Ziofascist Israel’s 2023 to 2024 Genocide of Palestinians, Part 33: October 8 to 17, 2024–The Erasure of Jabalia and North Gaza, the Burning Alive of Shaaban Al-Dalo and the Killing of Hamas Leader Yahya Sinwar
A documentation of Ziofascist Israel’s 2023 to 2024 genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians from October 8 to 17, 2024. (Part 32)
October 8: Ziofascist Israel Illegally Orders the Evacuation of Three Hospitals
USA:
A longer version of the above exchange:
Said Arikat: “We have given them — or taxpayers paid for — almost $23 billion in the last year alone. That’s almost $3000 for each and every Israeli. So you have absolutely no leverage, no pressure? You cannot tell them ‘Do this or not do this’?”
Ziofascist Matthew Miller [gaslighting]: “[…] they’re ultimately a sovereign country and have to make their own decisions. […]”
The Ziofascist propaganda narrative continues to crumble:
Trey Hingst: “[…] Palestinian journalists […] have been pushed to the south. Dozens [rather: around 180] have been killed.
There is this false narrative about Palestinian journalists. More than a hundred of them have been killed by Israel since the war [rather: the genocide] began. And I take very few positions in the conflicts that we cover. But let this be a position that I take: Journalists — specifically Palestinian journalists — must be protected amid the war. The Israelis have killed journalists in drone strikes, they’ve killed them with small arms fire — and it’s unacceptable.
October 9: The Destruction of Jabalia
The city of Jabalia in North Gaza:
The targetted killing of Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi Wahidi by Ziofascist Israelis, hit in the neck above the protective press vest just like Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022:
Many shots fired, Fadi Al-Wahidi turns and runs:
From an October 9 Common Dreams article by Brett Wilkins:
A Belgium-based advocacy group on Tuesday announced it “filed an unprecedented and historic complaint with the International Criminal Court against 1,000 Israeli occupation forces soldiers for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Gaza,” where more than 150,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded and millions more displaced, starved, and sickened by Israel’s yearlong onslaught.
The Hind Rajab Foundation — named after the 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed in January along with half a dozen relatives and rescue workers by Israeli troops invading Gaza in retaliation for the October 2023 Hamas-led attack — said that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) personnel identified by name in the International Criminal Court (ICC) complaint “are accused of participating in systematic attacks against civilians during the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
“This complaint, supported by over 8,000 pieces of verifiable evidence — including videos, audio recordings, forensic reports, and social media documentation — demonstrates the soldiers’ direct involvement in these atrocities,” the group explained. “All of the named soldiers were located in Gaza during the genocidal assault, and the evidence reveals their participation in violations of international law.”
The foundation accuses Israeli forces of:
* Destruction of civilian infrastructure: Targeted attacks on homes, hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, and other civilian infrastructure.
* Illegal occupation and looting: Soldiers were documented occupying civilian homes, looting personal belongings, and exploiting occupied properties.
* Participation in the Gaza blockade: The soldiers played an active role in enforcing a blockade that deprived civilians of essential goods such as food, water, and medical supplies.
* Targeting civilians: Audio and video evidence show soldiers deliberately attacking noncombatant individuals, including medical personnel and journalists.
* Use of inhumane warfare tactics: Indiscriminate bombing campaigns, starvation, and the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure were all part of their actions.
The IDF soldiers identified in the complaint include at least 12 American, 12 French, four Canadian, three British, and two Dutch nationals.
“This complaint is not only the largest ever submitted to the ICC, but it is also a milestone in documenting Israeli war crimes for future generations,” the Hind Rajab Foundation said. “By meticulously identifying the perpetrators and detailing their crimes, we are establishing a historical record that will ensure the individuals responsible are remembered and held accountable.”
The abduction and mistreatment of journalists, including the US Grayzone journalist Jeremy Loffredo:
Ben Gvir has issues with the insane settlers who he gave assault weapons:
Telegram Zionist censorship:
Britain:
USA:
October 10: Bezalel Smotrich on Greater Israel
Ziofascist Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich: “First, we’ll extend Israeli sovereignty to the whole West Bank, and I’d like to offer the Arabs three options.
Firstly, in return for renouncing Palestinian national aspirations — in clear terms: their aspirations to kill Jews(!!) — we will offer them resident status without the right to vote.
For those who struggle to abandon their Palestinian nationalism — to not kill Jews wherever they might be (!)— they will be able to choose between two options.
The first is to emigrate to another country. The state will help them(!) with that [i.e. ‘encourage voluntary migration,’ i.e. displace and genocide them]. I’d be delighted to lend a hand with that myself if need be [i.e. I’d personally displace and genocide them].
