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#1
The Comma That Erases Genocide
June 3, 2024
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Israel wants to muddy the waters — as it always does — so it can carry on with its genocide, writes Jonathan Cook. Here's an example of how the Western media help it along.


The International Court of Justice at The Hague, on May 24, 2024, when it ordered Israel to stop its assault on Rafah. (ICJ)

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

Israel's claim that a single comma exempts it from having to respect the International Court of Justice's order on May 24 to immediately halt its murderous attack on Rafah should be ridiculed.

Instead it is being given space to breathe by complicit media like The Guardian.

The paper's diplomatic editor offers an "analysis" that takes seriously claims by Israel and the two judges at the ICJ — one an Israeli — who dissented from the ruling approved by the other 13. They argue the following:

"The world is wrong to think that the ICJ has required Israel to halt its Rafah assault and any actions elsewhere in Gaza that are genocidal. Instead, a comma in the text qualifies the ruling to mean the court wants Israel to halt its actions in Rafah and elsewhere only if they are genocidal. Because Israel's actions are not genocidal, the court is not, in fact, asking Israel to halt anything."



That argument is preposterous on its face. It would be a less forceful statement than the one the court issued back in January, when Israel's genocide was far less developed than it is now.

But there's another glaring flaw in the argument's logic that The Guardian somehow overlooks. If the two dissenting judges are really so sure that is what the overwhelming majority meant — that Israel is barred only from carrying out actions if they are already proven to constitute genocide — why on earth did they dissent?

Were this really the case, there could be only one possible interpretation of their decision to dissent: that they favour giving Israel the green light to commit genocide.

[See: ICJ Orders Israel Stop Rafah Attack]

This isn't rocket science.

Israel wants to muddy the waters — as it always does — so it can carry on with its genocide.

The "fierce and continuing debate" about the comma, as The Guardian characterises it, is being aired so that Israel can continue murdering children in Gaza until the ICJ makes a definitive ruling on the question of genocide in a few years' time.

By then, Gaza will be even more of a smoldering ruin than it is already. By then, the Palestinian population will be either dead or have been ethnically cleansed.

Imagine if it were Vladimir Putin's Russia arguing over a comma as a pretext to avoid implementing a clear ruling by the ICJ to halt atrocities in Ukraine. The ignominy The Guardian and the rest of the media would heap on the Russian president would be relentless — and deserved.

[Related: ICJ Rules Against Ukraine on Terrorism, MH17]

So why are Israel's genocide-justifying evasions not treated the same way?

Because, however unwilling we are to face the facts, Western establishments, including our state-corporate media, are fully onboard with this genocide. The only concession they are willing to make is to the optics.
Because Western elites, like their more openly colonial forebears, are racist towards members of the Global South like the Palestinians.
Because the West's war machine — into which Israel is so tightly integrated — endlessly enriches those elites through "defence" contracts and resource theft.
And because Israel is central to the narrative we imbibe daily that it is we in the so-called West who are the real victims, not the people whose lives are torn apart by our bombs and our globe-spanning financial institutions.
The Western media takes seriously the debate about a comma because it helps us to avoid confronting a simple truth: The monsters are us.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021.He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.

This article is from the author's blog, Jonathan Cook.net 

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Please Dona
#2
Ilan Pappé Sees Hope for 'Collapse of Zionist Project'
May 22, 2024
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The anti-Zionist Israeli scholar told Democracy Now! that he sees signs that a free Palestine may be possible in which Jewish and Arab people can coexist.



National March on Washington to Free Palestine, Nov. 4, 2023. (Elvert Barnes, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

By Edward Carver
Common Dreams

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, a prominent anti-Zionist, expressed hope for a free, democratic Palestine in which Jewish and Arab people can coexist, during an interview on Tuesday with Democracy Now! following his interrogation by U.S. federal agents last week.

Pappé, director of the European Center for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, was interrogated by the agents for two hours about his views after arriving in Detroit on a flight from London on May 13.

The agents took his phone away before returning it. Pappé initially said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had interrogated him but later clarified that he was not sure which U.S. federal agency the agents represented.



Pappé cited the interrogation in Detroit as an example of the "sheer panic and desperation" of Israel and pro-Israel lobbies due to fear the country will become a "pariah state." The interrogation came amid crackdowns on pro-Palestine demonstrations on U.S. college campuses, as well as arrests of protestors and cancellations of pro-Palestine intellectual activity in Europe.

In Tuesday's interview, Pappé denounced Israel's historical policy toward Palestinians, declaring it to be clear-sighted in its cruelty and intentional in its methods, as he has long done in his scholarly work, most notably in his 2007 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Referring to events in the late 1940s, he told Democracy Now! that

"the Nakba is a bit of a misleading term, because it means, in Arabic, a 'catastrophe.' But really what the Palestinians suffered was not an actual catastrophe, but rather ethnic cleansing, which is a clear policy motivated by clear ideology."

"There is not one moment in the history of the Palestinians in Palestine, since the arrival of Zionism in Palestine, in which Palestinians are not potentially under danger of losing their home, their fields, their businesses, and their homeland," he added.

Pappé has argued that as ugly as that history may be, the current war in Gaza is even worse — a step up from ethnic cleansing to genocide, in his view. His forthcoming book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, documents the influence of the pro-Zionist lobbyists in the U.S., the U.K., and elsewhere.

Despite that influence, Pappé said that he sees signs that the ideological hold of Zionism is weakening, and a freer, more democratic Palestine may be possible, telling Democracy Now!:

"I think we are seeing processes, important processes, that are leading to the collapse of the Zionist project. Hopefully, the Palestinian national movement and anyone else involved in Israel and Palestine would be able to replace this apartheid state, this oppressive regime, with a democratic one for everyone who lives between the river and the sea and for all the Palestinians who were expelled from there since 1948 until today."

"I am really hopeful that there will be a different kind of life," he added, "for both Jews and Arabs between the river and the sea under a democratic, free Palestine."

Edward Carver is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

This article is from  Common Dreams.

Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
#3
Israel's Brutality Draws on British Rule
May 8, 2024
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Britain's "mandate" over Palestine from 1920-48 left an apparatus of repression which Israel inherited and still uses today in its ferocious war on Palestinians, writes A. Bustos.


Members of the U.K. Royal Commission during the Palestine "disturbances" of 1936. (Library of Congress)

By A. Bustos
Declassified UK

Israel's present use of collective punishment against Palestinians owes much of its origins to British rule in Palestine.

So too do the aerial bombardments, military raids, use of Palestinian civilians as human shields and the infrastructure of military law deployed against an occupied, overwhelmingly civilian population.

Britain ruled Palestine during its "mandate" between 1920-48, and its repressive infrastructure came into full force during the 1936-39 Great Arab Revolt.

In 1936, Palestine erupted into a national uprising following two decades of peaceful resistance against British rule and several failed uprisings over the 1920s, as the political and economic situation became dire for the Arab majority.

The uprising called for an end to British support for Zionist colonisation and a guarantee of Palestinian self-determination. Britain, however, saw it as a threat to its rule and responded with brutal repression.

By the end of the revolt, 10 percent of the adult male Arab population were either killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled by the British.

This brought the revolt to an end, devastated Palestinian society and left it defenceless against Zionist militia groups during the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe). Then, over two-thirds of the Palestinian people were ethnically cleansed from their country to establish the state of Israel.

Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi has argued that the armed suppression of Arab resistance during the revolt was among the most valuable services Britain provided to the Zionist movement.

Martial Law


Palestine resistance fighters against the British mandate, 1936. (PLO Collection, Institute for Palestine Studies, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

To crush the revolt, Britain brought Palestine under martial law, building on counterinsurgency tactics it had refined in other colonies like Ireland and India.

As historian Matthew Hughes explains, in response to the 1936 uprising, British authorities renewed local laws enacted during the 1920s, referring to them as "emergency laws", to impose collective punishment against Palestinians.

This allowed the mandate government to impose curfews, censor written materials, occupy buildings, as well as arrest, imprison and deport individuals without trial while suspending the right to counsel, policies Israel still enforces against Palestinians today.

Far from distinguishing between armed rebels and civilians, Britain enforced collective punishment against the entire population. Mining the declassified files, David Cronin describes how "Britain's elite decided early on that Palestinians should be targeted en masse".

By 1937, Palestine was under effective military rule. During the mandate period, Britain had put in place a legal system which was designed to prevent Palestinian political organising while also giving itself broad powers.

Camps & Prisons


Israeli prison camp at Sarafand, November 1948. (Palmach archive Yiftach 1st Battalion D company Volume 2 album, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

British military rule turned large parts of the country into prisons. Military law made it possible to hand out swift sentences, meaning large-scale detentions of peasants and urban workers.

Detainees were held, often without trial, in extremely overcrowded camps with inadequate sanitation. In May 1939, answering a parliamentary question, colonial secretary Malcolm MacDonald confirmed that there were 13 detention camps in Palestine housing 4,816 people.

