(Notes on Israel’s US backed GENOCIDE in Palestine, and other news items)
The world is on fire, as Israel and the U.S. continue with their mass-murdering thievery, destruction, and GENOCIDE. America’s modus operandi is to Destroy ALL LIFE, rather than give up on Controlling ALL Life, and unsurprisingly, far too many Americans seem to be okay with that.
“Amal, I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow, parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell…Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. “Never let them know they hurt you” was their creed.” – Author & Activist Susan Abulhawa
When I think of courage, I think of Palestinians.
“I’m speaking to those who have been lied to. If you grow up in the United States, you are naturally socialized to obscure settler colonialism. In a settler Colony you are naturally socialized to believe that capitalism has existed before the dinosaurs. You are socialized to be a capitalist, and to be a racist, and to be a settler, and then to be a Zionist…We must recognize our despair, and name it, to prevent its bottomless darkness from transforming our activist spaces into toxic places of harm. We must remember that surrender is not an option, and that history is more than even an epoch. We must turn to Palestinians for our greatest guidance and inspiration—they, who over 76 years, have been pummeled more than once, and who every time have risen like a phoenix to reconstitute themselves and continue forging a future with the fire of the most difficult sacrifice and the surety of collective victory. A genocide has threatened to erase Palestine, but it has ensured that Palestine now lives in each one of us, immortal. Nothing, and none of us, will be the same again.” – Professor & Human Rights attorney, Noura Erakat
The United States, Israel, and many of their Western allies, are certifiably insane, and EVIL. I am not exaggerating. The world is ablaze, as the U.S., and Israel, continue their near 15 month long GENOCIDAL slaughter of Palestinians (while also bringing the entire planet closer to nuclear annihilation), yet most most Americans, including those in the Vegan movement, and in Education, remain willfully ignorant, SILENT, or worse. I know that the U.S. has been mass murdering innocent people for centuries (literally, tens of MILLIONS of people), but somehow the horrors in Palestine, and now Lebanon too, feel even more personal. For example, I am just now learning how Israel has booby-trapped children’s toys for years (which continue to kill, and disfigure countless kids). As per the United Nations, “Israeli fighter planes have also attempted to kill children by dropping thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese villages and towns. The Israeli occupying forces have used this method through the years and continue to do so, the most recent example being when booby-trapped toys were dropped on the town of Nabatiyah, killing and injuring children and permanently disfiguring others.”
Click here for the full report from the UN: Lebanon and the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Click here to learn more from Middle East Eye: Bombs in toys: A brief history of Israeli booby traps in Lebanon.
Click here to learn more about how Israel and the US are the world’s largest agents of terror.
“Education is a system of imposed ignorance…Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It’s something you have to find out for yourself.” – Noam Chomsky
For me, things will never be the same. We are all flawed, but if you believe, as I do, that all children are our children, then where is the outrage? Where is the basic curiosity, amongst those Americans who have no excuse to be ignorant, to think critically, and learn the truth? Where is the humanity? Or better yet, does America even have a soul?
I was proud to once again join our Palestinian brothers and sisters (and allies), for another “Free Palestine” march in Manhattan a few weeks ago. I continue to be inspired by the diversity of people who show up to be counted, and particularly by the younger generation, who see through the BullSh*t of Israel, U.S. “leadership” (and its War Machine), and the US corporate media. Unfortunately, we are just a small percentage of the population. So, again, does America have a soul? And if so, how do we get most Americans to consistently care about issues surrounding Truth & Justice?
Thankfully, there are a ton of people, including independent journalists, authors, artists, academics, organizations, and others, who care about Truth and Justice, and are doing wonderful work all over the world!
Here are more notes and updates that I have collected over the last month or two:
1. The Moral Bankruptcy of the West
As per Professor John J. Mearsheimer:
“On 19 December 2024, Human Rights Watch issued a 179-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On 5 December 2024, Amnesty International issued a 296-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice found that a plausible case can be made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Given the West’s presumed commitment to human rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli genocide in its tracks.
Instead, the governments in those three countries, especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this genocide.
Moreover, almost all of the many human rights advocates in those countries, and in the West more generally, have stayed silent while Israel executed its genocide. The mainstream media has made hardly any effort to expose and challenge what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. Indeed some key outlets have staunchly supported Israel’s actions. One wonders what people in the West who have either supported Israel’s genocide or remained silent tell themselves to justify their behavior and sleep at night.
History will not treat them kindly.”
Click here to learn more from Professor John Mearshimer.
Click here to learn more from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Click here to learn more from the Middle East Monitor.
Artist: Carlos Latuff
“A friend of mine who is a comedian (I have friends of mine who are comedians, but who don’t know it) but this is a guy who is a comedian and who knows it. But he’s also serious…And in his serious comedy, he would very often be critical of certain things that the United States had done in the world. And people would say to him, “Well, why don’t you move somewhere else?” And he would say, “I don’t want to move somewhere else, because I don’t want to become the victim of American foreign policy.” – Howard Zinn
2. Although nothing surprises me anymore when it comes to America, this one was still JARRING.
A 2019 study by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists found that a third of Americans would be in favor of a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea, even if it killed a MILLION innocent people. Is North Korea a threat? They do have a small cache of nuclear weapons that are kept as a deterrent (to insane empires like the U.S.), but according to the Geopolitical Economy Report, North Korea’s entire military budget is less than the NYC Police Department’s budget.
So, the answer would be NO.
Why then are so many Americans grossly misinformed, seemingly soulless, and full of hate?
To a large extent, we can blame the US corporate media.
As per Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman, (in their seminal book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media), “The media are a key part of the political system, serving as a propaganda arm to maintain the existing social order…Manufacturing consent involves creating a climate of fear and insecurity, which makes it easier to control and manipulate the public…The media serve as a powerful tool of indoctrination, molding public opinion to support the goals of the ruling elite….The media are willing accomplices in propagating misinformation, generating fear, and manufacturing consent for harmful policies.” – Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman
Click here to learn more about the study from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Click here for the excellent podcast from the “Geopolitical Economy Report”, that referenced the study showing that 1/3 of Americans were in favor of using nuclear weapons as a preemptive strike on North Korea, even if it killed 1 MILLION people.
3. Resist, My People, Resist
As per author Vijay Prashad (who co-founded the excellent organization, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research):
“Pain shudders through the arteries of global society. Day after day passes by as the genocide against the Palestinian people continues and the conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa and Sudan escalate. More and more people slip into absolute poverty as arms companies’ profits soar. These realities have hardened society, allowing people to bury their heads and ignore the horrors unfolding across the world. Ferocious disregard for the pain of others has become a way to protect oneself from the inflation of suffering. What can one do with the wretchedness that has come to define life across the planet? What can I do? What can you do? In 2015, the Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour wrote Qawim ya sha’abi, qawimhum (Resist, My People, Resist Them), for which she was arrested and imprisoned by the Israeli state. A poem that can send you to prison is a powerful poem. A state threatened by a poem is an immoral state…”
Click here for the entire piece from Vijay Prashad.
Resist, my people, resist them.
In Jerusalem, I dressed my wounds and breathed my sorrows to God.
I carried the soul in my palm
for an Arab Palestine.
I will not succumb to the ‘peaceful solution’,
never lower my flags
until I evict them from my homeland
and make them kneel for a time to come.
Resist, my people, resist them.
Resist the settler’s robbery
and follow the caravan of martyrs.
Shred the disgraceful constitution
that has imposed relentless humiliation
and stopped us from restoring our rights.
They burned blameless children;
As for Hadeel, they sniped her in public,
killed her in broad daylight.
Resist, my people, resist them.
