He also has the UK military helping to protect Israel from Iran’s rockets while doing nothing to defend unarmed Palestinian women and children from the daily carnage inflicted by Israel’s “most moral” military.

He refers to Hamas’s murderous breakout last October 7 but never mentions Israel’s massacres and other atrocities against Palestinians in the decades leading up to October 7. Yet he practised as a human rights lawyer and was Director of Public Prosecutions. Would you believe it?

So what makes Western leaders abandon all sense of justice, all common sense and all norms of human decency in order to support, protect and supply a rogue regime in its lust to dominate, oppress, steal and butcher? Why such adoration for Israel in our corridors of power? Nobody I’ve spoken to can understand it.

But it looks like the culprit could be America’s QME doctrine. In 2008 Congress enacted legislation requiring that US arms sales to any country in the Middle East other than Israel must not adversely affect Israel’s “qualitative military edge” (QME).

Ensuring the apartheid state always has the upper hand over it neighbours

Legislation defines QME as “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from nonstate actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or nonstate actors.”

In a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on 4 November 2011, Andrew Shapiro (Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department), enlarged on QME saying: “As a result of the Obama Administration’s commitment, our security relationship with Israel is broader, deeper and more intense than ever before. One of my primary responsibilities is to preserve Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge, or QME. This is not just a top priority for me, it is a top priority for the Secretary and for the President.

“It is widely known that our two countries share a special bond that is rooted in our common values and interwoven cultures…. We are committed to that special bond, and we are going to do what’s required to back that up, not just with words but with actions.’

“The cornerstone of America’s security commitment to Israel has been an assurance that the United States would help Israel uphold its qualitative military edge. This commitment was written into law in 2008 and each and every security assistance request from the Israeli Government is evaluated in light of our policy to uphold Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge.”

‘Strongly in sync’

Shapiro explained how, for three decades, Israel had been the leading beneficiary of US security assistance through the Foreign Military Financing programme (FMF) which was providing $3 billion per year for training and equipment. A 2007 memorandum of understanding provided for $30 billion in security assistance over 10 years, allowing Israel to purchase the sophisticated defence equipment it needs to maintain its qualitative military edge. 60 percent of US security assistance funding to some 70 countries went to Israel.

And here’s the funny bit. Shapiro claimed: “Our support for Israel’s security helps preserve peace and stability in the region. If Israel were weaker, its enemies would be bolder. This would make broader conflict more likely, which would be catastrophic to American interests in the region. It is the very strength of Israel’s military which deters potential aggressors and helps foster peace and stability. Ensuring Israel’s military strength and its superiority in the region, is therefore critical to regional stability and as a result is fundamentally a core interest of the United States.”

That’s worked well, hasn’t it?

“The United States also experiences a number of tangible benefits from our close partnership with Israel. For instance, joint exercises allow us to learn from Israel’s experience in urban warfare and counterterrorism.” Yes, gained from decades of assaults, bombardments and brutal persecution of the captive Palestinian people under Israeli military occupation.

“Israeli technology is proving critical to improving our Homeland Security and protecting our troops. One only has to look at Afghanistan and Iraq…..

“Israel is a vital ally and serves as a cornerstone of our regional security commitments. From confronting Iranian aggression, to working together to combat transnational terrorist networks, to stopping nuclear proliferation and supporting democratic change and economic development in the region – it is clear that both our strategic outlook, as well as our national interests are strongly in sync…. Our security assistance to Israel also helps support American jobs, since the vast majority of security assistance to Israel is spent on American-made goods and services.”

It was then time for him to demonise Iran. “The Iranian regime continues to be committed to upsetting peace and stability in the region and beyond. Iran’s nuclear program is a serious concern, particularly in light of Iran’s expansion of the program over the past several years in defiance of its international obligations.”

Speaking of international obligations, how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? Why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?

Shapiro went on: “Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas enables these groups to fire rockets indiscriminately at Israeli population centers.” A bit like America’s support for the Israeli Offence Force then. “Iran’s extensive arms smuggling operations, many of which originate in Tehran and Damascus, weaken regional security and disrupt efforts to establish lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. As change sweeps the region, Iran has and should be expected to continue its attempts to exploit much positive change for its own cynical ambitions.”

And are we to believe that Israel’s long-term illegal occupation of its neighbours’ territories such as Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms has nothing whatsoever to do with the Zionists’ “cynical ambitions”? Has it never occurred to the Americans that Israel’s QME — all that power in the hands of an abusive regime — makes peace impossible? It is deeply worrying that successive US administration don’t seem to realise that Israel doesn’t want peace and never has — that peace gets in the way of its territorial ambitions. Or has America indeed realised this and made it part of the US’s “cynical ambition”.

Shapiro complained that despite its instability Syria was still providing Hezbollah with critical military and logistical support and that Syria might be supplying sophisticated missile technology. Perhaps he forgets that Hezbollah was set up in 1982 by Muslim clerics to fight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

“For six decades, Israelis have guarded their borders vigilantly,” he said. But he surely knows that Israel has never declared its borders for the simple reason it intends to constantly expand them.

“We are taking steps to help Israel better defend itself from the threat of rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas. This is a very real daily concern for ordinary Israelis living in border towns such as Sderot, who know that a rocket fired from Gaza may come crashing down at any moment.” Funny he should mention Sderot, now home to Israeli land-grabbers. It is built on the lands of a Palestinian village called Najd, which was ethnically cleansed by Jewish terrorists in May 1948 before Israel declared itself a state. The 600+ villagers, all Muslim, were forced to flee for their lives.

Najd was not allocated to the Jews in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, they stole it using armed force. Britain, the mandated government, was in charge while this and many other atrocities were committed by rampaging Jewish militia, Najd being one of 418 Palestinian villages and towns they wiped off the map. Its 82 homes were bulldozed and their inhabitants, presumably, became refugees in nearby Gaza. Their families are probably still living in camps there. The sweet irony is that some of them are quite likely manning the rocket launchers.

Being a target for Gaza’s rockets and only a mile from the prison camp fence, Sderot has become known as ‘the bomb shelter capital of the world’, residents having little time to take cover. It is now a major propaganda asset of the Israeli regime and a compulsory stop on the brainwash tour for gullible politicians and journalists. When Barak Obama visited in 2008 he said: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing.” Yes, Mr Obama. But hopefully you wouldn’t be such a plonker as to live on land stolen from your neighbour at gun-point.

Shapiro revealed that the funding for Iron Dome was above and beyond the $3 billion from FMF. He also remarked that “many Israeli officers and enlisted personnel attend US military schools such as the National War College. These personnel exchanges allow Israel’s future military leaders to acquire essential professional skills, as well as build life-long relationships with their U.S. military counterparts.”

So it really is a cosy setup.

Additionally, “Israel benefits from a War Reserve Stockpile that is maintained in Israel by US European Command. This can be used to boost Israeli defenses in the case of a significant military emergency…. Israel is also able to access millions of dollars in free or discounted military equipment each year through the Department of Defense’s Excess Defense Articles program.”

Sheer bribery

Shapiro also touched on how the US keeps other nearby nations sweet. “Our longstanding friendship and our extraordinary relationship of cooperation is reflected in the more than $300 million in security assistance that we provide Jordan annually…. For the past 30 years, the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt has served as the basis for the $1.3 billion in annual Foreign Military Financing (FMF) that we provide Egypt. This assistance helps Egypt maintain a strong and disciplined professional defense force that is able to act as a regional leader and a moderating influence. Our assistance helps build ties between militaries, ensures that foreign militaries conduct themselves in restrained and professional ways, and creates strong incentives for recipient countries to maintain good ties with the United States.

“We have continued to rely on Egypt to support and advance US interests in the region, including peace with Israel, confronting Iranian ambitions, interdicting smugglers, and supporting Iraq.”

Shapiro was also aware of diplomatic efforts from some quarters to question Israel’s legitimacy. “As the President has said, Israel’s legitimacy is not a matter for debate. We have consistently opposed efforts to isolate Israel. We have stood up strongly for Israel and its right to defend itself…. We have refused to attend events that endorse or commemorate the flawed 2001 World Conference Against Racism, which outrageously singled out Israel for criticism. This Administration has also made clear that a lasting and sustainable peace can only come though negotiations and remains firmly opposed to one-sided efforts to seek recognition of statehood outside the framework of negotiations, whether in the UN Security Council or other international fora.”

QME’s collision with international law

He was referring, presumably, to those same old lopsided negotiations that have led nowhere. Israel has no claim to self-defence against a threat emanating from a territory it belligerently occupies. That has been made perfectly clear by the UN and other authorities. It’s the Palestinians who have a cast-iron right to self-defence, using “armed struggle” if necessary, against Israel’s illegal military occupation and murderous oppression (UN Resolutions 37/43 and 3246). UN Resolution 3246 also calls for all States to recognize the right to self-determination and independence for all peoples subjected to colonial and foreign domination and to assist them in their struggle.

Furthermore Palestinians should not have to negotiate their freedom and self-determination – it’s theirs by right and doesn’t depend on anyone else, such as Israel or the US, agreeing to it. The US, UK and Israel (the latter stating repeatedly that it will not allow a Palestinian state to be created) arrogantly ignore the rights of others. But legal opinion (Wilde) has it that when 138 of the world’s states at the UN General Assembly voted in 2012 to re-designate Palestine’s status from ‘non-member Entity’ to ‘non-member State’, this had the effect of establishing statehood.

Seriously, could no-one see that America’s crooked QME doctine would clash with justice and international law?

