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Three Blows Against Zionism in a Single Day

A court ruling in Australia, an election result in New York and a military setback for Israel, all coming on Tuesday this week, signaled a serious turn of events for Zionism and its supporters, writes Joe Lauria.

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, https://consortiumnews.com/2025/06/26/three-blows-against-zionism-in-a-single-day/

The impunity with which Zionism invades and bombs its neighbors and shuts up its critics in Western nations was thrown into question perhaps as never before on Tuesday as Zionism suffered a legal, a political and a military defeat all in one day.

A Military Defeat in the Morning

On Tuesday morning Washington time, President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Iran had agreed to a cessation of hostilities after an 11-day war that saw Israel seriously deplete its air defenses, undermine its economy and suffer the worst damage from enemy fire in memory.  

A war that Israel — and especially its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — had lusted after for three decades had finally been launched. Netanyahu at last found an American president willing to join him in unprovoked aggression against Iran to extend Israel’s regional dominance well beyond the Jordan River.

That would require the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and the overthrow of the Iranian government to be replaced by a puppet regime led by Israel and the United States.  

Instead, Israel had to cut short the operation despite U.S. involvement because it was not going to plan.  U.S. intelligence says the so-far merely civilian nuclear program was only set back a few months and the Iranian government has never been made more secure.

As it touts itself as the most invincible (and “moral”) army, the failure to achieve its goals in Iran and the physical damage it took from Iranian missile and drone attacks makes what just transpired a humiliating military defeat for Zionism. 

And though U.S. presidents have privately groused about Israeli leaders before, never has Israel been cursed out before in public by a president, as Trump did on Tuesday morning.

A Legal Defeat in the Evening

Then at 8:15 pm Tuesday, U.S. East Coast time (10:15 am Wednesday in Australia), a federal judge in Sydney found the courage to stand up to the organized thuggery of Zionist lobbies by ruling that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) had succumbed to intense pressure from Israel lobbyists to sack a radio presenter because she shared an instagram post from Human Rights Watch which accurately reported that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war.

That is the exact charge formally leveled in Netanyahu’s arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Australian judge ruled that the presenter, Antoinette Lattouf, was wrongly dismissed and that the ABC must pay her restitution.

Judge Daryl Rangiah said the ABC had “appease[d] … pro-Israel lobbyists” because Lattouf “held political opinions opposing the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.” Rangiah said that “the complaints [to the ABC] were an orchestrated campaign by pro-Israel lobbyists to have Ms Lattouf taken off air.”

ABC managing director Hugh Marks apologized to the public on air, saying, “Any undue influence or pressure on ABC management or any of its employees must always be guarded against.”

It was a major setback for a powerful Israel Lobby in a Western nation. These lobbies have been untouchable until now no matter what underhanded tactics they employ to create cover for genocide and wars of aggression by smearing and silencing legitimate critics of Israel. 

A Political Defeat in the Night

Still on Tuesday, at around 11 pm in New York City, a Muslim politician who has vowed to arrest Netanyahu based on the ICC warrant if he steps foot in the city while he is mayor, defeated a Democratic Party machine politician in the party’s primary election for mayor.

Despite being repeatedly smeared as an anti-semite, Zohran Mamdani has refused to renounce his strong support for Palestinians, including refusing to retract his labelling of Israel’s war on Gaza “genocide.”

Mamdani’s electoral victory has incensed Zionists everywhere, setting off gnashing of teeth. “NY Democrats have fully embraced Marxism, antisemitism, anti-capitalism, and sheer insanity,” said fanatical Zionist Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler called Mamdani “a radical, antisemitic socialist.”

The election result shows that a sizeable number of voters in the city with the largest population of Jews after Tel Aviv don’t care anymore about the taboos constructed and enforced against criticizing Israel.  Israel has their live-streamed genocide to thank for that. 

A Beginning, Not an End

Anyone of these events alone would signify a momentous turning of the tide against decades of built-up injustice committed by Israel and its lobby. The baseless smears of anti-semitism are losing their effect. The image of an all-powerful Israeli military is tarnished. 

June 24, 2025 may be seen as the day in which fear of Israel was overcome on a scale not seen before. There is a long road ahead filled with enormous obstacles, but this day could usher in an era in which Israel and its enablers are at last held accountable for their many crimes. 

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. 

June 28, 2025 Posted by | AUSTRALIA, Legal, politics, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Meet the Israeli fanatic running Ted Cruz’s office

Wyatt Reed·June 23, 2025, The Grayzone

After Ted Cruz’s humiliation by Tucker Carlson, attention has focused on a top staffer of the self-proclaimed “leading defender of Israel in the United States Senate.”

On June 18, former Fox host Tucker Carlson published a video which, though marketed as an interview, was more of a snuff film. Over the course of two hours, Carlson can be seen rhetorically disemboweling his debate opponent, US Senator Ted Cruz, on the politician’s determination to see the US attack Iran on Israel’s behalf.

While Cruz presents himself as a Christian Zionist moved by his own zealotry to support Israel, the politician’s Tel Aviv-driven policy line can also be traced back to his Senior Advisor for Policy and Communications, an Israeli-born Zionist lobbyist named Omri Ceren.

Before overseeing Cruz’s public relations, Ceren managed his foreign policy docket as his national security advisor. Prior to joining the Senator’s staff, Ceren served as the press director for The Israel Project, a Zionist pressure group which was forced to close down after being exposed as a de facto Israeli government front by Al Jazeera’s groundbreaking undercover investigation, The Lobby. Before that, Ceren cut his teeth lobbying for Ivory Coast dictator Laurent Gbagbo, who relied on Ceren as a registered foreign agent lending his marketing expertise to the embattled regime.

