This is scary

[10tazione]

2 hours ago, vinapu said:

nothing wrong with that, when we were young we got our political ideas from barbers and taxi drivers. 

You forgot from parents, but that didnt work well in my case

[stevenkesslar]

17 hours ago, vinapu said:

when we were young we got our political ideas from barbers and taxi drivers. 

Well, when I was in my 20's I was going to leftie protests all the time and spending lots of time on Capitol Hill getting anti-redlining legislation passed and beating up on redlining banks  all over the US.  I didn't talk about politics with barbers or taxi drivers, though.  To each his own, I guess.  😉

The issue I care about now is whether young people who get their politics off Tik Tok will vote for Biden, or indirectly help elect Trump.

20 hours ago, KeepItReal said:

I can both sympathize and criticise aspects on all sides - and there are many sides with many stakeholders. It is the proverbial "barrel of fish hooks". Approach with caution. ⚠️

Biden was a US Senator back then, when I was young once.  Despite being called a fool, a gaffe machine, and now senile, he has managed to have pretty good political instincts and ride waves.  We'll see how he rides this very fierce wave.

If a whole bunch of polls are right, there are slightly more Americans that think Israel is not being tough enough on Hamas, as opposed to they are being too tough.  Although that is a moving target, literally.  64 UN relief workers have died simply trying to help people in Gaza survive.  That's completely unprecedented. One relief worker was killed alongside his wife and 8 children.   So much for being cautious.   

Biden is being decisive.  Which is a good look for someone often called senile.  And the reality is that even if he got down on his knees and begged for a ceasefire, which is what a majority of Americans of all leanings want, there is zero evidence Netanyahu would agree.  Biden is in a very fraught position.  Caution won't work.  But it's not clear what will.

[Moses]

Angelina Jolie in her Instagram: By refusing to demand a humanitarian ceasefire and blocking the UN Security Council from imposing one on both parties, world leaders are complicit in these crimes.

Quote

This is the deliberate bombing of a trapped population who have nowhere to flee. Gaza has been an open-air prison for nearly two decades and is fast becoming a mass grave.

40% of those killed are innocent children. Whole families are being murdered. While the world watches and with the active support of many governments, millions of Palestinian civilians - children, women, families - are being collectively punished and dehumanized, all while being deprived food, medicine and humanitarian aid against international law.

By refusing to demand a humanitarian ceasefire and blocking the UN Security Council from imposing one on both parties, world leaders are complicit in these crimes.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CzHDsD1x8s9/?hl=en

[Moses]

Letter of designation from director UN office of The High Commissioner for Human rights

 

 

 

 

[EmmetK]

3 hours ago, Moses said:

Letter of designation from director UN office of The High Commissioner for Human rights

 

 

 

 

And why would any rational person with half a brain care what is contained in a letter of resignation from a UN bureaucrat? 
The UN has a long history of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias. They are a bloated, corrupt, and mismanaged organization dominated by third-world, undemocratic tyrannical regimes.

This is the organization that has put Iran in charge of their Human Rights Commission.
This is the organization that has overseen billions of dollars of aid to Gaza. Where has the money gone? Hamas took the money and built tunnels, underground bunkers which were used as their command centers.

Good riddance to Mr. Moktuber. My only regret is that he left way too much trash behind him in Turtle Bay.

[Moses]

11 minutes ago, EmmetK said:

And why would any rational person with half a brain care what is contained in a letter of resignation from a UN bureaucrat? 

... and citizen of Israel.

By the way: have you seen Amnesty International report from spring 2023?
280 pages of accusation of Israel in apartheid.
 

Quote

Israel’s continuing oppressive and discriminatory system of governing Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) constituted a system of apartheid, and Israeli officials committed the crime of apartheid under international law.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/report-israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/

[reader]

From Amnesty International 

Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine was accompanied by escalating repression against dissent within Russia. Peaceful anti-war protests were dispersed, often forcibly, and those speaking out against the war faced prosecution. New legislation was introduced restricting protests and the activities of NGOs and civil society activists. Prosecutions of Jehovah’s Witnesses continued. Torture and other ill-treatment remained endemic in places of detention. Abductions and enforced disappearances continued to be reported in Chechnya. Fair trial standards were repeatedly violated. Conscientious objectors were refused alternative civilian service. New legislation further stigmatized and discriminated against LGBTI people.