A further boost to this US-Israel love affair came in July 2012 with an Act called the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012. It included the following policy statement:

(1) To reaffirm our unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel as a Jewish state. As President Barack Obama stated on December 16, 2011, ‘‘America’s commitment and my commitment to Israel and Israel’s security is unshakeable.’’ And as President George W. Bush stated before the Israeli Knesset on May 15, 2008, on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, ‘‘The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friend ship runs deeper than any treaty.’’.

(2) To help the Government of Israel preserve its qualitative military edge amid rapid and uncertain regional political trans-formation.

(3) To veto any one-sided anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations Security Council.

(4) To support Israel’s inherent right to self-defense.

(5) To pursue avenues to expand cooperation with the Government of Israel both in defense and across the spectrum of civilian sectors, including high technology, agriculture, medicine, health, pharmaceuticals, and energy.

(6) To assist the Government of Israel with its ongoing efforts to forge a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that results in two states living side-by-side in peace and security, and to encourage Israel’s neighbors to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

(7) To encourage further development of advanced technology programs between the United States and Israel given current trends and instability in the region.

Policy (6) is nonsensical given the Israelis’ continuing refusal to recognize Palestine’s right to statehood, the recent passing of nation state laws reinforcing Israel’s apartheid, and the sidelining of international law and justice in seeking instead to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by arm-twisting negotiation.

Need to eliminate the Zionist Tendency

As Shapiro reminded his audience, President Truman famously took just 11 minutes to extend official, diplomatic recognition to the State of Israel when it was founded in 1948. He didn’t even have the sense to sleep on it, and the US’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security has been one of the fundamental tenets of America’s national security ever since. While Truman, a self-declared Zionist, felt sorry for “the victims of Hitler’s madness” his hasty decision created millions of victims of Israel’s evil intent, which was so obvious from the start and is now laid bare for all to see.

It seems as if the UK has been roped in and superglued to America’s ridiculous infatuation with the apartheid regime and its genocidal maniacs. Here it’s a criminal offence to show support for Hamas or Hezbollah, but it’s business as usual with the loathsome regime in Israel. Clubs supporting Israel are still allowed to flourish at Westminster.

Our new trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds is reported to be in talks with a minister in Tel Aviv, Nir Barkat, who is one of the more extreme proponents of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. The department says: “Our teams will be entering negotiating rooms as soon as possible, laser-focused on creating new opportunities for UK firms”, while British embassy officials in Israel talk about the “tremendous opportunity for collaboration between Israeli and British companies”.

Reynolds was responsible for the decision to end a mere 30 out of the 350 arms export licences to Israel, which was widely considered insufficient for sending the right message. Unsurprisingly Reynolds is a vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel. As such he appears to be in breach of the Government’s Ministerial Code and Principles of Public Life which state that “holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work….. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.” But people with such dangerous affiliation are allowed to occupy many senior Government positions.

The influence of the Israel lobby is so strong, and its enforcers so enmeshed in the fabric of Westminster politics, that politicians feel they must join their party’s Friends of Israel group and undergo indoctrination to qualify for a senior position.

With American presidents and senior politicians “either side of the aisle” so firmly shackled to Israel’s nauseating ambitions, it’s no surprise that their poodle, the UK, is similarly compromised. Successive prime ministers and their foreign secretaries have been amazingly keen to endorse Israel’s sense of impunity and grovel to its stooges inside and outside Westminster. How are we to rid ourselves of this malign influence?

One of the first tasks in securing peace is to purge the ‘Zionist tendency’ from all corridors of power in the West. This is where the problem lies. These are Israel’s pimps and stooges who identify with Zionism and promote its sinister and unlawful ambitions inside the UK and other Western parliaments. They are the root cause of strife in the Middle East. Time they were removed.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle of … the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
— (BAP Principle of Unity)

Today, October 7, 2024, the world commemorates – some in horror, others in celebration – a full year of a genocidal war, prosecuted in real time in occupied Palestine. In spite of the commonly accepted lie that the Al Aqsa Flood on October 7 was the beginning, this “war” actually began on November 29, 1947, with the passing of the UN resolution that led to the creation of the Israeli settler colonial state. For the next seventy-six years, with the backing of Western governments the state of Israel would lead a war of conquest, ethnically cleansing and massacring hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, displacing and maiming millions, and establishing an apartheid state. Therefore, the Black Alliance for Peace views the Al-Aqsa Flood as a legitimate resistance operation by the besieged Palestinians – the only party with an internationally recognized right of resistance. We support Palestinian resistance against the violent military domination by white supremacist imperialism and colonialism that began, first in the form of British colonialism, and continues in the form of zionism.

In response to the prison breakout of October 7, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IDF) unleashed a horrific wave of state terror with indiscriminate bombing, targeting of civilian infrastructure, rape, torture and starvation with an obvious and specific target – the non-combatant civilian population. The result – a second Nakba – another catastrophe for the Palestinian people, with tens of thousands slaughtered with impunity. This systematic state terrorism has now engulfed Lebanon, with Israel replicating its depraved, anti-human tactics from Gaza. It began with an attempt to terrorize the resistance group Hezbollah including the killing of the group’s revered leader and anti-colonial fighter, Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah. This terrorism has continued with the indiscriminate massacre of civilians in an attempt to force the Lebanese people into submission.

Over the last year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ) along with all the other Western-run international bodies that claim to defend human rights have proven themselves complicit, acting as mere puppets of U.S. imperialism. As global protests erupt in fury, Israel continues its slaughter, understanding clearly that the U.S. settler-state and the white West will continue to provide it protection.

What the last year has reconfirmed for BAP is that the violence we have witnessed is part of a global system of white supremacism dependent on unrestrained state terror in order to continue the extraction of value from still colonized and oppressed non-European peoples, working classes and nations.  The militarization of police, from the Israeli Occupation Force in Gaza to the deadly exchange programs in domestic colonized communities, is the extension of fascist settler colonialism. If we understand the U.S. as a settler project, then its global expansion can only result in one thing – replicating systems of dominance and repression everywhere. Here, we must also recognize that the attacks on Gaza and Lebanon mirror the looming assault on Haiti. Both represent the deep-rooted racist violence that has always been at the core of the Pan-European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy since this system of oppression emerged in 1492.

Speaking out against this system of global white supremacy, whether here or abroad, is met with criminalization. From resisting austerity and Cop Cities in the U.S., to the prosecution of the “Uhuru 3” as agents of Russia, to curtailing speech and protest in hopes of dismantling the ‘student intifada’ across campuses, to the Palestinians and Lebanese fighting occupation, the message is clear: dissent is dangerous. But we must stand firm in truth. The real terrorists are those upholding the illegal zionist settler-colonial apartheid regime. The Black Alliance for Peace condemns Israel’s decades-long barbarism and fully supports the Palestinian people’s right to resist occupation. Decolonization and self-determination are not simply demands – they are central to the realization of human rights. And since there is no real justice for Palestinians in Western-controlled international laws, we stand by their right to fight for their humanity. Collective resistance is a central principle of the People(s)-Centered Human Rights framework that guides BAP’s approach to the human rights issue.

Fifty years into the future, the zionist massacre of Palestinians and invasion of Lebanon will be widely recognized for the war crimes that they are. But in the same way that it takes little courage today to oppose the segregation of the 1950s, the time to stand up against genocide and colonialism is right now – today. And we do not have the luxury of waiting for history to vindicate the Palestinians’ just struggle; we must act to help end the zionists’ ever-expanding genocidal war now, once and for all.

Our struggles are intertwined: we are bound by the shared reality of living under white supremacist, settler-colonial states. When one of us suffers, we all do. And together, we will resist. Long live the resistance. Glory to the martyrs. Palestine will be free – and so will the world once our peoples unite to defeat the U.S./EU/NATO Axis Domination.

Resist the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination

Defeat the war in the U.S. being waged against the resisters

Smash the Duopoly

No Compromise! No Retreat!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Black Alliance for Peace.

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates.”

Genesis 15:18

“You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. 2:17 You must completely destroy them the Hethite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite as the Lord your God has commanded you.”

Deuteronomy 2:16 2:17J

“And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.”

Joshua 6:21

“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” (Christian Standard Bible)

Samuel 1 15:3

The Jerusalem Post states: “Rabbi Dov Lior, a national- religious leader and the chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba and Hebron, published a letter on Monday saying that Jewish law permits destroying the entire Gaza Strip.”

A rabbi whose yeshivah is being funded by the government shamelessly calling for the murder of an entire population. Wiping them all out. This happened. And nothing is being done to stop him or silence him or even defund this guy yet to this historian’s knowledge.

Israeli pilots know that they kill children when dropping massive amount bombs on city centers, the bombardment these pilots carry out resulting in the death of exponentially monstrously more civilians, including children, than died in the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. Western media outlets portray the pilots as heroes who did not intend to kill non-combatants, but they have bombed homes, residential buildings, mosques, schools, universities, bakeries, shops, hospitals, U.N. facilities etc. As of October 13, 2024, the U.N. has reported over 41,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since October 7, 2023. [A Lancet article from 10 July 2024 reported a much higher estimate: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death⁹ to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” — DV ed.]

Have the pilots been made to feel that God is on their side in any and all circumstance?: during the 2014 bombing that took 2,200 lives? during Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009) when approximately 1,400 Palestinians were killed, including a large number of civilians, while Israel lost 13 soldiers? during Operation Pillar of Defense (2012) when over 160 Palestinians were killed, while only six Israelis died? during Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021) wherein over 250 Palestinians were killed, including women and children, and 13 people in Israel died? during the long merciless Israeli invasion 1982 war in Lebanon in which from 10,000 to 20,000 were killed and which led to the abominable bloody massacre at Sabra and Shatila?[statistics provided by AI ChatbotGTP]

All to seize the land ‘God gave their ancestors’ more than seventeen centuries ago.