Ceren has consistently opposed a nuclear deal with Iran since at least 2015, when he declared that any agreement would simply ensure Tehran was “able to cheat with impunity.” At a talk hosted by the neocon Hudson Institute think tank in 2018, he suggested Washington should continue preaching about “freedom” and encouraging Iranian protesters to pursue regime change while simultaneously maintaining Trump’s ban on Iranians entering the US…………………………………………….

Since the attack, Cruz has posted 14 comments on Twitter/X. 12 of them consisted of breathless statements cheering the bombing or attacks on opponents of the war, whom he branded as “the death to America crowd.”… https://thegrayzone.com/2025/06/23/israeli-fanatic-ted-cruz-office/

June 27, 2025 Posted by | Religion and ethics, USA | Leave a comment

Ghoulish US Congresspersons applaud dastardly Israeli attack on Iran

17 June 2025 By Walt Zlotow  ,https://theaimn.net/ghoulish-us-congresspersons-applaud-dastardly-israeli-attack-on-iran/

No surprise upon hearing the news, supreme US warmonger Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) immediately chortled “Game on. Pray for Israel.” That would be like a US Senator saying “Game on, pray for Germany” after their September 1, 1939 attack on Poland. Just like Germany, Israel cited ‘self-defense’ for their criminal, senseless bombardment that could provoke a regional if not nuclear war.

Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez (R-FL) was a tad less ecstatic but bloodthirsty nonetheless charging: “The threat from Iran will only stop when the regime is destroyed. Anything less is just a temporary respite from the existential threat Iran poses to our allies and the free world.”

Even relatively moderate Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins offered up this huge whopper before hoping for an Israeli victory. “Our country too is at risk as Iran continues its development not only of fissile material but also of ballistic missiles.” The only risk this conflict has to America is destroying every decent, peaceful, humane value our country should be embracing.

The majority of congresspersons commenting, fully support the Israeli regime change attack on Iran just as they’ve been supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza for the past 20 months. Most are Republicans but one Democratic Senator, John Fetterman, offered this bit of heartless cruelty to the bombarded Iranians: “Our commitment to Israel must be absolute and I fully support this attack. Keep wiping out Iranian leadership and the nuclear personnel We must provide whatever is necessary – military, intelligence, weaponry – to fully back Israel in striking Iran.”

We can only surmise why these unhinged congresspersons support the most heinous conduct any governmental leader can inflict on a people posing no threat to America. But in so doing they disgrace their office, they disgrace America, they disgrace themselves.

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL

June 18, 2025 Posted by | Religion and ethics, USA | Leave a comment

The ‘unsustainable’ reason behind who can have nuclear weapons, and who can’t

there was no evidence of active weaponisation, or that Israel’s strike was “pre-emptive in the sense that Iran was clearly planning an attack on Israel that was imminent”.

“the most flagrant example of double standards that you could possibly imagine”.

Israel has said its attack on Iran on Friday was partially aimed at destroying its nuclear infrastructure. But it’s far from the only country to have developed its capacity in recent years.

By Alex Gallagher, 16 June 2025, https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-unsustainable-decision-on-who-gets-to-have-nuclear-weapons-and-who-doesnt/dpk5breh3

On Friday, Israel launched its largest attack on Iran in decades, with a wave of airstrikes that hit nuclear facilities, military sites and residential buildings in the capital, Tehran.

Iran responded with retaliatory strikes on Israel, and the two countries have continued trading missile fire for days.

Iran’s health ministry said 224 people have been killed by Israel’s attacks, while Israel said 13 have been killed by Iranian strikes. Hundreds of people have been wounded in both countries.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the goal of Friday’s strikes was partially to wipe out Iran’s nuclear program, calling the strikes “pre-emptive”.

The strikes caused significant damage to linked sites such as the Natanz nuclear facility and a uranium enrichment facility in Isfahan, and killed multiple nuclear scientists in addition to military officials and civilians.

Israel has long claimed Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, with Netanyahu calling it an “existential threat to Israel”.

Iran has consistently denied it is developing nuclear weapons, saying its uranium enrichment program is exclusively for peaceful purposes such as energy, and international assessments have found no evidence that Iran, over the past 20 years, has had an active nuclear weaponisation program.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly said there is an Islamic fatwa — a legal ruling — against the development of nuclear weapons, and that such development is prohibited under Islamic law.

Shortly before Israel’s strikes on Iran, the United Nations’ global nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), declared Iran was in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in 20 years.

The IAEA cited “many failures” since 2019 to uphold its obligations to provide the agency with “full and timely co-operation regarding undeclared nuclear material and activities”.

Earlier this month, the IAEA said Iran had enough uranium enriched to near-weapons grade to potentially make nine nuclear bombs.

In recent days, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Defence Minister Richard Marles and Opposition leader Sussan Ley have all described Iran’s nuclear program as a significant “threat” to international peace and security.

Tilman Ruff is an honorary principal fellow at The University of Melbourne and the co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and was a founding chair of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

He told SBS News while it’s “pretty clear that Iran was flirting with nuclear weapons” and had an early nuclear weapons program around 20 years ago, there was no evidence of active weaponisation, or that Israel’s strike was “pre-emptive in the sense that Iran was clearly planning an attack on Israel that was imminent”.

Israel has never formally confirmed or denied if it has nuclear weapons itself, long maintaining a policy of deliberate ambiguity.

It’s also never signed two key international agreements aimed at the non-proliferation and prohibition of nuclear weapons. These factors have contributed to the widely held perception that Israel owns nuclear weapons.

