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By Joseph Gerson

With the world, our species, facing the greatest danger of nuclear apocalypse since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, this year’s Peace Prize will refocus world attention on the urgency of renewing nuclear disarmament diplomacy.

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Nihon Hidankyo is long overdue and could not come at a more important time.

The Hibakusha (A-bomb witness/survivors) of Nihon Hidankyo have been among the world’s most courageous and steadfast advocates of nuclear disarmament. The organization has focused on three core demands: preventing nuclear war, eliminating nuclear weapons, and obtaining essential medical care for A-bomb victims.

Hidankyo was founded in 1956, in the wake of the Bravo H-Bomb test 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb, which poisoned Japanese fishermen and Marshall Islanders.

As Wilfred Burchett, the first Western journalist to witness the ruins and suffering in Hiroshima in 1945, later reported, despite their excruciating physical and emotional suffering, the Hibakusha became the world’s most powerful and influential force for the abolition. With the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, the voices of the Hibakusha, their tortured testimonies, and their truth that human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist will now ring out more powerfully around the world.

Nihon Hidankyo was repeatedly nominated for its now well-earned Peace Prize, and the Nobel Committee is now to be celebrated for finally making this year’s decision. With the world, our species, facing the greatest danger of nuclear apocalypse since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, this year’s Peace Prize will refocus world attention on the urgency of renewing nuclear disarmament diplomacy. In addition to Russian nuclear threats related to the continuing Ukraine war, an accident, incident, or miscalculation growing out of provocative U.S., allied, and Chinese military operations in and around the Taiwan Strait and the South China/West could ignite escalation to a nuclear cataclysm.

With uncertainties about a possible Trump election victory, there are growing demands among Japanese and South Korean elites for their nations to become nuclear powers. The U.S. and Russia have lowered their official operational thresholds for launching their nuclear weapons. All of the nuclear weapons states are upgrading their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems, with the U.S. committing an estimated two trillion dollars to “modernize” its systems when that money could be spent to stanch and reverse the climate emergency and to address other urgent human needs.

Let us marvel and learn from the reality that Hibakusha, who were literally the last people on Earth, once seen by U.S. leaders and media as “vermin” to be eliminated, have awakened the conscience of the world after suffering what was probably the world’s worst war crime. And contrary to the myth propagated by President Truman, the A-bombs were not necessary to defeat Japan. Senior U.S. military officials from Eisenhower to LeMay and Leahy advised the president that “it wasn’t necessary to hit Japan with that awful thing” Secretary of War Stimson had already advised that Japan’s surrender on terms acceptable to the U.S. could be negotiated.”

Hibakusha’s friends, families, and neighbors were incinerated, irradiated, and physically ripped apart by the radiation’s heat and blast waves of the world’s first A-bombs. An entire city was destroyed and burned to the ground. Amidst their own agonies, many Hibakusha were unable to save their families in their shattered and burning homes. They witnessed ghostlike figures, no longer recognizable as human beings, some holding their eyeballs or intestines in their hands marching to their deaths, often in cisterns or the city’s rivers.

In the months and years that followed, many died from radiation-inflicted cancers and other diseases. Memories remain of the birthing of mutant babies and of other young children whose lives were cut short by radiation diseases. With initial fears that the radiation diseases might be contagious and about genetic damages, Hibakusha’s suffering was compounded by marginalization and discrimination.

As a result of the U.S. military occupation which continued until 1952 and subsequently with Japan functioning as the United States’ subservient ally, essential medical and other support services were long denied to Hibakusha. Among the achievements of Nihon Hidankyo and its allies are the collaborations they have built with other “global hibakusha.” These included forced laborers who were brought from Japanese-occupied Korea who also suffered the A-bombings. Compassionately and strategically they supported and joined with nuclear weapons test victims from the Marshall Islands, the United States, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tahiti, the Christmas Islands, and other Pacific Islands. Together with their testimonies in communities across the world and in the United Nations they forged the powerful but still inadequate taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. With their testimonies at the U.N. and elsewhere they have won the majority of the world’s governments to the understanding that for the human species to survive, priority must be given to the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, not so-called “state security” interests.

Hibakusha testimonies were essential to the successful negotiation of the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which seeks to hold the nuclear weapons states accountable to their Article VI Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligation to engage in good faith negotiations for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.

That nuclear weapons have not been used since the Nagasaki A-bombing was an unfortunate misstatement in the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s award announcement. As Daniel Ellsberg, a principal author of the United States’ nuclear war planning in the Kennedy administration, taught during many international crises and wars, the U.S. has used its nuclear arsenal in the same way that an armed robber uses his gun when pointed at his victim’s head. Whether or not the trigger is pulled, the gun has been used.

Tragically, this is a playbook from which the Russian government has been working with its Ukraine-war nuclear threats. It is worth noting that in response to the announcement of the award, Hidankyo referenced the terrible assaults on the people of Gaza. The Hibakusha have identified with victims of other holocausts and massacres going back to Vietnam, when they identified with the people under the bombs.

They then warned of the danger that the U.S. might resort to a nuclear attack (which the U.S. prepared and threatened in 1954, 1957, and with President Nixon’s 1969 “madman” nuclear mobilization. Numerous popular initiatives are at work in the world which will be boosted by the Peace Prize award to Nihon Hibakusha.

In the U.S., the Back from the Brink campaign, initiated by Physicians for Social Responsibility, has been at the cutting edge. Its call for negotiation of a verifiable agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons, renunciation of first-use policies, ending the president’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons, taking U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert, and canceling the plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons has been endorsed by 43 members of Congress and numerous U.S. cities and states.

The Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security works to prevent nuclear war and achieve a nuclear weapons-free world via its advocacy of Common Security. This is the ancient truth that no nation can achieve security at the expense of its rival. As with the INF Treaty that ended the Cold War before the fall of the Cold War, peaceful coexistence and security can be achieved only through mutual recognition and respectful, if difficult, win-win negotiations between rivals.

In the face of the horrors of nuclear weapons and drawing on the courage of Hibakusha, this is the paradigm on which the Hibakusha’s vision of a nuclear weapons-free world can be achieved.

Joseph Gerson is the president of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common security, the co-chair of an Indo-Pacific working group preparing a Common Security Report, and author of Empire and the Bomb and With Hiroshima Eyes.

13 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Brett Wilkins

A Belgium-based advocacy group on Tuesday announced it “filed an unprecedented and historic complaint with the International Criminal Court against 1,000 Israeli occupation forces soldiers for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Gaza,” where more than 150,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded and millions more displaced, starved, and sickened by Israel’s yearlong onslaught.

