https://twitter.com/Restitutor_/status/1701994591728066983?s=20
Showing posts with label Genocide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Genocide. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
URGENT - SOS FROM THE OLDEST TRIBAL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD.
World Doctors Alliance, [11/24/2021 1:38 AM]
URGENT - SOS FROM THE OLDEST TRIBAL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD.
Please I ask us all to make the report to the human rights commission for the tribal people of Australia. This is a serious humanitarian crisis now. We must act. PLEASE SHARE THIS VIDEO. I IMPLORE YOU 🙏
~
REALNewsNT Published November 24, 2021
125 rumbles
Rumble — Sovereign Tribal people calling out for international intervention and exposing what is happening in the communities.
[Listen to the end. The last man to speak is the most articulate and calls it all out! Criminal Genocide -the oldest living culture with all 7 DNA strains - the Original tribal people of the planet...being wiped out! A plea for INTERVENTION and HELP! ]
Monday, June 15, 2020
Saturday, October 29, 2016
How To Talk About #NoDAPL: A Native Perspective ~ KELLY HAYES
How To Talk About #NoDAPL:
A Native Perspective
Water Protectors gather after a day of prayer and direct action. (Photo: Desiree Kane)
This piece is very personal because, as an Indigenous woman, my analysis is very personal, as is the analysis that my friends on the frontlines have shared with me. We obviously can’t speak for everyone involved, as Native beliefs and perspectives are as diverse as the convictions of any people. But as my friends hold strong on the frontlines of Standing Rock, and I watch, transfixed with both pride and worry, we feel the need to say a few things.
I’ve been in and out of communication with my friends at Standing Rock all day. As you might imagine, as much as they don’t want me to worry, it’s pretty hard for them to stay in touch. I asked if there was anything they wanted me to convey on social media, as most of them are maintaining a very limited presence on such platforms. The following is my best effort to summarize what they had to say, and to chime in with a few corresponding thoughts of my own.
It is crucial that people recognize that Standing Rock is part of an ongoing struggle against colonial violence. #NoDAPL is a front of struggle in a long-erased war against Native peoples — a war that has been active since first contact, and waged without interruption. Our efforts to survive the conditions of this anti-Native society have gone largely unnoticed because white supremacy is the law of the land, and because we, as Native people, have been pushed beyond the limits of public consciousness.
The fact that we are more likely to be killed by law enforcement than
any other group speaks to the fact that Native erasure is ubiquitous,
both culturally and literally, but pushed from public view. Our
struggles intersect with numerous others, but are perpetrated with
different motives and intentions. Anti-Blackness, for example, is a
performative enforcement of structural power, whereas the violence
against us is a matter of pragmatism. The struggle at Standing Rock is
an effort to prevent the construction of a deadly, destructive
mechanism, created by greed-driven people with no regard for our lives.
It has always been this way. We die, and have died, for the sake of
expansion and white wealth, and for the maintenance of both.
The harms committed against us have long been relegated to the history books. This erasure has occurred for the sake of both white supremacy and US mythology, such as American exceptionalism. It has also been perpetuated to sustain the comfort of those who benefit from harms committed against us. Our struggles have been kept both out of sight and out of mind — easily forgotten by those who aren’t directly impacted.
It should be clear to everyone that we are not simply here in those rare moments when others bear witness.
To reiterate (what should be obvious): We are not simply here when you see us.
We have always been here, fighting for our lives, surviving colonization, and that reality is rarely acknowledged. Even people who believe in freedom frequently overlook our issues, as well as the intersections of their issues with our own. It matters that more of the world is bearing witness in this historic moment, but we feel the need to point out that the dialogue around #NoDAPL has become extremely climate oriented. Yes, there is an undeniable connectivity between this front of struggle and the larger fight to combat climate change. We fully recognize that all of humanity is at risk of extinction, whether they realize it or not. But intersectionality does not mean focusing exclusively on the intersections of our respective work.
It sometimes means taking a journey well outside the bounds of those intersections.
