The Rational National points out in his normal reasonable way that holding the view that there is a difference in the worth of a Palestinian child and an Israeli child makes no sense. He also points out many incidents of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian people, reporters, and children over the last year that received no news coverage. The video is done without sensationalism, which I appreciate. Hugs.
Breaking down the latest from the conflict, including what’s making me go crazy, a good clip from MSNBC, and where major Israeli media is correctly putting the blame.
(Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Over the years, the United States has endowed Israel with more than $150 billion in assistance, making it possible for the Jewish state to maintain its occupation, its ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of the land, its unremitting seizure of territory, and its settlement project, the latter of which has intentionally and drastically diminished any possibility a fair peace could ever be negotiated between the parties.
Prominent Israelis have referred to Palestinians as donkeys, crocodiles, cockroaches, snakes, psychopaths and serial killers, animals, not human, not entitled to live, shrapnel in the buttocks, they deserve to have their heads chopped off, etc., etc.1 Convinced of the truth of these slurs, Jewish settlers, protected by Israeli soldiers, have made it a practice of entering Palestinian villages where they poison wells, cut down olive trees, physically assault villagers, teach their children to throw stones at Palestinian children coming home from school, and deface buildings, mosques, and churches with slogans such as “Death to the Arabs” and “Jesus is a monkey?”
With its United Nations security council veto, the United States shields Israel from accountability to international law, thereby giving it a green light to continue and even accelerate these crimes against humanity.
Hamas’s October 7 surprise breach of the Israel-Gaza border, followed by its killing, injuring, and hostage-taking of soldiers and civilians is horrifying. American media has been following the tragedy for hours daily and has been overwhelmingly sympathetic to Israel, rarely, if ever, mentioning the motivation behind Hamas’s assault, which are the generations of persecution, humiliation, and character assassination Israel has levied against its Palestinian subjects; never enunciating that it shouldn’t have come to this; not once admonishing Israel for prioritizing its lust for Palestinian land over the lives of its own citizens.
At the same time, the media has been interviewing Israeli citizens who, outraged at Hamas’s actions, likewise make no mention of the motivation behind the actions. Neither have they expressed a hint of empathy or a measure of self-reflection upon the role their attitudes may have played in the dehumanization of the Palestinian people who, for decades, have endured essentially the same horrors these Israelis are now having to endure.
On October 9, Hamas threatened to kill a Jewish hostage every time Israel bombs a civilian building without first giving its residents time to flee. Justifiably horrified and quick to excoriate Hamas, the Israelis I’ve watched have said nothing about Israel’s habit of bombing residential buildings. As prominent Israelis throughout its history have admitted, their nation always targets civilians. The implications behind the following admissions are as horrifying as Hamas’s pronouncement:
Ze’ev Schiff, Israel’s most respected military analyst (by all sides of the military spectrum): “the Israeli Army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously . . . the Army . . . has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets . . . [but] purposely attacked civilian targets.”
General Yigal Allon with the approval of Ben-Gurion: “There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction If we accuse a family – we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise, this is not an effective reaction. During the operation there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.”
During Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), Deputy Prime Minister Eliyahu Yishai urged the IDF to “bomb thousands of houses, to destroy Gaza.”
During Operation Pillar of Defense (November 2012), Ariel Sharon’s son Gilad: “They will pay the price and will remember the same for a long time. We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.”
Israel’s past assaults on Gaza, which human rights organizations have documented in detail, are further testaments to Israel’s contempt for a defenseless civilian population.
The reaction from every American lawmaker I‘ve seen is that Hamas, not Israel, must pay for its crimes. How? By giving more weapons to Israel so it can kill even more families. That is exactly what the United States intends to do, despite its hollow assurances, past and present, that it seeks peace between the two parties; despite knowing that years of military assistance have sustained both Israel’s illegal occupation and the violence it perpetrates upon ordinary people.
