Impunity, Crimes Of Israel & Genocide! Israel’s killing of aid workers is no accident. It’s part of the plan to destroy Gaza!

The isolation of Gaza is almost complete. The laws of war have been torn up and the enclave is now completely at Israel’s mercy

from thefreeonline on 11 April 2024 by Jonathan Cook at MiddleEastEye via truthaholics

Israel’s killing of aid workers is no accident. It’s part of the plan to destroy Gaza | Jonathan Cook | MIDDLE EAST EYE | 9 April 2024 The isolation of Gaza is almost complete. The laws of war have been torn up and the enclave is now completely at Israel’s mercy –

Palestinians react at a hospital where casualties of Israeli bombardment on al-Bureij camp in the central Gaza Strip were transported on 8 April, 2024 (AFP)

After six months – and many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian women and children later – western commentators are finally wondering whether something may be amiss with Israel’s actions in Gaza..

Israel apparently crossed a red line when it killed a handful of foreign aid workers on 1 April, including three British security contractors.

Three missiles, fired over several minutes, struck vehicles in a World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid convoy heading up Gaza’s coast on one of the few roads still passable after Israel turned the enclave’s homes and streets into rubble. All the vehicles were clearly marked. All were on an approved, safe passage. And the Israeli military had been given the coordinates to track the convoy’s location.

With precise missile holes through the vehicle roofs making it impossible to blame Hamas for the strike, Israel was forced to admit responsibility. Its spokespeople claimed an armed figure had been seen entering the storage area from which the aid convoy had departed.

But even that feeble, formulaic response could not explain why the Israeli military hit cars in which it was known there were aid workers. So Israel hurriedly promised to investigate what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a “tragic incident”.

Presumably, it was a “tragic incident” just like the 15,000-plus other “tragic incidents” – the ones we know about – that Israel has committed against Palestinian children day after day for six months.

In those cases, of course, western commentators always managed to produce some rationalisation for the slaughter.

Not this time.

‘This has to stop’

Half a year too late, with Gaza’s entire medical infrastructure wrecked by Israel and a population on the brink of starvation, Britain’s Independent newspaper suddenly found its voice to declare decisively on its front page: “Enough.”

Richard Madeley, host of Good Morning Britain, finally felt compelled to opine that Israel had carried out an “execution” of the foreign aid workers. Presumably, 15,000 Palestinian children were not executed, they simply “died”.

When it came to the killing of WCK staff, popular LBC talk-show host Nick Ferrari concluded that Israel’s actions were “indefensible”. Did he think it defensible for Israel to bomb and starve Gaza’s children month after month?

At least the foreign aid workers merited an investigation, however much of a foregone conclusion the verdict. That is more than the dead children of Gaza will ever get

Like the Independent, he too proclaimed: “This has to stop.”

The attack on the WCK convoy briefly changed the equation for the western media. Seven dead aid workers were a wake-up call when many tens of thousands of dead, maimed and orphaned Palestinian children had not been.

A salutary equation indeed.

British politicians reassured the public that Israel would carry out an “independent investigation” into the killings. That is, the same Israel that never punishes its soldiers even when their atrocities are televised. The same Israel whose military courts find almost every Palestinian guilty of whatever crime Israel chooses to accuse them of, if it allows them a trial.

But at least the foreign aid workers merited an investigation, however much of a foregone conclusion the verdict. That is more than the dead children of Gaza will ever get.

Israel’s playbook

British commentators appeared startled by the thought that Israel had chosen to kill the foreigners working for World Central Kitchen – even if those same journalists still treat tens of thousands of dead Palestinians as unfortunate “collateral damage” in a “war” to “eradicate Hamas”.

But had they been paying closer attention, these pundits would understand that the murder of foreigners is not exceptional. It has been central to Israel’s occupation playbook for decades – and helps explain what Israel hopes to achieve with its current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

Israel’s war on Gaza .. We were lied into the Gaza genocide. Al Jazeera has shown us how

Back in the early 2000s, Israel was on another of its rampages, wrecking Gaza and the West Bank supposedly in “retaliation” for Palestinians having had the temerity to rise up against decades of military occupation.

