Gaza
Pics/vid: Liverpool comes out three times for Gaza – Grand National, city and Waterloo
City sees whole weekend of solidarity and activism
Liverpool and Merseyside saw a whole weekend of solidarity with the Palestinians against Israel’s genocide over the last couple of days – beginning with a demonstration at Aintree racecourse for the Grand National.
Protesters, including members of Merseyside’s Jewish community, received a positive reaction from most racegoers as they braved windy weather to wave banners and Palestinian flags:
Sunday saw a large march through the city centre – numbers that have remained undiminished through the long months of Israel’s ongoing war crimes against Palestinian civilians – including a group of women holding ‘bloodied’ bundles representing the around eighteen thousand children murdered in Gaza:
And on Sunday night, around a hundred activists – gathered at Da Gurka restaurant in Waterloo to share food, lift spirits and raise thousands of pounds for Medical Aid for Palestinians.
Israel is losing the PR war badly, its murderousness and arrogance as it slaughters tens of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children, and tries to starve two million more, appalling the world and prompting millions to turn out on the streets every week. The flailing of its far-right regime is now putting the whole world in danger as it tries to provoke a regional war and bring the US into open aggression against the Muslim nations around it.
Free Palestine. Justice for Gaza and the West Bank.
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The Palestine Congress
Thank God for the German Hate Police! Or heil … or whatever the appropriate salutation is for these unsung heroes. They just saved us all from “hate” again!
Yes, that’s right, once again, democracy-loving people here in New Normal Berlin and all across the New Normal world were right on the brink of being exposed to “hate,” and would have been exposed to “hate,” had the Hate Police not sprang into action.
You probably have no idea what I’m talking about.
OK, what happened was, some pro-Palestinian activists organized a “Palestine Congress,” and attempted to discuss the situation in Gaza, and call for solidarity with the Palestinians, and so on, right here in the middle of Berlin, the epicenter of European democracy, as if they thought they had a right to do that. The German authorities were clearly intent on disabusing them of that notion.
Early Friday morning, hundreds of black-clad Hate Police descended on the congress location. Reinforcements were called in from throughout the nation. Metal barricades were erected on the sidewalks. Hate Police stood guard at the entrance. The German media warned the public that a potential “Hate-Speech” attack was now imminent. Berliners were advised to shelter in place, switch off their phones and any other audio-receptive communication devices, and wad up little pieces of toilet paper and ram them deep into their ear canals to prevent any possible exposure to the “hate.”
Sure enough, minutes into the congress, the anticipated “Hate-Speech” attack was launched! A Palestinian activist — Salman Abu Sitta — who had written an article that allegedly “expressed understanding of Hamas,” and thus had already been placed on the official German “No-Speak” list, started speaking to the congress on Zoom or whatever. Or … it isn’t quite clear whether he actually started speaking. According to a Hate Police spokesperson, they raided the congress because “there is a risk of a speaker being put on the screen who in the past made anti-Semitic and violence-glorifying remarks.”
Anyway, the Hate Police stormed the venue, pulled the plug, dispersed the crowd, and banned the rest of the “Palestine Congress,” which was scheduled to continue on Saturday and Sunday. Then they arrested a Jewish guy who was wearing a Palestinian-flag-kippah, presumably out of an abundance of caution.
But the “Hate-Speech” attack wasn’t over yet. It was one of those multi-pronged “Hate-Speech” attacks, or at least it involved one other prong. Earlier that morning, or perhaps while the Hate Police were still neutralizing the threat at the venue, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, a prominent British surgeon, who had volunteered in Gaza and was due to speak at the congress, was intercepted by the Berlin Airport Hate Police, refused entry into Germany, and forced to return to the UK. The Airport Hate Police informed the doctor that he was being denied entry in order to ensure “the safety of the people at the conference and public order,” Abu Sitta told the Associated Press.
Kai Wegner, Berlin’s mayor, presumably feeling a bit nostalgic for the fanatical days of 2020 to 2023 when one could persecute “the Unvaccinated” with total impunity, took to X to celebrate the Hate Police’s thwarting of this “Hate event.”
