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"Biden has started a new US war in Yemen while backing a genocide in Gaza, both of which are fully supported by the party which supposedly opposes him. But by all means go ahead and spend the rest of the year fixating on the US presidential race."

-- Caitlin Johnstone

News and Opinion

The Biden Administration’s Absurd Justification For Its Yemen War

On Monday the US launched its eighth wave of airstrikes in its new war against Yemeni forces, which it has now formally titled “Operation Poseidon Archer”. The strikes are aimed at breaking a Red Sea shipping blockade which the de facto authorities in Yemen have implemented to pressure Israel and its allies into ceasing the genocidal onslaught in Gaza.

At a press briefing on Monday, Principal Deputy State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel uttered a now-familiar Biden administration line when asked if the war would escalate to involve US boots on the ground.

“First, as it relates to the Houthis, the United States is not interested in any escalation, but it is never acceptable for malign actors to target international vessels, to target legitimate commerce that is flowing through the Red Sea,” Patel said. “We’re talking about international waters that allow 30 percent of global container shipping to flow through those waters — 15 percent of seaborne trade. This is a waterway that is vital. And we will always take appropriate steps to hold those accountable that put things like legitimate commerce, civilians, U.S. personnel, in harm’s way.”

Ever since the Biden administration began bombing Yemen, its official spinmeisters have been babbling about commerce and global container shipping to justify it. The unspoken premise behind this justification is that an active genocide should be permitted to continue with zero economic repercussions of any kind, for Israel or anyone else.

It’s just taken as a given by empire managers and their defenders that the money must keep flowing and the gears of capitalism must keep turning at the same rate they were turning before Israel began massacring tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, if not faster. That the horrors being unleashed in Gaza should have no material impact on the rest of the world whatsoever.

The empire will permit you to think thoughts and feel feelings about the butchery in Gaza quietly in the privacy of your own head, and under the right circumstances it will even permit you to attend pro-Palestine demonstrations and share your opinions on social media. But as soon as it comes to physically interfering with the gears of the imperial machine, they’ll blow your guts out.

This is of course absurd. The horrors in Gaza should be affecting the whole world. Our lives should not be proceeding normally, and it’s freakish and obscene that they do. It’s a sign of a profoundly sick civilization that so many of us in the west are able to lose ourselves in idle entertainment and laugh and stuff our faces with snacks and go out on the town while the nightmare in Gaza continues to unfold.

Gaza should be stopping us in our tracks. Hell we should be disrupting the economy ourselves — we shouldn’t have to wait for impoverished Yemenis to do it for us. We should be holding general strikes and stopping ships and disrupting everything we can possibly disrupt in order to force western civilization to look at what it’s supporting in Gaza and bring this mass atrocity to a screeching halt. Instead we’re just sleepwalking through life like we always do while people in the poorest nation in the middle east bravely fight our battle for us.

When you see how effective the Houthis have been at using Yemen's critical location to shut down Red Sea traffic, you understand why the US spent years backing a horrific genocidal military campaign trying to get rid of them. pic.twitter.com/kL3fYDqJlY

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 21, 2023

The empire is not entitled to expect that all commerce keep flowing normally during an active genocide. Israel is not entitled to have zero consequences for its actions, and its trading partners are not entitled to be unaffected by those consequences. The idea that it’s normal and appropriate to use any and all measures to prevent Israel’s atrocities from having any material impact on commerce — up to and including starting a new American war — is self-evidently ridiculous.

It’s been an incredibly draining past 100 days for those of us who’ve been following events in Gaza. There’ve been days when I couldn’t believe the sun dared to shine. The premise that there shouldn’t even be a slight economic downturn as a result of this madness, and that it’s fine to start a war to make sure there isn’t, deserves to be dismissed with extreme disdain.

We live in a dystopian world where it’s completely normalized to subvert human interests to commercial interests, to toss tens of thousands of lives into the incinerator for wealth and convenience. Where war profiteers rake in vast fortunes for selling instruments of mass murder to genocidal governments, and where the most powerful empire in history declares a war to defend shipping containers at the cost of human life.

Don’t ever let these sick freaks convince you that this is normal.

