The Destruction Of Gaza SHOULD Be Radicalizing People

Be sure to distribute this article as widely as possible. Pushing back against the Big Lie is really up to you.

Caitlin Johnstone
ROGUE JOURNALIST


Resize text-+=

Pro Palstine protest answer coalition

(Photo: TGP screenshot)

If the so-called “moderate” position of your nation’s political status quo is to accept, normalize, support and defend the sort of evil that is being inflicted upon the people of Gaza, then you should want to get as far away from that “moderate” position as possible.

What’s happening in Gaza should radicalize you. It absolutely should.

Right now, even as its own criminality hits fever pitch, the western political-media class is fretting with increasing shrillness about young people getting “radicalized” and turned against their government by the spread of information and ideas at campus demonstrations and on TikTok. 

But young people should be radicalizing right now. Everyone should.

When you see Israel rejecting a Hamas ceasefire and beginning its long-threatened assault on Rafah (the last so-called “safe zone” in Gaza), that should radicalize you.

 

When you see US senators assist this horrifying onslaught by publicly threateningthe International Criminal Court if they dare to indict Israeli officials for war crimes, that should radicalize you.

When you see Israel shutting down Al Jazeera to quash news reporting about its criminality immediately before launching this mass atrocity, that should radicalize you.

When you see The New York Times receiving a Pulitzer Prize for its scandalously discredited, notoriously biased and widely–mocked Gaza coverage, that should radicalize you.

When you see the US president publicly supporting and encouraging violent police crackdowns against protesters opposing his genocidal actions in Gaza, that should radicalize you.

If the so-called “moderate” position of your nation’s political status quo is to accept, normalize, support and defend the sort of evil that is being inflicted upon the people of Gaza, then you should want to get as far away from that “moderate” position as possible, and you should seek the complete annihilation of that political status quo.

This obvious point is being aggressively attacked with rapidly intensifying frenzy by the empire and its lackeys.

After police violently shut down anti-genocide campus demonstrations in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams said “There is a movement to radicalize young people, and I’m not going to wait until it’s done… I’m not going to allow that to happen as the mayor of the City of New York,” as though preventing the spread of radical political opinions is something a mayor is elected to do in the United States.

NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry ominously told the pressthat there is “some organization” who is “radicalizing our students,” and that the New York police force intends to “find out who that is.” Again, the implication being that it is the job of the police to control the spread of unauthorized political opinions.

In an article with the incredibly propagandistic headline “Anti-Israel protests infiltrated by ‘outside agitators’ who radicalize students, sow violence,” The Washington Times presented these unevidenced assertions from New York City officials as though they are established fact instead of highly convenient fiction.

In a talk at the McCain Institute on Friday, Senator Mitt Romney told Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Congress supports banning TikTok because it shares information that turns people’s opinions against Israel, saying such information has a “very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”

A new report from The Intercept reveals that congressmen Mike Lawler and Josh Gottheimer called on the FBI to investigate campus protesters at a “centrist” political group called No Labels, suggesting there these demonstrations have a nefarious support system which the federal police should look into.

The Wall Street Journal has been losing its mind over the campus protests, posting articles with headlines like “Activist Groups Trained Students for Months Before Campus Protests” and “Rules for Campus Radicals, 2024 — A website reveals the planning and strategy behind the current college mayhem” which suggest that there is something sinister and unacceptable about these demonstrations receiving support from “longtime activists and left-wing groups.”

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough went full Alex Jones on his show last week, telling his audience that these university protests have been happening because Qatar has “poured hundreds of millions of dollars into American universities to have a radicalizing effect on Middle Eastern studies.”

Empire managers and propagandists have been pushing the narrative that foreign governments are behind this new protest movement to radicalize young people against Washington and Israel, though as we discussed recently they humorously can’t yet manage to agree on which foreign government that is.

The imperial spinmeisters have been churning out these talking points about radicalization and nefarious support because that’s the narrative bludgeon they plan on using to stomp out the burgeoning antiwar movement the empire has created with its genocidal atrocities in Gaza. If they can establish a narrative that it is the government’s job to shut down political dissent and stop the spread of unauthorized political opinions, then they can justify doing pretty much anything to stop this movement in its tracks.

All to shut down something that absolutely should be happening. Young people should be cultivating radical political positions in response to an active genocide that’s supported by their government. An antiwar movement should be forming against the imperial murder machine as its murderousness gets more and more insane. People should be aggressively rejecting the political status quo that has allowed this nightmare to be unleashed upon humanity.

Everyone should be turning against the US-centralized empire right now. Don’t let the imperial manipulators dupe our society into believing this turn is anything but a correct and appropriate response to what the empire is doing.

Lili News 029
  • In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
  • Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
  • Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

RSS
Follow by Email
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Telegram
WhatsApp
Reddit
window.addEventListener("sfsi_functions_loaded", function() { if (typeof sfsi_widget_set == "function") { sfsi_widget_set(); } });

All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone


Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician. 
 

 Creative Commons License  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Photo Credit: GDA via AP

Covid-19 has put this site on ventilators.
DONATIONS HAVE DRIED UP... 
PLEASE send what you can today!
JUST USE THE BUTTON BELOW

 NOTE : ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.



Palestine is the ‘red pill’ for America’s Gen Z

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Alex Lo
My Take
SCMP

Resize text-+=

The sociopathic perfidy of US foreign policy is one of America's best-kept secrets (from Americans!)

The CIA "Jakarta Method" applied to Chile in 1973. (TGP screenshot)

I

Neo, of course, takes the red pill.

American university students protesting for an end to the Palestinian genocide and their government’s support for it are today’s real-life Neos. More Canadian and British students are joining them. That’s why university apparatchiks are calling in police to suppress their protests, and many Western news outlets are painting them as antisemitic rather than the spearheading of a new anti-war movement that it really is.

The Israeli war on the Palestinians is showing young people the brutal realities of the American empire and the world it has made.

However, committing or supporting acts of genocide, mass murder and massacres is nothing new for the United States. Arming and providing diplomatic cover for Israel’s war is hardly exceptional.

The US “war on terror” caused the deaths in multiple countries of 4.5 million people, of whom about 900,000 could be attributed to US military operations and their direct impact, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. An estimated 38 million were displaced from their homes.

The multi-year Saudi intervention in the Yemeni civil war in the past decade contributed to “an estimated 233,000 deaths, including 131,000 from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure”, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in late 2020.

Like Israel, the Saudis received US weapons and intelligence support from Washington in their merciless bombing campaigns, resulting in high civilian death tolls and famine conditions.

In 1996, during a 60 Minutes interview, correspondent Lesley Stahl asked then US ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright about an estimated half a million deaths of Iraqi children from US-led international sanctions after the first Gulf war: “I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright replied: “The price, we think, the price is worth it.”

Less than seven months after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, which led to US sanctions against China, the administration of President George H.W. Bush launched Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama to overthrow the dictator Manuel Noriega.

In a little-known episode, the US invaders “indiscriminately bombed” a poor neighbourhood called El Chorrillo. “The assault killed twenty-five hundred to three thousand non-combatant Panamanians and displaced fifteen thousand,” wrote Yale historian Greg Grandin in Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Making of an Imperial Republic.

Like many developing world strongmen, Noriega was a long-time US asset until Washington eventually turned against him.

“He first established contact with the Eisenhower administration … continuing as an asset to the US during the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan presidencies,” Grandin wrote.

As recounted by Princeton political scientist Gary Bass in The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, Washington gave the go-ahead to the Pakistani army in 1971 to launch Operation Searchlight that killed at least 300,000 Bengalis and forced 10 million to flee. The genocide was halted by India’s military intervention, leading to the establishment of Bangladesh.

In 1965-66, with full support from the CIA and the State Department, the anti-communist purge launched by Suharto after his coup against Sukarno cost the lives of up to a million Indonesians.

About 3 million Vietnamese were killed in the war waged by the US in their country.

In The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped our World, journalist Vincent Bevins has argued America’s victory in the Cold War had less to do with its promotion of democracy and free-market capitalism than its ability to run a global network of authoritarian client states and military juntas to suppress and exterminate communists, socialists and social democrats, outside the protected “Western” cores of Europe, Oceania and Japan.

For a full numerical picture, in Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War, Boston College political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke counted a whopping 72 attempts by Washington between 1949 and 1989 to effect regime change against a foreign government. Of these, 29 succeeded in installing US-backed plotters. In at least six cases, a successful coup was launched against a democratically elected government, resulting in a US-allied dictatorship or fascist government.