In keeping with the past, and vowing to “crush and destroy” Hamas, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu warned that every Hamas member was “a dead man.” In keeping with his fellow lawmakers, President Biden condemned Hamas’s attack, again without acknowledging either its seeds or that Israel wrote the rules of the game and that Hamas is playing by those rules. Aware of the thousands of Gazan civilians, including a disproportionate number of children, whose lives Israel has snuffed out in previous operations, Biden said, “terrorists purposely target civilians, kill them.” Yes, they do Mr. President. As of the early morning of October 12, over 1,000 Gazans, mostly residents, have been killed, and 5,000 injured. Whole neighborhoods and refugee camps have been blown to smithereens, more than 120,000 displaced. And Israel has yet to commence its inevitable ground invasion. Fortunately, I’ve not seen any reports that Hamas has made good on its threat.
Israel has cut off the delivery of all fuel, food, water and medical supplies. If its assault doesn’t end soon, Gazans who survive the bombings could starve, freeze to death, or die from a lack of medicine and medical treatment. This is genocide, the Final Solution, all because “terrorists target civilians.”
The only way to stop this cycle is for the US to resist its habit of resorting to physical punishment, concede that arming Israel so it can do to Palestinians what it always does will only inflame hostilities, and demand that Israel break the cycle of violence and negotiate a fair peace. Or, at the very least, treat its subjects not as snakes and cockroaches but as human beings. Otherwise, America and Israel’s message to the world will continue to be that revenge is more satisfying than peace—the lives of Israelis and Palestinians be damned.
Thank you to Ten Bears for the link. Again it is becoming clear that the Israeli government is using this event to clear out and claim the entire territory of Gaza as Israeli and belonging to the Jewish people only. The goal of Israel has always been to remove the Palestinians and claim all the land, all the territory as its own. Hugs
As Israel engages in a massive air campaign ahead of an anticipated full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Friday that all citizens of Gaza are responsible for the attack Hamas perpetrated in Israel last weekend that left over 1,200 people dead.
“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”
Herzog’s statement has the same logic as “settlers aren’t civilians.” Given that this is coming from a president not a student group, the chorus of condemnations should be louder than that drawn by the Hamas apologists. Somehow, I don’t think it will be https://t.co/93SoZI3mBk
Holding civilians — half of them not adults — collectively responsible for atrocities committed by a democratically unaccountable regime and using this as a justification for destroying neighborhoods with little discrimination, cutting off water and electricity to an entire population, and ordering the 24-hour mass evacuation of over a million people from a tiny land mass with closed borders on both sides — if this isn’t a disproportionate response I’m not sure what would be.
Thank you to Ten Bears for the link. At the time I write this the number of Palestinian deaths is over 2,300 which is more than double the number of Israeli deaths caused by the Hamas raids. Plus the number of Palestinian injured is more than 4 times the number of Israeli’s injured during the Hamas attacks. Israel has gotten their pound of flesh. Hugs
There is no moral clarity in wreaking vengeance on innocent people.
Friends,
Today, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stood next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a military base in Tel Aviv and said, “Too often in the past, leaders have equivocated in the face of terrorist attacks against Israel and its people. This is — this must be — a moment for moral clarity.”
Blinken is correct. Moral clarity requires that the world condemn the atrocities committed by Hamas militants as unmitigated evil.
But this does not render morally justifiable retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza that have so far killed 1,417 Palestinians, including 447 children, and wounded 6,368, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Or the siege of a city of 2.1 million people who have gone days without electricity, water, or food.
The wounded in Gaza needing intensive care now have no beds that can hold them, and the number of injured exceeds the hospitals’ capacities. The International Committee of the Red Cross warns that “without electricity, hospitals risk turning into morgues.”
More than 300,000 people in Gaza are now homeless. More than 338,000 have left their homes in search of safety, but border crossings into Israel and Egypt are blocked.
Israeli troops are now moving toward the border with Gaza in preparation for a possible ground invasion. I fear what is to come.
It could prove to be very bad for Israel, as well as for those trapped in Gaza. As Thomas L. Friedman writes,
What Israel’s worst enemies — Hamas and Iran — want is for Israel to invade Gaza and get enmeshed in a strategic overreach there that would make America’s entanglement in Falluja look like a children’s birthday party. We are talking house-to-house fighting that would undermine whatever sympathy Israel has garnered on the world stage, deflect world attention from the murderous regime in Tehran and force Israel to stretch its forces to permanently occupy Gaza and the West Bank.
