Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists ... -go-368862
Gaza: What would Einstein say?
Albert Einstein famously said that one could not solve a problem with the level of thinking that created it.
Clearly, the problem of Gaza was created by the belief that land could be transferred to the Palestinian Arabs to provide them a viable opportunity for self-governance.
Equally clearly, then, the problem of Gaza cannot be solved by persisting with ideas that created it – i.e. persisting with a plan for Israel to provide the Palestinian Arabs with land for self-governance.
The problem can only be solved by entirely abandoning the concept that Gaza should be governed by Palestinian Arabs. Any effective solution must follow this new line of reasoning.
Any other outcome will merely prolong the problem. If Hamas comes out stronger from this round of fighting, it will be only a matter of time before the next, probably more deadly, round breaks out.
If Hamas comes out weaker from this round of fighting, it is only a matter of time before it will be replaced by an even more violent extremist-successor – and thus, once more, only a matter of time until the next, probably more deadly, round breaks out.
The only durable solution requires dismantling Gaza, humanitarian relocation of the non-belligerent Arab population, and extension of Israeli sovereignty over the region.
“Concentrate” and “exterminate”: Israel parliament deputy speaker’s Gaza genocide plan
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Sun, 08/03/2014 - 16:31
Moshe Feiglin, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has published a plan for the total destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
His detailed plan, which calls for the use of concentration camps, amounts to direct and public incitement to genocide – a punishable crime under the Genocide Convention.
In a 1 August posting on his Facebook page, Feiglin, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, calls for the “conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters.”
“This is our country – our country exclusively,” he writes, “including Gaza.”
Feiglin’s posting is the text of a letter he addressed to Netanyahu.
Citizens and public authorities around the world should attempt to have Feiglin arrested and prosecuted under the Genocide Convention for his statements, should he set foot in their territories.
His abominable plan comes as the death toll from Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza reaches 1,752 people, including ten persons killed on Sunday morning when Israel once again bombed a United Nations-run school being used as a shelter, this time in the southern town of Rafah.
Feiglin, like his Knesset colleague Ayelet Shaked, has previously made genocidal statements, but these are perhaps his most specific and explicit.
Calling for mass extermination and ethnic cleansing, Feiglin now urges Netanyahu to “turn Gaza into Jaffa, a flourishing Israeli city with a minimum number of hostile civilians.”
Jaffa is a major Palestinian coastal city that was ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias in 1948 and incorporated into present-day Israel. The few thousand Palestinians who remain in the city face ongoing attempts to force them out.
As of this writing, Feiglin’s Facebook post had more than eight thousand “Likes” and had been shared almost two thousand times.
“Concentrate” and “exterminate”
Feiglin writes that the Israeli army must “designate certain open areas on the Sinai border, adjacent to the sea, in which the civilian population will be concentrated, far from the built-up areas that are used for launches and tunneling. In these areas, tent encampments will be established, until relevant emigration destinations are determined.”
“Tent encampments,” where the Palestinian civilian population would be “concentrated,” are simply concentration camps.
“The supply of electricity and water to the formerly populated areas will be disconnected,” he adds.
He then calls for the “formerly populated areas” to be “shelled with maximum fire power. The entire civilian and military infrastructure of Hamas, its means of communication and of logistics, will be destroyed entirely, down to their foundations.”
The Israeli army would then “exterminate nests of resistance, in the event that any should remain.”
Expulsion
“Israel will start searching for emigration destinations and quotas for the refugees from Gaza,” Feiglin writes, but “those who insist on staying, if they can be proven to have no affiliation with Hamas, will be required to publicly sign a declaration of loyalty to Israel, and receive a blue ID card similar to that of the Arabs of East Jerusalem.”
Feiglin’s statements are crimes
The Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of a number acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
These acts are:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Feiglin’s plan has clear genocidal intent in at least two respects: he denies that the Palestinian people exist and he defines Palestinians collectively as an enemy and target because of their religion:
“There are no two states, and there are no two peoples. There is only one state for one people.”
“The strategic enemy is extremist Arab Islam in all its varieties, from Iran to Gaza, which seeks to annihilate Israel in its entirety.”
In addition to outright acts of genocide, punishable crimes under the convention include “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”; “conspiracy to commit genocide” and “complicity in genocide.”
Any fair-minded prosecutor would see that Feiglin’s statements provide ample probable cause for action under the convention.
State parties to the Genocide Convention are obligated to punish crimes under the Genocide Convention in their domestic courts.
Citizens around the world should seek to have Feiglin and any other Israeli leaders who commit genocidal acts arrested and sent for trial by using whatever legal mechanisms are available, including notifying law enforcement and immigration authorities of such genocidal statements.