Ruff described Israel’s “extremely dangerous” attack on Friday as “the most flagrant example of double standards that you could possibly imagine”.

When it comes to countries developing nuclear capacities, Ruff said the “inherent ambiguity” of nuclear programs made it a far bigger issue than just Iran.

“Any country that’s determined to do so, that’s got either an enrichment plant or a nuclear reactor, can build a nuclear weapon,” he said.

“If you can produce uranium to run in reactors, then you’ve got everything you need to enrich it to weapons grade. And there are other countries with vast stocks much larger than Iran’s of weapons-usable material.

“There are many other countries who have been flirting with having nuclear facilities and the capacity to produce fissile material quickly to shorten the path to a weapon, should they choose to do so.”

Which countries have nuclear weapons?

Eight countries have declared they have nuclear weapons: Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan and North Korea.

Russia and the US control the vast majority of these weapons, together possessing around 90 per cent of the 12,241 estimated warheads that exist globally, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

While Israel is also strongly believed to have nuclear weapons, including by SIPRI, it has long maintained a policy of deliberate ambiguity.

Ruff said there had been “very clear threats” of nuclear weapon use from Israeli government members.

Most recently, in November 2023, Israeli minister Amihai Eliyahu said a nuclear strike on Gaza would be “one way” of responding to Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel.

Some viewed Eliyahu’s comments as an implicit admission that Israel had nuclear capabilities.

The comments were disavowed by Israeli politicians, including a rebuke by Netanyahu.

SIPRI, in its annual assessment of armaments, disarmament and international security on Monday, warned the world’s nuclear arsenals were being enlarged.

SIPRI stated that the nine nuclear-armed states continued to modernise and upgrade their nuclear capabilities throughout 2024.

SIPRI’s Hans M Kristensen said: “The era of reductions in the number of nuclear weapons in the world, which had lasted since the end of the Cold War, is coming to an end.”

“Instead, we see a clear trend of growing nuclear arsenals, sharpened nuclear rhetoric and the abandonment of arms control agreements.”

What steps have been taken to limit nuclear weapons?

Multiple international agreements have aimed at curbing the spread of nuclear weapons with a view towards disarmament.

The United Nations-backed Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Weapons (NPT) came into effect in 1970, and included agreements from Russia, the US, the UK, China and France.

Those states agreed to pursue disarmament in exchange for the rest of the treaty’s signatories agreeing never to acquire nuclear weapons.

The treaty has overwhelming support, with 191 states being party to it, including Iran.

Israel is one of the few countries — along with India, Pakistan, North Korea and South Sudan — to not have signed on, due to its policy of deliberate ambiguity.

Ruff said a shortcoming of the treaty was that, while it contained a detailed regime regarding non-proliferation by states that didn’t already have nuclear weapons, there were no clear details or timeframe for other countries to implement disarmament.

June 17, 2025 Posted by | Iran, Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Greta Thunberg on Gaza: Why we joined the Freedom Flotilla | Talk to Al Jazeera

June 9, 2025 Posted by | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Greta Thunberg Speaks from Aid Ship Heading to Gaza Despite Israeli Threats: It’s My Moral Obligation

SCHEERPOST, June 5, 2025 By DemocracyNow!

As Gaza faces over three months of Israeli blockade, a group of 12 activists is sailing to Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid. The Madleen ship was launched by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and initially planned to sail from Malta last month, but the group’s ship was damaged in a drone attack. The new mission includes the renowned Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who speaks with Democracy Now! live from the Madleen. “We deem the risk of silence and the risk of inaction to be so much more deadly than this mission,” says Thunberg.

Transcript…………………………..

GRETA THUNBERG: “A month after our latest attempt to go on with this mission, the boat was bombed twice. All evidence suggests Israel. And we are doing this because we have to keep our promise to the Palestinians to do everything in our power to protest against the genocide and to try to open up a humanitarian corridor.“………………………………………………..

….  I happen to have a platform for some reason, and then it is my moral obligation to use that platform. And if my presence on this boat can make a difference, if that can show in any way that the world has not forgotten about Palestine, and to try once again to attempt to break the siege and open up a humanitarian corridor and deliver the extremely needed humanitarian aid, then that is a risk I am willing to take.

And it’s something that we just simply have to do. We cannot just sit, sit around and do nothing and watch this like live-streamed genocide unfold in front of our very eyes. So we are doing this because we are human beings who care about justice. And when our complicit governments fail to step up, it falls on us, unfortunately, to do so.

………………………………. My message is that right now international law is failing us. International institutions, our governments are failing us. Media, our companies are all failing us. Or “failing us” is a diplomatic way of saying that our system seems to be designed in a way that is built upon exploitation and oppression of people. And so, there’s no one to turn to. There’s no one we can turn to to rescue the situation, but it falls on us to step up, to continue flooding the streets, to continue organizing, boycotting, to speak up on all platforms to try to send a clear message that we will not stand for what is happening right now.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/05/greta-thunberg-speaks-from-aid-ship-heading-to-gaza-despite-israeli-threats-its-my-moral-obligation/

June 7, 2025 Posted by | Gaza, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

This Is Israel

Caitlin Johnstone, Jun 04, 2025

This is Israel. This is what the Zionist project looks like. The dead kids. The blown-out hospitals. The desperate, starving civilians. This is it.

There is no alternate version of Israel where these things are not happening. The liberal Zionist vision of a two-state solution and a just and peaceful Israel exists solely in the imaginations of the people who envision it. Nothing like it has ever existed. Everything about the modern state of Israel is unyieldingly hostile to that vision.

