I’ve posted this twice now but, in case you missed it, here’s the Green Party foreign minister in Germany’s governing (and if the polls are reliable, electorally doomed) coalition energetically backing the war crime of collective punishment in Gaza. Her broken moral compass aside, she’s plain wrong on Israel’s “right to defend itself” when international law extends no such right to an unlawfully occupying power.
Also, she’s clearly deranged.
An occupational hazard of striving to contextualise horrific happenings, in Ukraine as in Gaza, is that the processes of intellectual inquiry numb us to the scale of suffering. Such contextualising, all the while leaving oceans of room for what we can’t yet know, is vital, but so is our emotional engagement.
When I began my unfinished three-parter, US Neocons & Israel’s far Right, I told myself I’d be delivering it in three consecutive posts but I keep getting distracted by the nightmare. After Part 1 a Caitlin Johnstone post on how the minority are so often morally vindicated by history drew my attention. After Part 2 another Caitlin Johnstone piece, on why West is Worst, delayed Part 3. Now it’s delayed again to make way for a Jonathan Cook piece which opens with an atrocity I covered a week ago in Burned alive for a Greater Israel …
… before widening the inquiry.
Israel’s burning alive of Shaaban al-Dalou also incinerated the western-led global order …
Dalou was in the tent recovering from an Israeli air strike a week earlier on Deir al-Balah that had killed 26 people. He was already malnourished and immunocompromised from many months of an Israeli blockade, which has denied the entry of food and aid into Gaza.
Dalou’s two sisters, father and younger brother all sustained severe burns from the fire caused by the strike. His 10-year-old brother succumbed to his wounds days later. The victims in Deir al-Balah were charred into oblivion – and with them the “rules-based international order” the West helped establish to prevent a repeat of the horrors of the Second World War.
The year-long genocide in Gaza is entirely a western co-production. The US and Europe send the weapons, provide the diplomatic cover, orchestrate support from their pliant state- and billionaire-owned media, and stifle all domestic dissent.
The modern era of international humanitarian law that the West proclaimed, as well as the institutions the West championed to uphold it, are going up in flames.
The parties unravelling – week after week, month after month – the rules that kept in check the dangers of a third world war are not the so-called “terrorists”. It’s not Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. It’s not even Iran, Russia or China.
It is the West. It is Washington and its allies. They are the arsonists …
Read – or listen to – the full piece on Jonathan’s substack.
* * *
Good morning Phil.
I read it yesterday. Jonathan excellent as always. In another piece he said he’s been expecting a knock on the door like Asa Winstanley and others have had recently, for some time. I can’t comprehend, if that’s the correct word, the scale of suffering and death that’s happening, not just in Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere.
Don’t know whether you watch any of the discussions Andrew Napolitano puts up. I listen to them regularly when I’m going about my daily activities. A discussion I played yesterday he’d had with Scott Ritter terrified me. Basically if Netanyahu hits Iran, as he’s said he will before the US election, Iran will hit back at Israel with a nuclear weapon, which they can have ready in few days. What would follow clearly is the stuff of nightmares.
Anyway this morning a UK government press release popped up on my phone from Starmer’s people on a phone call he’d had with Netanyahu on the 19th. It opened with Starmer telling Netanyahu he was disturbed to hear a drone had hit his house. He then said Sinwar had been killed (didn’t say he was assassinated on Netanyahu’s orders which is what actually happened), just that he was a brutal terrorist who the world is better off without. Rambled on about a ceasefire or something, getting the hostages home, humanitarian aid blah blah blah. Nothing to the effect “don’t attack Iran”. Absolutely stunning. Lost for anything else to say, except I fear for all of us, my children especially.
G’day Margaret. Yes, I watched that video. Scott was a weapons inspector and is a shrewd dude but I’ve done some triangulation. A consensus seems to be that Iran can make a bomb in short order. I mean a “clean” one as opposed to the “dirty” bomb the Ukraine could make by dispersing radioactive material from a conventional device. And I gather the Ayatollah fatwah on nukes as anti-Islamic has been revised in the case of an existential threat. In any case what Scott and other informed Alt sources agree on is that Iran is capable of destroying Israel, and triggering global economic shock if not WW3, by conventional means alone. The question, as we await Israel’s uncharacteristically delayed response to October 1st, is whether Netanyahu will gamble everything on a US entry.