None of those enamored of explanations for Israel/Palestine that include world jewish conspiracy motifs seems willing or able to admit the truth
American Dream » Mon Aug 04, 2014 12:25 pm wrote:It's the ones who suggest that Racism does not exist or matter much, and/or that perhaps admit it does but only "out there" somewhere, and/or deny that it could ever exist in them now- these are the type of people that most you've got to watch, in my experience.
I'm think we've got several like that, here on this board...
Standing by while their allies (or sock puppets) call someone a racist or anti-semite and then dissembling when asked if they - themselves- agree...
*which leads to a fracturing in trust, at least it did with me.
Not answering clear, simple questions, but generating fogweed.
*which results in the same stuff getting hashed over a many many times, because the level of detail that may be needed to solve issues is never addressed.
Consistently ignoring feedback on the subject of their own behaviour by multiple people, including Mods
*For myself, that lands as a lack of consideration, about not factoring in how one's own participation may be affecting a situation in counter-productive ways
Morty » Mon Aug 04, 2014 12:23 am wrote:If we started a thread "Gaza War Crimes, 2014" could we leave all the squabbling for this thread and stick to the topic on that one?
I've been poking around RI for years, and I'm really not interested in engaging with the squabbling, or seeing this topic of all topics derailed by it.
If BBC coverage of Israel’s systematic destruction of lives wasn’t sufficient to make people hot under the collar, the corporation’s justification of its role should do so.
“Our role is to explain what is happening and why and we endeavour to reflect a range of voices amid deeply held views,” says an anonymous spokesperson.
If that’s what it’s supposed to do, the BBC is failing its own criteria.
At no time do its correspondents explain that the Palestinians are a people under military occupation and that Israel is pursuing a relentless colonisation of the West Bank, which, under the 1993 Oslo accords, is supposed to be the site of an independent Palestinian state.
Israeli occupation forces should have evacuated the land they conquered in 1967 so a Palestinian Authority could be established and a permanent settlement finalised.
One reason alone stymied that agreement — Tel Aviv’s refusal to end its occupation of the West Bank, preferring instead to construct Jews-only settlements and infrastructure.
Israeli leaders, united in support of a maximalist Zionist programme, have dredged up one pretext after another to justify their ethnic cleansing programme.
But the unspoken — except in unguarded moments — reason is that they are determined to hold on to the entire territory from the Mediterranean to the Jordan.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Construction and Housing Minister Uri Ariel acknowledged two months ago that there are now about 400,000 Israeli settlers on the West Bank.
“I think that in five years there will be 550,000 or 600,000 Jews in Judea and Samaria,” he added.
Whatever marginal differences there may be in Netanyahu’s government about various issues, West Bank colonisation is not one of them.
Palestinians, whether from Christian or Muslim backgrounds, secular or Islamist, understand that the Zionist juggernaut rolling over them and their land is facilitated by US and European Union subscription to the myth that Israel wants a peaceful solution encompassing a two-state solution.
Even the dogs in the street can see the falsity of this claim, but our political leaders persist with it to avoid having to act in accordance with their supposed opposition to the colonisation process.
They pretend that there is a military threat to Israel’s existence, that Palestinian resistance to occupation is terrorism and that “if we could just get some peace,” all would be well.
Their efforts to appear even-handed by equating oppressors and oppressed and urging “both sides” to show restraint are cynical attempts to obscure British backing for the regional bullyboy.
The BBC makes much of its reputation built over the years of penetrating the blanket of censorship to encourage people fighting for their freedom.
Clearly the Palestinians are children of a lesser god since their desire for an independent state and an end to Israeli military occupation is soaked in blood by state-of-the-art tanks, bombs and rockets and drowned in BBC crocodile tears.
How could any TV reporter with integrity refer to hundreds of slaughtered civilians being “caught in the crossfire” during a one-sided onslaught on schools, mosques, hospitals and homes?
The BBC professes its commitment to reporting “sometimes fast-moving events in an accurate, fair and balanced way.” Well, it’s falling down on the job.
The BBC Bristol occupation has shown the way. The national broadcaster belongs to us all, not just those who are indifferent to Palestinian humanity.
Film-maker Ken Loach tears into the BBC for its biased coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza
Film-maker Ken Loach tore into the BBC for its biased coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza as he joined an ongoing occupation outside the broadcaster’s headquarters in Bristol.
Speaking to the Morning Star from the front lawn of the BBC Bristol offices, Mr Loach said: “The protesters are doing a terrific job even as the BBC is threatening to get them evicted from the site.
