Israeli war propaganda moves from cheering genocide to phony angst

Gaza- shrapnel car August 9 2014

When you think you’ve heard it all in Zionist propaganda, think again. This Palestinian boy is playing inside the carcass of a car shrapneled to death in the residential neighborhood of al-Shejaea of Gaza City. Israeli hasbara claims it warned residents (through automated phone calls, text messages, & leaflets dropped from planes) to evacuate their homes before it bombed them into smithereens. So when Palestinians ran to pick up a leaflet or evacuated their homes were they then shrapneled to death by the same kind of artillery barrage that destroyed this car?

Zionist media & apologists are having a hell of a time trying to clean up the propaganda disaster of hundreds of Palestinian “civilians” & children slaughtered like fish in a barrel. They’re trying first to minimize the numbers killed & claim the death toll is under dispute, as if Palestinians jack up the numbers for sympathy. Well of course, the death toll is under debate; many people are still buried dead & alive in cement rubble & no one yet knows how many have died.

Some media, like the NY Times & BBC, are analyzing death data & the NY Times concludes the most overrepresented in the death toll are men aged 20 to 29, “the population most likely to be militants.” Well that’s okay then!? Apparently being a young man in Gaza makes you an acceptable target for Israeli bombs & shrapnel. The NY Times continues its idiocies: “Human rights groups acknowledge that people killed by Hamas as collaborators & people who died naturally, or perhaps through domestic violence, are most likely counted as well.” Well quite frankly we can understand (even if we completely disbelieve the allegation) that Hamas would shoot someone collaborating with Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza. That’s where that “war is hell” thing really fits. We would certainly like the human rights group cited by the NY Times to identify themselves & document such allegations. But are we really expected to believe Palestinian men took time out from dodging Israeli bombs & artillery to beat their wives for not having dinner on the table? Or that a Palestinian who had a heart attack during the bombing just had a ticker than ran out?

Israeli war propaganda made the death of Palestinian children a central theme by targeting children with their bombs & then claiming parents used their beloved kids as human shields–or as Eely-Oily Weasel put it, “child sacrifice.” But there’s fallout to face & Zionist apologists are struggling to cope with the condemnation. So what we’re getting now is the hand-wringing, the angst, what the NY Times calls grappling with the “moral implications” of slaughtering so many Palestinian children. But this kind of moral grappling is only worthy of contempt. Listen to how cleverly this angst is framed: “many Israelis & their supporters abroad, forced to grapple with the moral implications of backing a military campaign against guerrilla fighters embedded in a densely populated area, have embraced the rationale offered by Israel’s government that Islamist militants are guilty of provoking the carnage by launching missiles from residential neighborhoods.” So you see just how deep that grappling goes!? Hamas provoked the slaughter of small children & unarmed men & women. Does that differ from Netan-psycho-yahu who said “Every civilian casualty is a tragedy, a tragedy of Hamas’s own making”?

The NY Times wants us to see the scope of Zionist “radical empathy” (as the liberal Zionist rabbi terms it) by citing Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic who said, “A provocation does not relieve one of accountability for how one responds to it. For this reason, the war has filled me with disquiet, which my sympathetic understanding of Israel’s position has failed to stifle.” Disquiet at ethnic cleansing? Not revulsion? Oh such delicate & refined sensibilities! Disquiet is what you feel when someone farts in public, not what normal people feel when hundreds of people are bombed to death.

Mr Wieseltier goes on: “I have been surprised by the magnitude of the indifference in the Jewish world to the human costs of Israel’s defense against the missiles & the tunnels. Some of the emails I have received have been lunatic in their lack of compassion. According to a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, 95 percent of Jewish Israelis believe the war in Gaza is just. It is easy to see why: Self-defense is also a moral duty. But only 4 percent believe that the Israeli military has used excessive force. This makes me queasy.” Well good on him for feeling slightly indigested because most of the world have been deeply disturbed–not to mention, horrified–by the sight of Israelis sitting in the hills of Sderot cheering on ethnic cleansing like it was the World Cup.

Israel & it’s media chorus have a quandary on their hands & there is no reason on earth why those who oppose ethnic cleansing should buy this phony hand-wringing & “radical empathy”. Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing have been going on for over 66 years & the first time angst appears is when over a million people around the world rose up in opposition.

