economy of extractive export industries by glorifying pioneering farmers and diggers. But it’s a weak imagining, held up by the emptiest of symbols — so weak it cannot co-exist with the colonizer’s shame of ( Killing for Country and) the dispossession of First Nations peoples.
As the reign of the narrative’s greatest booster, John Howard, was petering out in 2007, Paul Keating identified its weakness: the “we” that Howard often spoke of “was ( never) meant to be all of us, but only some of us. As it was when the ( Colonial Settlers the Squatters who) Howard believes are (and were) the keepers of the Holy Grail; the sentries at the gates of the true Australia.”
Those same sentries ( today) have long found a comfortable barracks in the commentary sections at News Corp. Since the Voice vote, they’ve pivoted their war against cosmopolitan urban elites ( in the same way the squatters did the city elite in the 19th century when the urban woke too looked on Australian natives as worthy of British protection rather than total dispossession and would have) voted Yes for an enlarged imagining of Australia.”
It would seem Sweet FA has changed
Source: “This past… – The Fiberal Party of Australia – Lies & Misdemeanours | Facebook
When you hear LNP politicians Like James Patterson speak of Israel being a Liberal Democracy you know it’s time to become a Republic and change our Constitution. James Patterson echoes the sound bytes of the 19th Century Squattocracy who while expressing their loyalty to laws of the King and Country were simply ignoring them and refusing to be dictated to as a British Colony. Australia stood alone ruled by the Sqattocracy whose loyalty was purely to themselves because they believed they sat here on the top of the food chain and were more needed by Britain than they were of it. The small contingent of governors and military largely based in the cities were simply a gesture to the King and were complicit in ignoring the laws and this became reflected in our Racist no-recognition Constitution of 1901 along with no treaties as was required by British Law.
Surely, this is an additional reason why Australians urgently need a new constitution. The idea of a treaty can be incorporated into that. It would also be entirely desirable if Australia is to become a republic. It has been almost impossible to change anything in this colonial Constitution for over 123 years. The vicious cycle needs to be broken. In the meantime, measures aimed to improve the situation for the Indigenous people should be legislated as soon as possible.
Source: Australia’s vicious constitutional cycle needs to be broken
Historical context for the Israel and Hamas conflict is complex but these five charts can help.
Source: Understanding the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 5 charts
The fact that Palestinian fighters committed unspeakable war crimes against Israeli civilians does not justify Israeli authorities committing war crimes against Palestinian civilians.
Source: In War Crime, Israel is Still Blocking Water, Electricity to Gaza’s Palestinian Civilians
Israel claims it’s “Only after Hamas”. They don’t even measure their success or failure on the number of “Hamas killed”. If this war was numbers it would be judged a total failure. A failure because the world is witness to the numbers of innocents killed 2300 children, 5,800, and over 15,000 injured and more about to needlessly die in need of aid. Israel’s gesture to allow a few trucks in for 2.3M people is seen as little more than a callous PR exercise. If the world volunteered to take all the Palestinians and forego their homelands would Israel stop their genocidal carnage? With or without them Hamas would still exist as would the majority of the world’s Jews not wanting to live there.
Gantz, Cohen and Netanyahu yelling to rid the UN of Secretary Guterres shows they know they are losing this war in the eyes of the rest of the world. Might isn’t always Right. It no longer matters how wrong Hamas was Israel’s reaction has been worse. It isn’t a role model for doing things right.
If someone in a next-door family stabbed my brother because he felt hard done by. My family wouldn’t have the “right” to destroy his. Mine are obliged to step back and give some thought not just react by throwing a grenade killing a whole family and saying, ” Oops they just got in the way I was only after your son” 35 UN Peace Keepers were killed by Israel not by Hamas….Oops, they just didn’t in the way!
In a world where oil is increasingly unneeded and requires a united focus on Climate Change will the US and West continue to speak up for Israel or correct for the planet’s survival rather than their immediate geopolitical interests? A revolutionary shift in attention is needed a united shift of goalposts to Human Rights rather than allowing billionaires and Trillion dollar multinational corporations to determine divisive shareholder interests for profit.
Nearly 5,800 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since 7 October, according to the health ministry, including 2,360 children. Hundreds of people remain under the rubble of destroyed buildings.
Source: UN begs for more aid to enter Gaza as hospitals run out of fuel | The Electronic Intifada
By failing to advocate for a ceasefire, western states have given a green light to Israel’s agenda of collective punishment.
The recent escalation of conflict in the Middle East is a reminder that after decades of aggression, peace in the region is difficult to achieve.
Source: Middle East: No end in sight to cruel war many years in the making
The war in Gaza has emboldened settlers in the West Bank. In five accounts from the occupied territory, Palestinians speak of terrifying, ever-present settler violence — beatings, killings, house raids — backed up by the Israeli military.
The LNP still maintains Israel is a Democracy and our government isn’t doing enough in support. When Israel’s Gantz and Cohen demand that the UN Secretary-General “doesn’t live in “their world” they simply telling the UN to fuck off. They’re right the majority of Nations on this planet don’t agree with Israel and it doesn’t make them anti-Semitic.