And for those who are uncomfortable with the word ‘peace’ and continue down the path of terror, I’m sure will be able to defeat them.”
Bezalel Smotrich [with insane cultist eyes]: “It is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus. Only Jerusalem, until Damascus.”
Narrator: Bezalel Smotrich has a radical vision for the promised land, and it includes all Palestinian lands, but also lands in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt. Even in Saudi Arabia. Certainly an extremist vision, but it is an accepted one in Israel’s public discourse.
Britain:
Caller: “How are these Palestinians supposed to defend themselves when not only are the settlers attacking them, but IDF soldiers are actually watching on, and encouraging them, and egging them on, and even snipering kids with precision shots into their heads.”
LBC Interviewer: “Is that true?”
Ziofascist Tzipi Hotovely [pure gaslighting]: “Those, those are very hard accusations that have no base, ah, as a matter of fact, because…”
Caller: “Save the Children have reported it, as have Human Rights Watch, as have Amnesty International in their Crossing Thresholds report. Multiple reports from multiple NGOs, and Israeli soldiers admitting to it live on TV with Matt, Iain Dale’s colleague on channel 4 news.”
Ziofascist Tzipi Hotovely [more gaslighting]: “I am sure you are taking your information from sources you believe are reliable, but all I can tell you…”
LBC Interviewer: “Well, are they lying?”
Ziofascist Tzipi Hotovely [evading and distracting, more gaslighting]: “No, no, I want to tell you what I know. I am sure you are taking your information from sources you believe are reliable, but all I can tell you […] there has been increase of terrorism in Jenin. Jenin has become a huge terror hub. […]”
USA:
The Jeremy Loffredo affair:
A revealing NYT article:
Apple subsidizes the genocide:
“Apple pays 100% of their base salary to anyone that goes to serve in the IDF, which means that there are like Apple engineers in the IDF, killing babies, getting paid bank while murdering children.”
October 11
Thus “slaughter” such as the following:
From a leading Ziofascist Israeli propagandist:
Netanyahu’s omnicidal tendenciees and his son Yair’s privileges:
The Jeremy Loffredo affair:
On October 11, journalist Jeremy Loffredo was ordered released from Israeli jail.
Israeli soldiers arrested the Jewish-American reporter and three other journalists at a checkpoint in the West Bank on October 8. According to one of the jailed reporters, @the_andrey_x, the soldiers blindfolded them tightly, roughed them up, drawing guns on them at one point, and hauled them off to detention in Jerusalem.
“The soldiers… illegally requested that the journalists hand in their phones, and when they refused, the soldiers pointed a gun at one of the journalists, hit him with their hands and the barrel of a gun, then dragged him out of the car and slammed him onto the concrete. When lying on the ground, they pointed 2 guns at his head. The rest of the journalists exited the car and the military raided it, confiscating phones, cameras, and personal items,” said @the_andrey_x.
Andrey recalled that in the course of abusing the journalists, “The soldiers told the female Israeli photographer that she should have been raped by Hamas.”
While Loffredo’s colleagues were released after 11 hours, the “Judea and Samaria” division of the Israeli police opened an investigation into Loffredo for supposedly “aiding the enemy in a time of war.”
The Israeli police’s accusation related to Loffredo’s video report for The Grayzone covering the aftermath of Iranian missile strikes aimed at Israeli military installations. According to the police, Jeremy had revealed “the locations of missile drops near or inside sensitive security facilities, with the aim of bringing this to the notice of the enemy, and thereby assisting them in their future attacks.”
On October 9, an Israeli court declared it had “reasonable suspicion” to extend the journalist’s imprisonment. At a hearing the next day, the police insisted to Magistrate’s Court Judge Zion Sahrai that Loffredo was not an actual journalist, but did not present any evidence that he was pursuing a hostile ulterior agenda.
A journalist from the Israeli publication YNet countered the allegation that Loffredo violated Israeli censorship laws by pointing out that the military censor approved his own article in which a tweet containing Loffredo’s full video report for The Grayzone was embedded.
Judge Sahrai ordered Loffredo’s release, stating that since Israeli military censors agreed to allow Ynet to publish both “word of [Jeremy’s] arrest and the publications that led to his arrest,” Israel could “no longer justify his continued detention.”
However, the police appealed Sahrai’s decision, protesting that the censor only approved the YNet article retroactively, and would have never done so if it had been submitted in advance.
That police also complained that Loffredo had refused to unlock his phone for them, insisting they needed more time to crack the device. “We believe that we will find things on the phone and we will be able to link him [to the alleged crime],” a police representative stated.