“We should note that many at the BBC, including senior staff, are embarrassed by the broadcaster’s coverage that has an obvious pro-Israel bias.
“They don’t put the views of Palestinians to the Israelis during interviews, while the use of language about Gazans is pejorative and the war crimes being committed against them ignored.
“They’re not ‘militants’ or ‘terrorists,’ they’re ‘resistance fighters.’ On the one side innocent people are being massacred, while the other are setting off a few fireworks.
“It’s the BBC, we own it, so it should be answerable.”
He believes BBC editors will have no choice but to respond to the pressure but believes any change to their broadcasting habits will be a “tactical” one.
Palestine campaigners have occupied the front lawn of the BBC building in Bristol for the last week.
They are set to join thousands in a march through the city today against the “Israeli genocide” in Gaza. It is set to be the biggest protest in Bristol for a decade, with demonstrators departing Bristol’s Shah Jahal Mosque at noon for a rally on College Green.
And next week they are set to present a “damning dossier” to BBC Bristol TV editor Neil Bennett containing evidence of the broadcaster’s biased reporting and demand time to argue their case.
The activists are also arranging a public burning of TV licences and the occupation’s court summons, as well as making plans to resist the eviction and to shame the BBC.
Along with Mr Loach’s attendance to the picket, other high-profile artists and campaigners offered messages of support.
Among them was comedian Mark Thomas, who said: “The BBC reporting of the Israeli military assault on Gaza has failed time and time again to contextualise the violence, refusing to explain the occupation of Palestine and the siege of Gaza.
“Ironically the occupation of the BBC in Bristol seems likely to be the only time an occupation is commented on.”
Miriam...The BBC has a murky history of bias, nothing new here. The refusal to allow a BBC Gaza donations appeal over the Cast Lead massacre in 2008/9 - initiated by the late Tony Benn - is a good example of the bbc's pro Israel/Zionist leanings.
BBC removed Jeremy Bowen from #Gaza for saying he had not seen any evidence of #Hamas using civilians as humanshields pic.twitter.com/ynoKwQtbXG
Israeli spokesmen have their work cut out explaining how they have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, compared with just three civilians killed in Israel by Hamas rocket and mortar fire. But on television and radio and in newspapers, Israeli government spokesmen such as Mark Regev appear slicker and less aggressive than their predecessors, who were often visibly indifferent to how many Palestinians were killed.
There is a reason for this enhancement of the PR skills of Israeli spokesmen. Going by what they say, the playbook they are using is a professional, well-researched and confidential study on how to influence the media and public opinion in America and Europe. Written by the expert Republican pollster and political strategist Dr Frank Luntz, the study was commissioned five years ago by a group called The Israel Project, with offices in the US and Israel, for use by those "who are on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel".
Every one of the 112 pages in the booklet is marked "not for distribution or publication" and it is easy to see why. The Luntz report, officially entitled "The Israel project's 2009 Global Language Dictionary, was leaked almost immediately to Newsweek Online, but its true importance has seldom been appreciated. It should be required reading for everybody, especially journalists, interested in any aspect of Israeli policy because of its "dos and don'ts" for Israeli spokesmen.
These are highly illuminating about the gap between what Israeli officials and politicians really believe, and what they say, the latter shaped in minute detail by polling to determine what Americans want to hear. Certainly, no journalist interviewing an Israeli spokesman should do so without reading this preview of many of the themes and phrases employed by Mr Regev and his colleagues.
The booklet is full of meaty advice about how they should shape their answers for different audiences. For example, the study says that "Americans agree that Israel 'has a right to defensible borders'. But it does you no good to define exactly what those borders should be. Avoid talking about borders in terms of pre- or post-1967, because it only serves to remind Americans of Israel's military history. Particularly on the left this does you harm. For instance, support for Israel's right to defensible borders drops from a heady 89 per cent to under 60 per cent when you talk about it in terms of 1967."
How about the right of return for Palestinian refugees who were expelled or fled in 1948 and in the following years, and who are not allowed to go back to their homes? Here Dr Luntz has subtle advice for spokesmen, saying that "the right of return is a tough issue for Israelis to communicate effectively because much of Israeli language sounds like the 'separate but equal' words of the 1950s segregationists and the 1980s advocates of Apartheid. The fact is, Americans don't like, don't believe and don't accept the concept of 'separate but equal'."
So how should spokesmen deal with what the booklet admits is a tough question? They should call it a "demand", on the grounds that Americans don't like people who make demands. "Then say 'Palestinians aren't content with their own state. Now they're demanding territory inside Israel'." Other suggestions for an effective Israeli response include saying that the right of return might become part of a final settlement "at some point in the future".