The pro-Palestinian activist community also took to X and expressed their displeasure. Yanis “Vaccinate Humanity” Varoufakis, who was one of the organizers and was scheduled to speak, was particularly incensed over the new German “fascism,” which apparently he has just now noticed, despite the fact that it has been goose-stepping around in a medical-looking mask for the last four years.
Yanis was not alone in his outrage. An increasing number of mainstream German journalists, authors, academics, and other members of the professional “progressive” classes are stunned that the new totalitarian society that they fanatically ushered into being during the so-called “Covid Pandemic” era — or stood by in silence and watched it happen — is now unleashing its fascistic force against them.
Which, OK, I get it. I mean, if I had just spent the last four years behaving like a Nazi, you know, persecuting “the Unvaccinated,” demonizing everyone who refused to wear the insignia of my fascist ideology on their face, and parroting official propaganda like an enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument, or just stood by in silence while other people did that, I would probably want to act like that never happened, and pretend that Germany was suddenly going “fascist” over the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and just memory-hole the whole “Covid” thing.
I would probably be highly motivated to do that — if that were how I had behaved for the past four years — so that I didn’t appear to be a fucking hypocrite who will start clicking heels and following orders the moment the authorities declare another fake emergency and jack up the Fear.
Sorry … I’ve been trying to be less vituperative, but this memory-holing bullshit makes me go ballistic. If there is one demographic that I do not need to hear sanctimonious exhortations to speak out against the global crackdown on dissent from, it’s recently ex-Covidian-Cult leftists.
In any event, thank God for those Hate Police! If it weren’t for them … well, just imagine the horror, if the activists at that Palestine Congress had been allowed to express their opinions about Israel. They might have even said the word “genocide,” or made reference to a “river” and a “sea.”
Who knows what that kind of unbridled “hate” could lead to? Perhaps the end of democracy. Maybe even World War III.
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CJ Hopkins
April 14, 2024
DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.
As Israel supporters weaponise Sydney attack as ‘Muslim’, early reports suggest killer was Cohen
No name of knife attacker killed by police has been officially released, despite senior officers saying the killer was known to the New South Wales force
The unnamed police officer who shot the knife attacker crouches over his body
Update: the attacker has finally been identified as Joel Cauchi, a 40yo Queensland man. Hartley Brewer and Kern seem to have deleted their tweets but only Hartley-Brewer has bothered to issue a correction at the time of this update. None has apologised and Riley has added a follow-up tweet in which she still attacks Palestinians supporters, saying ‘no, the man being named Joel Cauchi has not changed my opinion that is is wrong for people on the streets to be calling for mass terror attacks across the world’. Opponents of genocide are not, of course, doing this.
Pro-Israel apologists who tried to exploit today’s mass-casualty knife attack in Sydney, Australia, by claiming it was committed by ‘Islamists’ or ‘Jihadists’ and linking it to protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza look to have been humiliated after early, though still unconfirmed, reports indicated the killer was a pro-Israel fanatic named Benjamin Cohen.
Five of the six killed were women, including a young mother stabbed while trying to protect her baby. Children are reportedly among those wounded.
A heroic Russian shopper held the knifeman back with a ‘bollard’ before a police officer fatally shot the killer
Right-wingers including TV ‘personalities’ Rachel Riley and Julia Hartley-Brewer were quick to put out social media posts blaming Muslims and supporters of Palestinian human rights:
And the rabid Lee Kern, unsurprisingly, spewed a string of tweets blaming ‘Muslim terrorists’ and ‘fundamentalists’:
The idea that another kind of fundamentalist may well be responsible for the murder of six innocent people and the wounding of five more does not seem to have perturbed their world view – at the time of writing, none of the trio have deleted their posts.
The name of the murderer, despite him being shot dead by an unnamed police officer – and comments from senior New South Wales police officers that the killer ‘was known to the police’ and no terrorist motive is suspected – has not been released, leading some to voice suspicions that this would never be the case if the killer was a Muslim. Only time will tell whether the early reports are correct.