Resist the colonialist’s onslaught.
Pay no mind to his agents among us
who shackle us with illusions of peace.
Do not fear the Merkava [Israeli army tanks];
the truth in your heart is stronger,
as long as you resist in a land
that has lived through raids and victory.
Ali called from his grave:
resist, my rebellious people,
write me as prose on the agarwood,
for you have become the answer to my remains.
Resist, my people, resist them.
Resist, my people, resist them
– Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour
4. Oxford Union (one of the most prestigious debating societies), Declares Israel an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide
Oxford Union Society: “This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.”
(with an overwhelming 278 votes in favour and 59 against)
Excerpts from author & activist Susan Abulhawa’s “Epic” speech (which should be required viewing/reading for everyone): Wow.
“Addressing the challenge of what to do about the indigenous inhabitants of the land, Chaim Weizman, a Russian Jew, said to the World Zionist Congress in 1921 that Palestinians were akin to “the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.” David Gruen, a Polish Jew, who changed his name to David Ben Gurion to sound relevant to the region, said: “We must expel Arabs and take their places.” There are thousands of such conversations among the early Zionists who plotted and implemented the violent colonization of Palestine and the annihilation of her native people. But they were only partially successful, murdering or ethnically cleansing 80 percent of Palestinians, which meant that 20 percent of us remained an enduring obstacle to their colonial fantasies, which became the subject of their obsessions in the decades that followed, especially after conquering what remained of Palestine in 1967. Zionists lamented our presence and they debated publicly in all circles—political, academic, social, cultural circles—regarding what to do with us; what to do about the Palestinian birthrate, about our babies, which they dub a demographic threat. Benny Morris, who was originally meant to be here, once expressed regret that Ben Gurion “did not finish the job” of getting rid of us all, which would have obviated what they refer to as the “Arab problem.” Benjamin Netanyahu, a Polish Jew whose real name is Benjamin Mileikowsky, once bemoaned a missed opportunity during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising to expel large swaths of the Palestinian population “while world attention was focused on China. Some of their articulated solutions to the nuisance of our existence include a “break their bones” policy in the 80s and 90s, ordered by Yitzhak Rubitzov, a Ukrainian Jew who changed his name to Yitzhak Rabin (for the same reasons). That horrific policy that crippled generations of Palestinians did not succeed in making us leave. And frustrated by Palestinian resilience, a new discourse arose, especially after a massive natural gas field was discovered off the coast of Northern Gaza worth trillions of dollars. This new discourse is echoed in the words of Colonel Efraim Eitan, who said in 2004, “We have to kill them all.” Aaron Sofer, an Israeli so-called intellectual and political advisor, insisted in 2018 that “we have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.” When I was in Gaza, I saw a little boy no more than 9 years old whose hands and part of his face, had been blown off from a booby-trapped can of food that soldiers had left behind for Gaza’s starving children. I later learned that they had also left poisoned food for people in Shujaiyya, and in the 1980s and 90s, Israeli soldiers had left booby-trapped toys in southern Lebanon that exploded when excited children picked them up. The harm they do is diabolical, and yet, they expect you to believe they are the victims. Invoking Europe’s holocaust and screaming antisemitism, they expect you to suspend fundamental human reason to believe that the daily sniping of children with so-called “kill shots” and the bombing of entire neighborhoods that bury families alive and wipe out whole bloodlines is self-defense…It’s clear to me that we’re not here to debate whether Israel is an apartheid or genocidal state. This debate is ultimately about the worth of Palestinian lives; about the worth of our schools, research centers, books, art, and dreams; about the worth of the homes we worked all our lives to build and which contain the memories of generations; about the worth of our humanity and our agency; the worth of bodies and ambitions.
Because if the roles were reversed…
If Palestinians had spent the last eight-decade stealing Jewish homes, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, raping and killing them; if Palestinians had killed an estimated 300,000 Jews in one year, targeted their journalists, their thinkers, their healthcare workers, their athletes, their artists, bombed every Israeli hospital, university, library, museum, cultural center, synagogue, and simultaneously set up an observation platform where people came watch their slaughter as if a tourist attraction. If Palestinians had corralled them by the hundreds of thousands into flimsy tents, bombed them in so-called safe zones, burned them alive, cut off their food, water, and medicine. If Palestinians made Jewish children wander barefoot with empty pots; made them gather the flesh of their parents into plastic bags; made them bury their siblings, cousins and friends; made them sneak out from their tents in the middle of the night to sleep on their parents’ graves; made them pray for death just to join their families and not be alone in this terrible world anymore, and terrorized them so utterly that their children lose their hair, lose their memory, lose their minds, and made those as young as 4 and 5-year-old were die of heart attacks. If we mercilessly forced their NICU babies to die, alone in hospital beds, crying until they could cry no more, died and decomposed in the same spot. If Palestinians used wheat flour aid trucks to lure starving Jews, then opened fire on them when they gathered to collect a day’s bread; if Palestinians finally allowed a food delivery into a shelter with hungry Jews, then set fire to the entire shelter and aid truck before anyone could taste the food. If a Palestinian sniper bragged about blowing out 42 Jewish kneecaps in one day as one Israeli soldier did in 2019; if a Palestinian admitted to CNN that he ran over hundreds of Jews with his tank, their squished flesh lingering in the tank treads. If Palestinians were systematically raping Jewish doctors, patients, and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks, and fire extinguishers, sometimes raping to death, as happened with Dr Adnan alBursh and others. If Jewish women were forced to give birth in filth, get C-sections or leg amputations without anesthesia; if we destroyed their children then decorated our tanks with their toys; if we killed or displaced their women then posed with their lingerie…If the world were watching the live-streamed systematic annihilation of Jews in real-time, there would be no debating whether that constituted terrorism or genocide. And yet two Palestinians—myself and Mohammad el-Kurd— showed up here to do just that, enduring the indignity of debating those who think our only life choices should be to leave our homeland, submit to their supremacy, or die politely and quietly. But you would be wrong to think that I came to convince you of anything. The house resolution, though well-meaning and appreciated, is of little consequence in the midst of this holocaust of our time. I came in the spirit of Malcolm X and Jimmy Baldwin, both of whom stood here and in Cambridge before I was born, facing finely dressed well-spoken monsters who harbored the same supremacist ideologies as Zionism—these notions of entitlement and privilege, of being divinely favored, blessed, or chosen. I’m here for the sake of history. To speak to generations not yet born and for the chronicles of this extraordinary time where the carpet bombing of defenseless indigenous societies is legitimized…
You will never know how it feels to be loved and supported by those who have nothing to gain from you, and in fact, everything to lose. You will never know the feeling of masses all over the world pouring into the streets and stadiums to chant and sing for your freedom; and it is not because you are Jewish, as you try to make the world believe, but because you are depraved violent colonizers who think your Jewishness entitles you to the home my grandfather and his brothers built with their own hands on lands that had been in our family for centuries. It is because Zionism is a blight on Judaism and indeed on humanity. You can change your names to sound more relevant to the region and you can pretend falafel and hummus and zaatar are your ancient cuisines, but in the recesses of your being, you will always feel the sting of this epic forgery and theft, that’s why even the drawings of our children hung on walls at the UN or in a hospital ward send your leaders and lawyers into hysteric meltdowns. You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day. We are not the rocks Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land. We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters, from our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married or raped, loved, enslaved, converted between religions, settled or prayed in our land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage. The fabled, tumultuous stories of that land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use or what Hollywood and corporate media arsenals you deploy. Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free; she will be restored to her multi-religious, multi-ethnic pluralistic glory; we will restore and expand the trains that run from Cairo to Gaza to Jerusalem, Haifa, Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Kuwait, Sanaa, and so on; we will put an end to the zionist American war machine of domination, expansion, extraction, pollution, and looting...and you will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.” – Author & Activist Susan Abulhawa
Click here for Susan Abulhawa’s superb presentation at Oxford Union (albeit censored).