The Hind Rajab Foundation—named after the 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed in January along with half a dozen relatives and rescue workers by Israeli troops invading Gaza in retaliation for the October 2023 Hamas-led attack—said that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) personnel identified by name in the International Criminal Court (ICC) complaint “are accused of participating in systematic attacks against civilians during the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

“This complaint, supported by over 8,000 pieces of verifiable evidence—including videos, audio recordings, forensic reports, and social media documentation—demonstrates the soldiers’ direct involvement in these atrocities,” the group explained. “All of the named soldiers were located in Gaza during the genocidal assault, and the evidence reveals their participation in violations of international law.”

[https://twitter.com/prem_thakker/status/1843653184331624552]

The foundation accuses Israeli forces of:

• Destruction of civilian infrastructure: Targeted attacks on homes, hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, and other civilian infrastructure.
• Illegal occupation and looting: Soldiers were documented occupying civilian homes, looting personal belongings, and exploiting occupied properties.
• Participation in the Gaza blockade: The soldiers played an active role in enforcing a blockade that deprived civilians of essential goods such as food, water, and medical supplies.
• Targeting civilians: Audio and video evidence show soldiers deliberately attacking noncombatant individuals, including medical personnel and journalists.
• Use of inhumane warfare tactics: Indiscriminate bombing campaigns, starvation, and the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure were all part of their actions.

The IDF soldiers identified in the complaint include at least 12 American, 12 French, four Canadian, three British, and two Dutch nationals.

“This complaint is not only the largest ever submitted to the ICC, but it is also a milestone in documenting Israeli war crimes for future generations,” the Hind Rajab Foundation said. “By meticulously identifying the perpetrators and detailing their crimes, we are establishing a historical record that will ensure the individuals responsible are remembered and held accountable.”

“The submission of this complaint represents a significant moment in the fight for justice,” the group continued. “We honor the memory of Hind Rajab and the countless victims who have perished in the ongoing genocide. Their stories will not be forgotten, and their voices will be heard through our persistent legal action.”

The foundation added that the complaint “supports the efforts” of International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan—who is seeking to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leaders—and “pushes for immediate action, including the issuance of arrest warrants for those responsible.”

“We believe this complaint marks a turning point in the global fight to bring justice to Palestine,” the group asserted.

The complaint’s filing came amid Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, for which the U.S.-backed ally is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice. In recent weeks, Israel has escalated attacks on Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere, killing and injuring thousands of people and threatening to plunge the Middle East into a wider war.

The filing also came on the same day that Sky News published an investigation confirming that IDF officials lied when repeatedly claiming there were no Israeli troops near the site of Rajab’s killing at the time of the attack. The British network published satellite images showing numerous IDF vehicles nearby and interviewed military experts who identified damage done by bullets and tank rounds to the vehicle in which the family was traveling.

[https://twitter.com/SkyYaldaHakim/status/1843900645906010350]

The car was hit multiple times. Hind Rajab and her 15-year-old cousin Layan were the last survivors. In one recorded phone conversation with Rajab’s mother before the two children were killed Layan said, “The tanks are next to us.”

Hamas has no tanks.

The Sky News investigation was at least the second journalistic probe that concluded Israeli officials are not telling the truth about the attack.

In June, the U.K. research agency Forensic Architecture collaborated with Al Jazeera journalists and the advocacy group Earshot to publish an analysis that found Israeli tank fire likely fired the bullets that killed Rajab, her relatives, and two paramedics trying to rescue them in an ambulance that was blown to pieces despite receiving IDF permission to proceed with the rescue shortly before being attacked.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

10 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

No one had expected that one year would be enough to recenter the Palestinian cause as the world’s most pressing issue, and that millions of people across the globe, would, once again rally for Palestinian freedom.

The last year witnessed an Israeli genocide in Gaza, unprecedented violence in the West Bank, but also legendary expressions of Palestinian sumud, or steadfastness.

It is not the enormity of the Israeli war, but the degree of the Palestinian sumud that has challenged what once seemed to be a foregone conclusion to the Palestinian struggle.

Yet, it turned out that the last chapter on Palestine was not yet ready to be written, and that it would not be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who would write it.

The ongoing war has exposed the limits of Israel’s military machine. The typical trajectory of Israel’s relationship with the occupied Palestinians has been predicated on unhindered Israeli violence and deafening international silence. It was largely Israel that alone determined the timing and objectives of war. Its enemies, until recently, seemed to have no say over the matter.

Yet, this is no longer the case. Israeli war crimes are now met with Palestinian unity, Arab, Muslim and international solidarity, and early, albeit serious signs of legal accountability as well.

This is hardly what Netanyahu was hoping to achieve; just days before the start of the war, he stood in the United Nations General Assembly Hall carrying a map of a ‘New Middle East’, a map that had completely erased Palestine and the Palestinians.

“We must not give the Palestinians a veto over (..) peace,” he said, as “Palestinians are only 2% of the Arab world.” His arrogance didn’t last long, as that supposedly triumphant moment was short-lived.

Embattled Netanyahu is now mostly concerned about his own political survival. He is expanding the war front to escape his army’s humiliation in Gaza and is terrified by the prospect of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.

And as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) continues to look into an ever-expanding file, accusing Israel of deliberate genocide in the Strip, the UNGA, on September 18, resolved that Israel must end its illegal occupation of Palestine within a year from the passing of its resolution on the matter.

It must be utterly disappointing for Netanyahu – who has worked tirelessly to normalize his occupation of Palestine – to be met with total and thundering international rejection of his schemes. The advisory opinion of the ICJ, on July 19, declaring that “Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (is) unlawful” was another blow to Tel Aviv, which despite unlimited US support, failed to change international consensus on the illegality of the occupation.

In addition to the relentless Israeli violence, the Palestinian people have been marginalized as political actors. Since the Oslo Accords in 1993, their fate has been largely entrusted to a mostly unelected Palestinian leadership, which, with time, monopolized the Palestinian cause for its own financial and political interests.

The sumud of the Palestinians in Gaza, who have endured a year of mass killing, deliberate starvation and total destruction of all aspects of life, is helping reassert the political significance of a long-marginalized nation.

This shift is fundamental as it runs opposite to everything that Netanyahu had tried to achieve. In the years prior to the war, Israel seemed to be writing the final chapter of its settler colonial project in Palestine. It had subdued or co-opted the Palestinian leadership, perfected its siege on Gaza and was ready to annex much of the West Bank.

Gaza became the least of Israel’s concerns, as any discussion around it was confined to the hermetic Israeli siege and the resulting humanitarian, though not political crisis.

