Question: what have the following in common? One, the eye surgeon thrust by destiny, Michael Corleone style, into the role of Arab leader falsely vilified by the same dark forces – their true motives hidden, their power to gaslight vast but not limitless 1 – now unable to tell a genocide from a ‘right to self defence’. Two, the Guardian columnist who turned Nazareth blogger. Three, the British artist, film maker and much besides whose Jungian inspired work spans community gardening, dementia projects, calling out tax evasion – and Palestine.
Answer: all have this week spoken or written from the heart on the world’s first livestreamed genocide. Here, without further ado and in reverse order, I give you Ed Torsney, Jonathan Cook and Bashar al-Assad.
Ed pleads, don’t look away!
Real-time genocide exposure – a social media phenomenon we must not become numb to
November 18
The world is witnessing a genocide in Gaza. All the definitions of genocide were found to have been met back in March 2024 by The UN Human Rights Council, International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and every other human rights organisation on Earth. Since then the Israeli Genocide Machine has ramped up towards a “Final Solution”. The definitive, detailed, evidenced analysis which formalises its classification as ‘genocide’ can be found in: “Anatomy of a Genocide – Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” – Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur.
Of course there have been Genocides before, the stench of their evil reverberates for centuries, but this genocide is special. Special for humanity. Special because everyone can see it. Through social media, all of humanity bears witness to the daily horror of fully automated, systematic extermination. Yesterday it was an obliterated school full of children, this morning it was an apartment block with 50 starving civilians vaporised from existence. For the first time in history, we can’t look away. No amount of mainstream distraction, no ‘Dancing on Ice’, or ‘Married at First Sight’, no faux political talk-show-come-lunchtime-chat-shit-show can divert our gaze, can stop us saying:
That was a child I saw… a broken child, lifeless in the rubble. I heard her murderers laughing and mocking. They were wearing her mother’s clothes. One had a wedding dress stretched tight over his body armour. Laughing. He had perfect white teeth. He posted the pictures on Instagram and boasted. All his friends laughed too. That’s really what I just saw! That. is. what. I. saw!
I can’t describe the feeling, but if you’re reading this I’m guessing you know. You’ve been there, you’ve seen it and felt it too. There’s disbelief, horror, shock, deep sadness, anger & everything else in between. But all of these feelings soon give way to the overwhelming, crushing weight of helplessness when it dawns on us that our own government, OUR country is involved, neck-deep in this bloodbath. Our own Prime Minister has declared unquestioning support for the political ideology driving the genocide, and vowed that his government will ALWAYS support the genocidal regime no matter what they do, no matter what we say. Last week he even went to so far as to flat-out deny there was a genocide happening at all! We are ordinary people living in a country which is actively engaged in the most heinous atrocities and our instinctive moral responses are at best ignored by our leaders and in many cases these reactions are being criminalised …
Read Ed’s piece in full piece at Skwawkbox.com …
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Jonathan, on our leaders’ lies
Starmer lied in saying Israel isn’t carrying out genocide in Gaza.
We may be exhausted by 13 months of lies, disinformation and smears. But we’re not voiceless, or powerless. Our leaders seek to bully us into silence because they fear what we have to say
Video still: Jonathan speaking in Bath, November 1. Transcript below.
For 13 months, western governments and the establishment media have shown us who they are. They are indifferent to the mass murder of children in Gaza. In fact, the West supplies the weapons and intelligence to help Israel slaughter more Palestinian children.
Western leaders seem fine too with an aid blockade denying water, food and power to more than 2 million people – starving them. Our politicians and media call it “self-defence”.
Similarly, the West has quietly consented to Israel’s war on the United Nations and its banning of UNRWA, the only refugee agency able to feed and care for Gaza’s families. Western leaders have gradually resigned themselves to Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and medical centres, as well as the documented killing, kidnapping and torture of medical workers.
Western politicians and media have shrugged their shoulders as Israel has picked off more than 150 journalists in Gaza – the largest massacre of media workers in history. Israel prefers to carry out its crimes unobserved.
Israel has carved up tiny Gaza into a northern and a southern zone, and is terrorising 400,000 Palestinians out of the ruins of north Gaza into the ruins of south Gaza.
They are being herded into a south Gaza of so-called “safe zones” bombarded and starved nearly as intensely as north Gaza.
The West has watched mutely as Israeli leaders declare the Palestinians of north Gaza will never be allowed back – that is, that they are being ethnically cleansed, as they were earlier by Israel, in 1948, during the Nakba.
