Doctors perform surgery at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza on March 18, 2024 | Photo: Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images We urge anyone who reads this to publicly oppose sending weapons to Israel as long as this onslaught continues Reposted from Common Dreams On March 25 the two of us, an orthopedic surgeon […]
As Surgeons, We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza / by Feroze Sidhwa and Mark Perlmutter
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Continue reading “Impunity, Crimes Of Israel & Genocide! Israel’s killing of aid workers is no accident. It’s part of the plan to destroy Gaza!”
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
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.
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?
Continue reading “Riot, Grrrls: Marisa Crawford remembers great Girl Culture and Feminist Lit – Weird Sister”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…
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.
READ MORE: Ex-Ukrainian MP calls for corruption charges in Biden impeachment probe
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.
READ MORE: Hunter Biden-linked Ukrainian firm connected to terror attacks in Russia – Moscow
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.
from thefreeonline on by Dr Eddy Betterman MD at Dreddy MD
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer amassed a lengthy rap sheet of criminal activity that much of the world does not even know exists.
Before being chosen as the world’s leading provider of mRNA “vaccines” for the coronavirus (COVID-19), pharmaceutical giant Pfizer amassed a lengthy rap sheet of criminal activity that much of the world does not even know exists.
In 2009, Pfizer was ordered to pay $2.3 billion in what the United States federal government announced was “the largest medical fraud settlement in history.”
Continue reading “Pfizer’s $2.3bn CRIMINAL RECORD invalidates Pharma Giant as FRAUDULENT peddling deadly snake oil”
Anarchism, for me, is just the name for a kind of politics that never stops being messy and never stops listening to personal and collective desires, no matter how unreasonable they seem.
Autism and anarchy: The importance of autistic anarchism
The Free 