There are those who say the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 – the Gaza breakout if you will – had the collusion of the Israeli State. I think that unlikely but have been wrong before on such matters. Who knows what will emerge in the fulness of time? A smoking gun? A burgeoning list of questions, as with 9/11, which cannot be answered within the existing ‘truth paradigm’?
Questions which, also as with 9/11, may allow for a number of staging points on a spectrum of collusion ranging from full-on connivance by the Israeli state – a “hard” conspiracy” – to the softer version of an Israel forewarned but choosing for Machiavellian purposes (as opposed to the common or garden arrogance we have seen time and again from this rogue state) to look the other way.
Be that as it may the Israeli regime, like ruling classes since class rule began, knows how to find advantage in a crisis. In this case a year of “plausible genocide” in ICJ parlance, and “the world’s first to be electronically disseminated” in mine, has (a) been defended as justified by the events of October 7, and (b) served seemingly to advance the agenda, explored in my recent post on Israel’s end-times fanatics, of a Greater (Biblical) Israel.
As regards (b) I’ve inserted that “seemingly” because there’s good reason to suppose Israel’s far right regime may have overplayed its hand. As I wrote in the wake of Iran’s strike of October 1st this year:
In a game-changing display of its capacity to slice through Iron Dome and David’s Sling, Tehran has telegraphed – in sterner terms than those of Operation True Promise in April – to the terrorist state and its Western partners in genocide that the era of Zionist impunity is over. No Western asset in the Middle East is untouchable. Be it an RAF base in Cyprus supplying intel for IDF murder from the air, a US warship in the eastern Med, the oil fields of the Arab autocracies, the ships through the Hormuz choke point or, indeed, the apartheid state itself – all are vulnerable …
But my focus here is on (a). Such justifying of genocide may be sly, as when Peter Beinart writes, in a first anniversary Guardian piece I described as “half way decent”, that:
Networks had every right to avoid commentators who justified the 7 October massacre.
… but may take more strident form, as when Piers Morgan begins interviews with Lowkey, Roger Waters, Mohammad Marandi and a dozen others with a “will you or will you not condemn the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7?
… or despicable form, as when Howard Jacobson penned another GMG piece that saw Jonathan Cook respond – Why is the ‘liberal’ media peddling the vilest genocide apologism? – that:
Jacobson’s may be one of the vilest pieces of journalism in living memory, arguing that any reporting of Israel’s documented slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza is a “blood libel” and antisemitic. It is pure genocide apologism. But worse is the fact the Guardian signed off his column. This isn’t the work of one Zionist loon. A whole army of journalists brought it to print …
… or chilling braggadocio, as when Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant (a moderate at side of finance minister Bezalel Smotrich or national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvr) declared on 9th October, 2023 that:
We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly. We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.
The bombing of schools, hospitals and mosques – as sure a sign as any of a terrorist state bent on wiping out an entire people – would come later. Likewise the targeting, for obvious reasons, of journalists.
Yesterday I wrote that:
- Under international law an occupying power has no “right to self defence”.
- Under international law an occupied (and racially oppressed) people have every right to take up arms against the occupier.
- Claims of systematic rape and infants beheaded on October 7 2023 have been exhaustively debunked.
- Many if not most deaths that day were at IDF hands courtesy its Hannibal Directive
- As a matter of simple arithmetic, those deaths are rendered miniscule at side of the tens of thousands of Palestinians slaughtered, starved and traumatised for life while …
- … also as a matter of simple arithmetic, a few score Israeli hostages are miniscule at side of a thousand Palestinian men, women and children incarcerated without charge and tortured in Israeli jails.
Today I’ll home in on points 3 and 4. Or rather, hand over to the single most thorough rebuttal I’ve seen to date. Over to Asa Winstanley of Electronica Intifada, writing under the header, How Israel killed hundreds of its own people on October 7.
That title, alluding to Israel’s Hannibal Directive and its extension from IDF to Israeli civilians, is a tad misleading since the piece, evidenced at every turn, goes wider than Hannibal. You may recall that Biden’s own staff had to issue a correction after he’d told the world of having seen non-existent pictures of babies decapitated that day.
The “systematic rape” allegations, originating in a disgraceful New York Times feature, have since been disproven, while the “decapitated babies” meme began with IDF accounts – and as Caitlin Johnstone reminds us, all Israeli claims on things Palestine should, given its track record, be seen as lies until proven otherwise – which remain unsubstantiated by photographs, names of the headless infants, or statements from identifiable grieving families.
Contrast such absence of evidence with the incontestable truth of children spending their last hours or even days buried alive by the rubble of IAF dropped and US supplied ‘bunker-buster’ bombs. But wait! Am I advancing, by mentioning such things, Howard Jacobson’s “blood libel”?
Enough. All are addressed in an exemplary piece of investigative journalism which challenges a propaganda blitz I have dubbed, as a nod to Norman Finkelstein, the October 7 industry. 1 But precisely because it does challenge a propaganda blitz, few will read it.
Here’s your chance to be one of the few. Please share widely.
* * *
- Finkelstein, his family on both sides all but wiped out in the camps, wrote in “The Holocaust Industry” of that horrific genocide’s shameless exploitation by Zionism.
Good alert from the Daves over at Medialens today on MSM complicity with genocide. The BBC and Bowen in particular come in for a well deserved roasting here. I like to name these MSM schills in the hope that , maybe, one day they will pay a price. Not holding my breath though, they are more likely to get gongs and knighthoods for services to the empire
https://www.medialens.org/2024/part-of-the-mechanism-of-genocide-in-palestine-the-complicity-of-mainstream-media/
Yes, good piece again from Media Lens
There seems to be a better critical coverage from the media within Israel than anywhere in the Collective Worst. This piece from the Times of Israel, for example….
https://www.timesofisrael.com/tv-report-details-idfs-silence-on-security-fears-failure-to-react-to-nova-massacre/
….details the concerns of the rave festival organisers in the days prior to October 7th:
Meanwhile, you can email your MP on the matter via this link:*
*Apparently this site does not like the link and thinks it is spam.
Consequently, I’ve split it up into four sections. With each section ending with the ‘/’ character (apart from the first one which has a double ‘//’ and the last one which does not have a ‘/’ character at the end . All it needs is to be joined back together again.
https://
the.organise.network/
campaigns/
email-your-mp-stop-arming-israel-1-year-on
The link works fine Dave:
https://the.organise.network/campaigns/email-your-mp-stop-arming-israel-1-year-on
Yes. Times of Israel and the liberal Ha’aretz, each of which have English and Hebrew versions, are more willing than Western media to publish ugly truths. I don’t find this altogether surprising. Jonathan Cook has spoken of BBC editors cowering in fear, after broadcasting any item critical of the “Jewish State”, of the dreaded phone call from The Lobby. Said lobby would have less interest and less clout within Israel.
Collective Worst – tee hee.