Xiang Shuchen, a Xidian University philosopher, has reproduced O’Rourke’s full list of America’s global subversion and regime change in the glossary of her new book, Chinese Cosmopolitanism.

So much for America’s professed belief in other people’s national sovereignty and right to self-determination.

No one historically knowledgeable should be surprised that the profound violence that defined the American identity engendered at home needed to find outlets aboard, which in turn came back to haunt its citizens.

In one of the most penetrating observations on this destabilising cycle of societal and state violence of the US and its devastating impact on the rest of the world, the Marxist historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in Main Currents in Modern American History:

“Violence in America antedated industrialism and urban life, and it was initially a product of an expansive rural-commercial economy that in the context of vast distance and a hastily improvised and often changing social structure saw barbarism, violence, and their toleration ritualised into a way of life.

“Slavery consisted of institutionalised inhumanity and an attack on the very fibre of the black’s personal identity and integrity, yet the ultimate restraint on its violence was the value of the black as property.

“Against the Indians, who owned and occupied much coveted land, wholesale slaughter was widely sanctioned as a virtue. That terribly bloody, sordid history, involving countless tens of thousands of lives that neither victims nor executioners can ever enumerate, made violence endemic to the process of continental expansion.

“Violence reached a crescendo against the Indians after the civil war and found a yet bloodier manifestation during the protracted conquest of the Philippines from 1898 until well into the next decade, when anywhere between 200,000 to 600,000 Filipinos were killed in an orgy of racist slaughter that evoked much congratulation and approval from the eminent journals and men of the era who were also much concerned about progress and stability at home.

“From their inception, the great acts of violence and attempted genocide America launched against outsiders seemed socially tolerated, even celebrated. Long before Vietnam, that perverse acceptance of horror helped make possible the dominating experience of our own epoch.”

Kolko wrote these words in 1976. Today, rather than Vietnam, replace it with Palestine, and they are as true as ever about “that perverse acceptance of horror” by “eminent journals and men of the era … much concerned about progress and stability at home.”

Can America’s Gen Z stop these endless cycles of violence unleashed like a plague by their elders onto the rest of the world?

News 2739
  • If you approve of this article, please share it with your friends and kin.
  • Help us expand our reach. Defeat appalling hypocrisy. Lies cost countless lives.
  • We must act together to smash the VILE Western disinformation machine.
  • This is the Lying Machine that protects the greatest evil humanity has ever seen.
  • YOU know what we are talking about.

Things to keep in mind...

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. Meanwhile, fascist ideology and blatant lies also permeate the consciousness of most people in the West. Those in the comfortable top 10%, the "PMCs" (Professional Managerial Class), are especially vulnerable. They support and disseminate such ideas. They are the executors of the actual ruling class' orders, those in the 0.001%, who remain largely invisible. The PMCs are the political class, the media whores, the top military brass, some people in academia, and the "national security/foreign policy" industry honchos. Push back against these unethical, contaminated people with the truth while you can.

AND...where the US Government is at: LYING 24/7

RSS
Follow by Email
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Telegram
WhatsApp
Reddit
window.addEventListener("sfsi_functions_loaded", function() { if (typeof sfsi_widget_set == "function") { sfsi_widget_set(); } });

Print this article
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.

Unfortunately, most people take this site for granted.
DONATIONS HAVE ALMOST DRIED UP… 
PLEASE send what you can today!
JUST USE THE BUTTON BELOW

 

 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS



SCOTT RITTER: Dancing the Khorumi on Rustaveli Avenue

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Scott Ritter

Resize text-+=
Dancing the Khorumi on Rustaveli Avenue

How a dance meant to celebrate Georgian life has been turned into a ballet of national doom

Georgian National Ballet performs the Khorumi


Khorumi, Elene Kintsurashvili, a program analyst with the German Marshall Fund (GMF) (1), wrote in a post where she commented on a video of Georgian youth dancing in a park near Rustaveli Avenue, the main street of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, “is an absolute masterpiece. Since Georgia has seen many wars throughout its history, Khorumi is a call from the past. It serves as a reminder that in order have peace, we must be ready for war.”

Just a quick factcheck for Elene—the last time Georgia went to war, in 2008, it didn’t turn out so well. Possessing a US-trained and -equipped force of several brigades, including dozens of tanks and artillery pieces backed by a robust air force, the Georgian army forcibly entered the breakaway territory of South Ossetia, after then-Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili followed the advice of then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be more “decisive.” The Georgian forces attacked Russian peacekeepers, who had been operating on the soil of South Ossetia since 1993, killing two and wounding five others. The Russian army responded, routing the invading Georgian force in four days. Some 180 Georgian soldiers and security forces were killed, along with 224 civilians. Hundreds of others were wounded.

No one danced the Khorumi then.

The GMF is an ostensibly non-partisan American public policy think tank that claims to promote “cooperation and understanding between North America and the European Union.” But lately it seems to be favoring confrontation and conflict over dialogue and peace. This point was driven home at the recently convened Brussels Forum (a GMF-sponsored event). There, Laura Thornton, who oversees the GMF Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), through which GMF “tracks and analyzes malign internal and external influence operations that target democracies worldwide and builds strategies to thwart them,” declared that, “The time for democracy to go on the offensive has long passed. This is going to require democracies to ally, the way autocracies do. This is going to require disruption and risk-taking.”

The streets of Tbilisi have been transformed into the literal manifestation of GMF-inspired “disruption and risk taking.” The Georgian youth dance the Khorumi in between bouts of a massive protest that have become increasingly violent since they began early last month, when Georgian political opposition parties, together with Western non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the Georgian social movement organizations (SMOs) they sponsor took to the streets in opposition to the so-called “foreign agents law,” which would require these NGO’s and SMO’s to declare the sources of foreign funds that amount to 20% or more of their budgets.

   
Georgian girls dancing theKhorumion Rustaveli Avenue, May 2024

Since these NGO’s and SMO’s are almost exclusively the byproduct of the policies and monies of organizations like the German Marshall Fund, the impact of this law would be that the Georgian public would become aware of who is underwriting the programs that are being fronted by Georgian NGO’s and SMO’s and, perhaps more disturbing to the GMF and similar organizations, what the real policy is behind this money.

Thornton served for more than 20 years in leadership positions overseas at the National Democratic Institute (NDI), which is the Democratic Party’s operational arm of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), created during the administration of President Ronald Reagan to provide an overt bureaucracy to manage what had previously been covert political action operations organized and implemented by the Central Intelligence Agency. In short, the NDI, together with its Republican Party twin, the International Republican Institute (IRI), carry out soft-power regime change operations under the guise of “building democracy.”

   
A Georgian female demonstrator confronts police on the streets of Tbilisi, April 30, 2024

Let there be no doubt: what the GMF, NED and other organizations of their ilk are doing in Georgia today is a regime-change operation designed to topple the ruling Georgia Dream Party. It is a frontal assault on Georgian sovereignty, an insult to all Georgians, and a flagrant betrayal of the very principles of self-determination that underpin the global community in the era of the United Nations.

Georgia Dream has been in power since 2012, when it unseated former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili’s United National Movement Party, and is seeking a fourth term in office. From the very outset, Georgia Dream made it clear that it was pursuing a policy in which Georgia would seek membership in both NATO and the European Union (EU) while maintaining good relations with Russia, its neighbor to the north.

So far, so good.

The problem, however, is that Georgia Dream had “made in Georgia” stamped on it. For the policymakers in Washington, DC and Brussels, whose mission it was to ensure global submission to and compliance with the so-called “rules-based international order” crafted by the United States in the post-Second World War era to impose and sustain American hegemony over the world, “Made in Georgia” was a threat. It implied actual sovereignty, up to and including a desire to live in peace with Georgia’s larger neighbor to the north, Russia. At a time when the United States was using the possibility of NATO and EU membership as bait to lure nations into the all-encompassing gravitational pull of the American Empire, such independence-minded thinking on the part of a potential partner was fatal to the cause and had to be eliminated.

   
Scott will discuss this article and answer audience questions on Ep. 157 ofAsk the Inspector. Check out our new website.

The methodology of Georgia Dream’s execution was a coup disguised as “democracy.” Over the course of the past few decades, Georgia was the recipient of massive amounts of Western financial assistance, much of it in the form of grants provided by Western NGOs passed on to Georgian SMOs. These SMOs were ostensibly created to assist Georgia in building the foundations of “democracy,” which in this case meant meeting European Union (EU) societal norms and standards as a way of facilitating Georgia’s accession into the EU.

