Washington DC — (Scheerpost)
— Israel was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely
unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and
villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize 78 percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria.
Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants a just and equitable peace and will support a Palestinian state. The lie
that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that
Israel is an “outpost of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism.”
The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights.
Israel’s
atrocities against the Palestinians are always greeted with lies. I
heard them. I recorded them. I published them in my stories for The New
York Times when I was the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief.
I
covered war for two decades, including seven years in the Middle East. I
learned quite a bit about the size and lethality of explosive devices.
There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad that could
have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that killed an estimated
500 civilians in the al-Ahli Arab Christian Hospital in Gaza. Nothing.
If Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) had these kinds of missiles,
huge buildings in Israel would be rubble with hundreds of dead. They
don’t.
The whistling sound,
audible on the video moments before the explosion, appears to come from
the high velocity of a missile. This sound gives it away. No
Palestinian rocket makes this noise. And then there is the speed of the
missile. Palestinian rockets are slow and lumbering, clearly visible as
they arch in the sky and then tumble in free fall toward their targets.
They do not strike with precision or travel at close to supersonic
speed. They are incapable of killing hundreds of people.
The Israeli military dropped “roof knocking” rockets with no warheads on the hospital in the days leading up to the Oct. 17 strike, the familiar warning given by Israel to evacuate buildings, according to al-Ahli hospital officials. Hospital officials also said they had received calls from Israel saying “we warned you to evacuate twice.” Israel has demanded that all hospitals in northern Gaza be evacuated.
Following the strike on the hospital, Hananya Naftali, a “digital aide” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted
on X, formerly Twitter: “Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist
base inside a hospital in Gaza.” The post was quickly deleted.
Since
the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Palestinian resistance fighters,
which reportedly left some 1,300 Israelis dead, many of them civilians,
and saw some 200 kidnapped
as hostages and taken to Gaza, Israel has carried out 51 attacks on
healthcare facilities in Gaza that have killed 15 healthcare workers and
injured 27, according
to the World Health Organization (WHO). Out of 35 hospitals in Gaza,
four are not functioning due to severe damage and targeting. Only eight
of the 22 UNRWA primary healthcare centers are “partially functional,”
the WHO says.
The
brazenness of Israeli lies stunned those of us who reported from Gaza.
It did not matter if we had seen the Israeli attack, including the
shooting of unarmed Palestinians. It did not matter how many witnesses
we interviewed. It did not matter what photographic and forensic
evidence we obtained. Israel lied. Small lies. Big lies. Huge lies.
These lies came reflexively and instantly from the Israeli military,
Israeli politicians and Israeli media. They were amplified by Israel’s
well-oiled propaganda machine and repeated with a cloying sincerity on
international news outlets.
Israel
engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic
regimes. It does not deform the truth, it inverts it. It paints a
picture that is diametrically opposed to reality. Those of us who have
covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s
Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our
stories — required under the rules of American journalism — although we
know they are untrue.
Israel has invented an Orwellian lexicon. Children killed by Israelis become children caught in crossfire. The bombing of residential districts, with dozens of dead and wounded, becomes a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. The destruction of Palestinian homes becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists.
The Big Lie — Große Lüge
— feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit — racism among its
supporters and terror among its victims. The Big Lies fosters the myth
of a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency and honor
on one side and Islamic terrorism, barbarism and medievalism on the
other.
George
Orwell in his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” called the Big Lie
“doublethink”. Doublethink uses “logic against logic” and “repudiate[s]
morality while laying claim to it.” The Big Lie abolishes nuances,
ambiguities and contradictions that can plague conscience. It is
designed to create cognitive dissonance. It permits no gray zones. The
world is black and white, good and evil, righteous and unrighteous. The
Big Lie allows believers to take comfort — a comfort they are
desperately seeking — in their own moral superiority even as they
abrogate all morality. It feeds, what Edward Bernays called, the
“logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence.” All effective
propaganda, Bernays writes, targets and builds upon these irrational
“psychological habits.”
Israeli
supporters thirst for these lies. They do not want to know the truth.
The truth would force them to examine their racism, self-delusion and
complicity in oppression, murder and genocide.
Most
importantly, the Big Lie sends an ominous message to the Palestinians.
The Big Lie states that Israel will wage a campaign of mass terror and
genocide and never take responsibility for its crimes. The Big Lie
obliterates the truth. It obliterates the dignity of human thought and
human action. It obliterates facts. It obliterates history. It
obliterates comprehension. It obliterates hope. It reduces all
communication to the language of violence. When oppressors speak to the
oppressed exclusively through indiscriminate violence, the oppressed
answer through indiscriminate violence.