In discussing #NoDAPL, too few people have started from a place of naming that we have a right to defend our water and our lives, simply because we have a natural right to defend ourselves and our communities. When “climate justice”, in a very broad sense, becomes the center of conversation, our fronts of struggle are often reduced to a staging ground for the messaging of NGOs.
This is happening far too frequently in public discussion of #NoDAPL.
Yes, everyone should be talking about climate change, but you should also be talking about the fact that Native communities deserve to survive, because our lives are worth defending in their own right — not simply because “this affects us all.”
So when you talk about Standing Rock, please begin by acknowledging that this pipeline was redirected from an area where it was most likely to impact white people. And please remind people that our people are struggling to survive the violence of colonization on many fronts, and that people shouldn’t simply engage with or retweet such stories when they see a concrete connection to their own issues — or a jumping off point to discuss their own issues. Our friends, allies and accomplices should be fighting alongside us because they value our humanity and right to live, in addition to whatever else they believe in.
Every Native at Standing Rock — every Native on this continent — has survived the genocide of a hundred million of our people. That means that every Indigenous child born is a victory against colonialism, but we are all born into a fight for our very existence. We need that to be named and centered, which is a courtesy we are rarely afforded.
This message is not a condemnation. It’s an ask.
We are asking that you help ensure that dialogue around this issue begins with and centers a discussion of anti-Native violence and policies, no matter what other connections you might ultimately make, because those discussions simply don’t happen in this country. There obviously aren’t enough people talking about climate change, but there are even fewer people — and let’s be real, far fewer people — discussing the various forms of violence we are up against, and acting in solidarity with us. And while such discussions have always been deserved, we are living in a moment when Native Water Protectors and Water Warriors have more than earned both acknowledgement and solidarity.
So if you have been with us in this fight, we appreciate you, but we are reaching out, right now, in these brave days for our people, and asking that you keep the aforementioned truths front and center as you discuss this effort. This moment is, first and foremost, about Native liberation, self determination and Native survival. That needs to be centered and celebrated.
Thanks,
K and friends
The harms committed against us have long been relegated to the history books. This erasure has occurred for the sake of both white supremacy and US mythology, such as American exceptionalism. It has also been perpetuated to sustain the comfort of those who benefit from harms committed against us. Our struggles have been kept both out of sight and out of mind — easily forgotten by those who aren’t directly impacted.
It should be clear to everyone that we are not simply here in those rare moments when others bear witness.
To reiterate (what should be obvious): We are not simply here when you see us.
We have always been here, fighting for our lives, surviving colonization, and that reality is rarely acknowledged. Even people who believe in freedom frequently overlook our issues, as well as the intersections of their issues with our own. It matters that more of the world is bearing witness in this historic moment, but we feel the need to point out that the dialogue around #NoDAPL has become extremely climate oriented. Yes, there is an undeniable connectivity between this front of struggle and the larger fight to combat climate change. We fully recognize that all of humanity is at risk of extinction, whether they realize it or not. But intersectionality does not mean focusing exclusively on the intersections of our respective work.
It sometimes means taking a journey well outside the bounds of those intersections.
In discussing #NoDAPL, too few people have started from a place of naming that we have a right to defend our water and our lives, simply because we have a natural right to defend ourselves and our communities. When “climate justice”, in a very broad sense, becomes the center of conversation, our fronts of struggle are often reduced to a staging ground for the messaging of NGOs.
This is happening far too frequently in public discussion of #NoDAPL.
Yes, everyone should be talking about climate change, but you should also be talking about the fact that Native communities deserve to survive, because our lives are worth defending in their own right — not simply because “this affects us all.”
So when you talk about Standing Rock, please begin by acknowledging that this pipeline was redirected from an area where it was most likely to impact white people. And please remind people that our people are struggling to survive the violence of colonization on many fronts, and that people shouldn’t simply engage with or retweet such stories when they see a concrete connection to their own issues — or a jumping off point to discuss their own issues. Our friends, allies and accomplices should be fighting alongside us because they value our humanity and right to live, in addition to whatever else they believe in.
