far right
Israeli ministers speak to extremist conference about clearing Gaza for settlement
A day after the ICJ’s damning verdict that found Israel’s genocidal acts as fact, government ministers call for more war crimes
Around twenty Israeli government ministers and Knesset members have attended a right-wing extremist event demanding the clearing of Gaza and the replacement of the indigenous Palestinian people with Zionist settlers.
Security minister Itamar ben Gvir, communications minister Shlomo Karhi, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke at, and a string of other members of the Netanyahu government and government parties attended, the event – titled “Conference for the Victory of Israel – Settlement Brings Security: Returning to the Gaza Strip and Northern Samaria”.
Ben Gvir – himself an illegal settler – told the far right gathering of the imperative to ‘voluntarily’ move the Palestinian population out of Gaza:
We need to find a legal way to voluntarily emigrate [Palestinians] and impose death sentences on terrorists.
I turn to you, PM Netanyahu: this is time for brave decisions.
Smotrich, according to Israeli paper Haaretz, said:
We are rising, we have a nation of lions [and many children] are returning there as combat fighters. We must make sure they return there as settlers to protect the people of Israel.
Karhi clarified what a farce all talk of ‘voluntary’ migration is:
‘…voluntary’ is at times a state you impose [on someone] until they give their consent.
Katz added, in chilling language:
Today, after 18 years [from disengagement from Gaza], we have the opportunity to rebuild and expand the land of Israel. This is our final opportunity.
The conference came just a couple of days after another far-right event titled ‘Victory Convention: Conquer and Colonise Gaza’.
Israel has continued to slaughter hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered its interim ruling, despite being ordered by the court to take all measures to prevent any Palestinians being killed. Now, after the court found as fact the genocidal language used by Israeli government figures, others are piling the evidence still higher.
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Why does the ‘march against antisemitism’ look so much like a National Front rally?
Far right is a strong presence at both
A pro-Israel ‘march against antisemitism’ and a National Front march – but which is which?
The latest ‘march against antisemitism’ – code for a gathering of those who support Israel despite or because of its apartheid and its genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza – bears a strong resemblance to National Front marches and rallies.
Wonder why that might be – well there’s the pervasive presence of the far-right at both. At a recent such march, members of the demo protested against the removal of right-wing extremist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson – and the links between pro-Israel hardliners and the far right have long been well established, if largely ignored by the so-called ‘mainstream’ media.
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Netanyahu ‘changes tune’ about ethnic cleansing on eve of ICJ genocide hearing
Israeli PM broadcasts ‘clarification’ – but only in English
Far-right Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has suddenly – for the first time – said that he doesn’t want to drive Palestinians out of Gaza. Previously, Netanyahu has described Gazans as ‘Amalek’, a reference to a biblical nation that the Israelites destroyed down to the last person, while his ministers have talked in various ways about the destruction, flattening, ‘voluntary’ transfer and even nuclear bombing of Gaza’s population – and his ambassador to the UK has spoken of the complete destruction of Gaza as the only ‘solution’.
The change comes on the evening before Israel faces South Africa’s genocide accusations in the International Court of Justice:
Netanyahu repeated the ridiculous claim that Israel – which has murdered more than 30,000 civilians, more than two thirds of them women and children, and maimed almost sixty thousand others – is doing all it can to minimise civilian casualties an that its orders driving Palestinians out of northern Gaza to be bombed in the south is somehow humanitarian.
They lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and . . .#NetanyahuIsAwarCriminalhttps://t.co/OPwAC5KyXu
— RonniSalt (@RonniSalt) January 10, 2024
Israel appears to be seriously worried about the outcome of the ICJ case. Netanyahu, who faced corruption charges before again becoming PM, looks personally worried too. But no statement or change of tune can mask Israel’s genocidal intent in its mass murder of women and children and its bombing of schools, hospitals and homes, or hide the direct violence and the deprivation of food, water, fuel and medicines that threaten to kill far more innocent Palestinian civilians than the bombs and bullets.
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Change.org disables huge petition for expulsion of far-right Israeli ambassador
Petition was over 100,000 signatures when removed ‘for review’
A huge petition by signed by the British people to demand the expulsion from the UK of far-right Israeli ambassador Tsipi Hotovely has been deactivated by petition hosting site change.org.
The petition had been signed by more than 100,000 people – the point at which it should trigger a formal debate on the topic in Parliament:
But anyone attempting to read or sign the petition now is unable to do so – because change.org has removed it for ‘review’:
The petition was started after Hotovely, a far-right figure described by Israeli paper Haaretz as ‘the ugly, extremist face of Israel’, justified Israel’s flattening of Gaza and mass killing of civilians during an interview on LBC last week:
Hotovely went on to claim that the IDF was killing children because Hamas was parading them ‘in front of every place the IDF soldiers were getting’. Israel has killed more than 30,000 people in Gaza so far, more than two thirds of them children and women, and has forcibly displaced almost two million Gazan Palestinians. It now faces charges of genocide at the international Court of Justice brought by South Africa.