Shocked by the brutality, a group of foreign volunteers, a significant number of them Jewish, ventured into these areas to witness and document the Israeli military’s crimes and act as human shields to protect Palestinians from the violence.

They arrived under the mantle of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led initiative. They were keen to use what were then new technologies such as digital cameras, email and blogs to focus attention on the Israeli military’s atrocities.

Some became a new breed of activist journalist, embedded in Palestinian communities to report the story western establishment journalists, embedded in Israel, never managed to cover.

Israel presented the ISM as a terrorist group and dismissed its filmed documentation as “Pallywood” – a supposedly fiction-producing industry equated to a Palestinian Hollywood.

Gaza isolated

But the ISM’s evidence increasingly exposed the “most moral army in the world” for what it really was: a criminal enterprise there to enforce land thefts and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Israel needed to take firmer action.

The evidence suggests soldiers received authorisation to execute foreigners in the occupied territories. That included young activists such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall; James Miller, an independent filmmaker who ventured into Gaza; and even a United Nations official, Iain Hook, based in the West Bank.

This rapid spate of killings – and the maiming of many other activists – had the intended effect. The ISM largely withdrew from the occupied territories to protect its volunteers. Meanwhile, Israel formally banned the ISM from accessing the occupied territories.

Meanwhile, Israel denied press credentials to any journalist not sponsored by a state or a billionaire-owned outlet, kicking them out of the region.

Al Jazeera, the one critical Arab channel whose coverage reached western audiences, found its journalists regularly banned or killed, and its offices bombed.

The battle to isolate the Palestinians, freeing Israel to commit atrocities unmonitored, culminated in Israel’s now 17-year blockade of Gaza. It was sealed off.

With the enclave completely besieged by land, human rights activists focused their efforts on breaking the blockade via the high seas. A series of “freedom flotillas” tried to reach Gaza’s coast from 2008 onwards. Israel soon managed to stop most of them.

The largest was led by the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel laden with aid and medicine. Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship illegally in international waters in 2010, killing 10 foreign aid workers and human rights activists on board and injuring another 30.

The western media soft-pedalled Israel’s preposterous characterisation of the flotillas as a terrorist enterprise. The initiative gradually petered out.

Western complicity

That is the proper context for understanding the latest attack on the WCK aid convoy.

Israel has always had four prongs to its strategy towards the Palestinians. Taken together, they have allowed Israel to refine its apartheid-style rule, and are now allowing it to implement its genocidal policies undisturbed.

The first is to incrementally isolate the Palestinians from the international community.

Demonstrators stage a protest during a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the US Capitol on 30 January 2024, in Washington, DC (Alex Wong/AFP)

The second is to make the Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli military’s goodwill, and create conditions that are so precarious and unpredictable that most Palestinians try to vacate their historic homeland, leaving it free to be “Judaised”.

Riot, Grrrls: Marisa Crawford remembers great Girl Culture and Feminist Lit – Weird Sister

Marisa Crawford is the founder of the feminist blog Weird Sister, which highlights writing at the intersections of feminism, literature, and pop culture. This spring the Feminist Press released The Weird Sister Collection, a vital anthology that collects a decade’s worth of writing published on the blog. Contributors include writers such as Morgan Parker, Megan Milks, Virgie Tovar, and Christopher Soto.…
Riot, Grrrls: Marisa Crawford on Why Feminist Lit and 1990s Girl Culture Need More Critical Attention

Feminist Lit and 1990s Girl Culture Need More Critical Attention

Eleanor Whitney in Conversation with the Editor of “The Weird Sister Collection”

from thefreeonline By Eleanor Whitney on April 8, 2024

…In addition to being an editor and essayist, Marisa is a poet and her most recent collection, Diary, came out in the fall of 2023. Both the essays in The Weird Sister Collection and in Marisa’s poetry investigate and celebrate girlhood, nostalgia, and confessional writing. They also challenge traditional notions of what is considered “literature” and who is allowed to make “important art.”

In our conversation, we discussed the origins of the Weird Sister blog and anthology, as well as Marisa’s work as a writer and editor to give the worlds, cultures, and artifacts of women and girls the social, political, and critical attention that they deserve.