Every Native at Standing Rock — every Native on this continent — has survived the genocide of a hundred million of our people. That means that every Indigenous child born is a victory against colonialism, but we are all born into a fight for our very existence. We need that to be named and centered, which is a courtesy we are rarely afforded.
This message is not a condemnation. It’s an ask.
We are asking that you help ensure that dialogue around this issue begins with and centers a discussion of anti-Native violence and policies, no matter what other connections you might ultimately make, because those discussions simply don’t happen in this country. There obviously aren’t enough people talking about climate change, but there are even fewer people — and let’s be real, far fewer people — discussing the various forms of violence we are up against, and acting in solidarity with us. And while such discussions have always been deserved, we are living in a moment when Native Water Protectors and Water Warriors have more than earned both acknowledgement and solidarity.
So if you have been with us in this fight, we appreciate you, but we are reaching out, right now, in these brave days for our people, and asking that you keep the aforementioned truths front and center as you discuss this effort. This moment is, first and foremost, about Native liberation, self determination and Native survival. That needs to be centered and celebrated.
Thanks,
K and friends
Transformative Spaces
On creating liberation spaces and lifting up voices for change.
Monday, August 4, 2014
HYPKNOWYS: Benjamin Fulford - August 4, 2014: It is time to briefly summarize the recent history of the ongoing battle for the planet earth
Monday, August 4, 2014
HYPKNOWYS: Benjamin Fulford - August 4, 2014: It is time to briefly summarize the recent history of the ongoing battle for the planet earth
"As readers are aware, there has been a war raging over the process of
deciding what we as a species do in the future. Since the war is coming
to an end, it is a good time to look back and see who is fighting and
what the stakes are.
Essentially what we are seeing is a battle between the fascist forces who lost World War II and everybody else. The fascists, also known as the Nazis /Zionists or Nazionists are trying to establish a family controlled absolute Babylonian style world dictatorship known as the New World Order. Everybody else is trying to prevent that from happening.
It is hard to know where to draw a line and say the battle started here because as far as the Nazionists are concerned World War II never ended. It is well known now many were brought to the United States where they heavily infiltrated the intelligence apparatus. We also know much of the top Nazi leadership was part of the group of families that controlled the financial system after the war.
In case, one good time to start is 1994 because that is when the 50 year Bretton Woods mandate for the US, the UK and France to control the global financial system expired.
Looking back, 1994 was a year of great hope and optimism. The cold war had ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States, champion of democracy, human rights and capitalism, was the sole super-power.
However, instead of ushering in an era of world peace and prosperity, the United States acted like a violent rapist criminal who had just taken the world family hostage. First the US broke all the peace keeping rules set up after World War II to dismember Yugoslavia in order to steal its mineral resources. Then the former Soviet Union was plunged into poverty and despair as Zionist oligarchs looted its natural resources.
Behind the scenes, attempts were being made to force the families that owned the Federal Reserve Board to hand over their control of the world’s financial system to a more representative group.
This push was led by the Chinese royal families who had agreed a century earlier to finance, with their gold, a grand sociological experiment to create a world government.
There was a lawsuit brought against the families that own the Federal Reserve Board, i.e. the Bushes, the Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Morgans, the Warburgs, the Rothschilds etc. to hand back gold that was deposited with them in 1938. News reports from the time confirm that US warships did evacuate gold from Kuomintang China to keep it out of Japanese hands. The gold was traded for 60 year US government bonds and after the 60 years ended the gold was supposed to be handed back.
The Americans argued that Nixon gave to gold to communist China in the 1970’s so they were under no obligation to return it. The Fed families lost the lawsuit and were ordered to return the gold starting on September 12, 2001.
