Yves here. Apologies for not having my own post in this slot. I lost power for over an hour, and with a feeble old battery in my computer, I decided to work on something I could get done.
But it is separately useful to run this piece. The horrors in Gaza are if anything accelerating, and now compounded by Gaza-like attacks on Beirut. But between Israel succeeding in curtailing coverage via murdering journalists and much of the world falling into tragedy fatigue, new abuses and variants of old ones are not getting the attention they warrant.
The latest humanitarian aid charade confirms what a immoral, cruel, and cynical country the US is, deserving of only rebuke around the world. The Biden Administration first tried the obvious ruse of saying Israel had to let more aid in, intended as a sop to Muslim and anti-war voters, but with the deadline after November 5, so Israel could fall short with no effect on the election.
This tweet in today’s Links shows how the Israelis are not just blocking aid but destroying it:
Look at what our team @EuroMedHR documented yesterday and today..
Yesterday, Israel allowed a humanitarian aid truck into a shelter in the town of Beit Hanoun, amidst widespread media coverage.
This morning, Israeli forces stormed the shelter, killed some civilians, forcibly… pic.twitter.com/OzDxtqkXSc
— Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده (@RamAbdu) November 12, 2024
But in the US, supporting genocide is a bipartisasn affair.
By Brett Williams, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
Human rights advocates around the world reacted angrily to Tuesday’s U.S. State Department determination that Israelis not violating humanitarian law—even as its forces annihilate Gaza and block aid from entering the embattled Palestinian enclave.
Last month, the Biden administration—which has approved tens of billions of dollars in military aid for Israel and provided nearly unconditional diplomatic support since October 2023—sent a letter to the Israeli government threatening to cut off U.S. arms transfers if it failed to take “urgent and sustained actions” to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days.
Asked during a Tuesday press conference if the Israeli government has met the letter’s demands, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said that “we have not made an assessment that they are in violation of U.S. law.”
Predictable, pathetic, and blatantly illegal. https://t.co/RWglDrMLvR
— Matt Duss (@mattduss) November 12, 2024
“The overall humanitarian situation in Gaza continues to be unsatisfactory,” Patel continued. “But in the context of the letter, it’s not about whether we find something satisfactory or not; it’s what are the actions that we’re seeing.”
“These actions that we have seen, we think that these are steps in the right direction,” he added, citing the limited reopening of the Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel. “We want to see more steps. We want to see these steps sustained over a significant period of time, and ultimately, we want to see these steps have a result on the situation.”
Patel insisted that the Biden administration is “not giving Israel a pass.”
🚨 State Department: “We have not made an assessment that Israel is violating U.S. law.”
This comes as eight major international humanitarian organizations published a letter today, stating Israel has failed to meet U.S.-set aid requirements by the deadline.
(Reporter… pic.twitter.com/ZnpovfuYzU
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) November 12, 2024
However, humanitarian aid groups accuse Israel of causing ” apocalyptic” conditions in northern Gaza, where thousands of civilians including many women and children have been killed or wounded while others face imminent famine under a plan to starve out the population in order to ethnically cleanse the area.
On Tuesday, a coalition of eight international humanitarian groups including Oxfam International, CARE, Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children, and others published a report titled The Gaza Scorecard: Israel Fails to Comply With U.S. Humanitarian Access Demands in Gaza, which found that Israel has failed to fully comply with any of the 19 specific demands in the Biden administration’s letter.
The scorecard noted:
The principals of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee now assess that “the entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine, and violence.” The findings of this scorecard underscore Israel’s failure to comply with U.S. demands and international obligations. Israel should be held accountable for the end result of failing to ensure the adequate provision of food, medical, and other supplies to reach people in need.
“While Israel manipulates the U.S. by allowing some aid trucks into other parts of Gaza in the days leading up to the deadline, the performative act did not bring any humanitarian aid to the besieged northern neighborhoods of Gaza,” said Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). “Even more concerning, no forcibly displaced Palestinian from the northern neighborhoods of Gaza has been allowed to return home.”
Last month, Biden gave Israel 30 days to increase the number of aid trucks it allows into Gaza to 350/day, or risk losing access to American military aid under US law.
Those 30 days are now up. Israel has let in just 54/day, on average. https://t.co/UZerAHsxXP pic.twitter.com/nowa3sOHCK
— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) November 12, 2024
Indeed, the IDF said it has “no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes.”
At the same time, relief workers describe deadly dangers faced by Palestinians who try to flee besieged areas including the Jabalia refugee camp, site of some of the war’s worst massacres, including indiscriminate Israeli targeting of refugees without regard for age or gender.