This included several concentration camps (as Britain itself referred to them) like Sarafand al-Amar, located at the largest military base in Palestine, which held thousands of prisoners.

Other camps included Nur Shams, near Tulkarem, and Acre prison on the Mediterranean coast which also hosted Palestine's largest prison.

At one point the overcrowding was so bad it became necessary to release veteran detainees whenever new ones were arrested. In 1939 the number of detainees rose to over 9,000, 10 times the figure of two years previously.

According to Palestinian prisoner rights group, Addameer, at least six of the major Israeli prison and detention centres today were built during the mandate era. These include Kishon, Damon, Ramleh, Ashkelon, Megiddo and Al-Moscobiyeh (the Russian Compound) which are still used by Israel to imprison Palestinians.

Administrative Detention


Palestinian Youth Accord for Prisoners rally in Gaza support of Palestinian administrative detainees on a mass hunger strike, May 12, 2014. (Joe Catron, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

In November 2023, following a four-day humanitarian "pause" between Israel and Hamas, the Israeli government released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. This shone a spotlight for Western audiences on the fact that thousands of Palestinians are regularly imprisoned today in Israeli jails.

What drew most attention was that so many of them, including children, were held under the policy of administrative detention, an unlawful process that allows Israel to hold detainees without charge or trial.

However, Israel appears to have inherited the practice from the British, who regularly detained thousands of Palestinians without trial. Following its establishment in 1948, Israel has practised detention without trial as a staple of military rule.

After the end of the revolt in 1939, Britain strengthened the powers of the mandate administration and in 1945 introduced the Defence (Emergency) Regulations. Ironically, this was in response to violence carried out by Zionist paramilitary groups at that time.

Israel incorporated these regulations and most other British mandate laws into the Israeli Law and Administration Ordinance of 1948. It used them against Palestinians inside Israel between 1948-66 and then extended them to Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.

These laws would be used repeatedly in response to popular uprisings thereafter, this time against Israeli rule.

A 1989 report by Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq describes how Israeli commanders issued a proclamation in 1967 affirming that the Defence (Emergency) Regulations were to remain in force.

Even though they had been terminated by Britain at the end of its mandate, Israeli leaders kept and continued to use them against Palestinians.

In 2019, Human Rights Watch highlighted eight cases where Israeli authorities used military orders to "prosecute Palestinians in military courts for their peaceful expression or involvement in non-violent groups or demonstrations" using, among other measures, the Defence (Emergency) Regulations of 1945 inherited from Britain.

Charles Tegart's Fence


"Tegart's Wall", actually a barbed wire fence, Palestine 1938–1940. (Map prepared for the Survey of Palestine, 1944, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

To fight the 1930s revolt, Britain sent Sir Charles Tegart, who had previously headed the police force in colonial India, to Palestine where he built much of the infrastructure used to intern suspects. Tegart built so-called Arab Investigation Centres which were used as torture chambers.

He established a special centre in Jerusalem to train interrogators in torture where suspects underwent brutal questioning, involving humiliation, beatings, and physical mistreatment.

Colonial administrator Edward Keith-Roach recounted in his memoirs that the purpose of these centres was to train police officers "in the gentle art of 'third degree'" for use on Arabs until they "spilled the beans".

Israeli historian Tom Segev describes how Tegart "built dozens of police fortresses around the country and put up concrete guard posts, which the British called pillboxes, along the roads".


Tegart Fort at Kibbutz Sasa, Upper Galile, Israel, 2010. (Ranbar, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Tegart's best-known recommendation was that a huge fence be erected along Palestine's northern border, which came to be known as "Tegart's fence".

To construct it, he enlisted the help of the Jewish Agency, the main organisation encouraging Jewish settlement to Palestine. The contract to build it was awarded to construction company Solel Boneh which was a project of the Histadrut, the leading Zionist trade union in Palestine and Israel's national trade union today.

Solel Boneh also built the new police buildings, popularly known as the "Tegart Fortresses". A 2012 BBC profile on Tegart describes how many of them are still used today.

Located mainly in the north of the country they are now situated near the Israeli border with Lebanon but instead of British troops, they are manned by Israeli soldiers.

Military Tactics

Britain used both ground troops and air power through the Royal Air Force against Palestinian rebels during 1936-39. Following the termination of the Munich Agreement made by Britain with Nazi Germany in 1938, Britain sent over 100,000 troops to Palestine, flooding the country with soldiers.

On 7 May 1936, the high commissioner for Palestine, Arthur Wauchope, sought "general covering approval" from the Colonial Office to impose collective punishment on cities and towns where acts of disobedience occurred.

He promptly received the go-ahead and chose Nazareth, Safed and Bisan to be penalised.

In June 1936, British forces destroyed large parts of the Old City of Jaffa. The army blew up between 220 and 240 multi-occupancy buildings, rendering up to 6,000 Palestinians homeless.


Palestinians in Jaffa in the 1920s. (Frank Scholten, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

While the level of destruction then seems small in comparison to the massive Israeli bombardment in Gaza today, the use of disproportionate force and collective punishment during a military operation felt mainly by civilians is not new to Palestine.

After crushing the general strike that had been declared by the newly formed Arab Higher Committee, with many of the key figures involved imprisoned or exiled, the second phase of the revolt from 1937 saw a large armed uprising sweep through most of the country, reaching its peak in 1938.

To combat this, British forces would take their repression to Palestine's rural countryside where most of the armed groups were.

Village Raids

To hunt down and eliminate those involved in the uprising, the British regularly cordoned off entire villages, followed by deadly raids. British troops would ransack homes, often destroying property, in search of rebel fighters or weapons.

Palestinian men found with weapons or even bullets were shot dead. Many were killed without any evidence of involvement in military activities.

During raids, British soldiers would often round up the inhabitants and imprison them in open-air pens with barbed wire. Villages would be collectively fined for attacks against British soldiers if the attacker was believed to hail from, or live near, the village in question.

In addition, the homes of suspected attackers and their relatives were demolished, a policy which Israel uses against convicted, or suspected, Palestinian militants today.

Two villages subjected to abuses were al-Bassa and Halhul, which both became the subject of a 2022 BBC report, following a petition from survivors calling for official recognition and an apology from the British government.

This report found that "the historical evidence involved includes details of arbitrary killings, torture, the use of human shields and the introduction of home demolitions as collective punishment."

It added: "Much of it was conducted within formal policy guidelines for UK forces at the time or with the consent of senior officers." 

Israeli military raids into Palestinians villages in the West Bank are a daily part of life and have escalated since 7 October 2023.

Human Shields


British soldiers on an armoured train car with two Palestinian Arab hostages used as human shields, 1936. (Chaim Kahanov and Zecharia Oryon, Jewish Settlement Police, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Another tactic Britain used was to force Palestinian civilians to accompany them on patrols. They were made to sit, unprotected, at the front of military convoys while driving through areas with high rebel activity and even to drive over mines to blow them up before British troops proceeded.

This tactic had come from British rule in India and was known as "minesweeping". Many Palestinians were killed or seriously injured this way.

Britain effectively used Palestinian civilians as human shields, which Israeli forces have been filmed doing repeatedly in both the West Bank and in Gaza for years.

In December 2023, two Palestinians, a 15-year-old boy and a 30-year-old man in Gaza, claim they were used as human shields by Israeli soldiers, the boy saying they strapped him with bombs before forcing him into a tunnel. In Israel's 2014 assault against Gaza, similar allegations were made.

In the West Bank there have been numerous videos showing Israeli soldiers taking Palestinian civilians and forcing them to sit or stand blindfolded in front of Israeli vehicles as they conduct operations.

In some cases, they have even placed civilians onto the front of those vehicles to deter other Palestinians from throwing rocks at invading Israeli forces, just like Britain did during the revolt.

This historical context is especially important to understand now, as Israel has for years accused Palestinian groups like Hamas of using civilians as human shields.

Despite there being little evidence to support this claim (and that the available evidence actually shows Israeli forces doing it themselves) the key historical context is that British troops used it against Palestinian civilians during the Great Revolt.

Orde Wingate & Special Night Squads


Brigadier Orde Wingate in India in 1943. (No 9 Army Film and Photographic Unit, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

The most explicit case of British-Zionist collaboration in repressing the revolt came with the entry into Palestine of the British general Orde Charles Wingate and his creation of the Special Night Squads (SNS).

Wingate, an intelligence officer and committed Christian Zionist, was tasked by the British Army with training Jewish fighters to patrol the Iraq Petroleum Company's pipeline.

With the SNS, he created his own private militia drawn from recruits within the Haganah, the Zionist military organisation, training them in ambush and assassination tactics.

Describing himself as a firm believer in Zionism, Wingate reportedly told his men that "the Arabs think the night is theirs. The British lock themselves up in their barracks at night. But we, the Jews, will teach them to fear the night more than the day".

