1/17/2024

the slaughter in gaza

the slaughter in gaza continues and it's not just carried out by the israeli government, it's also carried out by u.s. president joe biden.   peter lavenia ('counterpunch') observes the insanity of u.s. politics:


A very strange vision for these uncertain times appeared on stage in Washington, DC on Nov. 14: House Speaker Mike Johnson joined hands with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. They stood together, along with Sen. Jodi Ernst, to celebrate Israel’s genocidal war on and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. The handholding underlines the lack of daylight between bourgeois parties at each other’s throats in this era of partisan polarization. An eerie understanding arises that perhaps the last unifying force in America is not just war, but war crimes. Awash in media that portrays the political leadership of the United States as mortal enemies, to see them without the mask, holding hands and celebrating the heinous acts of an imperial client state, is incongruous with the spectacle we routinely consume.

Especially difficult to understand, at least using conventional political wisdom, is the lockstep nature of the political elite on this issue opposed to the vast majority of Americans. Polls taken recently show support for a ceasefire across the ideological divide[1]: 68% of all Americans, 82% of Independents, 77% of Democrats, and 53% of Republicans. Willingness to ignore the overwhelming majority of public opinion on a volatile issue is confusing in an era where elections, and electoral college votes, hang on slim majorities. Unlike much of our polarized era, this seems to be a situation in which the median voter theorem should work: both Democrats and Republicans should be shifting their positions to attract the vast majority of voters whose views on this issue overlap. Yet, they are doing just the opposite and choosing to ignore or shame their constituents that call for a ceasefire.

Confusion over Washington’s endorsement of Israel’s genocide seems to stem less from the historical continuity of American foreign policy than the dawning recognition from a broad section of the population that the American government is happy to condemn aggression from official enemies (China, Russia) but to accept the war crimes of an ally. American citizens witnessing war crimes perpetrated against civilians on a horrific scale in real-time have rightfully demanded their representatives acknowledge and do something – anything – about it. If the precepts of liberal democracy are to be believed, the overwhelming revulsion from the American public at the horrific pummeling of Gaza and the Palestinian people should spur at least a short-term realignment within the Democratic and Republican parties on the issue of ceasefire. And yet, as of writing, only 18 members[2] have signed onto a non-binding ceasefire resolution, primarily House Democrats whose symbolic shift cannot move legislation on the floor, with 63 in total[3] calling for a ceasefire in some way; but President Biden remains unyielding alongside Donald Trump – the likely Republican nominee – and the bulk of both parties in Congress and statehouses.

Voters believe their opinions are influential because it is a foundational myth taught within bourgeois democratic states. The ether around us is permeated from childhood with endless paeans to the virtuous citizen-voter. Non-voters appear as fools at best, willingly refusing their chance to influence government, and at worst as unsavory characters that have renounced their birthright. Those that vote for the wrong candidate or party – heaven forbid – are the spoilers and the snakes, a kind of fifth column to be rooted out by democracy’s champions. Countless scholars produce endless reams of articles and books on every aspect of voting, and even the turn within political theory towards endless discussion on deliberative legitimation has of late begun to include work on political parties. There is clearly a shock, even if not entirely unexpected, that elected officials can ignore the will of their voters so blatantly while demonstrating willingness to support the interest Israel – a foreign state – so definitively. John Fetterman and Ritchie Torres may now be the most notorious for this, but they are only the most strident and obnoxious voices within Congress.


brett wilkins ('common dreams') reports:


  Gaza's children—already reeling from 102 days of U.S.-backed Israeli bombardment that has killed and maimed tens of thousands of them—are now dying of starvation, with adults likely to soon follow, as famine rapidly grips the besieged Palestinian enclave, doctors and United Nations officials said this week.

Hundreds of thousands of Gazans, half of whom are children, are starving as Israel's bombardment and siege have "brought famine with such incredible speed to the front of the lines," United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said during a Monday interview on CNN.

The Guardianreported Tuesday that doctors in Gaza say that newborn babies there are not lasting more than a few days because their undernourished mothers are unable to feed them.

"It is unprecedented to make an entire civilian population go hungry this completely and quickly... Our alarm for the unfolding genocide does not only refer to the ongoing bombardment of Gaza."

"We don't have the numbers but we can say that children are dying as a result of the humanitarian situation on the ground as well as due to the direct impact of the fighting," United Nations Children's Fund spokesperson Tess Ingram told the U.K.-based paper from Gaza.