The International Court of Justice in The Hague is in the lengthy process of determining if Israel’s atrocities amount to violations of the Genocide Convention. While it is weighing the evidence in the South Africa-led case, the ICJ has issued a series of provisional orders directing Israel to prevent genocidal acts, halt its assault on Rafah, and stop blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Critics accuse Israel of flouting all three orders.
“As a signatory to the Genocide Convention, the U.S. is obligated to prevent acts of genocide and to avoid complicity in them,” DAWN stressed on Tuesday. “The U.S. should halt its military support for Israel to comply with its convention obligations and uphold international legal norms.”
The US demanded that Israel increase aid into Gaza. Israel reduced aid.
The US warned of consequences. There will be none.
This will be the Biden administration’s legacy: Unconditional support for war crimes and complicity in genocide. https://t.co/rXWMGhjXZ6
— IMEU Policy Project (@imeupolicy) November 12, 2024
This is not the first time that the Biden administration has officially denied that Israel has violated humanitarian law during the Gaza war. In March, the State Department accepted Israel’s assertion that the country is using U.S.-supplied arms in compliance with international law, even as more than 100,000 Palestinians had been killed or wounded in Gaza up to that date. The casualty figure has since increased by about 50%.
Congressional progressives and human rights groups pushed back on the Biden administration’s claim. In April, a leaked memo revealed that officials at the United States Agency for International Development warned Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Israel was indeed breaking the law by blocking aid from entering Gaza. Another leaked State Department memo raised “serious concern” over Israeli noncompliance with humanitarian law and slammed Israel’s claims of legal U.S. weapons use as “neither credible nor reliable.”
Palestine advocates fear the Biden administration’s refusal to suspend arms shipments to Israel—as experts argue is required under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and Leahy Laws—will open the door for Republican President-elect Donald Trump to back Israeli crimes such as the annexation of Palestinian territories including the West Bank.
This sums up the failures of the Democratic Party—repeatedly refusing to fulfill promises to its own voters.
Whether it's refusing to end weapons sales to Israel or refusing to stand up to billionaires & corporate power, the Democratic Party brand right now is bait-and-switch. https://t.co/3V9LQAhWDR
— Justice Democrats (@justicedems) November 12, 2024
“By spending over a year ignoring U.S. law on supplying arms, the Biden administration has handed Trump an excuse to ignore any law he wants,” Center for International Policy executive vice president Matt Duss said Tuesday on social media. “And they will have nothing to say about it.”
Duss called the Biden administration’s new determination “predictable, pathetic, and blatantly illegal.”
Out with the old administration’s ghouls and in with the new.
Gaza is rubble and it’s people, those that have survived the bombing, are being starved.
We, as a country, are so ƒ¨ç˚´∂.
Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), on Electronic Intifada today.
As predicted, the genocide will continue seamlessly and will continue after the new regime takes office. Millions of US denizens willingly participated in supporting the genocide by “voting” for the Ds and Rs.
And a survey of today’s Anglo mass media “news” sites would indicate that there is no genocide, and no problem. If the mass media ignores it, then it doesn’t exist. Giving genocidal oligarchs free publicity is more important than reporting in-your-face genocide.
Re Alice’s comment “Out with the old administration’s ghouls and in with the new.”
One can only speculate about debates and intrigues at the UN in 2025; however, words spoken be the Republican House Rep from NY state who is to assume the US seat and become the face/voice of US policy at the the Security Council points to more of the same.
Let her own words delivered at the Knesset help set the tone:
https://stefanik.house.gov/2024/5/stefanik-delivers-historic-address-on-antisemitism-and-u-s-support-for-israel-at-israeli-knesset
226 days ago, we witnessed the most vicious, brutal attack on Israel and the Jewish people since the Holocaust…Civilian women, children, and the elderly were ripped from their homes and massacred. Raped — Beheaded — Jewish families were bound together and burned. Babies burned alive. Atrocities of humanity…
What we are witnessing today is a story of the forces of good versus evil. The forces of civilization against the forces of barbarism, of humanity versus depravity.
In truth, total victory is about more than responding to one attack, it’s about restoring a way of life. It is about securing the Jewish State so that it no longer faces threats of annihilation from any actor, whether from Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, or any other.
Leaving aside the fact that Stefanik is clearly deranged for whom the most suitable treatment is a gag and a straightjacket, I would say that the legal actions of the Resistance against an Occupying Power (which responds by proceeding to massacre it’s own citzens and then blames their extermination on the Resistance) bears no relation to the enormity of the evil crimes committed against the USS Liberty and it’s crew on 8 June 1967, truly a date that will go down in history when Lyndon Johnson chose to cover up the crime rather than destroy the Israeli war machine.
