does it matter if it’s Fox or NBC or NYT or WSJ or these Fake Fakes Like The Nation because an open air prison, Gaza, and Palestine, not recognized a people, are not AT WAR with Israel
They are in their waders with $500 fishing poles fishing for salmon.
The boaters with fancy boats of a $100,000 with three engines are throwing crab pots over the side to continue in their numbness.
Locals are pounding and sawing away with their Better Homes and Gardens projects.
Piles of piles of candy in stores awaiting the poor AmeriKKKano children’s dash in the streets for Halloween.
Radio stations are talking about football and upcoming Fall fun.
Muscle cars and 35-foot RVs travel highway 101 looking for the next photo shoot to deadened their ennui.
My spouse is away from home assisting a cancer-ridden father as the TV blares and blares and blares the lies of Jewish Pride and Israeli Supremacy. FOX, sure, but no different thatn CBC,CBS, ABC, MNBC, NPR, PBS.
Two aircraft carriers made in the USA are heading for the Mediterranean.
Endless manure heaps of half-mind politicians yakking and war drumming and virtue signaling.
Fuck this country. Of course, Israel should be, well, you know where I stand there. Think of the dodo!
Evil dirty USA there, stripping my shallow roots from some sort of sane life, with SS less than a welfare sad sack, roads crumbling, two-year waits to get a primary doctor, prices not up 6 percent, but 300 percent (you want me to repeat the number of items I have purchased in the past three years that have tripled in price?).
Israel has free health care for the Jews, and USA funnels $5 or $10 billion or more a year into Israel, and we get what?
Remember those crocodile tears for the Jews in ghettos, the forced starvation, the concentration camps?
Fuck these Rachel Maddows these Sean Penns these Blinkens these Kamala I Married a Jewish Man Harris’s.
Is this what happened? Early Saturday morning, Hamas launched an air-sea-land surprise offensive from Gaza into Israel. Its operation responded to an extraordinarily violent year that followed the rise of Israel’s most-extreme-ever right-wing government: a year when Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 200 Palestinians; locked thousands more to languish in military prisons; intensified assaults on West Bank villages like Jenin and Huwara; kept 2 million Palestinians under a blockade of Gaza that has left only an estimated 4 percent of households able to access clean drinking water; and attacked Palestine on symbolic levels, as when the anti-Palestinian Justice Minister Itamar Ben Gvir led multiple intrusions into the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem with the express aim of bringing one of the holiest sites in Islam under Israeli sovereignty.
I will be teaching a class Friday, memoir writing, and the students will talk about their lives, the plans for some sort of writing project tied to their lives. We will probe each person’s motivation, consideration about who and where they are now; perceptions of life now, going back, and learning from the hard knocks and trials and tribulations and those so-called high points.
Does my wife’s father, who is steeped in anti-liberal education, anti-diversity thinking, anti-BIPOC mentality, anti-communism hatred, anti-socialism digust, anti-multipolarism stupidity; steeped in racism and sexism, who believes in some bearded blue-eyed guy in the sky with his shepherd’s hook looking over his war-mongering, child-bombing mob of believers.
It is a world of babble, two distinct languages living in this hell hole — all of them, democrats, republicans, libertarians, they speak mush, mishmash of lies, propaganda, scripted words, empty ideas, false histories, and just mean as cuss words. I have so many problems and challenges even to get them to listen!
These recreating Americans, these K12 schools vacating/rotorooting minds; these Mad men and Mad women looking for the next sale on 12-roll three-ply toilet paper and beef short ribs and Arizona Tea, they do not care. And to get them to care, whew, that is the question, and with so many of them colonized by bad air, bad water, bad food, bad media, bad entertainment, bad schooling , bad politicking, bad legislation, bad judges and juries, it is that shit show for sure. A CHALLENGE. Talking to a brick WALL.
Vijay:
Who knows how many Palestinian civilians will be killed by the time this report is published? Among the bodies that cannot be taken to a hospital or a morgue, because there will be no petrol or electricity, will be large numbers of children. They will have hidden in their homes, listening to the sound of the Israeli F-16 bombers coming closer and closer, the explosions advancing toward them like a swarm of red ants on the chase. They will have covered their ears with their hands, crouched with their parents in their darkened living rooms, waiting, waiting for the inevitable bomb to strike their home. By the time the rescue workers get to them under the mountains of rubble, their bodies would have become unrecognizable, their families weeping as familiar clothing or household goods are excavated. Such is the torment of the Palestinians who live in Gaza.