A group of U.N. human rights experts said in a statement Tuesday that "it is unprecedented to make an entire civilian population go hungry this completely and quickly. Israel is destroying Gaza's food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people." 



let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'


 Tuesday, January 16, 2024.  The slaughter continues in Gaza, a racist liar attacks South Africa today for what it did when racists were in charge in the forties, the same racist liar ignores the 'encouraging' role the Israeli government provided to apartheid in South African for decades, Iraq's attacked, and much more.


I am at my zero limit when it comes to dumb racists.  Now racism itself is dumb, yes.  We all know that.  Or should.  But sometimes an idiot doesn't realize that they are racist and they say something.  Or worse, write something.  Maybe it's time failed actress Noa Tishby goes home to her own country of Israel.  Or is there another American male she needs to soak first -- two should have been more than enough even for a greedy person.  Instead, she decides to stay in the US and run/ruin her little foundation that tries to guilt American Jews into donating to Israel.  


The non-American takes to USA TODAY because she's a propagandist for the Israeli government and there the racist writes:


South Africa, which prohibited Jewish immigration before and during World War II, the Jewish people’s hour of greatest need. This is part of a ghastly trend of Holocaust misappropriation by anti-Israel extremists who attempt to use the Nazi systematic murder of nearly 40% of the global Jewish population to deny Israel, the country founded by the survivors, of its right to self-defense. 


You  ignorant racist.


South Africa was a disgusting country for most of the 20th century.  Apartheid would be made legal in 1948 but it only codified what already existed in that country.


Yes, how sad that Jews weren't able to go to South Africa (1930 was when the law was passed).

 

How dare you, Idiot Noa, slam South Africa today for the sins that took place under a previous regime that practiced racism to hold down the majority of their citizens. 


You are so ignorant and you are so self-focused.  The vanity involved in trying to attack South Africa today for what its people (the majority of its people) didn't ask for and didn't want?  You're just a disgusting whore.  


And, in the end, you stupid fool, you really need to go back to your country.  Are you registered as an agent for the Israeli government in the United States?  Did you make that declaration when attempting to enter this country?  Because I don't see how you 'fund raise' here without being registered.  And I think it's time for foreign lobbyist to go home.  Especially when they engage in racists attacks.  


Greatest hour of need?  What the hell, idiot, did you ever do to call out apartheid -- during the Black South Africans greatest hour of need?


Not one damn thing.


Truth bombs for Noa.  Chris McGreal (GUARDIAN) reported in 2006:


Several years ago in Johannesburg I met a Jewish woman whose mother and sister were murdered in Auschwitz. After their deaths, she was forced into a gas chamber, but by some miracle that bout of killing was called off. Vera Reitzer survived the extermination camp, married soon after the war and moved to South Africa.

Reitzer joined the apartheid Nationalist party (NP) in the early 1950s, at about the time that the new prime minister, DF Malan, was introducing legislation reminiscent of Hitler's Nuremberg laws against Jews: the population registration act that classified South Africans according to race, legislation that forbade sex and marriage across the colour line and laws barring black people from many jobs.


Reitzer saw no contradiction in surviving the Holocaust only to sign up for a system that was disturbingly reminiscent in its underpinning philosophy, if not in the scale of its crimes, as the one she had outlived. She vigorously defended apartheid as a necessary bulwark against black domination and the communism that engulfed her native Yugoslavia. Reitzer let slip that she thought Africans inferior to other human beings and not entitled to be treated as equals. I asked if Hitler hadn't said the same thing about her as a Jew. She called a halt to the conversation.

Reitzer was unusual among Jewish South Africans in her open enthusiasm for apartheid and for her membership of the NP. But she was an accepted member of the Jewish community in Johannesburg, working for the Holocaust survivors association, while Jews who fought the system were frequently ostracised by their own community.

Many Israelis recoil at suggestions that their country, risen from the ashes of genocide and built on Jewish ideals, could be compared to a racist regime. Yet for years the bulk of South Africa's Jews not only failed to challenge the apartheid system but benefited and thrived under its protection, even if some of their number figured prominently in the liberation movements. In time, Israeli governments too set aside objections to a regime whose leaders had once been admirers of Adolf Hitler. Within three decades of its birth, Israel's self-proclaimed "purity of arms" - what it describes as the moral superiority of its soldiers - was secretly sacrificed as the fate of the Jewish state became so intertwined with South Africa that the Israeli security establishment came to believe the relationship saved the Jewish state.