Flip this stuff the bird & keep marching in solidarity with Palestinian justice & opposition to ethnic cleansing.

(Photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)

“We’re OK in Gaza”

 

“We’re OK in Gaza. We’re just scrabbling for life amid the death that spreads wider & wider each day. The death which stalks every corner, snatches up souls from every alley, attacks every building, every street, every home. It doesn’t distinguish between old & young, between man or woman, between a child in its mother’s womb & an old man soon headed for the grave. It has become a common language among us, this death. We do not fear death per se, just the way it arrives—its cruel closing in, its ineffable descent, the painful impact when it tears us to shreds. Did this hand belong to that man, or to the man or the women who died next to him? That’s the cruelty we fear, that’s what we don’t want. As for death itself, each of us feels we’ve eluded death already, when every previous war failed to finish us off. We fear death coming painfully like an act of fate—we want it to come softly, like a gentle spell. Death itself is welcome, for every life has its pathways and endings that we have no control over. We just want to live out the life nature has in store for us, like other humans. Just like our children want to be like other ordinary children—like the ones who appear on their television screens. It’s as if there is a life for other people, and a separate life for us.”

(From “We’re OK in Gaza” by Atef Abu Saif in Guernica magazine, August 8th 2014)

(Photo is children in Rafah, Gaza by Flickr user Giles)

A tribute to Palestinian survivors of Israeli ethnic cleansing

Rahaf Al Attar (Gaza) August 8 2014

We should also take a moment to honor the children of Gaza who survived the savagery of Operation Ethnic Cleansing, but who witnessed unspeakable horrors & endured unbearable fear & loss.

There are studies describing how traumatized the children of Gaza are by Israeli ethnic cleansing which never stops. How could they not be? Thousands of US soldiers returning from war zones commit suicide, or bury themselves in addiction, or get forever lost in psychosis to erase the trauma of war & their part in it. We know from combat veterans of US wars that when they return to civilian life & regain psychic balance, they are unable to forgive themselves for what they did or forget what they saw.

Imagine then what it does to small, innocent children to be hunted down like animals by bombers & tanks? Once again, the sole purpose of Israel targeting children is to demoralize & destroy Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing.

Palestinian parents in Gaza won’t be given time to heal or help their children, many of whom are now homeless. This makes the commitment of Palestinian solidarity all the more compelling & all the more urgent.

Stand with the children of Gaza: Demand “Stop the slaughter in Gaza”, “End the blockade of Gaza!” & evangelize for the economic boycott of Israel (barcode beginning 729).

Photo is 3-year-old Rahaf Al Attar at a UN refugee center in Gaza City in a play session organized by a local NGO to lessen the stress on chilldren.

(Photo by Lefteris Pitarakis/AP)

A tribute to the children slaughtered in Gaza

Ibrahim al-Dawawsa (Gaza) August 8 2014

We should take a moment to pay respects to the children of Gaza slaughtered so barbarically by Israeli bombs & tanks: children playing, sleeping, cowering in terror. Israel murdered children hoping to demoralize & destroy Palestinian intifada. What Israel did is enrage men & women of good will around the world, even those who do not understand the conflict between Israel & Palestinians. Palestinian intifada–which is political resistance to Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing–has not been weakened by the murder of children but broadened & strengthened in commitment & resolve. How dare Israel murder them & try to blame their parents by accusing them of using their beloved as human shields!?

For every child destroyed so mercilessly, thousands take their place to honor them by carrying solidarity with intifada to the four corners of the earth. Long live Palestinian intifada! Palestine will be free!

This is 12-year-old Abrahim al-Dawawsa, killed in an Israeli air strike, being prepared for burial at Shifa hospital in Gaza City. May these young martyrs RIP.

(Photo by Hatem Moussa/AP)

Under there really entrances to “attack tunnels” under all this rubble?

Gaza--returning home to rubble August 7 2014

Do you think we’ll find the entrance to those cement “attack tunnels” from Gaza to Israel when this rubble gets removed? Or do you think it more likely Israel will prevent back hoes & bulldozers from removing the cement so their war propaganda won’t be exposed as lies? So we won’t know that ethnic cleansing was the purpose for bombing homes, schools, mosques, hospitals, refugee centers?