You either support the existence of the Israel you see before you, or you support the end of the apartheid Zionist entity. There is no hidden third option. There are no other positions on the menu. To pretend otherwise is to live in a fantasy land.

You either want to burn children alive, or you don’t. You either want to deliberately starve civilians, or you don’t. You either want to bomb hospitals, or you don’t. You either want to deliberately assassinate Palestinian journalists while forbidding foreign journalists entry into Gaza, or you don’t. You either want to deliberately massacre civilians and systematically destroy civilian infrastructure in order to force the removal of Palestinians from a Palestinian territory, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you must oppose the state of Israel.

That’s Israel, the state. Not just Netanyahu. Not just extremist settlers. Not just “far right elements within the Israeli government”. Israel itself. Because everything we are seeing Israel do is the result of everything Israel is as a state.

Everything Israel is doing is the result of everything it has always been. As soon as the west decided to drop a settler-colonialist state on top of a pre-existing civilization wherein the new immigrants would receive preferential treatment over the indigenous inhabitants who were already living there, it became inevitable that Israel would wind up in the condition it’s in today.

Because there was no way to uphold that status quo without mass displacement and nonstop tyranny, violence and abuse. There was no way to set up a tiered society where one tier is placed above the other without indoctrinating the public to accept that apartheid system by systematically dehumanizing the members of the disempowered group.

Set up a status quo of dehumanizing a group of people and manufacturing consent for violence and abuse against them, and you will inevitably wind up with a far right apartheid state which is committing genocide, as surely as dropping a stone off a building will result in a stone falling to the ground.

What we are seeing in Gaza today was baked into the state of Israel ever since its inception.

All those dead kids on your social media feed are the fruit of a tree whose seed was planted after the second world war. That tree has been bearing more and more fruit, and it will continue to for as long as it remains standing. Because that’s just the kind of tree it is. The only kind of tree it ever could have been.

Saying “I support Israel but I don’t support the actions of Netanyahu in Gaza” is like saying “I like this apple tree but only when it sprouts coconuts instead of apples.” That is not the kind of tree it is. The apple tree will only produce apples, and the genocide tree will only produce genocide.

Israel’s supporters avoid confronting obvious truths like these. Support for Israel depends on mass-scale psychological compartmentalization. Everything about it revolves around avoiding unpleasant truths instead of deeply and viscerally reckoning with them.

Averting the eyes from the video footage of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. Averting the eyes from the contradictions between the values they purport to hold and everything Israel is as a state. Averting the eyes from the mountains upon mountains of evidence staring us all in the face. That’s the only way support for Israel is able to continue.

In order to become a truth-driven species, we need to stop hiding from uncomfortable truths. And one of our favorite hiding places for uncomfortable truths at this point in history is the modern state of Israel, and the western empire’s support for it.

June 5, 2025 Posted by | Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Poll: 82% of Israelis want to expel Palestinians from Gaza; 47% want to kill every man, woman, child

A poll found that 82% of full citizens of Israel want to expel Palestinians from Gaza. 47% want to kill every single man, woman, and child in Gaza. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote that Israel is waging a “war of extermination: the indiscriminate, unrestrained, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians”.

By Ben Norton, https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/05/30/poll-israelis-expel-palestinians-gaza-genocide/

Support for genocide, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing is widespread in Israel.

Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert admitted that his country is waging a “war of extermination: the indiscriminate, unrestrained, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians”.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of Israelis want to expel Palestinians from Gaza, and roughly half want to kill every single man, woman, and child in the besieged strip.

This is according to a poll that was published by the major Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

It found that 82% of Israelis want to expel Gazans, and 47% support killing all Palestinians in Gaza.

The more religious an Israeli is, the more likely they are to support genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The survey was conducted in March by Israeli scholar Tamir Sorek, a professor at Pennsylvania State University. He worked with the Israeli polling firm Geocartography Knowledge Group.

Most Israelis want to expel Palestinian citizens

Roughly 21% of citizens of Israel are Palestinians, although they are not considered to be fully Israeli. They are third-class citizens, and are denied equal treatment by the Israeli regime.

“Israel is not a state of all its citizens”, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared with pride in 2019.

“According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it”, Netanyahu stressed, making it clear that Palestinians are not truly considered to be Israelis.

The March 2025 poll commissioned by Pennsylvania State University found that 56% of Jewish Israelis — who are the only ones considered to be true, full citizens — want to expel all Palestinian citizens. This includes 66% of Israelis under the age 40.

The younger an Israeli is, the more likely they are to be a far-right extremist, the survey showed.

How the political systems of Israel and the USA promote far-right extremism

Professor Tamir Sorek, the Israeli scholar who conducted the poll, noted that some prominent religious leaders in Israel have advocated for the mass murder of Palestinian civilians.

As an example, Sorek cited Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, an influential Israeli settler leader in the West Bank, which according to international law is Palestinian territory that has been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967.

Ginsburgh, who wants to eliminate Palestinians and establish a theocratic monarchy in Israel, is also an American. He was born and raised in the United States, and did not move to Israel until he was in his 20s.

Sorek wrote that the attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 “only unleashed demons that had been nurtured for decades in the media and the legal and educational systems”.

In Haaretz, Sorek wrote (emphasis added):

Zionism, besides being a national movement, is also a movement of immigrant-settlers, seeking to displace the local population. Settler-immigrant societies always encounter indiscriminate violent resistance from indigenous groups. The desire for absolute and permanent security can lead to an aspiration to eliminate the resisting population. Therefore, virtually every settlement project has the potential for ethnic cleansing and genocide, as indeed happened in North America in the 17th through 19th centuries or in Namibia in the early 1900s.