Together with Yitzhak Sadeh, commander of the Palmach, the main strike force of the Haganah, and future founder of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), Wingate took the SNS on nightly raids against Palestinian villages.

After attacks against the pipeline occurred, his Night Squads would invade nearby villages at dawn, rounding up all the male inhabitants. Forcing them to stand against the wall, the squads then whipped the men's bare backs.

At times, Wingate would humiliate the villagers, other times he shot them dead. According to Segev, the men under his command said behind his back they thought he was mad.

Israeli military historian Ze'ev Schiff argued that Wingate "left his mark as the single most important influence on the military thinking of the Haganah".

A lexicon issued by the Israeli Ministry of Defense many years after his death states:

"The teaching of Orde Charles Wingate, his character and leadership were a cornerstone for many of the Haganah's commanders, and his influence can be seen in the Israel Defense Force's combat doctrine."

Two of Israel's leading future commanders both served under Wingate in the SNS: Moshe Dayan, who became the IDF's chief of staff and Yigal Allon, a future IDF general and foreign minister.

Dayan said Wingate "taught us everything we know" and that "even when nothing happened, we learned much from Wingate's instruction".

Allon described how "by attaching Jewish fighters to his units, he [Wingate] also helped to provide facilities for practical training... He regarded himself, in practice, as a member of the Haganah and that was how we all saw him – as the comrade and, as we called him, 'the Friend'."

Major General Bernard Montgomery


General Bernard L. Montgomery watching a tank movement in North Africa, November 1942. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

After Wingate, the most notorious British military figure in Palestine during the revolt was Bernard Montgomery. "Monty", as he was known, was a short-tempered, old-fashioned soldier who rejected any suggestion that the revolt was a national uprising, instead describing the rebels as "bandits".

He introduced the Bren gun to Palestine, replacing the old Lewis submachine gun the British had been using and gave his men simple instructions on how to deal with the rebels: kill them.

Having previously served in Ireland, launching operations against Irish rebels in 1921, he often made comparisons between the two colonies.

Montgomery was preoccupied with how Britain had lost control of most of Ireland. He thought too many concessions had been made to Sinn Fein. Therefore, his conclusions for Palestine were that Britain should suppress any expression of national identity.

He ordered any Arab caught wearing the chequered headscarf (the Keffiyeh) to be "caged". He also floated the idea of chaining people's legs as punishment.

Since Israel's own military occupation of 1967 began, authorities there have repeatedly waged campaigns against Palestinian national symbols. The Palestinian flag has been targeted across the West Bank, Jerusalem and inside Israel itself and is regularly removed from public view and confiscated.

Much like the British during the revolt, Israeli authorities see Palestinian national identity as a threat and work to stamp it out.

A.Bustos is a researcher with a masters degree in Near and Middle Eastern studies from SOAS University of London and before that studied history and politics. He works as the assistant director at Palestine Deep Dive.

This article is from Declassified UK.

Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
#4
Profs Urge NYT to Probe False Oct. 7 Rape Story
April 30, 2024
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More than 50 journalism professors call for an independent review into the debunked NYT story "Screams Without Words."



The New York Times headquarters, 620 Eighth Avenue, 2019. (Ajay Suresh, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

By Julia Conley
Common Dreams

Nothing can "reverse the damage done to Palestine and to Palestinians," said the professors, "but the Times could still reverse some of the damage it has done to itself with its silence."

A front-page New York Times story that Israel used to galvanize public support for its U.S.-backed assault on Gaza must be subject to an independent review, more than 50 journalism professors said in a letter to the newspaper on Monday, as growing protests signified widespread outrage over the destruction that followed the bombshell article.

The professors, many of whom worked as full-time journalists before turning to academia, wrote to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, executive editor Joe Kahn, and international editor Philip Pan, calling for a "thorough and independent review" into the article "Screams Without Words: Sexual Violence on Oct. 7."

The letter urged the newspaper to form a commission made up of journalism experts to examine the "reporting, editing, and publishing processes" for the story.

The article came under scrutiny shortly after it was published, having been reported by not only international correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman but also two inexperienced freelancers based in Israel. One, Anat Schwartz, is a "former air force intelligence official" with whom the Times cut ties after it was revealed that she had "liked" a social media post calling for Gaza to be turned into a "slaughterhouse."

"It appears that extraordinary trust was invested in these individuals and the Times would benefit from publicly explaining the circumstances that justified such unusual reliance on freelancers for such an important story," the professors wrote. The academics included Mohamad Bazzi of New York University, Shahan Mufti of University of Richmond, and Jeff Cohen, who retired from Ithaca College.

Mufti joined Northwestern University assistant professor Steven Thrasher in gathering the signatures. He told The Washington Post that after "serious consideration and deliberation," the academics "came to the conclusion that this is necessary."

'Facts' Without Evidence

In addition to questions that have been raised about Schwartz's and Sella's experience and bias, the professors pointed to the newspaper's acknowledgment on March 26 that "new video evidence 'undercut' some important details" in "Screams Without Words," as well as Gettleman's comment suggesting he did not view the information in the story as hard "evidence."

"Can the paper 'establish' fact if its own reporter does not consider his information 'evidence'?" asked the professors.


In March, a spokesperson for Kibbutz Be'eri told The Intercept that victims of the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel were not sexually assaulted, and the family of one woman who was a key figure in "Screams Without Words" has denied the report's graphic details of sexual abuse were true.

The Intercept also wrote that in reporting on the alleged sexual assaults, Schwartz relied on interviews with a rescue group that was "documented to have mishandled evidence and spread multiple false stories about the events of October 7, including debunked allegations of Hamas operatives beheading babies."

Al Jazeera journalist Laila Al-Arian called Monday's letter a "major development" and urged the Times to "do the right thing."

The methods used by Schwartz, The Intercept noted earlier this month, were the building blocks for a story that "instantly served as a powerful reference in a mounting campaign waged by Israel and its supporters" to excuse Israel's assault on Gaza.

"The impact of The New York Times story is impossible to fathom," the professors wrote.

"This is wartime and in the minds of many people, the Times' story fueled the fire at a pivotal moment when there might have been an opportunity to contain it before, as the International Court of Justice has ruled, the situation devolved into the 'plausible' realm of genocide. Considering these grave circumstances, we believe that the Times must waste no time in extending an invitation for an independent review."

External Review 'Appropriate'


An missile attack on Gaza in October, 2023. (Ali Hamad of APAimages for WAFA, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The article, said one signatory, Sandy Tolan of the University of Southern California, was published "as the death toll mounted in Gaza, and criticism was beginning to focus more on Israel."

"Being cognizant of the potential damages of and consequences of the timing," Tolan told the Post, "given that it didn't appear to be as well-reported as it should have been, there's all the more reason why an external review is appropriate."

The signatories pointed out that there is significant precedent for newspapers conducting independent reviews of articles that have raised questions about bias and veracity.

"If an independent review finds that the Times did nothing gravely wrong, then it will be a win not just for the Times but for all journalism," the professors wrote.

"In the worst case, if an investigation does find remarkable errors or negligence in the way the newsroom operated, nothing that the Times would do in response could ever reverse the damage done to Palestine and to Palestinians but the Times could still reverse some of the damage it has done to itself with its silence."

"Doing nothing, however," they added, "and allowing a cloud of doubt to hang over this historically consequential story will ensure that all the journalism that The New York Times produces in the course of this conflict will remain under a dark shadow."

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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#5
Craig Murray: Worse Than You Can Imagine
April 26, 2024
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The author has no doubt the Western political elite are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians at a much deeper level than the people have yet understood.


Sunak and Netanyahu in Israel, Oct. 19, 2023. (No. 10/Wikimedia Commons)

By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk



Governments cannot take big decisions extremely quickly except in the most extreme of circumstances.

There are mechanisms in all states that consider policy decisions, weigh them up, involve the various departments of the state whose activities are affected by that decision, and arrive at a conclusion, though not necessarily a good one.

The decision to stop aid funding to UNRWA, the specialized U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians, was not taken by numerous Western states in a single day.

In the U.K., several different government ministries had to coordinate.

Even within only a single ministry, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO,), views would have to be coordinated through written submissions and interdepartmental meetings between the departments dealing with the Middle East, with the United Nations, with the United States, with Europe and then of course between the diplomatic and development wings of the ministry.

That process would include seeking the views of British ambassadors to Tel Aviv, Doha, Cairo, Riyadh, Istanbul and Washington and to the United Nations in Geneva and in New York.

It is not necessarily a lengthy process but it is not a day's work, and nor would it need to be. There was no practical impact to making the announcement of cutting UNRWA funding a day sooner or a day later.

Consider that the parallel process had to be completed in the United States, in Canada, in Germany, in Australia and in all the other Western powers that contributed to starvation in Gaza by cutting aid to UNRWA.

