The continued violence in Gaza and the renewed violence on the West Bank points to a dark future for the Middle East, particularly for Israel, Lebanon, and the Palestinian community. Israel has become increasingly isolated in the international community, and the ultra nationalism of the right wing is increasingly dominating Israeli politics. For the past thirty years, the Israelis have hidden behind false gestures of support for a two-state solution and now the possibility of a cease fire in Gaza in order to maintain military and economic support from the United States. Sadly, it is working, and Israel shows no interest in pursuing any alternative to an endless war.
After rejecting the idea for months, US officials are now arguing that a ceasefire agreement should be signed.
US officials estimate that Israel has achieved all it can militarily in the Gaza Strip, but Israel’s leadership is divided on ending the war, argues Joost Hiltermann, the programme director for the Middle East at the International Crisis Group.
Hiltermann tells host Steve Clemons that Israel’s military believes Hamas has been weakened enough for now, while its politicians argue that the war should be open-ended, allowing for a resumption after Israeli captives are released.
The question remains: is the United States content to allow the internal Israeli debate to run its course, even if that means endless war on Gaza?
Blinken’s Bullshit Bridge was never explained. It was conceived to simply continue to put the blame on Hamas otherwise known as Gaza. A vacuous Propaganda Proposal for Joe and Bibi at the continued cost of innocent lives. Last week they passed to give $20Bill more arms to Israel. Does that for a moment indicate there ever was a genuine effort for peace? In the meantime Israel is grabbing more land and looting the West Bank and demolishing homes in East Jerusalem
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday that Israel has accepted a proposal to bridge differences holding up a cease-fire and hostage release in Gaza, and he called on Hamas to do the same, without saying whether concerns cited by the militant group had been addressed.
Netanyahu has never accepted a proposal that he knew he wasn’t going to break. A “bridging proposal” is about as clear as once declaring Israel was “just mowing the lawn” and not breaking any truce. America and Israel need not just a vague announcement but a specific course of action. Blinken seems more like a Netanyahu puppet than a “tour de force” mediator &/or negotiator.
What is a “bridging proposal”? How is it to be executed? If it’s anything like the “Pier Proposal” the Americans put forward to allow Netanyahu’s war to proceed while aid was being delivered. Well, we know how well that went down.
What about Israel’s Moral High Ground? “We let the aid trucks into Gaza” but kept the Gazans moving to prevent any distribution. Then blamed the NGO volunteers who they routinely killed. If Gazans even tried they too were shot at along with the starving people queued.
So what we are seeing is more Hasbara. Propaganda for both Israel and America’s sake rather than reality. Reality was the a hostage exchange in November 2023. It made Netanyahu and Israel look so bad they have never offered another “bridge to peace” since. This one you can be assured is built on sand. Why on earth would Hamas accept it?
Hamas — designated by the Australian government as a terrorist group — has said it is losing faith in the US as a mediator, accusing American negotiators of siding with Israel as it makes new demands that the militant group rejects.
What we are witnessing is the greatest “Conflict of Interest” with America acting as the principal negotiator while supplying arms to Israel for the duration of this war.
The examples of Israeli state-sponsored terrorism include the 1954 Lavon Affair, an unsuccessful bomb plot in Egypt that led to the resignation of the Israeli minister of defence.[15] In the 1970s and 80s Israel was a major supplier of arms to dictatorial regimes in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. In Indonesia, as reported by Noam Chomsky, Israel served as a proxy of the United States, providing aircraft used by Indonesia to massacre the Timorese[16]. More recently Israel has been accused of sponsoring and supporting several terrorist groups in its proxy wars against Iran, Lebanon and Syria.
In public, Biden appears “tough” on Netanyahu, urging him not to “invade” Rafah and pressuring him to allow more “humanitarian aid” into Gaza.
But already the White House is preparing the ground to subvert its own messaging. It insists that Israel has offered an “extraordinarily generous” deal to Hamas – one that, Washington suggests, amounts to a ceasefire. It doesn’t. According to reports, the best Israel has offered is an undefined “period of sustained calm”. Even that promise can’t be trusted.