The
cartoonist Joe Sacco and I watched Israeli soldiers taunt and shoot
small boys in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza. We interviewed the
boys and their parents afterwards in the hospital. In a few cases we
attended their funerals. We had their names. We had the dates and
locations of the shootings.
Israel’s response was to say that we were not in Gaza. We had made it up.
The
Israeli Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Defense Minister and Israeli
Defense Force (IDF) spokesperson immediately blamed the killing of the
Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, on Palestinian gunmen.
Israel disseminated footage of a Palestinian fighter they said shot and
killed the journalist, who was wearing a flak jacket and helmet marked
“PRESS.”
Benny Gantz, who was at the time Defense Minister, stated
that “no [Israeli] gunfire was directed at the journalist,” and that
the Israeli army had “seen footage of indiscriminate shooting by
Palestinian terrorists”.
This lie was peddled until video
footage examined by B’Tselem, The Israeli Center for Human Rights in
the Occupied Territories, identified the location of the Palestinian
gunman depicted in the video. The video, the human rights organization
found, was taken in a different location from where Shireen was killed.
When
Israel is caught lying, as it was with the murder of Shireen, it
promises an investigation. But these investigations are a sham.
Impartial investigations into the hundreds of killings by soldiers and
Jewish settlers of Palestinians are rarely carried out. Perpetrators are
almost never brought to trial or held accountable. The pattern of
Israeli obfuscation is predictable. So is the collusion
of nearly all of the corporate media along with Republican and
Democratic politicians. U.S. politicians decried the murder of Shireen
and dutifully repeated the old mantra, calling for a “thorough investigation” by the army that carried out the crime.
A few months later, Israel admitted
that there was a “high possibility” that an Israeli soldier killed the
journalist by accident, but by then the eruption of street protests and
rage over the killing of the journalist was over and her murder largely
forgotten.
By the time the conclusive proof comes out about the bombing of the hospital, it too will be a distant memory.
There is dramatic footage
captured in September 2000 at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip —
where I saw a nineteen-year-old boy shot and killed by an Israeli
sniper — by France 2 TV, of a father trying to shield his traumatized
12-year-old son, Muhammad al-Durrah, from Israeli gunfire that
ultimately killed him.
The
killing of the boy resulted in the typical propaganda campaign by
Israel. Israeli officials spent years lying about the killing, first blaming the Palestinians for the shooting, later suggesting that the scene was faked, and finally insisting the boy was still alive.
When an Israeli soldier, in 2003, murdered the 23-year-old student and American activist Rachel Corrie, by crushing her to death with a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the illegal demolition of a Palestinian doctor’s home, the Israeli army said it was an accident for which Corrie was responsible.
The
Israeli military has killed “at least” 20 journalists since 2001, with
no accountability, according to a 2023 report by the New York-based
Committee to Protect Journalists. “Immediately after a journalist is
killed by security forces, Israeli officials often push out a counter
narrative to media reporting,” the CPJ concluded.
This includes blaming the deaths on “indiscriminate fire” by
Palestinians or attempts to discredit those killed as “terrorists.”
Israel blocks the work of independent human rights organizations into atrocities and war crimes it commits in Gaza and the West Bank. It refuses to cooperate with the International Criminal Court into possible war crimes in the Occupied Territories. It does not cooperate with the U.N. Human Rights Council and prohibits
the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the
Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, from entering the country.
Israel revoked the work permit for Omar Shakir, the Director of Human Rights Watch (Israel and Palestine), in 2018 and expelled him. In May 2018, Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy published a report calling
on the European Union and European states to halt their direct and
indirect financial support and funding to Palestinian and international
human rights organizations that “have ties to terror and promote
boycotts against Israel.”
After
the bombing of the hospital, Israel first released a video that
purported to show Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets which struck the
hospital. The Israelis hastily removed the video when journalists noticed that time stamps showed the images were taken 40 minutes after the strike on the hospital.
Israeli
propagandists — aware that Palestinian rockets have little explosive
power — then claimed that Hamas stored munitions under the hospital.
This caused the massive explosion, they said. But if this was true, it
would mean there would be a secondary explosion. There was none. And now
Israel has released what they say is a recording
of two Hamas militants discussing the missile strike on the hospital.