UN secretary general says Israel’s rejection of two-state solution is ‘unacceptable’

Israel’s “clear and repeated rejection of the two-state solution” is unacceptable, and could only prolong the conflict in Gaza, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, has said, at the launch of a highly charged security council debate focusing on aid shipments to Gaza.

Gutteres told the meeting in New York on Monday that the denial of a Palestinian state will only embolden extremists everywhere and indefinitely extend the conflict.

“Last week’s clear and repeated rejection of the two-state solution at the highest levels of the Israeli government is unacceptable,” Guterres told the council.

“This refusal, and the denial of the right to statehood to the Palestinian people, would indefinitely prolong a conflict that has become a major threat to global peace and security,” he said.

He said a two-state solution is the only way out of the endless cycle of fear, hatred and violence, adding it is the only way to address the legitimate aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians.

iTV Captures WHITE-FLAG WAVING Gazan Shot & Killed; IDF Says 9K Hamas Are Dead

Twenty-One Israeli Soldiers Killed After Hamas Rocket Triggered Mine Explosion

Twenty-one Israeli soldiers were killed on Monday when they came under attack by Hamas in the Gaza Strip near the Israeli border.

The soldiers came under attack while they were planting mines to demolish two buildings in central Gaza, and a Hamas RPG hit a nearby tank, which likely triggered the mines and collapsed the building on the troops, according to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

“At around 4 pm, an RPG was fired by gunmen at a tank securing the forces, and simultaneously, an explosion occurred in two two-story buildings. The buildings collapsed due to this explosion, while most of the forces were inside and near them,” the IDF said.

In a separate incident, three other Israeli soldiers were killed, making it the deadliest day for the IDF since the ground invasion of Gaza was launched in October. The IDF said the death toll in the ground operation has risen to 219. A recent report from the Israeli news site Walla said 4,000 Israeli troops have been classified as disabled.

CNN Catches IDF War Crime

Why Israel Will Never Manage to Destroy All Hamas Tunnels in Gaza

The Israel Defense Forces will not destroy all the Hamas and Islamic Jihad tunnels under Gaza. Probably not even most of them. This assessment, which has yet to be voiced publicly, is shared by all levels of the IDF. From the generals, trying to plan what they call a "year of warfare" in 2024, through the brigade and battalion commanders who are spending entire weeks on the ground to destroy just one section of the tunnel system, all the way down to the combat engineering troops, who are now starting to come out of Gaza after three months of fighting with mixed feelings. On the one hand they have carried out an unprecedented number of tunnel demolition missions. On the other, they know many more such tunnels remain intact.

The IDF is scaling down its forces in Gaza City with full knowledge that many tunnels have been overlooked. This shouldn't come as a surprise. The tunnels under the Gaza Strip were there even before Hamas' founding in 1987 and it seems they'll be here after this war too. ...

In May 2021, the IDF thought it knew enough about the tunnels under Gaza to launch Operation Blue Thunder, more widely known as the operation against the "Gaza metro." It was an attempt to trick Hamas into thinking Israel was about to launch a ground attack, in the hopes of making its fighters take shelter in the tunnels which would then be targeted by airstrikes, killing hundreds of them. Ultimately only a handful were killed.

Without speculating about why the operation failed, it's now clear that the IDF was aware of only a few of the tunnel locations. Hamas has ample room to spread out its forces underground and there probably aren't enough bunker-busting bombs in all the air forces of the world to take out all the tunnels at once. Even after the operation's meager results became known, there were those in the IDF who thought it was a success because Hamas would in a future confrontation be wary of using the tunnels again. That has proven baseless over the past three months.

Only gradually did the IDF realize that the tunnel network was much more extensive than it had previously understood and that their main use by Hamas was not for launching arsenals, but for preserving its forces. Another assumption that was proven wrong was that it would be enough to control the ground above for a few weeks for Hamas fighters, starved of food, water and oxygen to be forced to emerge. Not only were the tunnels stocked with provisions for a prolonged siege, they provided safe passage between different parts of the city and the Strip. The IDF claimed to have destroyed Hamas' regional battalions only to find fighters from those battalions turning up in other areas. And when signs of the presence of hostages were discovered in the tunnels, they had by then been moved to other tunnels.