Click here to learn more from Katie Halper on how Susan Abulhawa’s speech was censored by Oxford Union.
Click here for the entire transcript of Ms. Abulhawa’s speech.
Click here to learn more from RTR.
Click here to learn more about Susan Abulhawa’s activism, which includes animal rights (she also inspires by being vegan!).
5. The Invisible Wounds of Palestinian Children
Dr. Gabor Mate: “95% of the Children in Palestine suffer from PTSD.”
According to Dr. Kamal Qadih, “I can confirm that an overwhelming majority, approximately 90 to 95%, of Palestinian children are in need of extensive psychological assistance. This type of support cannot be adequately provided in a brief time frame; it necessitates long-term therapy spanning three to five years to effectively address and restore the mental health of these children. In my experience working with Palestinian children at our clinic, it is evident that they grapple with various behavioral, psychological, mental, and emotional challenges. Despite our best efforts with the resources available, as we strive to offer as much psychological aid as possible, regrettably, that remains insufficient due to limitations.” As per the study, “The report also highlighted that over half of Gaza’s children have considered suicide, and 3 out of 5 are engaging in self-harm. Extreme behaviors among Palestinian children, such as attempted suicide, stem from feelings of hopelessness and unacknowledged trauma. These behaviors can serve as a message of protest and rejection of the horrific reality of everyday terror, destruction, loss of loved ones, and loss of all elements of life in their community.”
Click here to learn more about the study from Psychiatric Times.
Click here to learn more from Dr. Gabor Mate on the study from 2005.
As per Vijay Prashad, and the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research: “From Palestine to Sudan, imperialist wars are destroying the lives of innocent children, leaving long-term physical and psychological wounds on those who survive…A study came out in December that made me cry. Titled Needs Study: Impact of War in Gaza on Children with Vulnerabilities and Families, it was conducted by the Community Training Centre for Crisis Management (CTCCM) in Gaza. Written in a clinical style, nothing about the language should have impacted me in the way that it did. But the study’s findings were shocking. Here are some of the cold facts:
– 79% of the children in Gaza suffer from nightmares.
– 87% of them experience severe fear.
– 38% report bedwetting.
– 49% of caregivers said that their children believed that they would die in the war.
– 96% of the children in Gaza felt that death was imminent.
Put simply, every single child in Gaza feels that they are going to die.
In March 2024, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child released a sharp statement on the war in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, both backed by a range of foreign powers. That statement had its own powerful facts:
– 24 million children in Sudan, nearly half of the country’s total population of 50 million, are at risk of ‘generational catastrophe’.
– 19 million children are out of school.
– 4 million children are displaced.
– 3.7 million children are acutely malnourished.
The 2014 Israeli barrage on Gaza killed at least 150 children in total. When the human rights group B’Tselem produced an advertisement to broadcast the names of the children on Israeli television, the Israel Broadcast Authority banned it…We must name the dead children.
Click here for the excellent piece from Vijay Prashad.
Nearly half of these children expressed a desire to die due to the extensive and overwhelming trauma they have endured. Helen Pattinson, CEO of War Child UK, emphasised the severity of the situation, calling Gaza “one of the most horrifying places in the world to be a child.”
Click here to learn more about the study that concludes that 96% of children in Gaza feel that death is imminent.
6. Criminal “Healthcare” CEO Shot Dead
“Health” Insurance CEO, Brian Thompson, was shot dead a few weeks ago in midtown Manhattan. Thompson’s company, United-Healthcare, is the biggest provider of “Medicare Advantage” plans. Medicare Advantage is a complete SCAM, and people like Brian Thompson are/were criminals. Legendary consumer advocate, Ralph Nader, has called Medicare Advantage, Medicare Dis-Advantage. It is estimated that companies like United-Healthcare have stolen tens of billions of dollars from consumers via the “Medicare Advantage” scheme. Brian Thompson received a salary of over $10 MILLION per year, and his net worth was estimated to be between $43 million to $120 million (as per a two minute Google search).” I only bring this up because I know that more people than ever are feeling helpless as well. I have learned that in the U.S., medical debt is the biggest reason that people file for bankruptcy, and that the company that this “douche-canoe” CEO ran, also used AI technology (with a 90% error rate), to deny medical claims, and had a near 35% denial rate overall (which was the highest in the industry)! Apparently, the shooter of the CEO, Luigi Mangione, took the time to write “Delay”, “Deny”, and “Depose” on the shell casings and bullets recovered from the scene of the shooting (the words relate to the language that is used by “health” insurance companies in their denial forms). I suspect that the greed, and heartlessness of the CEO, ultimately led to his death. I hope that this killing sends a message to other CEOS, billionaires, and the wealthiest 1%, but I doubt that it will have a significant impact. The US corporate media can’t get enough of the story (a rich and powerful white guy from the “establishment” is killed), as they are running piece after piece, portraying the criminal CEO as an innocent victim. Can you imagine? It is estimated that, conservatively, over 70,000 Americans die each year due to not having health insurance, or being underinsured (denied). Conversely, guess how many stories the US corporate media has aired on the tens of thousands of Palestinian children who have been targeted, and murdered by US backed Israeli forces? ZERO (as far as I know). I can’t condemn the shooter, Luigi Mangione. I completely understand his feelings of anger, and frustration. We will never know how many people the CEO, Brian Thompson, killed but the number is no doubt in the THOUSANDS. Our healthcare system, or sick-care system, is completely broken, and built only to maximize profits. Its leaders figured out a long time ago that they can make a lot more money by “managing disease”, rather than preventing, effectively treating, or reversing disease. In other words, they want you to be sick! Did you know that in 2020, 550,000 Americans lost their homes to medical debt? And that over 62% of Americans are currently living check to check, with most being one emergency away from financial ruin? As per Common Dreams’ Julia Conley: “Nearly 7 in 10 Americans Say Insurers’ Greed Played Role in UnitedHealthcare CEO Killing…Believing the health insurance industry is at least partly responsible for the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO is not some fringe position,” wrote one journalist.”
Click here to learn why US “Healthcare” really means US Sick-care & Early Death.
Click here to learn more about the criminality of CEO Brian Thompson, and United-Healthcare.
Click here for a short piece from Chris Hedges.
Click here for a 7 minute clip from the always excellent and funny Lee Camp.
Click here to learn more from filmmaker Abby Martin and journalist Taylor Lorenz.
Click here to learn more about the US health-care/sick-care industry and the corporations and billionaires who don’t give a f*ck about you or me from legendary comedian George Carlin (“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it!).
Click here to learn more from ProPublica on the oncologist who killed untold numbers of people by purposely misdiagnosing them to make more money.
As per author & poet Alice Walker, “I pray never to have to kill anyone; though when I lived in Mississippi and faced the possibility that terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan might harm my family that included my child, I realized that such is the strength of motherhood that, in defending what I cared most about in life, I would have shot them with barely a second thought. What to do about Luigi? This son of ours whom we embrace instinctively? Killing anyone is wrong. Half a million young men killed in Ukraine for politics few of them understood, isn’t discussed. The thousands slaughtered in Palestine by Netanyahu/Biden/Harris. The endless atrocities committed against the people of Africa, billions of murders over centuries by now. Ditto the murders of incalculable numbers of Indigenous ancestors in the Americas. The murder this very moment of countless millions, all over the planet, of the starving, often ill, houseless poor. And for what? Rule by People who already live on Earth as if they’re from, headed toward, or on a different planet than the rest of us. Let us gather in council with each other, on every suffering continent, and see what, together –and before WW3 wipes us all out – we can make of our dread predicament. Our phones will be useful in connecting us, but it will be our voices, our faces, our eyes, truly felt, that will determine whether we survive.”
