Philip Giraldi argues that narratives surrounding Gazan violence disproportionately paint Israel as the victim and Hamas as the aggressor. He suggests mainstream media and politicians suppress reports of Israeli responsibility in mass killings, draw attention from Israel’s nuclear arsenal, and excessively fund Israel’s defense, perpetuating an inhumane war on Gaza. Tom
Israel is an unrestrained monster that endangers all of us
By Philip Giraldi
Mainstream media and official government commentary on the violence in Gaza appears to have acquired a certain rhythm to make sure that everyone understands that it is the poor Israelis who are the real victims being assailed by a group called Hamas that is invariably labeled as “terrorists.” It is absolutely obligatory in the first paragraph of an article on developments in the fighting to remind the reader that on October 7th the “terrorist” group Hamas “invaded” Israel and killed 1,400 peace loving Israelis, taking 200 additional Israelis as hostages. Israel is described as “retaliating” and it is frequently seen as relevant to state that it was the most dreadful mass killing of Jews since the alleged “holocaust.” To add a bit of current cultural and historic relevance, “9/11” and “Pearl Harbor” are often also cited to suggest that it was a both a surprise attack and a game changer in terms of how Israel now sees the external threat and will have to harden its national security imperatives. And there might even be inserted a comment from Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi or Senator Chuck Schumer that “Israel has a right to defend itself!” Joe Biden was also quoted as saying it was 15 “9/11”s for Israel given the comparative size and populations of the US and the Jewish state, emphasizing the enormity of the tragedy.
And that’s just in the first paragraph to make sure that the reader gets his or her mind right. The second paragraph is the really important contribution to the discussion, raising the issue of “surging antisemitism” in the United States and Europe, frequently including a quote from the relentless Jonathan Greenblatt of the redoubtable and widely feared Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Greenblatt is cited frequently, often intoning something along the lines of “There is a growing, radical movement on many campuses in which opposition to Israel and Zionism is required to be fully accepted, effectively marginalizing campus Jewish communities.” The intention of raising the antisemitism issue is to lead the reader away from any possible perception that an apartheid Israel was attacked because of its exceptionally brutal behavior towards the Palestinians over the past 76 years and was instead a victim of vicious terrorists who did what they did largely because they hate Jews. In that fashion, the possible issue of Israeli responsibility for what occurred goes away and Benjamin Netanyahu and his fanatical and racist colleagues Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir get a pass to do whatever they want to solve their Arab problem. Both men have expressed their dream of an Israel without any Palestinians, whom they regard as not quite acceptably human, and have endorsed shoot to kill authority for policemen and soldiers who are confronted by any Arab demonstrators. More than 100 Palestinians have already been killed on the West Bank by armed settlers, police and soldiers who will not be held accountable for the murders while there have also been hundreds of arrests of protesters.
In America Fox News has been a leader in pumping out the interviews and reports suggesting that America’s Jewish students are so terrified by the threats implicit and explicit in the antisemitic rage that is manifest on college campuses and elsewhere that they have stopped eating at the university kosher dining halls lest they become the targets of a madman. And there are the inevitable calls to completely ban gatherings expressing sympathy with the Palestinians or even waving or displaying Palestine’s flag. The moaning about surging antisemitism is indeed all over the mainstream media even though there are quite a few things wrong with the narrative about Israel-Palestine and the events on October 7th and subsequently. In short, the American and European public are being subjected to the usual con job when it comes to anything having to do with Israel. And the propagandization is certainly also given additional effectiveness when it is repeated by senior politicians coming from both parties with a unanimous Senate vote of 97-0 and a House of Representatives vote of 412 to 10 on resolutions pledging unconditional and total support for Israel and whatever it chooses to do, backed up by two US carrier groups plus Marines standing by in the Eastern Mediterranean.