[Moses]

39 minutes ago, reader said:

From Amnesty International 

Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine was accompanied by escalating repression against dissent within Russia. Peaceful anti-war protests were dispersed, often forcibly, and those speaking out against the war faced prosecution. New legislation was introduced restricting protests and the activities of NGOs and civil society activists. Prosecutions of Jehovah’s Witnesses continued. Torture and other ill-treatment remained endemic in places of detention. Abductions and enforced disappearances continued to be reported in Chechnya. Fair trial standards were repeatedly violated. Conscientious objectors were refused alternative civilian service. New legislation further stigmatized and discriminated against LGBTI people.

That's nice you still remember Russia, but why you bring it to thread about Israel and Palestine?

[EmmetK]

1 hour ago, Moses said:

... and citizen of Israel.

By the way: have you seen Amnesty International report from spring 2023?
280 pages of accusation of Israel in apartheid.
 

https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/report-israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/

And why would any sane rational person care what Amnesty International has to say about Israel any more than what a disgraced UN bureaucrat has to say? The UN (with Iran as the head of its Human Rights Commission and China set to lead the Security Council next month) and Amnesty International have as much credibility about Israel as do any other Jew-hating, Israel organization.
The only ones who listen to them and quote them are other Israel haters and anti-Semites. 
I'll take my cue from people that ACTUALLY matter. Like the those White House, US Senate, and House of Reps.

I give a lot more credibility to what an elected US Rep has to say than what a spiteful, unelected bureaucrat from the UN has to say on the subject:

GOP lawmaker contends ‘there are very few innocent Palestinian citizens’ (msn.com)

[Moses]

1 hour ago, EmmetK said:

Like the those White House, US Senate, and House of Reps.

I give a lot more credibility to what an elected US Rep has to say than what a spiteful

https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/gaza-has-become-graveyard-thousands-children

 

Quote

GENEVA, 31 October 2023 – “From the earliest days of the unprecedented hostilities in the Gaza Strip, UNICEF has been forthright on the need for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, for the aid to flow and for children abducted to be released.  Like many others, we have pleaded for the killing of children to stop.

Our gravest fears about the reported numbers of children killed becoming dozens, then hundreds, and ultimately thousands were realized in just a fortnight. The numbers are appalling; reportedly more than 3,450 children killed; staggeringly this rises significantly every day. 

Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It’s a living hell for everyone else.

And yet the threats to children go beyond bombs and mortars.  I want to speak briefly on water and trauma. 

The more than one million children of Gaza also have a water crisis.  Gaza’s water production capacity is a mere 5 per cent of its usual daily output.  Child deaths – particularly infants - to dehydration are a growing threat. 

 

[Moses]

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief:

All settler colonial projects, including Israel, reach a point when they embrace wholesale slaughter and genocide to eradicate a native population that refuses to capitulate.

On Friday the Gaza Strip had all its communications severed. No Internet. No phone service. No electricity. Israel’s goal is the murder of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of those who survive into refugee camps in Egypt. It is an attempt by Israel to erase not only a people, but the idea of Palestine.

It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial projects who believed that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make the aspirations of an oppressed people, whose land they stole, go away. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden.

Israel’s bombing campaign, one of the heaviest of the 21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are homeless.

Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.

Not only are the tactics the same, but so is the rhetoric. Palestinians are referred to as animals, beasts and Nazis. They have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth.

The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder and whose labor we exploit is coded within our DNA. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Herero in Namibia who, like Palestinians in Gaza, were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and disease. Eighty thousand of them. Ask Iraqis. Ask Afghans. Ask Syrians. Ask Kurds. Ask Libyans. Ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who we are.

Israel’s distorted, settler colonial visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves virtues and civilizing qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for stripping an occupied and besieged people of their rights, seizing their land and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, enforced poverty and murder to keep them subjugated.

Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as “the new Nazis”.

Think about that. A people, imprisoned in the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis?