All of these countries had to go through their procedures, and it could only be by prior coordination – weeks in advance – between these states that they announced all on the same day the destruction of the life support system for Palestinians, then in absolute need.

And then consider that we now know for certain that the Israelis had produced no evidence whatsoever of UNRWA complicity in Hamas resistance, on which these decisions in all those states were allegedly based.

I have no doubt at all that the Western political elite, paid tools of the zionist machine, are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians and ethnic cleansing of Gaza at a much deeper level than the people have yet understood.

The refusal by Labour leader Keir Starmer and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to contemplate ending arms sales and military support to Israel is not due to inertia or concern for the arms industry. It is that they actively support the destruction of the Palestinians.

Within an Hour


British barrister Malcom Shaw arguing for Israel before the World Court on Jan 12, 2024. (UN TV Screenshot)

The coordinated decision of the Western nations to fast track famine by stopping UNRWA funding was announced within an hour of the ICJ ruling that Gazans were at immediate risk of genocide, driving from the headlines that adverse ruling against Israel.

This sent the clearest signal in response that the Western powers would not be stopped from genocide by international law or institutions.

The Western powers give not a fig for 16,000 massacred Palestinian infants. No evidence of mass graves in hospitals will move them. They knew genocide was happening and continued actively to arm and abet it.

This genocide is the desired goal of the West. No other explanation is remotely plausible.

I have never believed the spin that Joe Biden is trying to restrain Benjamin Netanyahu, while simultaneously arming and funding Netanyahu and using U.S. forces to fight alongside him.

Biden is making no effort to restrain Netanyahu. Biden fully supports the genocide.

My reading of this was reinforced when I was looking back at the Israeli murders on the Mavi Mamara in 2010, when they killed ten unarmed aid workers attempting a Freedom Flotilla aid delivery to Gaza.

Israel's actions were clearly both murderous and in breach of international law. Biden as vice president defended Israel staunchly then.  It is essential to understand that Genocide Joe has always been Genocide Joe. I wrote:

"Joe Biden took the lead in defending the raid to the U.S. public. In an interview with PBS, he described the raid as 'legitimate' and argued that the flotilla organizers could have disembarked elsewhere before transferring the aid to Gaza.

'So what's the big deal here? What's the big deal of insisting it go straight to Gaza?' Biden asked about the humanitarian mission. 'Well, it's legitimate for Israel to say, 'I don't know what's on that ship. These guys are dropping eight — 3,000 rockets on my people.'"

Biden is not being outplayed by Netanyahu. He is actively abetting Netanyahu and shares with him the objective of full Israeli occupation of Gaza after the Palestinian people are killed or expelled into Sinai.

He also shares with Netanyahu the aim of a wider regional conflict in which the U.S. and Gulf states ally with Israel against Iran, Syria, Yemen and Hezbollah. This is their joint vision of the Middle East – Greater Israel, and U.S. hegemony operating through the Sunni monarchies.

"This genocide is the desired goal of the West. No other explanation is remotely plausible."

If you believe all the spin from the White House about Biden trying to restrain Netanyahu, I suggest you look instead at the White House and State Department spokesmen refusing to accept any single instance of Israeli atrocity and deferring to Israel on every single crime.

I am currently in Pakistan, and I must say it has been a great refreshment to be in a country where everybody understands why ISIS, Al Nusra etc. never attacked Israeli interests, and sees precisely what Western governments are doing over Gaza. What is understood by developing nations is thankfully understood by Gen Z in the West as well.

The Arab regimes of the Gulf and Jordan are dependent upon Israeli and U.S. security services and surveillance for protection from their own people.

The lack of really massive street protest against their own regimes by Arab peoples is a direct testimony to the effectiveness of that vicious repression, particularly when states like Jordan actually fight alongside Israel against Iranian weapons.

The anti-Iranian card is of course the trick both Biden and Netanyahu have left to play. By promoting an escalation with Iran, Western politicians were able to default to a position of claiming the case for arming Israel was proven – and I think were genuinely perplexed to find the public did not buy it.

The political class, across the Western world and the Arab world, is utterly divorced from its people over Gaza.

We are seeing worldwide repression, as peaceful conferences are stormed by police in Germany, students are beaten by police on American campuses, and in the U.K. old white people like me suffer the kind of continual harassment long suffered by young Muslim men.

This is not the work of Netanyahu operating as a rogue. It is the result of the machinations of a professional political class across the Western world welded to zionism, with the supremacy of Israel as an article of fundamental belief.

Times are not this dark by accident. They were designed to be this dark.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

This article is from CraigMurray.org.uk.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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Tags: Benjamin Netanyahu Craig Murray Gaza Genocide Joe Biden Keir Starmer
#6
IDF Kills 18 Kids Hours After House Votes Billions to Israel
April 22, 2024
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The latest strikes on the southern Gaza city bring laws governing U.S. transfers of weaponry into the spotlight, reports Jake Johnson.


U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Tel Aviv on Jan. 9, 2024. (Amos Ben Gershom, Government Press Office of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams



Hours after the U.S. House approved legislation that would send billions of dollars in additional military aid to Israel, the country's forces killed nearly two dozen people in Rafah, the southern Gaza city where more than half of the enclave's population is sheltering.

Gaza health officials said Sunday that the weekend strikes on Rafah — a former "safe zone" that Israel has been threatening to invade for weeks — killed 22 people, including 18 children. The Associated Press (AP) reported that the first of the Israeli strikes "killed a man, his wife, and their 3-year-old child, according to the nearby Kuwaiti Hospital, which received the bodies."

AP added:

"The woman was pregnant and the doctors saved the baby, the hospital said. The second strike killed 17 children and two women from an extended family."

Israeli forces have killed more than 14,000 children in Gaza since October, but the Biden administration and American lawmakers have refused to back growing international calls to cut off the supply of weaponry and other military equipment even as U.S. voters express support for an arms embargo.

The measure the House approved on Saturday includes $26 billion in funding for Israel, much of which is military assistance. U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), one of the 58 House lawmakers who voted against the legislation, wrote on social media late Sunday:

"Just a day after the House voted to send $14 billion in unconditional military funding to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's campaign of death and destruction, he bombed the safe zone of Rafah AGAIN, killing 22 Palestinians, of which 18 were CHILDREN! History books will write about today and the past seven months, and how our nation's leaders lacked the courage and moral clarity to stand up to a tyrant. Shameful."


The military aid package for Israel now heads to the U.S. Senate, which is set to consider the bill early this week. U.S. President Joe Biden, who has continued to greenlight arms sales to Israel amid clear evidence of war crimes, is expected to sign the measure if it reaches his desk.

 Arms Move Contrary to Law

U.S. law prohibits "arms transfers that risk facilitating or otherwise contributing to violations of human rights or international humanitarian law," according to a White House memo issued in February.

The U.S. State Department has said repeatedly that it has not found Israel to be in violation of international law, a position that runs directly counter to the findings of leading humanitarian organizations and United Nations experts.

The investigative outlet ProPublica reported last week that a "special State Department panel recommended months ago that Secretary of State Antony Blinken disqualify multiple Israeli military and police units from receiving U.S. aid after reviewing allegations that they committed serious human rights abuses" prior to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. ProPublica further noted:

"But Blinken has failed to act on the proposal in the face of growing international criticism of the Israeli military's conduct in Gaza, according to current and former State Department officials."

Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), said in a statement on Sunday that senators "should reject sending additional weapons to Israel not only because our laws prohibit military aid to abusive regimes, but because it's extremely damaging to our national interests."

DAWN's advocacy director, Raed Jarrar, added that,

"At a time when Israel is bracing for International Criminal Court arrest warrants against its leaders, members of Congress should understand that approving more military aid could subject them to personal liability for aiding and abetting an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Rather than sending more weapons to Israel Congress should declare an immediate arms embargo on Israel."

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
#7
Angela Merkel and François Hollande's crime against peace
by Thierry Meyssan
A controversy has arisen over my analyses of the personal responsibility of former Chancellor Angela Merkel and former President François Hollande in the current war in Ukraine. My colleagues claim that I made it all up and that these two personalities are innocent. I'd just be peddling Russian disinformation.
This controversy is not insignificant: my opponents are trying to whitewash our political leaders, and in so doing they are serving the Western narrative of the war in Ukraine and justifying it.
So here are the facts and documents on which I rely. You be the judge.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | PARIS (FRANCE) | 16 APRIL 2024
DEUTSCH ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΆ ESPAÑOL FRANÇAIS ITALIANO NEDERLANDS NORSK PORTUGUÊS РУССКИЙ


Angela Merkel and François Hollande lying to Vladimir Putin.
Afew mainstream media colleagues have launched a controversy over an extract from a lecture I gave in Colmar last month [1]. They dispute what I said about the personal responsibility of former Chancellor Angela Merkel and former President François Hollande for the current war in Ukraine.


Here, in detail, are the facts I have reported and the documents on which I relied, which they deny.