A friend of mine in Gaza who has a 17-year-old child told me on the first night of this recent spell of Israeli bombing that his child has lived through at least ten major Israeli assaults on the Palestinians in Gaza. As we spoke, we made a list of some of the wars we could remember (because these are Israel’s wars, we are using the Israeli army names for their attacks on Gaza):
- Operation Summer Rains (June 2006)
- Operation Autumn Clouds (October-November 2006)
- Operation Hot Winter (February-March 2008)
- Operation Cast Lead (December 2008-January 2009)
- Operation Running Echo (March 2012)
- Operation Pillar of Cloud (November 2012)
- Operation Protective Edge (July-August 2014)
- Operation Black Belt (November 2019)
- Operation Breaking Dawn (August 2022)
- Operation Shield and Arrow (May 2023)
Each of these attacks pulverizes the minimal infrastructure that remains intact in Gaza and hits the Palestinian civilians very hard. Civilian deaths and casualties are recorded by the Health Ministry in Gaza but disregarded by the Israelis and their Western enablers. As the current bombing intensified, journalist Muhammad Smiry said, “We might not survive this time.” Smiry’s worry is not isolated. Each time Israel sends in its fighter jets and missiles, the death and destruction are of an unimaginable proportion. This time, with a full-scale invasion, the destruction will be at a scale not previously witnessed.
The Savagery of the War Against the Palestinian People Vijay Prashad | 11 Oct 2023
Proportional Force? Here’s from West Point, Articles of War!
In addition to being codified, the rule of proportionality has a specific scope. It applies in a particular context, in the conduct of hostilities and prescribes a specific type of proportionality: the balance of interests. It also determines the elements to be weighed. The rule of proportionality requires that the anticipated incidental loss of human life and damage to civilian objects should not be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected from the destruction of a military objective. The balance is composed of, on the one hand, the military advantage expected from the destruction of a military objective, and on the other hand, the incidental damage caused by the military intervention, i.e., the harm to civilians and civilian property.
The limited circumstances to which the rule of proportionality applies demonstrate its specific scope. The rule applies only when a military objective (legitimate target) is the object of an attack and incidental damage is foreseeable. Moreover, the rule applies only to an attack. Not every military operation in an armed conflict constitutes an attack.
Finally, the proportionality rule operates according to an “all-or-nothing” (p. 24) model. This means that once the conditions for its application are met, it must be complied with in full. The principle of proportionality, on the contrary, offers variable solutions since it operates according to the “plus-or-minus” (p. 427) scheme. Principles are norms that require something to be achieved to the greatest extent possible according to the factual possibilities and within the limits imposed by other competing principles. They are “optimization requirements”(p. 47) characterized by the fact that they can be satisfied to varying degrees and the appropriate level of satisfaction depends not only on factual, but also on legal and political possibilities. Rules, on the other hand, are either satisfied or not satisfied, with no room for discretion. They are called “fixed points” (p. 2) in the field of factual and legal possibilities.
We remembered all the miseries, all the injustices, our people and the conditions they lived, the coldness with which world opinion looks at our cause, and so we felt that we will not permit them to crush us. We will defend ourselves and our revolution by every way and every means.
George Habash (1926-2008)
It’s always in the lawyer’s fucking dirty briefcase:
There has been an increasing number of armed conflicts, and others looming on the horizon, that should cause us to pause and think about why and how we go to war. The list is long: Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, North Korea, etc. One especially poignant method of analyzing our decisions to go to war that has not received much attention is based on the Just War doctrine. The overarching principle behind the Just War doctrine is proportionality: this doctrine observes that (1) any sovereign undertaking a war should measure its response in proportion to the claimed wrong, and (2) the means used to carry out that war should be proportionate to the desired goal. The doctrine was developed by early philosophers who were concerned with the unprincipled, and often brutal, way that sovereigns of their time went to war.’