The IDF began this war with an unparalleled array of underground capabilities which proved to not be enough. Commanders in the field discovered that it would often take an entire battalion days, even weeks, to locate, plan and carry out the demolition of just a few hundred meters. And during this time, hundreds of soldiers had to remain in a war zone, securing themselves from Hamas ambushes and missiles. Destroying a tunnel network the size of a major city's public transport system is a complex engineering task which would take months, even if not in a war zone. ...

Instead of destroying all the tunnels, the IDF is now talking of "denying" their future military use to Hamas. But no one has a clear idea of how to do that. It isn't certain that all the main tunnels have been located, though the IDF has already discovered over a thousand shafts. And even if it did find them all, which ones should be prioritized? And what's to prevent Hamas from rebuilding? The tunnels may be as organic to the earth under Gaza as Hamas.

Does Tony Blinken have a conscience?

Worth a full read:

Sec. Blinken Casually Admits Entire Gaza Strategy Is Premised on Pointless Mass Death

Buried in a recent, routine “mounting tensions between Netanyahu and Biden” piece (its own ass-covering sub-genre that we’ve seen dozens of times) was a fairly significant admission by the White House that has gone entirely unnoticed by mainstream media—but, I will argue, is objectively very important.

NBC’s Andera Mitchell reported on Wednesday, recapping a recent meeting between the Israeli Prime Minister and the US Secretary of State Blinken:

Blinken told Netanyahu that ultimately there is no military solution to Hamas, according to the officials, and that the Israeli leader needs to recognize that or history will repeat itself and violence will continue. But, the officials said, Netanyahu was unmoved.

If the White House believes there is “no military solution” to Hamas, then why are they funding, arming, and backing a “military solution” to Hamas? Shouldn’t Mitchell have followed up this fairly startling admission with some more reporting? Or bigger questions? Clearly not, since Mitchell is a well-established White House stenographer. But others should probably pull on this thread a bit, given the implications of what Blinken is reportedly telling Israel officials.

The idea that Hamas will not be “eliminated” by bombing, starving, and collectively punishing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians is a point others have made for months, including on the Substack. The whole moral reasoning of the continued mass death in Gaza is that it is pursuant to some type of regime change operation designed to “remove Hamas from power”—that there was a greater good rationalizing all the unprecedented violence. If the White House thinks such a thing is impossible, that defeating Hamas—whatever this means—is not possible with shelling, bombing, starving, and besieging Gaza, then why is it continuing to back the Israeli military operations with regime change as its nominal goal? This isn’t to say the nominal goal would, at all, justify killing over 25,000 civilians, but now that our own leaders don’t believe it, shouldn’t this be a major political scandal? Not a throw away line in a bigger report?

The 'IDF': where genocide is a funny game

Houthis say US-UK airstrikes will not go unpunished or unanswered

Houthi leaders have vowed defiance in the face of a new wave of attacks they say targeted five governorates, including the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, and surrounding areas.

A Houthi army spokesperson, Brig Gen Yahya Saree, said the allied attacks would not go unpunished or unanswered. Houthi leaders also repeated that their threats to ships in the Red Sea were solely directed at stopping commercial ships trading with Israel due to its bombardment of Gaza. They insisted other ships had free passage. Some ships navigating the Red Sea have put out identifiers saying they are “not Israeli connected”.

Within hours of the attacks, UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) was reporting “uncrewed aerial system activity” south of al-Mukha, Yemen. Authorities are investigating, the UKMTO said.

Houthi propaganda juxtaposed pictures of Sana’a under attack with similar pictures in Gaza. ...

The Houthis regard the attack by America as a moment of vindication.

Nasr al-Din Amer, a senior Houthi official, said: “We’ve been waiting for 20 years for the moment of [military] engagement with America and Israel. Praise God, who helped us fight the lords of blasphemy and tyranny.”

Biden White House prepares another forever war

US launches strikes in Iraq on militia groups backed by Iran

The US has carried out strikes in Iraq against three facilities linked to Iran-backed militia, the Pentagon has said, after a weekend attack on an Iraqi airbase that wounded US forces.