Albert Einstein letter to Jewish philosopher Eric Gutkind dated January 1954

“For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people” I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the New York Times on December 4, 1948, co-signed by several prominent intellectuals and Jewish figures. The letter specifically referred to the Deir Yassin massacre (April 1948), in which over 100 Palestinian civilians were killed by the Irgun and other forces, calling it an example of the group’s brutality. It also warned against Menachem Begin’s politics of expansionism and aggression. The letter represented a moral appeal against the rise of extremist nationalist movements within Zionism (but Menachem Begin came to be Israel’s sixth prime minister).

In spite of Einstein’s efforts, the Palestinian Arabs, while still suffering British military occupation as a colony since the end of the First World War, were expelled and/or re-colonized after the Second World War by another group of armed Europeans through a genocidal civil war planned and provoked by Anglo-American machinations.

Subsequently the U.N. General Assembly told Israelis to return the land and homes and to compensate Palestinians! Resolution #194 12/11/1948, ignored by Israel.

The State of Israel from its creation has been in bed with a US war investing business elite that once heavily invested in Hitler, was itself anti-Semitic in outlook, coldly indifferent and even complicit during the Holocaust its investments had made possible.

The billions of US dollars spent on munitions and weapons of mass destruction to kill Palestinians who keep on attacking fighting for rectification of the heartless injustice done them, could have been used to begin to compensate Arabs made destitute refugees by the criminal seizure of their lands, homes and properties.

But then where would faith in the Bible be? And U.S. support for Israel’s military with the latest high tech bombs and war planes? And Israeli support of the many U.S./NATO regime change wars in the oil rich nations of the Middle East? And the billions in profits for the investors in U.S. and European giant weapons manufacturing corporations like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and BAE Systems (UK), Airbus Defense and Space (EU), Leonardo (Italy), Thales Group (France) and Rheinmetall AG (Germany), whose CEO’s are most probably well educated and knowledgeable about the Bible.

Post Script

Great Fun?

As journalists in the West sought to portray the war on Gaza as complex and nuanced rather than the genocide it was accused of approaching by a U.N. court, a flood of social media posts from Israeli soldiers suggested they regarded it as anything but.

Apparently, for a considerable amount of Israeli soldiers war against defenceless Palestinian civilians can be great fun, and worth sharing with society at large.

An Al Jazeera feature length investigation exposed Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip through the medium of photos and videos posted online by Israeli soldiers themselves during the year-long conflict.

Israeli troops laugh as they blow up a mosque in Gaza. For the most part, soldiers posted material in their own names on publicly accessible platforms and often gave details of when and where the incidents depicted took place.

Al Jazeera began collecting these videos and photos, compiling a database of more than 2,500 social media accounts.

A soldier told about a man being tortured: “Nothing prevents us from killing you. We could just kill you all. That’s normal. No one will deter us, and no one will call us to account.”

The behaviour displayed in the photos and videos ranges from crass jokes and soldiers rifling through women’s underwear drawers to what appears to be the murder of unarmed civilians.

It reveals a range of illegal activities, from wanton destruction and looting to demolitions of neighbourhoods and murder featuring wildly joyous grins and laughing while watching terrifyingly huge fiery explosions.

Could it possibly be Bible-based Schadenfreude?

*****

                                ADDENDUM 1

“The Oppressed Will Rise!”  Eventual Rebellion of Those Who Have Been Subjugated

Back in 1956, Moshe Dayan, Israeli military leader and politician, commander of the Jerusalem front in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War spoke thusly at a funeral.

“Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we deplore their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate” a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling.”

OCTOBER 7, 2023!

          As Reported in Hegemonic Western Media

On Oct. 7, the militant Palestinian organisation Hamas based in Gaza led a brutal invasion of Israel. Israel accuses Hamas of killing 1,200 people, mainly civilians, however the major Hebrew newspapers have carried Israeli military admissions that firing from Israeli Apache Helicopters and tanks accounted for some of the Israeli civilian deaths. Hamas, which is also the democratically elected government of the Israeli open air prison of Gaza, claims most Israeli casualties were military.

By October 17, ten days later, the Israeli armed forces had bombed to death more than 5,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women and children, at times dropping 2,000 pound bombs on apartment buildings, and had cut off all water, food and fuel to Gaza.

On that same 17th day of October 2023, Dr. Norman Finkelstein gave a talk at the University of Massachusetts labeled, “The Struggle for Justice in Palestine: Past, Present, and Future.”

“Palestinians have been trapped in a concentration camp for twenty years” as “the international community had abandoned them, and whatever tactic they attempted, including nonviolent resistance, had no impact on freeing them from that concentration camp.”

China to International Court of Justice:

“Palestine has ‘inalienable right’ to armed resistance. Palestinian ‘use of force to resist oppression is an inalienable right’ and cannot be equated with terrorism.”

UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, tweeted on X, April 8, 2023: “Israel can’t claim it has a right to defend itself from the people it oppresses and whose land it colonizes.” 

Right away, on October 9, Israel’s defence minister announced a “complete siege” of Gaza, describing the Palestinian fighters who attacked Israel over the weekend as “human animals.” “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza,” Gallant said. “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.” (Oct. 9, 2023 HuffPost)

Once Reported – Thereafter Made to be Forgotten

‘Erase Gaza’: War Unleashes Incendiary Rhetoric in Israel

Nov 15, 2023 – “Erase Gaza. Don’t leave a single person there,” Yair Golan an Israeli politician and senior military officer, said in an interview with Channel 14 on Oct. 15. New York Times Nov. 15, 2023

An Israeli rabbi urged the killing of women and children in the Gaza Strip and said he considered it a response to the teachings of halakha, or Jewish law.

It came from Eliyahu Mali in a video that was widely circulated Thursday on social media.

Mali heads the Shirat Moshe religious school in Jaffa in central Israel, where students serve in the army.

He claimed that those described as “vandals” in today’s war are “the children of the previous war whom we kept alive, and in reality, it is the women who produce terrorists.”

“Whoever comes to kill you with this concept does not only include the young man aged 16, 18, 20, or 30 who is now pointing a weapon at you, but also the future generation (the children of Gaza), and those who produce the future generation (women of Gaza), because there is really no difference,” he said.

Since October 7, 2023

‘Hamas beheaded 40 babies, baked another in an oven, carried out mass, systematic rapes, and cut a foetus from its mother’s womb.’

An Israeli first responder to the October 7 terror attack has claimed that Hamas terrorists roasted a baby in an oven in shocking video testimony. Asher Moskowitz, of the United Hatzalah first responder group, published a video of himself speaking to a camera, delivering his witness account.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken describing in graphic detail – an incredible Hamas attack on an Israeli family watched and heard by this writer on C-Span, but now blacked out of the Internet.

“The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.Then their executioners sat down and had a meal.”

Efforts by the United Nations to investigate these claims are being obstructed by Israel and have largely gone unreported.

Le Monde April 3, 2024: “On October 10, official Israeli accounts relayed a sordid but unfounded allegation. Six months later, it continues to circulate, fuelling accusations of Israeli disinformation.”

Western Media Journalists Avoid Mention of IDF Videos Showing Israeli soldiers Laughing as Universities, Mosques, Hospitals, and Apartment Buildings Are Blown Up

As hegemonic news media makes sure this macabre inhuman slaughter in Gaza goes on and on, we can recall what hero publisher of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, said during the U.S.-UK-led war on Iraq. Assange suggested we ask ourselves:

That is war by media. Let us ask ourselves of the complicit media, which is the majority of the mainstream press, what is the average death count attributed to each journalist?

“When we understand that wars come about as a result of lies peddled to the British public and the American public and the publics all over Europe and other countries then who are the war criminals? It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists; journalists are war criminals. And while one might think that that should lead us to a state of despair, that the reality that is constructed around us is constructed by liars, is constructed by people who are close to those that they are meant to be policing, it should lead us also to an optimistic understanding because if wars can be started by lies, truth can be started, peace can be started by truth.

Julian Assange spoke succinctly about those media journalists who read us selected, bent and twisted one-sided news to disinform, blind or subtly trick the public to support, accept or ignore ongoing atrocity wars even when massive amount of lives are being taken.

Julian Assange has brought to our attention the pleasant-looking evening news anchor who captivates TV audiences with alternating joviality and gravitas, asking whether they should be seen as insidiously evil as they generate support for horrific suffering, death, maiming and destruction.

Media Falsified ‘Search for Peace in the Holy Land

For seventy-five years, the powerful media of the ‘Colonial Powers renamed ‘Free World’ and finally ‘the International Community of Nations’ have kept up a murderously deceitful pretence of trying to bring peace to Palestine and the oil rich Middle East. A quick glance at the provisions of the 1946 proposed UN partition that were fully expected and obviously intended to incite violence and create deadly conflict, permanent hostilities, destabilisation and facilitate Western imperialist penetration, exposes this pretending to search for a peace which that financial element that rules the United States and Wall St. has never wanted.

75 years of pro-Israel journalism for the same U.S. war investing business elite that once heavily invested in Hitler, was itself anti-Semitic in outlook, coldly indifferent and even complicit during the Holocaust its investments had made possible.

Since October 7, Israel has blocked, food, water, electricity and fuel from entering Gaza, with the unholy desired effect of the present famine with children now dying of malnutrition. This has been rarely mentioned in pro-Israel journalism.

Commercial newscast time is almost entirely devoted to the hostages, with almost never a word regarding the thousands of Palestinians, many children, the hostages were taken to exchange.

Journalists of the U.S.-led hegemonic West are responsible for prolonging the Genocide of fellow Human Beings — almost half of them children! — by delaying the world from putting an end to Israel’s American provisioned and supported slaughter of Palestinians through air strikes and famine.

