Tag Archives: Palestine

AIPAC Lobbies Against Probe Of US-Palestinian Journalist Likely Murdered By Israeli Sniper, by Tyler Durden

Posted on June 25, 2022 | Leave a comment

This is a story many members of the establishment would just like to shove under the rug, because it may involve some culpability on the part of Israel. That nation is of course the fair-haired child of U.S. foreign policy and can do no wrong. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Twenty-four U.S. senators sent a letter to President Biden on Thursday urging an FBI and State Department investigation of the May 11 killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank. They did so in defiance of the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which actively lobbied against the letter. 

Abu Akleh, a star reporter for al Jazeera, was shot in the head on May 11 in the West Bank town of Jenin, as she and her crew reported on an Israeli raid on a refugee camp. The Al Jazeera crew and other witnesses said Israeli forces were responsible, but the Israeli government raced to blame “Palestinian terrorists firing indiscriminately,” tweeting a video that purported to support the claim.

However, demonstrating a sharply heightened capacity for honest reporting about Israel when Israel’s victim happens to be a journalist, several major U.S. media outlets have investigated the incident and concluded Abu Akleh was most likely killed by Israeli security forces.

CNN was particularly forceful, saying its multifaceted forensic investigation concluded that Abu Akleh was “shot dead in a targeted attack by Israeli forces.” In addition to video and acoustic evidence, the tight shot group on the tree she was standing next to was indicative of careful and deliberate fire, an expert told CNN. Abu Akleh and her crew were all wearing helmets and vests marked “PRESS.”

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The Israeli Government Is Changing, but Some Things Remain the Same, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on June 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

Meet the new Israeli boss, same as the old Israeli boss. From Philip Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

However, there is growing sentiment even in Congress and the Zionist controlled media that “what is wrong is wrong,” Phil Giraldi writes.

Israel is undergoing a change of management, with reliably hardline Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being replaced by extreme nationalist Naftali Bennett. Bennett has at intervals favored the disenfranchisement of non-Jewish Israeli citizens and the ethnic cleansing of all non-Jews from historic Palestine, killing them if necessary. He opposes the creation of any Palestinian state and routinely describes Palestinian protesters as terrorists while stating his belief that they should be shot on sight. He has also boasted of his shooting Palestinians during his military service, saying at one point “I already killed lots of Arabs in my life, and there is absolutely no problem with that.” He was heavily involved in “Operation Grapes of Wrath” in Lebanon in the 1980s, where his commando unit killed numerous civilians, and takes pleasure in recounting his participation in Israel’s war crimes.

All of which means that there will be no respite from the brutal Netanyahu reign of terror which has been prevailing on the West Bank, in Gaza and also in Jerusalem itself. If anything, the pressure on Arabs forcing them to leave will intensify. Evidence that the recently negotiated cease fire was little more than a pause in the plan to mitigate international pressure before continuing to make the former Palestine Palestinian free is already available. Israeli police and army units have been arresting hundreds of Arabs, many of whom are Israeli citizens, not because they have broken any of the “rules” imposed by the Netanyahu government, but as a preventive measure to have them identified, allowing them to be safely locked away when the next round of fighting begins. Eighteen hundred arrests have been reported since unrest began in April, but the figure is probably much higher than that. An estimated 25% of those who are detained are children and 85% of those children arrested report that they were physically abused.  Also, at least 26 Palestinians have been killed while resisting. It has been claimed that the police, embarrassed by being ridiculed by protesting Palestinians, are “settling scores” and “closing accounts,” frequently using savage beatings during arrests and as collective punishment to break the Arab resistance.

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Israel Wins Big in Washington, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on June 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

Israel is America’s trust fund kid and it’s definitely been spoiled. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

$1.2 billion more is on the way!

Now let me get this straight. A nation bullies and harasses a much smaller neighbor which eventually leads that neighbor to strike back with largely home-made weapons. The larger and more powerful country, armed with state of the art killing machines, attacks its basically unarmed opponent and kills hundreds of civilians, including a large number of children. It also destroys billions of dollars of infrastructure in the poorer and weaker neighbor. Almost immediately after the fighting stops, senior legislators from a third nation that had nothing to do with the war apart from supplying the larger nation with weapons appeared on the scene and promoted the lie that the larger nation had actually been the victim of an unprovoked attack by the “terrorists” running the small nation. They did so publicly while meeting with and endorsing the actions of the government officials from the large nation, which, it would seem, is about to be investigated by an international body for war crimes. They were joined by an ex-officio former foreign minister of the third nation who likewise echoed the propaganda being put out by the large nation. Several of them also promised to provide military assistance worth $1 billion so the large nation could rearm itself.