There is an historical analogy here. But it is not one that Bennett, Netanyahu or any other Israeli leader wants to acknowledge.

When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority.

We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization — we are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the “wretched of the earth.” It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed.

Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness — although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest — are useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice-in-Wonderland fairytale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens. You can listen to them spout their pseudo-morality in the White House and in Congress. They are always wrong. And they never go away.

[Mavica]

1 hour ago, Moses said:

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief:

[stevenkesslar]

10 hours ago, Moses said:

Letter of designation from director UN office of The High Commissioner for Human rights

 

 

 

 

Thanks for posting that @Moses.  At the very least, you have demonstrated how bad I suck at being verbose.  My posts are like bumper stickers compared to that.  

I did read the whole thing.  It's obviously a very one-sided take on an intractable struggle and human rights nightmare.  But I agree with most of the principles Mokhiber articulates.  And I also agree with @reader.   Please send a copy to Murderous Vlad, as well, @Moses.  He might get some pointers on his genocide in Ukraine.  Fair is fair.

As compelling as the UN and Angelina Jolie are,  I'll add an article by Mark Penn I read yesterday.  I think it really captured why this is a sad and probably unfixable tragedy, in a way Penn didn't intend.

Before I get to Mark Penn's defense of Israel, and Hillary Clinton's hawkishness, let me focus on a fact that is a clear "Fuck you Biden, fuck you Israel, fuck you apartheid lovers" statement.  Anyone who does not want Trump, The Sequel in 2024 should be scared shitless by clear facts that are emerging.

Young and old Americans are now completely split on Israel.  The latest YouGov poll asks people who they sympathize with more, Israelis or Palestinians.  In both cases, 23 % say both equally.  But older voters (over 65) who are the core of Trump's support break 65/5 on supporting Israel over Palestinians.  Younger voters under 30, the voters who will make or break Biden's re-election, break for Palestinians 30/17.  The vast majority of older voters (82 %) say it is important or very important to help Israel.  Only 38 % of younger voters agree.  A plurality of younger voters (43 %) say it is not too important, or not important at all, to help Israel.  '

Fuck you apartheid Israel.  Fuck you Biden, for supporting Israel.  The young voters who see it this way are the people that Biden desperately needs to win.  Let me repeat.  Fuck you, apartheid Israel.  Fuck you Biden, for supporting Israel.  How is this going to work out in 2024?

Many young Americans feel that Netayahu is a sadistic genocidal monster who is perfectly happy to kill countless innocent Palestinian women and children.  And subject all of them to cruelty and apartheid, in order to make sure there is never a Palestinian state.  They're not going to be persuaded that somehow opposing apartheid makes them anti-Semitic.

But let's forget about the extreme and the outspoken.  As predicted, now that the great promoter of Hamas, Bibi Netanyahu, has busted loose with his bombs and inhumane cruelty, more and more people are willing to see Israel the way young Americans do.  Last month, Oct 14-17, when YouGov asked the question for the first time, a plurality of 32 % of Americans said Israel's response to Hamas was just about right.  23 % said not harsh enough, and 19 % said too harsh.  That's right after a mass slaughter of innocent Jewish women and kids.  Now, a month later, right after a mass slaughter of innocent Muslim women and kids, 27 % say Israel's response is just about right.  23 % say too harsh and 19 % say not harsh enough.  Last month, only 9 % of young voters said Israel wasn't being harsh enough.  That has now dropped to 3 %, with a plurality of 36 % of young voters saying Israel is being too harsh.

I've been saying Israel has lost a pro-Israel US majority.  That's not true among the oldest Americans.  Among the youngest Americans, though, it's actually worse.  Israel is now viewed less favorably than Palestinians.  And Biden is telling these voters "fuck you" on a ceasefire.  Which most Americans, but especially most younger Americans, want him to press Israel on.  It's 1000 % clear that Biden can't tell Israel what to do.  That said, this sounds like 1968 to me.  We even have Robert Kennedy running again, who is getting double digits in every poll and will probably help elect Trump.

