From lawn chairs to setting up the parlor so they don’t miss a moment of the ethnic cleansing going on in Gaza. When we say there is a deep psychosis in Zionism that makes it irredeemable, this would be the proof. We need to continue anatomizing this rancid ideology but this scene would be the pièce de résistance of condemnation.
(Photo by Siegfried Modola/Reuters)
This Palestinian man from the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza is holding & pointing to flechette darts in his bombed-out home. Flechette shells are anti-personnel weapons fired from tanks which explode in air & release thousands of metal darts. Remarkably, they are not prohibited under international humanitarian law. Maybe if they shoot a few up Ban Ki-moon’s ass the UN will change its mind. In 2002 the Israeli Supreme Court upheld their legality for military use by the IDF–a done deal, if there ever was one. An unidentified Israeli military source said they were only used against “legitimate military targets in accordance with international law” but didn’t specify that “legitimate targets” included small children & anybody within shooting distance of those tanks.
They’ve been around a long while since they were invented by deranged but well-remunerated scientists in the US. Israel used them in Lebanon & in Gaza in it’s 2008-2009 phase of Operation Ethnic Cleansing. The pieties of international law have never stopped Israel from deploying illegal weapons. In the 2008-2009 assault they used artillery shells containing white phosporous which caused many agonizing deaths & massive burn injuries.
Things are really breaking down on the propaganda front for Israel. So while a few days ago, The Washington Post was calling for the complete destruction of Gaza, now they’re bringing on a liberal Zionist rabbi calling for “radical empathy” on both sides. She doesn’t like the vitriolic language or strident voices that “ignore or deny the painful narrative of the other.”
Just dripping in empathy she says we need to hear “pro-Palestinian voices that empathize with the Israelis racing for shelter, that denounce terrorism & rocket attacks, & that refuse to tolerate any anti-Semitic tropes masquerading as criticism of Israeli policy.” And, she goes on, “We need to hear pro-Israel voices expressing authentic grief at the deaths of Palestinian children, calling for protection for civilian populations, acknowledging the damage inflicted by 47 years of occupation, and denouncing any language that dehumanizes Palestinians or Muslims.” Well isn’t she the very soul of graciousness.
We share her concern at the rise of anti-Semitic violence around the world but why does she try to vilify Palestinian supporters as the perpetrators? She claims protesters against the slaughter in Gaza held up signs saying “Hitler was right” & encouraging reading of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Golly, we’d sure like to see some documentation of that accusation & we wonder how in the hell she spotted those signs in the sea of placards demanding Israel stop the massacre in Gaza. But we’re still waiting for documentation of property damage in Israel from those Hamas rocket attacks.
In her homilietic she says radical empathy will “force us to see the humanity of the other, to reject hate speech & violence, & ultimately to demand a political solution that protects the human rights of Palestinians & Israelis.” But why is her sermon addressed mainly to Palestinian supporters? We’re not the ones sitting in the hills of Sderot cheering on ethnic cleansing? We’re not supporting a government & military engaged in ethnic cleansing. We’re on the record as publicly opposing it.
Behind the smarmy mask of empathy & noblesse oblige is the–at this point in time–hopelessly stupid proposal for a bantustate solution. Behind the smarm is the refusal to face the moral, political, & criminal bankruptcy of Zionism & a shameful attempt to portray Palestinians defending themselves with homemade rockets as morally equivalent to one of the mightiest military apparatuses on the planet.
It is not those who stand with Gaza against ethnic cleansing who need sermons on empathy. Nice try rabbi, but your smarmy homiletics & unsubstantiated accusations don’t cut it. You need to direct your sermons to Israel & your condemnations too. And by the way, if Palestinians use epithets against those psychos in the Knesset & the hills of Sderot cheering on the murder of their children, well, “bombs & mortars will break your bones; words will never hurt you.” So shove your smarm & your phony homiletics.
Long live Palestinian intifada! Take it international in rallies & in honoring the economic boycott of Israel (barcodes beginning 729, 500, 871)
(Photo by Marco Longari/AFP/Getty Images)
This young boy embraces his small sister who was killed in an Israeli attack on Rafah, Gaza, as they drive to the cemetery to bury her. Does such grief need elaboration? Could words be anything but intrusive? Is this how you mourn a human shield?
Twitter this, Israel!
