Gaza
Jewish Biden appointee resigns, accusing US president of having ‘blood on his hands’ - YouTube
Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi reports from Washington, DC, highlighting the recent resignation of Lily Greenberg Call, marking the first departure among Biden appointees due to President Biden’s unwavering support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. Another notable resignation came from a Jewish member of the US administration, a career military officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Israeli Human Rights Lawyer Attacked While Documenting Settler Raid on Gaza Aid Convoy
Aid agencies are running out of food in southern Gaza amid Israel’s ongoing offensive in Rafah and the shutdown of the two main border crossings in the south. Some 1.1 million Palestinians are on the brink of starvation, according to the United Nations, while a “full-blown famine” is taking place in the north. Meanwhile, some Israelis have been blocking aid from reaching the Gaza border, including a violent attack on trucks carrying humanitarian relief through the occupied West Bank earlier this week.”
Joe Biden and those in Congress that continue to support arming Israel are supporting war crimes and genocide. They are war criminals.
Biden Administration Goes Full Genocide Denial For Israel - YouTube
What This Jewish Professor At Columbia Wants You To Know - YouTube
For over seven months, a dominant conversation in the U.S. news media has been about alleged and increased antisemitism on American campuses - culminating in the coverage around student encampments… In this interview, AJ+ speaks to Dr. Bruce Robbins, a Jewish professor at Columbia University who supported students protesting Columbia University’s investments in companies and programs that uphold Israeli apartheid and the genocide in Gaza.
It’s been clear for months that Israel is carrying out genocide in Palestine. And yet I still see Americans suggest it’s not happening, not genocide. Just two days ago a blogger citing the New York Times to suggest that the problem is confirmation bias and TikTok having undue influence.
Sure, because the New York Times, as the gatekeeper of “All the news that’s fit to print” is to be trusted.
The world would be a more just and peacful place if Americans made an effort to understand their role in the world. I’d suggest starting with texts like Chomsky’s “A Propaganda Model” excerpted from Manufacturing Consent, 1988 by Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky.
“The plan is genocide”: Palestinian ambassador on Israel’s assault #Gaza - YouTube
Senior Palestinian diplomat Husam Zomlot criticizes Western hypocrisy amid Israel’s intensifying attacks on Gaza. “The plan is genocide,” he says.
Army Major and Pentagon Officer Resigns Over US Support of Gaza Genocide | Truthout
Another Biden administration official has resigned over the U.S.’s unconditional support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza — this time a senior officer in the U.S. Army who also served as an intelligence official for the Pentagon.
In a letter posted on LinkedIn on Monday, Harrison Mann wrote that he felt complicit in the “most horrific and heartbreaking images imaginable” being broadcast from Gaza while in his role…
UN Officials Describe “Absolutely Catastrophic” Conditions in Gaza – Mother Jones
A senior UNICEF official for Gaza, Hamish Young, issued a statement on Saturday warning that “families lack proper sanitation facilities, drinking water and shelter,” and that “people are making improvised toilets by digging holes in the ground around groups of tents” in Al-Mawasi, a so-called humanitarian zone about six miles northeast of Rafah where Palestinians have been ordered to evacuate. He added that virtually no fuel or humanitarian aid had entered the Gaza Strip in five days.
How Zionism became a synonym for violence and oppression | The Guardian
For decades, Joe Biden has proudly declared that he is a Zionist, and he has repeated that claim since Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel. But for the student anti-war protests gripping the US, the words “Zionist” and “Zionism” have become a watchword – pejorative and emblematic of the violent state policies driving the war on Gaza…
Student protesters say that their criticisms of Zionism are rooted in the state of Israel’s displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
More than 800 faculty and staff at UCLA call for chancellor’s resignation | The Guardian
… following attacks by counter-protesters on pro-Palestinian student demonstrators and a violent police raid of the Gaza solidarity encampment on campus last week.
More than a hundred professors and other teaching staff gathered on Thursday to deliver a letter in support of their students engaged in pro-Palestinian activism, demanding Gene Block immediately step down as chancellor and an academic senate vote of no confidence in him.
Student Journalists Face Storm of Campus Protest Disinformation | WIRED
As campus protests reached new peaks last week, student newspapers like the Columbia Spectator at Columbia University were not only tasked with covering their peers but also the false and alarming narratives being spun up about and around them…
“I think the way that people saw the protest was completely different from how we observed it on campus. It wasn’t as rowdy as had been depicted. It was actually quite peaceful,” says Katrina Ventura, a student at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Romney Admits Push to Ban TikTok Is Aimed at Censoring News Out of Gaza | Common Dreams
A discussion between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sen. Mitt Romney over the weekend included what one critic called an “incredible mask-off moment,” with the two officials speaking openly about the U.S. government’s long-term attempts to provide public relations work for Israel in defense of its policies in the occupied Palestinian territories—and its push to ban TikTok in order to shut down Americans' access to unfiltered news about the Israeli assault on Gaza.
Mehdi Hasan interview on the Majority Report digging into mainstream press reporting on the violence UCLA Palestine solidarity protests.
