If Blinken is too cowardly to ride in the lead truck of a 1,000+ strong convoy, then (if we were sincere) use the US military tanks and Bradleys to lead and protect. Patrick Lawrence's post today in Consortium spells our role out well and notes, "... we find the West has licensed the Israelis. They bear a pre-authorization by way of many precedents."
Indeed our actions in too many countries gave Israel the playbook by which to commit atrocities and assume little to no accountability. Though I can't help but believe that we are putting the noose around our own neck and Israel's.
Bill, Jonathan Cook's latest article also posted Today is a much longer report on this same theme.
'How the Western media helped build the case for genocide in Gaza'
From obscuring the West’s role in starving Gaza to sensationalised accounts of mass rape by Hamas, journalists are playing the role of propagandists, not reporters.
The past five months have been clarifying. What was supposed to be hidden has been thrust into the light. What was supposed to be obscured has come sharply into focus.
Liberal democracy is not what it seems.
It has always defined itself in contrast to what it says it is not. Where other regimes are savage, it is humanitarian. Where others are authoritarian, it is open and tolerant. Where others are criminal, it is law-abiding. When others are belligerent, it seeks peace. Or so the manuals of liberal democracy argue.
But how to keep the faith when the world’s leading liberal democracies – invariably referred to as “the West” – are complicit in the crime of crimes: genocide?
Not just law-breaking or a misdemeanour, but the extermination of a people. And not just quickly, before the mind has time to absorb and weigh the gravity and extent of the crime, but in slow motion, day after day, week after week, month after month.
What kind of system of values can allow for five months the crushing of children under rubble, the detonation of fragile bodies, the wasting away of babies, while still claiming to be humanitarian, tolerant, peace-seeking?
And not just allow all this, but actively assist in it. Supply the bombs that blow those children to pieces or bring houses down on them, and sever ties to the only aid agency that can hope to keep them alive.
The answer, it seems, is the West’s system of values.
The mask has not just slipped, it has been ripped off. What lies beneath is ugly indeed.......................
To top it off, this is no war, it is a one-sided deliberate slaughter. HAMAS might be able to kill an Israeli soldier now and then, but the IDF is a full equipped modern army, the best the US can make it, so the gross mismatch of the two sides makes it farcical to call this a war. Israel is literally calling all the shots and goes wherever whenever it wishes.
I guess I'm not like you as I don't subscribe to the NY Times, WaPo or CNN. I cancelled my subscriptions after Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
In addition to your column (which I read religiously) I will read Al Jazeera, South China Morning Post, Haaretz and even RT knowing full well they have their own biases and allegiances, but at least they counterbalance the bullshit I get from American MSM and I can usually count on the truth being somewhere in the middle.
Reading The Washington Post Articles on the Israeli MASSACRE in Gaza, there is a distinct shift in that most of those commenting are against what Israel is doing in Gaza.. In Israeli's 2006 Cast Lead War in Gaza, those in Power never called for a ceasefire until the ordinary street People started to raise their voices, and then those in Power acted.
Here is another article appearing Today along with Bill's and Jonathan Cook. As Bob Dylan saw in 1963, 'The Times they are a-changin'
"So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen." Matthew 20:16
'PATRICK LAWRENCE: Authorized Atrocities'
Israel’s lawlessness has a history that those in the West share with the apartheid state.
It is remarked often enough, including in this space, that Israel’s savagery in its determination to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza — and we had better brace for what is next on the West Bank of the Jordan — marks a turn for all of humanity.
In its descent into depravity the Zionist state drags the West altogether down with it.
This is true, certainly, but we must put Israel’s criminal conduct, which warrants another Nuremberg trial at this point, in its proper context.
When we do, we find that Israel’s lawlessness has a history, an etymology, and if there is a road to Western salvation it must start with a recognition of a past that those in the West share with the apartheid state.
We can say Israel’s crimes against Gaza’s 2.3 million children, women, and men are unspeakable, in other words, but this would not be right. They are altogether speakable, and it behooves us now to speak of them if we are to grasp where responsibility for this stain upon the human story truly lies.
Pankaj Mishra has just published a thorough and thoroughly remarkable piece on these matters in the London Review of Books.
The Indian author, essayist, and columnist takes up many things in “The Shoah After Gaza,” chiefly the extent to which Zionists have exhausted “the culture of conspicuous Holocaust consumption” — excellent phrase — in defense of a nation that, to quote Primo Levi, “was a mistake in historical terms.”
