May 2, 2024

Dirty trick to help Israel continue genocide?

US to Spend $350 Million Constructing Gaza Pier

Dave DeCamp    Antiwar.com

Why They Hate Us: Decent Jews Against Occultist Khazarian Kid Killers

Alan Wagman    Common Dreams

Student protests show conscience still counts

USC:  This is a Teachable Moment

 Viet Tanh Nguyen & Karen Tongson        Daily Trojan

The Israeli computerized kill system is called “Lavender”

The Destruction of Human Civilization by Israel and the USA

Glen T. Martin

Elites Afraid to Talk About Palestine 

Vijay Prashad      Peoples Dispatch 

 "Zionist lobby group AIPAC puts US govt. in Chokehold for funding Genocide". Ex Congressional staffer said 

Gospa News 

Dirty trick to help Israel continue genocide?

US to Spend $350 Million Constructing Gaza Pier

Dave DeCamp     Antiwar.com

  EXCERPTS

"A reporter for Israel’s Kan news said last month that during a meeting of the Knessett’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, Netanyahu suggested using the pier to remove Palestinians from Gaza."

...The US military’s estimate of the cost to construct a pier on the coast of Gaza has risen to $320 million, Reuters reported on Monday.  ... The construction has already begun and involves 1,000 US troops operating just off the coast of Gaza, putting them at risk of being targeted, which could lead to a major escalation in the US involvement in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. ... President Biden ordered the military to construct the pier for aid deliveries instead of pressuring Israel to open more land border crossings, which is by far the most efficient way to get more aid into the Strip. Israel will impose a strict inspection regime on aid shipments coming through the pier, requiring inspections before they’re shipped from Cyprus and again when the aid reaches the shore of Gaza.

According to a report from The Jerusalem Post, the idea to build the pier actually came from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who proposed it to Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides in October. A reporter for Israel’s Kan news said last month that during a meeting of the Knessett’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, Netanyahu suggested using the pier to remove Palestinians from Gaza.  READ MORE

Why They Hate Us: Decent Jews Against Occultist Khazarian Kid Killers

Alan Wagman     Common Dreams

Foundational beliefs about Israel are not actually being threatened by anti-Zionist Jews—the beliefs are being threatened by Israel having stripped itself of the liberal veneer with which it has covered its true nature.

["We must demonstrate that one can leave Zionism and still be part of a Jewish community that lives its traditions, its values, and—if so inclined—its spiritual life with vitality and integrity." -- from Jonas E. Alexis, 4/29/24, in VTforeignpolicy.com]

EXCERPTS FROM ALAN WAGMAN:

As a longtime anti-Zionist and member of Jewish Voice for Peace, it has been a fact of my life that the organized Jewish community has considered me a pariah. When I was president of my Jewish congregation, the executive director of the local Jewish Federation refused to speak with me; when communication was required, he always found a workaround. Even so, he never insulted me, never directly expressed anger, never used profanity. A few years ago, members of the local federation board politely told me I was an antisemite. But, I emphasize, they were polite.

Things have changed. The organized Jewish community has weaponized conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism; colleges and universities are banning chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine from campuses. Congressional demagogues are forcing university presidents to resign. State and local governments, foreign governments, U.S. cabinet departments, and even Congress are adopting a definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionism. We are encountering rabbis who accost us and accuse us of creating division in their congregations. Other rabbis spare us the words and literally flip us off. (Yes. That happened.)

There is a name for the situation in which one finds one's internal beliefs clashing with the reality one sees— cognitive dissonance. The more desperately one clings to one's beliefs in the face of a contrary reality, the more fearful and angry one becomes.

When a member of a Jewish community group begins to question the core belief in Israel's goodness, it raises two issues: "If this is what Israel is, who am I?" and "If I accept the reality before me, what happens to my place in the group?" (The "group" can be the Jewish world as a whole, the congregation to which one belongs, one's family, one's friends, etc.) 

READ MORE

Guest editorial from my wife on the student protests: "Am I crazy or has the world gone mad? We teach our kids to care about others, and then get mad at them when they actually take action showing real empathy and caring. Have we become so numb as adults that when our children actually act on their conscience we become upset, when instead we should feel proud of their integrity for not being afraid to act on their conscience?"  

~ Shari Morgan-Kotila 

Student protests show conscience still counts 

USC:  This is a Teachable Moment

 Viet Tanh Nguyen & Karen Tongson        Daily Trojan

  EXCERPTS

A wave of campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza has swept across the United States, beginning at Vanderbilt and accelerating nationally with Columbia University. That wave hit University of Southern California (USC) on April 24, when students pitched tents at Alumni Park in the early morning hours, following the Columbia model, to “join the nation-wide call by students for their universities to disclose their finances and endowment, [and] to divest from Israeli violence,” in the organizers’ words. 

While the students were loud, they were also peaceful. The schedule for events at the encampment, shared on Instagram by the protest’s organizers, began with yoga and meditation at 8 a.m. and featured a Kaddish reading at sunset, led by Jewish Voice for Peace. The gathering was multicultural, multifaith and well-organized. 

In the wake of this and the brutal response sanctioned by USC’s administration, we demand the University drop all charges against our colleagues and our students. This belated gesture might in the smallest way ameliorate the violence of police arrest inflicted upon our students and colleagues. 