However, from the earliest days of the work of the SMOs, there was a clash between the progressive, diversity-inclusive agenda of the SMOs, and traditional conservative Georgian society which served as the political foundation of the Georgia Dream Party. Traditional Georgian values, it seemed, were not as welcoming to the “diversity inclusive” agenda promoted by the EU—in short, many Georgians objected to the mainstreaming of LGTBQ agendas into the Georgian political spectrum.

But there was an even bigger agenda at play. The founder of Georgia Dream was Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Georgian billionaire who made his fortune in Russian metals and banking during the wild, wild west days of the 1990s. Because of his Russian business connections, many in the West viewed Ivanishvili’s intervention in Georgian politics as being an extension of Russian national security policy, something Ivanishvili and his supporters deny. The truth, however, does not matter in a world governed by perceptions. Perceptions can be easily managed, something the Laura Thornton’s of the world know only too well. It became the official policy of the United States and the EU to remove Bidzina Ivanishvili and Georgia Dream from power by carrying out a “soft power” coup orchestrated by Western-funded NGOs and SMOs.

Khorumi Georgia

The methodology employed was simple—to flood the Georgian social and political spectrum with money, buying grass-roots support amongst a Georgian youth who were lured away from traditional Georgian values by the promise of western wealth and power. The youth of Georgia was literally recruited by the GMF and NED and others for the purpose of undermining the political viability of the Georgia Dream Party and its sponsor, Bidzina Ivanishvili. Professional propagandists like Thornton and Elene Kintsurashvili began painting Georgia Dream and Ivanishvili in Russian colors, proclaiming any policy initiative that promulgated the idea of Georgian sovereignty as nothing more than Russian propaganda. In short, any Georgian initiative that did not completely conform to the edicts of Washington, DC and Brussels was attacked as being nothing more than an extension of Russian imperial design. The concept of a free and independent Georgia was quashed by Western elites whose vision of Georgia was limited to a vassal state operating in support of a larger Western policy of containing and subverting Russia. NATO and EU membership was never a realistic proposition. Georgia was simply a tool to be used until broken, after which it would be discarded.

The Georgians who had become addicted to the opiate of western financial largesse, however, were blind to this reality. They allowed Georgia to be turned into a caricature of its real self, a nation defined by a flag which was never allowed to fly alone, but always alongside (or underneath) that of the European Union. The Georgian flag stopped being a symbol of a free and independent nation, and instead became a clothing accessory, something to be draped around the shoulder, like a scarf or cape.

Something to be cast upon the ground, like a carpet, so that ignorant Georgian youth could debase their culture by dancing the Khorumi around its edges, their feet kicking up dirt and dust that covered the once brilliant white and red colors of their national symbol, dulling them to a dirty grey.  

Georgia Dream was cognizant of these western designs. While enjoying a comfortable parliamentary majority, the leadership of the Georgia Dream Party understood that this majority could collapse in the face of a concerted effort by the West and its paid Georgian minions to undermine the credibility of the Georgia Dream Party in the lead up to Parliamentary elections scheduled for October 26, 2024.

The situation for Georgia and the Georgian Dream Party became dire following the February 2022 decision by the Russian government to initiate what it called a Special Military Operation (SMO) against Ukraine. Like Georgia, Ukraine had been extended an invitation to join NATO in 2008. Like Georgia, Ukraine had been lured away from the Russian orbit by a promise of EU membership. The West finally got what it wanted with Ukraine—an actual shooting war with Russia where NATO could buffer itself using a non-NATO proxy. In short, NATO could weaken Russia economically and militarily without directly assuming the risks normally associated with war. Ukraine would do the dying. All NATO had to do was supply Ukraine with weapons and money.

As a prospective NATO and EU member, Georgia was expected to fall fully in line with the strategic goals and objectives of its Western masters. But the Georgia Dream Party, ever cognizant of the need to serve the needs of the Georgian people first and foremost, balked at joining in with the sanctioning of the Russian economy. This decision turned out to be extremely beneficial to the Georgian economy and, by extension, the Georgian people—at a time when the economy of Europe was contracting because of the blowback brought on by the sanctions imposed on Russia, the Georgian economy enjoyed two consecutive years of 10% growth.

As the US/NATO/EU master plan for the strategic defeat of Russia faltered on both the global economic stage and on the battlefields of Ukraine, Georgia was placed under increasing pressure to join in on both fronts, sanctioning Russia while opening up a second front against Russia in order to divert Russian military resources away from the Ukraine front. The Georgia Dream Party resisted both, desiring instead to maintain continued economic growth while avoiding a suicidal conflict with Russia that could only end in the physical ruination of the Georgian nation.

For the Georgia Dream Party, it was more beneficial for the Georgian youth to be dancing the Kartuli, the symbol of Georgian romance and marriage, than the Khorumi.

To save Georgia from becoming a wasteland like Ukraine, Georgia Dream sought to level the political playing field inside Georgia by requiring organizations which are deemed to be pursuing the interests of a foreign power to register as such for the purpose of providing full transparency as to the motives and loyalties of such to the Georgian people. For the purposes of setting the bar regarding what constituted “pursuing the interests of a foreign power,” the law being pushed by Georgia Dream set as the benchmark the standard of 20% of the total income received by a given organization over the course of a calendar year as being derived from foreign sources. The proposed law did not in any way restrict the activities of any organization so designated—the purpose of the law was to provide full transparency for the Georgian people so they could be cognizant of the fact that issues and programs being pursued by so-called “Georgian” NGO’s and SMO’s were in reality reflective of foreign designs that may not coincide with the policies of the Georgian government.

As soon as the Georgia Dream put this new law on the floor of the parliament, the Western-funded political opposition parties, backed by their Western-funded NGO’s and SMO’s, took to the streets of Tbilisi in protest. At the same time, Georgian mercenaries fighting in Ukraine under the banner of the so-called “Georgian Legion” began preparations to return to Georgia, threatening to add a military dimension to the protests that could lead to civil war and the violent overthrow of the Georgian Government. Georgia Dream, faced with a crisis that it had not anticipated, withdrew the transparency law from consideration.

This retreat in the face of adversity may have saved the Republic of Georgia from catastrophe, but it was seen as a sign of weakness by the Georgian political opposition and their Western paymasters. As a result, even more money began flowing into Georgia for the purpose of accelerating the transformation of Georgian civil society, the end goal of which would be to empower the Georgian opposition to prevail in the October 2024 elections. Once Georgia Dream was removed from power, a new Georgian government would immediately join in on the sanctioning of Russia. More ominously, the Georgian borders would be opened to the Georgian Legion and other Western-backed mercenaries, who would join with the Georgian military to open a second front against Russia by attacking the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Faced with this threat, the Georgia Dream Party had no choice but to reintroduce the legislation on transparency on foreign influence. This time, however, Georgia Dream understood the scope and scale of the opposition it would face. Like any good ruling party, it counted the votes before it introduced the legislation, ensuring that it had enough votes not only to pass the bill, but also override any potential veto by the Geogian President, Salome Zourobichvili, a former French diplomat who had joined firmly with the goals and objectives of the Georgian political opposition and their US and European masters.

BELOW: This British video clip (SkyNews), run on Georgia's own pro-West President, Salome Zourabichvili YouTube platform, illustrates the solid, coordinated Western wall of propaganda supporting the new NATO-instigated Maidan in Georgia. The images intend to show the police as committing dastardly violence against the "innocent demonstrators" (patsies really for the Western regime change puppeteers), but the reality is precisely the opposite. These protesters are throwing Molotov cocktails at the police, rocks and even shooting bullets at them. If American cops confronted such a demonstration, the reaction would quickly turn very bloody.


The problem presented by President Zourobichvili was not a minor one. She served as the commander in chief of the Georgian armed forces, which over the past quarter century had been trained and equipped by the United States and NATO. On April 30, she addressed the Georgian army on its 33rd anniversary. “I address you today because dark forces are at work, attempting to subjugate a country that could not be brought to its knees by fueling ethnic conflicts, igniting confrontation between brothers, or through direct war and occupation,” the Georgian President intoned. “Today, once again, they seek to divide society.”

For over 30 years, this country and its society have been united around one goal.

The European perspective is the only path to our independence, sovereignty, identity, diversity, tolerance, peace, and development.

Over these 33 years, there have been many crises, passions, and various political movements, but no one has ever questioned this sole goal.

The Georgian Army knows best who the enemy is and who is not – who tried to destroy us and who helped us shape modern defense forces. The Georgian Army knows why we participated in international missions and what contribution we made to global security.

Today, some want to portray our 30-year-old allies and partners as some unknown and faceless party of war dragging Georgia into confrontation – this is a great harm.