That argument did not hold water with Jerusalem District Court Judge Hana Miriam Lomp, however. “The Court of First Instance did not err when it ordered the release of the respondent,” Judge Lomp stated during the October 11 appeal. “From the detailed investigative actions there is no fear of disruption [from Jeremy], and in light of the reasons stated above, the cause of the danger is also not clear.”
Though Lomp ordered the journalist be released, she gave police until October 20 to continue their digital strip search. Until then, Loffredo will remain without his passport and will not be permitted to return home to his family in the US.
Just what Israeli officials hope to uncover in their search of Loffredo’s cell phone remains a mystery. Also unclear is why the investigation focuses exclusively on Loffredo, and not on any of the numerous other reporters who reported the locations of the Iranian strikes. […]
From The Intercept:
Though the same targets were featured in broadcasts by other media outlets, Israeli authorities tried to argued that Loffredo’s reporting allowed Iran to study future targets.
“He didn’t do anything original — he took it from different sources that were published already, all over, by Israeli and foreign journalists,” Tsemel told The Intercept, who decried the government’s attempts to charge Loffredo as “nonsense.”
Loffredo’s detainment, which drew little attention from Western media, comes amid an unprecedented year of Israel targeting journalists who are covering its war in Gaza. At least 126 journalists have been killed by Israeli forces since October 7, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least five of those journalists were specifically targeted by Israel for their work, CPJ said, as it investigates the killing of 10 others. And in the West Bank, CPJ documented 69 journalist arrests during the war, with 43 remaining in Israeli custody. Last month, an Israeli lawmaker requested Israeli police charge the head of human rights group B’Tselem, Yuli Novak, with the same charge aimed at Loffredo, after Novak provided an expert review before the United Nations Security Council.
Local Israeli media also faced censorship over coverage of the Iranian missile attack. An Israel Defense Forces censor had barred Israeli media from publishing the exact locations of missile impacts, according to The Times of Israel.
Japan, Nobel Prize Winner:
Israel has attacked a prominent survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing over a comparison he made between the blast and the current assault on Gaza.
Toshiyuki Mimaki, a leader of the Nihon Hidankyo organisation that represents survivors of the US attack, compared the two after the group was announced as the recepient of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
“I thought for sure it would be the people working so hard in Gaza, as we’ve seen,” he told reporters in Tokyo after the announcement.
“In Gaza, bleeding children are being held by their parents. It’s like in Japan 80 years ago.”
In response, Israel’s ambassador to Japan attacked the comparison as “outrageous and baseless”, and said such comparisons “distort history and dishonor the victims”.
In August, the American and British ambassadors to Japan announced they would skip the ceremony commemorating the victims of the US’s 1945 atomic bombing because the city’s mayor did not invite the Israeli ambassador.
During Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, multiple Israeli ministers and officials have advocated using a nuclear bomb on Gaza, turning the enclave into a “slaughterhouse” and “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth”.
South Africa has argued these statements are evidence of genocidal intent in its ongoing case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, a charge which Israel denies.
At least 140,000 people were killed by the US bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, while a further 74,000 were killed in Nagasaki three days later.
Nihon Hidankyo was founded by survivors to commemorate the blast and campaign for nuclear disarmament.
Israeli forces have killed at least 62 Palestinians and wounded 220 in the past 24 hours, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
This brings the death toll since 7 October 2023 to 42,289, with more than 98,684 wounded and at least 10,000 still missing, likely dead and buried under rubble.
Health officials report that over 60 percent of the victims are children and women.
Spain:
Australia:
Britain:
Ziofascist Western MSM in general:
USA:
From that October 9 article:
The Silicon Valley oligarch has deep ties to the CIA and the military-industrial complex and is one of the Republican Party’s most powerful backers. Already one of the world’s most influential individuals, if Donald Trump wins in November, Thiel has set himself up to become a “shadow president,” wielding gigantic power over us all. This is his story.
Shadow President
Donald Trump is surging. A recent New York Times poll found the former president is ahead in several key battleground states, making the coming election too close to call. One man undoubtedly heartened by this news is Peter Thiel, the German-born tech entrepreneur and co-founder of such companies as PayPal and Palantir. Thiel, whose net worth stands at $10 billion, bankrolled Trump’s successful 2016 campaign when few others would. He served on his transition team and as an advisor, leading commentators to label him a “shadow president.”
This time, however, Thiel will enjoy even more influence in the White House, as Trump has selected Ohio Senator and Thiel protégé J.D. Vance as his vice president. Thiel — who has previously stated that freedom and democracy are incompatible- bemoaned the extension of the vote to women and denounced the public as an “unthinking demos” — took Vance under his wing when the latter was still at college. From there, Thiel secured Vance his first job in 2013. Two years later, Vance joined his venture capital firm, and in 2020, he provided the seed money for Vance to start his own investment group.