In his private meetings with Israeli authorities, I hope Antony Blinken is calling for restraint.
Justifiable moral revulsion must never be confused with retribution. There is no moral clarity in wreaking vengeance on innocent people.
I wanted to post an update of something I got wrong. The tatted up guy at the end of the video had a VERY different story than the one that was told to me.
Turns out he was not only at the show, he was a fan AND the guy that first got the attention of the police. He was so heated because he is part of the LGBTQ community and had been assaulted previously – so when he saw it potentially happening to a few trans women, he grabbed a cop who was stopped at a light, ran back to the theatre, and got in between the transphobe and the women. He wasn’t trying to escalate as much as he was trying to be the one to take the seemingly inevitable punch. And he left when the cops got there because he was the one who called them over in the first place.
I was told he was a bystander who just hopped in the fray, and I understand why the folks who didn’t know him thought that. In their eyes, he showed up out of nowhere and ran in – but really he was running back to protect folks from sharing the same fate he’d already experienced.
Anyway, my apologies go out to him. And know that if I ever get something wrong in a video, I am happy to correct it.
Franklin, Tennessee Alderman Gabrielle Hanson (Image from Hanson for Mayor campaign video)
Members of the white supremacist Tennessee Active Club provided security for Gabrielle Hanson, a Moms for Liberty-backed alderman in Franklin, Tennessee, and current candidate for mayor, at a recent candidate forum, according to local reporter Phil Williams of News Channel 5.
The Tennessee Active Club is one of the “prominent cells” in a rapidly growing network of groups that promote violent white supremacist ideology and provide training in combat sports, according to a recent report by The Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson. Like other far-right groups, Active Clubs “recruit with narratives of white victimhood” and see themselves as militias in training for future violent conflict.
Earlier this year, SPLC reported that the Tennessee Active Club has been training above the Lewis Country Store in Nashville, whose owner Brad Lewis responded to the report by declaring on Telegram, “I’m not a cuckservative, I’m an actual literal Nazi.” This week, Lewis told reporter Williams that he is a friend of Hanson’s and that the Active Club members were on hand at the forum because Hanson had received credible threats.
Alderman Hanson was cheered on by the Williamson County Moms for Liberty chapter this year when she led an unsuccessfuleffort to prevent the city’s annual Pride celebration from being held. Robin Steenland, head of Williamson County Moms for Liberty chapter, portrayed the campaign to stop Pride as a battle between good and evil, a struggle against a “social change agenda” that seeks the “destruction” of family, Christianity, and America itself. The county M4L chapter has also complained about curricular materials that teach students about the civil rights movement and seahorses.
M4L chapter president Steenland is also founder and chair of Williamson Families PAC, which claims to support candidates “that reflect our family values and demonstrate integrity, wisdom, and service to the community.” Whatever the PAC means by family values or integrity did not prevent it from endorsing Hanson, who has, to be generous, a checkered relationship with telling the truth.
A few weeks ago, Hanson was exposed for using women’s social media posts to falsely portray them as supporters of her campaign—and then repeatedly lying about it. News Channel 5 also caught her lying about her previous use of an alias. Hanson supporters tried to prevent from reporter Phil Williams from attending a Sept. 25 forum.
Back in April, Hanson claimed to have “full knowledge” from an inside source that a shooting at a Nashville Christian school involved a scandalous “love triangle,” and she stood by her claims even when she was called out for lying about the shooting. Her statements led to an ethics investigation, but the city’s ethics commission concluded that her comments were protected by the First Amendment and did not violate city ordinances.
The mayoral election will be held on Oct. 24; early voting begins Wednesday, Oct. 4.
Read the full article. Hanson recently appeared on JMG for her attempts to ban Franklin Pride, for being exposed for her history of arrests for facilitating prostitution, for using the photos of minority woman who don’t know her and claiming that they are her supporters, and for encouraging her husband to march in Chicago Pride wearing nothing but a Speedo.