***

Eleanor Whitney: I think a great place to start is the origin story of Weird Sister. I’m interested in how the Weird Sister website grew out of your poetry practice, and also is underscored by the other work you’ve done in journalism and creative nonfiction. What was the impetus a decade ago that made you feel you needed to start this project?

Marisa Crawford: I had been craving a space like Weird Sister for a long time. I discuss this in the introduction, but when I was a college student, I became a creative writing major. I was super interested in being a poet and was so excited about literature, writing, and poetry. I also started learning about feminism and it gave me a lens for understanding how messed up the world was that I had never had words or a framework for. But they felt super separate.

I loved my first creative writing instructor, but his syllabus had no women writers on it. I didn’t even think about it at the time because it included poets like Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsburg, and William Carlos Williams and I was excited to learn about all these writers.

In another sphere, I was learning about feminism, intersectionality, and privilege. Obviously, feminist writers existed, but I felt like in the particular literary world I ended up in, the experimental poetry scene, feminism and literature still felt all too separate.

Radical Feminist Solidarities: A Reading List – Asian American Writers …

When I started Weird Sister there were all these literary blogs where people were talking about books, poetry, and pop culture, but I just wasn’t seeing much feminist analysis woven into them. I was reading a lot of feminist books, magazines, and blogs, but I felt like that intersection with literature was missing. I wanted that space to exist and I felt like I had to create it. When I started Weird Sister there were all these literary blogs where people were talking about books, poetry, and pop culture, but I just wasn’t seeing much feminist analysis woven into them.

Trip Into Realism ..concert review /Videos!.. Poison Girls, Chumbawamba, Mark Miwurdz, and Toxic Shock.. 1984..

EW: Very punk of you to create the place you want to see in the world! So, fast forward to the anthology. Weird Sister started a decade ago in 2014 and at the LA launch party a lot of the readers were reflecting on themselves as writers publishing with you a decade ago. So why did it feel vital to anthologize this work and what’s the impact of it coming out now?

USA “backs and escalates illegal Phillipine claims to China’s Spratly Islands”

from thefreeonline on 11th April ’24 by Global Times

“There is absolutely no doubt that this whole dispute is entirely about the Americans trying to make life difficult for the Chinese.

The recent tensions between China and the Philippines have been flared up by the Philippines to make illegal claims over South China Sea islands and maritime rights.

Nonetheless, a book written by Anthony Carty (Carty), an Irish professor of international law and now a visiting professor at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences of Peking University and a professor at the School of Law of Beijing Institute of Technology, shows China’s indisputable sovereignty in the South China Sea.

The book, The History and Sovereignty of South China Sea, has been released in Chinese language so far and the English version will be released soon by the Beijing-headquartered New Star Press.

In an interview with the Global Times (GT) reporter Wang Wenwen, Professor Carty explained how the official British and French archives he had dug into back China’s claims and how he thought of the current situation in the South China Sea.

POST CENSORED ON GOOGLE

read article further down…

Also, important reminder that the Americans told the Philippines at its independence in 1946 (the Philippines were an American colony) that the Spratlys were not Philippine territory, because the Spratlys were not part of the Philippines per the 1898 treaty Spain signed with… pic.twitter.com/TDnZAQxYs0
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) April 10, 2024

Hunter Biden’s Ukraine firm Burisma implicated in Terror Attacks / Used to Launder Cash for US/UE Elite – VIDEOS

from thefreeonline on 11 April ’24 by West-Banned News Agency

Multiple entities, including Burisma Holdings, have been involved in funding terrorism, Russian investigators have claimed

A Biden family-linked Ukrainian business has been named in a criminal probe into the financing of terrorism, Russia’s Investigative Committee announced on Tuesday. The industrial conglomerate Burisma Holdings, which employed Hunter Biden as a highly paid director in the 2010s, is included among several entities listed by investigators.

The focus on the company stems from a complaint filed by a group of Russian MPs and public figures in the aftermath of the deadly Crocus City Hall attack outside Moscow last month. The original petition claims that the US and its allies have allegedly organized a string of attacks on Russian soil.

Ukraine is not the 51st State. Biden needs to be Impeached!

