I believe Israel absolutely had
the right to respond with force to the unspeakable Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas, in which more than 1,200 Israelis
were killed, some after being tortured, and more than 240 hostages were seized
and taken into Gaza. But I agree with President Biden — for decades, a fierce supporter of Israel
— that the way Israel is waging this war is ultimately counterproductive.- Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, ‘How IS
Any Of This Making Israel More Secure?’
While the Biden administration has repeatedly expressed alarm over mounting civilian casualties in Gaza, up to now there was never any affirmative aggressive action to put the brakes on Bibi Netanyahu's bloodthirsty insanity. Thankfully, the breaking point for Biden came last Monday, when Israel’s military ordered the immediate evacuation of 100,000 civilians from the southern city of Rafah and seized the border crossing with Egypt, warning it would use “extreme force” against militants in the heavily populated area. The first question that occurred to me is: "Where the hell are all the 1.4 million already shuffled into Rafah from the rest of Gaza supposed to go?" (According to the NY Times 1.4 million Palestinians are currently sheltering in Rafah having fled all other areas of Gaza owing to Israeli bombing.)
I mean the Israelis have bombed everything else - even the bugs and rodents- into a new Stone age, and left some 13,000 dead children in the wake. Doing this while using American-supplied 2,000 lb. bombs no less. WTF are Bibi and his bunch of right wing psychos thinking? Or are they thinking?
Multiple American-made 2,000-pound bombs were probably used in a daytime strike on the densely populated Jabalya refugee camp in November. The attack, which Israel said targeted a Hamas commander, killed more than 110 Palestinians. Never mind, the first moral principle is that the ends does not justify the means. The end objective of killing one Hamas commander does not justify killing 110 Palestinians to do so.
It was long past time to cut the slaughter pipeline to the authoritarian madman Netanyahu. (The Israeli Trump.) He’s done himself and his country no favors by his indiscriminate slaughter of innocents and in fact has been in violation of international law likely from two weeks after the Hamas’ original (Oct. 7) attack. While that attack was heinous and Netanyahu and Israel initially had the world’s sympathy and support – that has quickly evaporated as images of butchered children materialized on U.S. TV screens. Which also have triggered the massive campus protests, and cratered Biden’s ratings among the younger 18-34 set.
At last Biden told CNN on Wednesday that he made it clear "if they go into Rafah I'm not supplying the weapons." Nor should he have. It was bad to do so from the start, and only led Netanyahu and his nutso gang of extreme right-wing warmongers to slaughter innocents at will. This, based on the belief they had to slaughter innocents to get at Hamas.
I still recall the crazed IDF head back in October saying barely a week after the Hamas attack that "there are no innocent Palestinians." Say what? Of course there are innocent Gazans, like the infant corpses seen covered up after their heads were blasted off.
According to Charles Blaha, who worked as director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights between 2016 and 2023:
“When you look at those collapsed buildings where people are trapped underneath, the odds are that that death and destruction is being caused by a United States-supplied weapon. There is no remaining reason why the [NSM-20] report should not accurately reflect Israel’s misuse of U.S.-provided weapons,”
That cited NSM-20 report found that accepting the Israeli assurances, i.e. about upholding international law, “would mean continuing the long-standing U.S. approach to providing support for Israel … making the support unconditional, and endorsing the impunity."
This according to Brian Finucane, a Crisis Group senior adviser
who previously advised the U.S. government on counterterrorism and the use of
military force
Nearly 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in seven months of war, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. The Israeli military says it has killed 13,000 fighters but has not provided supporting evidence.
Typically, Israeli officials blame the steep human toll on Hamas, saying the militant group embeds itself in populated areas and uses civilians as human shields. Never mind. Accepted international humanitarian law still requires that warring parties distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Of course, the shrill cries of the pro-Bibi authoritarian Cassandras fill the air, like those of WSJ editorialists ('How Not To Remember The Holocaust', 5/8, p. A14) yammering mindlessly: "Words are cheap. What does it mean for Biden to say 'we must give hate no safe harbor' then insisting Israel give Hamas safe harbor in Rafah?"
But Biden isn't giving Hamas safe harbor in Rafah, you derelict boneheads! He's trying to ensure the 1 million or so Gazans huddled there retain what small 'safe harbor' they have left. Since Bibi's rightist military barbarians have reduced everything else in that forlorn strip to rubble while slaughtering thousands including children- now left on the edge of famine.
Then there was Reepturd J.D. Vance caterwauling on CNN yesterday a.m. about how the Jews will suffer thanks to Biden. This when Vance he doesn't give two snits about the Jews, Israel or any hostages. He is simply pulling a political grandstand in the heat of an election to try to yank Biden's poll numbers even lower. All that blabbering about Israel you hear from the Repukes ought to go in one ear and out the other, because it is all via politically calculation.
Then there is the former WSJ troll and NY Times transplant Bret Stephens (5/10, Times) insisting Biden "made four major errors", i.e.
1-The
munitions cutoff helps Hamas.
2- It
doesn’t end the war. It prolongs it.
3- It
diminishes Israel’s deterrent power and is a recipe for a wider war.
4- There
will be unintended foreign-policy consequences.