How many more children will soon die because Journalists working for the giant entertainment/news corporation conglomerates of the U.S.A. led hegemonic colonialist West have for twelve months been underreporting this inhumane blockage of life sustaining aid, focusing its audiences attention instead on Israeli propaganda of mostly lies of horrendous atrocities during the Palestinian freedom fighters guerrilla attack on October 7, 2023, which Western journalists never fail to label a terrorist attack by Hamas repeating ‘which the U.S. and other nations have cited as a terrorist organisation.’

This article is dedicated to the indescribably inhuman horror of death and destruction being brought down upon Palestinians, especially on thousands of their children.

For one whole year Israel has rained down death, maiming, and terror upon more than 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza. As of early October 2024, the ongoing conflict in Gaza has resulted in the deaths of around 17,000 Palestinian children since October 2023, according to reports from local authorities and humanitarian organisations, with UNICEF warning of the unimaginable horrors faced by Gaza’s children during the relentless Israeli attacks. Many of these children are not only victims of the violence but also suffer from severe psychological trauma, physical injuries, and the loss of parents.

Today’s seemingly ubiquitous accessory to wars CIA overseen hegemonic international media must and will eventually be taken down by a growing alternate media and new media from powerful greatly populated countries like China, India and other prospering nations of the awakening South. Today’s twisted realities and their mass murderous history will soon be apparent even to Americans, who, along with the victims of its wars, will benefit from the truth.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jay Janson.

1. Israel will not defeat Hamas or its allies in the Palestinian resistance. Hamas is becoming stronger, not weaker, with a growing number of recruits among survivors in Gaza whose families Israel has wiped out. Hamas weapons are largely harvested from the limitless supply of unexploded Israeli ordnance and abandoned arms, which are repurposed as needed in small factories deep underground, in mostly impenetrable and well defended sealed tunnels.

2. Hamas also cannot defeat Israel, but Israel is becoming weaker, not stronger. It may have unlimited US arms and money, but its mostly reserve forces are exhausted, and its economy is in tatters. Roughly 10% of its population has left the country in the last year. Until now, Israel’s military strategy for the last 77 years has been to fight short, intensive wars that quickly crush the enemy. Today it finds itself in a protracted war of attrition. That is why it is failing. Palestinians are ready to endure and sacrifice. Israelis are pampered by comparison.

3. Israel also cannot defeat Hezbollah, Ansarallah (Houthis), Iran, or any of the Axis of Resistance, nor can any or all of them defeat Israel. So why is Israel trying to bring them into the war? One reason is that Netanyahu and his government need to show the discouraged and increasingly angry Israeli public that they have options other than the stalemate in Gaza, i.e. a reason to cheer. The other reason is to attempt to bring the US military more directly into the war. Even the US cannot win without ground troops, for which they have no trained or properly armed forces, but under cover of a wider war, Israel perceives an opportunity to more intensively eliminate a larger portion of the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza. As in the past, this will not bring peace, but it will fulfill some Zionist expansionist dreams and assure a place for Netanyahu in the Zionist pantheon. It is also a potential doomsday scenario that could threaten the entire world as we know it.

4. If (a very big IF) Israel succeeds that far – and even if it does not – its future will nonetheless be very different from its past. It will no longer be the glamorous, trendy place that attracts celebrities and hosts international events. It will be shunned by much of the world, both economically and culturally. It will become a redoubt of Zionist fanatics, with a reduced domestic population as well as diminishing support among both the Jewish and non-Jewish population of the world with whom the fanatics have little in common. It will become more of a pariah than it is now, isolated and more dependent than ever on support from the US and a handful of other countries. It will be a rough existence, not very appealing.

5. How will it end? One possibility is that Israel will eventually fade away, as the crusaders did a millennium ago, its population dwindling to nothing, due to lack of support and reinforcements. Another is that they will finally leave by force, as the hated French did from Algeria, with few traces other than their edifices. The third possibility is that they will accept a single non-Zionist state in all of Palestine, where Jews are not a majority, based on the South African model. Although this last is probably the best for all concerned, it is by no means necessarily the most likely outcome. Then, there is ethnic cleansing, genocide, expulsion and/or eradication of the Palestinians, on a scale that leaves few if any in Palestine, but opens the possibility of future expansion into Lebanon, Syria, the East Bank (Jordan), Sinai (again, in Egypt) and even parts of Saudi Arabia. Some Zionists consider it Manifest Destiny.

I wish I could say that the situation in 2025, on the second anniversary of the al-Aqsa Flood, will be better than on the first, but it might look much the same, only with greater death and destruction. Nevertheless, I suspect that it is the beginning of the end for Israel as we know it – however long it takes – and that the long Palestinian sacrifice may finally achieve freedom, liberation and national sovereignty.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Larudee.

Read Part 1.

The events described in previous articles ─ pro-Israel influence that enabled rapid recognition by the U.S. government of the Israel regime in 1948 and an American murder of 29 Palestinians at the Cave of Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994 are not isolated relics of the past. They link to events that occur in contemporary times and remain alive as if happening today ─ salient features in the historical narrative that a world ignored and served to claim more victims.

Pro-Israel influence that enabled rapid recognition by the U.S. government of the Israel regime initiated the trend that guaranteed almost continuous support by the U.S. government for Israel’s mounting crimes. Made in America Baruch Goldstein, in his murderous rampage, set the stage for continuous murders of Palestinians and for the made in America bombs that extinguished the life of Hezbollah Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah.

The constant drumming of arranged epithets and twists of reality, where an Israel committed atrocity becomes an Israel sacrifice, continues to manipulate minds. Hezbollah and its deceased leader, Hassan Nasrallah, are not portrayed as fighting to prevent the genocide of the Palestinian people by the terrorist Israeli government; they are labelled as terrorist Hezbollah and terrorist Nasrallah urging genocide of nuclear-armed Israel and as individuals who deserve the ultimate fate.

In his speech to the United Nations (UN), Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, displayed the deranged and manipulative mind that governs Israel’s actions. He said “more resolutions have been passed by the General Assembly against Israel in the last decade than against the rest of the world’s countries,” and accused the UN of being a “house of darkness” and a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” The avalanche of UN resolutions condemning Israel’s genocidal actions prove that Israel is a “house of darkness,” a nation that has no regard for international law, and has leaders who feed upon hating other peoples. In his purposeful upside-down world, Netanyahu attempted to use valid condemnation of Israel’s actions by those who have been trusted to safeguard the world against criminal actions to prove Israel is a “shining light on the hill.”

From Netanyahu,

Hezbollah is the quintessential terror organization in the world today. It has tentacles that span all continents. It has murdered more Americans and more Frenchmen than any group except Bin Laden. It’s murdered the citizens of many countries represented in this room.

Netanyahu alludes to one incident, the 40 year-old 1983 bombings of French and American barracks in Beirut. On October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a truck filled with explosives into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and killed 241 U.S. military personnel. That same morning, another suicide attack killed 58 French soldiers in their barracks. The barracks were components of contingents of U.S. Marines and French forces that arrived in Lebanon as part of a peacekeeping mission. After the Sabra and Shatila massacres, which killed between “1,300 and 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shias,” and French and U.S. naval bombardments of the Shouf hills, Lebanese militants perceived the French and U.S. presences in their land as intruding forces that protected Israel’s invasion. The militants wanted these forces to leave, and, not too long after the bombings, they left. No confirmed information is available of who authorized and carried out the bombings. A formal Hezbollah did not exist at that time.

There is definite information that Israeli air force jet fighter aircraft and navy motor torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty on 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War, killed 34 and wounded 171 crew members. Many Americans have been arbitrarily murdered by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, about ½ dozen this year.

Heart breaking to learn that Turkish-American woman, Aysenur Eygi, who radiates beauty, was shot and killed while protesting near Nablus. Disturbing to know the U.S. government does not hold Israeli officials responsible. Pulverizing to understand that Israel uses slaughter to send a message ─ come to Israel to help the Palestinians and you will be killed — young, old, man, woman, or child. Her life should not be forgotten, and her image should appear on every protest mechanism.

Apply Netanyahu’s statement to situations that caused U.S. casualties, and we have, “Israel is the quintessential terror organization in the world today. It has tentacles that span all continents. It has murdered more Americans than any group except Bin Laden. It’s murdered the citizens of many countries represented at the UN.”

Reality, truth, and facts are rarely considered by Israel’s puppets. Reading a paper placed before him, US President Joe Biden says the same as his leader.

Hassan Nasrallah and the terrorist group he led, Hezbollah, were responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade reign of terror. His death from an Israeli airstrike is a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians.”

“Hundreds of Americans,” and “thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians?” Some Israeli civilians have been killed in the tit-for-tat hostilities, a minute number compared to Lebanese civilians and UN workers killed by Israel. Ex-president Joseph Biden, please name one American proven to be killed by Hezbollah since it became an official organization in 1985.

The Israeli Prime Minister, who believes that the function of the peoples of the world is to make certain Israeli Jews live and survive well, regardless of the murders of others, recites,

After generations in which our people were slaughtered, remorselessly butchered, and no one raised a finger in our defense, we now have a state. We now have a brave army, an army of incomparable courage, and we are defending ourselves.

An insolent and degrading insult to all those who fought and died in World War II. The United States, Soviet Union, and their allies fought bravely to defeat the Nazi state in World War II. They raised more than their fingers; they sacrificed themselves in defense of all the European peoples. If there was a strategy to liberate anyone from the camps and secure their lives — Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, gypsies, political opponents of the Nazi regime, and Jews — they would have implemented the strategy.