Dr Luntz notes that Americans as a whole are fearful of mass immigration into the US, so mention of "mass Palestinian immigration" into Israel will not go down well with them. If nothing else works, say that the return of Palestinians would "derail the effort to achieve peace".
The Luntz report was written in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and January 2009, when 1,387 Palestinians and nine Israelis were killed.
There is a whole chapter on "isolating Iran-backed Hamas as an obstacle to peace". Unfortunately, come the current Operation Protective Edge, which began on 6 July, there was a problem for Israeli propagandists because Hamas had quarrelled with Iran over the war in Syria and had no contact with Tehran. Friendly relations have been resumed only in the past few days – thanks to the Israeli invasion.
Much of Dr Luntz's advice is about the tone and presentation of the Israeli case. He says it is absolutely crucial to exude empathy for Palestinians: "Persuadables [sic] won't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Show Empathy for BOTH sides!" This may explain why a number of Israeli spokesman are almost lachrymose about the plight of Palestinians being pounded by Israeli bombs and shells.
In a sentence in bold type, underlined and with capitalisation, Dr Luntz says that Israeli spokesmen or political leaders must never, ever justify "the deliberate slaughter of innocent women and children" and they must aggressively challenge those who accuse Israel of such a crime. Israeli spokesmen struggled to be true to this prescription when 16 Palestinians were killed in a UN shelter in Gaza last Thursday.
There is a list of words and phrases to be used and a list of those to be avoided. Schmaltz is at a premium: "The best way, the only way, to achieve lasting peace is to achieve mutual respect." Above all, Israel's desire for peace with the Palestinians should be emphasised at all times because this what Americans overwhelmingly want to happen. But any pressure on Israel to actually make peace can be reduced by saying "one step at a time, one day at a time", which will be accepted as "a commonsense approach to the land-for-peace equation".
Dr Luntz cites as an example of an "effective Israeli sound bite" one which reads: "I particularly want to reach out to Palestinian mothers who have lost their children. No parent should have to bury their child."
The study admits that the Israeli government does not really want a two-state solution, but says this should be masked because 78 per cent of Americans do. Hopes for the economic betterment of Palestinians should be emphasised.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is quoted with approval for saying that it is "time for someone to ask Hamas: what exactly are YOU doing to bring prosperity to your people". The hypocrisy of this beggars belief: it is the seven-year-old Israeli economic siege that has reduced the Gaza to poverty and misery.
On every occasion, the presentation of events by Israeli spokesmen is geared to giving Americans and Europeans the impression that Israel wants peace with the Palestinians and is prepared to compromise to achieve this, when all the evidence is that it does not. Though it was not intended as such, few more revealing studies have been written about modern Israel in times of war and peace.
brainpanhandler » Tue Aug 05, 2014 2:31 am wrote:Are you just looking for a cataloging of Israeli war/genocidal crimes in 2014, sans commentary?
Monday, August 04, 2014
by TruthDig
Why Israel Lies
byChris Hedges
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appearing on CBS' Face The Nation last month. (Image: Screenshot)
All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories—required under the rules of American journalism—although we know they are untrue.
I saw small boys baited and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis. The soldiers swore at the boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle and the soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding others. I was present more than once as Israeli troops drew out and shot Palestinian children in this way. Such incidents, in the Israeli lexicon, become children caught in crossfire. I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on overcrowded hovels in Gaza City. I saw the corpses of the victims, including children. This became a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. I have watched Israel demolish homes and entire apartment blocks to create wide buffer zones between the Palestinians and the Israeli troops that ring Gaza. I have interviewed the destitute and homeless families, some camped out in crude shelters erected in the rubble. The destruction becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists. I have stood in the remains of schools—Israel struck two United Nations schools in the last six days, causing at least 10 fatalities at one in Rafah on Sunday and at least 19 at one in the Jebaliya refugee camp Wednesday—as well as medical clinics and mosques. I have heard Israel claim that errant rockets or mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or that the attacked spots were being used as arms depots or launching sites. I, along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, have never seen any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.”
There is a perverted logic to Israel’s repeated use of the Big Lie—Große Lüge—the lie favored by tyrants from Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to Saddam Hussein. The Big Lie feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit—racism among its supporters and terror among its victims.
By painting a picture of an army that never attacks civilians, that indeed goes out of its way to protect them, the Big Lie says Israelis are civilized and humane, and their Palestinian opponents are inhuman monsters. The Big Lie serves the idea that the slaughter in Gaza is a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency and honor on one side and Islamic barbarism on the other. And in the uncommon cases when news of atrocities penetrates to the wider public, Israel blames the destruction and casualties on Hamas.