Individuals commit crimes Mr Cohen nations shouldn’t. Israel once pursued those individual criminals and it did relentlessly after WW2. They didn’t reign Collective Punishment down on the Germans, the Dutch or wherever those Nazis went to hide. They sought justice and brought them to heel before the International courts. They didn’t bomb the bejeezus out of Buenos Aires
Today 2.2M people are merely “collateral damage” in their pursuit of Hamas. They are not being Collectively Punished Hamas is using them as shields. Israel’s strategies today are far removed from what they once were. Mind you the 1948 Nakba suggests otherwise. When Israel took 25% more land than they’d been allocated by that body they now hate the UN and displaced 80% of the Arabs that lived there.
Netanyahu’s right-wing government is a failure. It’s security failed and now his government’s over- reaction has failed. He’s running a failed Liberal Democracy while being the 4th most armed power in the world and becoming least stable in the eyes of the rest of the world. Netanyahu is betraying his own people hardly a role model of a Jewish State.
“Protecting civilians does not mean ordering more than one million people to evacuate to the south, where there is no shelter, no food, no water, no medicine and no fuel, and then continuing to bomb the south itself.”
Israel on Wednesday morning (AEDT) demanded Guterres’s resignation and Foreign Minister Eli Cohen asked: “Mr Secretary-General, in what world do you live? Definitely this is not our world.”
Source: ‘In what world do you live?’ Furious Israel slams UN chief
Scholars of genocide are criticizing the dangerous use of the Holocaust to justify Israeli mass violence against Palestinians
Source: Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust | Raz Segal | The Guardian
Indonesian politics are played hard. Corruption is a given, but a devious ploy to keep the president Jokowi wielding power has backfired with wholesale anger against a gross display of law-bending and nepotism. Duncan Graham reports.
Source: Indonesian elections: the making of a dynasty and unmaking of democracy? – Michael West
‘Participants expressed disgust about a statue of John McDouall Stuart being erected in Alice Springs following the 150th anniversary of his successful attempt to reach the top end. This expedition led to the opening up of the “South Australian frontier” which led to massacres as the telegraph line was established and white settlers moved into the region. People feel sad whenever they see the statue; its presence and the fact that Stuart is holding a gun is disrespectful to the Aboriginal community who are descendants of the families slaughtered during the massacres throughout central Australia.’[13]
It’s difficult to avoid seeing commonalities between the feelings of the people of Charlottesville and the feelings of the people of Alice Springs.
These events and their consequences on vastly different continents encapsulate the transgenerational suffering and trauma among Indigenous and African American peoples. This writer can only hope that – post-Referendum – Aboriginal Australians will come around to believing that their trust has not been wasted, that despite the awful, politically-manipulated rejection of the Referendum, there remain great swathes of non-Indigenous Australians who will continue to stand with them through ‘Makarrata’ and beyond, no matter what it takes.
By Frances Goold Voice Crash Investigation [1] 1 ‘Mario, what’s your relationship to this park?’ ‘This is the park where my wife and I got married, roughly eight years ago.’ ‘And what did you father say to you at the wedding?’ ‘My dad told the photographer he didn’t want that statue in our wedding pictures’.…
Source: Voice Crash Investigation: Transgenerational trauma – » The Australian Independent Media Network
What is described was what made Australia, a British Colony, unique among all of Britain’s colonies. Why we criminally ignored British Law that demanded that natives be acknowledged, treated with respect, and allowed to share the land as they traditionally had. The squatters simply ignored the crown and the governors were too afraid or complicit to act. Greed was the order of the day and “might was right”. Nothing much has changed when one hears Peter Dutton speak for the LNP.
This is the bedrock of Australian secrecy. Thousands of little stories that never made the newspapers or official reports. The First Peoples of this continent have, despite the catastrophic ruptures of forced relocation and child removal, nurtured their ancient and family storytelling; those who came later failed to even tell their stories to their children. This fostered a century of silence that made it possible for myths to flourish unchallenged, as the referendum “debate” has demonstrated in recent months.
James Paterson’s claims “that Israel should conduct its military response in the manner expected of liberal democracies” as it prepares for a likely ground invasion that will only contribute to a Gazan death toll that Hamas claims now tops 5000.
“.. we also absolutely understand why they need to do what they’re doing right now against Hamas,” Paterson said.
A major fact of today’s reality it seems beyond James Patterson LNP’s grasp. Israel isn’t a Democracy. It’s an acknowledged Apartheid State. One that for the past 17 years has held 2.2M people mainly children, women, and elderly illegally and inhumanely in an open-air prison, a ghetto called Gaza. At the same time, they have been killing and stealing their land in the West Bank. But then should we be surprised James Patterson was and is a “no” campaigner who hasn’t lifted his finger for this nation’s Indigenous people on whose land he built his career.