Sorek warned in another article in April that, “In Israel, calls for genocide have migrated from the margins to the mainstream”.

A clear example of how fascism has become mainstream in Israel is the country’s extreme-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the government’s powerful security cabinet.

Smotrich described himself as a “fascist homophobe”. The top Israeli official has called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza, and he argued it would be “justified and moral” to starve to death all 2.1 million Palestinians in the strip.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says Israel is waging a “war of extermination” in Gaza

Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has accused his country of committing war crimes and waging a “war of extermination” in Gaza.

Olmert led the Israeli regime from 2006 to 2009. He was previously a decades-long member of Netanyahu’s right-wing political party, Likud.

He made these frank admissions in a Hebrew-language article in Haaretz in May. (The following quotes are from Google Translate.)

“What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: the indiscriminate, unrestrained, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians”, Olmert stated.

He made it clear that this is the “result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, viciously, maliciously, recklessly”.

Olmert explained that, in 2023 and 2024, he denied that the Israeli regime was intentionally committing war crimes, but he now realizes that he was wrong.

“There are too many cases of brutal shooting of civilians, of destruction of property and homes”, the former Israeli prime minister said. “Looting of property, thefts from homes, which in many cases IDF soldiers have also taken pride in and published in personal posts. We are committing war crimes”.

Olmert stated in no uncertain terms that Israel is using hunger as a weapons: “Yes, we are depriving the residents of Gaza of food, medicine, and minimal means of subsistence as part of a declared policy”.

He referred to the Israeli regime as a “gang of criminals”, and wrote that “the ministers of the Israeli government, led by the head of the gang, Netanyahu, are actually adopting, without forethought, without hesitation, a policy of starvation and humanitarian pressure whose outcome could be catastrophic”.

Israel officially calls its war in Gaza “Operation Gideon’s Chariots”. Olmert said this is an “illegitimate military campaign”, in which Israeli soldiers have gone on a “rampage”, and have turned Gaza into a “humanitarian disaster zone”.

The army is acting “recklessly, carelessly, and excessively aggressively”, he added.

The large number of Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza is “unreasonable, unjustifiable, unacceptable”, he wrote.

Olmert also admitted that Israelis “massacre Palestinian civilians in the West Bank as well”, and “commit heinous crimes every day in the West Bank”.

In an interview with ABC News, the former Israeli prime minister acknowledged, “We have destroyed Gaza”.

June 3, 2025 Posted by | Israel, Reference, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Pope Leo XIV Renews Call for Gaza Ceasefire, Laments Israeli Killing of Palestinian Children

by Dave DeCamp May 28, 2025 , https://news.antiwar.com/2025/05/28/pope-leo-xiv-renews-call-for-gaza-ceasefire-laments-israeli-killing-of-palestinian-children/

On Wednesday, Pope Leo XIV renewed his call for a ceasefire in Gaza and lamented the death of Palestinian children, who have been killed by Israeli forces in staggering numbers.

“In the Gaza Strip, the intense cries are reaching Heaven more and more from mothers and fathers who hold tightly to the bodies of their dead children,” Leo said during his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.

His comments came about a week after Gaza’s Health Ministry published a list of 16,506 children killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 7, 2023. The list includes 917 babies who didn’t make it to their first birthdays.

Leo, the first US-born pontiff, also noted the forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, saying they are “constantly forced to move in search of some food and safer shelter from the bombardment.”

“To those responsible, I renew my appeal. Stop the fighting, liberate all the hostages, and completely respect humanitarian law,” he added.

The pope also renewed his call for peace in Ukraine, saying that his thoughts often turn to “the Ukrainian people affected by new serious attacks against civilians and infrastructure.”

Leo said he reiterated his “appeal to stop the war and to support every initiative of dialogue and peace” and invited Catholics to join “in prayer for peace in Ukraine and wherever there is suffering because of war.”

Since being elected on May 8, Leo has repeatedly called for peace in Gaza, Ukraine, and other conflict zones around the world, and has put a focus on the issue of war.

“War is never inevitable. Weapons can and must fall silent, for they never solve problems but only intensify them,” the pontiff wrote on X on May 14. “Those who sow peace will endure throughout history, not those who reap victims. Others are not enemies to hate but human beings with whom to speak.”

May 31, 2025 Posted by | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Sorry If This Is Antisemitic But I Think It’s Wrong To Burn Children Alive

Israel has done more to promote hatred toward Jews in the last year and a half than Stormfront has in its entire existence. No white supremacist propaganda will ever be as effective at spreading hatred against Jews as openly mass murdering children under a Star of David flag.

Caitlin Johnstone, May 28, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/sorry-if-this-is-antisemitic-but?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=164612152&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Israel is burning children alive in Gaza. And call me an antisemitic Jew-hating Nazi terrorist lover if you must, but I happen to believe that’s wrong.

❖

Now that it’s been made clear that Israel’s goal in Gaza is the complete ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians, Israel apologists have been shifting from bleating about hostages and Hamas to arguing that ethnic cleansing is actually fine and good. Which makes sense; that’s really the only argument they can make at this point.

❖

Never forget that the US Congress gave Netanyahu dozens of standing ovations during a single speech while he was in the middle of perpetrating history’s first live-streamed genocide. This is who they are. It will always be who they are.

Israel has done more to promote hatred toward Jews in the last year and a half than Stormfront has in its entire existence. No white supremacist propaganda will ever be as effective at spreading hatred against Jews as openly mass murdering children under a Star of David flag.