Here is a passage in Mishra’s piece that is to our present point:
“Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 — the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.”
I am not with Mishra on everything he writes in the LRB piece. Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine? Absolutely not. Unless you are into the demonization ploy to which propagandists commonly resort, it is the Russian Federation’s war, not the Russian president’s.
Revanchist? Simply wrong, a very poor take on a purposely provoked proxy war that left Moscow little choice but to intervene.
But “dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945,” and “a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945”: It does not get much pithier in the essay genre...................
Hamas and Gaza have been completely cut off from ALL supplies for 6 months now. No food, no fuel , electric, medical and most importantly NO ARMS for Hamas. The media doesn't report this obvious fact. Hamas is reduced to throwing rocks by now. Need anymore be said?
I'm retired in my 80th Year and live comfortably on my Old Age Security of $1360 USD/month to pay rent, utilities, food, car expenses and everything else. That's mostly due to the fact I'm single and live alone except for my 2 cats.
All my needs are met and some wants, so I have no financial stresses or worries. I can read much and comment on what get from reading. I get the rare personal email but I get over 100 emails every Day to read this or that. I can't read them all, but this is worth reading;
The Zone of Interest Is About the Danger of Ignoring Atrocities – Including in Gaza
“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present – not to say, ‘Look what they did then’; rather, ‘Look what we do now.”
Here are a few excerpts: Glazer was accepting the award for best international film for The Zone of Interest, which is inspired by the real life of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The film follows Höss’s idyllic domestic life with his wife and children, which unfolds in a stately home and garden immediately adjacent to the concentration camp. Glazer has described his characters not as monsters but as “non-thinking, bourgeois, aspirational-careerist horrors”, people who manage to turn profound evil into white noise.[,,,]
[...] Alfonso Cuarón, the Oscar-winning director of Roma, called it “probably the most important film of this century”. Steven Spielberg declared it “the best Holocaust movie I’ve witnessed since my own” – a reference to Schindler’s List, which swept the Oscars 30 years ago. [...]
[...] Does “never again” mean never again to anyone, or never again to the Jews, a pledge for which Israel is imagined as a kind of untouchable guarantee? [...]
[...] Glazer, interestingly, dropped his rhetorical bombs protected by the identity-equivalent of a suit of armor, standing before the glittering crowd as a successful white Jewish man – flanked by two other successful white Jewish men – who had, together, just made a film about the Holocaust. And that phalanx of privilege still didn’t save him from the flood of smears and distortions that misrepresented his words to wrongly claim that he had repudiated his Jewishness, which only served to underline Glazer’s point about those who turn victimhood into a weapon. [...]
[...] Glazer wanted his film to provoke these kinds of uneasy thoughts. He has said that he saw “the darkening world around us, and I had a feeling I had to do something about our similarities to the perpetrators rather than the victims.” He wanted to remind us that annihilation is never as far away as we might think. [...]
[...] And as genocide fades further into the background of our culture, some people grow too desperate for any of these efforts. Watching the Oscars on Sunday, where Glazer was alone among the parade of wealthy and powerful speakers across the podium to so much as mention Gaza, I remembered that exactly two weeks had passed since Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old member of the US air force, self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington.
I don’t want anyone else to deploy that horrifying protest tactic; there has already been far too much death. But we should spend some time sitting with the statement that Bushnell left, words I have come to view as a haunting, contemporary coda to Glazer’s film:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow south? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Excellent article. I hadn't really considered this temporary pier as having a dual use. BTW I don't subscribe to any of the supposed "news media" mentioned as they really all belong in the trash wrapping cat turds assuming they're still using paper.
Complicity in Genocide leaves an indelible stain which can not be cleaned up or erased from the books of history.
The US is running out of time to fix or at list partially fix what it destroyed “credibility as a democratic and progressive country and of course, its moral compass ”
I don’t agree that there is nothing we can do, protesting boycotting and suing is what needs to be done at every level and by everyone, pressure does work.
And as the issue is global and legalizing Genocide can never be accepted by any other than brainwashed eugenists, we must not only stand in opposition, but we must attack them and put them in their place if we wanna survive their insanity. “ diplomacy does not work with bullies “
Everyone must understand that continuing in this path would sum to opening wide open the door to World War III “which is in effect thanks to the US and its sold out proxies world leaders imbedded in the electropharmawar industrial complex, is already starting to open”
At this point in history, we need to provide support to the human side of humanity which the mass media are trying to suppress .