The militants ask each other, in a self-incriminating conversation that
is too ridiculous to believe, if Hamas or PIJ carried out the strike.
Please. How was Israel completely in the dark about an incursion by
thousands of armed Palestinian militants from Gaza into Israel on Oct. 7
and able to capture this incriminating conversation by two supposed
militants?
“Israel
has a whole unit of ‘mistaravim’, Israeli Jewish undercover agents
trained to pose as Palestinians and secretly operate among
Palestinians,” the reporter Jonathan Cook writes.
“Israel produced a highly popular TV series about such people in Gaza
called Fauda. You have to be beyond credulous to think that Israel
couldn’t, and wouldn’t, rig up a call like this to fool us, just as it
regularly fools Palestinians in Gaza.”
Israel has also long targeted medical facilities, ambulances and medics, as Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein points out. It bombed a Palestinian children’s hospital during the 1982 war in Lebanon, killing 60 people. It also carried out missile strikes
on clearly marked Lebanese ambulances during the 2006 war between
Israel and Lebanon. It damaged or destroyed 29 ambulances and almost
half of Gaza’s health facilities, including 15 hospitals, during the 2008-2009 assault on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. It routinely prohibited
wounded Palestinians from being picked up by ambulances during this
operation, often leaving them to die. During Operation Protective Edge,
the 51-day assault on Gaza in 2014, Israel destroyed or damaged 17 hospitals and 56 primary healthcare centers and damaged or destroyed 45 ambulances.
You can see my interview, released today, with Professor Finkelstein about Gaza and Israel here.
Amnesty
International, which investigated the Israeli attacks on three of these
hospitals in 2014, dismissed the “evidence” for the attacks offered by
Israel as false. “The image tweeted by the Israeli military does not
match satellite images of the al-Wafa hospital and appears to depict a
different location,” the report read.
Expose
Israeli lies and you are attacked by Israel and its supporters as an
anti-Semite and apologist for terrorists. You are banished from
mainstream media. You are denied forums to speak about the issue and, as
has happened to me, disinvited from university events.
It
is an old game, one I have played as a reporter many, many times. I bear
the scars of the lies spewed out by Israel and its lobby. Meanwhile,
Israel continues its butchery, endorsed and even lauded by Western
political leaders, including Joe Biden, who accompany the torrent of lies from Israel like a Wagnerian chorus.
Chris Hedges
is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent
for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle
East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously
worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science
Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
(Republished from Mintpress News by permission of author or representative)
exterminating palestinians ain’t cheap and Joe Hitler’s on a roll but he ain’t no kaiser
and gave the go ahead to bini to keep murdering no matter what
The
Rothschild neocolony in Palestine, like the UN, stands at the
intersection of interests of the USEUNATO terrorists, Russia, China,
etc. Deceit is the way of the world wherever management of witless
taxcattle is concerned, the plandemic and so-called “war” in Ukraine are
other recent events that’ve made that plenty clear.
The
Zionist Empire of Lies has been unmasked, and is consequentially in an
existential fight. Jordan has said it will consider an Israeli invasion
of Gaza to be a declaration of war. Jordan is relatively US-friendly,
so that implies ALL the Arab countries are probably on board with that.
And that could bring in all the BRICS 11 countries, and all those who
want to join BRICS 11.
The Zionist Empire is ordering its obsequious slaves Joe Biden and
Rishi Sunak to join its battle to save the Zionists’ future world
capital. The Zionist “mainstream” media in the US and UK is prepping
the public with fictional tales of heroic Israelis and evil
Palestinians.
So it looks like the wider world has decided that now is the time to
finally put a stop to the expansion of the Zionist Empire. Its mask has
dropped. Its attack on Russia through Ukraine has failed, and it is
low on weapons and ammunition. Yet it insanely persists in talking
about conquering Russia and China, like a rabid dog frothing at the
mouth.
Sane leaders in the US and UK would see the folly of their Zionist
masters. Perhaps some of them do, but are too controlled by bribery,
blackmail, and death threats to resist. So yet again they will
sacrifice the lives and treasure of their own countries to sate the
unquenchable appetite for blood and vengeance depicted in the Hebrew
“holy” book.
Even Christian conservatives like Steve Bannon are afraid to tell the
“Christian” Zionists in their base that “Christian Zionism” is just
another Zionist scam, another takeover tactic. The best match today for
the beast in the Book of Revelations is Israel itself. According to
the Bible God thrashed the Jews and kicked them out of Palestine into
captivity in Babylon (Jeremiah). He did it again in the Roman era. And
now it looks like He is getting ready to do it again.