❖

Support for Israel used to be the overwhelmingly dominant opinion in the western world. Luckily that’s changing, but the fact that this was the case until Israel exposed itself shows you really can’t just go along with majority opinion on any issue. You need to think for yourself.

Ignore what the crowd says. Ignore people who scream at you for disagreeing with their position. Look at the raw facts as free from your own cognitive biases as you are able, and have the courage to stand on your own if necessary.

❖

Gaza is such an easy moral issue to get right that there’s no way anyone who gets it wrong isn’t a shitty person in other areas of their life as well. I feel sorry for anyone who has interpersonal relationships with Israel supporters, because they’d suck to be around.

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World Food Programme director Cindy McCain is saying that she’s seen no evidence of Hamas stealing aid entering Gaza. Israel’s one and only argument for continuing to block aid to Gaza is being publicly debunked by a member of one of the most pro-Israel families in US politics.

The US has reportedly delivered some 90,000 tons of weapons to Israel since October 2023.

I mostly focus on the Gaza genocide these days, but sometimes figures like this make me zoom out a few clicks and think about how bat shit insane our civilization is as a whole. Just think how much good we could do in the world if we weren’t pouring resources into evil shit like this.

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Murdoch-owned publication The Australian came after me the other day for tweeting “Two Israeli embassy staff getting shot in Washington DC is less newsworthy than tens of thousands of Palestinians being killed in Israel’s genocidal land grab. It is less important. It deserves less attention. It is not the main story. Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the main story.”

They called me a “journalist” in scare quotes, which I guess is supposed to be an insult, but coming from the Murdoch press it can only be seen as a compliment.

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According to the official western narrative, Americans becoming violently radicalized by a US-backed genocide is a bigger issue than the US-backed genocide.

According to the official narrative, university protests against a transparent ethnic cleansing operation are a greater concern than the transparent ethnic cleansing operation.

According to the official narrative, western Zionist Jews feeling emotionally upset about opposition to a modern-day holocaust is a more urgent problem than a modern-day holocaust.

All of our institutions are backwards and evil. Our media. Our politics. Our education system. Our manufacturers of mainstream culture. This should be clear to everyone by now.

Every historical evil we were taught never to repeat is being repeated by our own rulers.

Everything we were taught to fear about the countries that the western empire hates is true of the western empire.

Every dark future we were warned about in dystopian fiction is true of the dystopia we are living in presently.

We live in a nightmare of a civilization, under an empire that is fueled by human blood. The closer you examine it, the uglier it gets.

This cannot be allowed to continue. It must not be allowed to continue.

The empire must fall.

May 30, 2025 Posted by | Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

The World Cannot Know True Peace Until We Have Reckoned With What We Did To Gaza

Caitlin Johnstone, May 21, 2025

I was listening to a young writer describe an idea he’d had that he was so excited about he couldn’t sleep the night before, and I remembered how before Gaza I used to get excited about writing stuff. I haven’t felt that feeling since 2023.

I’m not complaining or feeling sorry for myself, I’m just remarking on how incredibly bleak and dark the world has been during this terrible time. It would be weird and unhealthy if I was enjoying my job here this past year and a half. These things aren’t supposed to feel good. Not if you’re really looking at them and being sincere and honest with yourself about what you are seeing.

It’s been so ugly and so unsettling this whole time. There’s not really any way to reframe all this horror and make it okay. All you can do is work on yourself to make sure you have enough inner spaciousness to accommodate the bad feelings and feel them all the way through until they’ve had their say. Let in the despair. The grief. The rage. The pain. Let it move all the way through your system without resisting and then get up and write the next thing.

That’s what writing is for me now. It’s never anything I am excited to share or am lit up with inspiration about. If anything it’s more like “Okay, here you go, awful sorry I’ve got to show this to you, folks.” It’s just staring into the darkness and the blood and the gore and the anguished faces and writing out what I see, day after day.

Nothing about it is pleasant or rewarding. It’s just what you do when there’s a live-streamed genocide happening right in front of you with the backing of your own society. Everything about it sucks, and there’s no way to make it not suck, but you do what needs to be done, like you would if it were your own family out there in the rubble.

This genocide has changed me forever. It has changed a lot of people forever. We will never be the same. The world will never be the same. No matter what happens or how this nightmare ends, things are never again going back to the way they were.

And they shouldn’t. The Gaza holocaust is the product of the way the world was before it happened. Our society birthed it into existence, and now it’s staring us all right in the face. This is who we are. This is the fruit of the tree of what western civilization has been up until this point.

Now it’s just a matter of doing everything we can to make sure the genocide ends, and that the world learns the right lessons from it. This is as worthy a cause as anyone could take up in this life.

I still have hope that we can have a healthy world. I still have hope that writing about what’s happening can be enjoyable again one day. But these things exist on the other side of some very hard and confronting work in the years to come. There’s just no getting around it. The world cannot have peace and happiness until we have fully reckoned with what we did to Gaza.

May 22, 2025 Posted by | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Chris Hedges: The New Dark Age

Gaza puts to rest the lie of human progress, the myth that we are evolving morally. Only the tools change. Where once we clubbed victims to death, or chopped them to pieces with broadswords, today we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee camps, spray families with bullets from militarized drones or pulverize them with tank shells, heavy artillery and missiles. 

Such a Bright Future – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges ScheerPost, May 18, 2025, https://scheerpost.com/2025/05/18/chris-hedges-the-new-dark-age/

CAIRO, Egypt — It is 200 miles from where I am in Cairo to the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Parked in the arid sands in the northern Sinai of Egypt are 2,000 trucks filled with sacks of flour, water tanks, canned food, medical supplies, tarps and fuel. The trucks idle under the scorching sun with temperatures climbing into the high 90s. 