I have personally already lost my interests in macabre and negative thinkers like C hedges, which instead of giving hope, stumps on the victims of what should never be, and presents the situation as if there would be no other solution but bending over and squeeze the teeth, which is Perhaps what he likes too do in his private time, not sure and actually could not care less. “disappointing though”
We need to keep on blasting the warmongers and sadists, and demand for justice before those supporting this Genocide do more than damage than what they already have done.
Also we must always remember that Palestinians are reading what we write too, and if we care for them we must support them, and not depressing them like the sold out politicians and UN representatives with their dehumanizing psychological warfare do.
Here something I wrote a few days ago along with some important links, if you can survive my typos.
You make some great points on how this is being framed, but some people just don't seem to get it. Genocide through starvation and famine is a sin and it doesn't make anyone an anti-Semite to point this out or whether you think this side or that started it. Linking as usual @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/ and will continue to link articles like yours until this nonsense stops. As human beings we should all be better than this or mankind is lost!
With all due respect, Bill, i think it is a mistake to judge that Reuters article based solely on a read of its "Daily Briefing" summary. Or to judge the Daily Briefing summary without reading the referenced article.
And if You are correct that "most" Americans are satisfied with reading quick synopses of lengthy news articles to get their news, then, once again: Those people have the system of government and the leaders of that government that they deserve, And will get the exact political, economic, and civil society future that they deserve.
And i'm curious: What exactly are You saying or implying when You write that Hamas "allegedly started all the trouble on October 7th"? Are You suggesting that this whole thing didn't start on October 7? And/or that perhaps the whole thing is a False Flag operation, started by Hamas in cooperation and coordination with Israel and the United States?
If Blinken is too cowardly to ride in the lead truck of a 1,000+ strong convoy, then (if we were sincere) use the US military tanks and Bradleys to lead and protect. Patrick Lawrence's post today in Consortium spells our role out well and notes, "... we find the West has licensed the Israelis. They bear a pre-authorization by way of many precedents."
Indeed our actions in too many countries gave Israel the playbook by which to commit atrocities and assume little to no accountability. Though I can't help but believe that we are putting the noose around our own neck and Israel's.
I am pleased to recommend this very well-written and powerful post that should be required reading in journalism classes.
Bill, Jonathan Cook's latest article also posted Today is a much longer report on this same theme.
'How the Western media helped build the case for genocide in Gaza'
From obscuring the West’s role in starving Gaza to sensationalised accounts of mass rape by Hamas, journalists are playing the role of propagandists, not reporters.
The past five months have been clarifying. What was supposed to be hidden has been thrust into the light. What was supposed to be obscured has come sharply into focus.
Liberal democracy is not what it seems.
It has always defined itself in contrast to what it says it is not. Where other regimes are savage, it is humanitarian. Where others are authoritarian, it is open and tolerant. Where others are criminal, it is law-abiding. When others are belligerent, it seeks peace. Or so the manuals of liberal democracy argue.
But how to keep the faith when the world’s leading liberal democracies – invariably referred to as “the West” – are complicit in the crime of crimes: genocide?
Not just law-breaking or a misdemeanour, but the extermination of a people. And not just quickly, before the mind has time to absorb and weigh the gravity and extent of the crime, but in slow motion, day after day, week after week, month after month.
What kind of system of values can allow for five months the crushing of children under rubble, the detonation of fragile bodies, the wasting away of babies, while still claiming to be humanitarian, tolerant, peace-seeking?
And not just allow all this, but actively assist in it. Supply the bombs that blow those children to pieces or bring houses down on them, and sever ties to the only aid agency that can hope to keep them alive.
The answer, it seems, is the West’s system of values.
The mask has not just slipped, it has been ripped off. What lies beneath is ugly indeed.......................
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2024-03-20/media-genocide-gaza/
To top it off, this is no war, it is a one-sided deliberate slaughter. HAMAS might be able to kill an Israeli soldier now and then, but the IDF is a full equipped modern army, the best the US can make it, so the gross mismatch of the two sides makes it farcical to call this a war. Israel is literally calling all the shots and goes wherever whenever it wishes.
Sorry, Bill.
I guess I'm not like you as I don't subscribe to the NY Times, WaPo or CNN. I cancelled my subscriptions after Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
In addition to your column (which I read religiously) I will read Al Jazeera, South China Morning Post, Haaretz and even RT knowing full well they have their own biases and allegiances, but at least they counterbalance the bullshit I get from American MSM and I can usually count on the truth being somewhere in the middle.