Change.org has been contacted for comment on its reasons for removing the petition.
Update: the page was reinstated at some point afterward.
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Israel and media ‘Hamas rape’ claims collapse under scrutiny
‘Eye-witness’ accounts contradict evidence – and earlier claims of the eye-witnesses – as yet another atrocity propaganda campaign falls apart. Warning: potential triggering or distressing content
The outraged reaction of the family of an alleged ‘Hamas rape’ victim to a newspaper’s con is just one of the ways in which the ‘Hamas rape’ narrative now being pushed hard by the Israeli regime and its apologists has fallen apart hard – like every other piece of atrocity propaganda Israel has tried to use so far to justify its genocide in Gaza.
The New York Times has published an article claiming to have evidence of the weaponisation of rape by Hamas during the 7 October raid, but the centrepiece of its claims was supposed ‘evidence’ that Israeli woman Gal Abdush was raped and murdered by Hamas fighters, quoting extensively from an interview with her family.
But her family has furiously insisted that there is no evidence that Ms Abdush was raped – and slammed the paper for misleading and manipulating them by telling them the interview was for a memorial about her and her husband and not mentioning anything about rape.
Speak Up, which fights violence against women, condemned the NYT investigation as ‘disgraceful’ ‘weaponisation’ of sexual violence for propaganda
The family – who appear to be hardline right-wingers perfectly prepared to propagate the already-discredited Israeli lines about beheadings and dismemberments, and therefore not inclined to discredit the rape report out of support for Palestinians – responded after the article was published. They pointed out, among other things, that there were only a few minutes passed between one message from their sister’s husband that they were at the Gaza border and another saying she had been shot – no time for the rape claimed by Israeli authorities and the NYT:
Gal Abdush’s family’s statement (translation by David Sheen and Electronic Intifada)
In fact, the family’s comment – though they don’t seem to have joined the dots – suggests that Ms Abdush and her husband were killed by Israeli forces determined, under the ‘Hannibal directive‘ of killing potential hostages rather than allowing them to be taken, since ‘at the border’ the Hamas fighters would only have been interested in getting them into captivity – and Hamas had no weapons capable of leaving bodies ‘totally burned’, while Israeli planes and helicopter gunships armed with missiles did and it is now well known in Israel, if ignored by UK and US media, that IDF forces killed Israelis in their determination to eliminate Hamas fighters holding them.
Another element of the atrocity propaganda to collapse are the lurid tales from supposed eye-witnesses who claimed that Hamas fighters – while trying to flee with their captives or fight Israeli troops – stopped to rape and dismember a woman and play catch with her body parts.
The ‘eyewitnesses’ have changed their stories. One was interviewed earlier and neglected to mention the claims of beheadings and games; another – coincidentally an Israeli ‘security consultant’ – had earlier admitted that he saw nothing because he was hiding with his head down the whole time, yet now claims he saw the same as the other witness.
Haaretz, 8 Nov 2023
Not only that, but Israeli lists of victims and their means of death do not claim to have found people at the site in question who had been beheaded or mutilated.
Another ‘eyewitness’ to a different supposed rape, Raz Cohen, happens to have recently been in the Democratic Republic of Congo, training DRC soldiers. While he claims to have seen the rape and to be haunted by the victim’s ‘screams without words’, shortly after the Hamas raid he filmed himself talking about the incident and published it on TikTok – where he seems upbeat and doesn’t mention any of the claims now attributed to him. Journalist Max Blumenthal analysed the changes in Cohen’s testimony:
While much of the NYT “mass Hamas rape” report relies on innuendo, it also purports to contain several credible eyewitness testimonies. One was delivered by a survivor of the Nova electronic music festival named Raz Cohen, who also happens to be an Israeli special forces vet who trains Congolese soldiers. Since his first interview on October 9, Cohen has altered his testimony several times.
Cohen told the NYT he personally witnessed a white van filled with Hamas militants pull up a mile from the Nova music festival, gather over a woman, and gang rape her: “I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.” He said they then butchered the woman with knives.