Vance is a political neophyte, first running for Senate only in 2021. He was able to do so thanks to an enormous $15 million donation from Thiel — the largest ever amount to a Senate candidate. That Thiel had plucked someone from his own firm and bankrolled his political career raised many eyebrows at the time, with many feeling the billionaire had essentially bought a senate seat and put a pawn in his place. However, the stakes have been raised considerably now that Trump has selected Vance as his running mate. “J.D. Vance owes both his political career and his previous venture capital career to Peter Thiel,” Whitney Webb, an investigative journalist who has closely tracked Thiel’s exploits, told MintPress News.
It has not always been plain sailing between Trump and Vance. The latter began his political career as a vocal “Never Trump” Republican, describing the 45th president as an “idiot” and “America’s Hitler.” It was Thiel himself who personally escorted Vance to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to smooth over the relationship. The tech mogul’s pitch was successful, and in July, Trump shocked many by picking the inexperienced senator as his VP — a decision that gave Thiel unprecedented power and influence over the country’s direction.
[…]
Ultimately, Thiel is a walking contradiction: a libertarian who got rich from fat military contracts, an immigrant working with ICE and a free speech advocate who attacks media outlets. He presents himself as an outsider. Yet he is a mainstay at many of the world’s most elite institutions and conferences, including the Bilderberg Group, the Munich Security Conference, and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
In many ways, his persona is almost out of a comic book, a real-life Lex Luthor. From aiding an Israeli genocide in Gaza to using AI to surveil immigrants at home to spearheading a war against whistleblowers, Thiel’s story perfectly encapsulates how Silicon Valley has been folded into the national security state and works to maintain the American empire well into the 21st century.
Yet his latest venture into politics could arguably be his most consequential project. He has always had a close relationship with the U.S. government. However, a Trump/Vance White House could bring the billionaire a level of influence he previously could only have dreamed of. Thiel does not particularly seek out the limelight. However, with Trump surging in the polls, there is an increasing chance that he will soon have an even more profound influence over our lives, whether we like it or not. Therefore, it is crucial that we understand the man who could be calling the shots come November.
October 12
UN:
Comments on a September 11, 2024 UN report about the Ziofascist Israeli rape of Palestinian detainees:
USA:
Also from the NYT, a prime peddler of Ziofascist propaganda:
From Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) member Philip Giraldi in response to a Sept. 30, 2024 article:
October 13:
On Ziofascist Israel’s solipsism, evil and insanity:
Canada:
October 14: Another Al Aqsa Hospital Massacre and the Burning Alive of Shaaban Al-Dalo and His Mother Alaa
Similar scenes from a Ziofascist Israeli operation:
A fundamental difference between the Axis of Resistance and the Axis of Genocide:
Britain:
Sky News’ Kay Burley reads Ziofascist Israeli propaganda in a sad, sad voice while Israel incinerates Palestinian civilians:
Kay Burley: “And the four [Israeli] soldiers who have died have now been named: All of them were just 19 years old. […] As I said, all four of them, just 19 years old.”
An even more despicable attempt at Ziofascist damage control on LBC with the “Pallywood” excuse:
USA:
October 15
A Twitter/X article by journalist Chris Hedges:
Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history. If Israel is not stopped — and no outside power appears willing to halt the genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon — it will achieve its goals of depopulating and annexing northern Gaza and turning southern Gaza into a charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive, decimated by bombs and die from starvation and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon — 2,255 people have been killed and over one million Lebanese have been displaced — in an attempt to turn it into a failed state. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing the United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly salivating over proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei and carry out airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear installations and oil facilities.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House — Antony Blinken, raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan — are true believers in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.
In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragon’s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery — we call it terrorism — what was done to those slain in the previous generation.
Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this.
Those of us who covered the Middle East were stunned that the Bush administration imagined it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children. Denis Halliday, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, resigned in 1998 over U.S.-imposed sanctions, calling them “genocidal” because they represented “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq.”
Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst for Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.
Will the international community continue to stand by passively and allow Israel to carry out a mass extermination campaign? Will there ever be limits? Or will war with Lebanon and Iran provide a smokescreen — Israel’s worst campaigns of ethnic cleansing and mass murder have always been done under the cover of war — to turn what is happening in Palestine into an updated version of the Armenian genocide?
I fear, given that the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties, as well as cowed the media and universities, the rivers of blood will continue to swell. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.
Unless, as Chalmers Johnson writes in “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” “we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence gathering to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon” we will “never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation.”