Americans and Brits need to grab their steering wheels away from
these insane Zionists to keep the Armageddon blowback from hitting their
own countries. In this age of hypersonic missiles and nuclear warheads
that is not farfetched. They also need to divest themselves of
subversive Zionist corruptton and get firmly on the side of honesty
& justice. That is the only viable long-range strategy.
Washington DC — (Scheerpost) — Israel was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize 78 percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria.
Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants a just and equitable peace and will support a Palestinian state. The lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that Israel is an “outpost of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism.” The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights.
Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians are always greeted with lies. I heard them. I recorded them. I published them in my stories for The New York Times when I was the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief.
I covered war for two decades, including seven years in the Middle East. I learned quite a bit about the size and lethality of explosive devices. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that killed an estimated 500 civilians in the al-Ahli Arab Christian Hospital in Gaza. Nothing. If Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) had these kinds of missiles, huge buildings in Israel would be rubble with hundreds of dead. They don’t.
The whistling sound, audible on the video moments before the explosion, appears to come from the high velocity of a missile. This sound gives it away. No Palestinian rocket makes this noise. And then there is the speed of the missile. Palestinian rockets are slow and lumbering, clearly visible as they arch in the sky and then tumble in free fall toward their targets. They do not strike with precision or travel at close to supersonic speed. They are incapable of killing hundreds of people.
The Israeli military dropped “roof knocking” rockets with no warheads on the hospital in the days leading up to the Oct. 17 strike, the familiar warning given by Israel to evacuate buildings, according to al-Ahli hospital officials. Hospital officials also said they had received calls from Israel saying “we warned you to evacuate twice.” Israel has demanded that all hospitals in northern Gaza be evacuated.
Following the strike on the hospital, Hananya Naftali, a “digital aide” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza.” The post was quickly deleted.
Since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Palestinian resistance fighters, which reportedly left some 1,300 Israelis dead, many of them civilians, and saw some 200 kidnapped as hostages and taken to Gaza, Israel has carried out 51 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza that have killed 15 healthcare workers and injured 27, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Out of 35 hospitals in Gaza, four are not functioning due to severe damage and targeting. Only eight of the 22 UNRWA primary healthcare centers are “partially functional,” the WHO says.
The brazenness of Israeli lies stunned those of us who reported from Gaza. It did not matter if we had seen the Israeli attack, including the shooting of unarmed Palestinians. It did not matter how many witnesses we interviewed. It did not matter what photographic and forensic evidence we obtained. Israel lied. Small lies. Big lies. Huge lies. These lies came reflexively and instantly from the Israeli military, Israeli politicians and Israeli media. They were amplified by Israel’s well-oiled propaganda machine and repeated with a cloying sincerity on international news outlets.
Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic regimes. It does not deform the truth, it inverts it. It paints a picture that is diametrically opposed to reality. Those of us who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories — required under the rules of American journalism — although we know they are untrue.
Israel has invented an Orwellian lexicon. Children killed by Israelis become children caught in crossfire. The bombing of residential districts, with dozens of dead and wounded, becomes a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. The destruction of Palestinian homes becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists.
The Big Lie — Große Lüge — feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit — racism among its supporters and terror among its victims. The Big Lies fosters the myth of a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency and honor on one side and Islamic terrorism, barbarism and medievalism on the other.
George Orwell in his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” called the Big Lie “doublethink”. Doublethink uses “logic against logic” and “repudiate[s] morality while laying claim to it.” The Big Lie abolishes nuances, ambiguities and contradictions that can plague conscience. It is designed to create cognitive dissonance. It permits no gray zones. The world is black and white, good and evil, righteous and unrighteous. The Big Lie allows believers to take comfort — a comfort they are desperately seeking — in their own moral superiority even as they abrogate all morality. It feeds, what Edward Bernays called, the “logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence.” All effective propaganda, Bernays writes, targets and builds upon these irrational “psychological habits.”
Israeli supporters thirst for these lies. They do not want to know the truth. The truth would force them to examine their racism, self-delusion and complicity in oppression, murder and genocide.
Most importantly, the Big Lie sends an ominous message to the Palestinians. The Big Lie states that Israel will wage a campaign of mass terror and genocide and never take responsibility for its crimes. The Big Lie obliterates the truth. It obliterates the dignity of human thought and human action. It obliterates facts. It obliterates history. It obliterates comprehension. It obliterates hope. It reduces all communication to the language of violence. When oppressors speak to the oppressed exclusively through indiscriminate violence, the oppressed answer through indiscriminate violence.