Afrikaner anti-semitism
Apartheid sought to segregate every aspect of life from the workplace to the bedroom, even though whites in practice were dependent on black people as a workforce and servants. Segregation evolved into "separate development" and the bantustans - the five nominally "independent" homelands where millions of black people were dumped under the rule of despots beholden to Pretoria.

When the Nationalist party government first gained power in Pretoria in 1948, the Jews of South Africa - the bulk of them descendants of refugees from 19th-century pogroms in Lithuania and Latvia - had reason to be wary. A decade before Malan became the first apartheid-era prime minister, he was leading opposition to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany entering South Africa. In promoting legislation to block immigration, Malan told parliament in 1937: "I have been reproached that I am now discriminating against the Jews as Jews. Now let me say frankly that I admit that it is so."

South African anti-semitism had grown with the rise of Jews to prominence in the 1860s, during the Kimberly diamond rush. At the turn of the century, the Manchester Guardian's correspondent, JA Hobson, reflected a view that the Boer war was being fought in the interests of a "small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race". Fifty years later, Malan's cabinet saw similar conspiracies. Hendrik Verwoerd, editor of the virulently anti-semitic newspaper, Die Transvaler, and future author of "grand apartheid", accused Jews of controlling the economy. Before the second world war, the secret Afrikaner society, the Broederbond - which included Malan and Verwoerd as members - developed ties to the Nazis. Another Broederbond member and future prime minister, John Vorster, was interned in a prison camp by Jan Smuts's government during the war for his Nazi sympathies and ties to the Grey Shirt fascist militia. 

Don Krausz, chairman of Johannesburg's Holocaust survivors association, arrived in South Africa a year after the war, having survived Hitler's camps at Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen when much of his extended family did not. "The Nationalists had a strongly anti-semitic platform before 1948. The Afrikaans press was viciously anti-Jewish, much like Der Stürmer in Germany under Hitler. The Jew felt himself very much threatened by the Afrikaner. The Afrikaner supported Hitler," he says. "My wife comes from Potchefstroom [in what was then the Transvaal]. Every Jewish shop in that town was blown up by the Grey Shirts. In the communities that were predominantly Afrikaans, the Jews were absolutely victimised. Now the same crowd comes to power in 1948. The Jew was a very frightened person. There were cabinet ministers who openly supported the Nazis."

Helen Suzman, a secular Jew, was for many years the only anti-apartheid voice in parliament. "They didn't fear there would be a Holocaust but they did fear there might be Nuremberg-style laws, the kind that prevented people practising their professions. The incoming government had made it clear that race differentiation was going to be intensified, and the Jews didn't know where they were going to fit into that," she says.

Many South African Jews were soon reassured that, while there would be Nuremberg-style laws, they would not be the victims. The apartheid regime had a demographic problem and it could not afford the luxury of isolating a section of the white population, even if it was Jewish. Within a few years many South African Jews not only came to feel secure under the new order but comfortable with it. Some found echoes of Israel's struggle in the revival of Afrikaner nationalism.

Many Afrikaners saw the Nationalist party's election victory as liberation from bitterly hated British rule. British concentration camps in South Africa may not have matched the scale or intent of Hitler's war against the Jews, but the deaths of 25,000 women and children from disease and starvation were deeply rooted in Afrikaner nationalism, in the way the memory of the Holocaust is now central to Israel's perception of itself. The white regime said that the lesson was for Afrikaners to protect their interests or face destruction.

"What the Nats were trying to do was protect the Afrikaner," says Krausz. "Especially after what was done to them in the Boer war, where the Afrikaner was reduced almost to a beggar on returning after the war, whether it was from the battlefield or some sort of concentration camp. They did it to protect the Afrikaner, his predominance after 1948, his culture."

There was also God. The Dutch Reformed Church, prising justifications for apartheid out of the Old Testament and Afrikaner history, seized on the victory over the Zulus at the battle of Blood River as confirming that the Almighty sided with the white man.

"Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity," says Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa's intelligence minister and Jewish co-author of a petition that was circulated amongst South African Jewry protesting at the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. 