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Uni lecturer wins damages from ‘antisemitism campaigners’ who endangered him and family
James Wilson wins defamation case against Mendelsohn and Cantor in judgment that speaks volumes about methods and attitudes of so-called ‘campaigners against antisemitism’
University lecturer James Wilson has been awarded £30,000 in damages against James Mendelsohn and Edward Cantor for defamatory material published about him during an argument about supposed antisemitism in the Labour party. The false claim, that Mr Wilson was a ‘freak [who] takes pictures of kids’, put Mr Wilson and his partner in fear of physical danger, as well as seriously damaging his reputation. The judge had previously rejected an attempt by Mendelsohn and Cantor to quash the lawsuit.
The judgement lays bare that:
- Mendelsohn and Cantor kept private information and recycled it to the late Dr Pete Newbon – a director of the anti-left group ‘Labour against Antisemitism’ (LAAS), so that he could use it to defame Wilson – the information was untrue and based a) on statements from someone the judge found to have lied about Wilson and b) on false claims about a university disciplinary investigation. Newbon was described by the judge as ‘bullying’
- that Newbon, who committed suicided in 2022 after a row with his wife and has been lionised by so-called ‘antisemitism campaigners’ despite his awful record as a serial troll repeatedly disciplined by his employers Northumbria University for his appalling social media conduct, had not told her of Wilson’s lawsuit against him for the defamatory posts
- Mendelsohn and Cantor refused to apologise, mediate or settle, forcing the legal action to proceed to its conclusion
- a key witness for the defendants said that she had been offered £5,000 by Mendelsohn and Cantor to testify for them (though the judge did not make a finding that her claim was true)
- the defendants further abused and insulted Wilson in the course of their defence – despite, in the case of Cantor, being warned by the judge not to do so
The defendants – who represented themselves in court apart from the use of a barrister to cross-examine Wilson – wheeled out a number of figures who are well known for their attacks on the left in an attempt to shore up their defence. The judge dismissed them:
- University lecturer David Hirsh, a prominent, pro-Israel proponent of supposed ‘left antisemitism’, who wrote an unintentionally revealing elegy to Pete Newbon after his suicide. Hirsh was called to bolster the defendants’ claim that Wilson had shown ‘unwarrantedly aggressive and belligerent conduct’. The judge rejected Hirsh’s evidence that Wilson was ‘aggressive, unpredictable, persistent and irrational’ and found that Wilson’s communications with him over the spreading of a crowdfund for the defendants’ legal costs were ‘not unreasonable’
- Nathan Comiskey, another advocate of ‘left antisemitism’, who claimed that Wilson contacting him about insulting remarks was ‘highly intrusive and upsetting’ and that he had felt ‘harassed and targeted’. The judge ruled that there was nothing unreasonable in Wilson’s communications and that Comiskey’s testimony did nothing to support the defendants’ claims about supposed unwarranted aggression or belligerence
- Simon Myerson – a founding signatory of LAAS and supporter of Israel, and a part-time judge recently sanctioned for judicial misconduct for abusive social media posts. Myerson was also a vocal supporter of Newbon, trying to link Jewish author Michael Rosen to Newbon’s suicide, despite a coroner not mentioning Rosen at all in his inquest findings. Mendelsohn and Cantor put forward Wilson’s communications with Myerson, who had shared a post describing Wilson as ‘scum of the earth’, as evidence to support their claim of aggressive behaviour. The judge ruled that it did nothing of the sort
- Joanne Bell and journalist Adam Cailler – more well-known anti-left activists whose correspondence with Wilson was put forward by the defence as supporting evidence. The judge ruled, “I can find nothing in the emails which is particularly aggressive or which points to conduct of the kind said to demonstrate the pleaded propensity [to aggression]”
A Myerson attack on Michael Rosen
The findings, as well as being clearly welcome to the smeared and endangered James Wilson, illuminate much of the approach of the right-wingers who created and propagated the ‘Labour antisemitism’ smear. While so-called ‘antisemitism campaigners’ – lauded by Hirsh in his document supporting the creation of the so-called ‘Pete Newbon award’ – are ready to doxx, insult, smear and abuse those with whom they disagree, the conduct of the defence and the witnesses it put forward or quoted reveal a group that is quick to describe their supposed hurt and fear when someone challenges them and, even in the most reasonable terms, takes issue with the smears and abuse. Happily, the judge saw through such asymmetrical nonsense.