SCREENSHOT… POST CENSORED ON GOOGLE SEARCH

So far, investigators have “established that the funds, flowing through commercial organizations, including the oil and gas conglomerate Burisma Holdings, operating in Ukraine, have been used in recent years to carry out terrorist attacks in Russia,” committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said. Terrorist activities have also taken place in third countries, aimed at the “elimination of prominent political and public figures, as well as causing economic damage,” she added.

Hunter Biden and Burisma Had Account With Bank Suspected of Money Laundering…

The committee’s specialists have been working “in cooperation with other intelligence services and financial intelligence,” Petrenko noted. The scrutiny currently revolves around “checking sources of income and further movement of funds in the amount of several million US dollars,” and examining the potential involvement of “specific individuals from among government officials, people with civic and commercial organizations of Western countries,” the spokeswoman stated.

Burisma is probably best known internationally for its controversial ties to the current first family in the US. In the spring of 2014, following the US-backed Maidan coup in Kiev, the Ukrainian energy firm employed Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer as directors, offering $1 million a year in pay.

Biden’s father Joe was President Barack Obama’s vice president at the time, and oversaw Washington’s Ukraine policy. He once famously bragged about getting a corruption prosecutor fired – which just happened to occur after the official began investigating Burisma.

The company also offered protection payments to the government in Kiev, according to former Ukrainian MP Andrey Derkach. Its co-founder Nikolay Zlochevsky paid some “800 million hryvnias [over $21 million] for terrorism financing” in “various jurisdictions,” Derkach claimed in January.

Ukrainian Burisma company ‘vehicle to launder taxpayer money’ – lawyer to RT

The oil and gas firm was named by the Russian Investigative Committee among organizations potentially used to finance terrorism

The Russian Investigative Committee on Tuesday said it launched a criminal probe into the financing of terrorism, naming the Ukrainian industrial conglomerate Burisma among the suspects.

RT spoke about the unfolding scandal to Arnaud Develay, an international human rights advocate and the author of a book covering ties between the Ukrainian company and the family of US President Joe Biden.

“This is something that the Russian Investigative Committee is going to have to determine to be sure, but this is nothing new,” Develay stated, describing the Ukrainian company as a “vehicle to launder taxpayers’ money.”

The investigators have already “established that the funds, flowing through commercial organizations, including the oil and gas conglomerate Burisma Holdings, operating in Ukraine, have been used in recent years to carry out terrorist attacks in Russia” and beyond.

WATCH ABOVE ON RUMBLE –

Should the allegation prove to be true, the West will try its best to swipe the whole affair under the rug, as well as to derail any attempts to bring it before international bodies, Develay believes.

“They would try to fight tooth and nail to basically deny it,” he said, adding that an attempt to establish a UN-backed tribunal to handle the affair is bound to get vetoed by the “Big Three” – the US, the UK and France.

“This is something that is going to have to be handled a different way,” he warned.

Develay’s work, titled ‘Foreign Entanglements: Ukraine, Biden & the Fractured American Political Consensus’ is set for public release on Wednesday.

“The leaders of Ukraine’s security services make no secret of the fact that they carry out terrorist acts and political assassinations for extra-budgetary cash,” he said at the time. “Once again: Biden’s partners in the corruption business in Ukraine finance terrorist acts, thus avoiding responsibility for corruption in Ukraine.”

Derkach claimed it was common practice for the owners of large businesses in Ukraine to ‘donate’ to the war effort in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

He pointed to a criminal case against Zlochevsky relating to a $6 million cash bribe that ended with the Burisma owner paying a $1,800 fine.

The EPA’s first chemical plant rule in 20 years targets polluters in Louisiana and Texas

Fracking Gas and Oil to Supply Giant US Chemical Belt and Lock-in cheap Plastics Monopoly

The chemical plants that dot the industrial corridors of Texas and Louisiana produce some of the most toxic pollution in the country. Companies like Celanese and Indorama Ventures emit ethylene oxide and 1,3-butadiene into the air of predominantly Black and Latino communities, day and night.

At the start of his term running the EPA in 2021, Michael Regan pledged to tackle these emissions. On Tuesday, the agency announced a major step in that direction when it finalized a rule to cut thousands of tons of toxic emissions and require air monitoring at more than 200 chemical plants across the country.

