Protests in Gaza

Protester in Rafah, Gaza (Ibrahim Khatib:Demotix:Corbis) Oct 14 2015

The caption to this photo was terse: “In Rafah, Gaza Strip, a Palestinian schoolgirl takes part in a protest after clashes between Israeli security forces & Palestinians.” Since their 51-day siege of carpet bombing in summer 2014, Israel has bombed Gaza nearly 700 times. But who knew Israeli troops had entered Gaza again?

The only report on this “clash” is in the right-wing Times of Israel. Just to be clear, a “clash” in this context is a media euphemism for ‘Israeli soldiers attack unarmed Palestinians & Palestinians defend themselves with rocks & slingshots &–in the interests of full disclosure–burning tires.’

According to the Times article, there have been a series of skirmishes at Rafah near the apartheid prison cage separating Gaza from Israel: a couple times where Palestinians “opened fire” on Israeli military vehicles patrolling the fence; a couple times when Gazans “rioted” & cut through the fence to enter Israel. The Israeli military reports these attempts were repulsed by firing tear gas & rubber bullets at the protesters–& by killing six unarmed Palestinians near Gaza City last Friday.

The Times also reports the US White House denounced Palestinian terrorism, European media is confused about who is attacking who, & UN chief Ban Ki-moon is overwrought with handwringing about Israeli aggression. Nothing like playing stupid about one of the most important political struggles in the world today.

This schoolgirl is one of the “clashers” in Rafah. Our deepest respect for all of the “clashers.”

Cut through the crap & hit the pavement with placards demanding Israel stop the violence & end the occupation of Palestine; & build the hell out of the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel (BDS).

(Photo by Ibrahim Khatib/Demotix/Corbis)

Enough with hating on Jews!

I shouldn’t have to say this for the umpteenth time: anti-Semitic references to Jewish bankers (one of Hitler’s charges), formulations that can suggest anti-Semitism (like “Zionist control of media”), or comments that don’t distinguish between Jews & Zionists are absolutely verboten on my wall. Prejudice against Jews is a social hatred detestable to me & most of my Facebook friends & it is reckless in defense of Palestinians.

Just this morning, I’ve had a few go-arounds on the issue & had to block two people. It’s just too elementary to have to do battle about. We could keep going rounds, hoping to educate such people, but you can’t reason people out of ignorant hatred. Political power is necessary for that. Muscle works where ideas can’t cope.

Adrenalin should be preserved for the big battles. So if you post that crap, it will be deleted. And if you persist, you will be ushered unceremoniously to the block button.

Zionists want truth of their crimes hidden

Alleged Pal. knifer ((REUTERS:Ammar Awad) Oct 13 2015

My apologies for the graphic nature of this photo which I posted yesterday because this young man’s face is masked & to show the character of Israeli violence against Palestinians. Undressing him & leaving his body exposed on the public street is desecration of a corpse & exposes the monstrous racism of Israel.

The photo was reported to Facebook as a violation of their community standards–not by someone whose modesty was offended but by someone who doesn’t want the truth about Israeli ethnic cleansing & criminality exposed to public view. As we can see in this photo, the Israeli cops don’t particularly like the photographer capturing the crime on film.

FB did the right thing; they reviewed the photo & deemed it did not violate their standards (anyway loose when it comes to pornography).

Our most heartfelt sympathies to the family & friends of this young man. We should not let the ignominy of his brutal death overshadow the sacrifice he has made for Palestinian freedom. Our deepest respect for him & all those who have died in this Israeli rampage against Palestinians. May they Rest In Peace & Power.

All out in defense of Palestinian justice!

(Photo by Ammar Awad/Reuters)

Israeli propaganda passed off as news

Bethlehem ( Musa Al-Shaer:AFP:Getty Images) Oct 14 2015

It is extremely distressing to see Israeli propaganda against Palestinians passing as legitimate news in every mainstream media source. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that a few incidents against Israelis in Jerusalem are receiving more attention that the entire 51 days of Israel’s murderous carpet bombing siege in Gaza in 2014.

That kind of outrageous lying-assed coverage is not going to change because the stakes are so high in maintaining Israel as a military fortress against the rise of popular uprisings in the Middle East. It isn’t just the US perpetrating the deceit against Palestinians to maintain its economic & political hegemony but the Arab regimes who do not want their autocratic rule challenged again as they were in the Arab uprisings of 2011. That’s what makes the Arab regimes such firm allies with the US & Israel & why they are armed to the teeth by the Pentagon.