I’ve seen several blog posts uncritically sharing the media reporting that “the protests were violent”. On the ground reporting indicates that the violence was, not surprisingly, being carried out by “counter protesters”. Mostly non-students, mostly men. Violent thugs beating up non-violent protesters.
nullagent: “The UCLA Palestine Solidarity …” - PartyOn
The UCLA Palestine Solidarity encampment has so far appeared free from serious police interference today.
They did however have run in’s with an antagonistic group of Zionist who became violent.
nullagent: “The UCLA Palestine Solidarity
As I was pointing out five days ago, the zionist mob that’s been showing up at UCLA is increasingly violent and dangerous.
Last night around 100 zionist attacked the UCLA encampment. There’s video of UCLA’s private security letting these guys in and just watching as they dragged out protesters to beat.
Several students were seen bloodied after being jumped by the zionist mob.
The protest was peaceful prior to this police enabled mob violence.
FULL BLOWN FAMINE in northern Gaza
Senior UN official says northern Gaza is now in ‘full-blown famine’ : NPR
A top U.N. official said Friday that hard-hit northern Gaza was now in “full-blown famine” after more than six months of war between Israel and Hamas and severe Israeli restrictions on food deliveries to the Palestinian territory.
“It’s horror,” McCain told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview to air Sunday. “There is famine — full-blown famine — in the north, and it’s moving its way south.”
It’s frustrating (though not surprising) to see the distorted media presentation of violence at the Pro-Palestinian protests on campuses last week. Most notably the UCLA protest where police did nothing as masked Pro-Israel counter “protestors” attacked the student encampment Tuesday night. Democracy Now! has excellent coverage.
Even worse that Biden referenced the violence without any clarification that the student encampment, a stationary protest, was generally very peaceful to that point.
The counter protesters moved in and attacked with tear gas and a variety of weapons. By all accounts many of the attackers were not students. Nor was the first such attack but just the last and most intense.
From Democracy Now:
We get an update from the University of California, Los Angeles, where police in riot gear began dismantling a pro-Palestinian encampment early Thursday, using flashbang grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas, and arresting dozens of students. The raid came just over a day after pro-Israel counterprotesters armed with sticks, metal rods and fireworks attacked students at the encampment. The Real News Network reporter Mel Buer was on the scene during the attack. She describes seeing counterprotesters provoke students, yelling slurs and bludgeoning them with parts of the encampment’s barricade, and says the attack lasted several hours without police or security intervention.” UCLA is complicit in violence inflicted upon protesters,” wrote the editorial board of UCLA’s campus newspaper, the Daily Bruin, the next day. Four of the paper’s student journalists were targeted and assaulted by counterprotesters while covering the protests.
Fascinating.
A Clockwork Orange, White Supremacy, and Palestine by Politically Depressed
A Clockwork Orange is not about human nature, it’s about European fascism. This is at least my reading of it. I’ve been thinking a lot about it as we’re seeing the European centre shift drastically to the right in defence of the ongoing Israeli genocide in Palestine. In this episode I share my analysis and reading of A Clockwork Orange that I think illuminates some terrifying and bizarre aspects of the current moment.
Christiane Amanpour’s interview with Bernie Sanders is excellent and worth a listen. Sanders on the US media allowing Netanyahu to define anti-Semitism.
“What he has done is deflect attention, and the American media by and large has fallen for it, to say any protest against Israel, it’s anti-Semitic. If you’re talking about how the two-thirds of the people who have been killed or injured are women and children, not of us participants, women and children, that’s anti-Semitic. If you’re talking about 70% of the housing damaged, that’s anti-Semitic. If you’re talking about how the United Nations and humanitarian organizations are worried about famine, children right now, today, in Gaza, are dying of malnutrition. If you talk about that, you’re anti-Semitic. Well, I think the American people are not going to fall for that. Netanyahu is insulting the intelligence of the American people. He has got to be held accountable for the actions of his right-wing extremists and, by the way, racist government. And charging or claiming that everybody who is critical of him is anti-Semitic is really quite disgraceful.”
Excerpt above starts at 11:00.
Meet Hala Rharrit, First U.S. Diplomat to Quit over Gaza - YouTube
Democracy Now! speaks with Hala Rharrit, the first State Department diplomat to publicly resign over the Biden administration’s policies backing Israel’s assault and siege of the Gaza Strip. Rharrit is an 18-year career diplomat who served as the Arabic-language spokesperson for the State Department in the region. “I could no longer be a part of the State Department and promote this policy. It’s an inhumane policy. It’s a failed policy that is helping neither Palestinians, neither Israelis,” Rharrit says. “We are not authorized to send military equipment, weapons to countries that commit human rights abuses. ICJ has determined plausible genocide, yet we are still sending billions upon billions of not just defensive weaponry, but offensive weaponry. It is tantamount to a violation of domestic law. Many diplomats know it. Many diplomats are scared to say it.” She adds, “I read the talking points that we were supposed to promote on Arab media. A lot of them were dehumanizing to Palestinians.” Rharrit also discusses how “corruption” in government allows for arms sales to continue. “I could not help but be concerned about the influence of special interest groups, of lobbying groups on our foreign policy and, as well, on Congress — on the people that decide whether or not some of those shipments of arms get sent. The bottom line is that our politicians should not be profiting from war. And unfortunately, we have some institutionalized corruption that enables that,” she says.