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-- C. S. Lewis

News and Opinion

Your Opposition To Israel’s Crimes Makes A Difference

In an article titled “Smotrich: Might be ‘justified and moral’ to cause 2 million Gazans to die of hunger, but world won’t let us,” The Times of Israel reports the following:

“Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich implies he believes that blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is ‘justified and moral’ even if it causes 2 million civilians to die of hunger, adding however that the international community won’t allow this to happen.

“‘We are bringing in aid because there is no choice,’ Smotrich says at a conference in Yad Binyamin hosted by the Israel Hayom outlet. ‘We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned.’”

Liberal supporters of the state of Israel often talk about Israel’s Naziesque far right leaders like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir like they’re some kind of fringe element in Israeli society, when really they’re both high-level officials in the Israeli government and play a crucial role in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. Just the other day it was announced that Netanyahu has appointed a new spokesman who openly supports the ethnic cleansing and colonization of the Gaza Strip; these freaks keep getting elevated to prominent positions within the Israeli power structure because of everything Israel is as a state.

The Smotrich article is doing the rounds on pro-Palestine social media today because of how psychopathic his comments are, and understandably so. It says so much that you can occupy high-level positions in the Israeli government while openly advocating the genocide of millions of people, even as Israel is on trial in the International Court of Justice for genocide.

But what’s not getting enough attention is the grievance Smotrich is expressing here: that while he thinks it would be great to starve two million Palestinians to death, the rest of the world won’t allow Israel to do this.

Smotrich is pretty much as evil as a human being can get, but in many ways he’s also one of the most honest people in the Israeli government. Is there any doubt that Israel would have gotten away with far worse genocidal atrocities these last ten months if its powerful western allies had allowed it to? And, while we’re on the subject, is there any doubt that Israel’s western allies would be consenting to far worse genocidal atrocities if not for fear of massive public backlash?

It seems pretty clear to me that the pressure westerners have been putting on their own governments regarding Israel’s criminality in Gaza is the primary reason why the western empire couldn’t just sign off on a swift final solution to the Palestinian problem back in October, and has had to settle for this awkward slow-motion genocide disguised as self-defense instead. It’s not that the empire has a conscience, it’s that it is sufficiently afraid of sparking mass-scale unrest on its own turf to need to disguise its own psychopathy a bit.

It is entirely likely that the only reason there are any Palestinians left in Gaza today is because normal people around the world have made their own governments fear the consequences of supporting Israel through a live-streamed full-scale holocaust. Our murderous governments have no conscience apart from the conscience of their own citizenry.

So don’t let anyone tell you your opposition to this thing makes no difference. Even if all you’ve been able to do is pressure them to slow this nightmare down a bit and make them hide what they’re really doing from the light of day, it could wind up being enough to save millions of lives.

Palestinian prisoners describe systemic abuse in Israel’s jails

Violence, extreme hunger, humiliation and other abuse of Palestinian prisoners has been normalised across Israel’s jail system, according to Guardian interviews with released prisoners, with mistreatment now so systemic that rights group B’Tselem says it must be considered a policy of “institutionalised abuse”.

Former detainees described abuse ranging from severe beatings and sexual violence to starvation rations, refusal of medical care, and deprivation of basic needs including water, daylight, electricity and sanitation, including soap and sanitary pads for women.

In a months-long investigation, B’Tselem interviewed 55 former prisoners housed in 16 Israeli prison service jails and detention centres run by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), mapping the scale and nature of abuse. The highly respected Jerusalem-based group concluded that Israel’s prisons should now be labelled “torture camps”.

“When we started the project we thought we would find sporadic evidence and extreme cases here and there, but the picture that has emerged is completely different,” said Yuli Novak, the organisation’s executive director. “We were shocked by the scale of what we heard. It is uncomfortable as an Israeli-Palestinian organisation to say Israel is running torture camps. But we realised that is what we are looking at.”

The Israel Prison Service (IPS) said it operated according to the law and under the oversight of the state comptroller. “We are not aware of the claims you described and as far as we know, no such events have occurred under IPS responsibility,” it said in a statement. The IPS also claimed that several petitions regarding jail conditions filed by human rights organisations had been rejected by the supreme court.

Scott Ritter : The Evil That Netanyahu Has Wrought

Iran says it has duty to punish Israel over killing of Hamas leader in Tehran

Iran has called in foreign ambassadors based in Tehran to warn of the country’s moral duty to punish Israel for what it sees as its “adventurism” and law-breaking in assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader, a week ago in the Iranian capital. Iran has also secured an emergency meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on Wednesday where it will try to press Arab states to back its right to take reprisal actions against Israel.