“US military forces conducted necessary and proportionate strikes on three facilities used by the Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia group and other Iran-affiliated groups in Iraq,” the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, said in a statement.

“These precision strikes are in direct response to a series of escalatory attacks against US and Coalition personnel in Iraq and Syria by Iranian-sponsored militias,” Austin added.

On Saturday, four US personnel suffered traumatic brain injuries after Iraq’s Ain al-Asad airbase was hit by multiple ballistic missiles and rockets fired by Iranian-backed militants from inside Iraq.

Slovak Prime Minister Says Ukraine Must Give Up Territory to End War

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said over the weekend that the only way to end the war in Ukraine is for Kyiv to give up some of its territory to Russia.

“There has to be some kind of compromise,” Fico said, according to POLITICO. “What do they expect, that the Russians will leave Crimea, Donbas, and Luhansk? That’s unrealistic.” ...

Fico will meet with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal on Wednesday and said he will tell him that Slovakia will block any attempts to bring Ukraine into NATO. “I will tell him that I am against the membership of Ukraine in NATO and that I will veto it,” Fico said. “It would merely be a basis for World War III, nothing else.”

The Slovak leader said Ukraine was not a “sovereign nation” since it is “under the total influence and control of the United States.”

NYPD investigating alleged chemical attack on pro-Palestine Columbia University students

The New York police department announced on Tuesday it was investigating an alleged chemical attack on students protesting in support of Palestine on Columbia University’s campus last week. Students protesting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza – which has killed more than 25,000 people, according to Palestinian health officials – reported being sprayed with a chemical that left many with symptoms such as nausea, abdominal pain, headaches and irritated eyes.

Columbia’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) said eight students were a hospitalized as a result. Students reported their clothes and hair had a foul smell for hours after the protest.

NYPD is investigating claims that the chemical unleashed on these students is “skunk”, an agent developed in Israel and used as a crowd control weapon, most commonly in the occupied West Bank. SJP said the chemicals were sprayed by two students who are former Israeli soldiers, who mixed in with the crowd by wearing Palestinian keffiyehs. The Guardian could not verify this claim, and the NYPD and Columbia did not directly respond to questions about the identity of the perpetrators. According to a statement from Columbia, “the alleged perpetrators of the attack have been identified and immediately banned from campus while law enforcement’s investigation proceeds”.

The NYPD told the Guardian that a total of six students filed police reports and that no arrests were made. A police spokesperson said that the first victim who filed a report said she “smelled an unknown odor and began to feel nauseated and experienced a burning sensation in her eyes”.

TRUCKER VICTORY: Trudeau's Emergency Act Use 'UNJUSTIFIED', Rules Canadian Judge

Judge rebukes Trudeau for ‘not justified’ use of Emergencies Act to break convoy

A Canadian court has ruled that Justin Trudeau’s government was not justified when it used sweeping powers to break up what the prime minister called “illegal and dangerous” protest blockades across the country two years ago.

A federal court found on Tuesday the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the so-called freedom convoy protests “was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration”.

In his decision, Justice Richard Mosley wrote that the move was “unreasonable” and led to infringement of Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms.

In February 2022, truckers and their supporters occupied Ottawa, the Canadian capital, for nearly a month in a protest over public health orders related to the coronavirus pandemic. Protesters also blockaded key border crossings with the US.

Trudeau responded by invoking the 1988 Emergencies Act for the first time in Canada’s history, granting the federal government sweeping powers, including the ability to ban gatherings at certain locations and stop crowdfunding efforts to support the protest.

"MAGA vs. MAGA Polite": Trump Beats Haley in New Hampshire, Haley Vows to Fight On

Trump wins New Hampshire Republican primary

Donald Trump has won New Hampshire’s Republican presidential primary, the Associated Press reports.

This is Trump’s second victory in the two states that voted in the GOP nomination process. Last week, he won overwhelmingly in Iowa’s caucuses.

Biden BUYS NEW HAMPSHIRE VICTORY With SUPER-PAC Backed Astrotruf Write-In Campaign

The US needs 22m acres for the solar energy transition

If the US is to rid itself of fossil fuels then one of its primary replacements, solar energy, is going to need land. A lot of land.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which oversees more of the public realm than any other federal government agency, has outlined exactly how much of western America should be made available for solar panels and their associated cables and transformers – 22m acres. That is roughly the size of Maine, or an area larger than Scotland.