What’s that saying from Abraham Lincoln? “You can fool all the people some of the time, & some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Israeli hasbara is down to ‘fooling some of the people some of the time.’ Anybody else paying attention who buys it has to have their head examined.

Many have noted a major shift in media coverage of Israel & Palestine, including The London Times refusing to publish the scurrilous ad by Eely-Oily Weasel (known better by his stage name Elie Wiesel) accusing Palestinians of using their children as human shields. This shift is not because Israel went too far this time; their genocide & dispossession of Palestinians has gone on relentlessly for over 66 years. These media outlets are not the least bit squeamish about genocide & have been covering Israel’s ass for all of that time. What’s changed is that the BDS boycott movement politically educated hundreds of thousands of people around the world to the historic crimes committed against the people of Palestine. When Israel entered this phase of Operation Ethnic Cleansing people knew exactly what it was all about. BDS combined with Twitter & social media stripped the veil of obscurantism, mysticism, & Exodus mythology to the bare bones & exposed it as colonial fraud.

Israel is a lynch pin of neocolonial policy & plunder in the Middle East & it won’t be let go without a fight–including on the propaganda front. Those smarmy think tanks are working overtime these days to devise a new approach to selling Israeli mythology destroyed by ethnic cleansing witnessed by the entire world.

Palestinian solidarity can’t buy any of it. We stand steadfast against genocide & on the side of justice. We don’t want to hear equivocations; we don’t want phony UN investigations that let Israel walk away scot-free from war crimes. We demand in every possible venue that Israel lift the blockade of Gaza.

That’s our job. And don’t think for one moment that over a million people in the street over the last month demanding “Stop the slaughter in Gaza” was all for naught. It changed everything. Palestinian justice stands a chance now. They no longer stand alone against the mightiest & most barbaric military forces in the world: Israel & the US Pentagon.

Continue protests demanding “End the blockade of Gaza” & evangelize for the economic boycott of Israel (barcode beginning 729).

This litle guy is in the Gaza town of Khan Yunis, which was pummeled by Israeli bombers.

(Photo by Said Khatib/AFP)

Returning home to rubble

Gaza ceasefire (returning home) August 7 2014

Where do Palestinians in Gaza go from here? They’re returning home to bombed out rubble with only the clothes on their back. They’ve no place to toilet or bathe or sleep. Some may have beloved still buried in the rubble. Before they bring in back hoes & bulldozers to remove rubble, they need rescue teams to recover bodies & make sure no one is buried alive. They need port-a-potties & temporary housing. They need toiletries, clean clothing, diapers, medicines.

Israel’s blown out the ony power plant & destroyed the sanitation systems so on an emergency basis those need to be repaired lest diseases run rampant over an already malnourished population.

But let’s get real. Israel’s embargo of Gaza has the area hermetically sealed tighter than a drum; nothing goes in or out without Israel’s approval. The smuggling tunnels used by Palestinians to bring in vital products embargoed by Israel are destroyed. If Israel bombed out the hospitals & refugee centers in Gaza does anyone seriously believe they’ll open the gates now for back hoes & bulldozers? For rebuilding materials like steel & cement? Or let Gazans rebuild the power plant to restore electricity?

The bombing hasn’t stopped yet; it never really has, but continuous sorties are punctuated periodically with massive assaults like Operation Protective Edge as part of Operation Ethnic Cleansing. Israel forcibly removed Zionist settlers from Gaza in 2005 claiming it was a peace initiative but we now know it was to facilitate ethnic cleansing & make the operation a case of shooting fish in a barrel.

The most important task of Palestinian solidarity is to demand in every venue & every forum that Israel end the blockade of Gaza. That mission has to be the centerpiece of all our work from now on out. It isn’t just a matter of donating humanitarian aid to Gaza since Israel will obstruct the delivery–& obstruct it violently as they did in 2010. In that year, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, six civilian ships with solidarity activists from around the world, attempted to defy Israel’s blockade of Gaza & deliver humanitarian aid by ship. Israeli commandos from speedboats & helicopters boarded the ships, assaulted activists, & shot to death ten unarmed activists. A UN investigation under the gutless Ban Ki-moon faulted the solidarity activists & let Israel walk away scot-free from ten murders. The UN investigation also concluded Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza was legal.