Irakli Kobakhidze, the Prime Minister of Georgia (and a member of the Georgia Dream Party), followed the Georgian President on the stage. “Mr. Speaker, Mr. Mayor of the capital, Mr. Minister of Defense, Mr. Commander of the Defense Forces, generals, officers, sergeants, privates, and corporals, esteemed guests, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “welcome.”

In my greeting, I deliberately did not mention the previous speaker [president]. I will not allow the Georgian army to react to her political statements, completely unsuitable for today and the high position of the president. The person who is still legally called the president of Georgia is simply a traitor to this country in the truest sense of the word. She directly betrays Georgia’s national interests.

In short, while the streets of Tbilisi were filled with foreign-paid agitators resisting a law which would expose the level to which they had sold the Republic of Georgia out to the foreign masters, the President of Georgia appealed to the Georgian Army to be prepared to intervene on behalf of these very same foreign parties—the so-called “European perspective,” and those who had helped build the modern Georgian military.

And the Georgian Prime Minister called her a traitor for uttering such words—in front of the Georgian army.

Georgia has never witnessed such a dangerous spectacle.

Fortunately for the Georgian nation, the leadership of the Georgian armed forces is well-versed in the concepts of civil-military relations and will not allow the military to be drawn into a domestic political dispute. The problem, however, resides with the junior officers and junior enlisted soldiers, who are more susceptible to the allure of Western promises and money. If the ongoing protests against the transparency law escalate into the kind of violence that was witnessed at the Maidan in Kiev in February 2014, the temptation to break ranks and join the insurrectionists might be too strong.

And then Georgia will be once again confronted with the horrific reality of a civil war.

This is, of course, the master plan of the Georgian opposition and their western overlords.

Georgians should never forget their history.

In April 1989, the stretch of Rustaveli Avenue in front of the Parliament was filled with pro-independence demonstrators, many of whom were young women like those who danced the Khorumi today. The protests started peacefully, but within days began to grow out of control. The Soviet Army was called in, and on the morning of April 8, moved in, violently dispersing the demonstrators. Nineteen Georgians were killed—17 of whom were young women—and more than 100 others injured in what has become known as “the Tbilisi Massacre.”

   
Georgian women weep in the aftermath of the “Tbilisi Massacre,” April 8, 1989

Eto Buziashvili is part of this political opposition. She had previously served in the Georgian Ministry of Interior, where she was involved in issues pertaining to confronting Russia. After Georgia Dream came to power, Ms. Buziashvili left government and took up residency with the Atlantic Council, where she, in her own words, oversees “influence operations, foreign influence, and social media manipulation.”

Eto Buziashvili reposted Elene Kintsurashvili’s video of Georgian youth dancing the Khorumi near Rustaveli Avenue. “Protest level: dancing a war dance,” she wrote.

A war dance.

“Young Georgians perform Khorumi, a traditional dance of Georgian warriors, waving EU and Georgian flags,” Buziashvili gushed from the safety of her Atlantic Council office. “Frankly, this is my [favorite] Georgian dance, incorporating elements of military intelligence, war, and the celebration of victory.”

The high status of the Khorumi in modern Georgian culture resulted in it being officially named a “monument of intangible culture” by the Ministry of Culture and Monuments Protection of Georgia in 2013.

When performed on stage, the Khorumi depicts a battle scene divided into episodes that are linked to a singular storyline—the search for a place to set up camp, surveillance of the enemy, the attack, and ultimately victory and celebration.

The Khorumi is an extremely complicated dance which, when performed by trained professionals, leaves the audience enraptured by its majesty and power.

It is the dance of warriors.

When performed on Rustaveli Avenue by young Georgian women, theKhorumi becomes a mockery of everything the dance, and the Georgian people and nation, stand for.

A Georgian war dance, performed by young women untrained in the art of war, who are genuflecting to the banner of the European Union, all the while disgracing their own flag by laying in the grass, as if thrown to the ground in defeat.

As performed by these misguided youth, the Khorumi ceases being a symbol of Georgian national virility, and instead becomes little more than the dance of the dead.

(1) The GMF is a US-controlled power projection tool designed to operate with and behind "transatlantic cover". Officially, as a "good NGO", fully integrated with NATO's strategic goals, it purports to work for the old hypocritical values supposedly championed by US foreign policy (used to justify all its hegemonic interventions): freedom and democracy. Its mission reads:

GMF strives to champion democratic values and the transatlantic alliance by strengthening civil society, forging bold and innovative policy ideas, and developing a new generation of leaders to tackle global challenges. GMF delivers hope by upholding the dignity of the individual and defending freedom in the spirit of the Marshall Plan.

The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, transatlantic organization headquartered in Washington, DC, with offices in Ankara, Belgrade, Berlin, Brussels, Bucharest, Paris, and Warsaw.

Donate now

News 131
  • YOU WILL NEVER SEE THIS KIND OF EXPOSÉ ON THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA.
  • Nor on any channel controlled by the Democrats\' Fake Left. Not on Maddow. Not on NPR. Not on PBS.
  • Or any media controlled by the complicit Republican party and its many devious branches.

Things to keep in mind...

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. Meanwhile, fascist ideology and blatant lies also permeate the consciousness of most people in the West. Those in the comfortable top 10%, the "PMCs" (Professional Managerial Class), are especially vulnerable. They support and disseminate such ideas. They are the executors of the actual ruling class' orders, those in the 0.001%, who remain largely invisible. The PMCs are the political class, the media whores, the top military brass, some people in academia, and the "national security/foreign policy" industry honchos. Push back against these unethical, contaminated people with the truth while you can.

AND...where the US Government is at: LYING 24/7

RSS
Follow by Email
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Telegram
WhatsApp
Reddit
window.addEventListener("sfsi_functions_loaded", function() { if (typeof sfsi_widget_set == "function") { sfsi_widget_set(); } });

Print this article
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.

Unfortunately, most people take this site for granted.
DONATIONS HAVE ALMOST DRIED UP… 
PLEASE send what you can today!
JUST USE THE BUTTON BELOW

 

 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS



Gaza War: Deceptions, Distortions, Misperceptions. What are the Relevant Actual Facts?

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

By Charles Pierce

Resize text-+=
Gaza War: Deceptions, Distortions, Misperceptions. What are the Relevant Actual Facts?
 Dateline:  March 29, 2024

All of Gaza has been systematically reduced to countless tons of rubble. Under which lie probably tens of thousands of unrecognised Palestinian martyrs. The IDF indiscriminate bombing of a virtually defenceless population has included civilian homes, hospitals, schools, churches, universities, and vital health-supporting installations. (Photo:Mondoweiss)

Responses to the current violence in, and from, Gaza vary as follows:

  • Israeli leaders, much of the Israeli public, and Zionists in the West, thirsting for vengeance, call for genocidal mass murder and/or wholesale ethnic-cleansing operations against the people of Gaza.
  • Many liberal leftists, evidently obsessive to distance themselves from all U.S.-designated “terrorists” and other alleged enemies of “democracy,” always preface any condemnation of Israeli crimes against the Palestinians with an absolute condemnation of the October 7 attack against Israel by resistance forces in Gaza. Thusly, they purvey a false moral equivalence between the violence of the oppressed and that of their oppressor.
  • A few partisans of the Palestinian cause have asserted that all Israeli suffering from the October 7 attack by Gaza resistance fighters was deserved, thereby exhibiting a lack of recognition and empathy for the innocent victims thereof. In fact, innocent victims are generally inevitable in war, even in just and necessary wars, but nevertheless deserving of sympathetic recognition.
  • Unfortunately, after decades of racist distortions by Zionists and supportive imperial Western states, and given hard-to-avoid reliance upon a dominant and biased Western mainstream media, even consistent supporters of the Palestinian cause sometimes take, as fact, notions which have become generally accepted as “true” (unaware that critical investigation may disprove it). Consequently, mistakes can occur when there is rush to judgment and publication without questioning and scrutinizing so as to ascertain what are the relevant actual facts.

    ROOTS OF THE CONFLICT. The current Gaza War can be fully and accurately understood only when placed in the context of Jewish and Palestinian history.