While Palestinians in Gaza have tirelessly implored the world to pressure Israel to end the protracted siege, imposed in earnest in 2007, Tel Aviv continued to conduct its policies in the Strip according to the infamous logic of former top Israeli official, Dov Weissglas, who explained the rationale behind the blockade as “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

But a year into the war, Palestinians, due to their own steadfastness, have become the center of any serious discussion on a peaceful future in the Middle East. Their collective courage and steadfastness have neutralized the Israeli military machine’s ability to exact political outcomes through violence.

True, the number of dead, missing or wounded in Gaza has already exceeded 150,000. The Strip, impoverished and dilapidated to begin with, is in total ruins. Every mosque, church or hospital has been destroyed or seriously damaged. Most of the region’s educational infrastructure has been obliterated. Yet, Israel hasn’t achieved any of its strategic objectives, which are ultimately united by a single goal, that of silencing the Palestinian quest for freedom, forever.

Despite the unbelievable pain and loss, there is now a powerful energy that is unifying Palestinians around their cause, and the Arabs and the whole world around Palestine. This shall have consequences that will last for many years, long after Netanyahu and his ilk of extremists are gone.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

10 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By M K Bhadrakumar

Israel has apparently shelved its planned attack on Iran. A combination of circumstances can be attributed to this retreat, which rubbishes Israel’s own high-pitched rhetoric that it was raring to go.

Despite Israel’s brilliant media management, reports have surfaced  that the Iranian missile attack on October 1 was a spectacular success. It was a display of Iran’s deterrence capability to crush Israel, if need arises. The failure of the US to intercept Iranian hypersonic missiles carried its own message. Iran claims that 90 percent of its missiles penetrated Israel’s air defence system.

Will Schryver, a technical engineer and security commentator, wrote on X: “I don’t understand how anyone who has seen the many video clips of the Iranian missile strikes on Israel cannot recognise and acknowledge that it was a stunningdemonstration of Iranian capabilities. Iran’s ballistic missiles smashed through US/Israeli air defences and delivered several large-warhead strikes to Israeli military targets.”

Evidently, in the ensuing panic situation in Israel, as the US president Joe Biden put it, as of October 4, there had been no decision yet on what type of response Israel should mount against Iran. “If I were in their [Israeli] shoes, I’d be thinking about other alternatives than striking oil fields,” Biden said in a rare appearance in the White House briefing room a day after Israeli officials were saying that a “significant retaliation” was imminent.

Biden added that Israelis “have not concluded how they’re — what they’re going to do” in retaliation. Biden also told reporters that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should remember US support for Israel when deciding on next steps. He claimed that he was trying to rally the world to avoid all-out war in West Asia.

In this pantomime, it is safer to believe Biden, as the honest truth is that without US inputs and practical help, and money — and direct intervention — Israel simply lacks the stamina to take on Iran. Israel’s regional dominance narrows down to executing assassination plots and attacking unarmed civilians.

But here too, it is debatable how self-sufficient Israel is vis-a-vis Iran. Reports have appeared that the US’ new technological intel  pinpointed Hezbollah leader Sayyed Nasrallah’s whereabouts, which were passed on to Israel, leading to his assassination.

Interestingly, CIA Director William Burns stepped in to refute the rumours that Iran conducted a nuclear test on Saturday. Speaking at a security conference on Monday, Burns stated that the US has closely monitored Iran’s nuclear activity for any sign of rushing toward a nuclear bomb.

“We don’t see evidence today that such a decision has been made. We watch it very carefully,” he said. Burns gently erased another alibi to attack Iran.

One critical factor that has compelled Israel / US to defer any attack on Iran is the stern warning by Tehran that any attack on its infrastructure by Israel will be met with an even harsher response. “In responding, we neither hesitate nor rush,” to quote Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, who, by the way, made a trip to Lebanon and Syria over the weekend by way of giving Israel a defiant “message” — as he put it — that “Iran has strongly backed the resistance and will always support it.”

Earlier on October 4, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had used a rare public sermon to defend Iran’s missile attack against Israel, saying it was “legitimate and legal” and that “if needed,” Tehran will do it again. Speaking in both Persian and Arabic during Friday Prayers in Tehran, Khamenei said Iran and the Axis of Resistance won’t back down from Israel. Iran will not “procrastinate nor act hastily to carry out its duty” in confronting Israel, Khamenei declared.

However, what deters the Israelis and causes uneasiness in the American mind is something else — Russia’s lengthening shadows on the West Asian tapestry.

American military analysts have disclosed that certain highly advanced Russian weaponry have been transferred to Iran in the recent weeks backed up by the deployment of Russian military personnel to operate these systems, including S-400 missiles. There is speculation that the secretary of Russia’s Security Council (former Defence Minister) Sergei Shoigu paid two secret visits to Iran in the recent period.

Apparently, Moscow also responded to the Iranian request for satellite data on Israeli targets for its missile strike on October 1. Russia also supplied Iran with the long-range electronic warfare system “Murmansk-BN”.

The “Murmansk-BN” system is a powerful EW system, which can jam and intercept enemy radio signals, GPS, communications, satellites, and other electronic systems up to 5,000 kms away and  neutralise “smart” munitions and drone systems — and is capable of disrupting high-frequency satellite communication systems owned by the US and NATO.

To be sure, the Russian involvement in Iran’s standoff with Israel is potentially a game changer. From the US perspective, it raises the worrisome spectre of a direct confrontation with Russia, which it doesn’t want.

It is in this scenario that official Russian news agencies have quoted presidential aide Yury Ushakov on Sunday that Putin plans to meet with his Iranian counterpart, Masud Pezeshkian in the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat, on October 11.

Ushakov did not elaborate on the meeting. Indeed, this comes as a surprise since the two leaders are scheduled to meet again at the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan that runs on October 22-24.

Of course, Iranians are also playing coy. Both Moscow and Tehran announced that their presidents were visiting Ashgabat on October 11 to attend a ceremony marking the 300th birth anniversary of the Turkmen poet and thinker Magtymguly Pyragy. Smoke and mirrors! (here and here)

It is entirely conceivable that amidst the cascading regional tensions, Moscow and Tehran may have thought of bringing forward the formal signing of the Russian-Iranian defence pact, which was originally scheduled to take place in Kazan.

If so, the event on Thursday will be reminiscent of the unscheduled visit by the then Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to New Delhi for the signing of the historic Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation Between India and the USSR on 9th August 1971.

Interestingly, Ushakov added that Putin has no plans to meet Netanyahu. Putin is yet to respond to a request by Netanyahu for a phone conversation, made five days ago. A legend that Netanyahu created, typically, in the recent years to impress his domestic audience (and confuse the Arab street) — that he had a special relationship with Putin — is falling apart.