Many leaders in the Gulf are willing to condemn Israel’s actions but have also been calling for Iran to show restraint. The meeting will be held at the OIC headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Israeli leaders have said they are prepared for an Iranian-led attack. The defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said in response to mounting Iranian threats on Monday that the Israeli military was ready for a “swift transition to offence”, echoing comments by the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who said on Sunday the country was already engaged in a multi-front war with Iran and its allies.

Previous efforts by the deceased Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi to win the support of Gulf states for military action or direct economic sanction failed. Raisi died in a helicopter crash in May. ...

Iran is trying to portray its planned missile strikes as necessary to try to re-establish regional deterrence after the US’s failure to control its ally Israel. In a meeting with foreign diplomats, the acting foreign minister, Ali Bagheri, said: “We all have a moral duty and responsibility not to remain silent in the face of the occupation, displacement and genocide of the Palestinian nation.” He added: “Indifference and appeasement in the face of evil and injustice is a kind of moral negligence and causes the spread of evil.”

Matt Hoh: Why Haniyeh Was Murdered

Israeli Minister Laments That 'Nobody Will Let Us' Starve 2 Million Gazans To Death

Far-right Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich on Monday said that it might be "justified and moral" to cause two million Palestinian civilians to starve to death until Hamas returns Israeli hostages, drawing criticism from humanitarian groups.

Human rights campaigners have demonstrated that Israel is limiting and delaying aid into the Gaza Strip, and even using starvation as a "weapon of war." United Nations' experts warned earlier this month that famine had spread across the enclave, calling it an "intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people" and "a form of genocidal violence."

The comments from Smotrich, Israel's finance minister, added further weight to critics' charges that the country's leaders are uncommitted to addressing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

"We bring in aid because there is no choice," Smotrich, the finance minister, said at a conference hosted by the right-wing news outlet Israel Hayom. "We can't, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned."

"We live today in a certain reality, we need international legitimacy for this war," he added.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian-American fellow at the Atlantic Council, argued that Smotrich's comments indicated a genocidal intent to kill all of the people of Gaza. "This is what fascism and the desire for mass extermination and displacement look like," he wrote on social media. "These criminals want to eliminate all Palestinians in Gaza, not just Hamas."

Jehad Abusalim, executive director of the Institute for Palestine Studies, said Smotrich's comments were "horrifying but not surprising."

"This vile rhetoric is just the tip of the iceberg," he wrote on social media. "Smotrich is a minister in a government that Western leaders claim shares their values."

Peace Now, an anti-occupation Israeli group, condemned Smotrich's remarks in several social media posts, expressing disbelief that a "senior member of our government" would say such a thing and arguing that it would be "justified" for the U.S. to sanction Smotrich.

"All the way to the Hague," Peace Now wrote, suggesting that Smotrich or other Israeli leaders were guilty of war crimes.

Smotrich implied that allowing in any aid to Gaza was a public relations exercise aimed at quelling international criticism of the Israel's assault on the enclave, which has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians since October, according to the Gaza health ministry.

Investigation Exposes Big Tech Ties to Israeli Genocide in Gaza

The Israeli military is using cloud storage and artificial intelligence services provided by U.S. tech titans for "direct participation and collaboration" in what many critics around the world call Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, according to an investigation published this week.

Two Israeli publications—+972 Magazine and Local Call—on Sunday published a joint investigation revealing that the Israeli military is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store data gleaned from the mass surveillance in Gaza, where nearly 10 months of bombings and ground invasion have left more than 140,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to local and international estimates.

Multiple sources told the outlets that pressure on the IDF since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel has "led to a dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon's AWS, and Microsoft Azure." The report states that cooperation between the IDF and AWS "is particularly close" and "even helped on rare occasions to confirm aerial assassination strikes in Gaza—strikes that would have also killed and harmed Palestinian civilians."

IDF Col. Racheli Dembinsky—who spoke at a recent "IT for IDF" event near Tel Aviv—told investigative journalist Yuval Abraham that the "most important" advantage offered by cloud computing companies is advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. AI, she said, provides the IDF with "very significant operational effectiveness" as it obliterates Gaza.

Last year, Abraham published an investigation on the same two websites that showed how the IDF is using AI to select targets, essentially creating what one former Israeli officer called a "mass assassination factory." In April, the journalist revealed that the IDF was using a previously undisclosed AI system that had replaced "human agency and precision" with "mass target creation and lethality."

According to Abraham:

Many of Israel's attacks in Gaza at the beginning of the war were based on the recommendations of a program called "Lavender." With the help of AI, this system processed information on most Gaza residents and compiled a list of suspected military operatives, including junior ones, for assassination. Israel systematically attacked these operatives in their private homes, killing entire families. Over time, the military realized that Lavender was not "reliable" enough, and its use decreased in favor of other software. +972 and Local Call could not confirm whether Lavender was developed with the help of civilian firms, including public cloud companies.