(Photo by Anne Paq)
War propaganda to justify ethnic cleansing becomes more irrational with every day. The media caption to this photo said “A fresh wave of violence killed dozens in Gaza.” “A fresh wave of violence” from whom? Killer bees? Those evil fairies again? Or Israeli bombs, mortars, flechette shells, DIME shrapnel? We’re told the UN & US proposed ceasefire “collapsed.” How does a ceasefire collapse? When Israel ignores it (again) & starts bombing market places & refugee centers? An Israeli soldier was killed trying to take out small Palestinian children & this was denounced furiously by Israel & the US as kidnapped by Hamas. Odd that, since the US has never raised a peep of objection when Israel tosses hundreds of Palestinian kids into its gulag & terrorizes, tortures, & threatens them. But “kidnapped” in a war; isn’t that what they call a POW when Hamas isn’t involved?
This despondent looking little Palestinian girl is trying to eat something sitting in the rubble of her home destroyed by Israeli bombs yesterday. The trauma of small children must be unbearable to endure & wrenching for parents to witness because there are no reassurances they all won’t die in the next airstrike. World media will simply report–with a treachery & psychosis pro forma in journalistic coverage of Gaza–that hundreds of Palestinians died when they parked their kids in front of Hamas rocket launchers or at the entrance to those imaginary tunnels–& Israel, regretting the carnage, had to bomb them into smithereens..
The international solidarity movement that refuses to accept racist propaganda to support ethnic cleansing has an immense mission: to continue mobilizing, speaking out, educating, explaining until we’re blue in the face because Palestinians under siege cannot. We have a commitment to justice & cannot give an inch to despondence when Israel & its supporters do not bend immediately to our demands. Keep this little girl in mind; keep justice in mind–& continue to tell the truth & demand an end to the slaughter.
Protests continue worldwide; the boycott of Israeli products must expand (barcode beginning 729, 871, & 500). Stop the massacre in Gaza!
(Photo by Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images)
It has to be said bluntly, without hedging, that Zionism has a deeply psychotic tendency–not something peripheral to Zionism but part of it’s very nature. This murderous assault on Gaza shows hasbara falling apart at the seams, unable to render a coherent explanation of why they are bombing children & refugee centers. But worse, it exposes Zionist ideology as cultural dry rot debasing & corrupting the very soul of its adherents.
We see it not only in people like Netan-psycho-yahu, Regev, Dermer, & other Israeli leaders but in Israelis who sit in lawn chairs & cheer on ethnic cleansing; in the claim that Palestinians use their children as human shields; in the IDF soldier who boasted on Instagram of killing thirteen Palestinian children like he was shooting squirrels; in the roving goon squads in Israel going after peace protesters & Palestinians. We see it in media like The Jerusalem Post or the Washington Post, urging the complete destruction of Gaza, or The Times of Israel, explaining why genocide is appropriate for Gaza. Such hatred sucks the breath right out of you. Such hatred is the dry rot of Zionism heralding it’s demise.
Hasbara can’t explain the hundreds of photos of Palestinian children mangled, dismembered, laden with shrapnel, traumatized that have circulated hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter & social media. That’s when they bring out their most troubled, conscienceless apologists like Phillippe Assouline, a UCLA doctoral student who bills himself a lawyer, free lance journalist, & peace activist. (And I’m a monkey’s uncle.) ASSouline has been writing hasbara for a while now, including for The Times of Israel, a right-wing tabloid that tries to make up in sensationalism & venom what it lacks in journalism. In his insipid style (his hatred doesn’t compensate for lack of talent), he opposes BDS, defended the November 2012 Israeli bombing siege of Gaza, & now this stage of Operation Ethnic Cleansing, which is looking more & more like the “final solution.” But genocide of Palestinians does not make our man squeamish one iota.
ASSouline’s a smarmy fellow; bold-faced lying is his stock in trade & there is no indignity in that realm he won’t stoop to. In an August 1st article in The World Post entitled, “Pornography of Pain: Why the Heartbreaking Images Out of Gaza Are Hurting the Palestinians,” he swears he’s seen Hamas launch rockets from their schools & homes & use children as human shields. (And I’ve seen images of the Virgin Mary in a grapefruit tree out back.) So hasbara has tasked him with explaining all those mutilated children & we should not doubt for a moment, remunerate him handsomely for services rendered.