    Defining Palestine. Prior to the 16th century BCE, the territory on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean was populated by small Canaanite city-states. In the 10th and 9thcenturies BCE, three small kingdoms (Israel, Judah, and Philistia) occupied the territory south of the Lebanon. From the Assyrian conquest (8th century BCE) until 1917, the territory was nearly always under the rule of a succession of tributary empires, the Ottoman being the last. Throughout those centuries, various episodes of oppression and revolt, as well as opportunities in other places, resulted in a large Judean/Jewish diaspora. After the Roman Empire made trinitarian Christianity the established religion (4th century CE), the population in Palestine began increasingly to convert (from Judaism, Samaritanism, paganism, other forms of Christianity, etc.) to the established faith. Similarly, following conquest by the first Islamic empire, the population gradually began converting to Islam, until it was more than 80% Muslim by the mid-19th century. Imperial Britain, which conquered the area in 1917, was given a League of Nations Mandate over Palestine, specifically defined as the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Since then, the term “Palestine,” despite Zionist objections (that a larger expanse of land is rightfully theirs or alternatively that there is no such country as Palestine and no such people as “Palestinians”), has generally meant the Mandate territory “from the river to the sea.”

    Christian procession in Bethlehem c. 1920. [Source: middleeasteye.net]

    “Jewish problem”? European Jews had experienced centuries of persecution (segregation into ghettos, abusive impositions, and pogroms) under medieval Christian European autocracies. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jewish activists responded to the most recent pogroms and other persecutions in two opposing ways: Whereas anti-racist secularists (liberal democrats and socialists) strove, along with like-minded gentiles, for equal rights for Jews in their home countries, Zionists, defining Jewish presence in gentile countries as a “Jewish problem,”[1] embraced a racial conception of Jews and refused to do so.[2] They sought instead to remove Europe’s Jews to colonial settlements in Palestine where they intended to eventually displace the indigenous population in order to establish a “Jewish state.”[3]

    Resistance to Judeophobia? Until World War II (1939-45), Zionist organizations routinely colluded with Judeophobe governments (including Nazi Germany) in facilitating Jewish removal (with preference for emigration to Palestine).[4] Moreover, in the face of extreme persecution in Nazi Germany (1933-39), the Zionist Organization (formed in 1897) discouraged efforts, as at the Évian Conference (1938), to obtain refuges for persecuted European Jews in countries (United States, Canada, Australia, Latin America, etc.) other than Palestine.

    Jewish-Arab conflict. Unlike in much of Europe, Palestinian Jews (about 4% of the population in 1880) lived amicably with their Muslim and Christian neighbors until the in-migration of European Zionist colonizers in the early 20th century. Zionist settlement was sponsored by some European and American Jewish capitalists who provided money for land acquisitions (generally from absentee landlords who owned most of the arable land). The Zionists then evicted the indigenous Arab tenant farmers, thereby violating the traditional rights of the latter. Moreover, the Zionist sponsoring organization (Jewish Agency) and its landholding body (Jewish National Fund) required that Jewish employers hire only Jews and prohibited the sale of any Jewish-owned land to Arabs. Such racial discrimination was standard practice within the Zionist settlements, and it quite predictably provoked Palestinian Arab resentment against the Zionist settlers. [See UNISPAL: The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1947 (Part I) ~ §§ V and VI]

    Jews in Jerusalem 1895 (Wiki).  Zionist settlers in Israel during the era of the Ottoman Empire. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

    Imperialism. After other colonialist powers had turned down Zionist applications, imperial Britain decided, with its Balfour Declaration (in 1917), to sponsor the Zionist project of establishing a European Jewish colonial settler state in Palestine.[5] Britain visualized said state as developing into a useful protectorate [UNISPAL: The Origins … (Part I) ~ § II] through which to project British imperial and commercial power over a part of the world in which British capital and empire were already heavily invested (notably in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company [now BP Inc.], Shell Oil, and the Suez Canal).

    Democratic governance denied. Throughout its (1917-48) rule over Palestine, Britain deferred to the Zionists by refusing to meet its obligations (pursuant to Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant), which required the Mandatory power to respect the wishes of the country’s population and to prepare said country for independence by establishing a democratically elected representative governing body [UNISPAL: The Origins … (Part I) ~ §§ IV-IX]. Why? Because such body would undoubtedly have opposed continued moves to transform Palestine into a Zionist nation-state and would have demanded an end to unconstrained Zionist immigration, Zionist land acquisitions, evictions of Arab tenant farmers, and racially discriminatory employment practices.

    killing thousands of Palestinian Arabs. Those militias would, in 1948, be constituted as the Israeli army.

    Partition [UNISPAL: The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1947 (Part II) ~ §§ I-IV]. The then 57-member United Nations (UN), dominated mostly by European and American states ruled by white and/or Eurocentric* elites, proposed (in 1947) a partition of Palestine (by then with a population 32% Jewish and 68% Arab) such that a “Jewish state” would have 55% of the territory, a Palestinian Arab state would have 42%, and 3% around Jerusalem would be under UN administration. Moreover, the “Jewish state” was to rule over a huge Arab minority (more than 40% of Palestinian Arabs), while the “Arab state” would have almost no Jews. Representative democracy was evidently deemed unacceptable where Arabs were the majority, but acceptable where Jews (mostly recent immigrant colonists from Europe) were the majority. [* Note: Although most Latin American countries’ populations were majority non-white (Indigenous, mestizo, etc.), in most of those, the ruling elites belonged to racial groups (white and/or mestizo) which identified with their European ethnic heritage.]

    forcibly expelled more than 80% of the Palestinians (directly and/or through terrorist threat) from territory which came under Israeli control. Four Arab states intervened militarily, by using mostly ill-trained and poorly equipped military forces in ineffectual defense of the Palestinians. The Zionist state confiscated all of the properties of the expelled Palestinians (whom it barred from returning) and nearly 40% of the landholdings of the Palestinians who remained in its territory. It also subjected the latter to repressive military rule for the next 18 years.[6]

    Later conquests. Israel launched surprise wars of conquest (1956 and 1967). U.S. pressure forced it to give up its 1956 conquests (Gaza and Sinai) and to abort its planned seizure of the West Bank and parts of Syria and Lebanon. U.S. acquiescence, in 1967, allowed Israel to seize much the same territories which it had wanted to annex in 1956. Subsequent Israeli rule (over Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Syria’s Golan, and Lebanon’s Sheba’a Farms) since 1967 has subjected their Arab populations to persistent violations of human rights, continuing to the present day.

occupied a swath of southern Lebanon until persistent armed Lebanese resistance (by Hezbollah, Amal, and units of the Lebanese Army) induced its withdrawal (in 2000).

Israeli troops in Lebanon, 1982. [Source: jstribune.com]

Holocaust weaponized. Ever since the Axis War (1939-45), Zionists and their supporters have manipulated popular sympathy for the Jewish victims of the European holocaust in order to obtain support for Zionism. They speak as though Jews were the only victims of the deliberate Nazi mass murder (systematic mass killing plus intentional starvation programs in occupied territory and POW camps). In fact, the actual death toll was more than 17 million (at least 11 million Slavs, some 5.9 million Jews, and probably more than 250,000 Romani). Zionists and supporters insist that the world must atone for the genocide of the six million Jews by granting them Palestine for a “Jewish state,” but they ignore the fact that justice would require any such compensation to be borne by Christian Europe, which perpetrated and/or permitted the genocide, not by the Palestinian Arabs, who had no part in it.

Anti-Semitism? Zionists and their supporters routinely attempt to silence opponents of Zionism and critics of Israeli crimes against humanity by smearing critics as purveyors of “anti-Semitism,” the word which Zionists and their allies use exclusively to mean Judeophobia (hatred of Jews), even though the Arab victims of Zionism are also Semitic in language and ancestral origin. When their critics are Jewish, as many are, Zionists routinely disparage and dismiss them as “self-hating Jews.” As Zionists obsessively smear their anti-racist critics, they generally give much less attention to actual Judeophobes. With growing popular opposition to Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, states abetting those crimes have increasingly enacted laws criminalizing free-speech activities in support of Palestinians. Those enactments include prohibitions against boycott and divestment (BDS) participation and laws defining opposition to Zionism as “anti-Semitism,” using the Zionist IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition which includes, as “anti-Semitism,” opposition to the existence of Israel as a Jewish supremacist state.

HAMAS. Israel, its Western allies, and their mainstream media portray Hamas as a “genocidal” “terrorist” organization. Relevant facts, listed below, mostly go unreported, distorted, or falsified.

