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Showing posts with label War on Gaza. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War on Gaza. Show all posts
Guardian 💣 South Africa brought the case, but one man dragged Israel into the dock at The Hague – Benjamin Netanyahu. Written by Jonathan Freedland. Recommended by Barry Gilheany.


The Israeli PM’s alliance with the far right made this case possible, and the result could be harmful to Jews all over the world.

There was so much history and so much tragedy in that room. For two days, ending today, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague witnessed a clash between two nations, each shaped by acts that live on in the global lexicon of good and evil.

In one corner, South Africa, which only a generation ago emerged from apartheid, still the universal shorthand for the wickedness of racism. In the other, Israel, established just three years after the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews and the attempt to eradicate the Jewish people from the face of the Earth. In a global courtroom, those who bore the scars of those two great crimes – apartheid and the Holocaust – squared up against each other, as one accused the other of the gravest crime of all: genocide.

The two never debated. There was no cross-examination or back and forth. 

Continue reading @ Guardian.

Benjamin Netanyahu Dragged Israel Into The Dock At The Hague

Only Sky ➽ Bethlehem is a city in mourning this year: quiet, with its usual tourist venues shuttered for weeks on account of the war in Gaza, and with very little of the joy that Christians usually associate with the season.
M L Clark

As the mythology goes in Luke 2, an angel descended after the birth of Jesus Christ, and proclaimed a time of “on Earth peace, good will toward men”. But it is hard to sustain such a conviction in human salvation amid at least two major wars, and many other bitter conflicts the world over.

Elsewhere in the world, some US Evangelicals still sorely hope that this brutal three-month-long siege will yield the endtimes scenario that shapes their antisemitic investment in Israel’s success. Whether they think Jews will eventually accept Christ as their Messiah, or die once they have fulfilled their part of the prophecy to usher in the Second Coming, Evangelical Christianity joins Islam and Judaism as faiths bound up in a war that has killed over 20,400 people in Gaza, and over 300 in the West Bank, after the October 7 attack by Hamas that killed over 1,200, and saw over 240 hostages taken, half of whom are still in captivity.

Continue reading @ Only Sky.

The Myth Of Personhood On A Wartorn Christmas Morn

Anthony McIntyre ✒ was in Drogheda town centre yesterday protesting Israeli war crimes.


Yesterday saw a number of us take to the streets of Drogheda in solidarity with the Palestinians currently being mercilessly pummeled by the vastly superior military force of the Israeli state.

It is seven years since we last turned out, so it was reassuring to see some of the same faces from our previous outing. Then, the terror war on Gaza was being waged with unmitigated ferocity, a favourite target of the war criminals - Palestinian children. They were murdered as they played soccer on a beach, in their homes, schools and hospitals.

Before the main weekly vigil kicked off in 2014, myself and my wife stood alone at the footbridge across the Boyne trying to focus attention on the plight of the Palestinians. We were joined by a Croatian mother and son, just in the country ten days. Israeli terror is something like a bad smell: just something you expect to announce its presence and which will not go away just because it is ignored.

How yesterday's vigil got off the ground I am not certain. Covid regulations are still in place and the event could not as easily be put together as on previous occasions. The interest was certainly there and word of mouth seemed to have carried the day. During the week I asked a friend who had stood with us in 2014 if anything was happening. She said she was going to stand at the Tholsel with a flag at noon on Saturday. I said I would join her and that's pretty much how it happened. Others turned up and our Pod for Palestine was visible to all, many who stopped to talk or bump their horns. 

Most of those I recognised were from Sinn Fein which has consistently done the heavy lifting in terms of putting a presence on the streets in support of the Palestinians. Labour Party members later told me had they known, they too would have been there. I am sure the same people will be there next week if the savagery does not abate and I hope as many as possible will stand alongside us. 

There seems to be a greater unity across the political divide this time. Tanaiste Leo Varadker spoke for many when he said:

Annexation, expulsion, plantation and the killing of civilians, deliberately or in terms of collateral damage, are not the behaviours of a democratic state in the 21st century and it is simply unacceptable that a democratic state or any state should behave in this way.

It would have been preferable had he gone as far as Richard Boyd Barret:

Given the outrageous breaches of international law, is it not time to expel the Israeli ambassador and to impose sanctions on the rogue state of Israel for its crimes against international law and against humanity in Palestine?

But his identifying Israel as an aggressor is significant when the terror state relies on the silent acquiescence of others.

As the Ballymurphy massacre inquest verdict illustrated this week, the armies of the West commit atrocity pretty much like those they are quick to condemn for committing atrocity, and Israel is no different. The mote in the Israeli eye happens to appear much larger because of its history: a state that ostensibly came into existence as a defensive reaction to war crimes perpetrated against Jews, has been one of the West's most frequent practitioners of war crimes since its inception. Internationally, the numbers willing to approve of its sense of entitlement to murder at will is shrinking inexorably. 