Click here to learn more from Alice Walker.
Just like the kid who shot at Donald Trump, and was dismissed by the US corporate media as being a “loser” and a “lunatic”, the shooter in this case is suffering a similar fate. Our systems are broken, and our society is sick. We are all responsible for the depravity of people like the CEO, Brian Thompson, as well as for the outrage and desperation that is felt by people like Luigi Mangione. I remain a total work in progress, but I am always inspired by the great Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
Here is a powerful excerpt from a piece written by Brother Thay, on compassion:
“After the Vietnam War, many people wrote to us in Plum Village. We received hundreds of letters each week from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, hundreds each week. It was very painful to read them, but we had to be in contact. We tried our best to help, but the suffering was enormous, and sometimes we were discouraged. It is said that half the boat people fleeing Vietnam died in the ocean; only half arrived at the shores of Southeast Asia. There are many young girls, boat people, who were raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries tried to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continued to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day, we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate. She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself. When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we can’t do that. In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I can’t condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
Click here to learn more about Thich Nhat Hanh.
“The NY Times is essentially a mouthpiece for Israel.” – Author & Activist Susan Abulhawa
7. NY Times killed investigation of Israeli hooligans, internal email reveals (US legacy media ignores Israeli hooligans)
Excerpt from Electronic Intifada piece: “The Times has come under fire for using a video of Israeli football hooligan violence in Amsterdam last week to claim the exact opposite of what the video actually showed. The Times claimed footage shot by a Dutch photojournalist showed “anti-Semitic attacks” on Israelis – even though it actually showed Israeli mob violence against a Dutch citizen. For several days, the footage was attached to the top of the paper’s 8 November report about events in Amsterdam the night before. But on Tuesday the paper was forced to issue a correction, after the video’s creator – Dutch photojournalist Annet de Graaf – publicly condemned international media for mislabeling her video as evidence of “anti-Semitic attacks” against Israeli football supporters. In fact, the video shows a mob of dozens of Israeli hooligans attacking someone, after their team Maccabi Tel Aviv lost an away game 5-0 to Dutch club Ajax on 7 November.”
Click here to learn more from the Electronic Intifada.
8. Stephen Semler continues to do fantastic work.
Here he shows how pro-Israel cash affected the Senate’s Decisions to send billions more dollars in weapons to Israel.
Click here to learn more about the criminality of the U.S. Senate from Stephen Semler.
Israel and U.S. are using Starvation, and Disease, as Weapons of War. I.e, they are purposely starving Palestinians!
Click here to learn more about Israel’s US backed Starvation policy from Stephen Semler.
The insanity of the U.S. doesn’t end with Its GENOCIDE in Gaza. The U.S. is also the biggest threat to the survival of our species.
As per Stephen Semler, Ukraine received more US military “aid” in three years, than Afghanistan did in twenty, as Congress authorized $123 BILLION in military “aid” for Ukraine. These funds stretch across three fiscal years, 2022, 2023, and 2024, but were all passed within 28 months of each other.
Click here to learn more about the soullessness of the United States, and its military industrial complex.
Homelessness in the US hits an all time high, yet Biden, and the mainstream media BLAME immigration.
As per Stephen Semler, “There’s no doubt immigration is part of the story, Hispanic homelessness grew faster than overall homelessness (31.6% and 18.1%, respectively) from 2023 to 2024, for example. But it’s not the story, record homelessness is. There were 118,376 more people who experienced homelessness in 2024, and most of them were non-Hispanic (61,747). Of the total 771,480 people who were homeless this year, 69% were non-Hispanic. There was an increase in homelessness across all subgroups HUD tracks, aside from veterans.”
Click here to learn more from Stephen Semler.
9. All the women in the Biden Administration are guilty of Genocide too.
As per Ann Wright, “As we in the United States sat down to Thanksgiving dinners, Palestinians in Gaza on Day 419 of the Israeli genocide of Gaza and U.S. complicity in that genocide are facing starvation, lack of water, tents purposefully destroyed by U.S. bombs dropped by Israeli warplanes, and drones and rain and cold from the winter storms…Here in the U.S., families enjoy meals prepared by mothers and wives. Yet, many mothers and wives and aunties of these families have day jobs with the Biden administration and have been key participants in the U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide…”
Click here to learn more from former Army Colonel & US Diplomat, Ann Wright, from CODEPINK.
US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas Greenfield (above), who VETOED four Life-saving Ceasefire Fire resolutions in the UN Security Council, cooks her Thanksgiving Turkey while participating in the Israeli genocide of Gaza.
Also from CODEPINK: Boycott Netflix until they Reinstate Palestinian films!
As per CODEPINK: “On October 13th and October 14th, Netflix decided to delete at least 19 films by Palestinian filmmakers or about Palestinian stories from its platform. Previously, Netflix launched “Palestinian Stories,” a Netflix collection of 32 films that would “showcase the depth and diversity of the Palestinian experience, exploring people’s lives, dreams, families, friendships, and love.” Now, the “Palestinian Stories” Netflix page only shows one film. Storytelling is a crucial aspect of keeping Palestinian history alive, Netflix is literally erasing Palestinians’ stories and perspectives from popular culture…Not only is Netflix erasing Palestinian stories, they’re rewriting them! A new wave of outrage and calls to boycott have been prompted by Netflix’s new film “Mary” a reimagining of the story of Mary, the mother of Jesus who is played by Israeli actress Noa Cohen alongside a supporting cast of Israeli actors including Ori Pfeffer, Mili Avital, Keren Tzur, and Hilla Vidor. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Palestine, and casting Israeli actors erases the Palestinian heritage tied to the historical and cultural context of the story. Sign the petition below demanding Netflix reinstate the Palestinian films it deleted.
Click here for more information and to sign the petition.
10. EWG reports that a new study finds that environmental chemicals, in addition to our food system, can trigger early puberty.
Click here for the full story from the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
Click here to learn more about how red meat consumption is linked to earlier onset of puberty, disease, and premature death.
11. More Great Work from Earthling Ed, as he calls out lying half-wits, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk.
US talk show host Joe Rogan (est. net worth $200 million), and billionaire Elon Musk, are proof that being unconscionable, arrogant, and often stupid, can help create even more personal wealth, and fame. America is a culture of celebrity, not morality.
Kudos to Earthling Ed for another excellent segment (excerpt below).
“If you needed open heart surgery performed on you, would you go to a heart surgeon or a UFC commentator? Or if you needed to hire a rocket scientist, would you hire a rocket scientist, or would you hire a graphic designer? And guess what? Elon has hired rocket scientists because he needs experts in rocket science for SpaceX. So if you want to build Rockets, you turn to Rocket scientists, and if you want to learn climate science, you turn to climate scientists. So why then when it comes to climate science, do people think that they are more knowledgeable than experts, who are as dedicated and as knowledgeable about climate science, as Rocket scientists are about rocket science. Elon is not a climate scientist, and he certainly is not an expert when it comes to animal farming and veganism. I mean Elon wasn’t even one of the original founders of Tesla. He is a businessman who hires experts and scientists but people think that because he’s the face of Tesla that somehow means that he’s an authority in all things science, and therefore knows more about climate science than actual climate scientists. And so faced with all of the peer-reviewed evidence, meta analysis, and research being conducted and published by the most highly respected, credible, and acclaimed institutions, organizations, and academics in the world, how can Joe Rogan and Elon Musk rationalize to themselves that all of this mountain of evidence is wrong?” – Earthling Ed
There are countless celebrities who are popular for reasons that are unclear to me. Joe Rogan is one of them. My guess is that he tells a large enough segment of the population what they want to hear (regardless of the evidence), and as a result, people keep tuning into his podcast. I don’t get it, but okay. Having said that, he is not our biggest problem (heck, even a broken clock is right twice a day). Our biggest problem is Capitalism, and the PROFITS over Everything, and Everyone, mentality of the corporations who run the US. They own the politicians (Citizens United), judges, mainstream media, and other powerful industries and forces. Our issues with regards to where people get their “disinformation” run much, much deeper than Joe Rogan (see the DNC & GOP, military generals with ties to weapons manufacturers, MSNBC, FOX, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, Facebook, Google, NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, etc.). Phew.