In war and immediate post-war years, communication and access to news, including firsthand knowledge was limited — no Internet, no 100 channels of television, no electronic mail, no You Tube, no digital cameras, no smart phones, no Facetime, no WhatsApp, and no social media. The ubiquitous, daily, and on site images of the violence we see today were not available to stir the mind to action. Unbelievable, that despite the enormous information that describes the genocide in Gaza, the world remains relatively passive and little effort is being applied to prevent the genocide. Just the opposite is occurring; societies are helping and encouraging it. Mr. Netanyahu, nobody encouraged the Holocaust; Mr. Netanyahu stand up and tell us why you are encouraging the genocide, requesting the Western world to contribute to your gruesome cause, and are ready to extend it to Lebanon?

The unwary world, still unable to confront its malaise, has allowed the Israeli Jews to judge who lives and who dies, slaughtering others with impunity and without redress. Netanyahu has said it with bravado, vowing to destroy anyone in the world who harms an Israeli citizen. Recent events indicate nobody is safe from the Zionist Jews who murder with ease, without remorse, and without facing justice. Give it perspective by citing a few examples.

The goat and sheepherders in the South Hebron Hills live a simple and basic life on semi-desert land, which is barely sufficient to feed their small herds. They don’t ask anything from anybody, don’t harm anybody, and just want to do their daily chores. Settlers from Brooklyn, New York, who never saw a goat or sheep in their life, have suddenly become herders who need room and land for their pet goats. Simple way to get it ─ forcibly evict these simple people and ruin their lives by telling them the land is now a closed “firing zone.” If they protest, well, just shoot them. A video (scroll down) shows a settler arguing with a Palestinian herder on the herder’s land in the village of al-Tawani and arbitrarily shooting him. Israeli soldiers nonchalantly regard the incident and nobody detains the assailant.

Gaza has its daily atrocities. Israeli snipers and soldiers wantonly murder men, women, and especially children. In one episode, Israeli soldiers search a building, going from apartment to apartment. They enter an apartment and order several men to strip and then execute them. No reason and no concern for the killings. Go to “The Night Won’t End,” a film that investigates civilian killings in Gaza. View from 1:00.01 to 1:04.50 and be prepared to witness a horror.

In the West Bank town of Qabatiya, soldiers murder several Palestinians and then commit a gruesome act — treat the lifeless bodies as rubbish and throw them off the roof into the street below.  

The New York Times reports,

According to Wafa (Palestine News Agency), seven Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military during a 10-hour raid into Qabatiya, south of the city of Jenin, on Thursday. Among them, Wafa said, were the three people — believed to be men — captured in the video.

Wafa reported that, after being thrown from the building, the bodies were mutilated on the ground by the claw of an Israeli excavator before being taken away by the military.

In describing the exploding pagers that killed about 10 people and injured several thousand in Lebanon, media, as usual, inserts a description of Hezbollah as the “terror group.” Here we have one of the most horrific terror attacks in recorded history, with innocent civilians suddenly blinded while doing their daily activities and the victims are called the terrorists.

Biggest atrocity

The greatest atrocity has been done to Jewish people. Since its inception, Israel Jews have been used as pawns to oppress and subjugate others and been subjected to constant attacks. Thanks to Netanyahu and his compatriots, the Jews have become the most hated people in the world. Not just animosity or mild disapproval; venomous hatred of not wanting to associate and wishing disappearance. World Jewry may not realize it but this animosity comes from democratic, freedom loving, and liberal persons, people fighting for human rights who now express belief that Zionist Jews are inhuman. Many decent and well-meaning people are following the suggestion by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi.

Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.

Can the world confront its malaise? Activists should keep doing what they are doing and try to overcome the Zionists and their worldwide conspirators who find antidotes by converting protests against their malevolent actions into malevolent protests by the protestors. The latest trickery has the New York Times, Sept. 4, 2024, publish, “Across the United States this spring, Iran also used social media to stoke student-organized protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, with operatives providing financial assistance and posing as students, according to American intelligence assessments.” What nonsense.

Well known that Israeli operatives flood social media with derogatory information on campus protestors and flattering information on their counter protestors, and hundreds of millions of dollars of donations are used to shape college presidents’ and government officials’ decisions. The Iranian agents, if they existed, probably could not buy a government or college official a cup of coffee.

Mentioning the atrocities committed by Israel leads to the question, “What can be done to stop Israel?” Arguments to the eventual demise of the Zionist nightmare are more wish fulfillment than reality.

The Times of Israel (TOI) features an article, “Derelict economy could sink ‘Titanic’ Israel, experts warn,” which relates, “New research paints worrying picture of decades of neglected national priorities leaving the country without the resources to face existential threats.” TOI is perspicacious, Intel has halted expansion of its facilities in Israel, delaying construction of a $25 billion factory for chip production. This pessimism gives optimism to those who believe that a disastrous economy will not be able to support a strong military. After Israel’s military decimates Hezbollah as a fighting force, Israel will no longer need a world class military to protect it from fulfilling its self-guided mission. This mission does not have a high-flying economy as its prominent feature; the Israel economy will always receive assistance from its benefactors — United States, Germany, and Jewish billionaires around the world. The salient feature of the Zionist mission is Irredentism ─ uniting of Jews around the world, physically or morally, in a supposedly united Biblical kingdom of Judah and Israel. That mission is almost completed and only enforcers composed of a small military and a large settler population will be needed to contain the Palestinians on the plantation. The shrinking labor force, due to emigrating Israelis, will be filled by the slave labor of compliant Palestinians.

Another argument for defeating Israel treats collapse of its principal supporter, the United States of America. Accomplishing that internally does not seem plausible. A possible solution to Israel’s maddening of the civilized world lays with leaders of several nations. A world realignment of blocs, those contending American hegemony and those blindly supporting it, is occurring. The U.S. faces economic decline from Chinese competition. If a substantial number of nations are convinced that moving away from the United States and aligning with China is less dangerous than allowing the modern Israelites and their Joshua leader to continue the revival of the Biblical Conquest, slay the inhabitants of the “promised Land,” and lead the world to continuous conflagrations, they could take action and give the U.S. an offer it cannot refuse ─ stop aiding Israel or we start aiding China. Successful rearrangement of the contending blocs requires a three-way endeavor.

• Gravitation to use of the Yuan as international currency will sink the dollar, substantially raise the price of U.S. imports, and cause a national inflation. This will be offset by lowering the cost of U.S. labor for exports and foreign investment.
• Tariffs will have to be imposed by foreign nations to offset the reduced prices and increased competitiveness of U.S. exports
• Nations will have to be assured they are not threatened by loss of U.S. security.

We have a complex subject that needs discussion beyond this article. Wait, there may be a solution on the way. I don’t recommend it but ex-President and future felon, Donald Trump, proposes weakening the dollar, increasing tariffs, and providing less security to other nations.

Will a Trump victory bring about the international realignment that forces the United States to compromise its protection of Israel to guarantee protection of its economy? What a dilemma!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

Over the past year the IDF has committed a holocaust in Gaza. The IDF has destroyed most of the occupied coastal strip’s buildings, water sources and agricultural land. According to the UN Satellite Centre (UNOSAT), 66% of buildings in Gaza have been damaged and “68% of the permanent crop fields in the Gaza Strip exhibited a significant decline in health and density in September 2024.”

The Israeli military has killed over 50,000 Palestinians directly (42,000 named and nearly 20,000 unidentified or disappeared). According to Oxfam, more women and children have been killed in Gaza than during the same period than any conflict over the past two decades. If you include excess mortality the full Gaza death toll is likely 200,000.

At the same time the Israeli military has brutalized Palestinians in the West Bank. The IDF has killed more than 700 there over the past year while enforcing an illegal occupation. They’ve also detained 10,000 in the West Bank.

Unsatisfied with slaughtering Palestinians, the IDF has killed nearly 2,000 Lebanese since last week. They’ve also injured thousands more and displaced almost a quarter of the country.

Last week the IDF bombed the port of Hodeidah in Yemen as they did in July. In April the Israeli military bombed Iran and Iran’s diplomatic compound in Syria. The IDF has been bombing Syria weekly for nearly a decade. During that time, they’ve blown-up hundreds of targets and people in Syria.

While its recent actions are extreme, IDF violence is not new. Over the decades the Israeli military has also bombed Jordan, Iraq, Sudan, Tunisia and Egypt (and other countries’ properties). The Israeli military has launched many invasions of its neighbours. Nearly seventy years ago the IDF invaded Egypt in a bid to reverse decolonization and weaken progressive Arab nationalism. As Zeev Maoz notes in Defending The Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security & Foreign Policy the IDF has engaged in the “threat, display, or limited use of force with its neighbors” every year since the country’s founding. The IDF was the outgrowth of the Haganah and Irgun paramilitary forces, which attacked the British and ethnically cleansed the Palestinians.

No organization on Canada’s terrorist list is responsible for nearly as much death and destruction as the IDF. It is responsible for dozens of times more deaths than any listed Palestinian or Lebanese organization. One of the groups listed, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is a sizeable secular leftist political organization that has engaged in little armed struggle for decades. The Toronto-based International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy (IRFAN) is also on the list even though no one claims it has ever committed violence (the former registered charity supported orphans and a hospital in Gaza through official Hamas controlled channels).

While it is true that Canada’s terrorist list overwhelmingly consists of non-state actors, in June the Trudeau government listed part of Iran’s military, the 100,000 strong Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as a terrorist entity. Its smaller Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Qods Force was listed in 2012. Again, the IDF is responsible for far more death and destruction than either. It has also flouted international law for the majority of its existence.

If a terrorism list is to have any legitimacy, it should be about saving lives and infrastructure that human societies need rather than pro-US geopolitics. As a country that claims to believe in an international rules-based order, Canada should add the Israeli military to its terrorism list.