Instead the Feds gave the world the proverbial finger by blowing up the world trade center building, staging a fascist coup in the United States and declaring a never ending war on terrorism. This was followed by invasion, pillaging and mass murder in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There was also an attempt to kill most of the world’s population with racially specific bio-weapons such as SARS and bird flu. This was accompanied by an attempt to create mass starvation by paying Western farmers to grow fuel instead of food. So we can see the Fed families have already tried to murder most of humanity.
In their own twisted minds these families thought they would be “saving nature” and improving the human gene pool by eliminating “useless eaters.”
That is why the members of these Fed families, Richard Rockefeller, Richard Mellon Scaife, several Warbugs and others have begun dying recently. It is not clear if these deaths are accidental or otherwise but clearly there are a lot of victims of the Fed who want restitution.
There was a big faction in the Western secret elite that argued paying third world countries money to preserve their forests was a way to save nature without mass murder. This was the faction behind Al Gore and the pseudo-scientific global warming CO2 campaign.
They lost because the genocidal Nazis controlled the armed forces and global criminal gangs so they used threats of murder to steal the year 2000 election for George Bush Jr.
The Asian families fought back by withholding money from the United States. They also revived the non-aligned nations’ alliance and teamed up with the former Soviet bloc to form what is now the 190 nation BRICS alliance. They thus control 90% of the world’s population and 68% of its GDP.
What the Fed controlled G7 nations and their tiny group of allies still control are the world’s largest armed forces, the global illegal drug trade, most of the corporate mass media, the United Nations and the directorship of many of the world’s largest corporations. They also have a network of about 1 million enablers peppered throughout academia, the media, government agencies and most importantly, the financial system.
However, it looks like Germany is ready to break ranks with the Feds and if it does, France and most of Europe will follow. Change has already happened at a high level to the extent that the Queen of the Netherlands, the Kings of Belgium and Spain and the German Pope Maledict have resigned. There are clear signs of reform taking place in these countries under the new regimes. For example, Euros are now being used to pay for Russian gas despite a US Fed calls for a boycott.
In addition, the pentagon has turned against the Feds at least to the extent that they passively resist attempts to con them into wars in places like Syria, Iran and East Asia. The people of the United States are also on the verge of revolution against the Fed families and their Babylonian slave driver network based on secret societies and religious cults.
As Chairman Mao said, “all it takes is a spark to start a prairie fire.” What that spark will be remains to be seen but, the best hope for the people of the United States is that the middle ranks of the US military remove corrupt generals and then start mass arrests of everybody involved in the 911 attack on New York. This can be done within the framework of military law because there are provisions for removing traitors from the ranks, even at the highest level such as supreme commander.
The other thing the military must do is nationalize the Federal Reserve Board and start issuing government money to replace Fed debt slavery notes. This is mandated in the constitution of the Republic of the United States of America. Failing to do this is treason.
If the military does not move, there will be civil war in the United States with militias fighting against militarized police forces working for the Fed cabal. It is just a matter of time."
Source:
http://benjaminfulford.net/2014/08/04/it-is-time-to-briefly-summarize-the-recent-history-of-the-ongoing-battle-for-the-planet-earth/
Essentially what we are seeing is a battle between the fascist forces who lost World War II and everybody else. The fascists, also known as the Nazis /Zionists or Nazionists are trying to establish a family controlled absolute Babylonian style world dictatorship known as the New World Order. Everybody else is trying to prevent that from happening.
It is hard to know where to draw a line and say the battle started here because as far as the Nazionists are concerned World War II never ended. It is well known now many were brought to the United States where they heavily infiltrated the intelligence apparatus. We also know much of the top Nazi leadership was part of the group of families that controlled the financial system after the war.
In case, one good time to start is 1994 because that is when the 50 year Bretton Woods mandate for the US, the UK and France to control the global financial system expired.
Looking back, 1994 was a year of great hope and optimism. The cold war had ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States, champion of democracy, human rights and capitalism, was the sole super-power.