Origin. Hamas originated (1987) in Palestine as a transformation of Mujama al-Islamiya, which had been formed (1973) as a Palestinian affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas, unlike the Brotherhood, embraced a Palestinian national liberationist political orientation.

progressive secularism of the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO]. However, Western alliance and Israeli motivations for condemning Hamas have nothing to do with its Salafist leanings; they are solely on account of its militant resistance to Zionist oppression of the Palestinians. In fact, Western supporters of Israel make no complaints where autocratic Arab states (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar), allied to the West, impose patriarchal and theocratic policies similar to those embraced in Brotherhood doctrine. It must be noted that Hamas’s doctrine and actual practice (since obtaining governing power) have been inconsistent. For example, in Gaza, a local faction (along with some rival Islamist groups), has periodically attempted to impose the Brotherhood interpretation of sharia law (including hijab) through religious coercions and persecutions, in defiance of the contrary policy prescribed by Hamas’s more permissive leadership. In fact, said leadership (though still embracing widely held patriarchal views on the role of women) has not decreed any such imposition.

Muslim Brotherhood versus PLO. Gaza (along with the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Syria’s Golan, and Lebanon’s Sheba’a Farms) had been, and remain, under repressive Israeli occupation since Israel’s 1967 war of conquest. From its founding, Mujama al-Islamiya (as a Salafi Islamist organization) competed with the secular PLO for support among Palestinians, and their competition sometimes erupted into violent clashes. Israel exploited that antagonism by enabling the activities of the Islamist organization as an alternative to the far-more-popular PLO which then represented the militant Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and persecution.

Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”). Ongoing Israeli repression (land seizures for illegal settlements, arbitrary detentions, torture of detainees, days-long curfews, indiscriminate killings, deportations, home demolitions, etc.) provoked a spontaneous mass resistance, the First Intifada (1987-93), which included strikes, boycotts, mass protests, road-blocks, use of stone-throwing and petrol bombs against Israeli police using violence to suppress protests, and other acts of civil disobedience.

For the first year of the Intifada, there was a near-totally-adhered-to policy (prescribed by a soon-established PLO-influenced local leadership) of refraining from lethal attacks against Israelis. Nevertheless, Israel responded to the Intifada with its “iron fist” policy including lethal force, ultimately killing 1,087 Palestinians including 240 children.

Israeli soldiers and protesters in Gaza during the First Intifada in 1987. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

Oslo peace process (1991-93). When the Fatah-dominated PLO agreed, in the Oslo negotiations, to recognize the “Jewish state” on 78% of Palestine in return for duplicitous promises of negotiations toward the establishment of a Palestinian state in the 22% of Palestine then classified as Israeli-occupied territories, it effectively abandoned the demand for the human rights of all Palestinians throughout Palestine and in the diaspora. In fact, no Israeli government has ever been willing to accept a genuinely independent and sovereign Palestinian state in any part of Palestine, or to grant equal rights to Palestinian Arabs in any part of the territory, or to permit the return of Palestinian refugees.

The Oslo agreements produced the Fatah-dominated Palestinian National Authority (PNA). a quasi-government for the West Bank and Gaza, which has devolved into a corrupted client regime with no effective capacity to prevent Israeli land grabs (which every Israeli government has actively encouraged since the 1967 conquest), and the many other persecutions of the Palestinians whom it purports to serve. The Palestinian response to Oslo was divided with Hamas and allies (including PIJ), along with some factions of the PLO, refusing to concede legitimacy to the Zionist state. Whether we like it or not, Hamas soon thereafter became the leading organized force of the Palestinian resistance (which is why it won all-Palestine legislative elections in 2006).

Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Shimon Peres signing the Oslo Accords with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat standing behind him on his right. Bill Clinton is behind him and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is to Clinton’s left. [Source: la-croix.com]

out-of-context interpretations of references to ancient Islamic quotations pertaining to specific Jewish communities which were then at war with the Muslim community. Moreover, its revised Charter (2017) drops the aforementioned Judeophobic tropes and clearly states (Article 16) that its fight is against Zionist oppressors and not against Jews in general. While Hamas believes that all of Palestine ought to be governed by an officially Islamic state, it embraces the Qur’anic obligation (sura 2:62) to respect the rights of peaceful non-Muslims (including resident Jews) to live and prosper in the land as long as they are not oppressing others.

“Terrorism.” Until Israeli forces killed more than 20 unarmed Palestinians protesting the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre of 29 Muslim worshipers (1994) by an Arab-hating Israeli extremist, Hamas policy was to avoid targeting Israeli civilians. Since then, Hamas, like Israel, has permitted its forces to attack any enemy target, civilian or military, whereas the Zionist state, throughout its existence, has routinely engaged in such indiscriminate killings of Palestinians. Moreover, Hamas has repeatedly offered to end violent attacks upon Israelis conditional upon Israeli reciprocation which has never been forthcoming for very long. In Israel and its Western enablers, Hamas attacks are always branded as “terrorism,” while far more massive Israeli violence against Palestinians (including unarmed civilians of both sexes and all ages) never is.

A large Hamas rally dominated by replica of a M75 long-range rocket model captures the attention of thousands in 2012.

Equating to the Islamic State (IS) or al-Qaeda (AQ). In 2008, a small group of AQ sympathizers organized in Gaza as Jund Ansar Allah (JAA). They denounced Hamas: for being “too lenient” by not enforcing Sharia law, and for being “no different than a secular nationalist state.” JAA also executed violent attacks (including bombings) against those Gazans whom they deemed to be in violation of Islamist morality, and they declared an “Islamic Emirate” in Gaza. Hamas then took forceful action to suppress the JAA. Hamas has likewise opposed other Salafi-jihadist Gazan groups which embrace AQ or IS. Whereas AQ and IS oppose democratic elections and pragmatic political compromises, Hamas embraces them. Whereas the former make war on alleged apostates and infidels and condemn Hamas for its tolerance, Hamas, in accordance with the Qur’an, embraces (though some local supporters have sometimes acted otherwise) an acceptance of respectful religious diversity. Despite the actual facts, Israel and its apologists persist in propagating lies to equate Hamas with al-Qaeda et al.

Democracy. Hamas surprised Israel and the U.S. by fairly winning Palestinian legislative elections (January 2006) and thereby obtaining the right to lead the PNA. Obstruction by Israel and the West has prevented any subsequent Palestinian election. Israel and its Western allies responded to the 2006 election outcome by demanding that Hamas abandon its commitment to fundamental Palestinian human rights by legitimizing Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

That demand was designed to produce a Hamas refusal, so that such refusal could then be used as a pretext for acts designed to cripple Hamas efforts to govern. The U.S. then pressured PNA President Abbas (of Fatah) to dismiss the fairly elected Hamas administration in defiance of the will of the Palestinian electorate. The Hamas Prime Minister (Ismail Haniyeh) attempted to overcome the hostility by asking Fatah to participate in a unity government (which Fatah refused), and by inducing Hamas ministers to formally resign their memberships in Hamas, all to no avail. Moreover, Abbas, under U.S. pressure, provoked a power struggle (in Gaza) over control of security services in a move to undermine and marginalize the Hamas administration. The resulting violent conflict ended with Hamas firmly in control in Gaza, and with Fatah in partial control in the West Bank, most of which was and continues to be under Israeli military rule.

Peace proposals. Hamas has repeatedly (since 2006) proposed peace through hudna(Islamic decade-long renewable truce resolving issues upon which current agreement can be obtained while negotiating upon remaining issues in an effort to reach a final peace agreement). Hamas’s proposed truce terms would include provisional acceptance by Hamas of Israel as an existential current reality, in return for a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories with East Jerusalem as its capital (same as PLO except that Hamas would not concede legitimacy to the ethnic cleansings of 1948 and 1967 nor to the racial supremacist and apartheid character of the Zionist state). Hamas would continue to seek eventual acceptance by Israel of all Palestinian civil and human rights (the effect of which would be to end its apartheid, its ethnic cleansing, its other persecutions, and its continuation as a “Jewish state”). Israel, making Hamas’s refusal to give de jurerecognition of the racist apartheid “Jewish state” as its pretext, has consistently refused to negotiate toward any peace agreement.

GAZA. Since the end of the Second Intifada (2005), Hamas has repeatedly sought and, when possible, entered cease-fire agreements with Israel. In fact, since seeking a role in government, Hamas evidently took seriously its obligation to serve the people of Palestine. Other resistance groups, often in defiance of Hamas, have sometimes committed small-scale violations of cease-fires, generally in response to Israeli violence. Whereas Hamas has striven to preserve cease-fires, Israel has repeatedly perpetrated major violations, thereby provoking resumption of violent conflict.