Reading The Washington Post Articles on the Israeli MASSACRE in Gaza, there is a distinct shift in that most of those commenting are against what Israel is doing in Gaza.. In Israeli's 2006 Cast Lead War in Gaza, those in Power never called for a ceasefire until the ordinary street People started to raise their voices, and then those in Power acted.
Here is another article appearing Today along with Bill's and Jonathan Cook. As Bob Dylan saw in 1963, 'The Times they are a-changin'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS7aBrBUaFU
Dylan's words here paraphrase Scripture,
"The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last."
"So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen." Matthew 20:16
'PATRICK LAWRENCE: Authorized Atrocities'
Israel’s lawlessness has a history that those in the West share with the apartheid state.
It is remarked often enough, including in this space, that Israel’s savagery in its determination to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza — and we had better brace for what is next on the West Bank of the Jordan — marks a turn for all of humanity.
In its descent into depravity the Zionist state drags the West altogether down with it.
This is true, certainly, but we must put Israel’s criminal conduct, which warrants another Nuremberg trial at this point, in its proper context.
When we do, we find that Israel’s lawlessness has a history, an etymology, and if there is a road to Western salvation it must start with a recognition of a past that those in the West share with the apartheid state.
We can say Israel’s crimes against Gaza’s 2.3 million children, women, and men are unspeakable, in other words, but this would not be right. They are altogether speakable, and it behooves us now to speak of them if we are to grasp where responsibility for this stain upon the human story truly lies.
Pankaj Mishra has just published a thorough and thoroughly remarkable piece on these matters in the London Review of Books.
The Indian author, essayist, and columnist takes up many things in “The Shoah After Gaza,” chiefly the extent to which Zionists have exhausted “the culture of conspicuous Holocaust consumption” — excellent phrase — in defense of a nation that, to quote Primo Levi, “was a mistake in historical terms.”
Here is a passage in Mishra’s piece that is to our present point:
“Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 — the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.”
I am not with Mishra on everything he writes in the LRB piece. Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine? Absolutely not. Unless you are into the demonization ploy to which propagandists commonly resort, it is the Russian Federation’s war, not the Russian president’s.
Revanchist? Simply wrong, a very poor take on a purposely provoked proxy war that left Moscow little choice but to intervene.
But “dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945,” and “a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945”: It does not get much pithier in the essay genre...................
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/20/patrick-lawrence-authorized-atrocities/
Hamas and Gaza have been completely cut off from ALL supplies for 6 months now. No food, no fuel , electric, medical and most importantly NO ARMS for Hamas. The media doesn't report this obvious fact. Hamas is reduced to throwing rocks by now. Need anymore be said?
I'm retired in my 80th Year and live comfortably on my Old Age Security of $1360 USD/month to pay rent, utilities, food, car expenses and everything else. That's mostly due to the fact I'm single and live alone except for my 2 cats.
All my needs are met and some wants, so I have no financial stresses or worries. I can read much and comment on what get from reading. I get the rare personal email but I get over 100 emails every Day to read this or that. I can't read them all, but this is worth reading;
The Zone of Interest Is About the Danger of Ignoring Atrocities – Including in Gaza
“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present – not to say, ‘Look what they did then’; rather, ‘Look what we do now.”
Here are a few excerpts: Glazer was accepting the award for best international film for The Zone of Interest, which is inspired by the real life of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The film follows Höss’s idyllic domestic life with his wife and children, which unfolds in a stately home and garden immediately adjacent to the concentration camp. Glazer has described his characters not as monsters but as “non-thinking, bourgeois, aspirational-careerist horrors”, people who manage to turn profound evil into white noise.[,,,]
[...] Alfonso Cuarón, the Oscar-winning director of Roma, called it “probably the most important film of this century”. Steven Spielberg declared it “the best Holocaust movie I’ve witnessed since my own” – a reference to Schindler’s List, which swept the Oscars 30 years ago. [...]
[...] Does “never again” mean never again to anyone, or never again to the Jews, a pledge for which Israel is imagined as a kind of untouchable guarantee? [...]
[...] Glazer, interestingly, dropped his rhetorical bombs protected by the identity-equivalent of a suit of armor, standing before the glittering crowd as a successful white Jewish man – flanked by two other successful white Jewish men – who had, together, just made a film about the Holocaust. And that phalanx of privilege still didn’t save him from the flood of smears and distortions that misrepresented his words to wrongly claim that he had repudiated his Jewishness, which only served to underline Glazer’s point about those who turn victimhood into a weapon. [...]