That unpatriotic failure has to led, war by war, murder by murder, torture by torture, to the genocidal crimes the world has been watching the Israelis commit day by day over the past year with an American President as deeply complicit in the Zionist Big Lie as Johnson was.
It will be a tragedy if this is all humanity will be able to remember of the Trump Presidency as well. The genocide is greater than the US and the West, and Israel is an ongoing crime against humanity. If it is to be allowed to remain to exist, it must do so in the strict confines of UN Resolution 181, or not at all.
You can’t beat the Israeli’s for Assholiness, enabled and endorsed by the “Shining City on a Hill”.
I’m 71 years old and I have been paying attention to American Foreign policy for 61 of those years, the Genocide in Gaza has been the most openly evil behavior by My country during those six decades.
There is no fig leaf.
The US Congress is so openly corrupt, craven and depraved that the gave Netanyahu several standing ovations as he spewed transparent lies when he appeared before them.
A spry 62 here, but same assessment of Bibi’s visit to Congress. Nauseated me physically and spiritually for days, and left in its wake no hope for nor pride in America.
Palestine is clearly an American-enabled genocide but the veto power in the U.N. has neutered the international response. Gaza is a dress-rehearsal for what is coming: genocide as the solution to the coming climate-induced mass migration.
The American voters face a Sophie’s Choice of only two allowed political parties, both committed to genocide. At a 63.5 turnout of eligible voters (non-felon citizens) about 100 million Americans sat out last week’s election. We all should have.
I had hoped I was sending a message by writing in “Cenk Uygur”. Clearly, messages like that are “not received” by the democratic party.
Yeah. How long before they set up minefields and sentry guns across the entire southern border? Backed up by AI controlled armed quadcopters. Gaza and Ukraine are harbingers.
73 here. I’ve been paying attention for nearly as long as Mr Stone, since I was a cub scout on a tour of the San Gabriel Mission and heard the docent gesture towards an empty lot and casually mention that’s where the Indians were buried (Spain the imperial culprit). Agreed, there is no fig leaf and as Yves wrote, tragedy fatigue.
100% David, we all should have.
I was surprised at the very low third-party vote totals, everywhere. They were the only peace parties, but somehow getting the Democrats out overweighed making a point to warmongers. In fairness, the Arabs of Dearborn got it.
I guess “them young-uns” can’t quite comprehend the extent of the deterioration of civic awareness and responsibility as citizens to hold their elected leaders responsible for the actions taken on our behalf (with OUR blood and treasure!!) that has taken place over the last 4 or 5 decades (I turn 70 next year :^\ ). We’ve sadly come a long way since the outrage over “Four dead in Ohio”.
Kent State put me over the top. I went to school at Case Western Reserve Uni about 15 miles away. The Fall semester in ’70 was very subdued. I dropped out, raised my freak flag high and have devoted the past 54 years to throwing sand in the gears.
My eyes were opened during the Six Day War in ’67 when my father came home from work with comic books depicting the “others” as non-human. I was appalled and still am. Nothing has changed.
Not really,, the biggest a-holes in the world are the US oligarchy. Without the US (and UK), Israel would not exist and none of this would be happening .
While the US Genocide of Palestine is indeed horrific, and evil. The carpet bombing of SE Asia was also pretty bad. Many hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered, and unexploded ordnance is still a big problem to this day. Apparently Laos is still the most bombed country in history.
But let’s not forget Korea.
“Assholiness”! Stealing it.
Yes! good one:, we have plain “holiness” and a new antonym “Assholiness”
My neighbor uses “assholery” which is my word of the month.
Def per urban dictionary : Actions or behavior consistent with being an a**hole.
That’s a good one too, reminds me of the Jamaican patois word “fuckery”. I first heard that word used by Peter Tosh when I was a kid in the late 1970s.
Really? More evil than engineering famine to kill 500,000 Iraqi children in Iraq during the Clinton Administration?
( This is indeed the very proudest the DC FedRegime has ever been about supporting an evil which is applied slowly to cause maximum visible torture to the targets during the whole evil rollout process. So perhaps it could well be called the most mockingly performative evil ever indulged in.)
More evil than re-invading Iraq all over again during the Cheney/(bush) Administration?
The DC FedRegime offers a lot of evils to choose from, compare and contrast.
@Editors – you should correct the spelling of Alex Christoforou’s name in your blogroll.
