With the body count rising in this latest, and particularly bloody Israel-Hamas War, the narrative of Israel the wounded, Israel the desperate, has now been annexed to Israel the just warrior State, fighting darkness and primaeval stone age barbarism.
This has taken two forms. The first is the way the victims of the Hamas attacks inside Israeli territory have been elevated, ennobled, sanctified. The second is the manner with which the Hamas killings have been rendered exceptionally ghoulish, visceral, blood curdling.
Regarding the former, Israeli suffering has been personalised, individualised, and given the spit and polish of reverence. US Secretary of State …
In Part I of this 2-part article, I began by listing the typical superstitious behavior college students engage in before taking a test. I identified the conditions of superstition, what superstition is and then added the range of its scope. My piece is about socially shared and personal superstitions rather than about paranormal or spiritual beliefs. From there I probed the demography of superstition including occupations, social class and gender. Next, I talked about the importance of Pavlov’s theory of associations as well of Skinner’s consequential reinforcement in the …
In the second decade of the 21st century, after much empty talk of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’, it was discovered that people weren’t even capable of governing their own media consumption. Huge, artificially intelligent computers revealed that while 49.5% of the population was drowning in a ‘post-truth’ sea of ‘disinformation’, another 49.5% was away with the fairies in ‘filter bubbles’ borne aloft by nothing but hot air.
This left the 1% to cope with the crisis. Giant media corporations recruited ‘disinformation experts’ – savant guardians uniquely …
Let this be a lesson to you students. You are now coming to the end of another semester, arbitrarily designated as having an even number of weeks, crammed with a range of objectives that no doubt most of you have not met. For one thing, you did not read. But my, did one try to encourage you. You will have a chance to punish your teacher with absurd course ratings and meaningless criteria. You will be able to “rate your professor” in the worst sense of the practice.
Modern education, if nothing else, is the elevation of admired, if predictable, failure …
Ralph Chaplin – Cartoon published in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) journal Solidarity on June 30, 1917.
My unlucky countrymen have always had a taste for justice, a taste as inconvenient to them, situated as they always have been, as a fancy for horse-racing would be to a Venetian. — Thomas Moore (1779–1852), Memoirs of Captain Rock: The Celebrated Irish Chieftain, with Some Account of His Ancestors (1824)
The raised or clenched fist is a symbol of unity and solidarity that became associated …
Don’t underestimate them, the Chinese women. They’re not wimps. They are way more strongminded than Chinese men. In China, it is the women who wear the pants. The labour force participation of women in China is the highest of the world. No other country on this planet has so many female engineers, scientists, mathematicians or other STEM graduates as in China. More than half of the Mensa China members are women.
I grew up in a small Midwestern town that was part of an industrial oasis located in the midst of corn and soybean fields. The oasis existed because bituminous coal had been discovered under the flat lands well over a hundred years ago.
The mines attracted thousands of workers from Eastern and Southern Europe, including my two grandfathers. The large immigrant working class, in turn, attracted industry as well. General Motors, General Electric, Hyster, and several other corporations soon made a home in this rural area.
At the time of my birth, the mines were exhausted for profitable exploitation (My grandfather had …
The year 2023 saw the hottest Summer on record in the northern hemisphere while those in the southern hemisphere felt the hottest winter on record. It was followed by a Fall with terrifying storms and floods across the globe. The number of people attributing climate catastrophe to economic growth is mounting.
Not all agree that growth is the problem. Some respond that growth is here to stay and that the concept of “degrowth” is idealistic nonsense.
This writer has been a student of the Holocaust since childhood, with my Poem/Plaque “Never Again” in the Wiesenthal Holocaust museum in Los Angeles. I recently found out, through Ancestry, that I am 12.5% Jewish, but that should not matter at all. Basically, one’s sensitivity is either there or not. Another case in point regarding Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians is the fact that there are perhaps millions of Israelis and Jews worldwide who abhor the current policies of that nation. The widely read Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, is known by many to be a “voice in the …
Resulting from the current violence in historical Palestine, numerous articles have been appeared. However, while a few include some historical background, there is some relevant historical background which none of them include.
And Why are Western Leaders Committed to Protecting Them?
by Stuart Littlewood / October 10th, 2023
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more sickening speech from a world leader than Biden’s following Hamas’s attack on Israel, the tormentor of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. His crass ignorance, prejudice and subservience to a criminal, apartheid regime, while utterly indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinian people, sets a new low among Western administrations.
Biden says that the United States “stands with the people of Israel in the face of these terrorist assaults. Israel has …
It has been a few days of slaughter-filled accounts. Starting on October 7 on the Jewish day of Simchat Torah, the State of Israel has faced assaults from hundreds of Hamas militants. Directed from southwards in the country, the mayhem has rattled the security and intelligence establishment smugly convinced in their reading of Palestinian motivations and capabilities. But outside the conflict, the commemorations for the dead are to be held according to a specific blueprint.
