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https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/7/10/freed-former-palestinian-bodybuilder-alleges-abuse-by-israeli-jailers

 

As the assault on Rafah continues I notice how regularly the news headlines follow a similar pattern: residential home bombed + at night + X number of women & children killed.

I strong suspect that these repeated headlines offer more evidence that Israel is continuing to use the AI programs Lavender and Where’s Daddy? Programs that I have discussed here previously.

The IDF uses these programs to intentionally bomb (1) the homes of suspected Hamas fighters (2) after dark (3) when the families are sleeping together. Hardly the practice of a military that was sincere in its insistence that it worked hard to avoid civilian casualties.

Well, here is yet another story demonstrating Israel’s disregard for murdered civilians.

When you bomb a crowd of people waiting for their turn to access a public internet connection, what else can you expect but — NUMEROUS CIVILIAN CASUALTIES. It’s not rocket science.

No one but no one can claim that these deaths were accidental, collateral damage due to the fog of war. It’s long past time for the LIES to stop.

Maung Zarni is a scholar who has been nominated for a Nobel Prize. He has spent his career studying genocide, specifically the Nazi holocaust.

In a recent interview he stated that “what is happening in Gaza is simply mass extermination without the gas chambers.”

You can read a excerpt from the article by Ahmet Gurhan Kartal at “If Americans Knew” below:

“What we are seeing in Gaza is simply mass extermination without the gas chambers,” he said, referring to the brutal Nazi method of killing prisoners in concentration camps during World War II.

“You don’t need to destroy a population with gas chambers only. If you are able to carpet bomb … 80% of the living space, the residential area, most schools, hospitals, you are destroying the population.”

Zarni also pointed out Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s statement that “no one in Gaza is innocent.”

“That’s 2.3 or 2.4 million Palestinian people, including infants. Half of the 2.3 million Palestinians are children and youth,” he said.

“So, what we are seeing is the repeat of Auschwitz in Gaza.”

You can read the entire article here.

Contrary to Israeli propaganda, the primary factor in the declining population of Christians in Gaza is not Muslim persecution.

As I have heard many times, most Christian families emigrate in order to escape Israeli violence. With respect to Gaza, it is the regular bombardments and military campaigns against them that has cause the Christian community to dwindle.

Today there are approximately 1,000 Christians remaining as a witness to their Savior from the oldest churches in the world.

Terry and I first met Anas this past March as we sat talking with his young, pregnant wife, Maysan. We were visiting with Maysan in her father’s home inside the Aida Refugee Camp.

Maysan’s father is our good friend, Sayid, who was once shot in the shoulder by an Israeli soldier while standing inside his own home. Yes, such things happen often to those living under Israeli military occupation.

Maysan has begun a new, thriving dental practice in Bethlehem. She and Anas were eagerly expecting their first child, a daughter, who happened to arrive while we were still visiting in Aida.

Anas is the director of the Aida Youth Center, the organization which Terry and I have worked with closely over the years.

As the Center’s director, Anas is committed to providing educational opportunities and improving the lives of the many children growing up inside a refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem.

Now Anas has been arrested simply for being a Palestinian man living in the West Bank.

Below is the account of what happened yesterday as posted by another friend, Munther Amira, on Facebook.

Please join us in praying for Anas’ swift and safe return from Israeli detention (all emphasis is mine):

Jeff Halper is an Israeli anthropology professor and a political activist who founded the organization ICAHD, the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions.

Earlier this week the ICAHD newsletter included the following article from Jeff:

I am going to bed tonight in full certainty that as I sleep, Israel, a member state of the UN, abetted, armed, and egged on by the US and the other G-7 countries that rule the world, is committing genocide in Gaza.

Confining two and half million people to a tiny area (while cynically and cruelly advising them to “leave”), cutting off all food, water, and electricity, declaring that all Gazans are Hamas, thus making even children legitimate targets, carpet bombing for days to “soften” the terrain, and then, tonight as I sleep, invading with an army of 300,000 soldiers — that is THE definition of genocide.

The world is run by war criminals, which imperils oppressed and poor people the world over. But tonight, we must think of the people of Gaza, thousands of whom will die in the next days, their lives destroyed, their cities, town and villages obliterated.

Read the entire article here.

As “pro-life”, Texas governor, Greg Abbott, installs a murderous, floating fence of razor wire down the middle of the Rio Grand river to shred the bare flesh of illegal immigrants, Phillis Zagano asks a probing question at the Religious News Service: what does it really mean to “respect life?”

[A number of dead bodies have already been retrieved from Abbott’s killer fence.]

Below is an excerpt:

Before backing a law banning abortion in Texas altogether, Gov. Greg Abbott propelled a 2021 measure banning abortion after a heartbeat has been detected, saying he “would protect the life of every child with a heartbeat.” He happens to be Catholic.

So why did Abbott put razor wire and a floating barrier in the Rio Grande? Do migrant children not have heartbeats?

There is an angry selectivity when it comes to life issues. Abortion is certainly a tragic reality in too many places in the world. Without denying the ability of the polity to legally allow or disallow abortion, the better course is to make it unnecessary.

To respect life means just that: the unborn, yes, and the elderly and the stranger, the migrant, and the homeless individual. Respect life includes the “other,” no matter how defined — by gender, skin color, language, ethnicity — the list is endless.

Yet too many so-called pro-life advocates demonstrate an abject denial of others’ right to life.

You can read the entire article here.

Avi Shlaim began  his academic career as an Israeli graduate student who went to England for his doctoral work.

He is now a long-time Oxford professor who has done pioneering historical research on the origins of the modern state of Israel and the history of Zionism.