Day by day, Israel shrinks the space for Palestinians in what was – even before Israel’s genocide in Gaza – one of the most overcrowded, besieged, attacked and surveilled places on the planet.
Israel is making a hell on earth for Palestinians ever more hellish.
And yet the West’s leaders have barely bothered to call for restraint. Even after 13 months of a genocide, we are told this is a necessary “war against Hamas” …
Read or view in full on Jonathan’s substack …
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Syria’s President, on Arab collusion
And now to a voice demonised – like Vladimir Putin’s – by corporate media careful to deny our access, unfettered and uncurated, to their words. If the Syrian President, part of his country still illegally occupied by US forces there, on the admission of one Donald Trump, to steal its oil – and all of it routinely bombed by Israel – appears here to pull his punches, do bear in mind both his being a guest of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and an Arab etiquette not given to the bluntly condemnatory. All present will have understood him perfectly.
Before we get to Bashar’s speech, here’s a picture I first posted three years ago. It’s of the man going walkabout among Christmas throngs in multi-faith Damascus. (A city saved by the aerial intervention of “Evil Putin”, and ground presence of “Evil Hezbollah”, from Western backed ISIS cut-outs laughably sold to us as “moderate Islamists”.) In my original post I contrasted this with Emmanuel Macron ringed by bodyguards. How many leaders in the West can walk with those to whom they – in theory more divorced with each passing day from reality – answer, as “Evil Assad” and his English wife walk with theirs?
The despot of Damascus walks freely among Christmas crowds ( 2018 or 2019?)
Arab countries are complicit in the Gaza genocide
Full speech by the President of the Syrian Arab Republic, Bashar al-Assad, on November 11, 2024 at the Extraordinary Arab and Islamic Summit held in Riyadh to address the consequences of ongoing Israeli aggression in Palestinian territories and Lebanon..
Source: Council of Ministers of the Syrian Arab Republic. Translation : resistancenews.org
Bashar al-Assad: His Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Your Highnesses, Majesties, and Excellencies,
I will not delve into the inalienable and historic rights of the Palestinians and the urgent duty to defend them firmly, nor the resilience of the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples and our duty to support them immediately and fully. Nor will I discuss the legitimacy of their resistance in both nations, a resistance that embodies honor, dignity, and nobility, through the achievements and sacrifices of its valiant leaders and brave fighters. I also will not dwell on the Nazi-like brutality of the Zionist occupiers, their crimes, their artificial entity, or how Western support has transformed into direct and open complicity with this regime’s crimes—this is already well-known by the majority of Arabs, Muslims, and many others worldwide.
A year ago, we gathered to express
condemnation and indignation, yet the crime persists. Are we here to recall past events, or to influence the future? Last year, we insisted on ending the aggression and protecting the Palestinians but a year later see tens of thousands of martyrs and millions of displaced people in Palestine and Lebanon. In 2002, the Arab world proposed a peace initiative; the response was increased massacres of Palestinians …
… our immediate priority must be to halt the massacres, extermination, and ethnic cleansing. As for the means, I believe we have them collectively—among the public and officials, between Arab and Muslim countries, among states and peoples. What we need is the decision to use them if the entity resists us. Such refusal is anticipated. We will then face a choice: will we merely express outrage again? Condemn? Appeal to the international community? Or will we sever relations (diplomatic and economic) which is the bare minimum? What is our action plan?
Otherwise, this extermination will continue, and we will become indirect accomplices. We are not dealing with a state in the legal sense of the term, but an outlaw colonial entity; we are not confronting a people in the civilized sense, but settler gangs closer to barbarism than to humanity.
To suggest that the issue lies solely with this extremist, irrational government or with a people traumatized by the events of October 7 is mistaken. They all share a common mindset and ideology, driven by a bloodthirsty ferocity, an illusion of (racial) superiority, torn between a professed hatred of Nazism and a twisted adoration of its methods, integrated within themselves … [emphasis added]
Read in full at Defend Democracy Press …
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- With ‘Arab Spring’ in full bloom, and the average Westerner clueless, it was child’s play to paint jihadists armed by the West and Riyadh, while Israeli medics tended their wounded, as freedom fighters. Few were listening to Wesley Clark’s revelations …
In the Pentagon in November 2001, a senior military staff officer had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was to be part of a five-year plan against seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran.
Brigadier-General Wesley K. Clark speaking to Democracy Now, June 14, 2020
… or had cottoned on to an empire looking to set the Middle East ablaze in the name of ‘bringing democracy’, and in the ashes build a new regional order answerable to Washington.