Fuck you, Biden.  Fuck you, Biden.  Fuck you, Biden.  Go be LBJ.  You back Israel, and we won't bother to vote for you.  That is the message I hear emerging in poll after poll from young US voters.  The good news for the great Hamas builder, Bibi Netanyahu, is that he'd rather have Trump, anyway.  🙄   He'll gin up his slaughter machine and Trump won't give a shit, knowing his older supporters mostly agree with Israel being as harsh as possible.  

A Ceasefire for Hamas?

Penn's article is thoughtful and worth reading the whole way through.  Had that been written 20 years ago, I would have wholeheartedly agreed with him. 

In fact, it was written 20 years ago.  Not literally.  But all the key data he cites is about that old.  With the single most important point being that Arafat rejected peace when it was offered by Israel, with a heavy lift by Bill Clinton.  Arafat said he'd be killed by the Hamas brand of radicals if he agreed to peace.  In fact, few leaders in my lifetime have been killed for seeking peace.  The main one that comes to mind is Rabin.  And that just makes Arafat looks like the worthless and weak piece of shit he was. So when I was a young US voter, I fully agreed with Penn and the Clintons.

But all of the things I am talking about happened 25 to 30 years ago.  If Penn wants to talk about Hillary Clinton's righteous hawkishness, we might mention that her big idea to liberate Libya happened over a decade ago.  It still hasn't worked out very well.  So how does this support the idea that we just need to stay on a course that has led to decades of endless bloodbaths?

Young voters were not even born when much of this happened.  And what they seem to mostly see is the bloodbaths.  So Penn is living in a past that no longer exists.  Except in the minds of older Americans like me.  His view of Israel doesn't fit with what young voters see on TikTok today.  It's fair to say many of them see a genocidal monster killing lots of innocent people.  I'm talking about you, Bibi.

The fact that Penn's argument is so tired and stale and useless was especially clear in the paragraph where he basically compares Bibi Netanyahu to .........................wait for it........................  Abraham Lincoln!!!???  It's actually the point.  Penn argues that demanding a ceasefire during the US Civil War would be like asking for slavery to stand.   The word "slavery" is pushing it too far.  But replace it with the word "apartheid," and that is the point.  Many young voters do see Biden's rejection of a ceasefire as backing Bibi's policies of apartheid and cruelty.  The clear logic of a ceasefire, which most Americans support, is that more violence and bloodbath is a formula for more Hamas and more Bibi, not less.  Why don't we instead try something else?  I'm with young voters on that.

What Penn made even clearer to me is that we have a massive and probably fatal leadership problem.  Fareed Zakaria said it most succinctly in the long interview of him I posted above.  He said he sympathizes very much with the Palestinian people.  He does not sympathize with Palestinian leaders at all.  I agree.  But for a long time I've felt exactly the same about Israel.  They have a sadistic, worthless, Hamas building leader who has rejected peace, too.  If you need someone to blame for that, Israel, blame Bibi.  It is telling and truthful that polls right now say many if not most Israeli Jews actually do blame Bibi.

I would like to think that Biden is the kind of leader that could create peace, like Bill Clinton came close to.  But, if I'm being honest with myself in a way Penn is not, it ain't gonna work.  You can't have peace when you have Hamas on the one side and Netanyahu on the other.  It's not at all clear that Israelis actually even want peace anymore.  The growing force of ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews who back Bibi clearly don't. 

So, more likely, Biden will be the transitional Democratic leader who once again failed to deliver peace.  Whether Biden will also fail to get re-elected next year, in part because young voters reject or simply don't care about his leadership, like he rejected a ceasefire, is a very good question right now. 

The next US President who is a Democrat will be much younger.  And much less tied at the hip with Israel.  There is no clear prospect for how Israel or the Palestinians get leadership - from Israel, Palestinians, the US, or anywhere - that can even come close to delivering peace.  Perhaps @Moses could ask Vlad to lend a hand?  Then again, that probably won't work out so well, either.

So, for now, it will just be bloodbath.  Tragic.  It won't help Biden in 2024.  And it may help end his Presidency.

[EmmetK]

4 hours ago, Moses said:

https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/gaza-has-become-graveyard-thousands-children

 

 

And your point is?

Israel's goal to to totally eradicate Hamas so they can no longer commit massacres atrocities.