On the other hand, by chalking up an urgent meeting in Ashgabat — in fact, Turkmen president Serdar Berdimuhamedov was in Moscow only on Monday/Tuesday on a working visit — Kremlin is making it clear to Washington and Tel Aviv that Moscow is irrevocably aligned with Tehran and will help the latter no matter what it takes. (See my blog West Asian crisis prompts Biden to break ice with Putin, Indian Punchline, October 5, 2024)

Isn’t history repeating? The 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty was the most consequential international treaty entered into by India since Independence. It was not a military alliance. But the Soviet Union boosted India’s military capability for an upcoming war and created space for India to strengthen the basis for its strategic autonomy, and its capacity for independent action.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar served the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years. He introduces about himself thus: “Roughly half of the 3 decades of my diplomatic career was devoted to assignments on the territories of the former Soviet Union and to Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan.

9 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Arundhati Roy

‘I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.’

Writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. This is an annual award set up by English PEN in the memory of playwright Harold Pinter. Shortly after having been named for the prize, Roy announced that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. She named Alaa Abd el-Fattah, British-Egyptian writer and activist, a ‘Writer of Courage’ who she would share her award with. The following is her acceptance speech for the prize, delivered on the evening of October 10, 2024, at the British Library.

I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s Writer of Courage who I have chosen to share this award with.

My greetings to you, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, “[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.” We are listening, Alaa. Closely.

Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.

Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well to as those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India – lawyers, academics, students, journalists – Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.

When Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.

I would like to dwell a little on the theme of ‘flinching’ and ‘unflinching’. Which may be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself:

“I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

“The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

“Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.”

Remember that President Reagan called the Contras “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” A turn of phrase that he was clearly fond of. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who then morphed into the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who rule Afghanistan today after waging a twenty-year-long war against the US invasion and occupation. Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the war in Vietnam and the unflinching US military doctrine that ordered its soldiers to ‘Kill Anything That Moves’. If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively unflinching discussions about how to commit genocide – is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better? The problem that the compassionate mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who, according to them, want ‘life, happiness, wealth, power’, Asians ‘stoically accept…the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives’ – and force America to carry their ‘strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.’ A terrible burden to be borne unflinchingly.

And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state. The death toll so far, is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty years.

To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another.

Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel – who believe themselves to be “the chosen people” – began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’, Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘grasshoppers’ who ‘could be crushed’ and Golda Meir said ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians’. Winston Churchill, that famous warrior against fascism, said, ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time’ and then went on to declare that a ‘higher race’ had the final right to the manger. Once those two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed, and ghettoised, a new country was born. It was celebrated as a ‘land without people for people without a land’. The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US and Europe. A lovely coincidence of aims and objectives.

The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed. It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home whose parents smile proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide. (At least The Pentagon Papers were secret. They had to be stolen. And leaked.) No wonder Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. No wonder they flood the social media with depraved videos of themselves wearing the lingerie of women they have killed or displaced, videos of themselves mimicking dying Palestinians and wounded children or raped and tortured prisoners, images of themselves blowing up buildings while they smoke cigarettes or jive to music on their headphones. Who are these people?

What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?

The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th last year. The killing of Israeli civilians and the taking of Israeli hostages. According to them, history only began a year ago.

So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done it all becomes easy, doesn’t it? Ah well. Everybody is terrible, what can one do? Let’s go shopping instead…

I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.

When US President Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet during a visit to Israel in October 2023, he said, ‘I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.’

Unlike President Joe Biden, who calls himself a non-Jewish Zionist and unflinchingly bankrolls and arms Israel while it commits its war crimes, I am not going to declare myself or define myself in any way that is narrower than my writing. I am what I write.

I am acutely aware that being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God? I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have vocal detractors in their own countries, some who also languish in jails or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions – the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7th by Hamas – constitute war crimes. However, there cannot be an equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. The root of all the violence, including the violence of October 7th, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on 7 October 2023.

I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted—other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?

Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.

Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator.

Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.

Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this. We have watched those marches of hundreds of thousands of people – including a young generation of Jews who are tired of being used, tired of being lied to. Who would have imagined that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and accuse them of anti-Semitism? Who would have thought the US government would, in the service of the Israeli state, undermine its cardinal principle of Free Speech by banning pro-Palestine slogans? The so-called moral architecture of western democracies – with a few honourable exceptions – has become a grim laughingstock in the rest of the world.

When Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map of the Middle East in which Palestine has been erased and Israel stretches from the river to the sea, he is applauded as a visionary who is working to realize the dream of a Jewish homeland.

But when Palestinians and their supporters chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they are accused of explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews.

Are they really? Or is that a sick imagination projecting its own darkness onto others? An imagination that cannot countenance diversity, cannot countenance the idea of living in a country alongside other people, equally, with equal rights. Like everybody else in the world does. An imagination that cannot afford to acknowledge that Palestinians want to be free, like South Africa is, like India is, like all countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are. Countries that are diverse, deeply, maybe even fatally, flawed, but free. When South Africans were chanting their popular rallying cry, Amandla! Power to the people, were they calling for the genocide of white people? They were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the Apartheid state. Just as the Palestinians are.

The war that has now begun will be terrible. But it will eventually dismantle Israeli Apartheid. The whole world will be far safer for everyone – including for Jewish people – and far more just. It will be like pulling an arrow from our wounded heart.

If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today. Hostilities could end right this minute. Israeli hostages could be freed, Palestinian prisoners could be released. The negotiations with Hamas and the other Palestinian stakeholders that must inevitably follow the war could instead take place now and prevent the suffering of millions of people. How sad that most people would consider this a naïve, laughable proposition.

As I conclude, let me turn to your words, Alaa Abd El-Fatah, from your book of prison writing, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.

As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day—

From the river to the sea

Palestine will be Free.

It will.

Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock.

That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time.

11 October 2024

Arundhati Roy is a writer.

Source: thewire.in

By Ari Shivat, Haaretz

8 October 2024

Under this headline, the Hebrew newspaper “Haaretz” was published with an article by the famous Zionist writer Ari Shavit, in which he states:

It appears we have passed the point of no return, and it may be that “Israel” can no longer end the occupation, stop colonization, or achieve peace. It seems impossible to reform Zionism, save democracy, and divide the people of this land.

He added:

If the situation is as it is, then:

• There is no reason to live in this country.

• There is no reason to write in “Haaretz.”

• There is no reason to read “Haaretz.”

We must follow what Rogel Alpher suggested two years ago—leave the country…
If “Israelism” and Jewishness are no longer a vital part of one’s identity,
and if every Israeli citizen holds a foreign passport, not only technically but psychologically, then it’s over.
We should say goodbye to our friends and move to San Francisco, Berlin, or Paris.

From there, from the land of new German nationalism or new American nationalism,
we should calmly watch as the “State of Israel” takes its last breath.