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Colleges and universities have been particularly targeted by Israel’s many friends, with mostly Jewish alumni holding back donations from those schools that do not explicitly denounce Hamas and praise Israeli “restraint” or that permit demonstrations by students supporting Gaza. Students who sign on to protests about what is being done to the Palestinians are being identified and placed on lists that will be submitted to potential future employers and universities to make it more difficult for them to get good jobs or secure academic appointments and fellowships. Ambitious politicians out to endear themselves to Jewish campaign donors and voters, like Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, have gone to extremes, banning Palestinian political groups at state universities and considering prosecution of members of such organizations for “hate crimes” as they are automatically being regarded as motivated by “antisemitism.” DeSantis has also vowed that his state will not accept any Palestinian refugees, though it is not clear how he would enforce that, basing his decision on his judgment that they are “all antisemites,” and Florida has recently purchased $135 million’s worth of so-called Israel Bonds to help in the Jewish state’s war effort. Senator Lindsey Graham has said that there should be “no limit” on Israelis killing Palestinians while Donald Trump has called for all Palestinian students in the US to be deported. It is just one more example of how low and even inhumane our politics have become when Israel is in any way involved, but it is also interesting to note that several European countries and Israel itself are also silencing critics of the Gaza massacres, in some cases by firing them from their jobs.
Part of the problem is that the narrative of what took place on October 7th and subsequently has been so spun by the media and talking heads that it continues to be somewhat unclear regarding what actually happened. The Israelis have persistently claimed that 1,405 Jews and Asian farm workers were killed by Hamas, 386 of whom were apparently soldiers. But how they died is where the tale goes adrift. Israeli survivors of the attack have told journalists that they were treated well when captured by Hamas and that the real killing began when Israeli Army units including tanks, artillery and helicopters counter-attacked Hamas, creating a brutal cross fire referred to in the trade as “friendly fire” which killed many if not most of the civilians. Houses in one kibbutz, where civilians were sheltering, were largely destroyed by fire from heavy weapons, which Hamas did not possess.
What we now also know from a growing body of evidence obtained from the Israeli media and eyewitnesses is that the Israeli military appear to have been overwhelmed by the day’s events. The reaction may have triggered an apparently long-standing policy referred to as the “Hannibal procedure” that seeks to prevent Israeli soldiers from being taken captive due to the high price the Israeli public insists on paying to make sure that the soldier-prisoners are returned. As a result, the military command has authorization to order Israeli troops to kill fellow soldiers rather than allow them to be taken prisoner. For the same reason, Hamas expends a great deal of energy in trying to find innovative ways to seize soldiers.
The possible reality that the Israeli military killed many of its own soldiers and civilians is, of course, being suppressed in the mainstream and by politicians eager to assist Israel in the Gazan genocide, but it is nevertheless out there. There is, however, another part of the story that is devastating in terms of its implications, and that is the immediate response to the crisis by offering to send Israel $14.5 billion to help in its defense, an incomprehensibly large figure that appears to have been pulled out of some lobbyist’s behind, which translates to performing genocide in Gaza and committing a host of war crimes along the way. The tribute payments, as some have described it, was approved by a party-line 226-196 vote in Congress last Thursday. The vote would have been closer to unanimous but for a partisan dispute over the funding of the measure. If Joe Biden and Congress are not aware that genocide is a big time crime against humanity as defined by the United Nations charter and by the Geneva Conventions and most international lawyers would agree that arming and funding an organization or state that is exterminating a nation or identifiable ethnicity is complicity or even participation in the crime.
Biden and Blinken may not have any idea of how much money Israel gets from the American taxpayer at all levels of government in a year beyond the $3.8 billion per year that it gets in direct “military assistance,” a gift from Barack Obama. Additional money flows from joint military projects, through dubious charities and via state and even local level development boards that bring the total up to roughly $10 billion. That contributes to making Israel a wealthy country which can afford to give its Jewish citizens free health care and college education as well as subsidized housing and it does not need additional US support to fight its wars.
And, by the way, that brings us to the final issue, Israel’s secret nuclear program which certainly should be of concern to US policymakers confronted by an exploding conflict that could engulf the entire Middle East and even spread beyond that area. The fact that Israel uniquely has the nukes in the region, numbering more than 200 by some estimates, is significant. In the United States government there exists a so-called “legislative rule” that no federal employee can confirm that Israel has nuclear weapons. The rule is ridiculous as the existence of the Israeli nuclear arsenal is well attested, including by Colin Powell, who once confirmed that “Israel had over 200 nuclear weapons pointed at Iran.” Powell made the statement when he was out of office but even prominent Israel-firster Senator Chuck Schumer has confirmed the existence of the arsenal.
The reason for acute sensitivity by the Israel Lobby and its bought-and-paid-for politicians over its nukes is the Symington Amendment in Section 101 of the US Arms Export Control Act of 1976 which bans foreign aid to any country that has nuclear weapons and has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Which means that Israel’s annual $3.8 billion in aid would be in jeopardy if Washington were to enforce its own laws, though one cannot imagine that President Joe Biden or the Attorney General Merrick Garland, both fervent Zionists, will take the necessary steps to do so.
