WTF !!!! This is wealthy Jewish supporters doxing young adult students just for exercising free thought! It is entirely an attempt to stop any expression of support for anything but the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Texas requires teachers to sign a pledge to Israel. It is not being done by Jewish people, it is being done by evangelical Christians to get to their end time. Hugs.
(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 want to thank PERSONNELENTE for the link. Most things I am hearing about the Hamas attack on Israel is all the horrible things that Hamas committed. And I 100% agree that what they did is horrible. But that doesn’t give the Israeli government and Israeli military the right to also commit horrible tragedies to the civilian Palestinian population. If it is wrong for Israeli children to be harmed, it is also just as wrong for Palestinian children to be harmed. Period full stop. Palestinian civilians and children have as much worth as Israeli civilians and children! Israel is using US supplied planes and missiles to level entire city blocks in Gaza while the people are still in them. Israeli military is bombing UN schools and hospitals. All things the US / world said was a war crime when Russia was doing them.
Please watch the very short subtitled clip of a Palestinian child showing the rubble that was her home, and saying how scared she is. Sad tearful hugs.
Antonia Hylton, investigative reporter for NBC News and co-host of the new podcast Grapevine, reports on the infiltration of far-right Christian ideology into classrooms in Texas and across America.
The hate and misinformation continues and spreads. The over the top rush to return to a regressive past of strict gender roles, censorship, and an enforced social acceptance of only what is acceptable to the leading churches in the area. Think of the time these people want desperately to return to, and ask why. It did not fix anything, it did not solve any problems. Gay kids were still born, they just had miserable lives. Trans people were still born, they just had to suffer with no social acceptance or relief. These people hate civil rights for anyone but themselves. They are demanding a return to a time when it was not only legal but acceptable to discriminate against anyone who was not a straight cis white person. That is what they want so badly, the right to insult, shame, targeting for bullying and harming people who are different. I have to ask why, what makes that time so attractive for these people. I think it is the right to abuse others, to feel superior to them! Again I repeat that a lot of this hate and bigotry is driven by fundmentlist religious sects. Below is are two quote. Hugs
The ALA said book challenges nearly doubled nationally in 2022 and are “evidence of a growing, well-organized, conservative political movement, the goals of which include removing books about race, history, gender identity, sexuality, and reproductive health from America’s public and school libraries that do not meet their approval.”
“The book fair is one of our biggest fundraisers, but unfortunately, we have seen more and more books that promote and support LBGTQ+ views,” the school wrote. “We’re at a crossroads where we share different values and beliefs, especially when it comes to exposing young children to adult topics. Friendswood Christian School is a private institution devoted to creating a complete learning environment for children by incorporating Christian principles into the academic framework. We want to provide an environment where children can hang on to their innocence as long as possible.”
As Texas enters its third straight school year of coordinated book banning activity, a growing number of districts are targeting library books. Caught in the dragnet: books featuring a “naked” crayon and one with a cartoon butt.
The American flag reflects off a Houston Little Free Library designed to look like a prison filled with banned books. Credit: Callaghan O’Hare/Reuters
This article is co-published with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published. Also, sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
As a new Texas law further restricting what books students can check out of school libraries takes effect, local bans are gaining steam in districts across the state — in some cases going in startling directions.
In Katy, a growing Houston suburb, school officials recently bought $93,000 worth of new library books and promptly put them in storage so an internal committee could review them. The district then banned 14 titles (bringing its total since 2021 to 30), including popular books by Dr. Seuss and Judy Blume, as well as “No, David!” an award-winning children’s book featuring a mischievous cartoon character who at one point jumps out of a bathtub, exposing a cartoon backside. (This wasn’t the district’s first foray into regulating cartoon nudity; over the summer, a book about a crayon that lost its wrapper, becoming “naked” in the process, was flagged for review but ultimately retained.)
Following the latest removals, the Katy school board decided that cartoon butts would be exempted from a district policy that called for removing books showing nudity. “Explicit frontal nudity,” on the other hand, would not be allowed.
“The board’s intent was never to remove well-known cartoon-like children’s books just because they showed a little drawing of a little boy’s rear-end,” its president, Victor Perez, said, according to the Houston Chronicle.