When Cohen was interviewed on October 9 about the attack on the music festival, however, he did not mention any act of sexual assault committed by Hamas militants. See here: https://twitter.com/i24NEWS_EN/sta… And here: http://tiktok.com/@lior.shapira9…
A day later, Cohen began to introduce vague suggestions of sexual assault into his testimony, but did not indicate that he witnessed any such acts taking place. “The terrorists captured women and hurt them in any way possible, and when they were done with them, they started butchering them in front of their friends,” Cohen told an Israeli publication: http://ashkelnayes.co.il/%D7%97%D7%A8%D…
Cohen was also interviewed by Canada’s CBC on October 10, but was not quoted about witnessing any rape: http://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/20…
The same day, Cohen offered lurid new details to PBS, claiming that “the terrorists” not only slaughtered women after raping them on October 7, but engaged in necrophilia as well: “The terrorists, people from Gaza, raped girls. And after they raped them, they killed them, murdered them with knives, or the opposite, killed — and after they raped, they — they did that.” http://pbs.org/newshour/show/…
Testimony he provided to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on October 11 differed slightly, and remained vague: “We see from there a lot of people and girls screaming and murdered by knives. And the girls, the terrorists rape them,” he stated abruptly and without apparent emotion. http://tiktok.com/@abcnewsaus/vi…
By this point, no Israeli media had reported that any rapes occurred on October 7. Cohen quickly fell off the media’s radar. He would not be heard from for over two months, when the Israeli government launched an international propaganda campaign accusing Hamas of mass rape in a transparent bid to maintain international support for its genocidal military assault on Gaza.
At this point, when the NY Times’ Jeffrey @gettleman interviewed Cohen, likely reaching him with assistance from the Israeli government, the “IDF” special forces soldier summoned for the first time a vivid account of a shocking gang rape on October 7.
How and why did Cohen’s story transform so dramatically over time, providing explosive new details at a moment of political urgency for the army in which he served? Was it plausible that a group of hardened Hamas commandoes suddenly paused their surprise attack, which was focused on taking as many captives as quickly as possible, stood in a circle and gang raped a woman, one after another, while Israeli forces mobilized to attack them?
Why did Hamas militants use knives to kill their victims, as Cohen alleged, when they carried rifles and grenades? Why did he drop his earlier allegation of necrophilia when speaking to the Times? And why did he mention seeing “a lot of people and girls” being raped to the ABC on October 11, but alter his testimony to refer specifically to a single female victim when interviewed by the Times?
Perhaps most importantly, why did Cohen’s friend, Shoam Gueta, who took shelter with him on October 7, not describe witnessing a gang rape when interviewed by the Times?
In his very first interview, with a US news station only two days after the Hamas raid, Cohen appeared mostly relaxed – and didn’t mention anyone being raped, as this clip aired recently on Grayzone shows:
Other Israeli mouthpieces have tried to bypass the eyewitnesses altogether, claiming it would be wrong to expect eyewitnesses to come forward and that ‘the corpses tell the story’. But they don’t, because the bodies were buried without evidence being taken, using Jewish burial practices to justify the failure to collect evidence – just as the huge number of cars incinerated by weapons Hamas does not possess were scrapped and buried without collecting evidence. Not one piece of actual evidence appears to have been put forward by Israel, yet the atrocity propaganda continues to be repeated by the so-called ‘mainstream’.
Yet again, Israel’s attempts to demonise Palestinian resistance to justify genocide have fallen apart under scrutiny – scrutiny that the so-called ‘mainstream’ press and broadcasters are simply not doing, or even reporting facts that media in Israel have already acknowledged, such as the mass killing of Israelis during the raid by Israeli media.
For full analysis and more video highlighting the collapse of yet another Israeli atrocity propaganda narrative, watch this video by Electronic Intifada and this by Grayzone.
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Starmer ‘planning attack on Corbyn’ in Bristol speech in desperate attention ploy
Best plan for left-wingers is to ignore feeble attempt to provoke backlash in pursuit of ‘MSM’ attention
Rent-free: Starmer can’t stop thinking about Corbyn and has nothing to offer than ‘I’m not him’
‘Labour’ ‘leader’ Keir Starmer is planning to make his planned speech in Bristol on Thursday an attack on Labour’s last real leader, Jeremy Corbyn, according to Labour sources.
The speech venue is being kept secret until the last minute in an attempt to avoid scenes of protests by large crowds outraged by Starmer’s support for Israeli genocide and apartheid, and disgusted by his adoption of Tory politics – and party insiders say that Starmer is frustrated at his inability to get the so-called ‘mainstream’ media’s attention and that his speech will be little more than another assault on Corbyn in an attempt to provoke an online reacton from left-wingers and get the media to give him airtime.
The best response from the left, therefore, is to treat Starmer’s feeble tactics with the disdain they deserve and ignore them while talking positively about the left’s vision and the hope it offers, rather than to engage and boost both his social media metrics and the chances of the media taking notice.
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Israel planning to transfer Palestinians to Congo
Ethnic cleansing plans outed further but still ignored by western ‘mainstream’ media
Image: ActionAid
Israel is negotiating with Congo – it is unclear from reports which of the two neighbouring Congos – and other African nations to transfer the Palestinian people, according to reports in the Times of Israel and its sister site Zman Israel.