We must take three steps back and watch the Jewish democratic state sink.

Perhaps the issue is not yet resolved. Perhaps we have not yet passed the point of no return.Perhaps it is still possible to end the occupation, stop colonization, reform Zionism, save democracy, and divide the land.

The writer continues:

I have pointed the finger at Netanyahu, Lieberman, and the neo-Nazis to wake them up from their Zionist delusion. Trump, Kushner, Biden, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton are not the ones who will end the occupation. The United Nations and the European Union will not stop the settlements. The only force in the world capable of saving Israel from itself is the Israelis themselves, by creating a new political language that recognizes reality and the fact that Palestinians are rooted in this land.

I urge you to seek a third way to survive here and not perish.

The writer from Haaretz confirms:

Since the Israelis arrived in Palestine, they have realized that they are the result of a lie created by the Zionist movement,
which used all sorts of deception regarding Jewish identity throughout history.

By exploiting and exaggerating what Hitler called the Holocaust, the movement succeeded in convincing the world that Palestine is the “Promised Land” And that the so-called Temple lies beneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Thus, the wolf was turned into a lamb, which was nurtured by American and European taxpayer money until it grew into a nuclear monster.

The writer sought help from Western and Jewish archaeologists, the most famous being Israel Finkelstein from Tel Aviv University,  who confirmed that “the Temple is a lie and a fairy tale that does not exist,”  and all excavations have proven that it disappeared thousands of years ago. This has been explicitly confirmed in many Jewish references, and numerous Western archaeologists have corroborated this. The last of these was in 1968 AD, when the British archaeologist Dr. Kathleen Kenyon, while she was the director of excavations at the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, carried out excavations in Jerusalem and was expelled from Palestine due to her revelation of “Israeli myths about the existence of traces of Solomon’s Temple beneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque.” She concluded that there is no trace of Solomon’s Temple and discovered that what the Israelis call “Solomon’s Stables” has nothing to do with Solomon or stables  It is an architectural model of palaces commonly built in various parts of Palestine. This is despite the fact that Kathleen Kenyon came from the Palestine Exploration Fund Society, with the purpose of clarifying the narratives in the Bible, as she showed great activity in Britain in the mid-19th century concerning the history of the “Near East.”

The Jewish writer emphasized that:

The curse of lies is what haunts the Israelis, and day after day it strikes them in the face in the form of a knife in the hand of a Jerusalemite, Hebronite, or Nabulsi, or with a stone or from a bus driver from Jaffa, Haifa, or Acre.

The Israelis realize they have no future in Palestine; this is not a land without a people as they falsely claimed. Another writer acknowledges not just the existence of the Palestinian people but rather their superiority over the Israelis. This is Gideon Levy, the leftist Zionist, who says:

It seems that the Palestinians are of a different nature from the rest of humanity… We occupied their land and treated their youth with drugs, prostitution, and depravity. We said that after a few years, they would forget their homeland and land, and then the younger generation would erupt in the 1987 Intifada.

We imprisoned them. We said, “We will raise them in prison.” Years later, after thinking they had learned their lesson,
they returned to us with the armed uprising in 2000, which consumed everything green and dry.

We said we would demolish their houses. We besieged them for many years, and then; they extracted missiles and managed to attack us despite the siege and destruction.

We started planning the separation wall and barbed wire… yet they came to us from underground and through tunnels, inflicting heavy losses on us. During the last war, we fought them with all our might, yet they took control of the Israeli satellite (Amos)?
They spread terror in every Israeli home by broadcasting threats and warnings, as happened when their youth managed to seize control of Israel’s Channel 2.

Ultimately, as the author says:

It seems that we are dealing with the most difficult people in history,
|and there is no other solution for them but to recognize their rights and end the occupation.

Writer

Ari Shavit*

Source: Hebrew newspaper Haaretz

Israel is turning, with alarming speed, into a country that lives on blood. The daily crimes of the occupation are already less relevant. Over the past year, a new reality of mass killing and crimes of an entirely different scale has emerged. We are in a genocidal reality…

By Chris Hedges

The fossil fuel industry, and the politician class they own, have no intention of halting the ecocide. As the climate crisis worsens, so do the laws and security measures to keep us in bondage.

Norfolk, U.K. — I am sitting with Roger Hallam, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, in the visitor’s room at HM Prison Wayland. On the walls are large photographs of families picnicking on lawns, verdant meadows and children playing. The juxtaposition of the photographs, no doubt hung to give the prison visiting room a homey feel, is jarring. There is no escaping, especially with prison guards circulating around us, where we are. Roger and I sit on squat upholstered chairs and face each other across from a low, white plastic table. Roger’s lanky frame tries to adjust to furniture designed to accommodate children.

Roger, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil, is serving a five-year prison sentence for “causing a public nuisance without reasonable excuse.”

He and his four co-defendants, who each received four-year sentences, were convicted for hosting a Zoom call in 2022 to organize activists to climb onto bridges over the M25, the main motorway that circles Greater London. The short-term aim was to stop traffic. The long-term aim was to force the government to stop new oil and gas licenses.

This was not a symbolic protest, exemplified by protesters hurling tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, preserved by protective glass, in the National Gallery in London. It was a protest designed to disrupt, as it did, commerce and the machinery of state. Although even the protestors who tossed soup at the painting, which was not damaged, received harsh prison terms of nearly three years.

Global warming is expected to exceed 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the 2020s and 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Farenheit) before 2050, according to a 2023 study published in the Oxford Open Climate Change journal. NASA scientists warn that “a 2-degree rise in global temperatures is considered a critical threshold above which dangerous and cascading effects of human-generated climate change will occur.”

The more the planet warms, the more extreme events such as severe droughts, heat waves, intense storms, and heavy rainfall intensify. The extinction of animal and plant life — one million plant and animal species are currently threatened with extinction — accelerates.

We are on the verge of tipping points, thresholds beyond which ice sheets, ocean circulation patterns, and other components of the climate system sustain and accelerate irreversible changes. There are also tipping points in ecosystems, which can become so degraded that no effort to save them can halt the effects of runaway climate change. At that point “feedback loops” see environmental catastrophes accelerate each other. The game will be up. Nothing will save us.

Mass death from climate disasters is becoming the norm. The official death toll from Hurricane Helene is at least 227, making it the deadliest in mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In North Carolina, South Carolina and northern Georgia 1.1 million people remain without power. Mountain towns, without electricity and cell phone service, are cut off. Hundreds of people are missing with many of them feared dead. Anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 people were killed last year in a single night by Cyclone Daniel in Libya.

These climate catastrophes, which occur routinely in the Global South, will soon characterize life for all of us.