Genocide is done by attrition. Once a targeted group is stripped of its rights the next steps are the displacement of the population, destruction of the infrastructure and the wholesale killing of civilians. Israel is also attacking and killing international monitors, human rights organizations, aid workers and United Nations staff, a feature of most genocides. Foreign journalists are being arrested and accused of “aiding the enemy,” while Palestinian journalists are being assassinated and their families wiped out. Israel carries out continuous assaults in Gaza on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), where two-thirds of its facilities have been damaged or destroyed, and 223 of its staff have been killed. It has attacked the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), where peacekeepers have been fired upon, tear gassed and wounded. This tactic replicates the Bosnian Serb attacks in July 1995, which I covered, on the U.N. Protection Force outposts in Srebrenica. The Serbs, who had cut off food deliveries to the Bosnian enclave, resulting in severe malnutrition and starvation, overran the U.N. outposts and took 30 U.N. troops hostage before massacring more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys.
These initial phases are complete in Gaza. The final stage is mass death, not only from bullets and bombs, but famine and disease. No food has entered northern Gaza since the beginning of this month.
Israel has been dropping leaflets demanding everyone in the north evacuate. 400,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza must leave or die. It has ordered the evacuation of hospitals — Israel is also targeting hospitals in Lebanon — deployed drones to fire indiscriminately on civilians, including those attempting to take the wounded for treatment, bombed schools that serve as shelters and turned the Jabaliya refugee camp into a free fire zone. As usual, Israel continues to target journalists, including Al Jazeera’s Fadi Al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck and remains in critical condition. At least 175 journalists and media workers are estimated to have been killed by Israeli troops in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warns that aid shipments to all of Gaza are at their lowest level in months. “People have run out of ways to cope, food systems have collapsed, and the risk of famine persists,” it notes.
The total siege imposed on northern Gaza will, in the next stage, be imposed on southern Gaza. Incremental death. And the primary weapon, as in the north, will be famine.
Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.
Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, in August complained openly that international pressure is preventing Israel from starving the Palestinians, “even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.”
What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesia’s military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath — much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs — decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.
This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as it will be in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis.
The killers in the Indonesian war against “communism” are cheered at political rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are interviewed on television about their “heroic” battles. The three-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the “Brownshirts” or the Hitler Youth — in 1965, joined in the genocidal mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the nation.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary “The Act of Killing,” which took eight years to make, exposes the dark psychology of a society that engages in genocide and venerates mass murderers.
We are as depraved as the killers in Indonesia and Israel. We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military.
Our mass killing in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq — what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar” — defines Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon. Technowar is centered on the concept of “overkill.” Overkill, with its intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an effective form of deterrence.
We, like Israel, as Nick Turse points out in “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam” deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children.
The slaughters, Turse writes, “were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military.”
Many of the Vietnamese — like Palestinians — who were murdered, Turse relates, were first subjected to degrading forms of public abuse. They were, Turse writes, when first detained “confined to tiny barbed wire ‘cow cages’ and sometimes jabbed with sharpened bamboo sticks while inside them.” Other detainees “were placed in large drums filled with water; the containers were then struck with great force, which caused internal injuries but left no scars.” Some were “suspended by ropes for hours on end or hung upside down and beaten, a practice called ‘the plane ride.’” They were subjected to electric shocks from crank-operated field telephones, battery-powered devices, or even cattle prods.” Soles of feet were beaten. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives, “suffocated, burned by cigarettes, or beaten with truncheons, clubs, sticks, bamboo flails, baseball bats, and other objects. Many were threatened with death or even subjected to mock executions.” Turse found — again like Israel — that “detained civilians and captured guerrillas were often used as human mine detectors and regularly died in the process.” And while soldiers and Marines were engaged in daily acts of brutality and murder, the CIA “organized, coordinated, and paid for” a clandestine program of targeted assassinations “of specific individuals without any attempt to capture them alive or any thought of a legal trial.”
“After the war,” Turse concludes, “most scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for — and thus blot out — all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiers’ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”
There is no difference between us and Israel. This is why we do not halt the genocide. Israel is doing exactly what we would do in its place. Israel’s bloodlust is our own. As ProPublica reported, “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.”
U.S. law requires the government to suspend weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid.
Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new animosities. The physical eradication of all Palestinians, the only way genocide works, is an impossibility given that six million Palestinians alone live in the diaspora. Over five million live in Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel’s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance. And it has turned Israel and the U.S. into despised pariahs.
Israel and the U.S. will probably win this round. But ultimately, they have signed their own death warrants.
October 16
USA:
Antony “The Butcher” Blinken and his Israeli intelligence ties:
October 17: Ziofascist Israel Kills Hamas Leader Yahya Sinwar
Reactions:
Yahya Sinwar: “We know that we don’t want war or fighting, because it costs lives, and our people deserve peace. For long periods of time, we’ve tried peaceful resistance.