At a candidate forum in Franklin, Tennessee, where members of the white supremacist group Tennessee Active Club are here, saying they are providing security for Gabrielle @HansonforMayor. 1/ pic.twitter.com/Yi6x7dDsey
I asked Ms. Hanson whether these are people with whom she should be associating as a candidate for Franklin mayor. She ignored the question. Then a couple of her supporters intervened. pic.twitter.com/G9cDsNifx3
Behind every man in a klan robe is a woman that washed and ironed it, fed and cleaned up after him, put up with his shitty sexual skills and raised his miserable spawn. It’s no wonder they are filled with nothing but hate, rage and christianity.
Just worried that what just happened to Josh Kruger in Philly could happen to another like him. Report on anti-LGBTQ+ violence, police violence and corruption, get shot in the chest seven times in your home.
This week, Lewis told reporter Williams that he is a friend of Hanson’s and that the Active Club members were on hand at the forum because Hanson had received credible threats. Hanson is afraid of protestors who might tell supporters the truth about her.
I’ve seen open Nazis since the 80s but mainstream politicians never associated with them this is a new thing. Its hardly a brain trust Tennesee has an economy less than half the size of major cities in the US.
Some news this morning: A pair of the supremacists and nazis who attended Tuesday's forum in support of Hanson went to Red Pony on Main Street that night and harrased a bartender. They proclaimed themselves as Nazis and started throwing Heil Hitler salutes.
It’s just idiots wanting ‘cred’ for bravely sacrificing for their belief in white supremacy, but without actually risking losing their jobs or being excluded from polite society if they were doxxed.
There’s another Dominionist racist loser. I didn’t know she was a prostitute (I actually don’t care if people are sex workers). Yet it’s rather hypocritical of her as the MAGAts will lap it up. Plus, she somehow will claim she’s being persecuted for being thought of poorly, just like Jesus and Trampy Trump.
Florida’s congressional Republicans are done with Matt Gaetz. They left the House chamber last night furious after Gaetz led seven other GOP members — and Democrats — to eject former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) from his leadership post.
They called Gaetz divisive. Disrespectful. Selfish. No other Florida Republican voted to oust McCarthy. Florida’s GOP delegation see Gaetz as carrying out a personal vendetta, accusing him of an overzealous bid for attention and of trying to position himself to become the state’s future governor.
“Gaetz has very few friends in the conference,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez said. “Gaetz maybe has a couple of friends in the delegation. But I’m not one of them. He’s about clicks,” Gimenez said. “He’s about how many cameras he can get shoved in his face and he’s a historical figure because he caused for the first time in history and all that. I think he gets off on that.”
Notice, too, that they are criticizing Gaetz for doing the same stuff they praise from Trump…!??!
Florida’s GOP delegation see Gaetz as carrying out a personal vendetta, accusing him of an overzealous bid for attention and of trying to position himself to become the state’s future governor.
…Gaetz led seven other GOP members — and Democrats — to eject former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy
God, I hate sloppy reporting. Gaetz did not lead Democrats to do anything. Democrats voted to eject Kev because after they saved his ass on Saturday by supporting his bill to prevent the GOP shutdown, he blamed them for the shutdown in Sunday interviews.
In addition, it is the responsibility of the party in power to select their leader, speaker, whatever. Played more than a few years of sports ball (rugby). I never participated in the selection of the captain for the opposing team. SMH. McCarthy was not entitled to a vote from any democrats.
He had a very credible primary challenger in 2022: Mark Lombardo, a Marine combat veteran and former FedEx executive.
Lombardo was a self-identified conservative who called out Gaetz for basically being a sex-trafficking drama queen. Still, Gaetz got 70% in the primary. His constituents love that he’s as asshole.
“The people of Northwest Florida need a Congressman who will put them first,” Lombardo said in a released statement.
“Matt Gaetz is a professional politician who has dishonored his constituents with unnecessary drama, childish gimmicks, and is reportedly entangled in a federal investigation for sex-trafficking a 17-year-old girl to the Bahamas. Displaying the highest level of arrogance imaginable, he hired pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s attorneys and used the money from his hardworking America First donors to pay the bill. His actions are disgraceful and do not reflect or represent the conservative values of Northwest Florida.”
By Peter Montgomery | October 4, 2023 11:38 am
Franklin, Tennessee Alderman Gabrielle Hanson (Image from Hanson for Mayor campaign video)
Scottie's Playtime 