“A billion refugees, the worst episode of suffering in human history,” Roger says of the 2 degrees Celsius mark, “and then human extinction.”

And yet with the devastation outside their doors, including the Southwest United States enduring the highest temperatures ever recorded in October — 117 degrees Fahrenheit in Palm Springs — the global oligarchs have no intention of risking their privilege and power by disrupting an economy driven by fossil fuel and animal agriculture, which is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock and their byproducts account for 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released each year into the atmosphere and 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead of a rational response, we get more drilling and oil leases, more catastrophic storms, more wildfires, more droughts, toxic factory farms, the charade of the U.N. Conference of the Parties (COP) summits, the eradication of the rain forests and the false panacea of geoengineering, carbon capture and artificial intelligence.

Fossil fuel subsidies have increased worldwide — from  $2 trillion to $7 trillion according to the International Monetary Fund — as governments seek to protect consumers from rising energy prices. This is despite the fact that two years ago, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments promised to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.

The governments that facilitate genocide in Gaza are, not surprisingly, the overlords of global genocide.

As the Swedish author and professor of human ecology Andreas Malm writes, “the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the earth.”

“The destruction of Gaza is executed by tanks and fighter jets pouring out their projectiles over the land: the Merkavas and the F-16s sending their hellfire over the Palestinians, the rockets and bombs that turn everything into rubble — but only after the explosive force of fossil fuel combustion has put them on the right trajectory,” writes Malm who with Wim Carton wrote “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.” “All these military vehicles run on petroleum. So do the supply flights from the US, the Boeings that ferry the missiles over the permanent airbridge. An early, provisional, conservative analysis found that emissions caused during the first 60 days of the war equaled annual emissions of between 20 and 33 low-emitting countries: a sudden spike, a plume of CO2 rising over the debris of Gaza. If I repeat the point here, it is because the cycle is self-repeating, only growing in scale and size: Western forces pulverize the living quarters of Palestine by mobilizing the boundless capacity for destruction only fossil fuels can give.”

The genocide is tied to fossil fuels in other ways.

“One of the many frontiers of oil and gas extraction is the Levant basin along the coast running from Beirut via Akka to Gaza,” Malm writes. “Two of the major gas fields discovered here, called Karish and Leviathan, are in waters claimed by Lebanon. What does the West think of this dispute? In 2015, Germany sold four warships to Israel so it could better defend its gas platforms against any eventualities. Seven years later, in 2022, as the war in Ukraine caused a crisis on the gas market, the state of Israel was for the first time elevated into a fossil fuel exporter of note, supplying Germany and other EU states with gas as well as crude oil from Leviathan and Karish, which came online in October of that year. 2022 sealed the high status of Israel in this department.”

“A year later, Toufan al-Aqsa [the incursion into Israel from the Gaza by Palestinian fighters on Oct. 7, 2023] threw a spanner in the expansion,” Malm notes. “It posed a direct threat to the Tamar gas platform, which can be seen from northern Gaza on a clear day; in the range of rocket fire, the platform was shut down. A major player on the Tamar field is Chevron. On 9 October, the New York Times reported: ‘The fierce fighting could slow the pace of energy investment in the region, just as the eastern Mediterranean’s prospects as an energy center have gained momentum.”

Expanding Israeli production requires occupying Gaza’s coastline and the removal of the Palestinians.

“Five weeks after 7 October, however, when most of northern Gaza had been comfortably turned into rubble, Chevron resumed operations at the Tamar gas field,” Malm continues. “In February, it announced another round of investment to further bolster output. In late October, the day after the ground invasion of Gaza began, the state of Israel awarded 12 licenses for the exploration of new gas fields — one of the companies picking them up being BP, the very same company that first discovered oil in the Middle East and built the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline.”

The connection between the genocide in Gaza and global mass death is not lost on the Global South, where climate refugees are dying on the open seas and in deserts as they attempt to flee north. UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, calculates that weather-related “sudden onset hazards” — such as floods, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures — forcibly displaced an annual average of 21.5 million people every year between 2008 and 2016. There are now 260 million people in coastal areas — an increase of 100 million from three decades ago — who are at “high risk” of being displaced by rising sea levels. Ninety percent of them live in poor developing countries and small island states.

As the ecocide and genocide in Gaza accelerates, we also get more draconian laws to criminalize protests.

Laws designed to protect the fossil fuel industry in the U.K. include “conspiracy to interfere with national infrastructure” or the new “lock on” offense that can see a protester who attaches him or herself to an object, land or another person with some form of adhesive or handcuffs, in a manner that is capable of causing serious disruption, go to prison for six months and receive an unlimited fine.

The trajectory is clear. Burn the planet. Lock up dissidents. Censorship. Crush those who resist, especially those in the Global South, with industrial weapons and indiscriminate violence. And, if you are part of the privileged class, retreat into gated compounds that provide food, water, medical care, electricity and security that will be denied to the rest of us.

In the end, everyone will go the way of the dinosaurs, who, at least, were not responsible for their own demise. The tragedy is that most of the ruling criminal class will probably survive a little longer than the rest of us.

Collective suicide will define what we call human progress.

The three-week trial for the Just Stop Oil activists, like the court hearings for Julian Assange, denied the accused the right to submit objective evidence. The defendants were not permitted to speak about climate change, the motive for their protest. Roger, defying the ban, attempted to address the jury about the climate crisis. The judge ordered him arrested for contempt of court. He was removed from the courtroom by six police officers. When the judge sentenced Roger and his co-defendants, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin, he told them that they had “crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic.”

The five activists were not convicted for taking part in the protests, but for its planning. The evidence used in court to convict them came from an online Zoom meeting that was captured by Scarlet Howes, a reporter posing as a supporter from the tabloid newspaper “The Sun.” No doubt some fossil fuel think tank is dreaming up a journalism prize for Howes now.

Sentences for those engaging in climate protests have steadily got harsher, longer than many of the sentences imposed on those who engaged in acts of violence during the racist riots in Southport, as Linda Lakhdhit, the legal director of Climate Rights International, points out.

I have long admired Roger, who has on the rust-colored vest all prisoners in the visiting room are required to wear, not only for his courage, but for his belief that resistance against radical evil is a moral imperative. It is not, ultimately, about what we can or cannot achieve. It is about defying, quite literally when we speak of the ecocide, the forces of death to protect and nurture life.

I addressed a crowd in London on Sept. 11 to raise money for the legal defense of the five imprisoned activists. The organizers at the Kairos Center played a recorded introduction Roger had sent from his prison cell before my talk.