Stephens has glib reasons for all four, but on close examination and using critical thinking none carry any ballast. It's similar to when Stephens went off half-cocked back in May, 2017 on Bill Maher's Real Time about climate change. Stephens claimed the climate quack Bjorn Lomborg (a Political Science Ph.D.)
Had "brought together some of the greatest climate scientists alive" (they were actually economists), and all agreed: "the least amount of resources should be devoted to climate change." So there you have Bret Stephens in a nutshell: a know nothing disinfo bozo. In the case of his latest effort to prop up Bibi and his ruthless gang, he actually suggested (under reason 4) if Israel didn't get the military wherewithal it needed it might seek it from Moscow. Really? And if Moscow denies them their bombs what next? They try the Roswell aliens?
Fortunately, to balance that hogwash from Stephens, the same NY Times at least had a counter voice in Thomas Friedman (NY Times, 5/11) who scotched Bret's baloney one time:
"Just do a simple mind experiment: Let’s assume Biden gave Israel all the 2,000-pound bombs it wanted. Israel leveled Rafah, where Hamas’s leadership, four intact battalions and many Israeli hostages are believed to be holed up. None of that would change the fact that Israel has no Palestinian or Arab partner to govern Gaza the next day in a way that would ensure a new Hamas would not rise from the ashes.
Netanyahu has managed to persuade and cajole Israel’s army leadership and people to fight this war in Gaza for more than seven months with no plan for how to get out and consolidate whatever military victory has been achieved. This is a direct result of the fact that in December 2022, Netanyahu formed the most extreme, far-right cabinet in Israel’s history — to get back into power and stave off his trial on corruption charges.....
As Biden officials kept pressing Netanyahu on this, the answer they kept getting was the geopolitical equivalent of “just shut up and dribble” — that is, just keep sending us arms and using your credibility to defend us on the world stage, particularly at the United Nations. We’ll do whatever we want, consistent with Netanyahu’s political needs. Biden’s political needs and America’s geopolitical needs be damned."
In other words the tyrant is using the bombing of innocent Gaza civilians to cover up his corruption, and the fact he blew the oversight that would have nipped the Hamas Oct. 7 attack in the bud. Maybe the biggest lesson Bibi and his Brigands need to learn is a moral principle: The ends never justified the means.
Maybe the most important lesson in geopolitics Biden and the U.S. need to teach these miscreants is that American military support is not unconditional. They cannot trash every humanitarian norm and still expect to get more bombs to trash more.
And maybe the takeaway for the purblind U.S. media is that being opposed to the folly and carnage of a corrupt Israeli madman and his cohort does not mean one is "anti-Semitic".
See Also:
How is any of this making Israel more secure?
We owe an ironic debt of gratitude to Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan for advancing the cause of the State of Palestine at the United Nations. By delivering a speech to the UN General Assembly that was so unhinged, absurd, vulgar, insulting, undignified, and undiplomatic, Erdan helped to secure a lopsided vote of 143 to 9 in favor of Palestine’s UN membership (the rest abstained or did not vote). But more than that, Erdan helped to clarify Israel’s tactical approach—and why it is doomed to fail.
Let us briefly consider the content of Erdan’s speech. Erdan claimed, in short, that Palestine equals Hamas and Hamas equals Hitler’s Nazi Reich. Erdan told the UN delegates that their nations support a state of Palestine because “so many of you are Jew-hating.” He then shredded the UN Charter at the podium, claiming that the delegates were doing the same by voting for Palestine’s UN membership. All the while, on the very same day as his speech and UN vote, Israel was amassing its forces for yet more slaughter of innocent civilians in Rafah.
Gaza Is A Humanitarian Catastrophe
And:
And:
by Bill Blum | May 10, 2024 - 5:49am | permalink
Bibi Netanyahu is worried about the International Criminal Court, and for good reason. For several weeks, rumors have swirled that the ICC is preparing to issue arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, the country’s defense minister and the chief of its armed forces. The word is they will be charged with war crimes. The ICC is also reportedly preparing arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas.
The rumors follow more than seven months of nonstop carnage that began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups launched a coordinated attack on Israel, killing 1,149 people, including 766 civilians, and abducting another 247 as hostages, including women, children, grandparents and people with disabilities. There have also been allegations of gang rape and sexual mutilation leveled against Hamas and its collaborators.
Palestinian casualties have been far greater. More than 34,000 Palestinians have died as a result of Israel’s military response, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry; more than 70,000 have been wounded. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA), an estimated 1.7 million Gazans have been displaced. Equally alarming, the head of the United Nations World Food Program has declared that conditions in northern Gaza have deteriorated into a “full-blown famine.”
And:
by Will Bunch | May 7, 2024 - 7:02am | permalink
— from the Philadelphia Inquirer
In an emotionally jarring and disorienting week where you might wake up to a televised, tear-gas haze of cops firing rubber bullets into a crowd of college students in the blackness of a Southern California night, the scariest thing came wrapped in the cover of a magazine.
Donald Trump, locked in as GOP presidential nominee even as he spends his days in a Manhattan courtroom in the first of his four felony trials, spoke at length to a reporter for Time magazine for a piece headlined, “How Far Trump Would Go” — aimed at addressing the growing talk that a second presidential term would look more like a dictatorship.
Trump’s way of addressing the dictatorship controversy was essentially to confirm it.
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