The Bureau of Land Management has proposed using 22m acres of public land for solar projects in the western US.

This total, part of a new administration plan to accelerate solar energy in the US west, will give the US “maximum flexibility” to meet climate goals, the BLM said. A smaller area of this available land, around 700,000 acres, will definitely need to be dotted with solar panels to meet a goal set by Joe Biden to have a 100% clean electricity grid by 2035. This is still a big leap from the status quo, where only around 34,000 acres of bureau land is used for solar.

Solar may currently contribute little more than 3% of the US’s electricity generation but it is having something of a moment, with projects bolstered by Biden’s huge tranche of clean energy subsidies. The BLM is progressing several major solar projects – the largest, in Nevada, is set to be 5,500 acres in size, enough to power more than 200,000 homes – and utility-scale solar generation is expected to grow 75% by next year compared to last, adding 79,000 megawatts of new capacity.

Alarm as first uranium mine in years opens near Grand Canyon

A uranium mine in Arizona located just 7 miles south of the Grand Canyon national park has begun operations, one of the first in the US to open in eight years. The opening of the Pinyon Plain mine comes as the US seeks to boost domestic production of the mineral needed for nuclear energy and accelerate divesting from fossil fuels.

But the mine has faced decades of fierce opposition from the Havasupai Tribe, who fear that its operations could contaminate its sole source of drinking water and damage important cultural sites. “It’s a very, very sad situation – it’s upsetting a lot of tribes in this region,” said Carletta Tilousi, a former Havasupai council member who has been leading the tribe’s opposition to uranium mining in the south-west. “But I think we all knew this was eventually going to happen.”

The Pinyon Plain mine lies within the new Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni national monument that Joe Biden designated last year, and is owned and operated by Energy Fuels Inc.

Uranium mining in the region had ceased for years, amid a federal ban on new mining claims around the Grand Canyon. Permitted mines unaffected by the ban sat dormant due to low uranium prices. But an agreement at Cop28 to triple nuclear energy production as a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has boosted demand. Energy Fuels Inc began operations at the Pinyon Plain mine in December and has also begun ramping up production at its Pandora and La Sal mines in Utah, near Moab.

The company cited rising uranium prices in a statement about its activities, as well as “increased buying interest from US nuclear utilities, US and global government policies supporting nuclear energy to address global climate change, and the need to reduce US reliance on Russian and Russian-controlled uranium and nuclear fuel” among their reasons to ramp-up production. The US still buys uranium from Russia, despite sanctions imposed after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but lawmakers have been seeking to divest from the country.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Many Say They Want Peace When What They Really Want Is Obedience

Philadelphi Corridor: How Gaza's border could be a tipping point in Egypt-Israel ties

The Roots of Israel’s Purge & Purify Strategy

Why There Will Never Be a Two-State Solution

New York Times Spins Lemkin’s Work on Genocide

Hamas says ‘faults happened’ in 7 October attacks in first account since start of war on Gaza

To Hope That China Will Help With Yemen Is Delusional Bullshit

Naming Names: Professor Exposes the Banking Cartel that Has Hijacked U.S. Democracy

Did Stock Buybacks Knock the Bolts Out of Boeing?

Reports Expose Deep Harms of Corporate Tax Cuts and 'Trickle Down' Ideology

Ohio Pastor Files Federal Lawsuit Over Charges for Helping Homeless

‘The Lord told us to’: US pastor says he stole $1m from Christians to remodel home

Black Church Called Out For Allowing Biden To Speak By Former CNN Host!

A Little Night Music

Garnet Mimms - There Goes My Baby

Garnet Mimms - As Long As I Have You

Garnet Mimms And The Enchanters ~ One Girl

Garnet Mimms - Looking For You

Garnet Mimms - Baby Don't You Weep

Garnet Mimms - I'll Take Good Care of You

Garnet Mimms - The Truth Hurts

Garnet Mimms - Tell Me Baby

Garnet Mimms - Prove It To Me