“Change,” he said in the taped message, “comes about not through instrumental reason, that meaning, you do something in order to get something to happen, but rather because you cannot stand by, and so you act, in order to be what you are. The critical reason we’re failing, in my view, is because we buy into the idea that they can oppress us by sending us to prison. While in fact, power resides in our fear of going to prison, not the act of doing it in itself. Once we realize it’s all about fear, we have that lightbulb moment. It’s not what they do to us, it’s how we choose to react that determines their power.”

“You carry out the good, not to create good outcomes,” he says to me, “but because it is good, because it’s truthful, because it’s a beautiful thing to do, because it creates a metaphysical harmony, a balance.”

The tactics employed over the past few decades by environmentalists — marching, lobbying, voting and petitioning — have failed.

In 1900, the burning of fossil fuel — mostly coal — produced about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide. That number rose threefold by 1950. Today the level is nearly 20 times higher than the 1900 figure. During the six decades the increase in CO₂ was 100 times faster than what the earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is Roger’s seventh time incarcerated in the British prison system which is plagued by a lack of adequate funding, decaying infrastructure, reduced services, staff recruitment and retention issues and severe overcrowding.

“When I first went to prison the guards could be sadists, ex-military from our colonial wars,” he says. “Now they are usually polite, but nothing works.”

His shoes disintegrated, but his repeated requests for new shoes were ignored. Another prisoner, who had an extra pair, gave them to him.

I line up at the small canteen to buy us something to eat. I have been allowed to bring 40 British pounds into the prison. On the menu they have a vegan sausage sandwich. Roger and I are vegan. But when I get to the counter, I am curtly informed the vegan options are unavailable.

Roger argues that if 10,000 people are willing to engage in civil resistance, which means accepting prison terms for non-violent civil disobedience, carry out grassroots educational campaigns and mobilize public assemblies, they can ignite one to two percent of the population to embrace the militancy to rupture the existing order.

He draws on the research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, and Maria J. Stephan who examined 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book “Why Civil Resistance Works.” They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings. Violent movements work primarily in civil wars or in ending foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them. And we only need one to five percent of the population actively working for the overthrow of a system, history has shown, to bring down even the most ruthless totalitarian structures.

“It’s not only about changing the world,” Roger says. “It’s about seeing the world in a different way, one that rejects the narrative of the dominant ideology. It is a re-enchantment of the world. It is about our spirit taking center stage. This is where it belonged all the time. But the spirit only becomes real through action. The spirit is made flesh, to use some old language.”

“I am not calling for an individualistic journey to personal enlightenment, which is a contradiction in terms,” he says. “I am not calling for calmness that never leaves your head, that never gets you off the couch and into the streets. The spirit is in the street. The street is the spirit. The spirit is in the prison cell. The time for pretending is over. We are facing the end of the old world, and we are going to have to battle to create what comes next.”

And then it is time to leave. We embrace. I promise to mail him books. Those of us in the visiting room are lined up and escorted by the guards through a series of locked doors to the prison courtyard.

Roger is paying a steep price for resistance, for the moral life.

Henry David Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax to protest the U.S. invasion of Mexico, which he condemned as an effort to seize territory to expand slavery. He was arrested and jailed for tax evasion in 1846.

“I say, break the law,” Thoreau wrote in his essay “Civil Disobedience.” “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalist philosopher whose Divinity School address provoked outrage among the clergy and led Harvard University not to invite him back to speak for another thirty years, visited Thoreau in jail.

“Henry, what are you doing in here?” Emerson asked.

“What are you doing out there?” Thoreau responded.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper.

7 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Akbar E. Torbat

It appears that the recent chain of terrors intensified after the helicopter crash of President Ebrahim Raisi and his companions on May 19, 2024. The assassinations of Palestinian leaders and Iran’s military advisors have continued to this date. Israel wishes to wipe out the Palestinian resistance movement in the surroundings of its occupied lands, which has failed. Israel assassinated Hamas’ founder, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, in 2004, yet after two decades, Hamas not only has not been wiped out, but it has become stronger. The only way to end the conflict is for the Westerners to give back Palestine to its native citizens and leave the region.

Recent Chain of Terrors

While the killing of Palestinians in the occupied territories has continued, a new chain of Israel terrors has begun. On September 17, Israel simultaneously blew up Hezbollah’s pagers. The Israel’s terror operation led to the death of about 37 people and the wounding of nearly 3,000 members of Hezbollah and Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, who was injured by the explosion of a pager. A day after the explosion of the pagers, the detonation of walkie-talkies and other electronic devices killed 14 people. Small amounts of explosives had been placed in the battery of each pager before reaching the hands of Hezbollah, and some of them had been given to their allies in Iran and Syria. The Pagers and walkie-talkies filled with concealed explosives were sold through a shell company that turned out to be owned by Israel’s Mossad.

This shows the importance of the role of intelligence and the influence of Israeli intelligence not only among Lebanon’s Hezbollah but also inside Iran. This once again proves the failure of the Islamic regime’s weak security apparatus, which is traditionally headed by a mullah.

As is seen, political assassinations have intensified since the crash of Raisi’s helicopter in May. Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political office, was assassinated in Tehran on July 31, 2024. On September 27, 2024, Israel’s heavy bombardment of the Hezbollah headquarters using bunker-buster bombs led to the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrollah and others with him. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians and wounded about 80,000, the most extensive genocide in recent history.

Iran claimed, according to Article 51 of the UN Charter, it has a legitimate right to attack Israel as its guest Ismael Haniya in Tehran, and Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan in Lebanon were assassinated by Israel, not to mention others who had been killed in many other circumstances.

Iran Responded

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard claimed that it targeted three important Israeli military bases. On October 1, 2024, the Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force fired about 200 ballistic missiles at targets deep in the occupied territories. According to Iran’s military officials, in operation, Truthful Promise 2 (Vadeh Sadegh 2), three major air bases of Nevatim, Hatzerim Airbase, and Tel Nof, the centers of Israel’s armored forces as well as the headquarters of the Mossad spy agency in Tel Aviv, were targeted by Iranian missiles. The missiles used, included hypersonic missiles that take about 12 minutes to reach Israel from Iran, about 1800 Km. The modern missiles used included Kheibar Shekan, a solid-fuel medium-range, and Fattah-1, a hypersonic ballistic missile. That was the largest attack that has ever been launched against Israel.

Israel’s F-15-I Ra’am ‘Thunder’ fighter jets used to target Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon operate from Hatzirim and Tel Nof airbases. Both bases were targeted by heavy attacks in the Truthful Promise 2 operation. The Nevatim military airbase in the heart of the Negev desert is the strategic headquarters of Israel’s air forces. This airbase is the central location of Israel’s fifth-generation F-35 stealth fighters. In Iran’s attack, the largest number of ballistic missiles were chosen to target Nevatim. In just one video recorded by the Zionist settlers, at least 25 ballistic missiles hit the Nevatim base area. The Wall Street Journal reported that satellite images showed 32 missiles had landed at Nevatim, and one was stuck in a hangar there. That shows Israel’s multilayered air defense system, called Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, are very weak in preventing such attacks. Netanyahu has ordered censorship of any reports regarding the damages that Iran’s attack has caused.