International agencies will be coming out of the woodwork asking for dough to help Gaza. The Red Cross is already out with a “Gaza & Israel Appeal”, as if Israel & the bantustate of Gaza suffered equal damage. One can argue this is diplomacy but it’s more honest to call it opportunism. The Red Cross raked in millions for Haiti relief after the 2010 earthquake but still hasn’t made an accounting of dispersal & shows no evidence for having done so. An elementary need in Gaza would be port-a-potties & while the Red Cross took in millions, most Haitians were not provided toilets for many months; some never got them. The rubble remained in the streets & is probably still sitting there; displaced Haitians are still living in makeshift squalor.

Be extremely selective in who you give funds to for humanitarian aid to Gaza especially because it will require a massive international political campaign to make sure it can be delivered. Obsequious appeals from beneficent looking blokes like Paul Farmer in Haiti don’t cut it. Beware the halos on those making appeals.

The most important humanitarian aid we can deliver to Gaza is to continue massive public protests, pickets, forums, speak-outs, teach-ins, demanding “stop the massacre in Gaza” & “end the blockade of Gaza!”

This is Salwa Shabat & four of her children returning to their bombed out home in Beit Hanoun, in north Gaza–once again, a few miles from the hills of Sderot where their suffering was so much fun to watch.

(Photo by Lefteris Pitarakis/AP)

The maestro of American burlesque

Biden August 7 2014

It’s time for a little comic relief & no one does farce better than US politicians. At their most ponderous, they’re fools. This is the maestro of American burlesque: Joseph Biden. Here he’s talking at the US-Africa Leaders Summit about rooting out corruption. The summit was held in Washington DC–the venue of a million dirty deals. Those of you who live in African countries, check your bank accounts. Ours are already depleted paying for US wars.

Biden, like Kerry, is all Botoxed up & can hardly move his face so he’s trying to say with his hands what he would if he could move his lying lips. Any way he says it, it comes out lies & just spells plunder.

(Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Does Israel use bullets to take out cement tunnels?

Bullet Casings--Gaza August 7 2014

Now here’s a curious phenomenon worthy of a UN investigation for Israeli war crimes. Israel claims it bombed homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, markets, & refugee centers to take out “attack tunnels” hidden in them between Gaza & Israel which Hamas would use at some future point for terrorist attacks on Israel. There are presently no charges against Hamas for ever having used one of these tunnels to enter Israel. There’s presently no evidence they exist.

That would explain–though it can never be said, justify–why Israel bombed those places. But what explains the bullet casings left by Israeli soldiers on the floors of homes in Gaza? Is the most sophisticated military force in the world trying to take out alleged cement tunnels with bullets? Or were they more likely trying to kill the inhabitants–that is the ones who couldn’t escape & weren’t already buried in rubble?

This photo is a man in Rafah, Gaza cleaning up Israeli bullet casings in his sister’s bombed out house.

Respond to Israeli lies with massive protests & by honoring the economic boycott of Israel (barcode beginning 729).

(Photo by Khalil Hamra/AP)

Kooky ideas in the service of social hatred

In the rubble August 7 2014

A blowhard I once knew morphed into a rabid Zionist. He was no prize package before that but when he started spouting hasbara, he just got ugly. He wrote a biography where he described growing up with parents who met at a séance conducted by a dead 13th century crusader & steeped his childhood in ghostly apparitions, spirit guides, star charts, & astral planes. So his embrace of Zionist irrationality just fit right in with all the other goblins.

Now this morning I received a video titled “Synagogue of Satan” by Andrew Carrington Hitchcock from a person who said we have to spread it’s truth far & wide. One minute into the video & you can see it coming: the devil’s brew of illuminati, Free Masons, & Rothschild bankers that makes up the heart of libertarian conspiracy theory (if you can call crazy theory). The new (now former) friend explained to me that Jesus was not a Jew but considered them sorcerers, vipers, hypocrites whose father was the devil–& she managed to get the antichrist & Bolsheviks in there too. At the end, reminiscent of that final scene in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” she accused me of being “one of them.”