One hundred miles to the east, a school district near Beaumont made headlines last month after removing a substitute middle school teacher who had read students portions of an illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, which detailed her hiding from the Nazis and was published after her death in the Holocaust.
The book, which had not been approved as part of the district’s curriculum, had been included on a reading list sent to parents at the start of the school year, according to television station KFDM.
The district is investigating whether administrators knew the book was being used in the class, according to news reports.
And just south of Houston, the private Friendswood Christian School announced it was canceling its Scholastic Book Fair, barring the nation’s largest children’s book publisher, which has put on book fairs at schools around the country for decades.
In a letter to parents, obtained by ABC13 in Houston, the school made clear the decision was aimed at books featuring LGBTQ+ themes and characters.
“The book fair is one of our biggest fundraisers, but unfortunately, we have seen more and more books that promote and support LBGTQ+ views,” the school wrote. “We’re at a crossroads where we share different values and beliefs, especially when it comes to exposing young children to adult topics. Friendswood Christian School is a private institution devoted to creating a complete learning environment for children by incorporating Christian principles into the academic framework. We want to provide an environment where children can hang on to their innocence as long as possible.”
Kasey Meehan, the Freedom to Read program director for the New York-based free speech organization PEN America, said that as Texas enters what is essentially its third consecutive school year of book banning activity, efforts have taken some troubling directions.
“Even after that first removal of books, what we see is a continued chilling effect that happens across schools,” she said in an interview. “There are these ripples that are going to extend beyond simply removing a book to just read, erring on the side of caution and bringing a bit more scrutiny to any availability of books and any opportunities that students can have to access books.”
The local censorship efforts come as courts wrestle with a new Texas law that requires booksellers to rate public school library books based on their depictions of or references to sex. Books in which such references are deemed “patently offensive” by the vendors will be issued a “sexually explicit” rating and can’t be sold to schools and must be removed from shelves of school libraries. Books that reference or depict sex generally will be rated “sexually relevant” and require parental permission to read.
Texas schools would be barred from buying books from vendors who don’t use the ratings.
On Sept. 18, a U.S. district judge in Austin issued a written order blocking the law, which was passed this spring, from taking effect. Judge Alan D. Albright, a Trump appointee, ruled the law would impose “unconstitutionally vague requirements” on booksellers and “misses the mark on obscenity.”
“And the state,” he wrote, “in abdicating its responsibility to protect children, forces private individuals and corporations into compliance with an unconstitutional law that violates the First Amendment.”
A week later, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the judge’s ruling, temporarily allowing the law to go into effect while the court considers the case, which it is expected to take up this month.
Book bannings have increased precipitously in the state since ProPublica and The Texas Tribune started reporting on the issue in rural Hood County two years ago, where a fight over library books foreshadowed the intense partisanship that has come to mark many Texas school board races. The U.S. Department of Education launched an investigation into the Granbury Independent School District after the superintendent was secretly recorded ordering librarians to remove library books with LGBTQ+ themes.
The federal probe, which followed a ProPublica-Tribune investigation with NBC News, remains open, according to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. Last year, in response to the outlets’ investigation, the district said it was committed to supporting students of all backgrounds.
The issue continues to roil Granbury, as some community members and trustees don’t believe the district has gone far enough to remove books. Last month, the school board censured a trustee who wants additional titles removed after she was accused of sneaking into a school library to examine books with a cellphone flashlight.
Of the 1,269 documented attempts to remove books from school or public libraries across the nation in 2022, 93 took place in Texas, affecting over 2,300 titles, the association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom found. The ALA said book challenges nearly doubled nationally in 2022 and are “evidence of a growing, well-organized, conservative political movement, the goals of which include removing books about race, history, gender identity, sexuality, and reproductive health from America’s public and school libraries that do not meet their approval.”
The American Library Association itself has come under fire among conservative circles in Texas. In August, Midland County commissioners voted to withdraw from the association. Days later, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission pulled out.
What’s been your experience with school library book bans in Texas? Email Austin-based reporter Jeremy Schwartz at jeremy.schwartz@propublica.org to let him know.
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