Israel stands ever at the ready to put Hindley and Brady types in uniform, arm them, throw them into confrontation with unarmed children whom they proceed to murder before cynically proclaiming that the infanticides belong to the most moral army on earth. Hayim Bialik, a posthumous Israeli national poet, wrote more than a century ago that "even Satan has not yet invented the revenge for the blood of a little child."


The world cannot feign ignorance of the despicable barbarism visited on Jewish children by the Wehrmacht and SS during the course of World War 2. Walter Karl Ernst August von Reichenau approved the murder of 90 Jewish children who were left orphaned after the massacre of their parents at Bila Tserkva in the Ukraine. He did so only after strong opposition from a Nazi officer, Helmuth Groscurth, who had intervened to retrieve the children from a church where they had been crammed and denied all food and water. 

Groscurth would go on to comment in his diaries:

My efforts to intervene in the defence of the Jewish orphans ended for me a rebuke from the Field Marshal von Reichenau. But honestly? I didn’t care about that. However, I was shocked by the bestiality that was in the German people ... The war has made all of us monsters. It has destroyed the national psyche. Judging by what I have written here, it would seem that I'm the good one. But the truth is different. I am an accomplice to all the crimes. We all are. We didn’t oppose the dictatorship of Hitler, and now everyone has to bear the consequences. Germans can’t and shouldn’t win this war. Definitely not ...

I wonder if there is anyone of that calibre in the Israeli Defence Forces willing to publicly speak out in real time against the mass murder of children. If some officers in the world's most moral army can up their game to the level of one Nazi officer who had the mettle to oppose infanticide, it might just make a difference. 

 ⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Infanticide From Bila Tserkva To Gaza




Yesterday afternoon we took our place at the Tholsel in the pelting rain. I had not realised the vigil was scheduled for this week, mistakenly believing it had been discontinued due to the cessation of Israeli military attacks on Gaza. Seemingly I was not alone in being of that view, our numbers now having dwindled down to no more than ten due to the onset of a feeling that the urgency has gone out of the situation.

Finding out at the last minute that the vigil would go ahead as normal I raced out of work in short sleeves and got soaked. Only one of us seemed to have the sense to turn up equipped for the weather, umbrella in hand. Towards the end one of the regulars told me it was the last vigil ... for now. If the ceasefire breaks and the Israelis resume war against the civilian population of Gaza we will be back on the streets.

Last Day at The Tholsel for Gaza

  • Just as we resist antisemitism, we refuse to dehumanise Palestinians in order to make their deaths lighter on our collective conscience. We sign this statement in order to affirm their humanity and our own. We distance ourselves from South African Jewish organizations whose blind support for Israel’s disproportionate actions moves us further from a just resolution to the conflict – letter signed by 500 prominent South African Jews.

Protesting the Malevolence of the Genocidal Mind

Beslan 2004
Pauline Mellon with a piece from her blog The Diary of a Derry Mother. It featured on 18 August 2014. Pauline Mellon is a social justice campaigner in Derry.


On September 1st the people of Beslan, North Ossetia will mark the tenth anniversary of the Beslan massacre. On what was the first day of the new school year, Chechen separatists stormed a school containing over 1100 people. In the following 52 hour siege 334 of the people lost their lives, 186 of which were children.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth is.


It’s a hideous atrocity, sadistic, vicious, murderous, totally without any credible pretext. It’s another one of the periodic Israeli exercises in what they delicately call "mowing the lawn." That means shooting fish in the pond, to make sure that the animals stay quiet in the cage that you’ve constructed for them, after which you go to a period of what’s called "ceasefire," which means that Hamas observes the ceasefire, as Israel concedes, while Israel continues to violate it. Then it’s broken by an Israeli escalation, Hamas reaction. Then you have period of "mowing the lawn." This one is, in many ways, more sadistic and vicious even than the earlier ones - Noam Chomsky

Flimflam and Fudge for the Lone Soldier

Drogheda's vigil for Palestine

This afternoon I turned up for the third vigil in a row staged by Sinn Fein in opposition to the Israeli War on Gaza, the venue again being The Tholsel in Drogheda’s town centre. With my previous companions busy for one reason or another I headed down on my own, ten minutes late and without my phone and its built in camera

On my own but hardly alone I assumed my place in the group. As with previous weeks there was a sizeable turnout, and no rain from Yahweh to deter us from protesting against the actions of those who tell us they are a government of his chosen people and therefore have licence to murder pretty much in the same way that he murdered his way through the Old Testament.

Heathens At The Tholsel

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