Unfortunately, we expected that the international community, free people and international organizations, would stop the occupation from committing crimes and massacring our people. Unfortunately, the world stood by and watched as the occupation war machine killed our young people. […]”
Hamas reactions:
Lebanese reactions:
Iranian reactions:
Jordanian reactions:
British reactions:
US reactions:
More from ‘the most moral army in the world’:
West Bank:
Britain:
British counterterrorism police on Thursday raided the home and seized several electronic devices belonging to The Electronic Intifada’s associate editor Asa Winstanley.
Approximately 10 officers arrived at Winstanley’s North London home before 6 am and served the journalist with warrants and other papers authorizing them to search his house and vehicle for devices and documents.
A letter addressed to Winstanley from the “Counter Terrorism Command” of the Metropolitan Police Service indicates that the authorities are “aware of your profession” as a journalist but that “notwithstanding, police are investigating possible offenses” under sections 1 and 2 of the Terrorism Act (2006). These provisions set out the purported offense of “encouragement of terrorism.”
An officer conducting Thursday’s raid informed Winstanley that the investigation was connected with the journalist’s social media posts. Attempts to reach the Metropolitan Police Service for comment for this story have been unsuccessful.
Although his devices were seized, Winstanley was not arrested and has not been charged with any offense.
Winstanley is active on several social media platforms, and has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter/X, where he frequently shares articles, other peoples’ opinions and his own comments on Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, British government support for these crimes, and the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide.
The vaguely worded provisions relating to “encouragement of terrorism” would clearly violate the First Amendment of the United States Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech, however the United Kingdom lacks similar constitutional protections for freedom of expression.
The draconian legislation “curtails a range of freedoms,” according to University of Edinburgh law professor Andrew Cornford, including “the freedoms to discuss controversial topics openly, and to share moral, political and religious opinions.”
Human Rights Watch has called on the British government to repeal the repressive provisions of the Terrorism Act (2006), noting that “the definition of the encouragement of terrorism offense is overly broad, raising serious concerns about undue infringement on free speech.”
In August, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service issued a warning to the British public to “think before you post” and threatening that it would prosecute anyone it deemed guilty of what it calls “online violence.”
“Journalism is not a crime”
The police raid on Winstanley’s home and the seizure of his devices appears to be the latest use by British authorities of repressive “counterterrorism” legislation to crack down on journalists and activists involved in reporting on or protesting Israel’s crimes, including its ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
In December, Winstanley reported for The Electronic Intifada on how British counterrorism police arrested Mick Napier and Tony Greenstein, two prominent activists, for saying they support the Palestinian right to resist Israel — a right enshrined in international law.
As part of his bail conditions, Greenstein, an author and contributor to The Electronic Intifada, was ordered “not to post on X (formerly Twitter) in regards to the ongoing conflict in Gaza.”
In mid-August, British journalist Richard Medhurst was arrested on arrival at London’s Heathrow Airport, detained under the Terrorism Act (2000), and had his phone and recording devices that he used for his journalism seized.
“Richard Medhurst’s arrest and detention for almost 24 hours using terrorism legislation is deeply concerning and will likely have a chilling effect on journalists in the UK and worldwide, in fear of arrest by UK authorities simply for carrying out their work,” Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the UK’s National Union of Journalists and Anthony Bellanger, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, said at the time in a joint statement.
“Both the NUJ and IFJ are shocked at the increased use of terrorism legislation by the British police in this manner,” Stanistreet and Bellanger added. “Journalism is not a crime. Powers contained in anti-terror legislation must be deployed proportionately — not wielded against journalists in ways that inevitably stifle press freedom.”
Nonetheless, later in August, British counterrorism police raided the home of Sarah Wilkinson, a Palestine solidarity activist with a large following, also reportedly in relation to content she posted online.
Full solidarity with Asa Winstanley
The letter handed to Winstanley by police refers to the raid on his home as being part of “Operation Incessantness,” perhaps indicative of a broad and ongoing crackdown against critics of Israel’s British-backed crimes.
Winstanley’s most recent investigative article, “How Israel killed hundreds of its own people on 7 October,” brings together a year of The Electronic Intifada’s reporting, along with new information, detailing Israel’s use of the Hannibal Directive — a secret order that allows Israeli forces to kill their own citizens rather than allowing them to be taken captive.
Winstanley is the author of Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn, a book culminating from his years of reporting on Britain’s Labour Party while it was in opposition.
Since 2019, the Labour Party launched an investigation and has made legal threats in apparent retaliation for Winstanley’s journalism.
Now that Labour is the UK’s ruling party, it has the potential to use the apparatus of the state against those it views as its own — or Israel’s — political enemies.
The raid on Winstanley’s home is clearly intended to intimidate and silence him, as well as other journalists and activists.