In 2021, Israel signed a $1.2 billion contract with Amazon and Google for Project Nimbus, which provides cloud services to the Israeli government and military. The move sparked the #NoTechForApartheid campaign, in which disaffected tech workers and dozens of advocacy groups rose up against Big Tech's complicity in Israeli human rights crimes in Palestine.

"Technology should be used to bring people together, not enable apartheid and ethnic cleansing," the campaign explained in 2021.

Earlier this year, Google—which Abraham said was briefly listed as a sponsor of the "IT for IDF" event—fired 50 employees for protesting Project Nimbus.

IDF Col. Avi Dadon told Abraham that "of course" tech companies want to work with the IDF, because "it's the strongest marketing."

"What the IDF uses was and will be one of the best selling points of products and services in the world," Dadon explained.

However, Big Tech's alleged complicity in Israeli human rights violations is coming under more intense scrutiny lately as Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan seeks arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Khan also sought ICC arrest warrants for two Hamas leaders, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri and Ismael Haniyah, who were both recently assassinated by Israel.

Last month, the ICJ ruled in a separate case that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza is an illegal form of apartheid that must immediately end.

Some campaigners have noted that Google is apparently violating its own AI principles, which vow that the company "will not design or deploy AI in… technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm… weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people… technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms… [or] technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights."

Others have noted Google and Amazon's lack of transparency on how its systems are being used.

"Neither company has publicly disclosed what, if any, human rights due diligence they carried out before participating in Project Nimbus," Zach Campbell, a digital rights expert at Human Rights Watch, told Abraham. "They haven't mentioned which, if any, red lines there are in terms of what would be permissible use of their technology."

Tariq Kenney-Shawa, U.S. policy fellow at the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told Abraham that while "there's always a lot of focus on the direct military assistance the United States provides to Israel—the munitions, fighter jets, and bombs," far less attention "has been paid to these partnerships that span both civilian and military environments."

"It's more than complicity: It's direct participation and collaboration with the Israeli military on the tools they're using to kill Palestinians," he stressed.

Reinforcing Failure in Israel & Ukraine - Col Lawrence Wilkerson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

10,000 Israeli Soldiers Killed or Wounded – Report Exposes Crisis among Israeli Soldiers in Gaza

The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth revealed on Sunday that the names of tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers are listed among those killed and wounded in the ongoing war on Gaza.

According to the report, “no less than 10,000 soldiers, who were killed or wounded during the long months of fighting in the Gaza Strip, are missing from the IDF today.”

The newspaper also revealed that approximately a thousand soldiers “join the ranks of the physically and mentally wounded,” as recorded by the rehabilitation department of the Israeli Ministry of Security.

Despite these alarming figures, both the Knesset and the government have pushed forward with the reformulation and passage of a law to extend compulsory military service, reportedly leaving regular soldiers in a state of significant frustration and uncertainty.

Israeli Intel US Media OP FALLS APART

Nine Unrwa staff members ‘may have been involved’ in 7 October attack

The UN has fired nine staff members from its agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, after an internal investigation found they may have been involved in the Hamas-led 7 October attack against Israel.

The UN secretary general’s office announced the move in a brief statement on Monday. It did not elaborate on the Unrwa staffers’ possible role in the attack. It said the nine included seven staffers who were fired previously over the claims.

Farhan Haq, the UN deputy spokesperson, said: “For nine people, the evidence was sufficient to conclude that they may have been involved in the7 October attacks.” In 10 other cases, evidence failed to support allegations of involvement, he added.

The UN’s internal watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), has been investigating the agency since January. Israel accused 19 Unrwa staffers of being involved in the 7 October attack in which militants killed 1,200 people and abducted about 250 others.

Unrwa employs 32,000 people across its area of operations, 13,000 of them in Gaza.

MULTIPLE US Troops WOUNDED In Iran Linked Rocket Attack

Five US Troops Injured in Rocket Attack on US Base in Iraq

At least five US personnel were injured in a rocket attack on the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq, Reuters reported on Monday, citing US and Iraqi sources.

The US officials said one of the Americans who was wounded had serious injuries and that the number of casualties could change as the damage is still being assessed. The Iraqi sources said two Katyusha rockets were fired at the base. ...

The US is vowing it will defend Israel from any Iranian reprisal, making it possible that US military assets are targeted in a coordinated response by Iran and its allies. There’s no sign yet that Iran’s reprisal has started, and the rocket attack on Ain al-Asad is likely a response to airstrikes the US launched in Iraq last week.

How Did Warren Buffett Know Stocks Would Crash?!? w/ Prof. Richard Wolff

Google broke law to maintain online search monopoly, US judge rules

Google violated antitrust laws as it built an internet search empire, a federal judge ruled on Monday in a decision that could have major implications for the way people interact with the internet. Judge Amit Mehta found that Google violated section 2 of the Sherman Act, a US antitrust law. His decision states that Google maintained a monopoly over search services and advertising. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” the ruling states.