CRIMES AGAINST PEACE
On December 28, 2022, President Hollande gave an interview in Paris to Théo Prouvost of the Kyiv Independent [2] , which my opponents have confused with the sketch by Russian comedians Vovan and Lexus that he inspired [3]. In it, he claims to recognize himself in the remarks made a few days earlier by the former German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to Zeit [4]. In it, she declared that she had signed the Minsk agreements, not to protect the people of the Donbass and put an end to the war being waged against them by the Kiev authorities, but to give them time to arm themselves. François Hollande explicitly confesses: "Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point. The Minsk agreements stopped the Russian offensive for a while. What was very important was to know how the West would use this respite to prevent any new Russian attempt".

The "Russian attempt" he refers to is not Moscow sending Russian troops, but the private initiative of billionaire Konstantin Malofeyev to send Cossacks to support the people of the Donbass, as he had done for the Bosnian Serbs.

Angela Merkel's and François Hollande's comments were confirmed by the Secretary General of Ukraine's National Defense and Security Council, Oleksiy Danilov, who resigned three weeks ago after insulting the Chinese special envoy [5]..

The Minsk agreements were negotiated in two stages:

• The first protocol was signed, on September 5, 2014, by Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It was also initialed by the governors of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts. At the time, these oblasts, though called "republics" like the former Soviet regions, had no ambitions for independence. The protocol instituted a ceasefire, the release of hostages, the withdrawal of troops from both sides, including Konstantin Malofeyev's Cossacks, and a general amnesty. It also provides for decentralization of powers, local elections and a national dialogue.


In 2019, Angela Merkel invited a Russian delegation to Berlin. In the second row, Vladislav Surkov was seated next to Sergey Lavrov. At the time, Surkov was banned from entering the European Union. EU sanctions are therefore variable in their application.
Not much happened, however, apart from the withdrawal of Konstantin Malofeyev's Cossacks at the urging of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who took a dim view of a modern oligarch behaving like a Tsarist-era Grand Duke.

• The second protocol was signed six months later, on February 11, 2015. Negotiations took place under the responsibility of the OSCE, again between Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk. This time, Germany, France and Russia acted as guarantors ("Normandy format").

It contains more or less the same provisions as the first protocol, but is more detailed. Above all, it states that decentralization, which has not taken place as agreed, will have to be achieved through constitutional reform.

Russia feared that this second protocol would not be applied any more than the first. Vladislav Sourkov, who had been in charge of this dossier at the Kremlin, later explained this and not that it did not want to apply it, as Le Figaro [6] wrongly interpreted it. Moreover, it was Moscow [7], not Berlin or Paris, that submitted the protocol to the Security Council for approval.


Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the Russian State Duma.
TOWARDS A NUREMBERG 2 TRIAL
Reacting to Chancellor Merkel's and President Hollande's remarks, Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the State Duma (i.e. the lower house), immediately intervened to express his indignation at these confessions. Then, after the Christmas holidays, he published his comments on his Telegram channel [8]. This led to two dispatches, one from the Tass agency [9] and another from the Ria-Novosti agency [10], which my opponents also ignore.

In his capacity as Chairman of the State Duma, he first quotes President Vladimir Putin: "If a fight is unavoidable, you must strike first". Then he declares: "The confessions of a representative of the Kiev regime and former German and French leaders should be used as evidence before an international military tribunal. These leaders were plotting to start a World War with predictable consequences. They deserve to be punished for their crimes.

In describing the statements made by Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Oleksiy Danilov as evidence of "crimes", he is referring to the "crimes against peace" enunciated at the Liberation by the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. According to this authority, recognized by all UN member states, these are the most serious crimes, even more so than "crimes against humanity". They are therefore not subject to any statute of limitations.

Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Oleksiy Danilov have not yet been the subject of an arrest warrant, but they have already been reported. For the time being, there is no jurisdiction capable of judging their crimes. This is why President Vyacheslav Volodin alluded to the idea of an "international military tribunal" (equivalent to the Nuremberg Tribunal). Such a tribunal has yet to be set up following the war in Ukraine. There is no doubt that, unless France, Germany and Ukraine agree, Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Oleksiy Danilov will have to answer for "crimes against Peace".

I can only deplore the fact that my opponents have not found the above-mentioned documents. In reality, this is quite normal: they are only interested in Anglo-Saxon or European press agencies that refuse to take into account the Russian point of view. They take the official narrative at face value and don't do their due diligence.

WHY THE MINSK AGREEMENTS WERE NEVER IMPLEMENTED
Russia, as I mentioned above, presented the second protocol to the Security Council on February 17, 2015. This was the subject of resolution 2202. In the annex, Moscow had the text of the protocol and the statement by the four heads of state adopted: Vladimir Putin (Russia), Petro Poroshenko (Ukraine), François Hollande (France) and Angela Merkel (Germany). During the debates, Ukraine's permanent representative in New York expressed his satisfaction at the unwavering support of the United Nations.

In passing, it should be noted that China's permanent representative made clear at the time the position he still holds today: peace can only be lasting if the concerns of all parties are addressed.


In August 31, 2015, Sloboda's "integral nationalists" kill police officers during the Rada vote. The constitutional reform was never adopted.
Yet the second Minsk agreement has not been implemented. In the Donbass, sporadic clashes have always taken place, with each side blaming the other. Moreover, Kiev wanted the amnesty to be proclaimed after the local elections, while the leaders of the Donbass Oblates wanted it to be proclaimed beforehand. This would have enabled them to stand in the elections, which they would probably have won. Constitutional amendments were indeed put to the vote on August 31, 2015, at the Verkhovna Rada, in the presence... of the US special envoy, the Straussian Victoria Nuland, who had organized the 2014 coup (known as "EuroMaidan"). Elected representatives of the "integral nationalist" Sloboda party tried to block the vote and invaded the gallery, shouting "Shame!" and "Treason!" [11]. Meanwhile, outside the Assembly, clashes broke out between police and "integral nationalist" militiamen, leaving 4 dead and 122 injured. A qualified majority was not reached in the Rada, and the constitutional reform was not adopted.

These riots were the biggest since the overthrow of the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, by the Sloboda "integral nationalists", supported by Victoria Nuland. President Petro Poroshneko condemned them, but wasn't told twice. It was clear that if he persisted in implementing the Minsk agreements, he too would be overthrown.

Courageous, but not foolhardy, he suddenly denounced the second Minsk protocol. According to him, former president Leonid Kuchma's signature on the Ukrainian side was worthless because he had not been accredited by the Verkhovna Rada. Yes, but Petro Poroshenko was present at the negotiations, as acting Ukrainian President, he raised no objections when the agreements were signed, nor when they were ratified by the Security Council, and he signed a joint declaration in which he undertook to implement them. Henceforth, he shared the same bad faith as President François Hollande and Chancellor Angela Merkel.

President Petro Poroshenko immediately appointed the Sloboda militia to put pressure on the people of the Donbass. This is the sinister Azov division of the "White Führer", Andriy Biletsky. Over a period of seven years, 80,000 fighters would battle it out. Kiev's men killed between 17,000 and 21,000 of their own Donbass population. Poroshenko set up an apartheid, a two-tier citizenship: Russian speakers in the Donbass were no longer entitled to any public services, schools or pensions.

The United Nations Security Council did not intervene, at most issuing a presidential statement on June 6, 2018 [12]. Once in power, President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to reconnect the threads by convening a Normandy-format meeting, but to no avail.

President Petro Poroshenko announced that he would do nothing more for the Ukrainian citizens of Donbass.
THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT THE PEOPLE OF DONBASS
On November 2, 2021, the President appoints Dmytro Yarosh, the leading figure of the "integral nationalists" and a long-time CIA agent [13], as advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. He quickly drew up a plan for an attack on the Donbass [14], to be launched on March 9, 2022.

However, at an impromptu ceremony in the Kremlin on February 21, Moscow suddenly recognized the Donestk and Loughansk People's Republics as independent states. The following day, it launched a "special military operation". Russian troops converged from both their own border and that of Belarus to prevent any regrouping of Ukrainian forces in the Donbass. It destroyed Kiev's military airport, but did not seek to take the capital. Within a few weeks, it had liberated most of the Donbass.

For months, Russia avoided uttering the word "war". It explained that it was intervening exclusively to put an end to the suffering of the civilian population of Donbass. On the contrary, the West accused Russia of having "invaded" Ukraine in order to conquer it. However, Russia has merely applied Resolution 2202 and the declaration of the heads of state that negotiated the Minsk agreements. In fact, in order to reserve this possibility, it reproduced it as an annex to the resolution. To say that Russia invaded Ukraine would imply that France "invaded" Rwanda when it put an end to the Tutsi genocide in 1994. No one thinks so. It simply implemented Resolution 929 and saved millions of lives.