He is one of those rare people of moral character who is willing to be self-critical. He is more committed to a consistent ethic applied equally to all than he is to nationalism or ideology.

Here is a brief excerpt from a longer interview with Human Rights Watch.

Breaking the Silence is an organization of former Israeli soldiers who are trying to educate their fellow citizens about the brutality of Israel’s military occupation over the Palestinian people in the West Bank.

Watch as this woman tells her story (with English translation). She explains how the Occupation is both persecuting Palestinians and poisoning Israel.

[It’s been a while since my last post! I will tell you about some of the things I’ve been doing in a few of the upcoming posts. Here are a few stories about our recent trip to Israel-Palestine. It also gives me a chance to plug my latest book, Like Birds in a Cage, which describes life in Aida camp more extensively.]

It had been nearly 5 years since we last visited our friends and loved one’s in Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem. So, we planned a return visit in early May and spent the rest of the month in our home away from home. We returned to the USA on May 31st. (Whereupon I was struck down by a long-menacing sinus infection. Ugh. But I am much better now, thank you.)

We had returned to the embrace of our Aida Camp family for no more than 10 days when 3 teenage boys were shot by Israeli soldiers, which is the standard punishment for throwing rocks towards heavily outfitted, helmet-wearing soldiers in body armor. Five years’ absence had not changed anything about daily life in Aida camp.

Actually, one of the boys was not shot by a living, breathing soldier but by a Terminator-style, automated, robotic, high-powered rifle. Only the night before a deadly device had been installed on top of the Apartheid Wall segregating Aida from the encroaching Jewish-only neighborhoods of SE Jerusalem. This new, robotic, high-powered rifle now rules over the main entrance to the camp; its field of fire covers the main Aida thoroughfare, several community centers, 2 playgrounds, 1 soccer field, a cemetery, and scores of apartments.

No one knows when or why the new installation may fire again. But this is nothing new. Palestinians have always served as unwilling guinea pigs for Israel’s cutting-edge military gadgets, whether it’s new teargas formulas, other “non-lethal” munitions, or facial recognition technology at checkpoints. No one has yet to inform Aida’s community leaders about the military’s rules of engagement for the new Terminator gun. But this is to be expected. Did Custer ever explain his military tactics to Sitting Bull?

Going to Massafer Yatta

On the first Friday of the month, we traveled with about 100 members of the Aida Youth Center to help an aged farmer work his land in a highly contested area south of Hebron known as Masafer Yatta.

Last year this Palestinian farmer was attacked by Jewish settlers from a nearby Jews-only settlement encroaching on this man’s agricultural land. The settlers broke both of the farmer’s hands. He was then jailed for 10 days without medical attention. [Nope, none of the settlers were arrested. “Law enforcement” in the West Bank exists to serve the purposes of Zionist settlement not to safeguard the Palestinians being displaced.]

My friend, Munther, had been in contact with this farmer and made arrangements for the young people of Aida Camp to replant his fields and rebuild one of the boundary markers along the border of a dirt roadway.

As the Palestinian teenagers picked up their farming tools, the disabled farmer welcomed everyone to his village. With his black and white kufiya blowing in the wind, he gave us instructions about where to plant the hundreds of starter plants we had brought along with us: grape vines, olive trees, as well as peach and apricot seedlings.

After a hard day’s work, planting and watering hundreds of new seedlings, we moved across a large stretch of rocky ground in order to rebuild the small rock wall demarcating the side of a narrow dirt road, running parallel to the edge of the field.

Now for Some Politics

It did not take long for Jewish settlers to emerge from the nearby Jewish-only settlement. They immediately set about destroying our wall, taking down the rocks we had put into place. They were soon followed by Israeli soldiers determined to chase us out of the area.

You see, Masafer Yatta has been declared an Israeli “military firing zone” which means that civilian occupation and agricultural development are prohibited. Palestinian villages have all received demolition orders, their long-time residents told to evacuate the area. Expulsions and demolitions have been ongoing for a long time.

Israeli authorities insist that the Palestinian residents, most of whom have lived on this land for many generations, often going back to the time of the Ottoman Empire, do not have the proper building permits necessary for them to stay where they are.

It’s a perfect Catch-22. Israel refuses to issue the very permits it requires of Palestinian residents, while also refusing to recognize the Ottoman-era title deeds the people still possess. The Mad Hatter couldn’t have devised a more insanely oppressive system.

The height of Israeli hypocrisy appears in the growth of Zionist, Jewish-only settlements in the very areas from which Palestinians are now being expelled. Declaring regions like Masafer Yatta a “closed military firing zone” is an old tactic used by the Zionist state.

It provides a cover story for the expulsion of the indigenous people who have lived here for generations, while simultaneously making room for more and more Jewish settlers who are apparently immune to the dangers of military firing zones. (Because no firing takes place.)

So a Palestinian farmer is beaten, his hands broken, and his land pillaged, while white settlers descended from recent European immigrants take over the region, building their shiny colonial startup cities with the help of Israeli state funding.

Eventually, we were all forced to leave the area as the Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and a stun grenade into the group of panicking teenagers. Munther, the group’s leader, is committed to nonviolent resistance. He was hectically moving from one spot to another, grabbing stones out of boys’ hands, trying to prevent anyone from throwing rocks at the soldiers.

The young people quickly loaded onto the bus that would take them back to Aida camp. Terry and I rode with Munther who was happy to avoid arrest and Israeli detention.

I wondered how long our plantings would survive. Are any of them still growing? Or have they all been ripped out of the ground by settlers?