The ruling is one of the largest antitrust decisions in decades, capping off a case that pitted the justice department against one of the world’s most valuable companies. It was also part of a broader push in recent years from the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, as well as European regulators, to scrutinize big tech companies for allegedly monopolistic practices.

There was no jury in the trial, which began in September of last year before taking a long hiatus for Mehta to consider a ruling. Closing arguments wrapped up in the first week of May, with Mehta concluding the trial by stating that he was aware of the gravity of the case for both Google and the public.

Google will appeal the decision, according to its president of global affairs, Kent Walker. ...

Government prosecutors had argued during the trial that Google illegally monopolized control over the internet search market, spending tens of billions of dollars each year on contracts to providers such as Apple and Samsung in order to become the default search engine on their devices. Justice department lawyers accused Google of using its dominant market position – they alleged the company controls about 90% of the US search market – to crowd out rivals and boost its own advertising revenues.

Google Is a Monopoly: Judge Rules Against Tech Giant in Landmark Antitrust Case

Clarence Thomas failed to disclose more private jet travel, senator says

The conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose more private travel on a jet owned by the rightwing mega-donor Harlan Crow, a Democratic senator said on Monday, amid a swirling ethics scandal and demands for judiciary reform.

“I am deeply concerned that Mr Crow may have been showering a public official with extravagant gifts, then writing off those gifts to lower his tax bill,” Ron Wyden of Oregon, the Senate finance committee chair, told a lawyer for Crow in a letter.

“This concern is only heightened by the committee’s recent discovery of additional undisclosed international travel on Mr Crow’s private jet by Justice Thomas.”

The committee, Wyden said, had “obtained international flight records showing that on 19 November 2010, Justice Thomas and his wife [the rightwing activist Ginni Thomas] flew from Hawaii to New Zealand on Mr Crow’s private jet, before flying back from New Zealand to Hawaii on the jet a week later on 27 November 2010. Mr Crow was also a passenger on these flights.

“To date, Justice Thomas has never disclosed this private jet travel on any financial disclosure forms, even though Justice Thomas has amended disclosures to reflect other international travel on Mr Crow’s private jet.”

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Top Dem Jamie Raskin Warned That Congress Will Ban Trump If He Wins Presidential Election

Climate change deniers make up nearly a quarter of US Congress

US politics is an outlier bastion of climate denial with nearly one in four members of Congress dismissing the reality of climate change, even as alarm has grown among the American public over dangerous global heating, an analysis has found.

A total of 123 elected federal representatives – 100 in the House of Representatives and 23 US senators – deny the existence of human-caused climate change, all of them Republicans, according to a recent study of statements made by current members. ...

The report defined climate deniers as those who say that the climate crisis is not real or not primarily caused by humans, or claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming or that planet-warming pollution is beneficial. ...

Climate-denying lawmakers have received a combined $52m in lifetime campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, the report also found. ...

The research shows that the American public, perhaps uniquely among people in developed countries, is represented disproportionately by climate deniers. Although 23% of the entire US Congress is composed of those who dismiss the climate crisis, polls show the proportion of Americans who share this view is significantly smaller, by as much as half.

Tropical Storm Debby intensifies as most of Florida under emergency orders

Tropical Storm Debby strengthened rapidly on Sunday and is expected to develop into a hurricane before making landfall on Florida’s Gulf coast, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said, warning of life-threatening ocean surges and devastating flooding.

The hurricane center forecast life-threatening conditions, including storm surges up to 7ft (2 meters). As it slowly moves north through the week, the storm may bring “potentially historic rainfall” of between 10 and 20in (25-50cm) and catastrophic flooding to Georgia and South Carolina, it said.

“There’s some really amazing rainfall totals being forecast, and amazing in a bad way,” Michael Brennan, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said to the Associated Press at a briefing on Sunday. “That would be record-breaking rainfall associated with a tropical cyclone for both the states of Georgia and South Carolina if we got up to the 30in level.”

The flooding impacts, which could last through Friday, are expected to be especially severe in low-lying areas near the coast, including Savannah, Georgia; Hilton Head, South Carolina; and Charleston, South Carolina.

Death Valley records its hottest month ever in July

Death Valley, the hottest place on Earth, recorded its hottest month ever on record in July, the National Park Service (NPS) announced. In a statement released on Friday, the NPS revealed that the park had an average 24-hour temperature of 108.5F (42.5C), in turn beating out its previous record of 108.1F (42.3C) set in 2018.

In July, the average high temperature in Death Valley was 121.9F (49.9C). According to the NPS, the park experienced nine days of temperatures at 125F (51.7C) or greater and only seven days that did not reach at least 120F (48.8C). The highest temperature last month was on 7 July, when the weather station at Furnace Creek recorded 129.2F (54C).

Also of Interest

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

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