However, instead of ushering in an era of world peace and prosperity, the United States acted like a violent rapist criminal who had just taken the world family hostage. First the US broke all the peace keeping rules set up after World War II to dismember Yugoslavia in order to steal its mineral resources. Then the former Soviet Union was plunged into poverty and despair as Zionist oligarchs looted its natural resources.
Behind the scenes, attempts were being made to force the families that owned the Federal Reserve Board to hand over their control of the world’s financial system to a more representative group.
This push was led by the Chinese royal families who had agreed a century earlier to finance, with their gold, a grand sociological experiment to create a world government.
There was a lawsuit brought against the families that own the Federal Reserve Board, i.e. the Bushes, the Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Morgans, the Warburgs, the Rothschilds etc. to hand back gold that was deposited with them in 1938. News reports from the time confirm that US warships did evacuate gold from Kuomintang China to keep it out of Japanese hands. The gold was traded for 60 year US government bonds and after the 60 years ended the gold was supposed to be handed back.
The Americans argued that Nixon gave to gold to communist China in the 1970’s so they were under no obligation to return it. The Fed families lost the lawsuit and were ordered to return the gold starting on September 12, 2001.
Instead the Feds gave the world the proverbial finger by blowing up the world trade center building, staging a fascist coup in the United States and declaring a never ending war on terrorism. This was followed by invasion, pillaging and mass murder in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There was also an attempt to kill most of the world’s population with racially specific bio-weapons such as SARS and bird flu. This was accompanied by an attempt to create mass starvation by paying Western farmers to grow fuel instead of food. So we can see the Fed families have already tried to murder most of humanity.
In their own twisted minds these families thought they would be “saving nature” and improving the human gene pool by eliminating “useless eaters.”
That is why the members of these Fed families, Richard Rockefeller, Richard Mellon Scaife, several Warbugs and others have begun dying recently. It is not clear if these deaths are accidental or otherwise but clearly there are a lot of victims of the Fed who want restitution.
There was a big faction in the Western secret elite that argued paying third world countries money to preserve their forests was a way to save nature without mass murder. This was the faction behind Al Gore and the pseudo-scientific global warming CO2 campaign.
They lost because the genocidal Nazis controlled the armed forces and global criminal gangs so they used threats of murder to steal the year 2000 election for George Bush Jr.
The Asian families fought back by withholding money from the United States. They also revived the non-aligned nations’ alliance and teamed up with the former Soviet bloc to form what is now the 190 nation BRICS alliance. They thus control 90% of the world’s population and 68% of its GDP.
What the Fed controlled G7 nations and their tiny group of allies still control are the world’s largest armed forces, the global illegal drug trade, most of the corporate mass media, the United Nations and the directorship of many of the world’s largest corporations. They also have a network of about 1 million enablers peppered throughout academia, the media, government agencies and most importantly, the financial system.
However, it looks like Germany is ready to break ranks with the Feds and if it does, France and most of Europe will follow. Change has already happened at a high level to the extent that the Queen of the Netherlands, the Kings of Belgium and Spain and the German Pope Maledict have resigned. There are clear signs of reform taking place in these countries under the new regimes. For example, Euros are now being used to pay for Russian gas despite a US Fed calls for a boycott.
In addition, the pentagon has turned against the Feds at least to the extent that they passively resist attempts to con them into wars in places like Syria, Iran and East Asia. The people of the United States are also on the verge of revolution against the Fed families and their Babylonian slave driver network based on secret societies and religious cults.
As Chairman Mao said, “all it takes is a spark to start a prairie fire.” What that spark will be remains to be seen but, the best hope for the people of the United States is that the middle ranks of the US military remove corrupt generals and then start mass arrests of everybody involved in the 911 attack on New York. This can be done within the framework of military law because there are provisions for removing traitors from the ranks, even at the highest level such as supreme commander.
The other thing the military must do is nationalize the Federal Reserve Board and start issuing government money to replace Fed debt slavery notes. This is mandated in the constitution of the Republic of the United States of America. Failing to do this is treason.
If the military does not move, there will be civil war in the United States with militias fighting against militarized police forces working for the Fed cabal. It is just a matter of time."