Of course there are Gazan civilian casualties. But unlike Hamas which commits wholesale slaughter and unspeakable horrors, the IDF drops leaflets in the civilian areas warning the citizens to leave. 
Good vs. evil was never so clear.

Every Gazan death can be attributed to Hamas. They started this war. The IDF will end it on its own terms.

And if you think posting links to quotes from UN bureaucrats or some former biased NY Times journalist will sway anyone's opinion, you are wrong.

[vinapu]

2 hours ago, EmmetK said:

the IDF drops leaflets in the civilian areas warning the citizens to leave. 

Have you ever been to Gaza? Where those people  are supposed  to go ? place is crowded and sealed from land and a sea. Seal Manhattan and tell people  we are starting blanket bombing so you better go

[vinapu]

2 hours ago, EmmetK said:

 

Every Gazan death can be attributed to Hamas

violent death is always attributed to killer.

It was not 9/11 victims fault that they went to work or see the vista from the top  on that fateful day 

[vinapu]

9 hours ago, Moses said:

That's nice you still remember Russia, but why you bring it to thread about Israel and Palestine?

skilful butchers all three ?

[vinapu]

9 hours ago, EmmetK said:

I give a lot more credibility to what an elected US Rep has to say than what a spiteful, unelected bureaucrat from the UN has to say on the subject:

 

I'm not talking about that case but that argument is off mark. Being elected doesn't prevent saying nonsense and a lot of it. I can think about persons elected to very high positions prone to saying a lot of crap, Orange Overlord comes to mind

[Mavica]

35 minutes ago, vinapu said:

... and tell people  we are starting blanket bombing so you better go

I don't see any information to cause me to believe there is blanket bombing (often also referred to as carpet bombing).

[forky123]

13 hours ago, Moses said:

That's nice you still remember Russia, but why you bring it to thread about Israel and Palestine?

I'm guessing because only hypocrites would strongly support the Russian murder of civilians in Ukraine while pillorying Israel for the same. 

[Moses]

30 minutes ago, forky123 said:

I'm guessing because only hypocrites would strongly support the Russian murder of civilians in Ukraine while pillorying Israel for the same. 

Could you please show me any my word where I "pillorying the same"? I just publish points of view from different people. 

But now I will tell you: for 30 times longer period, on territory 1000 times bigger, there are 7 times less causalities within Ukrainian kids, than in Gaza. 

In Ukraine are less than 550 causalities within children for almost 2 years on territory more than 50000 sq.km. Israel already kill more than 3400 kids, less than in 3 weeks, on territory 50 sq.km.

[forky123]

15 minutes ago, Moses said:

Could you please show me any my word where I "pillorying the same"? I just publish points of view from different people. 

But now I will tell you: for 30 times longer period, on territory 1000 times bigger, there are 7 times less causalities within Ukrainian kids.  In Ukraine are less than 550 causalities within children for almost 2 years on territory more than 50000 sq.km. Israel already kill more than 3400 kids, less than in 3 weeks, on territory 50 sq.km.

Of course there are fewer child casualties in a country with under 1/10th the population density of Gaza and where the Ukrainians don't hide behind their children.  I guess that's why Russia chooses to terrorize them with threats of nuclear annihilation to "avoid" innocent casualties. I'm against both wars but Hamas deliberately provoked the one in Gaza.

[Moses]

8 minutes ago, forky123 said:

Ukrainians don't hide behind their children

Really? Then read again news from first 6 months of conflict in Ukraine. Ukrainian propaganda nonstop moaned about schools, kindergartens and hospitals, while placed there artillery.

[Latbear4blk]

6 hours ago, Mavica said:

I don't see any information to cause me to believe there is blanket bombing (often also referred to as carpet bombing).

[Latbear4blk]

2 hours ago, forky123 said:

Of course there are fewer child casualties in a country with under 1/10th the population density of Gaza and where the Ukrainians don't hide behind their children.  I guess that's why Russia chooses to terrorize them with threats of nuclear annihilation to "avoid" innocent casualties. I'm against both wars but Hamas deliberately provoked the one in Gaza.

It looks like the hypocrites are the ones condemning Hamas but supporting the genocidal Israeli attacks.