Israeli response to 2006 election outcome. Israel and all significant Palestinian resistance factions (including Hamas) agreed (February and March 2005) to a cease-fire under which the resistance would cease violent attacks upon Israelis on condition that Israel cease military operations against the resistance organizations. Despite Hamas having respected that cease-fire agreement, Israel responded to Hamas’s electoral victory (January 2006) by imposing, upon Gaza, a suffocating economic blockade (an act of war as well as an act of collective punishment which is illegal under international law). That blockade ultimately included denial of access to one-third of Gaza’s already limited arable land and 85% of its fishing areas. Moreover, Israel blatantly violated the cease-fire by assassinating (June 2006) the Hamas-appointed security chief (Jamal Abu Samhadana). Hamas responded by resuming attacks against Israel, which then commenced its “Operation Summer Rains” bombing of Gaza. Death toll: 416 (mostly non-combatant) Gaza Palestinians and 11 Israelis.

Hamas rally before 2006 elections

Hamas rally before 2006 elections

“Cast Lead.” A mediated six-month cease-fire ended (November 4, 2008) with an Israeli raid which killed several Palestinians in Gaza. Resistance organizations responded with rocket fire into Israel. Israel then commenced “Operation Cast Lead,” bombing Gaza in December and invading in January. Israeli war crimes included using Palestinian children as human shields and use of white phosphorus weapons with indifference to its horrific injuries to civilians (both being war crimes under international law). Amnesty International and other independent investigators found no substantiation for Israeli allegations that Hamas made a practice of using civilians as human shields, or used health-care facilities as bases for military operations. Death toll: 1,400 Palestinians (85% non-combatants), 13 Israelis.

Destroyed building in Rafah, January 12, 2009. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

“Returning Echo.” Israel not only refused to lift its suffocating economic siege of Gaza, it assassinated (March 9, 2012, by air strike) the secretary-general (Zuhair al-Qaisi) of the Popular Resistance Committees (then the third-largest armed resistance group in Gaza), thereby provoking retaliatory rocket attacks by resistance groups in Gaza. Israel then commenced its “Operation Returning Echo” (consisting of additional murderous air strikes). Death toll: 28 Palestinians, no Israelis.

Hamas demonstration (2006)

Zuhair al-Qaisi [Source: sysoon.com]

“Pillar of defense.” Repeated Israeli attacks (from July 2012) upon Palestinian fishermen, farmers and other civilians provoked some additional clashes. Hamas and PIJ proposed (Nov 12) discussions to establish a cease-fire. Two days later, Israel assassinated Hamas’s military chief (Ahmed Jabari) in Gaza, thereby provoking an escalation of attacks from both sides. Israeli forces followed with “Operation Pillar of Defense,” a massive bombardment striking some 1,500 sites in Gaza (including residential apartment buildings). Death toll: 174 Palestinians (60% non-combatants) and six Israelis.

Ahmed Jabari [Source: theworld.org]

These attacks provoked rocket attacks from Gaza by PIJ and other resistance groups, attacks which Israel then used as a pretext for further attacks and intensification of the blockade. Despite all of that, Hamas complied with the cease-fire agreement and acted, with some success, to minimize attacks by other resistance groups. After PNA President Abbas agreed to include Hamas in a unity government (formed June 2, 2014), Israel—opposed to any unified Palestinian leadership—acted to destroy it. Specifically, Israel stepped up its attacks upon Palestinians, thereby provoking more rocket launches from Gaza. Ultimately, Hamas, unable to persuade armed resistance forces to desist from retaliatory rocket attacks against Israel, abandoned (in early July) the already-ineffective cease-fire. Israel then responded (July 8, 2014) with its (“Operation Protective Edge”) ground invasion and bombing of Gaza. Death toll: 2,300 Gazans (65% civilian) and 73 Israelis (all but five being soldiers).

“Guardian of the Walls.”Multiple Israeli provocations (April and May 2021) in Jerusalem [including ethnic-cleansing confiscations of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem (in violation of international law), unimpeded settler violence, police harassment of Palestinian residents, and police invasions and denials of Muslim access at the Al Aqsa Mosque] provoked Hamas and PIJ rocket fire into Israel. Israel responded (May 16-21, 2021) with a bombardment of Gaza (“Operation Guardian of the Walls”). Death toll: 256 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. 72,000 Gazans were displaced by the Israeli bombing.

Scene following Israeli airstrike in Operation Protective Edge (Wiki)

persecutions and violations of Palestinian human rights: impunity for settler attacks upon West Bank Palestinians; stepped up grabs of land and water rights; dispossessions and expulsions; arbitrary detentions; increased killings of unarmed Palestinians; blocking of Muslim access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque; continued assassinations of resistance leaders; etc. Finally, Hamas responded with its “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” (October 7, 2023) against Israeli forces in areas around Gaza.

ATROCITIES? The nature of warfare is such that it would be unrealistic to presume that none of the October 7 Gaza fighters (some of whom were not affiliated with either Hamas or PIJ) committed excesses in violation of Hamas’s rules of engagement or in the heat of the moment. That said, lurid sensationalized allegations of mass atrocities by those Gaza fighters are fundamentally false (refuted below and in the noted sources).

From the beginning the Western media has been 100% at the service of the Israeli narrative—no matter how false. The British even outdid the Americans. Their lies were constantly repeated at the highest levels of power, as Joe Biden soon demonstrated. That posture has scarcely changed, despite a modest improvement.

Numbers and identities. “1,400” “innocent” Israelis murdered (October 7) by Hamas? In fact, around 200 of the dead were apparently Gazan resistance fighters, and the actual number of Israeli dead as acknowledged by Israel has been revised down to “around 1,200.” Moreover, of the 1,133 actually identified and listed by Israel, 369 (32%) were soldiers, police and other armed security personnel (most of whom were enforcing the Gaza blockade and/or had offensive or supportive roles in Israeli attacks upon Palestinians in Gaza). Further, at least 421 (another 37%) of the 764 listed as “civilians” were of the age (20 to 40) at which most Israelis are obligated to be military reservists, and some of those were killed (often while resisting capture) at kibbutz[es] (which are constituted as militarized settlements).

Killed by whom? A great many of the Israeli civilian dead were killed in crossfire, others (including many of the dead at the music festival) by indiscriminate Israeli air attack failing to distinguish Israelis from Gazan resistance fighters, and some deliberately by Israeli forces to prevent their becoming captives in Gaza.

Decapitated babies? Israeli babies and toddlers decapitated by Hamas fighters? Absolutely false allegation, subsequently retracted.

Rape? We are asked to believe that Hamas and PIJ fighters, in difficult combat against Israeli armed forces, diverted their attention in order to amuse themselves by raping and murdering Israeli women, despite the fact that their essential objective was to bring as many captives as possible back to Gaza, and that such conduct would violate the Qur’an[’s] rules mandating humane treatment of captives. Israel refuses to provide real evidence or to permit any independent investigation of this allegation. Moreover, accusers misuse photos and videos of scantily dressed female captives as “evidence,” despite that some (including many participants at the music festival) were undoubtedly thusly clothed when captured. Israel evidently is using such allegations of mass sexual abuse as a defamatory racist portrayal of Palestinians so as to excuse the very real, massive atrocities currently being perpetrated by Israel against the people of Gaza. Meanwhile, captives released by Hamas generally report having been treated humanely.

but against an entire victimized population. Some examples:

  • Ayelet Shaked [Source- mondoweiss.net]

  • Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, in his guidance for Israeli action in the current outbreak of violence, twice referenced (October 28 and November 3) a biblical passage (about the Israelite war against the people of Amalek) which states “Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings.”
  • Israeli President Isaac Herzog asserted (October 12) “It’s an entire nation…that is responsible [for October 7].”
  • Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated (October 9) that Israel was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.…We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

    Yoav Gallant, center, with IDF troops. [Source: msn.com]

  • Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu posted (November 1) “The north of the Gaza Strip, more beautiful than ever. Everything is blown up and flattened, simply a pleasure for the eyes.”
  • Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi “tweeted” (October 7) “we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”
  • Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter stated (November 11) “[w]e are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”

    Avi Dichter [Source: jpost.com]

  • He later asserted (November 6) that there should be no distinction between Hamas combatants and Palestinian civilians, saying: “‘They’ are not only Hamas fighters with weapons, but also all the ‘civilian’ officials, including hospital administrators and school administrators, and also the entire Gaza population.”
  • One former Knesset member called for all Palestinians in Gaza to be killed, saying: “I tell you, in Gaza without exception, they are all terrorists, sons of dogs. They must be exterminated, all of them killed.”
  • South Africa’s indictment lists several additional such comments by Israeli leaders.
  •  threatened with sexual violence.

  • Imperialist vermin doesn't come much worse than Lindsey Graham, South Carolina's gift to the world.

    Joshua Wong with repugnant reactionary Marco Rubio, point man for imperialist intrigues against Venezuela, Cuba and China, among others. As vile as Lindsey Graham, which is an accomplishment of sorts.