The conflict over Israel’s obliteration of Gaza and the Palestinian people, and the American funding and munitions behind it, should have been what we professors call a “teachable moment” that could have taught lessons about war and conflict, justice and genocide.  READ MORE

The Israeli computerized kill system is called “Lavender”

The Destruction of Human Civilization by Israel & the USA

Glen T. Martin

 EXCERPTS

The essence of human civilization points to the rule of democratically legislated laws designed to protect freedom, justice, and keep the peace. The very foundations of civilization include the pursuit of truth, beauty, goodness, and dignity within a framework, in all complex societies, of enforceable laws protecting everyone equally. Due process of law arises from our common human dignity and constitutes a basic meaning of planetary civilization.

... The “laws of war” apply to all armed conflicts, including wars of independence or rebellions against oppression, but the prohibition against aggression does not apply to liberation struggles because the rebellion of an oppressed people against foreign or domestic oppression is not considered aggression. Under these rules the attack by Hamas on October 7 was rebellion by an oppressed people, not an act of aggression.

  War crimes conventions prohibit widespread or systematic attack on any civilian population, including deportations, the use of siege tactics to force immigration or starvation, extermination, enslavement, torture, enforced disappearances, murder, rape, or systematic persecution of a group. However, whether there are major conflicts going on around the world or not, the US, like Israel, has committed itself to an institutionalized policy of crimes against humanity, from WW II to the present, on a truly systematic and bone-chilling scale. ... Israel was borne in 1948 in a mighty act of violence that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and the subsequent “settler colonial” displacement of Palestinians from their homes from then to the present. ...

 The Israeli computerized kill system called “Lavender” generates the home addresses of suspected Hamas supporters using social media, phone records, etc. Then surveillance drones wait for these persons to come home, and their home is targeted. The building where they live or their house is bombed. This often kills at least ten additional people, usually mostly women and children, and sometimes hundreds of people. However, this fact means nothing to the Israeli kill machine, just as it means nothing to the killers at the Pentagon and the CIA. ...

   After 9/11, the US began compiling its kill lists on a worldwide basis, sending militarized drones over Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere to blow up its “enemies” from above, sometimes mistakenly blowing up wedding parties or funeral processions. In its occupation of Iraq, it systematically compiled lists of those suspected of resisting its occupation, targeting them for arrest, torture, or simply elimination.

   Israel, therefore, has had an astute teacher of how to destroy all civilized living and act with utter moral depravity. No unalienable human rights, nor habeas corpus, no innocent until proven guilty. Just murder anyone suspected of resisting you and indiscriminately kill everyone around them, including women and children. It is this world of utter moral depravity that the Earth Constitution is designed to replace. 

   Under the Earth Constitution, the weapons-systems of these depraved moral monsters will be removed and dismantled, and the rule of democratic law will establish civilized living for the entire Earth. Everyone ... will enjoy respect for their inalienable rights and their common human dignity. ... the global war-system on Earth blocks our ascent to planetary civilization,... READ MORE

To contact the author:  gmartin@radford.edu

Mailing address is:

Earth Constitution Institute/ World Constitution and Parliament Association

88 Oracle Way

Independence, Virginia 24348 USA

Elites Afraid to Talk About Palestine 

Vijay Prashad      Peoples Dispatch

The Western political class has used all tools at its disposal to support Israel’s genocide while criminalizing solidarity.

Israeli bombs continue to fall on Gaza, killing Palestinian civilians with abandon.

Al Jazeera published a story about the destruction of 24 hospitals in Gaza, each of them bombed mercilessly by the Israeli military. Half of the 35,000 Palestinians killed by Israel were children, their bodies littering the overwhelmed morgues and mosques of Gaza.

Andrew Gilmour, the former United Nations assistant secretary-general for human rights, told BBC Newsnight that the Palestinians are experiencing “collective punishment” and that what we are seeing in Gaza is “probably the highest kill rate of any military, killing anybody, since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”

Meanwhile, in the West Bank section of Palestine, Human Rights Watch shows that the Israeli military has participated in the displacement of Palestinians from 20 communities and has uprooted at least seven communities since October 2023. These are established facts.

Yet, these facts — according to a leaked memorandum — cannot be spoken about in the “newspaper of record” in the United States, The New York Times. Journalists at the paper were asked to avoid the terms “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory.”

Silence on College Campuses

At the University of Southern California (USC), Asna Tabassum, a South Asian American, was to deliver an address on campus to 65,000 people as the valedictorian of the class of 2024. Involved in the conversation around the Israeli war against the Palestinians, Tabassum was targeted by pro-Israeli activists who claimed to feel threatened.

In a thoughtful response, Tabassum — who majored in biomedical engineering and history (with a minor in resistance to genocide) — implored her classmates “to think outside the box, to work towards a world where cries of equality and human dignity are not manipulated to be expressions of hatred. I challenge us to respond to ideological discomfort with dialogue and learning, not bigotry and censorship.”  

READ MORE

 "Zionist lobby group AIPAC puts US govt. in Chokehold for funding Genocide". Ex Congressional staffer said

Gospa News

 Former US congressional staffer and political commentator Rodney Martin says the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other pro-Israel lobby groups in the United States have successfully put the US government in a chokehold.

20 advocacy groups announced the launch of the “Reject AIPAC” coalition.

Meanwhile, prominent progressive organizations in the United States are forming a coalition to defend those lawmakers targeted by AIPAC and counter its sway in Congress.

On Monday, more than 20 advocacy groups announced the launch of the “Reject AIPAC” coalition. The coalition includes mainstream left-wing groups as well as organizations focused on the Palestinian rights. 

“It’s interesting because throughout the time since 1948 any opposition to Israeli policy would be met one by being declared anti-Semite – that no longer works,” he said.

“Actually there is large segment of Jews in the United States that has joined in the chorus of condemning Israel. That too is a positive development,” Martin said.   READ MORE