Israel has threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities as well as the military bases and oil infrastructure. No doubt, Iran’s military leaders are aware of such threats and are prepared to defend them. On October 4, in a speech at the Friday Prayer, Ali Khamenei said Iran would destroy Tel Aviv and Haifa if the Zionist regime dared to attack Iran.

_____________

Akbar E. Torbat is the author of “Politics of Oil and Nuclear Technology in Iran,” Palgrave Macmillan (2020). Farsi translation of the book is available here.

7 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jay Janson

Genesis 15:18

“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.”

Deuteronomy 2:16 2:17

“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.” 

Joshua 6:21

“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.”

Samuel 1 15:3

“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)

‘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’ [Jerusalem Post, July 23, 2014]

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. “Controversy Over Sephardi Chief Rabbi’s Comments on Gaza” (Israeli Hebrew newspaper Haaretz, March 15, 2024).

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 et al. As of October 13, 2024, the U.N. has reported over 41,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since October 7, 2023

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 Palestinians Arabs, while still suffering British military occupation as a colony since the end of the First World War, became 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 Give the Land & Homes Back and 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 exposes 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 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’?         (Schadenfreude is a German word that means to take pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. It is a combination of the German words Schaden, which means “harm” or “damage,” and Freude, which means “joy”.)

=========END=========

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.” [Dr. Norman Finkelstein]

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

WEBNov 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

A Reconstructed ‘Reality’ in Gaza, Reconstructed by Western Media’ Wars Enabling Journalists 

Portraying the Annihilation in Gaza as ‘Acceptable,’ ‘Excusable,’ and/or a ‘Reasonable and ‘Proportionate’ ‘Necessary’ Defensive Reaction,’ and Not Seen as Genocide.

(“,,wars can be started by lies, – then kept going by lies!“) Julius Assange 

Hamas “beheading 40 babies” 

– headlines and the front pages of countless western news outlets. U.S. President Biden claimed to have seen “confirmed photos of terrorists beheading babies,” and that “Israeli women were raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies”

This is journalism that projects thinking the wholesale destruction of Gaza to eliminate Hamas is morally justified.

Hamas is pictured as bloodthirsty savages.

‘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 being obstructed by Israel have gone unreported.

NEWS 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, cried out during the barbaric U.S.UK led war on Iraq. Assange suggested we ask ourselves:

“Of the complicit media, (which is the majority of the mainstream press), what is the average death child count that could be attributed to each journalist?”

“When we understand that wars come about and are continued 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?”

“Journalists Are War Criminals!”

“It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists; journalists are war criminals. …the reality that is constructed around us is constructed by liars.”

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 Their 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 death. maiming and terror down upon a more than 2.2 million of God’s children 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.

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which contains a history of US crimes in 9 countries up to 2006  9 countries up to 2006

7 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Suresh Khairnar

More than sixteen thousand children were killed in one year and more than eighteen thousand children became orphans! Air strikes and military action by the Israeli army have been going on in Gaza Strip for the last one year! More than 41000 people have died so far in Gaza, which has a population of about 2.3 million ! 16,765 of them are children! People coming from different parts of Gaza are forced to live only in Al-Awasi humanitarian area which is only 10% of Gaza Strip! Children are bearing the brunt of Israel’s attacks! The United Nations estimates that more than 18000 children have become orphans in the last one year due to the war, there is no one left to raise them! Talin Al-Hinawi, who lost her father in the Israeli attack, has no one left in her family now, so she is living in Al Barka orphanage camp! She tells that her entire family has been destroyed in the war! Talin says that she wants to return to her home in Gaza City so that she can study like others! A similar story is of 10-year-old Nada al-Gharib who lives in Khan Younus refugee camp. She says that this war has taken away my father and my only brother from us! She says that our camp was attacked by the Israeli army and all the members of our family were killed! I had gone out to get food, so I survived!

The situation in Lebanon is almost the same! In Lebanon’s capital Beirut, refugees are seen everywhere from the roads to the parking lots! People affected by the war are sleeping on mattresses on the roadside, parking their vehicles in the parking lots and living in temporary tents! Some people are living in wooden or plastic camps in the beach area on the seashore!

The Lebanese government has arranged refugee camps in schools, colleges and other government buildings. These refugee camps are being run by social welfare organizations. In a refugee camp located in Beirut’s Omar Farooq School, Imad, an engineer by profession, used to work abroad but after the war he has returned to help the people. Ella is also helping with Imad. She studies in a college which is currently closed.

Noor Hassan, a Syrian, came to Lebanon as a refugee 25 years ago. Before the recent attacks, Noor’s husband used to work in a bakery, but now he himself is waiting in line at the refugee camp to be given bread. 52-year-old Saosan is sitting on a mattress near a church in Beirut. She is a resident of Der Jahain, 50 kilometers south of Beirut. She shows the picture of her house on her mobile phone and says that her entire house has been destroyed in the attack carried out by Israel.

Despite all this, the attitude of the world’s big countries America and England towards Israel in this war has been continuing for the last seventy-five years. The mistake of creating Israel on the land of Palestine of 10,000 square kilometers has been of these two countries. Where the total population of Palestine was 20 lakhs, in which the population of Jews was only six lakhs, 56% of the land was given to the Jews, 5,700 square kilometers of land was given to six lakh Jews. And 4,300 square kilometers of land was given to 14 lakh Arabs. And in that too, the most fertile land was given to the Jews and the Arabs were given the rugged hilly area. How unjust has this division been? And the matter did not stop here. Israel has taken over the land from the Arabs in the last seventy-five years after every fight and quarrel. In view of that, Israel has encroached upon 90% of the remaining land of Palestine instead of 56%! And has erected 25 to 30 feet high concrete walls at various places! And does America and England, who claim to be the champions of human rights, not see the need to maintain the world’s most densely populated areas, Gaza Strip and West Bank?

Mahatma Gandhi had said in 1938 itself, “Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home” saying that just as England belongs to the British and France belongs to the French, Palestine belongs to the Arabs. It is wrong and inhuman to impose Jews on Arabs. Mahatma Gandhi had warned about this ten years before Israel came into existence. And all of us who talk about Gandhiji’s legacy have a moral responsibility to stand with the people of Palestine in such a time of crisis.

Dr Suresh Khairnar is former president of Rashtra Sewa Dal (RSD)

7 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org