Strangely enough, Russia did not raise the "responsibility to protect" argument. This is because it had opposed the formulation of this concept, which was only adopted by the United Nations in 2005. However, she would finally use it, on February 12, 2024, at a meeting of the Security Council that she would convene. She would set out her invariable position, but this time she would use the same diplomatic language as her interlocutors.

WAR PROPAGANDA
As I conclude this article, I'd like to come back to what my colleagues have written. According to them, I have invented the responsibility of François Hollande and Angela Merkel in the current war, and I am relaying Russian disinformation by claiming that Moscow did not invade Ukraine. They probably wrote these articles with the intention of undermining my credibility.

Perhaps they didn't realize that by writing this nonsense in mainstream media, they were misleading the public and ultimately relaying the propaganda of war supporters.

Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé
#8
Scott Ritter: The Missiles of April
April 15, 2024
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The "Missiles of April" represent a sea-change moment in Middle Eastern geopolitics — the establishment of Iranian deterrence that impacts both Israel and the United States.


Iranian missiles passing over Al-Aqsa as IRGC hit Israel with multiple airstrikes on Sunday morning local time. (Unknown/Mehrnews.com/Wikimedia Commons)

By Scott Ritter
Substack



I've been writing about Iran for more than two decades. In 2005, I made a trip to Iran to ascertain the "ground truth" about that nation, a truth which I then incorporated into a book, Target Iran, laying out the U.S.-Israeli collaboration to craft a justification for a military attack on Iran designed to bring down its theocratic government.

I followed this book up with another, Dealbreaker, in 2018, which brought this U.S.-Israeli effort up to date.

Back in November 2006, in an address to Columbia University's School of International Relations, I underscored that the United States would never abandon my "good friend" Israel until, of course, we did. What could precipitate such an action, I asked?

I noted that Israel was a nation drunk of hubris and power, and unless the United States could find a way to remove the keys from the ignition of the bus Israel was navigating toward the abyss, we would not join Israel in its lemming-like suicidal journey.

The next year, in 2007, during an address to the American Jewish Committee, I pointed out that my criticism of Israel (which many in the audience took strong umbrage against) came from a place of concern for Israel's future.

I underscored the reality that I had spent the better part of a decade trying to protect Israel from Iraqi missiles, both during my service in Desert Storm, where I played a role in the counter-SCUD missile campaign, and as a United Nations weapons inspector, where I worked with Israeli intelligence to make sure Iraq's SCUD missiles were eliminated.

"The last thing I want to see," I told the crowd, "is a scenario where Iranian missiles were impacting on the soil of Israel. But unless Israel changes course, this is the inevitable outcome of a policy driven more by arrogance than common sense."

On Monday night, early Tuesday morning, April 13-14, my concerns were played out live before an international audience — Iranian missiles rained down on Israel, and there was nothing Israel could do to stop them.

As had been the case a little more than 33 years prior, when Iraqi SCUD missiles overcame U.S. and Israeli Patriot missile defenses to strike Israel dozens of times over the course of a month and a half, Iranian missiles, integrated into a plan of attack which was designed to overwhelm Israeli missile defense systems, struck designated targets inside Israel with impunity.

Despite having employed an extensive integrated anti-missile defense system comprised of the so-called "Iron Dome" system, U.S.-made Patriot missile batteries, and the Arrow and David's Sling missile interceptors, along with U.S., British, and Israeli aircraft, and U.S. and French shipborne anti-missile defenses, well over a dozen Iranian missiles struck heavily-protected Israeli airfields and air defense installations.

The Iranians hit at least two runways, taking them out of service, and at least five warehouse-type structures (this from satellite imagery taken after the attack.)

Iran gave Israel a five-hour advance warning to move high value items (F-35s). Moreover, Iran did not attack barracks, headquarters, or targets that would produce casualties.

The damage may have been minor, but the message is clear — Iran can hit any target it wants to, at any time.

Israel Had Hit Iranian Territory


Iranian consulate in Damascus after it was hit with an Israeli airstrike on April 1. (Unknown/Rajannews.com/Wikimedia.com)

The Iranian missile attack on Israel did not come out of the blue, so to speak, but rather was retaliation for an April 1 Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate building, in Damascus, Syria, that killed several senior Iranian military commanders.

While Israel has carried out attacks against Iranian personnel inside Syria in the past, the April 1 strike differed by not only killing very senior Iranian personnel, but by striking what was legally speaking sovereign Iranian territory — the Iranian consulate.

From an Iranian perspective, the attack on the consulate was a redline which, if not retaliated against, would erase any notion of deterrence, opening the door for even more brazen Israeli military action, up to and including direct attacks on Iran.

Weighing against retaliation, however, were a complex web of interwoven policy objectives which would probably be mooted by the kind of large-scale conflict between Israel and Iran that could be precipitated by any meaningful Iranian retaliatory strike on Israel.

First and foremost, Iran has been engaged in a strategic policy premised on a pivot away from Europe and the United States, and toward Russia, China, and the Eurasian landmass.

This shift has been driven by Iran's frustration over the U.S.-driven policy of economic sanctions, and the inability and/or unwillingness on the part of the collective West to find a path forward that would see these sanctions lifted.

The failure of the Iranian nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) to produce the kind of economic opportunities that had been promised at its signing has been a major driver behind this Iranian eastward pivot.

In its stead, Iran has joined both the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the BRICS forum and has directed its diplomatic energies into seeing Iran thoroughly and productively integrated into both groups.

A general war with Israel would play havoc on these efforts.

Secondly, but no less important in the overall geopolitical equation for Iran, is the ongoing conflict in Gaza. This is a game-changing event, where Israel is facing strategic defeat at the hands of Hamas and its regional allies, including the Iranian-led axis of resistance.

For the first time ever, the issue of Palestinian statehood has been taken up by a global audience.

This cause is further facilitated by the fact that the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, formed from a political coalition which is vehemently opposed to any notion of Palestinian statehood, finds itself in danger of collapse as a direct result of the consequences accrued from the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent failure of Israel to defeat Hamas militarily or politically.

Israel is likewise hampered by the actions of Hezbollah, which has held Israel in check along its northern border with Lebanon, and non-state actors such as the pro-Iranian Iraqi militias and the Houthi of Yemen which have attacked Israel directly and, in the case of the Houthi, indirectly, shutting down critical sea lines of communication which have the result of strangling the Israeli economy.

But it is Israel that has done the most damage to itself, carrying out a genocidal policy of retribution against the civilian population of Gaza. The Israeli actions in Gaza are the living manifestation of the very hubris and power-driven policies I warned about back in 2006-2007.

Then, I said that the U.S. would not be willing to be a passenger in a policy bus driven by Israel that would take us off the cliff of an unwinnable war with Iran.

Through its criminal behavior toward the Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Israel has lost the support of much of the world, putting the United States in a position where it will see its already-tarnished reputation irreparably damaged, at a time when the world is transitioning from a period of American-dominated singularity to a BRICS-driven multipolarity, and the U.S. needs to retain as much clout in the so-called "global south" as possible.

A Sea-Change Moment


Biden with Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on Oct. 18, 2023. (The White House/Wikimedia Commons)

The U.S. has tried — unsuccessfully — to take the keys out of the ignition of Netanyahu's suicide bus ride.

Faced with extreme reticence on the part of the Israeli government when it comes to altering its policy on Hamas and Gaza, the administration of President Joe Biden has begun to distance itself from the policies of Netanyahu and has put Israel on notice that there would be consequences for its refusal to alter its actions in Gaza to take U.S. concerns into account. 

Any Iranian retaliation against Israel would need to navigate these extremely complicated policy waters, enabling Iran to impose a viable deterrence posture designed to prevent future Israeli attacks while making sure that neither its policy objectives regarding a geopolitical pivot to the east, nor the elevation of the cause of Palestinian statehood on the global stage, were sidetracked.

The Iranian attack on Israel appears to have successfully maneuvered through these rocky policy shoals. It did so first and foremost by keeping the United States out of the fight. Yes, the United States participated in the defense of Israel, helping shoot down scores of Iranian drones and missiles.

This engagement was to the benefit of Iran, since it only reinforced the fact that there was no combination of missile defense capability that could, in the end, prevent Iranian missiles from hitting their designated targets.

The targets Iran struck — two air bases in the Negev desert from which aircraft used in the April 1 attack on the Iranian consulate had been launched, along with several Israeli air defense sites — were directly related to the points Iran was trying to make in establishing the scope and scale of its deterrence policy.


First, that the Iranian actions were justified under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter — Iran retaliated against those targets in Israel directly related to the Israeli attack on Iran, and second, that Israeli air defense sites were vulnerable to Iranian attack.

The combined impact of these two factors is that all of Israel was vulnerable to being struck by Iran at any time, and that there was nothing Israel or its allies could do to stop such an attack.

This message resonated not only in the halls of power in Tel Aviv, but also in Washington, DC, where U.S. policy makers were confronted with the uncomfortable truth that if the U.S. were to act in concert with Israel to either participate in or facilitate an Israeli retaliation, then U.S. military facilities throughout the Middle East would be subjected to Iranian attacks that the U.S. would be powerless to stop.