Mr Wilson, in a statement about the result, said:
The Judge has found that Mr James Mendelsohn gave Dr Pete Newbon confidential and defamatory information about me. It included a screenshot of a Facebook post that said I was “a freak who took pictures of kids” outside a school with a clear photo of me. The impression was, as the Judge decided, like a ‘wanted’ poster. When the Facebook post was published originally, there were incidents that made me fear for the safety of me and my family. The police secured its deletion within 24 hours.
The Judge found that the allegations in the Facebook post were untrue. Mr Mendelsohn took a screenshot of the Facebook post in the 24 hours it was published and, having kept it for 19 months, gave it to Dr Newbon in August 2020 knowing Dr Newbon was making abusive attacks on me on Twitter/X and so he could use the screenshot as a weapon against me.
Dr Newbon and Mr Eddy Cantor then published the screenshot on Twitter/X to, as the Judge has found, abuse and bully me. When Dr Newbon realised the screenshot he and Mr Cantor had published put the safety of me and my family at risk, he took no action. I suspect this was on the basis of advice he got from his solicitor.
Even when Dr Newbon deleted the screenshot from his feed, he sent it to other people by private message. He also invented seriously defamatory allegations about me that he sent to other people.
I did not want the litigation to start. The Defendants could have settled for zero damages and zero costs, and an agreement to delete and not to further publish the screenshot. Litigation only started because all the Defendants, presumably on advice from their solicitors, insisted that publication of the screenshot was in the public interest. They claimed this despite knowing of the intimidatory incidents.
I did not want there to be a trial. What made a trial inevitable was the conduct of the Defendants. I suspect some of the Defendants’ conduct was the result of advice from their solicitors. The Defendants’ conduct included:
- Refusing to comply with the Civil Procedure Rules on pre-action conduct.
- Refusing mediation in favour of litigation to drive up my costs and to try to bankrupt me.
- Making repeated threats to bankrupt me, explicitly referring to the impact this would have on my employment and children.
- Making false allegations of anti-Semitism to try to get me to abandon my claim.
- Making misogynistic allegations about my partner and falsely accusing her of conspiring to pervert the course of justice and breaching professional conduct rules.
- Taking the case to trial having stated: (a) they had no money and I would not recover any costs or damages; (b) they did not care about the outcome (they were “blasé about the result”); (c) they saw what they were doing as some sort of revenge (they “regard this as payback time”).
- Refusing to engage sensibly in negotiations to settle the whole claim when both Dr Newbon’s widow and I wanted to quietly and cheaply settle the claim and avoid further publicity after Dr Newbon’s tragic death.
The Defendants received encouragement on social media and financial help in pursuing their
defences. The crowdfunding claims made by the Defendants were outrageous. The most distasteful aspect was using Dr Newbon’s death to raise money (“One of us is now sadly silent. Those remaining must today come together and fight”).
The reality was that, having used Dr Newbon’s death to raise money, no serious effort was made to defend Dr Newbon at trial. I tried to protect Dr Newbon’s posthumous reputation by settling the claim without a trial and judgment. Mr Cantor rejected in principle a settlement for nominal damages and zero costs in November 2021. Rather than getting Mr Cantor out of the litigation for a nominal sum, [his lawyer] insisted I would have to pay him money before Mr Cantor would settle the claim. I do not know whether Mr Cantor himself knew about this, given his subsequent expressions of bemusement about being involved in the proceedings at all.
Both Defendants refused an offer to settle before trial for just a quarter of the damages the Judge has awarded. When the trial started, I avoided seeking a finding of harassment against Dr Newbon. It is unfortunate that detailed information about Dr Newbon’s conduct has been put in the public domain after his death.