[...] Glazer wanted his film to provoke these kinds of uneasy thoughts. He has said that he saw “the darkening world around us, and I had a feeling I had to do something about our similarities to the perpetrators rather than the victims.” He wanted to remind us that annihilation is never as far away as we might think. [...]
[...] And as genocide fades further into the background of our culture, some people grow too desperate for any of these efforts. Watching the Oscars on Sunday, where Glazer was alone among the parade of wealthy and powerful speakers across the podium to so much as mention Gaza, I remembered that exactly two weeks had passed since Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old member of the US air force, self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington.
I don’t want anyone else to deploy that horrifying protest tactic; there has already been far too much death. But we should spend some time sitting with the statement that Bushnell left, words I have come to view as a haunting, contemporary coda to Glazer’s film:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow south? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
https://portside.org/2024-03-19/zone-interest-about-danger-ignoring-atrocities-including-gaza
This video of Jonathan Cook, his article posted downstream with the same concern Bill expresses in this post, arrived in my email this am.
https://youtu.be/0MCyAtnfukc?si=y66uJtLZidnQe2fK
As usual, I couldn’t agree more, Bill. But why should _you_ have to say this? Why isn’t _everyone_ saying this?
Read the Intercept- all press releases MUST be approved by IDF censors.
Excellent article. I hadn't really considered this temporary pier as having a dual use. BTW I don't subscribe to any of the supposed "news media" mentioned as they really all belong in the trash wrapping cat turds assuming they're still using paper.
Complicity in Genocide leaves an indelible stain which can not be cleaned up or erased from the books of history.
The US is running out of time to fix or at list partially fix what it destroyed “credibility as a democratic and progressive country and of course, its moral compass ”
I don’t agree that there is nothing we can do, protesting boycotting and suing is what needs to be done at every level and by everyone, pressure does work.
And as the issue is global and legalizing Genocide can never be accepted by any other than brainwashed eugenists, we must not only stand in opposition, but we must attack them and put them in their place if we wanna survive their insanity. “ diplomacy does not work with bullies “
Everyone must understand that continuing in this path would sum to opening wide open the door to World War III “which is in effect thanks to the US and its sold out proxies world leaders imbedded in the electropharmawar industrial complex, is already starting to open”
At this point in history, we need to provide support to the human side of humanity which the mass media are trying to suppress .
I have personally already lost my interests in macabre and negative thinkers like C hedges, which instead of giving hope, stumps on the victims of what should never be, and presents the situation as if there would be no other solution but bending over and squeeze the teeth, which is Perhaps what he likes too do in his private time, not sure and actually could not care less. “disappointing though”
We need to keep on blasting the warmongers and sadists, and demand for justice before those supporting this Genocide do more than damage than what they already have done.
Also we must always remember that Palestinians are reading what we write too, and if we care for them we must support them, and not depressing them like the sold out politicians and UN representatives with their dehumanizing psychological warfare do.
Here something I wrote a few days ago along with some important links, if you can survive my typos.
https://mywisdom.substack.com/p/truth-be-told
You make some great points on how this is being framed, but some people just don't seem to get it. Genocide through starvation and famine is a sin and it doesn't make anyone an anti-Semite to point this out or whether you think this side or that started it. Linking as usual @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/ and will continue to link articles like yours until this nonsense stops. As human beings we should all be better than this or mankind is lost!
Lying by omission is still lying.
With all due respect, Bill, i think it is a mistake to judge that Reuters article based solely on a read of its "Daily Briefing" summary. Or to judge the Daily Briefing summary without reading the referenced article.
The article in question [ at https://www.reuters.com/default/gaza-starving-children-fill-hospital-wards-famine-looms-2024-03-19/ ] focuses especially on Children ~ with several very disturbing pictures ~ who are suffering from specific medical conditions that have worsened because of the War and the lack of treatment and medicine.
And if You are correct that "most" Americans are satisfied with reading quick synopses of lengthy news articles to get their news, then, once again: Those people have the system of government and the leaders of that government that they deserve, And will get the exact political, economic, and civil society future that they deserve.
And i'm curious: What exactly are You saying or implying when You write that Hamas "allegedly started all the trouble on October 7th"? Are You suggesting that this whole thing didn't start on October 7? And/or that perhaps the whole thing is a False Flag operation, started by Hamas in cooperation and coordination with Israel and the United States?