The cartoonist Joe Sacco and I watched Israeli soldiers taunt and shoot small boys in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza. We interviewed the boys and their parents afterwards in the hospital. In a few cases we attended their funerals. We had their names. We had the dates and locations of the shootings.
Israel’s response was to say that we were not in Gaza. We had made it up.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Defense Minister and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) spokesperson immediately blamed the killing of the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, on Palestinian gunmen. Israel disseminated footage of a Palestinian fighter they said shot and killed the journalist, who was wearing a flak jacket and helmet marked “PRESS.”
Benny Gantz, who was at the time Defense Minister, stated that “no [Israeli] gunfire was directed at the journalist,” and that the Israeli army had “seen footage of indiscriminate shooting by Palestinian terrorists”.
This lie was peddled until video footage examined by B’Tselem, The Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, identified the location of the Palestinian gunman depicted in the video. The video, the human rights organization found, was taken in a different location from where Shireen was killed.
When Israel is caught lying, as it was with the murder of Shireen, it promises an investigation. But these investigations are a sham. Impartial investigations into the hundreds of killings by soldiers and Jewish settlers of Palestinians are rarely carried out. Perpetrators are almost never brought to trial or held accountable. The pattern of Israeli obfuscation is predictable. So is the collusion of nearly all of the corporate media along with Republican and Democratic politicians. U.S. politicians decried the murder of Shireen and dutifully repeated the old mantra, calling for a “thorough investigation” by the army that carried out the crime.
A few months later, Israel admitted that there was a “high possibility” that an Israeli soldier killed the journalist by accident, but by then the eruption of street protests and rage over the killing of the journalist was over and her murder largely forgotten.
By the time the conclusive proof comes out about the bombing of the hospital, it too will be a distant memory.
There is dramatic footage captured in September 2000 at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip — where I saw a nineteen-year-old boy shot and killed by an Israeli sniper — by France 2 TV, of a father trying to shield his traumatized 12-year-old son, Muhammad al-Durrah, from Israeli gunfire that ultimately killed him.
The killing of the boy resulted in the typical propaganda campaign by Israel. Israeli officials spent years lying about the killing, first blaming the Palestinians for the shooting, later suggesting that the scene was faked, and finally insisting the boy was still alive.
When an Israeli soldier, in 2003, murdered the 23-year-old student and American activist Rachel Corrie, by crushing her to death with a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the illegal demolition of a Palestinian doctor’s home, the Israeli army said it was an accident for which Corrie was responsible.
The Israeli military has killed “at least” 20 journalists since 2001, with no accountability, according to a 2023 report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. “Immediately after a journalist is killed by security forces, Israeli officials often push out a counter narrative to media reporting,” the CPJ concluded. This includes blaming the deaths on “indiscriminate fire” by Palestinians or attempts to discredit those killed as “terrorists.”
Israel blocks the work of independent human rights organizations into atrocities and war crimes it commits in Gaza and the West Bank. It refuses to cooperate with the International Criminal Court into possible war crimes in the Occupied Territories. It does not cooperate with the U.N. Human Rights Council and prohibits the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, from entering the country. Israel revoked the work permit for Omar Shakir, the Director of Human Rights Watch (Israel and Palestine), in 2018 and expelled him. In May 2018, Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy published a report calling on the European Union and European states to halt their direct and indirect financial support and funding to Palestinian and international human rights organizations that “have ties to terror and promote boycotts against Israel.”
After the bombing of the hospital, Israel first released a video that purported to show Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets which struck the hospital. The Israelis hastily removed the video when journalists noticed that time stamps showed the images were taken 40 minutes after the strike on the hospital.
Israeli propagandists — aware that Palestinian rockets have little explosive power — then claimed that Hamas stored munitions under the hospital. This caused the massive explosion, they said. But if this was true, it would mean there would be a secondary explosion. There was none. And now Israel has released what they say is a recording of two Hamas militants discussing the missile strike on the hospital. The militants ask each other, in a self-incriminating conversation that is too ridiculous to believe, if Hamas or PIJ carried out the strike. Please. How was Israel completely in the dark about an incursion by thousands of armed Palestinian militants from Gaza into Israel on Oct. 7 and able to capture this incriminating conversation by two supposed militants?