Well listen to our man speak about those photos of children–the same photos that most human beings in the world view aghast in horror: “Preying on human emotions as a proxy for journalism, even where sprinkled with facts, may be good for ratings–like fear and sex–but it has turned too much of the coverage out of Gaza into little more than snuff with a halo.” Don’t miss the image he creates of deceased & beloved Palestinian children: “snuff with a halo.” That’s his version of Netan-psycho’s “telegenically dead” Palestinian children. Take a moment to catch your breath. He goes on to say “This macabre sensationalism also distorts our perception.” Oh that it does all right! It strips that Exodus narrative right down to it’s bony ass to expose hate & racism as all that’s left to justify a Jewish-only state.
Hasbara might want to take ASSouline out of service. To equate the gruesome deaths of children with sexual snuff films is something only a pervert & a Zionist could conjure. This photo is Palestinians outside a hospital in Khan Younis, a center of much Israeli bombing, holding their noses against the smell of death as bodies recovered from cement rubble are delivered to the morgue. Sergey Ponomarev, the freelance photojournalist covering Gaza for the NY Times said: “That’s the way this city lives now–one funeral to another, hiding from bombs & collecting the dead.”
All out in solidarity with Gaza! Long live intifada! Take it international by rallying & boycotting all Israeli products (barcodes beginning 729 & 500).
(Photo by Sergey Ponomarev/NY Times)
Just to be clear, this unexploded shell in Gaza is what Israel is dropping on homes, mosques, schools, hospitals, refugee centers hoping to take out all of Gaza’s children in the name of Exodus, the messianic mission invented by Hollywood scriptwriters which Zionists thought had become official history.
But bombs have a way of forcing truth to be heard. It isn’t that this time Israel went too far because they’ve been violently engaged in ethnic cleansing for over 66 years. It’s that this time, Palestinians laid the groundwork of understanding in the international movement of Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS). There’s a historic shift against Israel & Andy Williams crooning The Exodus Song doesn’t cut it any more. Millions of people around the world know something isn’t stacking up in the explanations rendered.
After nearly four weeks of slaughter, many protesters feel overwhelmed by the odds against Gaza & they are monumental. Some ask, what’s the point of all those protests since Israel isn’t stopping the bombing? The Vietnamese gave best testimony to the power of massive public opposition & held the international antiwar movement in the highest esteem. Other exposures of US policy like the “Pentagon Papers” gave further testimony by revealing the US made no moves in Vietnam without gauging the antiwar response. You can’t stamp your foot a couple times & expect to bring tyranny to it’s knees. For that a sustained, relentless movement is required.
This is not the time to be daunted by the weight of Israel with a military arsenal supplied by the US & a propaganda arsenal by world media. The Palestinians haven’t let that stop intifada in 66 years of standing alone. So enough with the disillusionment, it’s time to organize. All out this weekend demanding “Stop the massacre in Gaza!”
(Photo by Finbarr O’Reilly/Reuters)
This is a photo of Palestinians running from Israeli soldiers following a protest against the slaughter in Gaza outside the Ofer prison, an Israeli military prison & the site of frequent Palestinian protests. Ofer prison is near Ramallah in the West Bank. Israeli soldiers don’t just excessively use tear gas against Palestinians protesters; they use stink bombs, stun grenades, & live ammunition & in fact have already killed young activists in the West Bank protesting the slaughter in Gaza.
What’s interesting about this photo is it typifies photojournalism from the West Bank & makes it appear Palestinian intifada is a handful of young holligans with rocks. A far more compelling sight would be the reportedly 50,000 protesters near Ramallah a few days ago or the 30,000 Palestinians who marched yesterday in the West Bank city of Hebron. Both marches were confronted by Israeli jackboots using live ammunition. There have been some deaths & dozens of injuries inflicted. You have to hunt high & low to find photos of those massive protests which apparently didn’t pique the interest of editors but are mighty interesting to the rest of us because of the remarkable Palestinian defiance of the Israeli jackboot occupation in the West Bank.
Palestinians have been vilified in the most insidious & repugnant way as terrorists by Israeli propaganda because they defy the nonsense of the Exodus narrative claiming God promised Palestine to Jews so Palestinians have to pack up & get out or be violently dispossessed. There are even Zionists who claim they moved from Iowa or New Jersey or wherever the hell because they feel a mystical affinity with Palestine. Mystical affinity, my ass! Most of us feel mystical affinities getting deals at a flea market so mysticism must really go into high gear when you get land & all sorts of perks for free just by claiming you’re Jewish & moving to Israel. Jews in the Americas or Europe have no more affinity to Palestine than those of Celtic descent have to the Rhineland.
