EDITOR—“I have worked in hospitals in Afghanistan, Uganda, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Cambodia… but I have never operated on so many injured children as I am now in the Gaza Strip. In the burns unit of the European Hospital we now have 78 patients, nearly two-fifths of them children under five. I have never seen anything like it. I have been in many war contexts where the type of wounds are the same but the number is huge. We never leave the hospital. We work round the clock. We do operations with minimal anaesthesia. If we run out, we can’t operate but there is no clear line. There are a lot of people crying, screaming with pain, but we don’t have enough analgesics. We keep them for the kids or very severe cases….”
DISINFORMATION
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THE BROADER VIEW: Why does the US support Israel? A geopolitical analysis with economist Michael Hudson
90 Mins readBEN NORTON—The United Nations has referred to Gaza as a “graveyard for children”. More than 4,000 children have been killed. About 40% of the casualties are children.
And the United States has continued to support Israel, not only diplomatically and politically, not only by, for instance, vetoing resolutions in the U.N. Security Council that call for a ceasefire, but furthermore, the U.S. has been sending billions of dollars to Israel. Not only the $3.8 billion that the U.S. always gives to Israel every year in military aid, but additionally, tens of billions of dollars more. So I am wondering if you could provide your analysis of why you think the U.S. is investing so many resources in supporting Israel while it is clearly committing war crimes.MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, certainly it is supporting Israel, but it’s not supporting Israel because this is an altruistic act. To the United States, Israel is its landed aircraft carrier in the Near East. Israel is the takeoff point for America to control the Near East.
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• RBN’s Nick Cruse on The Need for Black-Leftist Media, Combatting Breadtubers & Fake Leftists
75 Mins readEDITOR—Interested in an “unapologetic Black, leftist, working-class” perspective on current sociopolitical events? If so, join us as we speak with Nick Cruse, citizen journalist and co-founder of Revolutionary Blackout Network (@RevBlackNetwork on Twitter and “Revolutionary Blackout” here on YouTube). We discuss a variety of topics, including the importance of independent Black, working-class commentary in an age of corporatized journalism, the leftist failures of electoral politics in the US, the absence of an established leftist perspective in mainstream media, the challenges of social media activism (particularly the “BreadTube” effect), as well as the potential to change the current status quo through ground-up, working class solidarity.
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PAUL EDWARDS—The idiotic bind that The Empire is in is one they chose by their long, duplicitous, two-faced vaudeville act in the Middle East. This Gaza slaughter has drawn the curtain exposing The Great Oz, and made starkly obvious the payoff for playing both ends against the middle. If it backs the murderous Zionist Reich, it must see its cringing romancing of previously wholly-owned tyrannies such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey end forever. There is no clean, or even dirty way—as in Afghanistan—out of this political iron maiden in which it has sealed itself. Official America backs wholesale murder of children and no spin can hide that.
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EDITOR—Brian Berletic, editor of The New Atlas, has spent decades studying not just the ugly manifestations of the Western imperialist disease, but also its anatomy, especially its colossal machinery of soft power, comprising a multitude of mutually reinforcing institutions: powerful legacy media, new social media, think tanks, Hollywood movies and the rest of pop culture, television, false flag events, human rights outfits playing propaganda roles, intel disinfo experts, and even supposedly incorruptible places like international criminal courts. Covering the whole world, this is a formidable tool of empire to bend people and countries to its will. In this outstanding video, Brian applies his insights into this topic to the tragic events in Palestine.