I’m no law expert but anyone passingly familiar with the UN Charter art. 2, might see the more than flagrant violations. (The UN Charter is US law: it was signed by the pres and ratified by Senate)
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-1
The Arms Export Control Act appears to be made a mockery of as well, yet we are not supposed to believe our lying eyes. I recall over ten years ago Ron Paul (R) and Dennis Kucinich (D) were brave enough to point this out and were some of the very few to genuinely speak out against US Israel policy. And look what their parties did to them.
The US gov. uses “the law” when convenient, or simply ignores it when not convenient, this is nothing new. SE Asia was infamously and illegally carpet-bombed during the early 1970s. No one was held to account
I recall prof. Bill Black saying that the largest financial crimes in the history of the US were never even investigated, and no one was held to account.
Iraq was bombed into the Stone Age and turned into a failed state, based on a pack of transparent lies. No one was held to account.
The law in the US is a tool of the powerful to use to further their own interests, and attempt to make it look. acceptable. Besides, poor folk don’t have access, it is an expensive process reserved for the wealthy. 500 bucks an hour or more is not affordable to most of the population.
As I have mentioned several times before, there is no pressure in the god fearing, Christian USA to ever compensate foreign citizens for harm done to them by the USA.
After the dust settled in Iraq, and the lack of WMD’s that this small nation just might use against the USA was obvious, the world should have pressured the USA to provide massive rebuilding aid and compensation to the Iraqis.
Instead Paul Wolfowitz stated that Iraq could fund its own rebuilding.
To judge from the billboards and radio ads in California for personal injury lawyers, USAians expect to be compensated for injuries caused by others.
But when the USA government causes unprovoked death and destruction overseas, no compensation is offered by the ostensibly religious and righteousness USA to overseas victims.
Law experience has nothing to do with it. Once amoral, always amoral and unethical. You can’t make this stuff up.
Chutzpah is not an Anglo Saxon term, but it aptly captures an entire cultural proclivity. The carnage in Gaza and now in Lebanon is beyond words. What’s particularly gulling is that the genocide is being streamed real time, even as the Committee to Protect Journalists notes: “As of November 13, 2024, CPJ’s preliminary investigations showed at least 137 journalists and media workers were among the more than tens of thousands killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.”
https://cpj.org/2024/11/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/
In explaining Trump’s win, MSNBC is doing summersaults claiming at “identity politics” is what sank Harris, completely burying the fact that the economy stinks for working families, that people are disgusted by the Biden/ Blinken/ Netanyahu non-stop of money and lethal weapons to Israel to finish up what’s left of humanity in that land. And, isn’t it the special treatment demanded against those who oppose “Zionism” a for of identity politics protection? Regrettably, under the new Administration the “Palestinian Final Solution” will continue, courtesy of the likes of Miriam Adelson and her $100M “campaign donation.”
True, and the set-up for Israel to annex the West Bank is here. The first DT regime “recognized” occupied Golan as part of Israel. The second DT regime will almost certainly recognize the occupied West Bank as Israeli. The puppet-state of Jordan will roll-over and go along with it.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/16/israel-minister-demands-west-bank-annexation-if-un-court-rules-against-it
You are correct. In 2017, Trump’s new Ambassador to Israel, Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee claimed that there’s “no such thing as a West Bank, settlements, or occupation.” 30 second clip.
Trump only hires the best and I’m sure Miriam Adelson approves.
https://packaged-media.redd.it/lzkgojpjzn0e1/pb/m2-res_480p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1731531600&s=438727ec30cbec2626eb61cf14631c29eb98c951
But in the US, supporting genocide is a bipartisasn affair.
Pretty much summarizes situation. I just sent a sibling who is licking her wounds from the results of the election a pic featuring split image of two B52’s dropping bombs, the one on top said Republican the one on bottom said Democratic. The only difference was that the latter had the rainbow colors on the tail fin.
I am 88 years old. I remember Pearl Harbor being bombed. I remember the pictures of concentration camps I saw in the newspaper. I remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I remember the enfolding of what the Nazis had done in the extermination camps. I remember the Korean War, the Vietnam War. I remember Mylai. I remember shootings and bombings. I remember atrocity after atrocity. Gaza is the worst … so far. Why? You need to ask why? It is not just genocide. It is a genocide condoned and aided by those who see themselves as righteous. It is genocide defended by those murdering and destroying and claiming that it is their right. It is genocide committed with a f–k you attitude and the knowledge that the world is going to watch for a while and then turn aside. But there are those who will not avert their eyes. There are those who will not swallow their anger. And thus have we sown the wind.