A few miles away in Gaza, dozens of men, women and children, living in crude tents or damaged buildings amid the rubble, are being butchered daily from bullets, bombs, missile strikes, tank shells, infectious diseases and that most ancient weapon of siege warfare — starvation. One in five people are facing starvation after nearly three months of Israel’s blockade of food and humanitarian aid.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has launched a new offensive that is killing upwards of 100 people a day, has declared that nothing will impede this final assault, named Operation Gideon’s Chariots. 

There will be “no way,” Israel will stop the war, he announced, even if the remaining Israeli hostages are returned. Israel is “destroying more and more houses” in Gaza. The Palestinians “have nowhere to return.”

“[The] only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip,” he told lawmakers at a leaked closed-door meeting. “But our main problem is finding countries to take them in.”

The nine-mile border between Egypt and Gaza has become the dividing line between the Global South and the Global North, the demarcation between a world of savage industrial violence and the desperate struggle by those cast aside by the wealthiest nations. It marks the end of a world where humanitarian law, conventions that protect civilians or the most basic and fundamental rights matter. It ushers in a Hobbesian nightmare where the strong crucify the weak, where no atrocity, including genocide, is precluded, where the white race in the Global North reverts to the unrestrained, atavistic savagery and domination that defines colonialism and our centuries long history of pillage and exploitation. We are tumbling backwards in time to our origins, origins that never left us, but origins that were masked by empty promises of democracy, justice and human rights. 

The Nazis are the convenient scapegoats for our shared European and American heritage of mass slaughter, as if the genocides we carried out in the Americas, Africa and India did not take place, unimportant footnotes in our collective history.

In fact, genocide is the currency of Western domination.  

Between 1490 and 1890, European colonization, including acts of genocide, was responsible for killing as many as 100 million indigenous people, according to the historian David E. Stannard. Since 1950 there have been nearly two dozen genocides, including those in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Rwanda.  

The genocide in Gaza is part of a pattern. It is the harbinger of genocides to come, especially as the climate breaks down and hundreds of millions are forced to flee to escape droughts, wildfires, flooding, declining crop yields, failed states and mass death. It is a blood-soaked message from us to the rest of the world: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you. 

Gaza puts to rest the lie of human progress, the myth that we are evolving morally. Only the tools change. Where once we clubbed victims to death, or chopped them to pieces with broadswords, today we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee camps, spray families with bullets from militarized drones or pulverize them with tank shells, heavy artillery and missiles. 

The 19th century socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, dismissed the belief central to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality. He warned that this absurd positivism is perpetrated by oppressors to disempower the oppressed. 

“All atrocities of the victor, the long series of his attacks are coldly transformed into constant, inevitable evolution, like that of nature… But the sequence of human things is not inevitable like that of the universe. It can be changed at any moment.” Blanqui warned.

Scientific and technological advancement, rather than an example of progress, could “become a terrible weapon in the hands of Capital against Work and Thought.” 

“For humanity” Blanqui wrote, “is never stationary. It either advances or goes back. Its progressive march leads it to equality. Its regressive march goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.” Further, he wrote, “I am not amongst those who claim that progress can be taken for granted, that humanity cannot go backwards.” 

Human history is defined by long periods of cultural barrenness and brutal repression. The fall of the Roman Empire led to immiseration and repression throughout Europe during the Dark Ages, roughly from the sixth through the 13th century. There was a loss of technical knowledge, including how to build and maintain aqueducts. Cultural and intellectual impoverishment led to collective amnesia. The ideas of ancient scholars and artists were blotted out. There was no rebirth until the 14th century and the Renaissance, a development made possible largely by the cultural flourishing of Islam, which, through translating Aristotle into Arabic and other intellectual accomplishments, kept the wisdom of the past from disappearing. 

Blanqui knew history’s tragic reverses. He took part in a series of French revolts, including an attempted armed insurrection in May 1839, the 1848 uprising and the Paris Commune — a socialist uprising that controlled France’s capital from March 18 until May 28 in 1871. Workers in cities such as Marseilles and Lyon attempted, but failed, to organize similar communes before the Paris Commune was militarily crushed.

We are entering a new dark age. This dark age uses the modern tools of mass surveillance, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, drones, militarized police, the revoking of due process and civil liberties to inflict the arbitrary rule, incessant wars, insecurity, anarchy and terror that were the common denominators of the Dark Ages. 

To trust in the fairy tale of human progress to save us is to become passive before despotic power. Only resistance, defined by mass mobilization, by disrupting the exercise of power, especially against genocide, can save us. 

Campaigns of mass killing unleash the feral qualities that lie latent in all humans. The ordered society, with its laws, etiquette, police, prisons and regulations, all forms of coercion, keeps these latent qualities in check. Remove these impediments and humans become, as we see with the Israelis in Gaza, murderous, predatory animals, reveling in the intoxication of destruction, including of women and children. I wish this was conjecture. It is not. It is what I witnessed in every war I covered. Almost no one is immune.

The Belgian monarch King Leopold in the late 19th century occupied the Congo in the name of Western civilization and anti-slavery, but plundered the country, resulting in the death — by disease, starvation and murder — of some 10 million Congolese.

Joseph Conrad captured this dichotomy between who we are and who we say we are in his novel “Heart of Darkness” and his short story “An Outpost of Progress.”