Click here for the superb piece from Earthling Ed.
Click here to learn how 99% of US animals are factory farmed.
Click here to learn how Animal farming is the number one driver of deforestation.
Click here to learn how Animal farming is the number one driver of biodiversity loss.
Click here to learn how Animal farming is the number one source of emissions in New Zealand, Ireland, Brazil and Argentina.
Click here to learn how Agriculture is the number one source of methane globally.
Click here to learn how half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, and how more than 3/4 of global agricultural land is used for livestock, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world’s protein and calories.
Click here to learn how ‘Regenerative’ beef requires 2.5 times more land.
Click here for another article that completely DEBUNKS the perceived benefits of regenerative agriculture.
Click to learn why we need to shift to healthier, more sustainable diets.
Click here to learn why Oxford scientists confirmed that a VEGAN diet is Massively Better for Planet Earth.
12. Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing GENOCIDE against Palestinians in Gaza.
This is good news, but why are they not including the United States?
Excerpt: “Amnesty International’s research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today. The report, ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity…Amnesty International’s report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International…Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now…States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end.”
Click here to learn more from Amnesty International.
Click here for an excellent take on Israel’s US backed genocide in Gaza from Arundhati Roy.
Click here to learn more about Israel’s US backed GENOCIDE in Palestine from an Israeli professor.
13. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is saying that we “need to be getting younger people into the fight”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is a War Criminal, and a GENOCIDIST. If we lived in a just society, and Blinken was held to the same standards as the Nazis at Nuremberg, he would be HANGED. Now Blinken is saying that we “need to be getting younger people into the fight” in Ukraine. According to the mass murderer Blinken, “18-25 year olds are not in the fight.” The United States is a failing, and monstrous empire. Hopefully, heinous cowards like Blinken will one day be held accountable.
Click here to learn more from Anti-War.
14. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is neither Artificial or Intelligent
AI could be a massive threat to truth and justice, as the link below shows when AI (Chat GTP?) is asked if Palestinians deserve to be free. Technology is neutral, and often amazing, but in the wrong hands…Scary stuff!
Click here for the video.
“People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.” – Alan Moore
15. Nancy Pelosi is a dangerous criminal, and she is once again trying to demonize China, and start a nuclear confrontation.
Kudos to CODEPINK for exposing Pelosi’s ignorance, greed, ego, and hypocrisy!
Excerpt: “Recently, as the CODEPINK crew was making their rounds in the halls of Congress, they ran into Nancy Pelosi coming out of a meeting about the Uyghurs. Medea asked her ‘what about the genocide in Gaza?” Instead of answering Medea’s questions, she started spewing lies about CODEPINK being funded by the government in China. News flash, Nancy, CODEPINK is funded by individual peace activists. She’s the one funded by foreign aligned lobbyist groups like AIPAC, not us!”
Click here to learn more, and sign CODEPINK’s petition.
Click here to learn more from CODEPINK about why China is NOT our enemy.
16. A few weeks ago, Israel murdered 20 more Palestinians in another US backed airstrike on a TENT encampment in Gaza.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society says that Israeli bombs in Mawasi destroyed TENTS and FOOD warehouses in the encampment, which was sheltering displaced Palestinians.
Click here to learn more from Popular Resistance.
Photo: People pray next to the bodies of Palestinians killed after Israeli strikes, at al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah, central Gaza Strip, 05 December 2024.
Israel = Nazis = US “Leadership” = Evil = US Corporate Media = GENOCIDE = World War III?
15. Targeting Childhood: Israel’s Shoot to Kill Policy in the West Bank. Another powerful graphic from Visualizing Palestine.
And kudos to Visualizing Palestine for another superb interactive piece called “The Road to Genocide.” Wow.
Click here for the piece.
17. A heartbreaking poem by Palestinian-American poet Zeina Azzam. Ms. Azzam explains how parents in Gaza have resorted to writing their children’s names on their legs to help identify them should either they or their children be killed.
Click here to learn more.
Poem:
“Write my name on my leg, Mama
Use the black permanent marker
with the ink that doesn’t bleed
if it gets wet, the one that doesn’t melt
if it’s exposed to heat
Write my name on my leg, Mama
Make the lines thick and clear
Add your special flourishes
so I can take comfort in seeing
my mama’s handwriting when I go to sleep
Write my name on my leg, Mama
and on the legs of my sisters and brothers
This way we will belong together
This way we will be known
as your children
Write my name on my leg, Mama
and please write your name
and Baba’s name on your legs, too
so we will be remembered
as a family
Write my name on my leg, Mama
Don’t add any numbers
like when I was born or the address of our home
I don’t want the world to list me as a number
I have a name and I am not a number
Write my name on my leg, Mama
When the bomb hits our house
When the walls crush our skulls and bones
our legs will tell our story, how
there was nowhere for us to run”
– Zeina Azzam
18. Over 125,000 march in London. If only we can get more Americans to care about Israel’s US backed GENOCIDE in Palestine!
Click here to learn more.
“Hell is the inability to Love.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
19. Israel’s Continued War on CHILDREN
Excerpt from another insightful piece from Mondoweiss:
“Israel’s onslaught against the Palestinian people has systematically targeted children in both Gaza and the West Bank. The result is a war against an entire generation…This is to say nothing of the systematic killing of children throughout the war, UN chief Antonio Guterres said Gaza had become a “graveyard for children” only a month into the genocidal war. Added to that are the long-term mental and health effects children will experience as a result of exposure to disease, chronic malnutrition, and relentless violence…On July 29, the Gaza-based Ministry of Education announced that 39,000 high school students from the Gaza Strip did not take the Tawjihi exam this year, with 10,000 of them killed alongside 400 school teachers. The Government Media Office said that since the beginning of the war on Gaza, the Israeli army had completely destroyed 125 schools and universities and partially destroyed 336 schools and universities. The assault on education is mirrored in the genocidal onslaught on all other sectors that make society in Gaza function, from healthcare to food systems to waste management facilities. But one of the most insidious parts of targeting the educational sector is that it aims to erase children’s future…”
Click here to learn more from Mondoweiss.
Click here to learn more about Israel’s War on CHILDREN.
20. The always inspiring CODEPINK strikes again!
“Israel is Burning Children Alive!” “Free Palestine!”
Kudos to this veteran (Ms. Gulbeau?), and CODEPINK for exposing US complicity with Israel’s GENOCIDE in Palestine!
Click here for the video.
Click here for another stirring video from CODEPINK.