Source:
http://benjaminfulford.net/2014/08/04/it-is-time-to-briefly-summarize-the-recent-history-of-the-ongoing-battle-for-the-planet-earth/
Sunday, July 20, 2014
The civilian death toll in Gaza is immoral and unacceptable — and it’s time to talk honestly about all of it
The civilian death toll in Gaza is immoral and unacceptable — and it’s time to talk honestly about all of it
Sat, July 19, 2014 - 10:50 PM
"Let us not be deceived – the Israeli massacre of innocent Palestinians, especially the precious children, is a crime against humanity! The rockets of Hamas indeed are morally wrong and politically ineffective......but these crimes pale in the face of the U.S. supported Israeli slaughters of innocent civilians." -Dr. Cornel West
WORDVIRUS: Jul18 by DJ Apollo:
The civilian death toll in Gaza is immoral and unacceptable — and it’s time to talk honestly about all of itCollective punishment or human shields? Israel’s military has no “moral superiority,” time for media to cover Gaza fairlyby Omar Baddar
How commonly is the alleged moral superiority of the Israeli military invoked? So commonly that if you type “the most moral army in the world” into Google, you’ll immediately get a bunch of articles discussing the Israeli “Defense” Forces. Just last week, Slate’s William Saletan argued that while Hamas fires rockets at civilians, Israel takes “pains” in its “exemplary” efforts to avoid harming Palestinian civilians. The New York Times’ Steven Erlanger didn’t “argue” that Israel takes major precautions to avoid harming civilians, he seemed to be taking it as a given when he wrote Gazans were anxious about airstrikes “no matter how carefully Israel tries to target them.”
Despite the fact that the Palestinians are an occupied, besieged and oppressed population that lacks the capability to defend itself against systemic and daily Israeli violence, Hamas’s insistence that Israeli civilians are legitimate targets is morally indefensible, and should be condemned by all people of conscience. But according to what evidence is Israel’s conduct better? And how can it possibly be better when Israel has advanced surveillance capability and laser-guided weaponry, but has still managed to kill more than 150 Palestinian civilians (including 40+ children) in Gaza, compared to just one Israeli death in this latest round of violence? Instead of taking Israel at its word, let’s look at the take of credible observers.
Human Rights Watch, on Israel’s Conduct
After conducting an investigation, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a report on Wednesday accusing Israel of carrying out “unlawful” strikes in Gaza, ones that “either did not attack a legitimate military target or attacked despite the likelihood of civilian casualties being disproportionate to the military gain.” It noted that “Such attacks committed deliberately or recklessly constitute war crimes.” HRW Middle East Director Sarah Leah Whitson also added that Israel’s actions raise “serious questions as to whether these attacks are intended to target civilians or wantonly destroy civilian property.”
The report also said that “Human Rights Watch has documented numerous serious violations of the laws of war by Israeli forces in the past decade, particularly indiscriminate attacks on civilians,” and criticized Israel’s preposterously inadequate efforts at “warning” civilians of impending strikes. Now, which part of all that fits with “exemplary” efforts at avoiding killing civilians? Still, some may buy into Israel’s allegation that Hamas’s use of human shields is what’s responsible for the high civilian death toll. Let’s look at the evidence.
Human Shields
While human rights organizations haven’t yet addressed “human shields” allegations in the ongoing round of Israel-Gaza violence, they did after the 2009 round when Israel killed at least 773 Palestinian civilians, compared to three Israeli civilian casualties (a ratio of 257:1), and used the same “human shields” argument to deflect responsibility for those deaths. When the dust settled, Amnesty International investigated the matter and concluded that there was “no evidence that [Palestinian] rockets were launched from residential houses or buildings while civilians were in these buildings.” More attention-worthy was the report’s note that, in the cases of [Israeli] precision missiles or tank shells which killed [Palestinian] civilians in their homes, no fighters were present in the houses that were struck and Amnesty International delegates found no indication that there had been any armed confrontations or other military activity in the immediate vicinity at the time of the attack.