In “An Outpost of Progress,” he tells the story of two European traders, Carlier and Kayerts, who are sent to the Congo. These traders claim to be in Africa to implant European civilization. The boredom, the stifling routine, and most importantly the lack of all outside constraints, turns the two men into beasts. They trade slaves for ivory. They fight over dwindling food and supplies. Kayerts finally murders his unarmed companion Carlier.

“They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals,” Conrad wrote of Kayerts and Carlier, “whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations — to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.”

The genocide in Gaza has imploded the subterfuges we use to fool ourselves and attempt to fool others. It mocks every virtue we claim to uphold, including the right of freedom of expression. It is a testament to our hypocrisy, cruelty and racism. We cannot, having provided billions of dollars in weapons and persecuted those who decry the genocide, make moral claims anymore that will be taken seriously. Our language, from now on, will be the language of violence, the language of genocide, the monstrous howling of the new dark age, one where absolute power, unchecked greed and unmitigated savagery stalks the earth.

May 19, 2025 Posted by | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Never, Ever Let Anyone Forget What They Did To Gaza

Caitlin Johnstone, 16 May 25, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/never-ever-let-anyone-forget-what?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=163621431&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

I will never forget the Gaza holocaust. I will never let anyone else forget about the Gaza holocaust.

No matter what happens or how this thing turns out, I will never let anyone my voice touches forget that our rulers did the most evil things imaginable right in front of us and lied to us about it the entire time.

I will never stop doing everything I can with my own small platform to help ensure that the perpetrators of this mass atrocity are brought to justice.

I will never stop doing everything I can to help bring down the western empire and to help free Palestine from the Zionist entity.

I will never forget those shaking children. Those tiny shredded bodies. Those starved, skeletal forms. The explosions followed by screams. The atrocities followed by western media silence.

I will never forget, and I will never forgive. I will never forgive our leaders. I will never forgive the western press. I will never forgive Israel. I will never forgive the mainstream US political parties. I will always want for them exactly what they wanted for the Palestinians.

No matter what happens or what they do in the future, they will always be the people who did this to Gaza. They will always be the people who inflicted this nightmare upon our species. That will always be the most significant thing about them. It will always be the single most defining characteristic about who they are as human beings.

And the same is true of all the ordinary members of the public who continued to stand with Israel long after evidence of its criminality became undeniable. They are genocide supporters, first and foremost.

If you stood on the side of Israel during the Gaza holocaust, then that is the most important thing about you, and it always will be. It doesn’t matter if you go to church on Sunday. It doesn’t matter if you are nice to your children and your pets. It doesn’t matter if you give money to charity, support local farmers, or drive an electric vehicle. The thing that matters most about you as a person is that you supported history’s first live-streamed genocide, and it always will be the thing that matters most about you.

I will keep bringing this up. Year after year. Decade after decade. I will keep rubbing everyone’s face in it. I will never tire of doing so. I will always do my part to remind the world who these people are, and what they did to Gaza.

May 17, 2025 Posted by | Gaza, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Pope Leo Breaks Silence on Ukraine, Gaza, and Middle East Violence | DRM News | AK1B

May 16, 2025 Posted by | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

The pro-nuclear drive and Zionism are inter-twined.

https://theaimn.net/the-pro-nuclear-drive-and-zionism-are-inter-twined/ 10 May 25

For many years, I’ve been running websites devoted to the nuclear-free movement. People have asked me why, over the past two years, I’ve been including news about Israel and Gaza.

What on earth do Israel and Gaza have to do with the pro-nuclear cause?

Well, unfortunately, quite a lot.

Here’s a report from 2015 –

“While everyone believes that the Israelis possess a sizable nuclear arsenal, no one really knows how big that arsenal is.  In 2008, President Jimmy Carter estimated that Israel probably had a minimum of 150 weapons in stock ready to use if the most dire circumstances warrant.  Six years later, the former President revised that estimate and put the figure in the 300 range, which—based on Carter’s calculations—would mean that Israel doubled its arsenal from the 2008-2014 time-period. “

Of course the Israeli government “does not confirm or deny” that they’ve got nuclear weapons, and the cowardly governments that support Israel similarly do not officially confirm it. And of course Israel has not signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), or participated in any kind of weapons control negotiations.

In Sep 22, 2023 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Iran at the United Nations of a “nuclear threat” in what his office quickly walked back as a slip of the tongue. In July 2024  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged in a scathing speech to Congress on Wednesday to achieve “total victory” against Hamas.

The Zionist philosophy means that the Jews are God’s chosen people. And the Islamics certainly are not. The attitude of Israel towards the Palestinians is that they are not the same kind of human being as the Jews are. Indeed, it’s OK to starve Gazan children to death – after all, they are some kind of untermenchen.

Well, the genocide of Gazans is being achieved without any need for nuclear weapons. But what about the other Islamics? There’s Yemen, and there’s Iran. Netanyahu believes that Iran poses an existential threat to the Zionist state, and could make a nuclear weapon in a short period of time, making Israel and even the US unable to defeat or contain it.

To what lengths might Netanyahu go, to prevent that? Bomb Iran’s nuclear sites?

And would Donald Trump, an enthusiastic fan of Israel, support that option.

Here’s Trump, seven months ago, urging Israel to make such a strike,

While I’ve been thinking about this for some time, I was prompted to write about it now, after reading an article by Lucy Hamilton in Australian Independent Media, about the close involvement of Australian pro-nuclear front groups with the Zionist movement.

It’s not only Israel that we must worry about, in Australia, and presumably world-wide. If we aim to be nuclear-free, we are up against a lobby determined to have nuclear-weapons superiority, and the Zionist movement is right up there in that determination.

May 10, 2025 Posted by | Christina's notes, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

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