If it does not, the stench of hypocrisy will grow stronger and stronger.

Please take a minute to ask the Canadian government to list the IDF as a terrorist organization.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

On October 1, Iran fired about 180 missiles at Israel in response to Israel’s recent assassinations of leaders of its Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), Hezbollah, and Hamas. There are conflicting reports about how many of the missiles struck their targets and if there were any deaths. But Israel is now considering a counterattack that could propel it into an all-out war with Iran, with the U.S. in tow.

For years, Iran has been trying to avoid such a war. That is why it signed the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement with the United States, the U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union. Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and despite Joe Biden’s much-touted differences with Trump, he failed to restore U.S. compliance. Instead, he tried to use Trump’s violation of the treaty as leverage to demand further concessions from Iran. This only served to further aggravate the schism between the United States and Iran, which have had no diplomatic relations since 1980.

Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees his long-awaited chance to draw the United States into war with Iran. By killing Iranian military leaders and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, as well as attacking Iran’s allies in Lebanon and Yemen, Netanyahu provoked a military response from Iran that has given him an excuse to widen the conflict even further. Tragically, there are warmongering U.S. officials who would welcome a war on Iran, and many more who would blindly go along with it.

Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, campaigned on a platform of reconciling with the West. When he came to New York to speak at the UN General Assembly on September 25, he was accompanied by three members of Iran’s JCPOA negotiating team: former foreign minister Javad Zarif; current foreign minister Abbas Araghchi; and deputy foreign minister Majid Ravanchi.

President Pezeshkian’s message in New York was conciliatory. With Zarif and Araghchi at his side at a press conference on September 23, he talked of peace, and of reviving the dormant nuclear agreement. “Vis-a-vis the JCPOA, we said 100 times we are willing to live up to our agreements,” he said. “We do hope we can sit at the table and hold discussions.”

On the crisis in the Middle East, Pezeshkian said that Iran wanted peace and had exercised restraint in the face of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its assassinations of resistance leaders and Iranian officials, and its war on its neighbors.

“Let’s create a situation where we can co-exist,” said Pezeshkian. “Let’s try to resolve tensions through dialogue…We are willing to put all of our weapons aside so long as Israel will do the same.” He added that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel is not, and that Israel’s nuclear arsenal is a serious threat to Iran.

Pezeshkian reiterated Iran’s desire for peace in his speech at the UN General Assembly.

“I am the president of a country that has endured threats, war, occupation, and sanctions throughout its modern history,” he said. “Others have neither come to our assistance nor respected our declared neutrality. Global powers have even sided with aggressors. We have learned that we can only rely on our own people and our own indigenous capabilities. The Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to safeguard its own security, not to create insecurity for others. We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.”

The U.S. response to Iran’s restraint throughout this crisis has been to keep sending destructive weapons to Israel, with which it has devastated Gaza, killed tens of thousands of women and children, bombed neighboring capitals, and beefed up the forces it would need to attack Iran.

That includes a new order for 50 F-15EX long-range bombers, with 750 gallon fuel tanks for the long journey to Iran. That arms deal still has to pass the Senate, where Senator Bernie Sanders is leading the opposition.

On the diplomatic front, the U.S. vetoed successive cease-fire resolutions in the UN Security Council and hijacked Qatar and Egypt’s cease-fire negotiations to provide diplomatic cover for unrestricted genocide.

Military leaders in the United States and Israel appear to be arguing against war on Iran, as they have in the past. Even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney balked at launching another catastrophic war based on lies against Iran, after the CIA publicly admitted in its 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons.

When Trump threatened to attack Iran, Tulsi Gabbard warned him that a U.S. war on Iran would be so catastrophic that it would finally, retroactively, make the war on Iraq look like the “cakewalk” the neocons had promised it would be.

But neither U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nor Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant can control their countries’ war policies, which are in the hands of political leaders with political agendas. Netanyahu has spent many years trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, and has kept escalating the Gaza crisis for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, with that goal clearly in mind.

Biden has been out of his depth throughout this crisis, relying on political instincts from an era when acting tough and blindly supporting Israel were politically safe positions for American politicians. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rose to power through the National Security Council and as a Senate staffer, not as a diplomat, riding Biden’s coat-tails into a senior position where he is as out of his depth as his boss.

Meanwhile, pro-Iran militia groups in Iraq warn that, if the U.S. joins in strikes on Iran, they will target U.S. bases in Iraq and the region.

So we are careening toward a catastrophic war with Iran, with no U.S. diplomatic leadership and only Trump and Harris waiting in the wings. As Trita Parsi wrote in Responsible Statecraft, “If U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this administration’s failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue America’s most core security interest here — avoiding war.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

The Australian political-media class have been in an uproar ever since footage surfaced of people waving Hezbollah flags at a protest in Melbourne over the weekend and displaying pictures of the group’s deceased leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was assassinated by Israel in a massive airstrike on Friday.

After initially stating that no crime had been committed in these acts of political speech, Victoria police are now saying they have identified six potentially criminal incidents related to the demonstration. These incidents reportedly involve “prohibited symbols” in violation of the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment which was enacted last year.

Needless to say, free nations do not have “prohibited symbols”.

This development follows numerous statements from various Australian leaders denouncing the protests as criminal.

“I expect the police agencies to pursue this,” Victorian premier Jacinta Allan said of the protests, adding, “Bringing grief and pain and division to the streets of Melbourne by displaying these prohibited symbols, is utterly unacceptable.”

Australia’s foreign minister Penny Wong took to Twitter to denounce the protesters, saying Australians must not only refrain from supporting Hezbollah but from even giving “any indication of support”.

“We condemn any indication of support for a terrorist organisation such as Hizballah,” Wong tweeted, adding, “It not only threatens national security, but fuels fear and division in our communities.”

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke wants to deport any international visitors displaying prohibited symbols in Australia, saying “I won’t hesitate to cancel the visas of visitors to our country who are spreading hate.”

On the other side of the aisle, opposition leader Peter Dutton is on a crusade to get new laws passed to ensure the elimination of banned symbols from public view, saying “enforcement for law is required and if there are laws that need to be passed to make sure that our values are upheld then the Prime Minister should be doing that.”

“Support for a proscribed terrorist organisation has no place on the streets of Melbourne,” tweeted Labor MP Josh Burns. “Anyone breaking counter-terrorism legislation should face the full force of the law.”

“Australians cherish the right to peaceful protest,” tweeted independent MP Zoe Daniels. “However, there is no justification for supporting a proscribed terrorist organisation. Those who were seen doing so on the streets of Melbourne at protests yesterday should be investigated and prosecuted.”

In an article titled “Hezbollah flags at protests shape as test of new hate-symbol laws,” the ABC reports that these legal efforts to stomp out dissenting political speech are made possible by laws which were recently passed with the official intention of targeting Nazi symbols, but which “also cover the symbols of listed terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah.” Which is about as strong an argument on the slippery slope of government censorship as you could possibly ask for.

Hezbollah is listed as a “terrorist organisation” on the say-so of the Australian government, not because of its actions or methods but because it stands in opposition to the US power alliance of which Australia is a part. This arbitrary designation is smeared across any resistance group on earth which opposes the dictates of Washington, and can then be used to suppress the speech of anyone who disagrees with the murderous behavior of the western empire.

And it should here be noted that Australia is the only so-called democracy in the world which has no national charter or bill of rights of any kind. A tremendous amount of faith has been placed in state and federal legislators to simply do the right thing, which has proved foolish and ineffective. Professor George Williams wrote for the Melbourne University Law Review in 2006:

“Australia is now the only democratic nation in the world without a national bill of rights. Some comprehensive form of legal protection for basic rights is otherwise seen as an essential check and balance in democratic governance around the world. Indeed, I can find no example of a democratic nation that has gained a new Constitution or legal system in recent decades that has not included some form of a bill of rights, nor am I aware of any such nation that has done away with a bill of rights once it has been put in place.

“Why then is Australia the exception? The answer lies in our history. Although many think of Australia as a young country, constitutionally speaking, it is one of the oldest in the world. The Australian Constitution remains almost completely as it was when enacted in 1901, while the Constitutions of the Australian states can go back as far as the 1850s. The legal systems and Constitutions of the nation and the Australian colonies (and then states) were conceived at a time when human rights, with the prominent exception of the 1791 United States Bill of Rights, tended not to be protected through a single legal instrument. Certainly, there was then no such law in the United Kingdom, upon whose legal system ours is substantially based. This has changed, especially after World War II and the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but by then Australia’s system of government had been operating for decades.”

If you ever wonder why Australia so often stands out as a freakish anomaly in the western world with its jarring authoritarianism and disregard for human rights, this is why.

The powerful abuse our civil rights because they can. We are pummeled with propaganda in the birthplace of Rupert Murdoch and increasingly forbidden from speaking out against the atrocities of our government and its allies overseas. We are being groomed into mindless, obedient sheep for the empire.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caitlin Johnstone.

Britain’s best-known Jewish newspaper has found itself thrust into the centre of an embarrassing and long-overdue storm over its involvement with the shadowy manoeuvrings of the pro-Israel lobby.

It raises questions about the degree to which parts of the British media are – inadvertently or otherwise – colluding in Israeli disinformation.

The 180-year-old Jewish Chronicle, or JC as it is now known, lost four of its big-name columnists on Sunday, after it was revealed that the paper had published a story based on a forged document concerning Israel’s war on Gaza. Jonathan Freedland, David Aaronovitch, Hadley Freeman and David Baddiel swiftly quit the paper.