If Hamas accepts the “deal” and agrees to return some of the hostages, the bombing eases for a short while but the famine intensifies, justified by Israel’s determination for “total victory” against Hamas – something that is impossible to achieve. This will simply delay, for a matter of days or weeks, Israel’s move to step 5 below.
If, as seems more likely, Hamas rejects the “deal”, it will be painted as the intransigent party and blamed for seeking to continue the “war”. (Note: This was never a war. Only the West pretends either that you can be at war with a territory you’ve been occupying for decades, or that Hamas “started the war” with its October 7 attack when Israel has been blockading the enclave, creating despair and incremental malnutrition there, for 17 years.)
We are very excited to announce that Michael West Media will be starting an airline. We haven’t set a date yet, nor do we have any planes, pilots or stewards, but watch this space, tickets will be on sale soon!
We made this decision after Qantas – an actual airline with planes, pilots, stewards, and some very clever finance people, revealed to the world (and the ACCC) that although it is an airline, it doesn’t really sell airline tickets as such. Its customers are:
not buying a specific flight when they book to travel but instead a ‘bundle of rights’ to fly.
There is more to the Snowy Hydro than cost overruns and endless delays. It turns out a noxious fish could bring the project to a permanent stop. So what’s the scam?
Former President Donald Trump has been siphoning money raised for his 2024 presidential campaign into a political action committee (PAC) that covers his personal legal finances.
Marco the French President got it right when he said he was double-crossed. It was all about the money and selling the soul of the nation. The ALP hasn’t changed the direction or in any way deflected the AUKUS scam. They are assisting the rampant profiteering of the Military-Industrial Complex at the expense of the French.
Paul Keating described the AUKUS submarines deal negotiated by the Albanese government as the “worst deal in all history”. Is he right, and if so, just how bad is it?
What owning your own home has come to in Australia. This is a partnership offer to drive up the cost of housing, or a 3rd party acting in combination like a Muslim bank who can’t charge interest because they are unlicensed. Are they investment partners really and/or landlords who charge rent instead? Something current banks aren’t prepared to do. What they are saying is go find a surrogate parent or angel, it’s not our problem.
Would-be homebuyers teaming up with private investors to stump up a deposit has been floated as a possible model to ease Australia’s housing crisis.
Under FOI, I requested Commissioner Woolcott’s briefing, minutes and talking points associated with the March 8 bureaucratic talk fest. Woolcott, a Coalition appointment (and former staffer to Andrew Peacock and Chief of Staff to Alexander Downer) retires in 4 months, has refused access to the documents he holds, claiming it’s not in the public interest to release them.
The Worst Health, Immigration and Home Affairs Minister on record. Facts vs Political point scoring.
it seems sufficient time has passed since the biggest labour trafficking scam in Australia’s history, a scam that started when Peter Dutton was Immigration Minister, for the Murdoch press to start agitating about asylum seekers who have arrived by plane.
Grifted funds were raised not for politics but for personal use, and revenge. Employment of lawyers who in all probability won’t be paid. It is what Donald Trump has done all his life to turn American law into a tool and it has allowed him.. Breaking people for revenge’s sake is his sociopathic bent. This is personal it’s not political but the money spent will have been taken from political donations. Cohen is just someone, a Jew, he intends to squash for the benefit of his Nazi funders to watch on cheer and keep donating whether he wins or loses. Just another scam
Donald Trump didn’t have a presidency — it was a crime spree. And the former President, to this day, has been playing his supporters for suckers. It’s been the longest grift ever.It Keeps Running,
Just late last year, Trump announced his foray into NFTs. The virtual trading cards targeting his supporters for sales depict him as a superhero. And more recently, after the one-term scandal-plagued President announced that he would be arrested on Tuesday of this week, he sent out an email blast begging for donations. The arrest hasn’t happened yet, but the grift did. He raised $1.5 million in three days.
But there’s now evidence companies are raising their prices over and above the increase in those costs.
“There’s no doubt that corporations have taken advantage of the supply chain problems and the desperation of consumers to jack up prices far more than required to cover their own costs, and their record profits have made this inflation far worse,” economist Jim Stanford, from the Centre for Future Work, told The Drum.