Of course, I am writing about how Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Bill Hagerty traveled to Israel over the Memorial Day weekend and bowed and scraped before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and company. During his meeting with Bibi, Graham even held up a sign reading “More for Israel.” They were joined in Jerusalem by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who was in town visiting with his old friend Yossi Cohen, head of the Israeli Intelligence service Mossad, who is retiring soon.

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Another Claim of ‘Mission Accomplished’ Collapses, by Alastair Crooke

Posted on June 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s been a long time since the US government had a foreign policy “mission accomplished.” From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

A provocation at the al-Aqsa enclosure by one or other of the extreme Settler cults, is not probable – it is inevitable, Alastair Crooke writes.

The post WW2 policy iceberg – like that of the Artic Cap – may still be solid – but only just. And, like the real Ice Cap, it too is disintegrating. It no longer serves purpose for our internationalist oligarchs. Bits of it are crumbling; some are purposefully being offered up (i.e. Gates/Fauci). Though, to extend this metaphor to geo-politics would be to say that we may be on the cusp of a multi-facetted cascade of the post-war, ‘forever’ political certainties – some intended; many not; but all disruptive.

On the one hand, the U.S. outsized military establishment demands a new raison d’être – just as Russia and China unveil their smart new weaponry. The ‘bigger play’, of course, is that the social decay eating away at the fabric of America has become all too visible – and damaging to the desired recasting of the American mission (Green-washing and now LBGTQ ‘washing’ – as mechanisms to firstly disrupt, and then reset, politics and geo-finance).

Belligerent ‘competition’ with China is ramped as the means to reunite this fragmented America. Yet, however much Washington keeps pushing Europe and Japan to decouple from both China and Russia, a Cold War 2.0 on two simultaneous fronts has very few takers. The (self-harming) EU provocations of China and Russia over Belarus or the Uyghurs – as naively woke, as they are – are no accident, however.

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Twisting UK Law to Criminalize Dissent on Palestine, by Craig Murray

Posted on June 3, 2021 | Leave a comment

The British have destroyed their traditional freedom of speech and the press, even more so than the US. From Craig Murray at consortiumnews.com:

raig Murray denounces the U.K.’s persecution of Richard Barnard for calling out his country’s role in the manufacture of instruments for the death and maiming of Palestinians. 

Matam high-tech park in Haifa, Israel, where military manufacturer Elbit Systems has one of the buildings in the foreground. (Zvi Roger, Haifa Municipality, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Once you have been active in politics for a few decades, you get used to the popular convulsions of support for Palestine every few years when Israel military action against Gaza becomes particularly intense. Then follows a ceasefire, the media move on and Israel resumes the daily routine of low-level evictions, destruction of tree crops, imprisonments and murders that accomplishes the gradual extinction of the territories that the Western powers pretended to intend for a Palestinian state.

For the media, 50 Palestinian children killed in a week has been a story. The regular killing of 50 a year is not; and anybody who thinks it is must be labeled an anti-Semite and hounded from political life.

As a young man, the two great injustices we campaigned on were South Africa and Palestine. I never dreamt the latter abuse would possibly outlast me. These two issues resonated so much because they were both remnants of European colonial arrogance, founded on racism and a sense of cultural superiority.

Nowadays I cannot even think myself into a mindset that says that for the greater good of the United Kingdom, it is O.K. to deport the entire population of the Chagos Islands to make way for a military base. But that was the view not just of governments, but of Labour governments, inside my own lifetime.

I should like to think that the undeniable openness of Israeli apartheid rule has made a fundamental shift in thinking towards Palestine, but I do not think much has in fact changed. The media and political class remain bought and paid for on the issue.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Recantations Are All the Rage, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on June 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

Israel has an unmatched propaganda, influence, and retribution operation, but it’s losing ground, at least temporarily, on the Palestinian conflict. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

Several things are happening simultaneously. Most important, Israel has lost the public opinion war in much of the world through its brutality during the recent attack on Gaza and it continues to lose ground even in the wake of a cease fire due to mass arrests of Palestinians and armed police intrusions in and around the al-Aqsa mosque. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is by its actions making clear that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine will continue at a time that he chooses. This in turn has produced a storm of criticism, including from Jewish groups and individuals, that is condemning the bloodshed and also sometimes explicitly seeking to distance Judaism the religion from Zionism, the political movement.