"This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was 'a land without people for a people without land', so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest."

Anti-semitism lingered, but within a few years of the Nationalists assuming power in 1948, many Jewish South Africans found common purpose with the rest of the white community. "We were white and even though the Afrikaner was no friend of ours, he was still white," says Krausz. "The Jew in South Africa sided with the Afrikaners, not so much out of sympathy, but out of fear sided against the blacks. I came to this country in 1946 and all you could hear from Jews was 'the blacks this and the blacks that'. And I said to them, 'You know, I've heard exactly the same from the Nazis about you.' The laws were reminiscent of the Nuremberg laws. Separate entrances; 'Reserved for whites' here; 'Not for Jews' there."

For decades, the Zionist Federation and Jewish Board of Deputies in South Africa honoured men such as Percy Yutar, who prosecuted Nelson Mandela for sabotage and conspiracy against the state in 1963 and sent him to jail for life (in the event, he served 27 years). Yutar went on to become attorney general of the Orange Free State and then of the Transvaal. He was elected president of Johannesburg's largest orthodox synagogue. Some Jewish leaders hailed him as a "credit to the community" and a symbol of the Jews' contribution to South Africa.

[. . .]

Shimon Peres was defence minister at the time of Vorster's visit to Jerusalem and twice served as prime minister during the 1980s when Israel drew closest to the apartheid government. He shies away from questions about the morality of ties to the white regime. "I never think back. Since I cannot change the past, why should I deal with it?" he says.

"I received these awards from international Zionist organisations claiming that it was my Judaic roots that had driven me," says Suzman. "When I said I didn't have a Jewish upbringing and that I went to a convent which didn't influence me either, they said it was not actively but instinctively."

For Kasrils, the embrace was short-lived. "They spent years denouncing me for 'endangering the Jews' and then suddenly they pretend they've been at my side all through the struggle. It didn't last long. As soon as I started criticising what Israel is doing in Palestine they dropped me again," he said.


Liars like Noa can't deal with reality so they bend the truth and bend it so far that it actually breaks.

The Israeli government embraced South Africa's apartheid while it took place, celebrated it, rewarded it.  The last thing the world needs is this idiot being published by USA TODAY with her lies and distortions.

Israel, please come gather your whore, we don't need her in the US and she may be infected and spreading in numerous ways.


Maybe you can send her to another country so she can boast of having failed at acting in three nations and not just two?


Meanwhile, THE GUARDIAN reports more abuse by Israeli soldiers:


A Palestinian shop owner said Israeli troops used him as a human shield to protect themselves during a raid on the town of Dura in the occupied West Bank, Reuters reports.

Mobile phone footage showed Baha Abu Ras being marched up a street by a soldier who guided him from behind with one hand and kept a rifle resting on his shoulder with the other. Two Israeli soldiers advanced carefully behind them, their rifles raised.

Abu Ras said he had been taken from his mobile phone shop on Monday in Dura, near the city of Hebron, after Israeli soldiers searched the premises during a raid in which Palestinian officials said two Palestinians were shot dead.

“He (the first soldier) told me that he will use me as a human shield, that young people shouldn’t hurl stones,” Abu Ras told Reuters. “‘You will walk in front of me.’ That’s what happened and he took me toward the centre of the town.”

Asked about the incident, the Israeli military had no immediate comment. It said in an earlier statement that troops in Dura had used live fire to disperse about 100 people who had thrown stones and fire bombs at them.


What a proud moment for the Israeli military.  Or, at least, what a revealing one.


This morning, Samra Zulfaqar (NBC NEWS) notes:


The head of the World Health Organization has called for "a fundamental step change" in the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, amid a worsening humanitarian crisis in the enclave that's home to more than 2 million people.

In a post on X, Tedros Ghebreyesus called for the opening of new entry routes into Gaza and for more trucks being allowed through border checks every day.

He also said there is a need for fewer restrictions on the movement of humanitarian workers and guarantees of safety for people accessing and distributing aid.


