Boycott Israeli goods: 240 more murdered by fascist Israeli army – US firm invests $25 Billion!-

Boycott Israel Movement Takes Off. Intel invest $25BN. 858 civilians killed and 1598 injured in Gaza over weekend

from thefreeonline on 27th Dec 2023 by .Al Jazeera and Sana

—286,059 views Dec 2023 #StopTheWar #BoycottIsrael –.. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – or BDS – movement that targets the Israeli occupation has been making waves amid the global protests against the war in Gaza. Social media sites such as X and TikTok and even apps are naming brands that they say have ties to Israel. Some governments are also taking action.

Israel grants Intel $3.2bn for new $25bn chip plant

Israel’s government has agreed to give Intel Corp a $3.2bn grant for a new $25bn chip plant it plans to build in southern Israel, both sides have said.

The news on Tuesday comes as Israel remains locked in an intense war on the Gaza Strip, which has killed close to 21,000 Palestinians, caused 100´s of Billions in damage, and ushered global calls to boycott Israel and companies that benefit from its occupation of Palestinian lands.

Intel operates four development and production sites in Israel, including a manufacturing plant in militarized Kiryat Gat, just 42km (26 miles) from the devastated Gaza Strip.

🇱🇧 Bombing by the fascist army of “Israel” against a house in Bent Jubeil, southern Lebanon. 🇱🇧 Bombardeo del ejército fascista de “Israel” contra una casa en Bent Jubeil, en el sur del Líbano. https://sanasyria.org/es/

Occupied Jerusalem, December 26 (SANA) The Palestinian Ministry of Health announced that the Israeli occupation committed 18 massacres during the last hours, leaving 241 martyrs and 382 wounded, raising the number of martyrs of the ongoing aggression for the 81st day to 20,915, and The injured numbered 54,918, in addition to thousands missing.

“The occupation intensified its aggression in multiple forms, including field executions, massacres, genocide and annihilation of residential neighborhoods,” he added.

‘Leave the World Behind’ predicts the perfect American apocalypse

from thefreeonline on 26 Dec, 2023 19:37 by Home Culture

Anyone with an interest in the cultural and political decline of the contemporary US should see ‘Leave the World Behind’

Graham Hryce is an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.

‘Leave the World Behind’ by Sam Esmail, 2023. © Netflix Studios

These days, Hollywood produces endless quantities of cultural dross – superhero franchise epics that Martin Scorsese has said have nothing to do with cinema at all; boring, lengthy, reverential biopics (‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Maestro’); and the crude #metoo propaganda of the ‘Barbie’ movie.

Yet last month a remarkable American film was released that stands out for its political realism and insight.

The film is ‘Leave the World Behind’ – a dystopian political tract directed, written, and produced by Sam Esmail, and based on a novel by Rumaan Alam published in 2020.

The movie features Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon – three Hollywood stars of note – and their involvement in such an iconoclastic film is not only surprising, but very much to their credit.

Esmail was born in New Jersey. His parents were Egyptian immigrants. Alam was born in Washington, to parents who emigrated to America from Bangladesh. It is surely their immigrant backgrounds that account for the film’s unique and critical perspective on contemporary America.

Esmail and Alam’s ‘outsider’ status allows them to see America in a way that is now virtually impossible within mainstream Hollywood.

Leave the World Behind is not easily categorised – thematically, it is similar to the 2022 European film ‘Triangle of Sadness’, but it is much more politically sophisticated. The film also harks back to the science fiction films that Hollywood churned out with monotonous regularly in the 1950s and 60s.

That entire film genre was, of course, the ideological product of the Cold War.

In science fiction films of that era, the irrational fear of an imminent Russian invasion was cinematically transformed into attacks by aliens from remote galaxies – and a powerful, liberal-democratic America was pictured as being threatened by these sinister forces from without.

Inevitably in these films, after a stirring heroic conflict, a victorious America prevailed over those malevolent alien forces that had sought to destroy the home of liberty and the land of the free.

Now that a weakened America is seeking to wage a recalibrated Cold War – against China as well as Russia – it is hardly surprising that an American film should echo the science fiction films of the Cold War era, albeit in a radically different form and with more realistic content.

Leave the World Behind is firmly based in current American political reality – no need to resort to fictitious aliens, as the threat the global elites pose to liberal democracy in America is all too apparent – and the film resolutely refuses to provide the bogus solace that was an integral ideological component of the science fiction films of the 1950s and 60s.

“Leave the World Behind” by Sam Esmail, 2023. © Netflix Studios

The film is bleakly pessimistic – a reflection of America’s dramatic decline as a world power since the 1960s, as well as its current state of acute internal cultural and political disintegration.

This is perfectly understandable – no intelligent and politically aware contemporary American filmmaker could embrace the complacent optimism that characterised America in the 1950s and 60s.

Blood Money: Top Ten US Politicians Taking Most Israel Lobby Cash to okay Genocide and Apartheid of Palestinians

from thefreeonline on December 25 2023 by Alan MacLeod at Mint Press

The largest recipient of Israel lobby money is President Joe Biden.