Some have suggested that we have finally reached a tipping point in which Israel has gone too far, evident in the Irish Government’s condemnation of Israeli “de facto annexation” of Palestinian land. Foreign Minister Simon Coveney told the Dial that “The scale, pace and strategic nature of Israel’s actions on settlement expansion and the intent behind it have brought us to a point where we need to be honest about what is actually happening on the ground …”

The Jewish state has even succeeded in alienating many who are normally supporters in countries like the United States, quite possibly leading to an eventual shift in policy in Congress and at the White House. That view might be exaggerated given the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to make past atrocities go away, but it might obtain some back-handed credibility from the ferocity of the counter-attack being waged by Israel and its friends against the celebrities and politicians who have finally developed backbones and have spoken out in defense of Palestinian rights.

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Israel and Palestine: What Else Is New? by Taki

Posted on June 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

Israel is essentially an occupying power, created after World War II, displacing Palestinians who already lived there, and eventually confining many of them to Gaza under brutal restrictions. The problem with taking up the Palestinian side is its corrupt leadership, but ordinary Palestinians deserve a better break than the one history and its own leadership have dealt them. From Taki at takimag.com:

Back in 1967, during the Six-Day War, I was living in Paris, and such was my pro-Israel ardor, I actually went to some dump and put my name down as a volunteer in case the state of Israel ran out of soldiers. I was asked by the man in charge if I was Jewish, I answered in the negative, and he jumped up and shook my hand. As everyone knows, my services were not needed that June 54 years ago, and the war was over while I was still contemplating which Parisian girl I would invite to go with me while I gallantly defended Israel’s right to exist.

Two years later, as a freelance photographer for Newsweek and Paris Match, I was in Jordan covering the aftermath of that famous victory, and what I saw made me ashamed to have ever contemplated fighting for Israel. I had been shown around the refugee camps by Farris Glubb, son of Sir John Glubb, or Glubb Pasha, as the Arabs called him, the British general who created and headed the Arab Legion when it fought for Arab independence from the Turks during World War I. Farris clued me in on what had been happening since 1948, when Israel expelled 700,000 Palestinians and created its modern state. These 700,000 were living in outdoor camps and in dire conditions and had been there since 1948. After the 1967 war, hundreds of thousands were added, and the number has grown exponentially since.

I covered the Yom Kippur War of 1973 from the Israeli side, and witnessed the Syrian and Egyptian armies giving a good account of themselves during the first week of fighting. The Egyptians used wire-guided hand-carried missiles to attack Israeli armor in the Sinai, while Syrian tanks held the “invincible” Israeli armor to a standstill in the Golan. I spent my nights in Tel Aviv and drove to the front either in the desert or the Golan every morning. Peter Townsend, a famous Battle of Britain pilot and erstwhile lover of Princess Margaret, writing for Paris Match, was my constant companion. He had never seen a dead body before, having done his fighting up in the air. It was an education for him.

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Palestine Has the Right to Defend Itself, by Taxi

Posted on May 14, 2021 | 1 comment

Are the reasons for the US’s support of Israel fading? Can Israel survive without US support? From Taxi at unz.com:

We have entered a new era in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The old days of Israel committing war crimes against the downtrodden, captive Palestinians are over. The world has done zero to address Israel’s fundamental crime of nation-stealing: a megalith crime that can only be described as the longest and most vicious war crime in our modern history. A crime that millions of people around the world consider to be even worse than the holocaust. After some 73 years of enduring relentless Israeli terrorism, land-theft, cultural appropriation AND the silence of the world, the Palestinian Resistance has finally taken charge and has, literally overnight, turned the tables against Israel. From here on, there will be accountability for Israel for any crime it commits against the Palestinians. From here on, all previous Israeli red lines will be crossed in favor of the Palestinians. From here on, the death of Israel is no longer a far-fetched fantasy. From here on, the Palestinian Resistance will take charge of Palestine’s destiny. And its destiny is total liberation.

Whether this liberation takes place in a day, in a week, in a month or a year, the gates of liberation are now open, and nobody on earth can close them.

The situation in the holy land is currently fluid – rocket and missile strikes continue by both sides with no end in sight as I write this. There is no point in talking casualties and targets in this article as this is not a journalistic report but a brief look at America’s strategy in the Middle East.

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