Gaza remains under assault.  Binoy Kampmark (DISSIDENT VOICE) points out, "Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion.  The ongoing campaign in Gaza by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction.  But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge for the propaganda outlets:  How to justify it?  Fortunately for Israel, the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence."   CNN has explained, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund."  ABC NEWS quotes UNICEF's December 9th statement, ""The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Scores of children are reportedly being killed and injured on a daily basis. Entire neighborhoods, where children used to play and go to school have been turned into stacks of rubble, with no life in them."  NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll. The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza."  The slaughter continues.  It has displaced over 1 million people per the US Congressional Research Service.  Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) points out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide."   The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza is now well over  20,000. NBC NEWS notes, "The vast majority of its 2.2 million people are displaced, and an estimated half face starvation amid an unfolding humanitarian crisis."   ALJAZEERA notes, "The number of Palestinians killed since the start of Israel’s attacks on October 7 has risen to 24,285, Gaza’s health ministry says. At least 61,154 others have been wounded."   In addition to the dead and the injured, there are the missing.  AP notes, "About 4,000 people are reported missing."  And the area itself?  Isabele Debre (AP) reveals, "Israel’s military offensive has turned much of northern Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape. Whole neighborhoods have been erased. Homes, schools and hospitals have been blasted by airstrikes and scorched by tank fire. Some buildings are still standing, but most are battered shells."  Kieron Monks (I NEWS) reports, "More than 40 per cent of the buildings in northern Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, according to a new study of satellite imagery by US researchers Jamon Van Den Hoek from Oregon State University and Corey Scher at the City University of New York. The UN gave a figure of 45 per cent of housing destroyed or damaged across the strip in less than six weeks. The rate of destruction is among the highest of any conflict since the Second World War."  Max Butterworth (NBC NEWS) adds, "Satellite images captured by Maxar Technologies on Sunday reveal three of the main hospitals in Gaza from above, surrounded by the rubble of destroyed buildings after weeks of intense bombing in the region by Israeli forces."


Matthew Knott (SYDNEY MORNING HERALD) reports:


Australia will boost funding to help Palestinian civilians affected by the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Penny Wong announced after arriving in the Middle East for her first visit as foreign minister.

Wong, who held meetings in Jordan on Tuesday ahead of visits to Israel, the West Bank and the United Arab Emirates later this week, said the government would provide an extra $22 million in humanitarian assistance to the Middle East.

The government said the latest round of funding would be “directed to conflict-affected populations in the occupied Palestinian territories and to address the ongoing regional refugee crisis, with a focus on women and children”.


The assault on Gaza has war spreading across the region.  Such as in Iraq.  THE GUARDIAN notes:


  • The Israeli military said on Tuesday its troops killed dozens of Palestinian militants around the town of Beit Lahia in northern Gaza and also uncovered about 100 rocket launchers. “During IDF activity in the area of Beit Lahia, the troops located approximately 100 rocket set-installations and 60 ready-to-use rockets. The troops killed dozens of terrorists during the activity,” it said.

  • The Iraqi Kurdish prime minister, Masrour Barzani, has accused Iran of killing innocent civilians in its strikes on the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards earlier said they attacked an Israeli spy centre in the region. Speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos after the attack, Barzani said the Iranian allegations were baseless and added that now was not the time for US forces to withdraw from the country.

  • Iraq on Tuesday condemned Iran’s “aggression” on Erbil that led to civilian casualties in residential areas, according to a statement by the country’s foreign ministry, after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they attacked Israel’s “spy headquarters” in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. The Iraqi government will take all legal measures against these actions that are considered a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty and the security of its people, including filing a complaint at the United Nations security council.

  • Iraq has recalled its ambassador from Tehran to discuss the recent Iranian attack on the city of Erbil, according to a statement by the country’s foreign ministry. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they attacked the “spy headquarters” of Israel in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region late on Monday.

  • A US state department spokesperson has said that an Iranian attack near Iraq’s northern city of Erbil on Monday “undermine Iraq’s stability.” “We oppose Iran’s reckless missile strikes,” Matthew Miller said, adding that the US supported “the government of Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government’s efforts to meet the aspirations of the Iraqi people.”

  • France has accused Iran of violating Iraq’s sovereignty after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards claimed to have struck a purported Israeli “spy headquarters” in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, Reuters reported. “Such acts represent blatant, unacceptable and worrying violations of Iraq’s sovereignty and an attack on its stability and security, as well as that of Kurdistan within it,” France’s foreign ministry said in a statement.


    • And yet US President Joe Biden continues to send US troops to Iraq -- 1500 from New Jersey's National Guard will just be the latest -- and it's New Jersey's biggest deployment to Iraq since 2008.  



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