In my opinion, the Defendants and/or their solicitors tried to cause me devastating reputational and, through the costs of the proceedings, financial harm because they disagree with my views on the State of Israel. The Defendants’ conduct was encouraged by others who share their views.
Dr Newbon also brought a separate defamation claim [against author Michael Rosen, who had complained about the antisemitic editing of an image showing one of his books]. He had intended to apologise for the conduct which was the subject of that case, but seems to have received dreadful advice to sue rather than simply say sorry. He ended up involved in two completely unnecessary and hopeless legal cases.
As the Judge found, it seemed the Defendants were motivated by an intense dislike if not hatred of me. For my part, I have no antipathy towards the Defendants despite their conduct and its impact on me and my family. I have never published confidential or defamatory information about the Defendants. I have never been abusive to them. I never retaliated to the Defendants’ abuse and bullying. It is ironic that while the Defendants are convinced that I am motivated by prejudice against them, it is they who had an obsessive and irrational dislike of me. I find it sad that the Defendants, their former legal advisers, and others believed that defending the State of Israel from criticism justified their conduct to me and my family.
It is my hope that what has happened to the Defendants and their families, and me and my family, never happens to anyone else again. Please do not use the judgment in my case as a reason to attack or abuse others on social media. Mr Mendelsohn and Mr Cantor definitely do not deserve to be attacked or abused and I urge people not to do so.
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Getting Gaza Right Is The Absolute Bare Minimum Requirement
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/83dc49dd9f3503db4fb759b724ec9f7f/href
Gaza is simpler than Iraq. Iraq was simpler than Yemen. Yemen was simpler than Libya. Libya was simpler than Ukraine. Ukraine is simpler than Syria. Gaza is the simplest and most straightforward of all the evil interventions of the US murder machine in recent memory — which is why I’ve got no patience for anyone who gets it wrong.
I’m a lot more forgiving of people who bought into the imperial narrative about Syria and believed that country erupted in violence because Assad just went ape shit and started killing innocent people for no reason, because it takes a lot of work to sort out fact from fiction about what actually happened there. There were really good journalists who got Syria wrong at first in the early years of the conflict, just because there was so much information to comb through and so much aggressive imperial narrative management about it. There was so much less visibility into the facts on the ground in Syria than there is in Gaza, and there were so many complex narrative control ops muddying the waters.
Gaza isn’t like that. What’s happening really could not be more obvious. A nuclear-armed high tech military has been raining bombs and inflicting siege warfare upon a densely packed, walled-in civilian population, half of whom are children, with the full backing of the most powerful empire that has ever existed. We’ve been seeing a constant stream of footage showing children ripped apart by military explosives and starved to skeletons, Israeli soldiers posting videos of themselves gleefully doing some of the most sadistic and depraved things you can imagine, destroyed hospitals, carpet-bombed neighborhoods, and Israelis blocking aid trucks from feeding starving people.
This is not the slightest bit complicated. It’s as subtle as a kick in the teeth. There is no excuse for getting this one wrong now. There’s not even any excuse for getting it wrong on day one. It’s been obvious this entire time. Any politician, pundit or journalist who’s gotten it wrong can be dismissed as completely worthless, even if they’re beginning to come around now after they sensed the wind blowing against Israel in recent weeks.
Gaza is a test of the absolute bare minimum requirements for someone to be worth listening to about anything at all, because if you got this one wrong then there’s just something wrong with you as a human being. You’re too fucked up and twisted inside to have a clear vision into anything that’s happening in the world. You’re not in touch with your own humanity enough to have any useful insight into humanity as a collective. You have wasted your time on this planet. You’ve managed to spend your entire life without learning any of the more meaningful lessons that can be learned here.
And there are plenty of people getting Gaza right who are buying into all kinds of other imperial propaganda spin about other international affairs and conflicts, which is to be expected — being able to understand the simplest possible foreign policy issue doesn’t mean you’ll be able to grasp the more complicated ones. But every one of them stands head and shoulders above everyone who couldn’t see the destruction of Gaza for what it is. They might fail other tests, but at least they passed the first one.
