Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.
Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.” The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.
I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.
I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.
The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia. Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.
The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”
This is the truth. Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.
exactly.
let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'
Monday, May 17, 2021. Protests erupt around the world.
Over the weekend, protests and demonstrations took place around the world to show support for the Palestinians. For example, Scotland:
Chicago:
Paris:
London:
Houston:
Berlin:
Los Angeles:
DC:
Qatar:
Tokyo:
Sydney:
Amersterdam:
Ethiopia:
Dallas:
Doha:
Jordan:
Massive protests in Jordanian capital in support of Palestine
And many other places around the world including Baghdad:
Why so many protests? Why such massiver turnout at the various protests?
Because this is an issue that can no longer be ignored. By the time former US President Jimmy Carter was referring to Israel as an apartheid state, people should have been paying attention in the US. By the time the US was carrying out two forever wars -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- people should have been paying attention. Many have worked for decades to raise attention on the plight of the Palestinians. Their work is the bedrock for what's going on right now and the ongoing wars helped fuel awareness over the last years. The movement the US government could not see coming was always going to rise. It' shame that so much money is wasted on 'intelligence' -- so much US taxpayer money -- when there is none in the government.
Another thing to note about the above? Moqtada al-Sdr had nothing to do with London, Sydney, etc. And no one is rushing, in those cities, to credit one person.
But with the Baghdad protest?
It's all Moqtada's effort, we are told. What a lie.
First off, it was a popular protest around the world. Second, Moqtada wasn't the only voice calling for protests as MEHR NEWS AGENCY notes:
In an exclusive interview with Mehr News Agency (MNA) Nasr al-Shammari, the deputy secretary-general and the spokesman of Iraq's Al-Nujaba Islamic Resistance Movement said that the Islamic Resistance of Iraq will spare no effort in defending their brothers in the Palestinian resistance and the dear Palestinian people based on their religious and moral duties.
Shammari added that the Iraqi resistance is ready to support the Palestinian resistance in the form of weapons supplies and the transfer of experience or in the form of direct participation in the fight against the usurping regime of Israel.
The missile power of the Palestinian resistance pushed ahead of the struggle against the Zionist regime into a new stage, according to the Nujaba deputy secretary-general, adding that now a new balance of power has been formed.
He added that the resistance now has the upper hand in the struggle and has achieved new deterrence, rendering the Zionist regime to think twice before taking action.
He also touched upon the unity among all resistance forces across the region based on their shared Islamic beliefs, explaining that all the resistance groups in different parts of the region have formed a united front against the Israeli regime and in support of the Palestinian forces.
Crediting the protests to Moaqtada? That's garbage journalism. That's taking the work of thousands and reducing it to one person. It's celebrity feature writing, not news. It obscures reality and leaves readers and viewers with the wrong perceptions.
The turnout in Baghdad was going to be intense (and was throughout Iraq). Al that was needed was for a date and time to be announced.
Sunday brought more COVID deaths including Nadia al-Iraqiya.
ALSUMARIA notes the passing here. ALMADA notes she began her career at the age of 16, working for IRAQI RADIO.
Moving on to other issues, e-mails are asking about Ava and my latest piece? We wrote it. It took five hours to write. We finished it at 9:00 am Sunday morning. THIRD's not finished the rest of the stuff, but we wrote our piece -- we also did an interview with Ty for this edition. (About KINDLE.) I have no idea what the status is on the rest. If it's not up by Monday night, I'm posting what is done Tuesday morning.
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