Palestine demonstrator, Sheffield, UK
So Hollywood marketing “guru” Ashlee Margolis, founder of the The A List agency, has ordered her staff to “hit pause” on working with any celebrity attacking Israel. This includes all who accuse it of genocide in Gaza, “as that is simply not true”.
(For wider context, see Why no stars on Gaza?)
Yesterday an Israeli airstrike hit a school in central Gaza. It killed, reports Al Jazeera, “at least 39 displaced civilians”.
I’d intended today to post three video clips, the longest thirteen minutes; the others far shorter. All pertain to Israel’s genocide, backed by my government and likely yours, on the Gaza Strip. The school strike, of which I heard this morning, brings the count to four while lowering average duration. Together, they comprise just under twenty-three minutes of viewing.
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Annalena Baerbock, Green Party Foreign Minister in Germany’s ruling coalition, is an out-and-out hawk in pursuing – much to the detriment of the people she nominally represents, and to those of Europe at large – the US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine. I of all people, having written on Western corruption for more than a decade, should not be surprised to learn she is also a bare-faced liar. Least of all when the substance of her lying is one I covered just ten days ago in Mass rape by Hamas – a truly evil lie.
Guess I’m more easily shocked than I’d realised. What follows is not only the lie itself, but the disgraceful evasions and deflection – via the time (dis)honoured method of vilifying the truth-teller – of her government colleagues.
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Moving on … Is it anti-Semitic to:
- speak of a billionaire Jewish Supremacist Lobby?
- draw a sharp distinction between that lobby and Zionism?
- ask why every US university cracked down on campus protests at genocide and …
- … why a New York Mayor facing re-election flooded every Gaza rally with cops?
Here’s Norman Finkelstein – author, among many other works, of The Holocaust Industry and Beyond Chutzpah – on these and related questions.
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Did you hear Lee Hall’s heartrending 1997 radio drama, Spoonface Steinberg? There’s a point where its eponymous narrator, a terminally ill and uniquely gifted little Jewish girl, tells how her doctor, a Nazi death camp survivor, had spoken of children playing in the dust outside the gas chambers they were about to enter.
That, the doctor had told her, is the human spirit.
We see it again here, as Gazan children play on the beach by the rubble and ruins of their former homes.
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Finally, that school strike yesterday.
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