Paterson hasn’t anything in common with Democracy if he believes Israel is one. In Australia, Patterson has freedoms that Israeli citizens don’t. In Australia citizen James Patterson can parrot and support the LNP Nope Nope Nopers just as the LNP has been doing for the majority of this century. If citizen Paterson acted like that in Israel today he’d find himself arrested. If his friends in the IPA or at Sky News acted as they do today in Israel railing against the Netanyahu Government they just might be imprisoned under the new laws Netanyahu is about to pass along with the removal of Israel’s Supreme Court’s current Separation of Powers which holds the judiciary above the government of the day.
Source: Israel-Hamas conflict: Opposition wants Anthony Albanese to speak with Benjamin Netanyahu
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Publisher’s Weekly wrote:
“Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappé offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East.”
Chris Hedges: Let Them Eat Cement Israel is not only decimating Gaza with airstrikes but employing the oldest and cruelest weapon of war — starvation. Israel’s message, on the eve of a ground invasion, is clear. Leave Gaza or Die.
Where did Israelis learn this process and why did they believe it would be so fruitful? Was it from their living historical experience in the ghetto or the success of the jackboots policing them 30s and 40s?
How had this condition of normalcy and forgetting been achieved? In Gaza, it had been achieved through a blockade that kept the entrapped Palestinians in a permanent state of poverty, unemployment, hunger, and dependency, an architecture of enforced scarcity and suffering meant to crush the spirit and will of those seeking to resist the relentless bulldozer of Israeli expansion into Palestinian lands.
In the West Bank, a similar though somewhat more porous blockade, combined with intense restrictions on movement and daily harassment and violence at the hands of Israeli military personnel and settlers, has aimed to achieve comparable results. Normalcy for the people of Israel, in other words, had been achieved through policies and practices meant to decimate the material infrastructures of will, hope, resistance, and agency among the more than five million Palestinians.
Source: Palestine Forgotten
The cruelest joke is Israel’s use of the term “humanitarian aid”. It’s proven to be an Oxymoron. The State of Israel was born from the pain of a War driven by the false belief that “Might was Right”. However, today Israel is rubber-stamping what we denied. History repeats and we are witness to yet another Colonial Settler tragedy. “Might” has never proved to be morally or ethically right. Never as much as the belief in Universal Human Rights and the equality of mankind which Israel denies. Individuals sin and make mistakes nations however set the yardstick on the way we should live together.
The 20 trucks of humanitarian aid that entered Gaza are just a distraction from Israel’s continuing murderous war on the Palestinians.
Source: A PR stunt amid a massacre in Gaza | Gaza | Al Jazeera
Black Lives it appears don’t matter in America or Australia so why on earth should we expect that Palestinian Lives do? How many Palestinian billionaires do you know of? How many have we heard of or have access to the West’s media? The West supports Israel because they defend the 10 commandments or set moral and ethical examples on how the world should behave? Or simply help us keep the oil flowing?
The hypocrisy of calling for ‘adherence to international humanitarian law, including the protection of civilians’ while simultaneously supporting Israel’s slaughter of them should be noted with the contempt it deserves. So should the fact that none of them are calling for a cease-fire and negotiations.
Source: Backing Israel’s rage-fuelled revenge presents moral dilemma
“Settlers all over the West Bank see this war as a golden opportunity to torment Palestinians from small communities who are literally defenseless,” said one human rights campaigner.
Source: Israel Ramps Up Assault on West Bank With Airstrike on Mosque, Deadly Raids
Israel Reap what it sowed. No Peace, Hatred,
All these developments have disheartened and disillusioned the Palestinians, who have lost their faith in the international community. From their perspective, decades of peaceful resistance have only resulted in further hardships and an uninterrupted expansion of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. Israel’s 75-year-long illegal occupation of Palestine and the associated atrocities, along with the 17-year siege imposed on Gaza, have failed to evoke a significant response from the international community. Nevertheless, the recent attacks by Hamas on Israel have drawn the world’s attention to the gravity of the issue. In this context, one can find an explanation for the increasing popularity of Hamas among Palestinian people.
Source: Israel’s Role in Hamas’ Creation and its Retaliatory Genocide in Gaza – CounterPunch.org
Israel was created out of death pain and suffering only to rise and deliver death pain and suffering. So much for the 10 commandments Moses received
Mowing the grass’
For too long, Israel has believed the Gaza imbroglio could be contained. However, the population has grown so large, this is no longer the case.
With a growth rate of just over 2% per year, its population is expected to be three million by 2030.
Gaza is also incredibly young, with a median age of 19.6, compared with the global average of 30.5. Almost half the adult population is unemployed, and Palestinians in Gaza are four times more likely to be living in poverty than those in the West Bank. This is a recipe for social upheaval and radicalisation.
As two Israeli journalists, Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, noted in a perceptive analysis of Israel’s 2014 Gaza war, the Israeli military describes its assaults on Gaza as “mowing the grass” – acting to punish Hamas severely for its aggressive behaviour and degrading its military capabilities.
The aim was to achieve realistic and, therefore, limited political and military goals. It was part of a long-term strategy of attrition, which would have a temporary deterrent effect in order to create periods of quiet along the border.
Source: Even if Israel can completely eliminate Hamas, does it have a long-term plan for Gaza?
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