The ability to believe kooky things contrary to all the evidence is a hallmark not just of Zionists but in almost every instance of irrational beliefs, there is a direct connection to social hatred of some kind, especially racism. Many liberal Zionists cannot accept the reality of mountains of evidence for ethnic cleansing in Gaza because they cannot break with Zionist belief in the special character & superiority of Jews nor can they break with racism toward Palestinians–which they hide behind criticisms of Hamas rockets. The political problems of Hamas have nothing to do with Israeli ethnic cleansing–which is why evidence is eschewed & irrationality embraced to defend Israel.

But irrationality employed ostensibly to defend Palestinians is just as vile. You cannot oppose racism & social hatred by spouting crazy-assed theories about illuminati & Jewish bankers. The other guy who plied that kind of crap was Adolph Hitler.

So unless you want to end up as a status on my wall, keep that crap away from here. Palestinian justice deserves better than that. You can’t serve justice with hatred.

This young boy in Rafah, Gaza is looking for belongings midst the rubble of his house.

(Photo by Hatem Ali/AP)

Homeless in Gaza

Displaced Gazans August 7 2014

While Israel is taking a brief rest from slaughter, displaced Palestinians are traveling back to the rubble that once was home. These little kids who just went through a living hell are leaving a school serving as a UN refugee center in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, a few miles from the hills of Sderot where their suffering was a spectator sport. The brief respite allows those psychos to run home now to check the mail & feed the dog.

The UN reported Israel bombed six UN refugee centers & that eight UN staff member have been killed. They also report the shells hit the centers while children & infants slept next to their parents. And still the best Ban Ki-moon can come up with is a wimpy complaint to Israel & a “shame on you” to both Israel & Hamas. It isn’t that the UN isn’t on top of things; they have more access to information than the entire Twitter-sphere which sent hundreds of images of Palestinian children round the world–images which are shattering the edifice of Zionist propaganda & the romance of Exodus mythology. Nothing explains the deafening silence of the UN & its refusal to indict Israel for war crimes except collusion with Israel & it’s allies.

Many laud the actions of Latin American regimes who issued objections or recalled their ambassadors after nearly four weeks of ethnic cleansing. Admirable, but mighty insufficient when you consider the massive political power they could bring to bear on Israel & the US or the massive humanitarian aid they could mobilize if they were willing. Their ambassadors will be back in Israel shortly & the lucrative deals with Israel will not miss a beat. But at least they lent their moral authority (even though some like Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff have that in short supply) to the struggle of Palestinians–& that is something the solidarity movement needs to run with.

Israel & the US are rightly concerned about the impact of those images of Palestinian children– what Netan-psycho-yahu called “telegenically dead babies” & another Zionist pervert called “snuff with haloes”–& they’re trying to counter them with the deeply racist, dehumanizing claim (drawn from the cesspool of 19th century colonialism) that Palestinians use their children as human shields. They’re dragging out the biggest halfwits on the planet like Donny Deutsch, & the living dead like Jon Voight & former terrorist Oily Weasel, to cover Israel’s ass by vituperations against Hamas. And when they speak of “Hamas”, they really mean all Palestinians since for Hamas to use children as human shields, they would need parental collusion.

Israel has been riding high a long time on Exodus romance; it was propelled into this phase of Operation Ethnic Cleansing by irrepressible conflicts within it’s own society. The combination was deadly & when ethnic cleansing went into overkill, even those who couldn’t point to Israel on a map & don’t know Palestine from Tunisia stood aghast.

Rather than be daunted by the criminality, the solidarity movement must run with the truth. We need to pressure those Latin American regimes to increase pressure on Israel, we need to put the heat on the US & the stooges of the US Congress, we need to badger the UN, but mostly we need to organize massive protests, speak-outs, forums, teach-ins; we need to have Palestinians tour; & we need to evangelize for the economic boycott of Israeli products (barcode beginning 729). The source of our power is in truth & in our numbers. Just ask the Vietnamese.

(Photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP?Getty Images)