George Orwell in his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” called this form of propaganda doublethink. Doublethink uses “logic against logic” and “repudiate[s] morality while laying claim to it.” The Big Lie does not allow for the nuances and contradictions that can plague conscience. It is a state-orchestrated response to the dilemma of cognitive dissonance. The Big Lie permits no gray zones. The world is black and white, good and evil, righteous and unrighteous. The Big Lie allows believers to take comfort—a comfort they are desperately seeking—in their own moral superiority at the very moment they have abrogated all morality.
The Big Lie, as the father of American public relations, Edward Bernays, wrote, is limited only by the propagandist’s capacity to fathom and harness the undercurrents of individual and mass psychology. And since most supporters of Israel do not have a desire to know the truth, a truth that would force them to examine their own racism and self-delusions about Zionist and Western moral superiority, like packs of famished dogs they lap up the lies fed to them by the Israeli government. The Big Lie always finds fertile soil in what Bernays called the “logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence.” All effective propaganda, Bernays wrote, targets and builds upon these irrational “psychological habits.”
This is the world Franz Kafka envisioned, a world where the irrational becomes rational. It is one where, as Gustave Le Bon noted in “The Crowd: A Study of the Public Mind,” those who supply the masses with the illusions they crave become their master, and “whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” This irrationality explains why the reaction of Israeli supporters to those who have the courage to speak the truth—Uri Avnery, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Norman Finkelstein, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Ilan Pappé, Henry Siegman and Philip Weiss—is so rabid. That so many of these voices are Jewish, and therefore have more credibility than non-Jews who are among Israel’s cheerleaders, only ratchets up the level of hate.
But the Big Lie is also consciously designed to send a chilling message to Gaza’s Palestinians, who have lost large numbers of their dwellings, clinics, mosques, and power, water and sewage facilities, along with schools and hospitals, who have suffered some 1,650 deaths since this assault began—most of the victims women and children—and who have seen 400,000 people displaced from their homes. The Big Lie makes it clear to the Palestinians that Israel will continue to wage a campaign of state terror and will never admit its atrocities or its intentions. The vast disparity between what Israel says and what Israel does tells the Palestinians that there is no hope. Israel will do and say whatever it wants. International law, like the truth, will always be irrelevant. There will never, the Palestinians understand from the Big Lie, be an acknowledgement of reality by the Israeli leadership.
The Israel Defense Forces website is replete with this black propaganda. “Hamas exploits the IDF’s sensitivity towards protecting civilian structures, particularly holy sites, by hiding command centers, weapons caches and tunnel entrances in mosques,” the IDF site reads. “In Hamas’ world, hospitals are command centers, ambulances are transport vehicles, and medics are human shields,” the site insists.
“... [Israeli] officers are tasked with an enormous responsibility: to protect Palestinian civilians on the ground, no matter how difficult that may be,” the site assures its viewers. And the IDF site provides this quote from a drone operator identified as Lt. Or. “I have personally seen rockets fired at Israel from hospitals and schools, but we couldn’t strike back because of civilians nearby. In one instance, we acquired a target but we saw that there were children in the area. We waited around, and when they didn’t leave we were forced to abort a strike on an important target.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, in a Big Lie of his own, said last month at a conference of Christians United for Israel that the Israeli army should be given the “Nobel Peace Prize … a Nobel Peace Prize for fighting with unimaginable restraint.”
The Big Lie destroys any possibility of history and therefore any hope for a dialogue between antagonistic parties that can be grounded in truth and reality. While, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, the ancient and modern sophists sought to win an argument at the expense of the truth, those who wield the Big Lie “want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.” The old sophists, she said, “destroyed the dignity of human thought.” Those who resort to the Big Lie “destroy the dignity of human action.” The result, Arendt warned, is that “history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility.” And when facts no longer matter, when there is no shared history grounded in the truth, when people foolishly believe their own lies, there can be no useful exchange of information. The Big Lie, used like a bludgeon by Israel, as perhaps it is designed to be, ultimately reduces all problems in the world to the brutish language of violence. And when oppressed people are addressed only through violence they will answer only through violence.
Morty » Mon Aug 04, 2014 8:07 pm wrote:brainpanhandler » Tue Aug 05, 2014 2:31 am wrote:Are you just looking for a cataloging of Israeli war/genocidal crimes in 2014, sans commentary?
My idea with the "Gaza War Crimes, 2014" title was that, given there are plenty of people out in the wider world who think only Hamas are committing war crimes in this conflict, it would allow the alleged war crimes of both sides to be discussed. A recipe for thread disaster now that I think about it.
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