Israel’s Use of Human Shields
By contrast, the same report found that “in several cases Israeli soldiers also used [Palestinian] civilians, including children, as ‘human shields’.” Going back in time just a little further to put this into context is important: when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the Israeli military had to stop using Palestinian civilians as human shields, the Israeli “defense” establishment objected to the ruling. The appeal against the ruling failed, and the practice remains technically illegal, but Israel implicitly encourages it to continue by offering an “inadequate … slap on the wrist,” as Human Rights Watch put it, to Israeli soldiers caught using this reprehensible tactic.
This reveals two important things: the first is the moral hypocrisy and chutzpah on display when Israel ignores its own use of human shields as it accuses its enemies of using them. The second is Israel’s self-contradicting logic: If Palestinian militants had such disregard for Palestinian civilian lives, why was the Israeli military so invested in maintaining the ability to use Palestinians as shields? The fact that the Israeli army wants to use Palestinian human shields actually proves that they believe Palestinian militants prefer not to endanger their own civilians.
When Intentions Are Clearer
There may be more discipline among Israeli leaders in how they talk about the war on Gaza this time, but that wasn’t the case in previous conflagrations. In the 2012 assault, Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai said the “goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages.” Gilad Sharon, son of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, said “we need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza.” And if you think that’s just rhetoric, consider that Amnesty International previously documented Israel had “flattened … busy neighborhoods” into “moonscapes.”
And it wasn’t just human rights organizations that were exposing Israeli war crimes in Gaza, but Israeli soldiers whose conscience could not bear to remain silent about the atrocities they had committed were also coming forward. And in the 2006 assault on Lebanon, one Israeli commander referred to the dropping of more than a million cluster bomblets over Lebanon like this: “What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs.” Is this the most moral army?
Imbalance of Power Shapes the Conflict
While the 2009 Amnesty International report found no evidence that Hamas used human shields, it did acknowledge the obvious reality that Hamas does operate in (and fire rockets from) residential areas, adding “although this would be difficult to avoid in the small and overcrowded Gaza Strip.” Beyond the size and overcrowding of Gaza, Hamas also has no real army which could confront Israel on a traditional battlefield. As Yousef Munayyer recently argued on MSNBC, “Palestinians would certainly prefer to have precision-guided missiles and F-16s, and the kind of defense establishment that an independent, sovereign state would have to defend itself.” But in the absence of such capabilities, any fighting militia would be forced to use guerilla tactics that involve operating in inhabited areas.
As Andrew Sullivan put it,
Yes, they conceal armaments and rockets and weapons in civilian areas — and that undoubtedly increases civilian deaths. But what alternative do they have exactly, if they wish to have any military capacity at all? Should they build clearly demarcated camps and barracks and munitions stores, where the IDF could just destroy them at will?
Violence against civilians does not suddenly become more legitimate just because it is carried out by a state actor, and one that doesn’t fit our biases and preconceptions of who commits terrorism. And leading human rights organizations get that, which is why they call for ending military support not just for Hamas and other militant groups, but also for Israel.
Israel’s ground incursion in Gaza is now underway, and while it will almost certainly cause more casualties and destruction, it won’t contribute to resolving the conflict in the long term. Ultimately, this conflict will only be solved when the side holding virtually all the power, the one imposing displacement, occupation, and apartheid on the other side, is pressured in a meaningful way to allow Palestinians to exercise self-determination. Heeding the calls for a suspension of military aid to Israel would be the beginning of such meaningful pressure, and through it we could hopefully see a process that puts us closer to the ending the needless killing of innocent Israelis and Palestinians.
Omar Baddar is a Middle East political analyst based in Washington, DC. You can follow him on Twitter at @OmarBaddar
http://www.salon.com/2014/0/18/israels_military_has_no_moral_superiority_and_its_time_the_media_covered_gaza_fairly/?source=newsletter
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