Both the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) regularly see serious human rights violations, including massacres. A 2022 US Department of State report on human rights in the Republic, which is commonly known as Congo Brazzaville after its capital city to distinguish it from its neighbour – states that:
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; political prisoners or detainees; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference
and more.
In the DRC, human rights groups have noted massacres and other human rights violations. Amnesty International said in 2022 that the DRC:
continued to experience serious human rights violations, including mass killings in the context of armed conflict and inter-communal violence, a crackdown on dissent and ill-treatment of detainees. People from regions affected by armed conflict, including eastern DRC, were particularly affected amid mass displacement and a deepening humanitarian crisis. The authorities continued to show a lack of political will to hold the perpetrators of human rights violations to account. The right to education was violated.
The Times quoted a ‘senior’ security cabinet source and comments by Israeli minister Gila Gamliel:
Israeli officials have held clandestine talks with the African nation of Congo and several others for the potential acceptance of Gaza emigrants.
“Congo will be willing to take in migrants, and we’re in talks with others,” a senior source in the security cabinet tells [journalist] Shalom Yerushalmi.
Yerushalmi quotes Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel saying at the Knesset yesterday: “At the end of the war Hamas rule will collapse, there are no municipal authorities, the civilian population will be entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. There will be no work, and 60% of Gaza’s agricultural land will become security buffer zones.”
The UK government has disgraced itself by continued attempts to transfer desperate refugees to Rwanda, attempts continually blocked by the courts – but the Israeli regime was the first to do it, sending around 4,000 Black refugees fleeing war in Eritrea and Sudan to Rwanda between 2013 and 2018 before discontinuing what it called ‘voluntary’ departure – similar to the ‘voluntary emigration’ euphemism it uses for its ethnic cleansing plan, alongside ‘humanitarian migration’.
Israel has an appalling record toward Black people, even Black Jews – and last year threatened to deport them, too. The SAGE Race & Class Journal notes that:
Ethiopian Jews who have been brought into Israel in several mass transfer operations, have found themselves relegated to an underclass. They are not only racially discriminated against in housing, employment, education, the army and even in the practice of their religion, but have also been unwittingly used to bolster illegal settlements.
Now, as well as the already-outed plan to force huge numbers of Palestinians out of Gaza into the Egyptian desert, Israel is actively working on plans to force more out of the Middle East altogether and into Africa. The Israeli regime’s war crimes continue to pile up.
Despite the similarities with the UK’s racist government, at the time of writing the UK’s so-called ‘mainstream’ media have not reported Israel’s plan – as has been the case with much of Israel’s racism and criminality.
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Israel ‘kills several’ in two new attacks on Red Crescent HQ in Khan Younis
Occupier targets humanitarian group – again
Israel has killed ‘several people’ in two separate attacks on the Khan Younis HQ of the International Red Crescent humanitarian organisation in Gaza. The group, the sister organisation in Muslim areas of the International Red Cross, has not yet put a number on how many were killed and injured.
The attacks are the second and third times in just over a week that Israel has targeted the Red Crescent HQ – with the first attack taking place just after Christmas:
The bombings come om the day that the genocidal regime also destroyed buildings and killed civilians in a missile strike in Lebanese capital Beirut, claiming to have targeted a Hamas building to assassinatea single official of the Palestinian resistance group, Saleh Al Arouri, in yet another extra-judicial murder. The attack is likely to trigger retaliatory strikes by Lebanese forces, perhaps in the form of long-range rockets.
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Huge victories for humanity as German courts rule Gaza chants protected speech
‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ and other chants for freedom and against genocide are freedom of expression, despite government efforts to criminalise pro-Palestinian protest
Image: Die Linke
In a huge victory for human rights, for humanity and for the Palestinian people, the Münster Administrative Court in north-west Germany has ruled that chants and slogans frequently used in pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide rallies and marches are not illegal.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Child murderer Israel” are not only legal but are protected by freedom of expression laws. “Stop the genocide in Gaza” has already been ruled legal by the Cologne Administrative Court.
The German state, which has some of the most extreme laws protecting Israel from criticism of its actions, has used riot police and draconian action to try to quell the protests.
Palestinian legal advocacy group the European Legal Support Center, which has been fighting the cases on behalf of the movement, noted that:
In both decisions, the judge reiterated that criticism of the Israeli state is protected by freedom of expression, stressing that the slogans are directed against Israel & not against the Jewish population of Germany, thus rejecting any inflammatory allegations of antisemitism.
Both court decisions followed protest bans issued by the Police. We congratulate the activists and their lawyers who refused to be silenced and boldly challenged the bans!
The decisions come as the UK government continues to try to demonise protesters and to use anti-terror laws to persecute activists working for human rights and justice in Palestine and to stop Israel’s mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing of civilians, which has taken approaching 30,000 innocent lives so far, around half of them children. Many more have been hideously wounded and more than seven out of ten of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are reported to be in severe hunger.
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