Israel as a state never had anything to do with sheltering Jews from the persecution & pogroms they were subject to for centuries but has made Israeli Jews the front phalanx of tyranny in the Middle East. They are not endangered by Palestinians but by Israeli militarism aided & abetted by the US & Arab regimes.

Maybe there were a few Palestinians in Jerusalem who snapped & engaged in a “terrorist” act. PTSD does that to people put under sustained assault who have seen their beloved blown to smithereens by Israeli bombs & homes bulldozed for settlers from all over Kingdom Come. And maybe they were Israeli agents provocateurs–which to be frank & not at all conspiratorial, is far more likely.

We cannot force media to tell the truth. The entire edifice of the Israeli colonial project would crumble. So we are going to have to live with lies in media, especially as they go into overdrive to counter BDS & growing Palestinian solidarity. If we want justice & peace in the Middle East, we will have to be the voices of Palestinians who are enduring a sustained & barbaric assault.

“We” includes Palestinians in diaspora & all men & women of good will who must go public with our support in street rallies, educational forums, debates, to tell the truth & support Palestinians. This is an emergency call to arms & no time for desultory response. We need to hit the pavement placard in hand demanding Israel stop the violence & end the occupation.

This is Palestinians in Bethlehem, West Bank, with a flag as their banner & a dumpster as their only defense against one of the mightiest & most barbaric military forces in the world. We need to back them up with the powerful weapon of solidarity.

All out for Palestinian justice!

(Photo by Musa Al-Shaer/AFP/Getty Images)

Pharrell Williams, the weasel for Israeli apartheid, supports pro-apartheid Clinton

Pharrell Williams, the weasel who performed for apartheid Israel in South Africa, has just given Hillary Clinton a reason to be “Happy” since she’s not looking good in the polls. He endorsed her campaign & she’s really the candidate for him although he could just as well have gone with Bernie Sanders.

While Sanders is belligerent against Palestinian justice & mute on the current pogrom, she is outspokenly belligerent in defense of Israel. She issued a statement saying she is “alarmed by the recent wave of attacks against Israelis.” Her rhetoric has been moving further left than Sanders & she wanted to signal her financial backers that she is still the same old war-mongering minion of power that she always was. It’s better than outright groveling.

Israeli propaganda in hysterical mode

Giant slling shot (AP Photo:Majdi Mohammed) Oct 13 2015

Judging from the character of its propaganda defending the violent onslaught against unarmed Palestinians, Israel must be in a time warp. The hysterical tone used in media to justify the 1967 War against Palestinians doesn’t cut it in the era of BDS & Palestinian solidarity–especially after the genocidal carpet bombing siege of Gaza in 2014. According to several human rights groups, that siege directly targeted civilians & children by bombing hospitals, schools, refugee centers, ambulances, markets, residential neighborhoods–& blasted that “Exodus” mythology all to hell, exactly where it belongs.

But you can’t fault a Zionist hack for trying. Bret Stephens, a columnist & editor for the Wall Street Journal (where no one goes for the progressive view of things) & former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post (a right-wing Israeli tabloid), wrote a column yesterday titled “Palestine: The Psychotic Stage–The truth about why Palestinians have been seized by their present blood lust.”

Our man is simply off his rocker. He argues that media is favoring Palestinians in the present pogrom. You gotta ask why this bozo is looking a gift horse in the mouth because there is hardly an article in mainstream media (of which he is a leading part) which does not misrepresent Palestinians as violent & on a stabbing binge against Israelis. Political poor mouthing is a staple of Zionist psychology where they also frequently lament how the US government has turned against them. To the tune of over USD$3 billion of grants annually? Such ingratitude for such largesse.

He added farce to his jeremiad on journalist bias by claiming a Palestinian used a vegetable peeler to stab an Israeli. One hopes it has more lethal capacity than American peelers which barely cut through potato skins. But farcical elements aside, the article is a piece of racist hysteria which refers to Palestinian’s “blood fetish,” “blood lust,” & “communal psychosis in which plunging knives into the necks of Jewish women, children, soldiers & civilians is seen as a religious & patriotic duty, a moral fulfillment.” This crap may fly with hedge fund managers, Wall Street bankers, & Zionist guppies but quite honestly it sounds like Nazi propaganda against Jews, Roma, & Bolsheviks.