The NYTimes calling the obsessive Neocon warmonger Nikki Haley, a "moderate" Republican voice.

Israel’s “Arab problem.” Despite Netanyahu’s denial, Israel’s policy vis-à-visPalestinians (whether in Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza) is to make their conditions as oppressive as possible (within the limits to which its Western allies will acquiesce) so that Palestinians will migrate to other countries. That is in accordance with Zionist prescriptions, from the time of Herzl (1890s),[7] to solve the “Arab problem” through “population transfer” (that is, ethnic cleansing).

Media bias. In the first days after October 7, the Western mainstream media focused almost exclusively upon grieving Israelis. It was only after the killings, destruction and extreme suffering in Gaza became so unavoidably blatant and massive that it began reporting on that. The racist anti-Palestinian bias of the Western mainstream media is exemplified by its response to reports of the three Hamas-captured Israeli men (shirtless, hands raised, holding a white flag of truce, and speaking Hebrew) nevertheless killed (December 15) by trigger-happy Israeli soldiers. That was treated as a horrific tragedy, but there was no thought to question, with Israeli soldiers acting that way toward captured Israelis, how do they act toward unarmed Palestinians.

Biden’s humanitarian concerns. U.S. President Biden (along with most congressional Democrats) expresses lip-service concern regarding Israel’s mass murder of tens of thousands of Gaza Palestinians (no more than 3% of whom could be armed resistance fighters). Biden could force a stop to it by supporting deployment of neutral UN peace-keepers into appropriate locations in Gaza, with U.S. guarantees of their safety, to protect hospitals, schools, desalination plants, sewage treatment facilities, humanitarian aid shipments, food and water dispensers, and UNRWA relief operations. It is highly likely that Hamas, et al., would welcome the introduction of such humanitarian intervenors as long as they are truly neutral. Meanwhile, for Israel to attack them would put it in armed conflict with the U.S. (and its allies) upon which it is extremely dependent. Instead of intervening in any real way to save lives in Gaza, Biden shows his true colors by sending munitions to Israel, by demanding billions of dollars for more no-strings military aid to the Zionist state, and by vetoing near-unanimous UN demands for a cease-fire.

Missiles headed to Israel. [Source: arabobserver.com]

Conclusion

The conflict. The Zionists (seeking to build and expand their racist colonial settler state) and their imperial Western allies (serving the selfish interests of their war industries and other profit-producing commercial entities with interests in the region) have subjected the Palestinian Arabs to a century of systematic subjugation and persecution. The Zionists’ ultimate applicable objective is to eliminate the threat to Zionist Jewish supremacy by removing most of the indigenous Palestinian population through expulsion and mass murder whenever they can find pretexts acceptable to Western allies, and by making life so difficult for Palestinians that they will choose to migrate.

Systematic oppression always provokes resistance by the oppressed (including violent resistance when peaceful appeals prove futile), and the responses by Palestinians are no exception. The Zionist state has always responded to that resistance (even peaceful protests) with repressive violence, attempting to bludgeon the Palestinians into passive acceptance of their Zionist-intended fate. That fate? To be treated as subhuman, to be massacred, to be permanently expelled from their homeland, to be robbed of their property, to be denied their right to equal civil rights and democratic self-government, and (for those allowed at least temporarily to remain in Palestine) to be exploited as cheap labor to perform work which Israelis choose to avoid.

  1. Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). ↑

  2. Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1993). ↑

  3. Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). ↑

  4. Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, ch. 5, 6, 7, 12. ↑

  5. Sachar, A History of Israel, 96-109. ↑

  6. Sachar, A History of Israel, 386-89. ↑

  7. Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.↑

CovertAction Magazine is made possible by subscriptions, orders and donations from readers like you.

Blow the Whistle on U.S. Imperialism

Click the whistle and donate

News 2739
  • If you approve of this article, please share it with your friends and kin.
  • Help us expand our reach. Defeat appalling hypocrisy. Lies cost countless lives.
  • We must act together to smash the VILE Western disinformation machine.
  • This is the Lying Machine that protects the greatest evil humanity has ever seen.
  • YOU know what we are talking about.

Things to keep in mind...

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. Meanwhile, fascist ideology and blatant lies also permeate the consciousness of most people in the West. Those in the comfortable top 10%, the "PMCs" (Professional Managerial Class), are especially vulnerable. They support and disseminate such ideas. They are the executors of the actual ruling class' orders, those in the 0.001%, who remain largely invisible. The PMCs are the political class, the media whores, the top military brass, some people in academia, and the "national security/foreign policy" industry honchos. Push back against these unethical, contaminated people with the truth while you can.

AND...where the US Government is at: LYING 24/7

RSS
Follow by Email
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Telegram
WhatsApp
Reddit
window.addEventListener("sfsi_functions_loaded", function() { if (typeof sfsi_widget_set == "function") { sfsi_widget_set(); } });

Print this article
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.

Unfortunately, most people take this site for granted.
DONATIONS HAVE ALMOST DRIED UP… 
PLEASE send what you can today!
JUST USE THE BUTTON BELOW

 

 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS



GLENN GREENWALD—Free Speech Frauds: Gov. Greg Abbott and the Pro-Israel Right

Please share this article as widely as you can.

editors log bluePATRICE GREANVILLE


Resize text-+=

As time goes by, and the last, fragile remnants of democracy's rituals (a democracy that barely existed, always drowning in an oligarchic ocean) disappear from public life in the US empire, the work of people like Glenn Greenwald acquires greater significance. Americans need to realise what is at stake and act accordingly, while they can, before the long night overt tyranny that approaches envelops everything in its path. Massive manufactured ignorance, explaining their alarming complacency, stands in their way, but reality is ultimately undeniable. Support Glenn Greenwald's work as much as you can. If not monetarily, then at least help us pass his message around.

BELOW IS A SUMMARY VERSION OF THIS VIDEO

This is a clip from our show SYSTEM UPDATE, now airing every weeknight at 7pm ET on Rumble. You can watch the full episode for FREE here: https://rumble.com/v4rl8gc-system-update-show-261.html

!function(r,u,m,b,l,e){r._Rumble=b,r[b]||(r[b]=function(){(r[b]._=r[b]._||[]).push(arguments);if(r[b]._.length==1){l=u.createElement(m),e=u.getElementsByTagName(m)[0],l.async=1,l.src="https://rumble.com/embedJS/uukz21"+(arguments[1].video?'.'+arguments[1].video:'')+"/?url="+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+"&args="+encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([].slice.apply(arguments))),e.parentNode.insertBefore(l,e)}})}(window, document, "script", "Rumble");

 

Rumble("play", {"video":"v4pa42w","div":"rumble_v4pa42w"});

Free Speech Frauds: Gov. Greg Abbott and the Pro-Israel Right

Glenn Greenwald
Streamed on: Apr 25, 7:00 pm EDT
 
 

BELOW IS THE REGULAR EXTENDED VERSION OF THIS VIDEO REPORT

!function(r,u,m,b,l,e){r._Rumble=b,r[b]||(r[b]=function(){(r[b]._=r[b]._||[]).push(arguments);if(r[b]._.length==1){l=u.createElement(m),e=u.getElementsByTagName(m)[0],l.async=1,l.src="https://rumble.com/embedJS/uukz21"+(arguments[1].video?'.'+arguments[1].video:'')+"/?url="+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+"&args="+encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([].slice.apply(arguments))),e.parentNode.insertBefore(l,e)}})}(window, document, "script", "Rumble");

 

Rumble("play", {"video":"v4p3506","div":"rumble_v4p3506"});

Now available as a podcast! Find full episodes here: https://linktr.ee/systemupdate_
Join us LIVE on Rumble, weeknights at 7pm ET: https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwald
Become part of our Locals community: https://greenwald.locals.com/
Follow Glenn:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glenn.11.greenwald/

THe views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of  The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience. 

All image captions, pull quotes, appendices, etc. by the editors not the authors. 
YOU ARE FREE TO REPRODUCE THIS ARTICLE PROVIDED YOU GIVE PROPER CREDIT TO THE GREANVILLE POST VIA A BACK LIVE LINK. 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

News 131
  • YOU WILL NEVER SEE THIS KIND OF EXPOSÉ ON THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA.
  • Nor on any channel controlled by the Democrats\' Fake Left. Not on Maddow. Not on NPR. Not on PBS.
  • Or any media controlled by the complicit Republican party and its many devious branches.

 Don't forget to sign up for our FREE bulletin. Get The Greanville Post in your mailbox every few days.