Great updated as usual and such reasonable comments as well. It is just so sad that with a so called advanced world we live in will stand by and watch an entire race of people be exterminated. I think the worst part for me is that the only reason is that other countries care more about economics than morallity. As an American, I personally believe the only possible way to stop it is not to vote which is exactly my plan unless an option to stop it all runs for election which just wont happen.
I wouldn’t call it tragedy fatigue. It is impotence and Sisiphean.
As individuals, and quite disconected and all living in very week communities, with extremely loose bonds – almost thoroughly atomized, except family links (needed for the reproduction of the specie), there is very little we can do. Emailing, phoning representatives will do nothing, because it will be just an insignificant fraction.
Jill Stein got maybe 600K votes, not even a million votes.
MSM has completely burried the story of this genocide and it will keep it that way, and the population at large doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or is for it and there are no ways under heaven to shame them to do something about it.
Almost feel like empathising with the character in the “Three Body Problem” alerting the aliens that hey, there is a livable planet here you can take it over…
I am hoping for a Russian victory in Ukraine as a small step up, and for the acceleration of climate change as the potential vehicle for societal change (hoping that climate change will make that cursed sliver of land inhospitable for all).
Wait, you are equating tragedy fatigue with Sisiphean-ness? I loved the Myth of Sisphus, but my take on it is completely different. You embrace your struggle and it is no longer a struggle, it is a passion. Maybe my take on it is incorrect, but it makes the struggle easier, even against the overwhelming odds of MSM and deep state (how ever you perceive it). Also, nope…can’t empathize with the antagonists actions in Three Body Problem. Good book, but that was over the top.
If climate change makes that cursed silver of land inhospitable for all, climate change will move on to make many other cursed silvers of land inhospitable for all as well. Just a reminder.
Israel has already targeted the West Bank for annexation and had the Democrats stayed in power, there is little chance they would have stopped it. As to Trump, he doesn’t need the Democrats to set a precedent for illegal US support for Israel. If anything, he set the precedent with the annexation of the Golan Heights, which the Biden administration chose to uphold.
Biden’s blatant disregard for the law only affirms the moral and legal bankruptcy of the Democratic Party which they’ve demonstrated again and again throughout this slaughter. Par for the course.
Well, neither Biden or Harris needs the ” Jewish vote” ( real, mythical or otherwise) for anything anymore because neither of them has anything left to run for.
So this decision is an expression of Biden’s deepestly held beliefs and desires. ( Harris’s only belief was in becoming President and her only desire was to become President).
And Trump has signalled his utter, absolute and total enthusiasm for this approach by naming Mike Huckabee as his Ambassador to Israel.
https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/politics/2024/11/12/trump-picks-former-arkansas-gov-mike-huckabee-to-be-ambassador-to-israel/
As AIPAC loses some of its power, which it will, the new Israel Lobby will be led by CUFI and organized around CUFI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christians_United_for_Israel
https://cufi.org/about/
The US should let Israil to become 51st state and modify the flag by adding a blue David’ star in the center.
It’s sick to think this but I really don’t believe that we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg yet. There are so many levels of escalation that these numbskulls have programmed into their algorithm that we may be stuck in a slow descent to (not utopian) anarchy that would make 6th century Rome look like belle époque France. It reminds me of the scene in Caddyshack where the bishop, high on his recent success on the course, decides to play a round in a lightning storm…
https://youtu.be/Pe5eL8LQdY0?feature=shared
Now, as a reminder, here is a little article about part of the upcoming Trump plans? Hysteria? Prophecy?
I decided I didn’t want to find out, which is why I voted for Harris. Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/houstonwade/comments/1gqca4q/once_the_trump_mass_deportation_process_starts/
Since either President was going to bring the same Gazacide, the difference was in what domestic outcomes either President would bring. And for those who view America as a real place instead of just an abstract simulation they happen to be playing a character inside of, that is the difference that the binary choice of “who will be president” would have made/ will make going forward.
After eight years of not seeming to do much about it, Eisenhower in his farewell address finally warned us about the military-industrial complex. Too little too late. The American Empire is still on the march. The only thing likely to stop it is Anthropogenic Global Warming, coming soon to a biome near you. As one of the few who voted for Jill Stein, I can only marvel at how totally messed up America has been throughout my lifetime. We invented “the American Dream” and then turned it into a nightmare.
Well, on April 16, 1953, not three months into his administration Eisenhower gave a speech addressed to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in Washington D.C. titled The Chance for Peace, but which is more commonly known as the Cross of Iron Speech.
A clip:
Volumes have been written that demonstrate that it was USian imperialists after FDR’s demise that started the Cold War and they sabotaged Ike’s sentiments expressed in the speech as well. His farewell address was a bookend to undue influence that was already well established.