Across a slew of Western capitals and cities – self-described their presses as The World, blue and white lights have splashed buildings, offering a plaster of …
On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists. Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said:
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are …
— National Museum of the American Indian (@SmithsonianNMAI) November 23, 2017
No one will dispute that the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island from Umingmak Nuna (Ellesmere Island) to Tierra del Fuego were here long, long before the White Man arrived. So, if land is to be “owned,” it seems only right that the people who first settled it would become the owners. However, the Europeans who chanced upon Turtle Island claimed it in the name of their God and their rulers. Now, if Martians were to land here and claim the land, would any of the inhabitants of the western hemisphere accept that? No, because the Martians were latecomers, and they …
There was a 196% increase in acts of Israeli settler violence from 2017-2022, with an even more alarming projection of the rise of settler violence in 2023. This visual tells the story of long-running impunity for escalating human rights violations against Palestinians.
At least 90 Palestinian children have been killed by Israel’s assault on Gaza so far. This visual tella the story of Palestinian children in Gaza, who have experienced multiple assaults and multiple types of trauma since 2007, leading to a widespread mental health crisis among youth.
From 2018-2019, Palestinians in Gaza engaged in mass civil resistance, calling for an end to Israel’s blockade and the realization of their right to return. Israel’s response was to open fire on protesters, massacring hundreds and wounding thousands. This visual tells the story of Israel’s repression of Palestinian civil resistance in Gaza.
by Geopolitical Economy Report / October 9th, 2023
International law clearly shows that the Palestinian people have a legal right to armed struggle against Israeli colonialism, just as South Africans did against apartheid. Gaza suffers under an illegal Israeli blockade that even a former British prime minister recognized to be a “prison camp.” Journalist Ben Norton looks over the evidence.
The bold and suicidal actions by Gaza militants defy reason… to the reasonable. To those frustrated by decades of oppression, with no apparent means to alleviate the suffering, the actions become comprehensible. Looking north from the Gaza border, the Gazan people can reconstruct their ancient village, al-Majdal, now called Ashkelon.
The modern Israeli city of Ashkelon, 20 kilometers north of the Gaza border, presents a picturesque setting along the Mediterranean coast.
Sparkling white beaches matched by white-faced apartment buildings, green lawns, and several wide boulevards depict a tranquil and …
Europe’s leaders obediently takes the apartheid state’s side
by Stuart Littlewood / October 9th, 2023
In a surprise move Hamas launched a massive rocket attack on 6 October on various Israeli targets in the illegally blockaded Gaza Strip and made incursions through the border wire into nearby Israeli communities such as Sderot.
Warmonger Binyamin Netanyahu’s response, blurting out “we are at war”, would have been faintly amusing if the situation wasn’t so sickening. And once again we’re treated to the spectacle of senior figures here in our midst desperately defending Israel’s illegal …
CODEPINK strongly opposes Secretary Lloyd J. Austin’s just-announced plan to send troops to the Eastern Mediterranean – including U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and defense munitions. Escalating the violence in Palestine is not the path to peace, it’s the path to destroying any chance the Palestinians have for peace, justice and freedom from Israeli Apartheid.
Our hearts break witnessing both the loss of life and the threats coming from Secretary Austin and Prime Minister Netanyahu. With the assistance of the U.S., Prime Minister Netanyahu has established and enforced an open-air prison for over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, making it the most …
There was a whiff of Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ at the 20th Valdai annual meeting this week at a hotel over the gorgeous heights of the Krasnaya Polyana, north-west of the picturesque resort Sochi.
But instead of a deep dive into the lure and degeneracy of ideas in an introverted community in the Swiss Alps on the eve of the First World War, we immersed ourselves in powerful new ideas expressed by a community of Global Majority intellectuals on the possible eve of a psycho neocon-intended …
Shock and horror. But to and for whom? At 6.30 am on October 7, the State of Israel was certainly in shock. From the south, its citizens faced attacks by, as news reports put it, air, sea and land executed by the Islamic militant group Hamas. Within a matter of hours, the death toll of Israelis had jumped by hundreds, complemented by hundreds of deaths in Gaza. Along the way, unspecified numbers of Israeli hostages have been taken and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has issued a declaration of war.
In the short term, the offensive by Hamas …
There will be little sympathy in the West as, yet again, besieged Palestinians are bombed by Israel, their immense suffering justified by the term ‘Israeli retaliation’
by Jonathan Cook / October 8th, 2023
The current outpouring of sympathy for Israel should make anyone with half a heart retch.
Not because it is not awful that Israeli civilians are dying and suffering in such large numbers. But because Palestinian civilians in Gaza have faced repeated rampages from Israel decade after decade, producing far more suffering, but have never elicited a fraction of the concern currently being expressed by western politicians or publics.
The West’s hypocrisy over Palestinian fighters killing and wounding hundreds of Israelis and holding dozens more hostage in communities surrounding and inside besieged Gaza is stark indeed.
Since the beginning of its ‘Iron Swords’ operation on Saturday, Israel has destroyed or damaged more than 400 sites in Gaza. Over 300 Palestinians have been killed, many of whom were civilians. At least 1,990 have been wounded.
Sanaa Kamal, a resident of Gaza who also works as a local reporter, has seen and covered a number of confrontations between Israel and the …
On September 29, the very pro-Biden Mediaite site headlined and reported with hostility toward RFK Jr., “EXCLUSIVE: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Planning to Announce Independent Run”. Then, on October 4, RFK Jr.’s Presidential campaign announced that on October 9 he “will make a historic announcement in Philadelphia, where he will share a vision of a profound realignment of American politics.” On many occasions recently, Kennedy has stated that the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are running one campaign — the DNC is effectively being run by Biden — and …