#1 Joe Biden, $4,346,264

The largest recipient of Israel lobby money is President Joe Biden. From the beginning of his political career, Biden, according to his biographer Branko Marcetic, “established himself as an implacable friend of Israel,” spending his Senate career “showering Israel with unquestioning support, even when its behavior elicited bipartisan outrage.” The future president was a key figure in securing record sums of U.S. aid to the Jewish state and helped block a 1998 peace proposal with Palestine.

The support for Israeli policies has continued into the present, with his administration insisting that there are “no red lines” that it could cross that would cause it to lose American support. In essence, Biden has given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a carte blanche to break any rules, norms or laws he wishes to.

This has included ethnic cleansing and war crimes such as the bombing of schools, hospitals and places of worship using banned weapons like white phosphorous munitions. The arms Israel is using come supplied directly by the U.S. In November, the Biden administration rubber-stamped another $14.5 billion military aid package to Israel, ensuring the carnage would continue.

For his staunch support, Biden has received more than $4.3 million from pro-Israel groups since 1990.

#2 Robert Menéndez, $2,483,205

The New Jersey senator has received nearly $2.5 million in contributions and, in the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7, has been a key figure in drumming up support for Israel.

Describing Operation Al-Aqsa Flood as “barbaric atrocities” that were an “affront to humankind itself,” Menéndez gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor where he addressed Biden directly, stating:

Mr. President, in the face of unspeakable evil, we must not mince words. We must not waver in our resolve. Every single one of us in this chamber has a moral responsibility to speak out — unequivocally and unapologetically — as we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel and her people. I’ve been staunchly devoted to this cause for 31 years in Congress.”

He went on to claim that Israel and the United States are intrinsically linked and were founded on the same principles.

Israel hawk Robert Menendez indicted for corruption, again

Menéndez also courted controversy after he demanded that the U.S. help Israel “wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth,” even as Israel was leveling Gaza by carpet bombing it.

In October, he co-sponsored a Senate resolution “standing with Israel against terrorism” that passed unanimously, without dissent.

#3 Mitch McConnell, $1,953,160

The Senate Minority Leader is one of the most powerful politicians in America and has used his influence to attempt to force through legislation criminalizing BDS. He has described the peaceful tactic as “an economic form of anti-Semitism that targets Israel.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., speaks during a news conference with other Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2020. (Tom Brenner/Pool via AP)

McConnell is known to be very close to Prime Minister Netanyahu and supported a bill condemning the United Nations and calling on the U.S. to continue to veto any U.N. resolution critical of Israel. Last month, he strongly opposed steps taken towards applying basic U.S. and international law on weapons shipments to Israel.

Mitch McConnell’s full support of Israel gets mixed reaction

Kropotkin’s anarchist Xmas “Infiltrate the Shops, Give away the Toys!”

from thefreeonline…

“We need to tell people”, Kropotkin wrote, “that community workshops can be set up anywhere and that we can pool our resources to make sure everybody has their needs met”

An anarchist guide to Christmas

It’s no surprise to discover that anarchist theorist Pyotr Kropotkin was interested in Christmas. In Russian culture, St. Nicholas (Николай Чудотворец) was revered as a defender of the oppressed, the weak and the disadvantaged. Kropotkin shared the sentiments.

A principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government — harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups…

But there was also a family link. As everyone knows, Kropotkin could trace his ancestry to the ancient Rurik dynasty that ruled Russia before the upstart Romanovs and which, from the first century CE, controlled the trade routes between Moscow and the Byzantine Empire. Nicholas’s branch of the family had been sent out to patrol the Black Sea.

On the night before Christmas, we’ll all be about. While the people are sleeping, we’ll realise our clout. We’ll expropriate goods from the stores, ‘cos that’s fair. And distribute them widely, to those who need care.Ruth Kinna 20 December 2018

June 30, 1876: Peter Kropotkin Escapes from Prison – The Free

But Nicholas was a spiritual man and sought an escape from the piracy and brigandage for which his Russian Viking family was famed. So he settled under a new name in the southern lands of the Empire, now Greece, and decided to use the wealth that he had amassed from his life of crime to alleviate the sufferings of the poor.

Can we reclaim Christmas for the masses? Credit: Grace Wilson/STRIKE! magazine.

Unpublished archival sources recently discovered in Moscow reveal that Kropotkin was fascinated by this family tie and the striking physical similarity between himself and the figure of Father Christmas, popularised by the publication of ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’ (better known as ‘The Night Before Christmas’) in 1823.

Kropotkin was not quite so portly as Klaus, but with a cushion stuffed up his tunic, he felt he could pass. His friend Elisée Reclus advised him to drop the fur trim on the outfit. That was a good idea as it would also allow him to wear a bit more black with the red.

The need for a new life becomes apparent. The code of established morality, that which governs the greater number of people in their daily life, no longer seems sufficient.

He’d decided to follow Elisée’s advice on the reindeer, too, and to use a hand driven sleigh. Kropotkin wasn’t normally given to dressing up. But exploiting the resemblance to spread the anarchist message was excellent propaganda by the deed.

Anticipating ‘V’, Kropotkin thought that we could all pose as Santa Claus. On the edge of one page Kropotkin writes: “Infiltrate the stores, give away the toys!”