The Chronicle, it emerged, had apparently failed to make the most rudimentary checks on Elon Perry, a mysterious British-based Israeli freelance journalist who has written nine stories for the paper since Israel’s war on Gaza began nearly a year ago. All have now been excised from its website.

Investigations by the Israeli media revealed that Perry’s CV, which included claims that he had been a professor at Tel Aviv University, a former elite Israeli commando and a longtime journalist, was a tissue of all-too-obvious lies. His only journalism appears to be the nine stories he published in the JC.

The Chronicle similarly failed to check before publication the veracity of his most recent article, which cited a Hamas document supposedly in the possession of Israeli intelligence. But the Israeli military says it has never seen such a document.

The forgery did, however, neatly bolster a narrative Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been desperate to build – one that allows him to avoid engaging in negotiations with Hamas that could end the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, has ruled Israel’s actions there to be a “plausible” genocide.

Netanyahu is under huge pressure – both from his own generals and from large sections of the Israeli public – to negotiate a ceasefire so that dozens of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza can be released. Their families have been leading ever-larger protests in Israel against the government.

‘Wild fabrication’

According to Perry’s report for the Chronicle, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning, under cover of negotiations, to smuggle himself, other Hamas leaders and Israeli hostages out of Gaza through its border with Egypt. They would then have been spirited away to Iran.

Happily for Netanyahu, the report closely echoed his own claims about Hamas’s intentions.

A few days after the JC’s article was published, his wife, Sara, reportedly met with the families of the hostages, citing the story as confirmation that Netanyahu could not compromise on his tough stance on negotiations.

But the credibility of the Chronicle’s story fell apart the moment it was subjected to the simplest scrutiny.

According to the Israeli media, Israeli intelligence and military sources described the story as a “wild fabrication” and “100 percent lies”. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s spokesperson, also discounted the story as baseless.

As has been noted in these pages before, Israeli officials, including Hagari, are no stranger to falsehoods and deceptions themselves, especially during Israel’s nearly year-long war on Gaza.

The reason this particular deception has come unstuck so quickly, it seems, is only because Netanyahu and Israel’s top brass have been feuding for weeks over the prime minister’s refusal to negotiate the hostages’ release and reach a ceasefire.

The generals are reported to be increasingly incensed by Netanyahu’s intransigence, and his determination to widen the war on Gaza into a dangerous regional confrontation to save his own skin.

They believe he is putting his own narrow, selfish interests – keeping his ultra-rightwing coalition together and himself in power, thereby delaying his corruption trial – before national security.

The likelihood of a regional war increased dramatically this week when ordinary electronic devices exploded across Lebanon, killing more than 30 people and wounding thousands more. Israel has not admitted responsibility, but no one is in any doubt it was behind the attack.

The Israeli military might have seen a chance to settle scores and embarrass Netanyahu by exposing the Chronicle’s report as fake news.

Israeli disinformation

Military sources have also derided another, earlier report by Perry, calling it “bullshit”. That story claimed many of the surviving hostages were being used as human shields to protect Sinwar.

And it is not just the JC peddling Israeli disinformation. The Israeli military criticised a report on Hamas published this month by Germany’s Bild newspaper, which alleged that another “Hamas document” – this one supposedly found on Sinwar’s computer – showed the group was negotiating in bad faith and “manipulating the international community”.

Again, usefully for Netanyahu, this fabricated story suggested that any effort to secure the hostages’ release through negotiations was futile.

The JC’s editor, Jake Wallis Simons, has responded to the spate of resignations at his publication by blaming Perry: “Obviously it’s every newspaper editor’s worst nightmare to be deceived by a journalist.”

The issue, however, is not that Perry perpetrated a sophisticated deception on the JC. Rather, the paper apparently failed to make even the most cursory checks that his “exclusives” were grounded in fact.

At the very least, a routine call to the Israeli military spokesperson’s office should have sufficed to discount Perry’s last two articles.

It looks suspiciously like the Chronicle, which over the past two decades has been growing ever-more hawkish on matters relating to Israel, had no interest in checking the truth of the story, because it fitted its own preferred narrative.

But potentially, the JC’s failings were worse. There is more than a suspicion that Netanyahu’s office was behind the forgeries, using them as part of an influence campaign.

That is a conclusion reached by several senior Israeli analysts.

One, Shlomi Eldar, wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “It was clear to me this was a leak from the Israeli prime minister’s office, which is using deception to manipulate the foreign press into further tearing apart Israel’s divided society and saving Netanyahu from the intensifying protests.”

Lack of scrutiny

The question is: had the Chronicle grown so used to publishing as news what amounted to undeclared press releases from Netanyahu’s office that it had become largely indifferent as to whether the information it received was actually true?

Given the lack of scrutiny from other British media outlets about the veracity of the JC’s stories, had it grown complacent, certain it could regurgitate Israeli government disinformation with no danger of being exposed?

It is unlikely we will ever know. But the implications were certainly troubling enough that four of its leading columnists felt that remaining with the paper would damage their reputations.

Freedland, who is also a columnist at the Guardian, wrote an open letter to Wallis Simons on social media, in which he observed: “Too often, the JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than journalistic.”

One such example was a tweet (since deleted) from Wallis Simons last December, when Israel had already killed thousands of Palestinian men, women and children. Over a video of a huge explosion killing untold numbers of Palestinians in Gaza City, the JC’s editor wrote: “Onwards to victory.”

Freedland is certainly right that the Chronicle has long promoted a highly partisan, hardline, pro-Israel agenda – one that has helped stoke a climate of fear among British Jews and readied them to be more indulgent of Israel’s genocidal policies.

Collapse of journalism

So why did Freedland find no reason to resign until now, if the Chronicle’s partisan journalism began long before the latest scandal?

I and others have been noting for some time scandalous breaches of both the law and media ethics by the JC.

Over the past six years, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the feeble “regulator” created and financed by the billionaire-owned corporate media, has repeatedly found the paper guilty of breaching its code of practice.

According to the research of journalist and academic Brian Cathcart, in the five years to 2023, the paper broke the code an astonishing 41 times. The Chronicle has also lost, or been forced to settle, at least four libel cases.

Writing about these failings, Cathcart called the large number of violations “off the scale” for a small weekly publication. He further noted that the spate of serious findings by IPSO against the JC should be seen in the context of the media regulator’s dismal record in upholding complaints – 99 percent are dismissed.

Notably, despite the JC’s unprecedented violations of the code, IPSO has refused to launch an investigation or exercise its powers to fine the paper.

The Chronicle subsequently went on the offensive against those it had defamed: “In a climate of rising antisemitism, we will never be cowed by attempts to bully us into silence.”

A spokesperson for IPSO told MEE it was “carefully reviewing developments at the Jewish Chronicle”, adding: “We have no further comment to share at this time.”

Chief attack dog

There are reasons for the great latitude IPSO has shown the Chronicle.

As Cathcart has noted, were the press “regulator” to investigate the JC for its journalistic failings, it would be hard to stop there. Other outlets, such as Rupert Murdoch’s titles, would have to be investigated too.

Critics contend that the whole purpose of IPSO, established a decade ago, was to stop meaningful media regulation in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry into abuses such as the phone-hacking scandal.

But there is another reason for IPSO’s endless indulgence. The Chronicle played a critical role in advancing one of the British establishment’s most important recent disinformation campaigns: making former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn unelectable by smearing him and his supporters as antisemites.

Notably, many of the JC’s press-code violations and libel settlements related to its false allegations against either Palestinian solidarity organisations or members of the Labour left. The Chronicle served as the chief attack dog on Corbyn and his allies, stoking fears among prominent sections of the Jewish community. It began that campaign early on, when Corbyn first emerged as a candidate for the leadership.

Those fears were then cited by the rest of the corporate media as evidence that Labour was riding roughshod over the Jewish community’s “sensitivities”. And in turn, the Labour left’s supposed indifference to Jewish sensitivities could be ascribed to its rampant antisemitism.

The more the left denied it was antisemitic, the more its denials were cited as proof that it was.

The four columnists who quit the JC on the weekend all actively contributed to fomenting a political climate in which Corbyn’s leadership could be depicted as an existential threat to British Jews.

In 2019, Stephen Pollard, Wallis Simons’s predecessor as editor of the JC, was open about his paper’s crucial role against Corbyn: “There’s certainly been a huge need for the journalism that the JC does in especially looking at the antisemitism in the Labour Party and elsewhere.”

A year later, as he stepped down as the paper’s chairman, Alan Jacobs made the same point. Wealthy donors who had been bailing the paper out financially “can be proud that their combined generosity allowed the JC to survive long enough to help to see off Jeremy Corbyn and friends”, he noted.

Israeli meddling

There is already plenty of evidence that, during Corbyn’s time as Labour leader, Israeli officials were actively meddling in British politics to stop him from reaching power.

Corbyn, as a longtime and vocal critic of Israel’s illegal occupation and an advocate of Palestinian rights, was seen as too much of a threat.

Shai Masot, a spy operating out of Israel’s London embassy, was secretly filmed by an undercover Al Jazeera reporter orchestrating a smear campaign against Corbyn, using pro-Israel lobby groups inside the Labour Party.

Despite its devastating revelations airing in 2017, Al Jazeera’s four-part documentary was mostly ignored by an establishment media that was actively helping to propagate such smears.

The JC played a critical role in all this. It led the pressure on British institutions, including the Labour Party, to adopt a new definition of antisemitism that conflated criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews. Israel was the original driving force behind this new definition.

Faced with a barrage of criticism from the JC and the wider establishment media, as well as from pro-Israel lobby groups inside his own party, Corbyn walked into the trap set for him.

The new definition adopted by Labour made it impossible to engage in meaningful support for the Palestinian people without violating one of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s examples of antisemitism related to criticism of Israel.