This is why the Iranians placed so much emphasis on keeping the U.S. out of the conflict, and why the Biden administration was so anxious to make sure that both Iran and Israel understood that the U.S. would not participate in any Israeli retaliatory strike against Iran.

The "Missiles of April" represent a sea-change moment in Middle Eastern geopolitics — the establishment of Iranian deterrence that impacts both Israel and the United States.

While emotions in Tel Aviv, especially among the more radical conservatives of the Israeli government, run high, and the threat of an Israeli retaliation against Iran cannot be completely discounted, the fact is the underlying policy objective of Netanyahu over the course of the past 30-plus years, namely to drag the U.S. into a war with Iran, has been put into checkmate by Iran.

Moreover, Iran has been able to accomplish this without either disrupting its strategic pivot to the east or undermining the cause of Palestinian statehood. "Operation True Promise," as Iran named its retaliatory attack on Israel, will go down in history as one of the most important military victories in the history of modern Iran, keeping in mind that war is but an extension of politics by other means.

The fact that Iran has established a credible deterrence posture without disrupting major policy goals and objectives is the very definition of victory.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

This is from the author's Substack page.
#9
SCOTT RITTER: The CIA & the Russian Fascists Who Fight Russia
March 18, 2024
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Disrupting the Russian presidential election and creating an atmosphere of weakness around Putin is precisely what the U.S. intelligence agency would seek to engender.


Russian President Vladimir Putin after take a flight in a military aircraft, Feb. 22. (Dmitry Azarov, Kommersant)

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

In the days leading to the Russian presidential election that concluded on Sunday, a network of three Russian paramilitary organizations working under the auspices of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, or GUR, launched a series of attacks on the territory of the Russian Federation.

The purpose of the attacks was clear — to disrupt the three-day Russian presidential election by creating an atmosphere of weakness and impotence around President Vladimir Putin designed to undermine his authority, legitimacy and appeal at the voting booth.

The operation was months in the planning, and involved the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), the Freedom of Russian Legion (LSR), and the Siberia Battalion. All three of these organizations are controlled by the GUR, whose spokesman announced the attacks.

Left unsaid is the degree to which the C.I.A. was involved in what amounts to an invasion of the territory of the Russian Federation by forces operating under the umbrella of what is openly acknowledged to be a proxy war between the United States and its NATO allies against Russia.

While Ukraine maintains the attacks by the RDK, LSR, and Siberia Battalion are the actions of "patriotic Russians" opposed to Putin, the involvement of the GUR in organizing, training, equipping, and directing these forces makes their attack on Russian soil a direct extension of the proxy war between Russia and the West.

Given the extensive involvement of the C.I.A. in the work of the GUR, it is highly unlikely that an action of this scope and scale could have been executed without the knowledge of the C.I.A. and in the attacks, including its goals and objectives.

Indeed, the presence of high-end U.S. military equipment, including M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), in the order of battle in the attack by Russian insurgent forces points to a direct U.S. role, as does the political nature of the mission of election disruption, which has been a long-term objective of the C.I.A. in Russia stretching back decades.

Relationship Begun in 2014


Chief Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine in Kiev, 2013. (Dmitry Trikutko, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The C.I.A.'s relationship with the GUR is well-established, dating back to 2014, according to The Washington Post, when the C.I.A. worked with the GUR to establish a network of bases along the Ukrainian-Russian border from which to conduct intelligence operations against Russia, including missions that involved operations on Russian soil.

The C.I.A. intercepted Russian communications, captured Russian drones for follow-on technical exploitation, and oversaw the recruitment and operation of spy rings operating on Russian soil.

In the lead up to Russia's initiation of the Special Military Operation (SMO) against Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the C.I.A. expanded its relationship with the GUR to include specialized training provided by members of the Ground Division of the C.I.A.'s Special Activities Group, responsible for covert paramilitary operations.

The training was focused on unconventional and guerrilla warfare skills that would help facilitate the creation and sustainment of anti-Russian insurgencies carried out by "stay behind" teams operating on any Ukrainian territory that was occupied by Russian forces.

After the SMO began, ethnic Russians who had served since 2014 within the ranks of the neo-Nazi, Ukrainian nationalist, paramilitary organization known as the Azov Regiment organized themselves into a separate organization known as the Russian Volunteer Corps, or RDK.


Members of the Russian Volunteer Corps on 24 May 2023. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

The RDK modeled itself after the Russian Liberation Army, an entity organized, trained, and equipped by the Nazi Germans during World War Two which was comprised of Russian prisoners of war. Russians today often refer to the RDK members as "Vlassovites," after Russian General Andrei Vlasov, who was captured by the Germans and later defected to their cause.

Vlasov recruited Russian prisoners of war into what was known as the Russian Liberation Army, which eventually consisted of two divisions comprising some 30,000 troops. Most of Vlasov's "army" were either killed in combat, or taken prisoner by the Soviet Union, where they were treated as traitors and punished accordingly (the enlisted sentenced to lengthy terms in the Gulag, and the leaders hung.) The RDK was able to attract several hundred former Azov fighters and new recruits into its ranks.

A second ethnic Russian military unit, created in the aftermath of the SMO, is comprised primarily of Russian military defectors and prisoners of war. Known as the Freedom of Russia Legion (LSR), it consists of several hundred soldiers organized into two battalions. The LSR operates as part of the International Legion of the Ukrainian Territorial Army.



However, it is controlled by the GUR, according to GUR chief Kyrylo Budanov, as opposed to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

The third ethnic Russian military unit operating with Ukraine is the so-called Siberian Battalion, composed of ethnic Russians and non-Russian ethnicities from the Siberian territories of the Russian Federation.

The members of this formation are volunteers from Russian Siberia who are opposed to Putin's government. Like the LSR, the Siberian Battalion operated as a GUR-controlled part of the Ukrainian Territorial Army and is said to consist of around 300 men, according to a report in Euronews.

The incursion over the weekend by the GUR-controlled, anti-Putin, Russian forces is not the first instance of its kind. In March and April 2023, several small cross-border attacks were carried out by forces affiliated with the Russian Volunteer Corps RDK.

More telling was a larger attack made on May 22, 2023. The timing of this attack, which lasted less than a day, seemed to coincide with the fall of the hotly contested city of to the Russian private military company Wagner.

The capture of Bakhmut by Wagner signaled the beginning of a rapid deterioration in relations between the head of the Wagner Group, the one-time Putin loyalist, insider Yevgeny Prigozhin, and the Russian military leadership, in particular Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff General Valeri Gerasimov.


From left: Putin, Shoigu and Gerasimov during a 2019 military exercise. (Kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

On June 23, 2023, Prigozhin led thousands of his Wagner fighters in a rebellion which saw him occupy the Russian headquarters of the SMO in Rostov-on-Don, and march on Moscow. While the rebellion was quashed within 24 hours, many of the Wagner fighters said that they had participated only because they were told they would be deploying on to Russian soil, where Wagner was prohibited by law from operating, to defend against further incursions from the RDK.

Information that emerged after Prigozhin's abortive rebellion showed that the Wagner leader had been in frequent contact with the Ukrainian GUR in the months leading up to his insurrection, and that the RDK attacks were part of a coordinated effort orchestrated by the GUR, designed to weaken and perhaps bring down Putin's government.

The Biden administration acknowledged having detailed intelligence beforehand about Prigozhin's revolt, and yet did not provide any warning to the Russian government, suggesting that the C.I.A. was at a minimum cognizant of the GUR operation and tacitly supported it.


A crowd in Rostov-on-Don watching a tank with flowers sticking out of its muzzle during the so-called Wagner Rebellion, June 24, 2023. (Fargoh, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)

The presence of U.S. weapons, including Humvee vehicles, in the possession of the RDK fighters on the weekend likewise hinted at a broader U.S. involvement in their training and equipping, involvement which, given the prohibition on the deployment of U.S. military forces in a training capacity on Ukrainian soil since the initiation of the SMO, pointed to the C.I.A.'s Ground Division as the facilitating unit.

The Russian government has assessed that the total strength of the GUR-controlled forces that attacked Russia in the leadup to the presidential election completed on Sunday numbered around 2,500 men, supported by at least 35 tanks and scores of armored vehicles, including a significant number of U.S.-supplied M-2 Bradley IFVs.

The scope and scale of the military operation, which included helicopter-borne forces inserted behind Russian lines, is such that it could not have been accomplished without the knowledge of the C.I.A. Moreover, the tactics and equipment used (helicopter raids, M-2 Bradley vehicles) strongly suggest a more direct role by the C.I.A. in both the planning and training of the mission and the troops involved.

The C.I.A.'s Ground Division is composed of veterans of the C.I.A.'s secret wars in both Syria and Afghanistan, where the C.I.A. trained secret armies to carry out their own secret wars in support of C.I.A. objectives.