As far as The Electronic Intifada is concerned, it will have only the opposite effect. Our colleague Asa Winstanley can count on our full support and solidarity, and as a publication we will continue to pursue with vigor any stories documenting British complicity in Israel’s crimes.
Ziofascist GMB and Jacob Rees-Mogg propaganda directed at Antizionist university professor and scholar David Miller:
USA:
Genocide Joe:
The Biden administration admitted today that the CIA and military special operations forces have been assisting Israel to locate and track Hamas leaders, an involvement in the Gaza war that goes far beyond what the government previously disclosed. The revelation follows Wednesday’s killing of October 7 architect Yayha Sinwar, but also comes after months of assurances by the White House that American intelligence and special operators were merely involved in hostage recovery.
Despite the fact that Sinwar was killed by accident (and not as part of a targeted operation), the Biden administration’s desperation to grab some of the limelight is more a political desire to demonstrate success in their decision to support Israel. It also shows an acceptance of one of Israel’s core beliefs about its wars against its many enemies, one that the United States has adopted: that killing leaders is going to eliminate threats, indeed that it is tantamount to victory.
Israeli leaders are already crowing that Hamas should release the hostages and “surrender,” pushing its own fantasy and narrative about the significance of Sinwar’s death, which is being used to affirm the country’s never-ending war. Lost in all the hoo-hah is the fact that Washington has consistently lied to the American people.
The U.S. does have boots on the ground in Israel. The U.S. is directly involved in Israel’s military campaigns. The U.S. is intrinsic to Israel’s ability to defend itself against Iran. It is the guarantor of Israel’s military adventures. All without much ability or evident interest in restraining the country or seeking any real negotiated outcome.
“Shortly after the October 7 massacres, I directed Special Operations personnel and our intelligence professionals to work side-by-side with their Israeli counterparts to help locate and track Sinwar and other Hamas leaders hiding in Gaza,” President Biden said today in a press release. Vice President Harris issued a nearly identical statement.
In October of last year, when asked if there were U.S. special operators on the ground in Israel, Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder responded evasively. “We are providing planning and intelligence support to the Israelis, as it pertains to hostage recovery.” Hostage recovery has remained the administration’s official line ever since. Such statements were frequently accompanied by a reminder that American citizens are among the hostages taken by Hamas. For Washington, it was a deft manipulation: Who could be opposed to rescuing Americans?
But behind the scenes, the Biden administration was providing assistance to locate not just Sinwar but other Hamas leadership as well. The embrace of the same War-on-Terror style head-hunting framework adopted by the Bush administration after 9/11 flies in the face of Biden’s public rhetoric about Israel’s need to resist the seduction of revenge.
“I caution this,” Biden said 10 days after Hamas’ attack on Israel. “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it.”
Asked today if the U.S. special operators had located Sinwar, Ryder declined to elaborate on the White House’s statement, hinting that the hostage recovery mission was used to track Hamas leaders.
“I’m not going to get into intelligence. What I’m telling you is this was an Israeli operation and that we’ve been sharing information and intelligence in support of hostage recovery efforts and the tracking of these leaders who have been holding hostages, hostages to include Americans. And so, insomuch as it’s helped to inform Israeli operations in general writ large, certainly it has played a role.”
After 20-plus years of hunting al Qaeda and other terrorists, U.S. intelligence has become very proficient at the painstaking task, mastering real time intelligence processing, precise geolocation, and rapid attack on individuals. Multiple sources have been added to the post 9/11 arsenal, from big data analysis to close in collection of the most minute of signals. New weapons and drones have been developed. Specialty organizations have been created. Behind all of this is a special access program in a joint CIA-military cell in McLean, Virginia that conducts the most sensitive “high value targeting.” The experts look for any blip that indicates a target’s location, a process that is a form of forensic analysis that includes overhead reconnaissance, signals intercepts, and on-the-ground detection.
One year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.” So reads the title of a recent Axios article describing the Israeli prime minister riding on an unbeatable wave of triumphs. These stunning military “successes,” its author Barak Ravid notes, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassinations of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the pager attack against Lebanon.
The same author recently went viral for an article that claimed that Israeli attacks against Hezbollah are “not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach ‘de-escalation through escalation.’” Users on social media mocked Ravid for this bizarre, Orwellian reasoning. But what almost everybody missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy — or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former analyst with Israeli spying agency Unit 8200, and as recently as last year, was still a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces group.
Unit 8200 is Israel’s largest and perhaps most controversial spying organization. It has been responsible for many high-profile espionage and terror operations, including the recent pager attack that injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. As this investigation will reveal, Ravid is far from the only Israeli ex-spook working at top U.S. media outlets, working hard to manufacture Western support for his country’s actions.