The problem in the United States isn’t immigration. It’s unconscionable corporations, and billionaires, who are never held accountable. And a runaway military industrial complex that is hell-bent on mass murder, and ending life as we know it. a.k.a., nuclear annihilation. Lifetime criminal Donald Trump is at it again, as he has told War Criminal & Genocidist, Benjamin Netanyahu, to “Finish the Job”, when referring to Israel’s US backed GENOCIDE in Gaza. According to the Associated Press, 49.9% of Americans who voted, voted for Trump (48.4% for Harris). Close to 90 million Americans didn’t vote at all (out of 245 million who were eligible), which is over 1/3. In other words, nearly 2/3 of Americans were okay voting for GENOCIDE, as both Harris and Trump are scary, and staunch supporters of Israel, and its countless crimes.
Here are excerpts from another excellent piece from CODEPINK’s Ann Wright:
“Trump’s Christmas Message is One of Chaos, Turbulence and Retaliation for the Next Four Years
As per Ms. Wright, “On Christmas Day, Trump wrote a backhanded, weird compliment to China while demanding the return of the Panama Canal to U.S. control to save U.S. corporations millions of dollars in canal transit fees…Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino released a video declaring that “every square meter of the canal belongs to Panama and will continue to belong” to his country. Mulino reminded Trump, who no doubt has no idea of how the canal operates but has been fed the story of dramatically rising costs by his corporate buddies, that fees for ships crossing the canal are set by experts who take into account operational costs, and supply and demand factors…In another gratuitous international statement…Trump said, “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity”….In yet another slap at the country’s important neighbors on Christmas Day, Trump also criticized Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau…
Policies to be Enacted on Day 1 in the New Trump Administration
– Close the US-Mexico border
– Begin what Trump says will be “the largest deportation program in American history”
– Expedite permits for drilling and fracking
– Roll back environmental regulations
– Pardon people convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol
– Sign an executive order that would cut federal funding for any school “pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the lives of our children.”
– Roll back President Joe Biden’s electric vehicle policies
– Enact tariffs on goods coming in from Mexico, Canada and China”
Click here to learn more from Ann Wright and CODEPINK.
Click here to learn more from CODEPINK about Pro-Palestine Activism in 2025.
21. Another ignorant, Jewish Supremacist, in a position of power in the United States.
Shame on Florida Senator Randy Fine. Due to our broken political system, and shallow culture, I would argue that the US has, by far, the highest number of war criminals/A-hole politicians, on the planet. Randy Fine is nothing more than a cowardly racist, who apparently enjoys lying, bullying, and supporting genocides. Hopefully, he will also be held accountable one day for being complicit in Israel’s US backed Genocide in Palestine.
As per Common Dreams:
“In 2021, the Florida chapter of CAIR filed an ethics complaint against Fine after he posted on social media calling Palestinian people “animals” and calling for their annihilation with the hashtag “#BlowThemUp.””
Click here to learn more about the heinous Senator from Common Dreams.
22. Katie Halper is a trusted source for great interviews, and news items.
Kudos to Katie Halper for telling the truth!
Click here to learn more.
Click here for a link to the Katie Halper Show YouTube channel.
“The West will Nuke China Before It Lets Go” – Norman Finkelstein
23. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity.
As mentioned earlier, the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, on allegations of war crimes, and crimes against humanity (Genocide).
Up next (if we lived in a just society): Arrest warrants for “Genocide Joe” Biden, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of “Defense” Lloyd Austin & VP Kamala Harris (for starters)!
Joe Biden, is a mass murdering psychopath, who should be viewed as one of the most overlooked Genocidal maniacs in history. “Genocide Joe” is a Monster, and a War Criminal. If we lived in a just society, and he was held to the same standards as the Nazis at Nuremberg, Joe Biden would be HANGED. “Genocide Joe” knows this, and it is why he has once again tried to undermine international law by saying that the ‘ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous’. It doesn’t matter that Biden is old and feeble. We know who he is and out of respect, love, and honor of the millions of people he has murdered (most of whom are women and CHILDREN), we must hold him, and ourselves, accountable. We must never forget that Joe Biden was one of the architects of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, which according to Brown University, killed millions of innocent people. As I have shared before, “Genocide Joe Biden” made the following declaration to Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Menachem Begin (in a 1982 Senate foreign relations committee meeting): “If attacks were launched from Canada into the US, everyone here would have said, “Attack all cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed.” Prime Minister Begin later told Israeli reporters that he “disassociated” himself from Biden’s remarks, and that according to his values, “it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war.” Don’t forget too that Biden championed two of the worst US Supreme Court justices in US history (Clarence Thomas & Antonin Scalia), and vehemently supported advocates of animal cruelty, in their fight AGAINST the more humane treatment of factory farm animals (California’s Prop 12). Genocide Joe Biden also proudly rejected every piece of “Medicare for All” legislation that came across his desk (again, it is conservatively estimated that over 70,000 Americans die each year due to having no health insurance or being underinsured). Genocide Joe has also been a chronic liar (beheaded babies? Mass rapes? Arrested in S. Africa?, etc.), throughout his career, and the top recipient of any active politician, of AIPAC money. Joe Biden has had the power to stop Israel’s GENOCIDE at any time, but instead has chosen to not only be complicit with GENOCIDE (the evil of all evils), but an active participant, and enabler as well. So yes, Genocide Joe Biden (and members of his administration) should be tried for War Crimes, Crimes against Humanity, and now Genocide too. And then we can start addressing the complicity of the US corporate media (along with the racist, and dangerously ignorant, pro-establishment, pro-Genocide, celebrities like Bill Maher, Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, and their entire lot), and hold them accountable too. Phew.
Click here to learn more from Dropsite News.
Click here to learn more from Max Blumenthal’s excellent documentary, Atrocity Inc: How Israel Sells its Destruction of Gaza.
Click here for an excellent interview with Katie Halper & Human Rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber on the Genocidal Media.
Click here to learn more from Craig Mokhiber on how Western media can be held legally accountable for its role in Israel’s US backed GENOCIDE in Palestine.
More from the always exceptional, Vijay Prashad, and Tricontinental: The US Raises a Middle Finger to the ICC
“Finally, before history ends, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The indictment stated that there ‘are reasonable grounds to believe that both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity’. The court found sufficient reasons to believe that the two men ‘bear criminal responsibility’ for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts, and the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against a civilian population. Almost immediately, US President Joe Biden condemned the court’s actions, stating that the ‘ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous’. The United States, Biden said, ‘will always stand with Israel’…Earlier this year, Mongane Wally Serote wrote a poem for Palestine, part of which I reproduce for the International Day in Solidarity with Palestine (29 November).
Click here for the entire piece.
Poem:
“We hear in our eyes the sounds of the siren and of the explosion
As it blasts our eye and hearing
and the red fire
flares its coming in the air with the power of a storm
The red-hot fire holds human flesh in its red-hot dance
It was preceded by a thick black smoke
Which bellows and rages
On
Oh
Human race
And then it ends…
Ah Palestine!
Be.”
– Mongane Wally Serote
24. A Powerful website that lists 422 examples (and counting), of Israeli leaders openly expressing their intent to commit Genocide against Palestinians. Wow.
As per the Law for Palestine website:
“The statements of genocidal intent in this database highlight the intentionality fueling specific acts that constitute genocide, committed by the Israeli Armed Forces against Palestinians.”
Click here to learn more.
25. “Israel is the main cause of anti-Semitism in the world today.” – Professor, Author, and Activist, Norman Finkelstein
Shame on US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), for having no soul, and supporting a GENOCIDE. In addition to being a phony-baloney, “AOC” is also a war criminal. I am embarrassed to admit that I once donated to her campaign.
Learn more about the awfulness of AOC:
Click here to learn how by endorsing Biden, AOC is backing Genocide.
Click here to learn how AOC votes to back Israel lobby’s bogus “anti-Semitism” definition.
Click here to learn more from a Palestinian Activist & Katie Halper about how AOC sold out and lost her soul (6:50 mark).
Click here to learn how AOC is a shill for the mass murdering establishment.
26. Zionism is a Genocidal cult, and overall, Israel is a SICK society.
It is not just the Israeli government that has descended into madness, but the majority of its citizens now too.
“It shows where Israeli society stands today. If you express solidarity, or empathy, with the killed children in Gaza, you might be arrested in Israel. Not you might be, people were arrested just for having empathy to the killed children. But if you suggest Nazi ideas, nobody cares. That’s political correctness. This is the new Israeli political correctness. And what else can you call it if not calling it genocide? I mean, it goes without saying.” – Award winning Israeli journalist Gideon Levy
The number of Palestinians killed by Israel’s US backed Genocide over the last 14 months is now estimated to be between 300,000 to 400,000 (70% of whom are women and CHILDREN!).
Click here to learn more from Popular Resistance.
Click here to learn more about the unimaginable death toll in Gaza from Susan Abulhawa.
Click here to learn what Nazis and Zionists have in common with Lebanese-American Political Scientist Asad AbuKhalil.
27. Another terrific piece from Chris Hedges on Israel’s US backed GENOCIDE, and the life, and writings of Refaat Alareer.
Excerpt: “Dear Refaat, We are not silent. We are being silenced. The students who, during the last academic year set up encampments, occupied halls, went on hunger strikes and spoke out against the genocide, were met this fall with a series of rules that have turned university campuses into academic gulags. Among the minority of academics who dared to speak out, many have been sanctioned or dismissed. Medical professionals who criticize the wholesale destruction by Israel of hospitals, clinics and targeted assassinations of health workers in Gaza have been suspended or terminated from medical school faculties with some facing threats to revoke their medical licenses. Journalists who detail the mass slaughter and expose Israeli propaganda have been taken off air or fired from their publications. Jobs are lost over social media posts…A whisper of protest and we are disappeared. None of these measures will be lifted once the genocide ends. The genocide is the pretext. The result will be one huge step towards an authoritarian state, especially with the ascendancy of Donald Trump. The silence will expand, like a great cloud of sulfurous gas. We choke on forbidden words. They killed you. They are strangling us. The goal is the same. Erasure. Your story, the story of all Palestinians, is not to be told. The Zionists and their allies have nothing left in their arsenal but lies, censorship, smear campaigns and violence, the blunt instruments of the damned.
But I hold in my hand the weapon that will, ultimately, defeat them. Your book, “If I must Die: Poetry and Prose”. “Stories teach life,” you write, “even if the hero suffers or dies in the end.” Writing, you told your students, “is a testimony, a memory that outlives any human experience, and an obligation to communicate with ourselves and the world. We lived for a reason, to tell the tales of loss, survival, and of hope…”
Click here for the entire piece from Chris Hedges.
Click here to learn more from poet Refaat Alareer.
“An educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor.” – Lerone Bennett Jr.,
28. Scary times indeed. While the United States continues its GENOCIDE in Gaza, and brings the entire world closer to nuclear annihilation, the US Congress has just passed a new bill that will re-write public school curriculums with a focus on anti-socialism, and anti-communism beliefs. Lifetime criminal Donald Trump: “I will order my government to deny entry to all communists and all Marxists. Those who come to join our country must love our country. We don’t want them if they want to destroy our country… So we’re going to be keeping foreign Christian-hating communists, socialists, and Marxists out of America.”
As per the always informative Alan Macleod, “Congress has just passed a new bill that will see the U.S. spend huge sums of money redesigning much of the public school system around the ideology of anti-communism. The “Crucial Communism Teaching Act” is now being read in the Senate, where it is all but certain to pass. The move comes amid growing public anger at the economic system and increased public support for socialism. The Crucial Communism Teaching Act, in its own words, is designed to teach children that “certain political ideologies, including communism and totalitarianism…conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy that are essential to the founding of the United States.” Although sponsored by Republicans, it enjoys widespread support from Democrats and is focused on China, Venezuela, Cuba and other targets of U.S. empire. The wording of the bill has many worried that this will be a centerpiece of a new era of anti-communist hysteria, similar to previous McCarthyist periods.”
Click here to learn more from MintPress News.
29. PETA is a GENOCIDE supporting organization.
Here is yet another example of the depravity of Israeli soldiers as they shoot and kill a horse for carrying bags of flour for Palestinians (The US & Israel have weaponized disease, and starvation, in their concerted efforts to erase Palestinians).
PETA’s reaction? SILENCE.
As per author Susan Abulhawa:
“PETA??? Why have you been silent over the slaughter of animals by Israelis? This isn’t the first video evidence of them targeting animals. They themselves have posted videos of firing on horses, sheep, and other animals in Gaza.”
Click here for the video.
30. NJ State Senator Cory Booker is a soulless criminal.
A vegan since 2014, NJ State Senator Cory Booker is a staunch supporter of Israel’s US Backed GENOCIDE in Palestine. Here, by posing with an international War Criminal (below), Booker reminds us all that being VEGAN doesn’t mean that you still can’t be a mass-murdering, soulless twat. US Senator Cory Booker has received $750,669 from AIPAC.
Click here to learn more from CODEPINK.
31. F*ck MIT. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is also supporting Israel’s US backed GENOCIDE in Palestine.
As per Mondoweiss: “An MIT lab is collaborating with the Israeli military to develop AI surveillance algorithms and the university censored a campus publication that tried to expose it. We refuse to be intimidated and continue to demand: No More Research for Genocide…Today, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) conducts research funded by the Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMoD), with direct applications to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We, the MIT Coalition for Palestine, whose tuition and labor support CSAIL, call on CSAIL Director Daniela Rus to lead by example and end her IMoD-sponsored research…We are committed to engaging in continuing action because it works. For instance, The U.S. arm of Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems recently ended its lease of office space in Cambridge after months of demonstrations by pro-Palestinian protestors. This win reinforces our resolve, and reminds us of a crucial lesson: the only way to make material disruptions for these inhumane systems is to continuously raise the cost for conducting research for genocide. MIT’s police and disciplinary response against peaceful demonstrators was swift and unjust. Within fifteen minutes, MIT escalated the situation with police force by violently arresting student protestors and detaining others for merely chanting and passing out flyers. At one point, there were four to six cops pinning down one person. Even those who were simply filming the arrests were detained, pushed around, and groped. There was no warning or attempt by faculty or administrators to engage with the students in order to understand their actions. Three days after the protest, 8 students received interim sanction letters from the MIT Committee on Discipline…”
Click here to learn more from Mondoweiss.
32. Israel weaponizes Food to Erase Palestinian Identity. Kudos to Mondoweiss for this educational piece!
Click here for the video on how Israel steals food.
33. Surprise, Surprise, Big Ag Triumphs over PUBLIC HEALTH in GMO Corn Trade Dispute
Mexico is not allowed to ban US grown genetically modified corn sprayed with glyphosate from use in its tortillas under the US Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), a panel of arbitrators ruled. Industry groups hailed the ruling as a win for industry, while pubic health, and food sovereignty groups, said the decision places the interests of multinational corporations over Mexico’s rights to protect people’s health, and the environment.
Click here to learn more about how the United States can force Mexico to accept GM corn for its tortillas.
Click here for the New scientific analyses that underpins Mexico’s restrictions on GM corn and glyphosate due to health risks.
Click here to learn more from a leading scientist who defends Mexico’s food sovereignty from GM corn and glyphosate.
Click here to learn more about the trade dispute, and why America s*cks.
34. Pew Research Center Data is Biased and Unreliable: P.U. (something stinks!) Research Center issued its research findings, and referred to Israel’s US backed GENOCIDE in Palestine, as the “Israel-Hamas War”, which of course is a form of propaganda, and a not so subtle way of supporting Israel’s US backed GENOCIDE in Palestine.
Here is a quick email that I sent to Pew (P.U.) Research Center (unsurprisingly, I never received a response):
Hello, I used to use your data until I realized that you are biased in many ways yourself.
“Amid the Israel-Hamas war”? It is a GENOCIDE. It is not a war of any kind. It is a GENOCIDE.
The fact that you are still calling a GENOCIDE, the “Israel-Hamas War” tells me all I need to know about the credibility of your research, and how trustworthy you are. Please look in the mirror, and take responsibility. You used to be pretty good, but now I can’t use your data anymore as a reference in the classroom.
*UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, does phenomenal work, and here she explains why it is deceitful, and wrong, to call Israel’s US backed GENOCIDE in Palestine, the “war between Gaza and Israel.”
Click here for the video.
35. Peace through Pleasure! Wow, a Lesson from our Closest Living Relatives on how to Eradicate Rape and Wars
Dr. Susan Block has done remarkable work that shows how Bonobos “Make Love not War”, by empowering their females.
According to Dr. Block, “Studies have shown that bonobo females are respected and empowered by the males and other females far more than any other great ape culture, and this female empowerment appears to be intrinsic to the extraordinary bonobo ability to make “peace through pleasure,” keeping rape levels low and murder and war nonexistent in their communities. In a word, females “rule” Bonoboville, gently but firmly… keeping the males gentle and firm. How do they do this, since the males are larger, stronger and sport fangs? Bonobo female solidarity is the key to their empowerment. Indeed, their sense of “sisterhood” is all the more remarkable since bonobo females in the same tribe aren’t even, for the most part, actual sisters or blood-related. Their intense bonds are forged through the sexual relations of hoka-hoka (genito-genital rubbing), as well as the intimacies of complex friendships and erotic political alliances, all of which are integral to the Bonobo Way of peace through pleasure…And then there’s the sex. If you know anything about bonobos, you probably know they have a lot of sex. And they have it in a dazzling array of ways. These loving, sensuous apes have as many kinds of sex as humans do, in a veritable Bonobo Sutra of positions, including face-to-face, with multiple partners and in all combinations, as bonobos are bisexual or pansexual, an especially fitting adjective since their Latin name is Pan paniscus. But it’s not just how they have sex that makes bonobos so important, especially to humans. It’s how they use sex: for barter, friendship, stress-relief, anger management, conflict resolution and even political positioning that allows the females to gently dominate the males, and to prevent murder and war in their communities. That’s right, no bonobo has ever been seen killing another bonobo in the wild or in captivity. Their uncanny ability to make “peace through pleasure” is intrinsically related to their sexuality…
A New Great Ape Paradigm for Humanity?
Recent bonobo studies (and they’re all pretty recent) reveal tremendous insights about the nature of lust, trust, arousal, orgasm, cooperation, compassion, intimacy, morality, the motivation for charity, just being human, and even being humane, as well as our place on this wild and very sexual planet earth, and even within this 13.8 billion-year-old cosmos. Understanding human closeness to the bonobos connects us more deeply to all of nature as well as to the better “bonoboësque” side of “human nature.” Of course, that includes our sexual nature. As a sex therapist, when I first saw bonobos, I wondered: What do these great apes know about sex—and the rest of life—that we don’t? It took me a book to even attempt to address that question! The Bonobo Way explores the very special world of these amazing creatures who have so much sex, never kill each other, empower the females and maybe have something to teach us about how we too might live in a sex-affirming society without murder or war…”
Click here to learn more from Dr. Susan Block.
Click here to learn more about her book.
36. Former US President Jimmy Carter dies at the age of 100.
I trust Noam Chomsky more than anyone on these matters, and he basically called Jimmy Carter a war criminal (and provided the evidence). Ralph Nader is another legend who I trust, and he mostly praised Jimmy Carter, which was surprising. However, according to Chris Hedges, “Jimmy Carter may have done good works out of office, but in power he fomented a series of domestic and foreign policy disasters…Carter had a decency most politicians lack, but his moral crusades, which came once he was out of power, seem like a form of penance. His record as president is bloody and dismal, although not as bloody and dismal as the presidents who followed. That’s the best we can say of him.”
Click here for the entire piece from Chris Hedges.
Click here to learn more from Noam Chomsky.
Click here to learn more from Ralph Nader.
As I have shared before, most Americans are desensitized and living in denial when it comes to America’s mass atrocities, including GENOCIDES, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It seems to me that most Americans know very little about history, and US foreign policy, but everything about celebrities, Hollywood movies (thousands of which are only made with US military involvement and propaganda), sports, and all things related to consumerism, and materialism. Overall, America is a strikingly shallow culture, and it starts in childhood when our feelings of compassion, empathy and curiosity are for the most part crushed by our educational system, in order to carry the torch of American Exceptionalism(capitalism, racism, militarism, etc.), from one generation to the next. How can we expect our children to think critically, when most of our teachers, and parents, are incapable, or unwilling to do so themselves? And America’s catastrophic food system is no different. It has been my experience that hiding the truth from children has less to do with concern for the child, and a lot more to do with parents and teachers who are not ready to look in the mirror, and consider their own choices, and the meal on their own plates. I can tell you as an educator, that kids love to learn, and they love animals. In other words, they love to love. We just need to tell them the truth, and watch them soar. We need to do it early however, so that they have less to unlearn. I truly believe that not one of my students (out of a 1,000+ over the years), would choose to harm a single animal, or support the horrors of animal factories, or a GENOCIDE. Not one. So, what is going on? Does America have a soul?
I am ashamed of the United States of America. Every US President since the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1945), has committed war crimes, and not a single one has been held accountable. US Secretary of State, and War Criminal, Antony Blinken, announced that the US will “defend” Israel for “as long as America exists”. In other words, the United States will continue to unconditionally support, and enable, Israel’s ongoing War Crimes, and GENOCIDAL massacre of HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of our brothers & sisters in Palestine (70% of whom are women & CHILDREN!). The United States is indeed, a monstrous, and failing empire. The vast majority of US “leaders” are War Criminals, and GENOCIDISTS, but again, none of these low life pukes will ever be held accountable. Their loyalties are only to weapon manufacturers, corporations, the wealthiest 1%, and their personal bank accounts. As the great George Carlin quipped, “it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it!” If they were to ever truly care about issues of Truth & Justice, they would never be “selected”. Once again, the mass murdering US War Machine wins. Yesterday it was Japan, Vietnam, and Iraq, today it’s Russia and Palestine, and next up will be China (not to mention the MILLIONS of other victims who were ravaged, and slaughtered, both abroad, and on America’s home soil too). When will the madness end? And whether it’s Animal Rights, Human Rights, or Mother Earth herself, when will most Americans begin to think critically, and care?
“As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.” – Noam Chomsky
Keep sleepwalking America. Silence is Violence.
Free Palestine!
Until next time…
“A loving heart is the truest wisdom.” – Charles Dickens
Additional Resources:
Click here to learn more from Professor & Human Rights attorney Noura Erakat.
Click here to learn more from Noam Chomsky.
Click here to learn how the US military pays for studies to determine if a nuclear war with Russia would starve billions of people.
Click here to learn how the US is bringing the world closer to nuclear war with a superb panel organized by Scott Ritter.
Click here for Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s superb documentary, Manufacturing Consent.
Click here to learn more from the University of Colorado on how nuclear war would cause global famine and kill billions of people.
Click here to learn more about one of the greatest teachers of all time, Noam Chomsky.