Another sticky bit of law consists of the so-called Leahy Amendments, which prohibit the US Department of State and Department of Defense from providing military assistance to foreign security force units that violate human rights “with impunity.” Israel’s numerous brutal assaults on Gaza, including the current one in which it is targeting hospitals and churches, bombing and killing helpless civilians, half of whom are children, is a textbook case for when the Leahy Amendments should be applied, but, of course, they never will be. That reality illustrates once again the actual political power of the Jewish Lobby in the United States backed up as it is by Christian Zionists like the new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
Finally, one must take a look at the Israeli nuclear arsenal itself coupled with the country’s reckless and aggressive leadership and what that represents, a subject that no one currently is even considered as a factor in what the expanding Gaza war might lead to. Twenty years ago, when the United States President George W. Bush initiated his disastrous neocon devised “war on terror” Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon saw the war as an opportunity and Israel as a major beneficiary, poised as it was to draw the US into the much-desired attack against Iran coupled with a renewed drive to terrorize the remaining Palestinians into fleeing into the neighboring Arab states. Israel clearly intended its nuclear capability to be used against its neighbors if needed, as described in the 1991 book by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, entitled The Samson Option. The book’s title refers to the Israeli government’s nuclear strategy whereby Israel would launch a massive nuclear retaliatory strike if the state itself was under threat from outside forces and was in danger of being overrun, just as the Biblical figure Samson pushed apart the pillars of a Philistine temple, bringing down the roof and killing himself and the thousands of Philistines who had gathered to see him humiliated. One of Hersh’s sources in the Israel intelligence service reportedly told him “We can still remember the smell of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Next time we’ll take all of you with us.”
When Sharon was queried about how the rest of the world might respond to Israel using its nukes to effectively wipe out its Arab neighbors, he responded “That depends on who does it and how quickly it happens. We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: ‘Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.’ I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”
So, there we are, poised on the edge of what might plausibly be the second avoidable nuclear war mishandled by Joe Biden and the muttonheads that he has chosen to “advise” him. Colonel Douglas Macgregor is rightly referring to the exploding crisis that contains a nuclear threat as an “Armageddon War.” Few Americans know that Israel only has nuclear weapons because it stole the enriched uranium and triggers from the United States with the cooperation of a Jewish industrialist Zalman Shapiro, owner of the NUMEC plant in Pennsylvania and a Jewish-Israeli Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan, neither of whom has ever been seriously held accountable by the US government. So, we have an Israel with a secret nuclear arsenal that no American official can even mention and that it currently is at “war” and is in theory prepared to use the weapons, most likely against an arch-enemy like Iran, but if threatened, to “take the world down.” As for the mostly silent majority of us Americans who would like to see a government that actually tries to do good for the people who live here and pay taxes, having a world at peace where Washington leaves everyone alone and is in return left along by others, is an aspiration whose time seemingly has expired.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
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Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Comments
11 responses to “The Gaza Genocide Continues”
I support and applaud those honest people that speak the truth, no matter who they are or where they come from. I’m referring to the fact that criticizing and blaming Netanyahu for the present Middle East crisis is a fallacy, since every single Israel leader even from before the country’s founding in 1948, is not only an avowed Zionist but an atheist who honors the memory of their nonbeliever leader Theodor Herzl. In fact it can be said that this peculiar trait, that goes against their fake religious claims, is their only positive asset since they know better than to believe in man’s created illusions. No matter who is in power in this accursed entity, their policies will never change, and that is a sacred promise.
Thanks Phil for another searing condemnation of the Rogue State that is called Israel . Here in the UK it seems that most of our MP’s are ‘bought and paid for ‘ and just parrot the ‘Israel must be able to defend itself ‘ mantra , never ever saying that the Palestinians should be able to defend themselves ! But the British People March in their thousands to support the Palestinians despite threats from our racist Foreign Secretary or the pathetic Shadow Leader of the so called Opposition, bought and paid for by a very rich Zionist and doing everything he can to give him value for money ! It seems to me that it is impossible to have a pro Palestinian political leader of any shape or form because of the ‘power of the press’ and the use of fake anti semitisen ! It constantly disgusts me that a fabulously wealthy country like the USA spends so much money on wars and the Military but cannot even give their people a decent Health Service to look after them . What a dangerous world we live in when the Terrorists are able to call their victims the ‘Terrorists ‘ . Keep up the good work Phil ,you are much valued and appreciated.
