Rescue workers remove bagged body parts after Israel’s August 10 mass murder at Al-Taba’een school
I don’t as a rule do censorship but one image that came my way yesterday had me reaching for the steel city blue pencil. It showed a large bag of clear heavy duty plastic, full of human jigsaw pieces.
So intermingled was the carnage Israel visited upon Al-Taba’een school on Saturday, rescue workers on the scene were reduced to filling builders’ bags then weighing them. Dividing total kilograms by 70 – average weight of a person like you, me or one of Yoav Gallant’s “human animals” – they took the result as the body count. Ninety-three, said Washington Post.
“That’s on Hamas”, chorus genocide apologists and Israel’s useful idiots. “They shouldn’t use schoolchildren and hospital patients as human shields.”
Yet two days after WashPo gave that death tally it ran an August 12 piece – Israel anticipates direct attack from Iran; U.S. deploys more vessels to region – housing this gem:
Israel has communicated to Iran and Hezbollah that targeting civilian population centers would be considered a red line for Israel, which is preparing for a spectrum of scenarios, including one in which Hezbollah attacks first and is joined by Iran afterward …
To which Caitlin Johnstone, writing today, August 13, says:
Firstly … the IDF headquarters is located smack dab in the heart of Tel Aviv, so any attack on the hub of the Israeli war machine would necessarily occur in the vicinity of civilian population centers. Secondly … Israel has spent years justifying its attacks on Palestinian population centers by claiming Hamas is using “human shields” by surrounding themselves with civilians to deter attacks.
Placing a legitimate military target in the heart of a civilian population center then declaring a “red line” — after launching an insanely escalatory assassination in Tehran — is obviously using civilians as human shields. And what’s wild is that Israel’s own claims about Hamas using human shields in the same way have been conclusively debunked, firstly by the self-evident fact that the presence of civilians obviously doesn’t deter Israeli attacks at all, and secondly by [the ‘Lavender’] revelations that the IDF deliberately waits to launch airstrikes on suspected Hamas members until they are at home with their families, thereby ensuring the maximum number of civilian deaths possible.
I mention these things in passing. As we hurtle towards WW3 to “defend” on the one hand the most corrupt regime in Europe (or to be precise, an expendable pawn); on the other Israel’s legally non-existent “right to defend” its lawless racism in Palestine (or to be precise, the West’s beachhead in the Middle East) let’s keep firmly in mind the full horror of the ethical swamp our leaders and the power-brokers they truly represent have dragged us into.
My real theme, you see, is not Israel’s ongoing atrocities. In continuation of yesterday’s post, my theme is world war three. I start with the Middle East and a world awaiting Iran’s response to the murder in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh by a rogue state whose only chance of survival now – the parallels with Zelensky’s militarily insane move on Kursk are inescapable – is to escalate by constant provocations aimed at dragging in the USA.
That and the final solution – since Egypt declines to greenlight ethnic cleansing by opening the Rafah Crossing to some two million Gazans trapped in hell – of genocide.
Here’s the bleak prognosis of former British career diplomat Alastair Crooke, given yesterday to Judge Napolitano. Mr Crooke’s assessment does not differ radically from my own, but its thirty-four highly cogent minutes apply a depth of regional knowledge and experience way beyond steel city reach.
My other offering is from former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. If the FBI raid on his home six days ago, reported in my last post but one, rattled him he’s doing a fine job of hiding it.
Scott’s main focus here is not the Middle East – though yesterday saw him on Hezbollah’s escalation management – but that other Armageddon flash point on Russia’s southwest border. In under twenty-one minutes he moves from a tightly argued assessment of NATO’s inability to win a conventional war against Russia, to the inescapable conclusion that Uncle Sam may go nuclear, or push Russia into it by crossing Moscow’s widely advertised red line through a strike on her own nuclear capability.
I’ll leave you with Scott’s express hope that:
People will to go to bed tonight and have nightmares. We’ve forgotten our fear of nuclear war.
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