“We promised to listen to folks that are suffering from pollution and act to protect them,” Regan said in a press release. “Today we deliver on that promise with strong final standards to slash pollution, reduce cancer risk, and ensure cleaner air for nearby communities.”

Image projected onto Houston petrochemical plant during the Houston Toxic Tour, Credit: Backbone Campaign, CC BY 2.0

It marks the first time that federal regulations for chemical plants have been updated in decades. The EPA expects the rule to cut more than 6,200 tons of toxic emissions each year, and lead to reductions of more than 100 hazardous pollutants. Officials also estimated a 23,000 ton-per-year reduction in smog-forming volatile organic compounds, which create the brown-tinged air often found in industrialized areas.

The announcement follows a move in March to crack down on emissions of ethylene oxide, a dangerous carcinogen, from facilities that sterilize medical equipment.

Between 2018 and 2050, production of new U.S. oil and gas reserves could unlock 120 billion metric tons of new carbon pollution. Meanwhile the U.S. — thanks to Permian production — just marked its first month as a net exporter since records have been kept. If production and expansion are not curtailed, U.S. oil and gas expansion will impede the rest of the world’s ability to manage a climate-safe, equitable phase out of oil and gas production.

Some of the facilities subject to these rules, such as the Denka Performance Elastomers plant in Louisiana’s St. John the Baptist Parish, are more than half a century old. Regan visited St. John on a tour of pollution hotspots across the Deep South in November 2021, and promised residents that they would see a reduction in Denka’s emissions of chloroprene, a toxic compound that studies have linked to cancers of the liver, lung, and digestive system.

But multiple avenues the agency took to tackle the plant’s pollution, including a civil rights complaint and an emergency legal motion, failed to cut the facility’s emissions.

The new rule “shows that the agency was not willing to give up after trying to use other legal platforms to address the problem,” said Scott Throwe, a former EPA enforcement official and air pollution expert.

The most important chemical that the rule seeks to reduce is ethylene oxide, a potent carcinogen that studies have linked to cancers of the breast and the lymph nodes.

Plants emitting ethylene oxide came under greater scrutiny after the EPA published a study in 2016 finding the chemical to be 30 times more toxic to adults and 60 times more toxic to children than previously thought.

Ethylene oxide pollution is particularly bad in the industrial suburbs of the Houston Metro Area and in Cancer Alley, the corridor full of oil refineries and chemical plants on the lower Mississippi River in southeast Louisiana.

No One Should Have to Breathe These Chemicals – AnaParras of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (@tejasbarrios). HOUSTON — While families across the country celebrated Thanksgiving with their loved ones, more than 50,000 people in Port Neches, Tex., were forced to evacuate from their homes and spend the holiday in makeshift

Once it’s in place, the rule is expected to reduce both ethylene oxide and chloroprene emissions from certain processes and equipment by nearly 80 percent. One provision seeks to improve the efficiency of flares, gas combustion devices that burn off excess chemicals. Recent research connected the practice of gas flaring to increased childhood asthma cases.

Fracking for Plastics, a DeSmog investigation into the proposed petrochemical build-out in the Rust Belt. Over 12.6 million people in the United States live within half a mile of an oil and gas facility.

The regulations will also require plant operators to install monitors around the perimeters of their sites to measure concentrations of a number of cancer-causing chemicals, including ethylene oxide and vinyl chloride.

If the amount of any of these chemicals is above the agency’s “action level,” plant operators will be required to determine the cause and make repairs.

see also..Texas Taxpayers Face $117,000,000,000 Bill For Orphaned Oil Wells, Authored by Josh Owens via OilPrice.com.

In a fact sheet published alongside the final rule, the EPA noted that a similar monitoring provision in the regulations for petroleum refineries led to significant reductions in benzene levels around those facilities.

Chemical companies subject to the rule will have two years to implement the new provisions. Officials estimated that the regulations will cost the chemical industry $1.8 billion over the next 14 years, the equivalent of $150 million per year.

“Most of the facilities covered by the final rule are owned by large corporations,” the agency noted. “The cost of implementing the final rule is less than 1 percent of their annual national sales.”

by… The EPA’s first chemical plant rule in 20 years targets polluters in Louisiana and Texas