“Israel has a whole unit of ‘mistaravim’, Israeli Jewish undercover agents trained to pose as Palestinians and secretly operate among Palestinians,” the reporter Jonathan Cook writes. “Israel produced a highly popular TV series about such people in Gaza called Fauda. You have to be beyond credulous to think that Israel couldn’t, and wouldn’t, rig up a call like this to fool us, just as it regularly fools Palestinians in Gaza.”
Israel has also long targeted medical facilities, ambulances and medics, as Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein points out. It bombed a Palestinian children’s hospital during the 1982 war in Lebanon, killing 60 people. It also carried out missile strikes on clearly marked Lebanese ambulances during the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon. It damaged or destroyed 29 ambulances and almost half of Gaza’s health facilities, including 15 hospitals, during the 2008-2009 assault on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. It routinely prohibited wounded Palestinians from being picked up by ambulances during this operation, often leaving them to die. During Operation Protective Edge, the 51-day assault on Gaza in 2014, Israel destroyed or damaged 17 hospitals and 56 primary healthcare centers and damaged or destroyed 45 ambulances.
You can see my interview, released today, with Professor Finkelstein about Gaza and Israel here.
Amnesty International, which investigated the Israeli attacks on three of these hospitals in 2014, dismissed the “evidence” for the attacks offered by Israel as false. “The image tweeted by the Israeli military does not match satellite images of the al-Wafa hospital and appears to depict a different location,” the report read.
Expose Israeli lies and you are attacked by Israel and its supporters as an anti-Semite and apologist for terrorists. You are banished from mainstream media. You are denied forums to speak about the issue and, as has happened to me, disinvited from university events.
It is an old game, one I have played as a reporter many, many times. I bear the scars of the lies spewed out by Israel and its lobby. Meanwhile, Israel continues its butchery, endorsed and even lauded by Western political leaders, including Joe Biden, who accompany the torrent of lies from Israel like a Wagnerian chorus.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
• 453 Comments
exterminating palestinians ain’t cheap and Joe Hitler’s on a roll but he ain’t no kaiser
and gave the go ahead to bini to keep murdering no matter what
And the Western media aggressively supports the Israeli lies, almost cheerfully.
The Rothschild neocolony in Palestine, like the UN, stands at the intersection of interests of the USEUNATO terrorists, Russia, China, etc. Deceit is the way of the world wherever management of witless taxcattle is concerned, the plandemic and so-called “war” in Ukraine are other recent events that’ve made that plenty clear.
The Zionist Empire of Lies has been unmasked, and is consequentially in an existential fight. Jordan has said it will consider an Israeli invasion of Gaza to be a declaration of war. Jordan is relatively US-friendly, so that implies ALL the Arab countries are probably on board with that. And that could bring in all the BRICS 11 countries, and all those who want to join BRICS 11.
The Zionist Empire is ordering its obsequious slaves Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak to join its battle to save the Zionists’ future world capital. The Zionist “mainstream” media in the US and UK is prepping the public with fictional tales of heroic Israelis and evil Palestinians.
The wide world now knows that Zionism is evil, and the US and UK are its principle vassals. This reflects its rise to power through the British East India Company. War Profiteers and Israel’s Bank
https://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com/p/war-profiteers-and-israels-bank.html
So it looks like the wider world has decided that now is the time to finally put a stop to the expansion of the Zionist Empire. Its mask has dropped. Its attack on Russia through Ukraine has failed, and it is low on weapons and ammunition. Yet it insanely persists in talking about conquering Russia and China, like a rabid dog frothing at the mouth.
Sane leaders in the US and UK would see the folly of their Zionist masters. Perhaps some of them do, but are too controlled by bribery, blackmail, and death threats to resist. So yet again they will sacrifice the lives and treasure of their own countries to sate the unquenchable appetite for blood and vengeance depicted in the Hebrew “holy” book.
Even Christian conservatives like Steve Bannon are afraid to tell the “Christian” Zionists in their base that “Christian Zionism” is just another Zionist scam, another takeover tactic. The best match today for the beast in the Book of Revelations is Israel itself. According to the Bible God thrashed the Jews and kicked them out of Palestine into captivity in Babylon (Jeremiah). He did it again in the Roman era. And now it looks like He is getting ready to do it again.
Americans and Brits need to grab their steering wheels away from these insane Zionists to keep the Armageddon blowback from hitting their own countries. In this age of hypersonic missiles and nuclear warheads that is not farfetched. They also need to divest themselves of subversive Zionist corruptton and get firmly on the side of honesty & justice. That is the only viable long-range strategy.