I’m not sure end-times zealots like Ben-Gvr and Smotrich even care
Only the delusional and the politically infantile – and not even all of them! – do not fear for their children right now.
“In another piece he said he’s been expecting a knock on the door like Asa Winstanley and others have had recently, for some time.”
Michael Rosen could well be on that list following his making public a letter he sent to the Guardian/Observer Group responding to the Jacobson piece last week, which they have refused to publish.
”
Dear Editor
Howard Jacobson writes, ‘I don’t accuse the BBC and other news outlets of wilfully stirring race-memory of the child-killing Jew of the middle ages’, and yet, he suggests, this is indeed what these news outlets are doing by showing those who are, in his words, the ‘innocent victims of war’.
Rich in suggestion as Jacobson’s article is, it’s short on suggestions as to what he thinks might be a way of solving this problem. Fortunately, the Israeli authorities have done all they can to help: they keep the world’s press photographers out of Gaza, but more work is needed. Surely, it should be to ban all images of dead and maimed Palestinian children, for only then can we western Jews be safe.
Yours
Michael Rosen”
Courtesy of Skwawkbox:
https://skwawkbox.org/2024/10/22/the-michael-rosen-letter-on-israels-genocide-that-the-guardian-observer-doesnt-want-to-show-you/
Given the way in which any dissent and opposition to anything coming out of the Collective Worst, the observation in Cook’s piece that….
“What Israel has made clear, supported by western capitals, is that there is no safe place, not even for those recovering in a hospital bed from Israel’s earlier atrocities. There are no “non-combatants”, no civilians. There are no rules. Everyone is a target.”
….may well be relevant beyond Israel?
Everyone. Palestinians; Arabs; Anyone who criticises or is opposed to The Official Narratives. Anyone and everyone who stands up to these parasitic sociopaths, regardless of who and where they are a target in one way or another.
Whether its the kind of censorship featured in this piece……
https://novaramedia.com/2024/10/18/discontent-deepens-among-guardian-staff-over-palestine-double-standard/
….along with the removal from Social Media of any critiques of the Western Oligarch’s policies on anything (Gaza; NHS; Economic policy; Regulation; Bribery of politicians by lobbyists; whatever)…..
….arrests and harassment of citizen journalists and protestors; or the smearing and outlawing of anyone who sticks their head above the parapet, everyone in some way is a target to the elites in the West,, their proxies, fellow travellers and cheerleaders.
To paraphrase:
“Who will rid us of these Genocidal ultra Zionists and their Fascist Western Puppet Masters?“
Yes I’m aware of the revised fatwah and I take in what you say re conventional means being equally catastrophic.
I also worry about the end times zealots not caring what this leads to. Aren’t the Christian Zionists of the same mentality? My own immediate family, including my children, are not infantile, both intelligent people, but certainly not knowledgeable about world affairs. They don’t gets their news from real journalists unfortunately, buying into MSM propaganda.
Causes arguments and a bad atmosphere so I don’t raise things any more.
Have a good day.
What a Holocaust looks like: Zionist style.
https://skwawkbox.org/2024/10/22/video-israeli-media-stream-jabalia-death-march-war-crime-as-evidence-of-victory/
“Israeli media stream Jabalia death march war crime as evidence of ‘victory’
Footage shows tens of thousands of civilians streaming out of northern Gaza after campaign of bombing and starvation as settlers prepare to move in
Israeli TV stations are live-streaming the exodus – or death march, as it has been termed in a reference back to the forced march of European Jews at gunpoint during the Second World War – of desperate Palestinian civilians from the Jabalia refugee camp. This is a clear war crime of forced displacement or transfer, but is being treated by the media as a sign of Israel’s ‘victory’:
Meanwhile, from Sky News…
https://news.sky.com/story/this-is-our-land-we-deserve-it-dozens-of-israelis-planning-to-cross-border-and-settle-in-gaza-13238436
‘This is our land, we deserve it’: Dozens of Israelis planning to cross border and settle in Gaza
When asked what should happen to the Palestinians currently living in the territory, one Israeli woman replied: “We should kill them. Every last one of them.””