Of course this was a false flag operation .A mouse somehow crawling under the fence and above the thick concrete wall below would trigger a minor response. Anything bigger would trigger a full on response alerting the IDF and an immediate overwhelming response. Besides the submerged concrete wall to prevent tunneling and the 6 metre high sturdy steel fence above this is as mass of high quality electronic devices with IDF members and tanks ready to respond 24/7/365. A. bulldozer heading for it would trigger all of this electronic security before it got to many many metres away. All of the electronic security devices will have fail -safe back ups. And all of this will be revealed by the fair and free independent western media in many years from now when it is no more than a matter of boring irrelevant history. The immediate Orwellian response is what would be expected. And all of these boring facts dropped quickly into the Memory Hole…..Let’s talk football and cricket and baseball and the latest fashion show.
That was an irreversible step that will take the Zionist Entity to their well deserved death. There is an anti Israel movement gearing up for their destruction, that is scaring their most ardent defender and supporter, the US. So much so, that they’re trying to backpedal Israel that instead is doubling down its efforts to eliminate every Palestinian from the face of the earth. The destruction of Gaza is signing their own death warrant that will be paid in blood, so be it.
Rabbi Arik Ascherman delivered an Oct. 29 online lecture on settler violence in the West Bank to Reform Jews in Canada from outside a Jerusalem cell phone repair shop.
He was there, in a perfect illustration of the topic he was discussing, because a settler fanatic stole his cell phone, so Ascherman was trying to get an old phone of his repaired to use as a replacement.
While the world’s attention has rightfully been focused on the situation in southern Israel and Gaza since Oct. 7, extremist Orthodox Jewish settlers have used this opportunity to escalate their ongoing efforts to destroy Palestinian villages in the West Bank, intimidating residents into fleeing across the Jordan Valley.
Ascherman, an American-born Israeli rabbi who founded the Jewish human rights organization Torat Tzedek — or Torah of Justice — addressed members of Reform for Human Rights, a new organization of Canadian Jews in the liturgically liberal Reform movement dedicated to defending Palestinian human rights.
“None of us, with all of our long-term collective memory, had seen anything like this. If we were saying that before the war, now it’s on steroids.”
The white supremacists of Israel have used “we are God’s chosen people”, we are “victims”, this is our land, Palestinians are not human and therefore we can kill them as we choose, and the list goes on. For 70 years these murderers, liars, thieves and torturers have wreaked havoc upon the middle east and elsewhere. Iran or any other entity out there if you are listening, please take control of the white supremacists of Israel. Stop their genocide upon the world.
For many decades the Zionists have been plotting away that they could exterminate the Gasans and needed a good escape as a cover story to do so. The most high tech fence in the world complete with a concrete deep foundation, automatic rader trained machine guns cameras,radar gamma ray and much other high tech surveillance material that is continuously monitored for fitness of purpose 24/7/365 . But suddenly for some days it was not functioning and the assembly of assault tools and materials was not noticed. Really? it seems much more likely that the old ‘come into my kitchen said the spider to the fly’ invitation was being extended. And look what happened to the unwary Gazan flies. Poor buggers.
Nothing like genocide has occurred ! Not even close!
Not even half of one percent of the Gazan population has been slain so far [6th November] As of the last report, 9,400 Gazans have gone off to see Allah and one percent of the Gazan population is at least 22,000. It is reliably reported that there are 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza at the moment; the Israelis are not even managing to keep pace with the Gazan birth rate!
The big issue is what is to be done with the surviving Gazans when the carnage is over and resistance has ceased. One possible solution would be to ship the survivors to Western China / Xinjiang / East Turkestan. Reputable commentators report that the Chinese are skilled and experienced in administering Thought Reform to over-zealous Muslims.
Thank you Billy, that’s exactly what I had in mind as a final solution to the Israeli conundrum.
Let’s ship every Zionist MFK squatting in a foreign land, to either China or if feasible the freaking moon. Problem solved.
You don’t sound like a very nice person Billy. I hope you wrote you get better soon
“Israel has every right to defend itself”
In reality, this is outrageous. After more than a hundred years of persecution and occupation, there is an understandably visceral HATE and DESPERATION from the Palestinians that becomes entrenched in generation after generation of oppressed people. Oct 7 was a manifestation of this.