Despite this new skewed definition, the JC still felt the need to push further in advancing its smear campaign – the main reason it has been found by IPSO to have broken its code of practice so frequently, and been forced to settle libel cases in recent years.

The JC had not responded to a request from MEE for comment by the time of publication.

Huge losses

The Chronicle was incurring huge losses even before it had to pay out large sums in legal bills. In 2020, the Kessler Foundation finally put it into liquidation.

Since then, it has been unclear who owns the paper. Whoever it is, they appear to have very deep pockets.

The consortium that acted as a front for the real buyer included a who’s who of public figures deeply opposed to Corbyn.

The head of the consortium was Robbie Gibb, a former Conservative spin doctor who now sits on the BBC Board, overseeing editorial standards.

Many observers are now, belatedly, pointing out Gibb’s deep conflict of interest. He is closely associated with the JC and its highly partisan, pro-Netanyahu agenda, while also holding a key position in guiding the BBC’s supposedly impartial editorial standards on Israel and Gaza.

Gibb had not replied to a request for comment from MEE by the time of publication.

‘Wrong sort of Jew’

Freedland and the other JC columnists who resigned last weekend expressed no public concerns earlier about the systematic editorial failings at the JC over many years because, it looks to me like those failings sat just fine with them – as they did with the British establishment.

Getting rid of Corbyn was a goal shared across the narrow political spectrum of the two main establishment tribes in the Conservative and Labour parties. The means – any means, it seems – justified that end.

Freedland had not replied to a request for comment from MEE by the time of publication.

On Monday, after resigning from the JC, columnist Hadley Freeman expressed concern that the paper had become a vehicle for Netanyahu’s agenda and was now failing to represent much of the British Jewish community.

“I strongly want there to be a mainstream Jewish national newspaper in this country that represents the plurality of views of Jews in this country,” she told BBC Radio 4. She went on to note: “That’s not why I joined a British Jewish newspaper, to represent the views of Netanyahu.”

And yet, she and other JC columnists spent years denying that very same “pluralism” to the substantial number of left-wing Jews who supported Corbyn, including the group Jewish Voice for Labour. Their voices were either ignored, or dismissed because they were considered the “wrong sort of Jew”.

Under Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, left-wing Jewish members of Labour have been almost five times more likely to be investigated for antisemitism by the party than non-Jewish members.

None of the JC’s columnists appear to have raised concerns about this pattern of discrimination, or the party’s institutional attacks on the rights of its Jewish members to express their political views.

Over the past year, that trend has continued. The “wrong sort of Jews” have once again found themselves ignored by the establishment media when taking part by their thousands in marches against the genocide in Gaza, or helping to lead protests on British and US campuses.

In an article published by the Times of Israel in June, Freeman asserted that “the progressive left hates the Jews”. She forgot to mention that the many Jews attending the Gaza protests and student encampments also belong to that progressive left.

Siding with the generals

The JC’s demonisation of fellow Jews in the Labour Party was not a red line for its celebrated columnists – nor was the paper’s cheering on of what the World Court has called a “plausible” genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

In fact, it was precisely the relentless bullying and silencing of voices critical of Israel through the Corbyn years that helped pave the way for Israel’s current slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children.

With almost any criticism of Israel denounced as antisemitism, Netanyahu’s ultra-right government was given a free hand to indiscriminately pulverise the enclave.

It could rely on western politicians like Starmer, now Britain’s prime minister, to rewrite international law and defend as a “right” Israel’s decision to starve Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants through a blockade on food, water and power.

So why have the JC’s four columnists suddenly found a backbone and decided to quit? The answer appears to be far less principled than they would have us believe.

The JC is finally in crisis, beset by scandal, only because the Israeli establishment is deeply split on negotiating a ceasefire and bringing home the hostages.

Israel’s parade of lies as it carried out a genocide in Gaza disturbed no one in power; it passed without comment, prompting no significant investigations by the western media.

The lies have registered on this occasion because Israel’s generals have decided that this one time, the truth matters – and only because the top brass have a score to settle with Netanyahu.

Are the JC’s columnists really taking a belated stand for journalistic integrity? Or have they simply been forced to choose a side as the rift within the Israeli establishment deepens – on one side, the generals who carried out the slaughter of Gaza’s civilians, and on the other, a far-right prime minister who wants that slaughter to continue indefinitely?

The columnists might have changed camps, but both camps are led by monsters.

• First published in Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

On Friday Israel leveled six large apartment buildings in the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut with some 80 bombs weighing 2,000 to 4,000 pounds each. Dropped by US-made F-15 fighter jets, the US-made BLU-109 “bunker-busters” incinerated an unknown number.

In response to this act of state terror Trudeau posted, “Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has been killed. He was the leader of a terrorist organization that attacked and killed innocent civilians, causing immense suffering across the region.”

When Israel’s terror campaign in Lebanon started in earnest ten days ago former ambassador to Norway and Communications Security Establishment Director General, Intelligence Operations Artur Wilczynski justified terrorizing Lebanese on the grounds of targeting “a terror group.” After Israel injured thousands by blowing up 3,000 pagers across Lebanon the University of Ottawa’s Special Advisor on Antisemitism posted that the “targeting of Hezbollah operatives was brilliant. t struck a major blow against a terror group.”

But Hezbollah isn’t classified as a “terrorist” organization by the United Nations or most countries in the world. Nor was an organization that’s long been represented in Lebanon’s parliament defined as a “terrorist” organization by Ottawa for the first half of its existence. In fact, Prime Minister Jean Chretien met Hezbollah Secretary-General Nasrallah in Beirut in October 2002.

In “Selectively Terrified” Mary Foster detailed “how Hezbollah became a terrorist organization in Canada”. Foster wrote that “pressure to list Hezbollah came from the Canadian Alliance Party (a precursor to today’s Conservative Party), senior Liberal politicians Irwin Cotler and Art Eggleton, B’nai Brith (a Jewish human rights organization, staunchly pro-Israel in orientation), and the Canadian Jewish Congress.” The campaign was greatly boosted by fabricated quotes in the National Post claiming Nasrallah encouraged suicide bombing during a speech at a Beirut rally.

If Hezbollah is a terrorist organization what is the Israeli military or government? Maybe the IOF and Netanyahu’s Likud party could be the first entries on a new Canadian genocidaires list!

Israel supporters have long argued that that country has the right to terrorize Palestinians because Ottawa (usually at the lobby’s behest) listed some organization with limited means a “terrorist” group. Before Hamas’ October 7 attack Canada’s apartheid lobby argued Israel could terrorize 2.2 million Palestinians living in the open-air Gaza prison because Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad is listed a terrorist group in Canada.

Over 10 percent of Canada’s terrorist list is made up of organizations headquartered in a long-occupied land representing one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population. Representing much of Palestinian political life, eight of the oppressed nation’s organizations are listed, ranging from the left secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to the elected Hamas ‘government’ in Gaza.

A dozen years after the terror list was established the first ever Canadian-based group was added. In 2014 the International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy (IRFAN) was designated a terrorist organization for engaging in the ghastly act of supporting orphans and a hospital in the Gaza Strip through official (Hamas-controlled) channels.

In recent months the genocide lobby has pushed to add the anti-imperialist group Samidoun to Canada’s terror enabling list. After its international branch “expressed our deepest mourning and our highest salutes” to Nasrallah upon his assassination, Holocaust Housefather opined that “Samidoun needs to be listed as a terrorist organization in Canada and around the world.” Liberal MP and Special Advisor on Jewish Community Relations and Antisemitism, Anthony Housefather added, “it is one of my priorities to get this done and by expressing how much they loved a terrorist leader who caused civilian deaths in Israel and around the world they are proving my point.”

While Palestinian groups are criminalized, Canada has close ties to the main generator of terror and killing of civilians in historic Palestine. Current Israeli government officials openly boast about their terror as necessary to teach Palestinians a lesson. Yet Canada has been selling weapons to the Israeli military and the two countries’ armed forces work together on various fronts. Additionally, Canadian officials turn a blind eye to illegal recruitment for the IOF while the Canada Revenue Agency takes a soft approach to registered charities that defy its rules by financially assisting the Israeli military.

Measured by the number maimed or killed, the Israeli army is responsible for far more violence than any Palestinian or Lebanese group (and they are doing so on behalf of a European colonial project). Yet the Israeli military is not a listed terrorist organization.

Canada’s terrorist list highlights the stark double standard in Ottawa’s treatment of the colonized and colonizer. In fact, events over the past year clearly illustrate how this list enables Israel to terrorize Palestinians and Lebanese. Once again, shame on us.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

Nearly all of Hezbollah’s military leaders have been eliminated in recent Israeli strikes, officials in West Jerusalem have claimed, after the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in a bombardment of a compound in Beirut.

In a post on X on Saturday, the Israeli Foreign Ministry released a diagram of what it said was Hezbollah’s military chain of command. All of the 18 high-ranking members – including Nasrallah and Ali Karaki, the commander of Hezbollah’s Southern front, and the heads of several units – are said to have been “eliminated.”

A separate post by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) listed 11 senior Hezbollah members, ten of whom were also described as “eliminated.” Only Abu Ali Rida, the commander of the Bader unit, has survived so far, according to the list. The IDF list largely mirrored the ministry’s, but included two additional names – Ibrahim Muhammad Qabisi, the commander of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile force, and Hussein Srour, the head of the Aerial Command – both of whom are also presumed dead.

Israel appeared to have trumpeted its successes against Hezbollah after announcing that Nasrallah had been killed in a powerful air strike in Beirut. Nasrallah, who led the group for more than 30 years, was widely regarded as an icon of resistance to Israel who oversaw the growth of Hezbollah’s power and influence.