So while the Fox News and Face the Nation lobotomies continue, the average Democrat and Republican, will never ever see this:
Does this headline mean anything to barbarians, Jews in Israel? UN slams Israeli siege on Gaza as violation of international law
It’s a siege on children (400 dead, murdered so far) and 1,500 total killed/murdered by Israel, and thousands injured and wounded, and the electricity is but, the Internet is cut, no drugs, equipment, no food. The wounded, dying and dead, those numbers increasing by the minute as F-15’s and F-16’s carpet bomb.
Starvation:
[Photo: Germany created the Warsaw ghetto to imprison and starve more than 400,000 Jews during World War II. ]
Eighty years ago, deep inside a Warsaw ghetto cemetery, Israel Milejkowski gathered fellow physicians with whom he co-authored a clandestine “hunger disease” study.
“What can I tell you, my beloved colleagues and companions in misery. You are a part of all of us,” said Milejkowski, a member of the ghetto’s Jewish Council and the head of its health department.
During the previous summer, many of the secret group’s 23 members had been “resettled,” a German euphemism for murder in the gas chambers of Treblinka.
[Jewish doctors’ secret study of Warsaw ghetto starvation rediscovered 80 years later ]
And today, in Occupied Palestine? “The Israeli military made precise calculations of Gaza’s daily calorie needs to avoid malnutrition during a blockade imposed on the Palestinian territory between 2007 and mid-2010, according to files the defence ministry released on Wednesday under a court order.
Israel says it never limited how many calories were available to Gaza, but critics claimed the document was proof the government limited food supplies to put pressure on Hamas.
At the height of the blockade Israel also maintained a list of foods that were permitted and banned from Gaza.
Major Guy Inbar, an Israeli military spokesman, said the calculation, based on a person’s average requirement of 2,300 calories a day, was meant to identify warning signs to help avoid a humanitarian crisis, and that it was never used to restrict the flow of food.”
Every Major or Colonel or General or Captain or soldier in Israel, they lie, and they are racists.
OPEN AIR PRISON. And, the children and old people, the babies and the disabled and pregnant women and sick ARE not soldiers: Gaza: Israel’s ‘Open-Air Prison’ at 15: Israel, Egypt Movement Restrictions Wreak Havoc on Palestinian Lives
Human Rights Watch: Israel’s sweeping restrictions on leaving Gaza deprive its more than two million residents of opportunities to better their lives, Human Rights Watch said today on the fifteenth anniversary of the 2007 closure. The closure has devastated the economy in Gaza, contributed to fragmentation of the Palestinian people, and forms part of Israeli authorities’ crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against millions of Palestinians.
Israel’s closure policy blocks most Gaza residents from going to the West Bank, preventing professionals, artists, athletes, students, and others from pursuing opportunities within Palestine and from traveling abroad via Israel, restricting their rights to work and an education. Restrictive Egyptian policies at its Rafah crossing with Gaza, including unnecessary delays and mistreatment of travelers, have exacerbated the closure’s harm to human rights.
“Israel, with Egypt’s help, has turned Gaza into an open-air prison,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “As many people around the world are once again traveling two years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Gaza’s more than two million Palestinians remain under what amounts to a 15-year-old lockdown.”
Israel should end its generalized ban on travel for Gaza residents and permit free movement of people to and from Gaza, subject to, at most, individual screening and physical searches for security purposes.
And, 3-7-7-0-0-0. Remember that number, as USA feeds death machines to Saudi Arabia. Its modern, high-technology arsenal makes Saudi Arabia among the world’s most densely armed nations, with its military equipment being supplied primarily by the United States, France, and Britain. 377,000!!!
The war in Yemen has killed an estimated 377,000 people through direct and indirect causes. Over 150,000, including tens of thousands of civilians, have been killed in fighting, including the Saudi-led bombing campaign, while many more have died of hunger and disease in the humanitarian crisis caused by the war.
[Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) is a UK-based organisation working to end the international arms trade.
The arms business has a devastating impact on human rights and security, and damages economic development. Large scale military procurement and arms exports only reinforce a militaristic approach to international problems.
In seeking to end the arms trade, CAAT’s priorities are:
- to stop the procurement or export of arms where they might:
- exacerbate conflict, support aggression, or increase tension
- support an oppressive regime or undermine democracy
- threaten social welfare through the level of military spending
- to end all government political and financial support for arms exports
- and to promote progressive demilitarisation within arms-producing countries. ]
Paul Haeder, Author 