This photo really shows the level of Palestinian blood fetish & communal psychosis Israel has to contend with. They’re using a handmade giant slingshot to hurl a stone at Israeli troops in Ramallah, West Bank yesterday. Those troops with tanks, pepper & tear gas, stun grenades, live ammo must really be terrified confronting all that blood lust. But what else could explain going up against one of the most sophisticated military machines in the world with slingshots? Truth of the matter is, if Palestinians used bazookas against Israeli troops, they’d be more than justified in defending themselves against unspeakable & relentless Israeli violence & dispossession.

Media often makes note of the masks Palestinian protesters wear, as if the keffiyeh represented nefarious intent rather than protection against tear gas & against being identified & marked for execution or arrest. Or is it to hide their blood lust?

What’s not one whit amusing about Stephen’s rancid vituperation is that it’s used to justify monstrous crimes against unarmed Palestinians, young & old, who have come of age & grown old having to fight for their existence against a barrage of racist slanders & Israeli predations for now 67 years. They are on the front lines & cannot respond to all this rubbish. But we can & we should by calling emergency rallies that confirm for those who are uninformed but have deep misgivings about the news they see justifying Israel’s latest pogrom, which is a period of heightened aggression against Palestinians.

Build the hell out of the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel & demand no aid to Israel.

(Photo by Majdi Mohammed/AP)

This is a crime scene. The crime? Israeli ethnic cleansing.

Alleged Pal. knifer ((REUTERS:Ammar Awad) Oct 13 2015

This is a crime scene & not in the way media & the Israeli police claim. The Reuters caption says the body is an “alleged Palestinian assailant at the scene of a stabbing” in the illegal Israeli settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev in occupied-East Jerusalem. What happened here? Who shot the young man? And why is he in his underwear publicly exposed?

In attempts to cover for egregious human rights crimes against Palestinians–actually what are called extrajudicial executions–media photojournalism has become a series of non sequiturs, imbecilities, & outright lies. They’re not writing a book when they caption a photo but wasn’t the reporter’s curiosity piqued when he saw the man lying there undressed? Didn’t he want to know who shot him? And what about the alleged stabbing victim? Did he/she die or were they just treated for a hangnail & released?

Instead the caption proceeds to “Palestinians escalated the pace of stabbing attacks in the Jerusalem area on Monday & Israeli police shot dead two of the alleged assailants in the worst spell of street violence for years.” The streets of occupied-East Jerusalem must be lined with dead Israeli bodies then. But can they produce some evidence of that? Because all we’re seeing & reading about is the toll of ‘alleged Palestinian assailants’ who’ve been shot dead by police.

You know, police procedurals are a TV staple. We all know how these crimes play out. Were the ‘alleged Palestinian assailants’ shot in the midst of stabbing when police might have missed & hit the victim? Or when they moved away from their victims? Or when they were on the run? Was there no point when police could just order him to put the knife down, cuff him, & cart him off to the Israeli gulag? Did they have to assassinate him right on the spot? And then take his clothes off? Isn’t that kind of like desecrating a corpse? Or maybe there was no crime at all. It’s all too creepy to consider.

Emergency rallies are imperative to defend unarmed Palestinians from this massive pogrom. And build the hell out of the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel.

(Photo by Ammar Awad/Reuters)

What happened to all that non-violence & compassion thing?

Shimon Peres and Dalai Lama

Everybody has to make an accounting in the era of genocide. Most of the Nobel Peace Prize winners aren’t shaking out so well–making the honorific more a stigma of opprobrium. If you’re going to be held up, even worshipped, as a paragon of non-violence & compassion, then you cannot align yourself with Israel against Palestinians or India against Kashmiris as the Dalai Lama does. There’s no two ways about it.

What’s perplexing is how the Dalai Lama can live with such a disconnect between opposing the Chinese occupation of Tibet & supporting the occupations of Palestine & Kashmir. More likely the disconnect is only apparent & in fact he has deep affinities with tyranny which he does not wish to disclose.

He did urge Aung San Suu Kyi to express opposition to the Myanmar regime in defense of the Rohingya when they were adrift in the Andaman Sea–but that was just once. Shouldn’t a man of compassion make it his mission to speak out ceaselessly for the oppressed & persecuted? And not just with abstract calls for compassion?

Kissing the hand of Shimon Peres? Who is he counseling in non-violence? The oppressor or the oppressed. The kiss betrays whose side he is on.

(Photo by unknown photographer)