Stand with Palestinian justice this weekend by getting to the nearest rally demanding “Stop the genocide in Gaza!” Honor the economic boycott of Israeli products (barcode beginning 729).
(Photo by Majdi Mohammed/AP)
There’s no two ways about it now–Israel is targeting children in Gaza. We can anatomize the ideology of Zionism till the cows come home: What did Theodor Herzl really stand for? Is he really as banal as some claim? Or behind his rancid ideas, is there even a kernel of possibility for freeing Jews from persecution? Is Zionism really not wedded theoretically & practically to colonialism & neoliberal plunder? We leave such exegeses to those who examine historic excreta to rewrite reality. The Zionist state of Israel is damned by the simple fact that it takes bombers, tanks, mortars, flechette shells, & DIME shrapnel after little kids. And it does so in order to kill Palestinian intifada, to destroy the future & the soul of political resistance to Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing. Those it does not bomb to death, Israel hopes will be too demoralized & defeated to continue the struggle for justice.
Those who believe in justice & human freedom cannot allow such atrocities to continue. While Gaza is being pummelled, we can hardly expect their resistance to outweigh their struggle for survival. That’s where we come in–to pick up the banner of intifada & carry it across this globe demanding the end of military aid to Israel & that Israel stop the massacre in Gaza.
This small boy grieves the loss of a family member killed when Israel bombed the UN school serving as a refugee center in Jabaliya, northern Gaza–not too far from the hills of Sderot, Israel where they watch ethnic cleansing in glee.
All out this weekend as the international solidarity flank of intifada. Stand with human freedom. Help pull those Israelis back from the brink of mass psychosis to embrace the concept of human solidarity. If Palestine is to be a haven from persecution, it will not be the Zionist state of Israel but a democratic secular state where Jews & Palestinians will live as brothers & sisters.
(Photo by Oliver Weiken/EPA)
We should take a moment to honor the medics of Gaza who have seen horrors too barbaric to imagine, who try to rescue people from cement rubble & gather dismembered remains strewn on streets while Israeli fire is directed right at them–in violation of umpteen international laws & by every standard of human civilization. More documentation for Israeli war crimes which the UN doesn’t see as they shake their decepit naughty fingers at both Israel & Hamas.
Here they rest after gathering those wounded in an Israeli airstrike on a market place in Gaza City during what was supposed to be a four-hour humanitarian ceasefire. The ceasefire excluded “areas of conflict,” a psychotic military nuance Gazans weren’t informed about. And anyway, who would think vegetables venders would be a hotbed of Hamas? But of course, if schools, mosques, hospitals, & refugee centers harbor rocket launchers & tunnels, then they’re just as likely to be hidden under potatoes & turnips. So as Palestinians came out of cover to get food, Israel picked them off, killing at least 15 & injuring many others.
“We’re tired of war. I, for one, have had enough of bloodshed, death & destruction. But I also can no longer tolerate the return to a deeply unjust status quo. I can no longer agree to live in this open-air prison. We can no longer tolerate to be treated as sub-humans, deprived of our most basic human rights. We are trapped here, trapped between two deaths: death by Israeli bombs & missiles, & death by Israel’s blockade of Gaza.” (Mohammed Suliman, Palestinian human rights worker in Gaza, “From Gaza: I would rather die in dignity than agree to living in an open-air prison”)
And we can no longer tolerate the systematic ethnic cleansing & dispossession of Palestinians either. The movement for Palestinian justice is the most important freedom movement in the world because before our very eyes Israel is hell-bent on exterminating them–& because their struggle has the power to destroy the foundation of US & European neoliberal colonialism in the entire Middle East. Israel was set up as a military outpost for US economic & political interests in the region, not as a Jewish haven from persecution. It’s Zionist leaders understand that very well; unfortunately the increasingly psychotic population of Israel does not.
The only possible solution to this conflict is a democratic secular state where Jews & Palestinians can live as brothers & sisters. The two-state solution is nothing but Palestinian bantustates & a prescription for continued ethnic cleansing & dispossession.
All out this weekend demanding “Stop the massacre in Gaza!” Honor the economic & cultural boycott of Israel (barcode beginning 729) & stand on the just side of history to create a world where men & women can live in peace.