Ukrainian special forces unit in Kabul during the 2021 Kabul airlift. (Defence Intelligence of Ukraine, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

The discrediting of Putin's government with an eye to his removal from power has been a goal of the C.I.A. since 2005, when the C.I.A., together with British intelligence, began actively working to create viable political opposition movements inside Russia.

While these efforts have largely failed (the recent death in a Russian prison of Alexei Navalny, believed to have been a creation of the C.I.A., underscores the scope and scale of this failure), the C.I.A.'s covert political warriors in the Political Action Group of the Special Activities Center continue to try to undermine Putin through various means.

Given the Russian government's stated goal of producing a large turnout in the election as a way to certify Putin's legitimacy, disrupting voter turnout by creating instability and a lack of confidence would be precisely the kind of cause and effect relationship the C.I.A. would seek to engender.

The fact that the RDK leadership openly bragged that their ongoing attacks were a) designed to disrupt the Russian presidential election and b) were planned months before the attack, is a strong indicator that, given the intimate nature of the C.I.A.-GUR relationship, that the C.I.A. was at a minimum knowledgeable of, and most likely a facilitator, of the GUR-led attacks using Ukrainian-controlled Russian insurgents.

To understand the gravity that surrounds the possibility — indeed, probability — that the C.I.A. was involved, however peripherally, in an attack on Russian soil designed to disrupt a Russian presidential election, one only need reflect on how the United States would react if Russian intelligence services collaborated with Mexican drug cartels to create a well-armed insurgent army composed of Mexican-Americans who attacked U.S. territory from across the U.S.-Mexican border in order to influence the outcome of November's U.S. presidential election.

The United States would view it as an act of war and respond accordingly.

Manifest Danger of Nuclear Conflagration

The Biden administration is overseeing a Ukrainian policy that is rapidly collapsing around it.

America's NATO allies, concerned by the lack of leadership from the Biden administration when it comes to Ukraine, are threatening to dispatch troops to Ukraine to bolster a flagging Ukrainian military. The Russian government has warned that any such move would be construed as an attack on Russia, and potentially create the conditions for a general nuclear war between Russia and the collective West.

Now, amid such a tense environment, it appears the C.I.A. has not only green-lighted an actual invasion of the Russian Federation, but more than likely was involved in its planning, preparation and execution.

Never in the history of the nuclear era has such danger of nuclear war been so manifest.

That the American people have allowed their government to create the conditions where foreign governments can determine their fate and the C.I.A. can carry out a secret war which could trigger a nuclear conflict, eviscerates the notion of democracy.

Government of the people, by the people, and for the people seems like a distant dream. In its stead the future of America appears to be in the hands of a rogue intelligence agency that long ago abandoned any pretense of accountability and operating under the rule of law.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
#10
The Real Gaza Death Toll
March 7, 2024
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Ralph Nader says it matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the Gaza Health Ministry's undercount.


Vigil on Feb. 27 outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington for Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force who self-immolated to protest the Israeli genocide in Gaza. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

By Ralph Nader
Common Dreams

Since the Hamas raid penetrated the multi-tiered Israeli border security on Oct. 7, 2023, (an unexplained collapse of Israel's defensive capabilities), 2.3 million utterly defenseless Palestinians in the tiny crowded Gaza enclave have been on the receiving end of over 65,000 bombs and missiles plus non-stop tank shelling and snipers.

The extreme right-wing Netanyahu regime has enforced its declared siege of, in its genocidal words, "no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel, no medicine."

The relentless bombing has destroyed apartment buildings, marketplaces, refugee camps, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, roads, electricity networks, critical water mains — just about everything.

The U.S.-equipped Israeli war machine has even uprooted agricultural fields, including thousands of olive trees on one farm; bulldozed many cemeteries; and bombed civilians fleeing on Israeli orders, while obstructing the few trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Egypt.


With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm, and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000?

With 5,000 babies born every month into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine, and clean water for any of their children, severe skepticism about the Hamas' Health Ministry's official count is warranted.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in lowballing the death and injury toll. But for different reasons. Hamas keeps the figures low to reduce being accused by its own people of not protecting them, and not building shelters. Hamas grossly underestimated the savage war crimes by the vengeful, occupying Israeli military superpower fully and unconditionally backed by the U.S. military superpower.

The Health Ministry is intentionally conservative, citing that its death toll came from reports only of those named as deceased by hospitals and morgues. But as the weeks turned into months, blasted, disabled hospitals and morgues cannot keep up with the bodies, or cannot count those slain laying on roadsides in allies and beneath building debris. Yet the Health Ministry remains conservative and the "official" rising civilian fatality and injury count continues to be uncritically reported by both friend and foe of this devastating Israeli state terrorism.

Predictions of Human Catastrophe


Medic carries an injured Palestinian child into Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City following an Israeli airstrike on Oct. 11, 2023, (Atia Darwish, Palestinian News & Information Agency — Wafa — for APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0)

It was especially astonishing to see the most progressive groups and writers routinely use the same figures from the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza as did the governments and outside groups backing the one-sided war on Gaza. All this despite predictions of a human catastrophe in the Gaza Strip almost every day since Oct. 7, 2023, by arms of the United Nations, other besieged international relief agencies on the ground, eyewitness accounts by medical personnel and many Israeli human rights groups and brave local journalists in that strip, the geographic size of Philadelphia. (Unguided Western and Israeli reporters and journalists are not allowed to enter Gaza by the Israeli government.) (See the open letter, titled "Stop the Humanitarian Catastrophe," to President Joe Biden on Dec. 13, 2023, by 16 Israeli human rights groups that also appeared as a paid notice in TheNew York Times.)


Then came the Dec. 29, 2023, opinion piece in The Guardian by the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Devi Sridhar. She predicted half a million deaths in 2024 if conditions continue unabated.

In recent days, the situation has become more dire. In the March 2, 2024, Washington Post, reporter Ishaan Tharoor writes:

"The bulk of Gaza's more than 2 million people face the prospect of famine — a state of affairs that constitutes the fastest decline in a population's nutrition status ever recorded, according to aid workers. Children are starving at the fastest rate the world has ever known. Aid groups have been pointing to Israel restricting the flow of assistance into the territory as a major driver of the crisis. Some prominent Israeli officials openly champion stymying these transfers of aid."


Tharoor quotes Jan Egeland, chief of the Norwegian Refugee Council: "We must be clear: civilians in Gaza are falling sick from hunger and thirst because of Israel's entry restrictions," and "Life-saving supplies are being intentionally blocked, and women and children are paying the price."

Martin Griffiths, the United Nations lead humanitarian officer, said "Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed."

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, according to the Post, warned of an "'unknown number of people' — believed to be in the tens of thousands — lying under the rubble of buildings brought down by Israeli strikes."

Volker Turk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said, "All people in Gaza are at imminent risk of famine. Almost all are drinking salty and contaminated water. Healthcare across the territory is barely functioning," and "Just imagine what this means for the wounded, and people suffering infectious-disease outbreaks... many are already believed to be starving."

UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee, the Palestinian Red Crescent, and Doctors Without Borders are all relating that the same catastrophic conditions are getting worse fast.

Yet, and get this, in this article, the Post still stuck with the "more than 30,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the ongoing war began."

Just like the entire mass media, many governments, even the independent media and critics of the war would have us accept that between 98 percent and 99 percent of Gaza's entire population has survived — albeit the sick, injured, and more Palestinians about to die. This is lethally improbable!

From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.

Imagine Americans, if this powerful U.S.-made weaponry was fired on the besieged, homeless, trapped people of Philadelphia, do you think that only 30,000 of that city's 1.5 million people would have been killed?

Daily circumstantial evidence of the deliberate Israeli targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructures requires more reliable epidemiological estimates of casualties.

It matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the Health Ministry's undercount. It matters for elevating the urgency for a permanent cease-fire, and direct and massive humanitarian aid by the U.S. and other countries, bypassing the sadistic cruelty against innocent families of the Israeli siege. It matters for the columnists and editorial writers who have been self-censoring, with some, like the Post's Charles Lane, fictionally claiming that Israel's military doesn't "intentionally target civilians." It matters for accountability under international law.

Above all, it lets weak Secretary of State Antony Blinken and duplicitous President Biden be less servile when Netanyahu dismisses the low death toll by taunting them: What about Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

As a percentage of the total population being killed, Gaza can expose the Israeli ruling racist extremists to a stronger rebuttal for ending U.S. co-belligerent complicity in this never-to-be-forgotten slaughter of mostly children and women. (The terrifying PTSD on civilians, especially children, will continue for years.)

Respecting the more accurate casualty toll of Palestinian children, mothers, and fathers presses harder for permanent cease-fires and the process of recovery and reparations for the survivors of their holocaust.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future (2012). His new book is, Wrecking America: How Trump's Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).

This article is from Common Dreams.

Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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