Foreign gas giants Shell, Chevron, Exxon are enjoying an explosion in revenue while paying virtually no income tax and forking out just spare change in royalties. What’s the scam?
Australia’s universities have been corporatised and compromised, and business schools are at the vanguard of academic capture. Jeanne Ryckmans investigates the rise and fall of the five-star travelling former professor who led the high-life on public grants.
CITIC the Chinese coal mining juggernaut churns out $8bn in revenue from its suite of Australian coal mines, gets government subsidies, but pays almost no tax and actually faxes in its one financial report to regulators. What’s the scam?
This week on Q&A Barnaby Joyce said “we are a government who only spends money where we see a return on investment and growth in GDP”. Well we know that!! So little has been devoted to Age-Care, flood disasters, pensioners, job seekers yet debt blew out 400% above 2013 levels. It went from 10% of GDP to over 40% and is heading to 50%. So where did the money go and why doesn’t it matter now? It mattered ever so badly when the ALP were in government. The LNP are currently screaming taxes taxes will go up under the ALP yet they have constantly been the highest under the LNP.
The scam is that flood and fire victims and other ordinary Australians don’t have lobbyists and don’t pay political parties. What are they thinking, that politicians will just help them because …?
Cruelling somewhat the Budget pitch euphoria in corporate media today, The Australia Institute has sallied forth with its annual analysis of hand-outs to coal and gas multinationals, state and federal, finding they cost the public $11.6b in 2021-22, or $22k per minute.
It’s a $1.3b (12%) increase on last year thanks to the feds. Across all budgets there is $55b committed, which is 11 times the balance of Australia’s Emergency Response Fund ($4.8b in Dec 2021), while $11.6b in 2021-22 is 56 times the budget of the National Recovery and Resilience Agency.
The subsidies cost the Federal government more than it spent on public schools in the same year ($9.7b). Now *that’s* a scam … and we are yet to see the Budget.
what’s the scam Google: What’s the Scam? by Michael West | May 1, 2021 Google Australia raked in $5.2bn revenue last year and paid the Tax Office … drumroll … zero income tax. What’s the scam? The scam used to be that Google simply pretended its income from selling services in Australia to Australians really belonged overseas so it invoiced straight from Singapore. No revenue here, ergo no tax. Now the scam is how they define revenue. They claim their revenue is $1.4bn but, buried in a footnote is the admission that gross revenue last year was actually $5.2bn. GST mysteriously plunged from $114m to $43m and “service fees” to foreign associates stomped in at an heroic $3.8bn. They actually paid $133m in tax in 2019. That’s $133m more than Rupert Murdoch’s News Australia Holdings paid in six years. But they’re back to their dodgy old ways – paying no tax again. Although they recorded a tax charge of $53m – this is what they claim they paid, their cashflow statement shows income tax received (not paid) of $22m last year. They got a tax benefit. That’s the scam.
Yair Netanyahu, the son of the Israeli prime minister, shared this meme on Facebook depicting George Soros as a puppet master, an image reminiscent of classic anti-Semitic propaganda.
Israeli leaders helped birth today’s most notorious anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
That’s the conclusion from recent reports about the origins of a right-wing plot against liberal Jewish billionaire George Soros.
The demonization of Soros – often in overtly anti-Semitic terms – has become a leading theme of the international right in recent years.
And two of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s key advisers were responsible for it.
The Koch Brothers alone will spend $20 million on ads selling the tax bill. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the $1.4 billion they stand to gain every year in tax breaks. It’s also a tiny fraction of their overall campaign spending on the 2018 midterms elections, which is projected to reach $400 million.
The Kochs have their work cut out for them. A new poll from Politico shows most workers report seeing no increase in their take home pay after the new tax laws took effect.
This is important.
The whole premise behind adding $1.5 trillion to the debt, giving massive handouts to the ultra-wealthy, and giving a tax break to the nation’s most profitable corporations was that working folks would also get a bit of cash.
Turns out, they’re not seeing that money. But the PR push is having an impact.
olddogthoughts 
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