(Photo by Lefteris Pitarakis/AP)
There are two media narratives on Israel’s Operation Ethnic Cleansing, both holding considerable sway. They’re not competing narratives–except in idiocy. The first is that of hardline Zionism: Hamas is using Palestinian children as human shields. Reporters on main stream media treat this like a serious matter for investigative journalism & interview dipshits like the Miami-born Israeli ambassador to the US who claims this arrant racism is the gospel truth. It takes about five minutes of searching on the internet to learn Israel has been claiming this rubbish for several years to justify it’s genocidal military policies. It comes straight out of IDF press releases & reports from the official Israeli propaganda office (the Israeli Foreign Ministry).
It has been exposed as war propaganda by too many sources to count, including UN reports, investigations by Human Rights Watch, & international journalists. In fact, UN reports document that it’s Israel that uses Palestinian children as human shields & accuses Israel of torturing & abusing Palestinian children in the Israeli gulag, including with solitary confinement & threats of sexual assault. These are not Hamas accusations. They come from UNICEF & the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in reports issued just last year.
So why aren’t CNN & the rest of media interviewing the UN investigators who issued those reports or the independent journalists? Why are they talking to the blowhard from Miami who claims Biblical roots in Palestine & runs interference for ethnic cleansing? Why are they quoting Netan-psycho-yahu who said the difference between Israel & Hamas is “We use anti-missile systems to protect our civilians. They use their civilians to protect their missiles”?
The second narrative is that of hardline Zionism with a facade of noblesse oblige: liberal Zionists. Liberal Zionists believe in a Jewish-only state even though many of them haven’t been to temple since their Bar or Bat Mitzvah. But contrary to their political views on many other questions, they accept the cynicism & elitism of Zionism.
Jodi Rudoren, the Jerusalem bureau chief for the NY Times, wrote the manifesto for this genre of war apologetics in a July 20th article entitled, “In Gaza, Epithets Are Fired & Euphemisms Give Shelter.” A committed Zionist, she tries to portray Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza & Hamas self-defense as having moral equivalence & equal blame. She wants Israel & Palestinians along with their supporters to cease the exchange of dehumanizing invectives. Apparently many Israelis object to Palestinians calling them monkeys & apes. We think such invective inappropriate too. Those who sit in lawn chairs cheering on ethnic cleansing are much more appropriately called psychos.
But the jig is up when Rudoren ends her article by quoting Michael Oren, the New York-born Israeli ambassador to the US before the Miami bozo took over. Oren demurs from calling hateful, racist invective against Palestinians dehumanizing “Because that’s a very loaded word–it’s benumbing. People are just, they don’t show it, but they’re in a daze.” And he went on: “In classic dehumanization scenarios, whether in Nazi Germany or in Rwanda before the genocide, you refer to the enemy as rats & cockroaches, & that enables you to kill them on a large scale. We’re not calling Palestinians cockroaches.” Still, he added, “It’s very difficult to feel compassion for the other when you have rockets aimed at your family.”
Well how does our man Oren explain those psychos sitting in the hills of Sderot, Israel cheering on ethnic cleansing? Is that what he calls “benumbed”? And what about the hundreds of photos of Palestinians weeping as they search rubble & morgues for the remains or bury their beloved?
When we hear that Palestinians use their children as human shields, we know we’ve entered another time warp–a time warp of time past & time present. Time past because such a repugnant imputation is straight out of 19th century colonialism where colonized peoples were considered less than animals; & time present in neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism where nothing is sacred, human life is expendable, & racist hatred is the ideology that prevails.
It cannot be said strongly or often enough: there is no redemption for Zionism, no part of that ideology is salvageable any more than the ideologies that justified Jim Crow in the US or apartheid in South Africa.
Grief is a private thing but Israeli war propaganda has made it political. We apologize for intruding on the mourning of the Abid Raboh family who lost a child when Israel bombed the UN refugee center near Jabaliyah yesterday. Nineteen others also died when (as the captions says) “what appeared to be four Israeli artillery shells hit the compound.” It could be the evil fairies but then again, if you do a forensic investigation of the massacre site, you’ll see Israel & “Made in the USA” written all over the artillery shells.
Palestine will be free. Long live intifada. Take it international in solidarity by joining one of the hundreds of protests across this globe, by honoring the economic & cultural boycotts of Israel.
(Photo by Sergey Ponomarev/NY Times)