White House Insider
Ravid has quickly become one of the most influential individuals in the Capitol Hill press corps. In April, he won the prestigious White House Press Correspondents’ Award “for overall excellence in White House coverage” — one of the highest awards in American journalism. Judges were impressed by what they described as his “deep, almost intimate levels of sourcing in the U.S. and abroad” and picked out six articles as exemplary pieces of journalism.
Most of these stories consisted of simply printing anonymous White House or Israeli government sources, making them look good, and distancing President Biden from the horrors of the Israeli attack on Palestine. As such, there was functionally no difference between these and White House press releases. For example, one story the judges picked out was titled “Scoop: Biden tells Bibi 3-day fighting pause could help secure release of some hostages,” and presented the 46th President of the United States as a dedicated humanitarian hellbent on reducing suffering. Another described how “frustrated” Biden was becoming with Netanyahu and the Israeli government.
Protestors had called on reporters to snub the event in solidarity with their fallen counterparts in Gaza (which, at the time of writing, comes to at least 128 journalists). Not only was there no boycott of the event, but organizers gave their highest award to an Israeli intelligence official-turned-reporter who has earned a reputation as perhaps the most dutiful stenographer of power in Washington.
Ravid was personally presented with the award by President Biden, who embraced him like a brother. That a known (former) Israeli spy could hug Biden in such a manner speaks volumes about not only the intimate relationship between the United States and Israel but about the extent to which establishment media holds power to account.
Ravid has made a name for himself by uncritically printing flattering information given to him by either the U.S. or Israeli government and passing it off as a scoop. In April, he wrote that “President Biden laid out an ultimatum to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their call on Thursday: If Israel doesn’t change course in Gaza, ‘we won’t be able to support you,’” and that he was “making his strongest push for an end to the fighting in Gaza in six months of war, and warning for the first time that U.S. policy on the war will depend on Israel’s adherence to his demands,” which included “an immediate ceasefire.” In July, he repeated anonymous sources that told him that Netanyahu and Israel are striving for “a diplomatic solution” — another highly dubious claim.
Other articles by Ravid following the same pattern include:
Scoop: Biden tells Bibi he’s not in it for a year of war in Gaza
Scoop: White House cancels meeting, scolds Netanyahu in protest over video
Biden “running out” of patience with Bibi as Gaza war hits 100 days
Biden-Bibi clash escalates as U.S. accused of undermining Israeli government
Biden and Bibi “red lines” for Rafah put them on a collision course
Biden on hot mic: Told Bibi we needed “come to Jesus” meeting on Gaza
Scoop: White House loses trust in Israeli government as Middle East spirals
Israeli minister lambasted at White House about Gaza and war strategy
Scoop: Biden told Bibi U.S. won’t support an Israeli counterattack on Iran
This relentless whitewashing of the Biden administration has drawn widespread mockery online.
“AXIOS EXCLUSIVE: After selling Netanyahu millions of dollars worth of weapons, Biden played — loudly — Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood.’ ‘Everyone could hear it,’ a source close to Biden says,” tweeted X user David Grossman. “Continuing to hand over big piles of cash and weapons, but shaking my head so everyone knows i sort of disagree with it,” quipped comedian Hussein Kesvani, in response to Ravid’s latest article suggesting that Biden has become “increasingly distrustful” of the Israeli government.
Throughout this supposed split between the U.S. and Israel, the Biden administration has continued to voice enthusiastic support for Israeli offensives, block ceasefire resolutions and Palestinian statehood at the U.N., and has sent $18 billion worth of weapons to Israel in the past 12 months. Thus, no matter how questionable these Axios reports are, they serve a vital role for Washington, allowing the Biden administration to distance itself from what international bodies have labeled a genocide. Ravid’s function has been to manufacture consent for the government among elite liberal audiences who read Axios, allowing them to continue to believe that the U.S. is an honest broker for peace in West Asia rather than a key enabler of Israel.
Ravid does not hide his open disdain for Palestinians. In September, he retweeted a post that stated:
That’s the PaliNazi way…they pocket concessions without giving anything in return and then use those concessions as the baseline for the next round of negotiations. PaliNazis don’t know how to tell the truth.”
Less than one week later, he promoted Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s highly dubious claim that Israeli Defense Forces had found a picture of the children al-Qassam Brigades leader Mohammed Sinwar celebrating in front of a huge picture of planes hitting the World Trade Center. Gallant stated that they had found this picture — clearly trying to falsely associate Palestinians with 9/11 — in a tunnel “where the Sinwar brothers were hiding like rats.” […]
More reminders that and how the USA and US media are deeply infiltrated by Israeli spies:
