Palestinian activists criticise Starmer, Macron and Scholz for ‘hollow’ call for de-escalation

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/palestinian-activists-criticise-starmer-macron-and-scholz-for-hollow-call-for-de-escalation

Palestinians displaced by the Israeli air and ground offensive on the Gaza Strip flee from Hamad City, following an evacuation order by the Israeli army to leave parts of the southern area of Khan Younis, August 11, 2024

A CALL by Prime Minister Keir Starmer for “de-escalation and regional stability” in the Middle East has been criticised by Palestine rights campaigners.

Sir Keir made the plea alongside French and German leaders Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz who urged Iran and its allies not to “jeopardise the opportunity to agree a ceasefire and the release of hostages” in Gaza.

But the Palestine Solidarity Campaign said the call “rings hollow when these same leaders maintain their complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”

PSC said: “40,000 Palestinians have now been killed in Israel’s genocidal assault. Every day we wake up to new scenes of Israel’s latest massacre of displaced Palestinian men, women and children.

“Starmer, Macron and Scholz are all complicit in these atrocities so long as they continue to sell arms to Israel and provide diplomatic cover for its war crimes.

“The quickest way for our leaders to bring about the ceasefire that they claim to want is to immediately ban all arms trade with Israel.”

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/palestinian-activists-criticise-starmer-macron-and-scholz-for-hollow-call-for-de-escalation

Continue ReadingPalestinian activists criticise Starmer, Macron and Scholz for ‘hollow’ call for de-escalation

‘Heinous’: Children Among 100 Killed by Israel Bombing of Gaza School Just Hours After US Weapons Approval

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Original article by JON QUEALLY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Relatives of Palestinians killed by the Israeli attack on Nuseirat refugee camp mourn as the bodies are brought to al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on August 10, 2024. (Photo by Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“It is hard to comprehend how the Biden administration can justify rewarding Israel with new weapons, despite Israel’s persistent defiance of every single plea the Biden administration has made urging a modicum of restraint.”

Just hours after the Biden administration Friday announced approval of $3.5 billion in military funds for Israel and shipments for new weaponry, an Israeli bombing of a school-turned-shelter in Gaza has killed 100 people or more, including scores of civilian men, women, and children in what was described as a “bloody massacre” that struck during morning prayers, leaving body parts scattered “in pieces” and healthcare workers overwhelmed with the dead and wounded.

The Palestinian Authority’s Fatah government in the Occupied West Bank released a statement Saturday describing the attack on the al-Tabin school in Gaza City as a “heinous bloody massacre” that represents the “peak of terrorism and criminality” by the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Committing these massacres confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt its efforts to exterminate our people through the policy of cumulative killing and mass massacres that make living consciences tremble,” said the PA.

“If the ICC doesn’t take action now, then when?”

Footage taken by volunteers working alongside Palestinian medical units in Gaza City showed wounded small children and adults being taken to local hospitals as well as scenes of carnage from the scene of the bombing [Warning: Images are graphic]. Gaza journalist Motasem A. Dalloul also posted his reporting from the scene, including footage of the carnage [Also graphic].

Al-Jazeera spoke with witnesses at the scene of the massacre, one of whom said many of the dead—which included women, children, and old people who had been praying and others sleeping when the missiles struck—were collected afterward “in pieces”:

– YouTube

youtu.be

Tamer Kirolos, a regional director for Save the Children, called Israel’s attack on al-Tabin the “deadliest attack on a school since last October.”

“It is devastating to see the toll this has taken, including so many children and people at the school for dawn prayers,” Kirolos said. “Civilians, children, must be protected. An immediate definitive ceasefire is the only foreseeable way that will happen.”

Just hours before the bombing, the U.S. State Department announcement that a $3.5 billion tranche of funds—part of a larger $14.1 billion in overseas military aid approved by Congress earlier this year—would be released to the Israeli government for weapons procurement.

As CNN reported, while some of those weapons purchases made possible by the fund may take years, the “supplemental funding also allocated billions of dollars’ worth of equipment that the Pentagon can draw from its own stockpiles to send directly to Israel on a much faster timeline.”

Unverified reporting indicated that at least one of the missiles dropped on the al-Tabin school overnight may have been a U.S.-made MK-84 bomb weighing 2,000 pounds.

On Friday night, after the State Department announcement but before news of the latest bombing in Gaza broke, Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the human rights and advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), was among those confounded by the U.S. government’s continued determination to arm the Israelis in the face of the human suffering in Gaza and the repeated massacre of civilians, day after day and month after month.

“It is mind-boggling that despite the overwhelming evidence of the IDF’s unprecedented crimes in Gaza that has shocked the conscience of the entire world, the Biden administration is greenlighting the transfer of additional lethal weapons to Israel,” said Whitson in a Friday night statement following news that the State Dept. had greenlit the release of taxpayer funds for a new round of weapons destined for Israel.

“It is hard to comprehend how the Biden administration can justify rewarding Israel with new weapons, despite Israel’s persistent defiance of every single plea the Biden administration has made urging a modicum of restraint,” she said, “and despite the very apparent fact that such sales violate black letter U.S. laws prohibiting weapons to gross abusers like Israel.”

Making a similar argument in a Saturday morning post on X, Sami Abou Shehadeh, leader of Israel’s leftist Balad Party, said that while President Joe Biden “could have stopped the genocide” by using his leverage of military aid to force the Israelis in a different direction, instead “he just released $3.5 billion for more weapons to kill civilians.”

Shehadeh warned that without any internal opposition “to the genocide” by Israel’s Zionist political parties, Netanyahu’s policies would continue, even as the region inches toward further destabilization over the crisis in Gaza that has also spread to Lebanon and beyond. Calling for the International Criminal Court to intervene, he asked, “If the ICC doesn’t take action now, then when?”

Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and co-founder of Progressive International, asked the same on Saturday.

“Israel has now killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and wounded well over 92,000 others,” said Varoufakis. “Thousands more lie, uncounted, under the debris. Some 10,000 Palestinians have been abducted by Israel’s occupying forces. Question: Where is the ICC indictment?”

“It is truly horrific,” Raed Jarrar, DAWN’s policy director told Common Dreams via email Saturday. “Last night’s massacre was another example of how Blinken and Biden have blood on their hands.”

Referencing a separate decision by the State Department to suspend an investigation into documented abuse violations by the “notorious” Netzah Yehuda Unit within the IDF, Jarrar said the “decisions of sending weapons to Israel and not sanctioning Israeli human rights abusers are not just corrupt policy decisions, they are criminal acts.”

Update: This article has been updated from its original to include additional comment from DAWN.

Original article by JON QUEALLY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue Reading‘Heinous’: Children Among 100 Killed by Israel Bombing of Gaza School Just Hours After US Weapons Approval

Exposed: what links Israel to UK far-right riots?

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TOMMY ROBINSON AND THE ZIONIST AGENDA: THE HIDDEN FORCES BEHIND THE UK RACE RIOTS

Original article by KIT KLARENBERG republished from MPN under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

Ever since July 29, Britain has been plunged into crisis, with incendiary far-riot rights sending towns and cities across the country spiraling into states of emergency. Vast mobs of armed, angry thugs, motivated by racist, Islamophobic animus, have vandalized homes, property and places of worship, violently clashed with police, and targeted hotels housing refugees with arson attacks in apparent stabs at mass murder. Hundreds of arrests have been made, and counter-protesters have taken to the streets in profusion to counter the upsurge of hatred.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged those responsible will face the “full force of the law” for their actions, and several perpetrators have already been sentenced to years in prison. Still, the situation remains gravely tense. Furthermore, in keeping with so many prior explosive, unanticipated episodes in modern British history, a vicious mainstream blame game has erupted, with ultimate responsibility for the upheaval being apportioned to a wide range of domestic and foreign actors and causes.

The unrest’s actual, and perhaps most apparent, sources have been mysteriously overlooked. For one, average Britons remain gripped by an ever-worsening economic cataclysm, in which the cost of essentials ever rises while living standards precipitously decline. The newly-elected Labour government has not only practically pledged to do nothing to alleviate the misery – by maintaining if not intensifying self-destructive austerity policies – but already exacerbated the dire situation significantly by slashing winter fuel payments, leaving millions facing life-threateningly freezing cold, without state support.

History shows that this milieu is invariably a fertile breeding ground for fascism to take root. With no mainstream alternative to the neoliberal status quo, desperate, disillusioned and dispossessed working-class Britons look to “outsiders” and extremists like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson for salvation in ever-greater numbers. And their remedy, as always, is to blame migrants, refugees and “the other” for all of society’s ills and their own personal deprivation rather than ruling elites.

Even more ominously, though, there are unambiguous indications the anti-Muslim fervor that has torn through Britain in August is being stirred up by unseen spectral actors in service of the Zionist entity’s ideological, political, and military interests.

‘GET THEM GONE’

For all the flurry of claims and counter-claims about how and why the riots started, there is no dispute they ignited on July 29 following a savage knife attack at a children’s yoga and dance workshop. Three children were killed and eight others injured, with five still in critical condition. Two adults present were also severely harmed. News of the shocking event rapidly spread far and wide, promptly followed by wildly incorrect conjecture and disinformation about the suspect’s identity.

Within mere hours, a popular anti-lockdown account posted on ‘X’ that the attacker was named “Ali al Shakati” – “an asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year…on an MI6 watch list.” While this false information was deleted within an hour, the damage was thoroughly done. Multiple far-right influencers instantly leaped upon these claims, adding further groundless, incriminating details of their own to the mix. Among them was Robinson – aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon – a notorious fascist activist of some standing.

He declared the Southport knife attacker was an “alleged Muslim,” adding, “They always target women.” The next day, an aggressive crowd gathered outside Southport Mosque, chanting Robinson’s name, along with the offensive Islamophobic slogan, “Who the fuck is Allah?” – a common fixture at far-right demonstrations. Attendant law enforcement officers were attacked, objects were hurled at the mosque, and police vehicles were set on fire. This malign spark produced copycat events and incidents across Britain, leading us to where we are now.

Protesters attack a Holiday Inn Express beillived to be housing asylum-seekers in South Yorkshire, August 4, 2024. Photo | AP

In almost every instance, police were quick to identify the rioters as members of the English Defence League (EDL), a now-defunct far-right organization comprised of hardcore anti-Islam agitators and football hooligans. Robinson, the League’s former leader, rubbished these allegations via X on the grounds that “there’s has [sic] been no EDL for over a decade.” Nonetheless, in a video published while the Southport riot was ongoing, he seemingly traced the violence back to the group he once headed and the streetfighting dogma it espoused:

Before people…condemn the ‘angry men’, that anger is justified. I’m surprised it’s took [sic] this long…you’ve actually encouraged the scenes you see tonight. You’ve done this, your government has done this, the police have done this…You care more for Afghanis, Somalis, Eritreans, Syrians, Pakistanis. They’re a danger to us. Stop the f***ing boats! Get them out of them [sic] hotels! Get them gone! Send them back! They shouldn’t be here ! Men will rise up, they were always going to rise up, they have to rise up, to defend their families!”

On August 8, intelligence-adjacent “independent” outlet Byline Times published a lengthy probe into “the real UK race riot instigators,” mapping “the key players and Transatlantic network” around Robinson. It argued he may have instigated the recent British upheaval at the behest of a sinister nexus of wealthy far-right figures in Europe and North America, including wealthy Donald Trump supporter Patrick Michael Byrne. Markedly, not once were Israel or Zionists mentioned – far more plausible candidates for directing Robinson’s incitation to Islamophobic violence.

‘FOREIGN PRESSURE’

The EDL burst onto British streets in June 2009. Describing itself as a “human rights organization”  and touting the slogan “not racist, not violent, just no longer silent,” Robinson and his confederates consistently claimed to be simply standing up for white working-class citizens and raising legitimate concerns about extremist Islam. However, the behavior and chants of its members on regular EDL marches through British towns and cities told a very different story.

Still, the League was ever-keen to flaunt its non-racist, diverse credentials. From its inception, the EDL had dedicated divisions for its Cypriot, Greek, Hindu, Jewish, LGBT and Pakistani Christian supporters and other minority groups present on marches besides. The League’s “Jewish” wing was always the movement’s most visible, even if barely acknowledged by the mainstream media. The profusion of Israel flags routinely found in EDL protests also went largely unremarked upon during the group’s five-year existence.

Yet, indications that the EDL’s activities served quite another nation’s interests were always unambiguously hidden in plain sight. The League never operated as a charity or political party in Britain, but two separate commercial entities were registered under its name. In June 2011, Robinson’s compatriots launched a company, the English Defence League. A month later, this was updated to the English and Jewish Defence League. Meanwhile, a firm known as EDL English Defence League LTD was registered in December 2010.

Two years later, the company’s name became the Jewish Defence League and one of its directors, Roberta Moore, a belligerent Zionist, established links with Jewish Task Force, a far-right U.S. organization. Founded by Victor Vancier, it espouses a hardcore, fundamentalist Zionism. Despite raising money for illegal settlements in the West Bank and avowedly seeking to “save” Israel, Vancier was banned from entering Tel Aviv for his involvement in 18 bombings in New York and Washington, protesting Soviet treatment of Jews during the 1980s.

This connection was reportedly too “extreme” for EDL higherups, who subsequently distanced themselves from Moore and their “Jewish” wing. However, this is difficult to rationalize with Robinson’s own views. In February 2019, a leaked video depicted the former League chief declaring his love for Israel and discussing how, on some occasions, he is forced to “get [his] Zionist card out, which says that [he is] a Zionist.” The clip ended with him proudly declaring:

Palestine?! F*** Palestine. Why would you support Palestine? If there was a war tomorrow, which probably there would be, I would be there on the front line fighting for Israel”.

Five months later, Robinson was jailed for 13 months for contempt of court after he exposed the protected identities of accused sexual groomers while they were on trial in May the previous year. Once imprisoned, notorious hardline Zionist lobby think tank Middle East Forum announced it had not only helped fund his legal expenses but financed and organized 25,000-strong solidarity protests in his honor. An accompanying statement revealed:

MEF is helping Mr. Robinson in his moment of danger…[MEF] is aiding Mr. Robinson…diplomatically, by bringing foreign pressure on the UK government to ensure [his] safety and eventual release.

The statement was signed by MEF Director Gregg Roman, who previously worked in the Zionist entity’s Defence and foreign ministries. There are no prizes for guessing from which country the “foreign pressure” to release Robinson emanated.

‘GOING UNDERCOVER’

In the EDL, Robinson and Moore were not alone in having deep and cohering ties to Israel and a pronounced affinity for Zionism. One of the group’s key founders, “Paul Ray,” whose blogging on race was cited in the manifesto of Norwegian Islamophobic mass murderer Anders Breivik, had a highly dubious history indeed as an infiltrator of Palestine solidarity movements in Britain. Whether he was a volunteer or state agent remains unclear today, but he evidently inflicted enormous damage on his targets.

In September 2006, Islamophobic U.S. website FrontPageMag published an “exposeé” on how one of its British “volunteers” had infiltrated the International Solidarity Movement’s London wing a year prior. ISM is a pro-Palestinian campaign group dedicated to nonviolent protests, with chapters around the world. It trains and dispatches volunteers to the Occupied Territories to assist with nonviolent protest activities. Despite this, in 2003, two ISM activists – Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – were killed by Israeli Occupation Forces.

Investigative journalist Asa Winstanley, a veteran Palestine solidarity activist, has revealed that British intelligence has long penetrated ISM. Ray—real name Paul Cinato—was among the spies who infiltrated the Movement. As the FrontPageMag article reported, he “had prior experience going undercover for the police in the UK” before targeting ISM. The outlet added, “Photos and intelligence [Cinato] brought back are proving invaluable to intelligence agencies watching ISM and [are] in official hands.”

Again, there are few prizes for guessing the location of the “intelligence agencies watching ISM” that benefited from Cinato’s activities. Other British spies who infiltrated the Movement very clearly passed what they learned on to Zionist entity authorities. By 2008, Tel Aviv had obtained such precise intelligence on the group that its volunteers were either deported after entering Israel or blocked from entering altogether. As ISM’s primary raison d’etre was to get people into the Occupied Territories, its value and impact were significantly curtailed.

Tommy Robinson poses with IDF troops during a visit to Israel. Photo | Twitter

It must not be forgotten either that the deranged “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was a core precept of the EDL during its five-year-long lifespan and remains promulgated by Robinson and Britain’s fascist rioters in the present day. This narrative posits that Western elites are covertly engaged in a dastardly connivance to flood Europe with Muslims and destroy local culture in service of creating “Eurabia,” an Islamized mega-continent and caliphate.

The originator of this profoundly racist, fantastical drivel was “Bat Ye’or” – the nom de plume of former Mossad operative Gisèle Littman. In 1961, she and her British husband David led Operation Mural, a sickening Zionist operation to kidnap Jewish children from Morocco to become settler colonists in Israel. She spent three months in Rabat posing as a Christian aid worker, gaining the trust of young targets to assist with their unwilling extraction.

The pair went on to be involved in a variety of Zionist organizations and leading lights in the Islamophobic Counterjihad movement. Despite their sordid personal and professional history being well-documented, Gisèle Littman’s obscenely hypocritical “Great Replacement” theory quickly became popular with right-wingers in Europe and North America. As a 2019 Guardian long-read put it:

Once an obscure idea confined to the darker corners of the internet, the anti-Islam ideology is now visible in the everyday politics of the West.”

Littman’s “theory” is just one way in which the Zionist entity has over decades normalized and legitimized everyday discrimination and xenophobia towards Muslims while dehumanizing and demonizing them in pursuit of its putrid, genocidal settler colonial project. Having insidiously poisoned Western information spaces with surging Islamophobic hatred via assets such as Tommy Robinson, it appears the pot is finally boiling over in Britain.

That there is a mainstream omerta on these fundamental truths indicates Europe and North America’s media and political class are determined to let the Zionist entity get away with it.

Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.

Original article by KIT KLARENBERG republished from MPN under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

dizzy: Britain’s Fascist rioters promote the theory of ‘Two-tier Policing’. There is obviously a two-tier justice system in UK as anyone who has experienced it will have undoubtedly learned but not in the way that the fascist rioters’ propose. I’ve suffered enough abuse from police – although not too much recently – and tried to get them to investigate former Met Police boss Ian Blair. There was absolutely no chance of that. I’ve been before enough judges – mostly but not all magistrates and civil ones two or three times – to recognise that they are prejudged and biased.

Ridiculously harsh sentences for non-violent Just Stop Oil protesters v. fascist rioters? Will Zionist Tommy Robinson be tried for his inflammatory social media posts? I somehow doubt that under UK’s Zionist establishment.

Continue ReadingExposed: what links Israel to UK far-right riots?

Western Media, Leaders Slammed for ‘Deafening’ Silence Over Israeli Torture Revelations

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

A leaked photograph obtained by CNN shows a blindfolded man with his arms over his head at the Sde Teiman detention facility. (Photo: CNN)

“Can you imagine the response if Palestinians were holding Israelis in mass rape camps and torturing them to death?” asked one critic.

Human rights defenders are calling out Western news outlets and political leaders for their conspicuous lack of coverage and vocalized condemnation after leaked video footage appeared to show Israeli soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian detainee in the notorious Sde Teiman prison and the release of a new report documenting systematic torture of prisoners held by Israel.

Earlier this week, Israel’s Channel 12 aired a video showing Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reservists assaulting a Palestinian man at Sde Teiman, which is often called “Israel’s Guantánamo.” The victim was reportedly hospitalized with a severe anal injury, ruptured bowel, broken ribs, and lung damage. In addition to torture, former Sde Teiman detainees have described rampant rape and sexual abuse, allegedly often committed by female soldiers.

Instead of avoiding the Sde Teiman rape story, Israeli media have aired an interview with one of the IDF suspects—who are being hailed as “heroes” by far-right Israelis including multiple Cabinet ministers—and panel discussions including one in which a journalist called for “institutionalized” rape of Palestinian prisoners. This, as Israeli leaders demanded an investigation of the rape video to find and punish whoever leaked the footage, and as Israeli lawmakers argue that it’s permissible to rape Palestinian prisoners.

Meanwhile, there has been very little coverage of Sde Teiman on U.S. broadcast media, which have come under fire for allowing Israeli officials to censor their coverage of the Gaza onslaught. This stands in stark contrast to the myriad—and sometimes outright falsereports of Hamas militants raping Israeli women during the October 7 attack, which have prompted embarrassing corrections.

“Can you imagine the response if Palestinians were holding Israelis in mass rape camps and torturing them to death? Every U.S. politician would condemn it, there would be congressional resolutions, countless CNN segments, and celebrity outrage,” Palestinian American poet Remi Kanazi said Thursday on social media. “But the victims are just Palestinians.”

Dazed politics editor James Greig said on social media Wednesday that “it feels redundant to complain about double standards at this point but still, the contrast between the silence about Sde Teiman and the months of lurid, detailed, and at best factually dubious reporting published when Hamas was accused of sexual violence is extremely stark.”

Syrian British journalist Richard Medhurst wrote Thursday on social media that “the silence by mainstream media on the IDF’s rape culture is deafening.”

“These journalists are literally covering for the most violent form of rape, recorded on camera, and documented by doctors,” he added.

When there is coverage of alleged Israeli crimes in the U.S. media, it is often presented in a manner that casts doubt upon the veracity of Palestinian claims—which are increasingly beyond doubt amid an avalanche of evidence.

On Monday, asCommon Dreamsreported, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem released a detailed report, ominously titled “Welcome to Hell,” which documented widespread torture and abuse of Palestinians across Israeli’s detention apparatus. The report found that “there is no room to doubt” that Israel’s torture methods are a systematic, organized policy of its prison authorities.

Israeli whistleblowers have described having to frequently amputate Sde Teiman detainees’ limbs due to damage from constant shackling. IDF officers have admitted that dozens of Palestinians have died at the prison. IDF soldiers allegedly murdered one detainee by shoving an electric baton in his anus. United Nations experts and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem have confirmed what the latter described as the “systematic” torture of detainees “that amounts to a war crime and even a crime against humanity.”

Meanwhile, Israeli protesters have rallied for the right to rape Palestinians, and a far-right mob whose members included a Cabinet minister and multiple Knesset lawmakers stormed two military bases last month in an attempt to free the alleged IDF rapists after nine suspects were arrested.

Yet “there is still no international outcry,” journalists Lubna Masarwa and Peter Osborne wrote in a Middle East Eyeopinion piece published Friday. “This collective omerta from politicians and the media about Israel’s monstrous conduct is hard to comprehend, given that we are talking about systematic war crimes committed on a horrifying scale by a country already under investigation at the International Court of Justice for potential genocide.”

“Their silence amounts to complicity,” the authors continued. “As for Israel, the majority of the political and media classes do not appear to think there is much wrong in the torture and abuse of prisoners, with some ministers actively defending the abusers.”

“These are the signs of a very sick society indeed—one that has passed through an invisible barrier into savagery,” they added. “There are no red lines, no respect for international law, and no accountability. The silence of the West shows that we, too, have entered the same nightmare universe.”

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingWestern Media, Leaders Slammed for ‘Deafening’ Silence Over Israeli Torture Revelations

US Rights Group Urges Media to Condemn Israel’s Killing of Journalists in Gaza

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A funeral ceremony is held for Palestine TV correspondent Mohammed Abu Hatab, who was killed, along with his family members, in an airstrike on his home in Khan Yunis, Gaza on November 3, 2023. (Photo: Abed Zagout/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“The only thing that can explain the shocking silence of American and international media professionals about the mass killing of their Palestinian colleagues is the decadeslong and systematic dehumanization of the Palestinian people.”

The largest U.S. Muslim advocacy group on Friday implored American and international media outlets to speak out against Israel’s killing of more than 100 journalists, almost all of them Palestinians, during the ongoing assault on Gaza.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) renewed its plea following Israeli airstrikes on the homes of Palestine TV journalist Tamim Ma’mmar and Al-Aqsa TV‘s Abdullah Al-Sousi. Ma’mmar was killed along with his wife and two of their children, while the other attack killed Al-Sousi and two of his nephews, according to Quds News Network.

“The only thing that can explain the shocking silence of American and international media professionals about the mass killing of their Palestinian colleagues is the decadeslong and systematic dehumanization of the Palestinian people, in which the lives of Palestinians have lesser or no value,” CAIR national communications director Ibrahim Cooper said in a statement.

“Journalists worldwide must begin to speak out about these killings and about the Israeli genocide in Gaza,” he added.

https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1821932693400981588?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1821932693400981588%7Ctwgr%5Eb50525bcbd64fb1a441b5d53fd2d2b071768fd5b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fisrael-killing-journalists

Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Its 308-day assault on Gaza has left more than 142,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing, according to local and international officials.

Preliminary investigations by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists found that at least 113 media professionals—including 108 Palestinians, three Lebanese, and two Israelis—have been killed during the war, “making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.”

CPJ has condemned what it called an “apparent pattern of targeting journalists and their families,” noting cases in which media workers were killed while wearing press insignia and after being threatened by Israeli officials.

Gaza’s Government Media Office said this week that Israeli forces have killed 166 journalists since October.

In May, the Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) filed a third complaint at the International Criminal Court alleging “war crimes against journalists in Gaza.”

RSF said it had “reasonable grounds for thinking that some of these journalists were deliberately killed and that the others were the victims of deliberate IDF attacks against civilians” and accused Israel of “an eradication of the Palestinian media.”

The following month, the Gaza Project—led by the Paris-based nonprofit Forbidden Storiespublished a report detailing a “chilling pattern” of Israeli forces apparently targeting journalists during the war.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have called for official investigations into Israeli killing of journalists including an October 13 attack that killed 37-year-old Lebanese Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and wounded half a dozen other journalists who were covering cross-border clashes between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon.

Dylan Collins, an American deputy editor at Al Jazeera English, was wounded while administering first aid to Christina Assi, an Agence-France Presse journalist who was seriously wounded in the attack. Assi-one of whose legs was amputated—recently carried the Olympic torch in Paris.

CPJ president Jodie Ginsburg recently told Al Jazeera that the killing of journalists by Israeli forces “appears to be part of a broader strategy that aims to stifle the information coming out of Gaza.”

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingUS Rights Group Urges Media to Condemn Israel’s Killing of Journalists in Gaza