Everything I’m saying here will all be completely obvious to everyone one day. People will look back on what was done to Gaza and struggle to comprehend how the world could have allowed such a thing when it was all happening right out in the open for everybody to see. And if I’m still around I will struggle to explain it myself, because it baffles me here and now in the present moment. It probably always will.
_______________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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Featured image via Adobe Stock.
Israeli Suffering Is Not Comparable To Palestinian Suffering
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/05c3e54558797824e207979e1b3580e3/href
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The mass media are once again pushing the narrative that Israel is “scaling back” its operations in Gaza, which as journalist Sana Saeed noted on Twitter is a claim they’ve been falsely making for months. To promote such stories even as Israel publicly declares that it’s preparing for an invasion of Rafah is absurd and irresponsible.
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A member of the Israeli Knesset named Limor Son Har-Melech says there are secret Israeli plans to establish settlements in the Gaza Strip. It sure is a crazy coincidence how every single part of Israel’s response to October 7 has looked exactly the same as what it would look like if Israel just started doing all the things that it has wanted to do to the Palestinians for generations.
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Biden has declared “ironclad” support for Israel as fears mount that Iran will soon retaliate for the Israeli strike on its consulate building in Syria which killed multiple Iranian military officers, despite the fact that Iran has made it clear to the White House that if the US comes to Israel’s defense it will make the US a target as well. We could be near the precipice of the worst-case nightmare scenario of all possible middle eastern conflicts because of this president’s unwavering support for the genocidal Zionist state.
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In the early weeks of Israel’s assault Palestinian journalists were filling social media with footage of Israeli atrocities in Gaza. We’re seeing far less footage now because the journalists have been killed and access to the internet made far more difficult and Palestinian access to much of Gaza has been restricted, but it’s important to remember that those atrocities have continued to happen this entire time.
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I’m sick of hearing October 7 mentioned in the same breath as Israel’s incineration of Gaza as though they’re equal or even comparable. A thousand Israelis dying (probably hundreds by indiscriminate IDF fire) is not comparable to tens of thousands of Palestinians (probably more) being deliberately exterminated by high tech war machinery, even if before you account for the fact that Israel was the aggressor and that the violence of the oppressed is not comparable to the violence of the oppressor in the first place.
But that’s what you’ll hear all the time from polite western liberals trying to walk a center line on the Israel-Palestine issue. They’ll talk about how “sad” and “tragic” and “heartbreaking” BOTH the butchery in Gaza AND October 7 are, giving equal weight to two exponentially unequal acts of violence.
This is the same as lying. It actively misrepresents what’s actually going on, leading to widespread misunderstanding like the fact that half of Americans have no idea whether more Palestinians or Israelis are being killed in the current “war”. Trying to balance out two wildly unbalanced events gives people a wildly unbalanced understanding of what’s really happening, leading to a wildly unbalanced worldview. But you see this constantly, and the western political-media class do everything they can to feed into it.
Israeli suffering is not equal to Palestinian suffering. It’s not even in the same ballpark. Pretending otherwise is deceitful and manipulative.
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Normal person: It’s bad to murder children
Crazy person: Aha I see you hate the Jewish faith
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“It’s so sad and tragic that children are being fed to the Child Incineration Machine,” said the liberal while loading the children onto the conveyor belt. “It’s heartbreaking!”
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Is there a word for the tactic where a government does something evil and then throws out a bunch of flimsy lies right off the bat to mute the initial backlash, so when the truth comes out public attention has moved on and it has no impact? Whatever that is, Israel excels at it.
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Funny how people get so emotionally invested in US presidential elections when the whole system’s stacked to ensure that each party wins half the time. It’s like putting 10 blue marbles and 10 red ones in a hat and crying when you pull out a red one and celebrating when it’s blue.
_____________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.
VIDEO: Armenian Christians under siege by Israel
Jeremy Loffredo visits the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, where a community of Armenian Christians dating back to the 4th century face displacement at the hands of a shadowy Israeli corporation called Xana Capital and the violent settlers it uses as hired muscle.
The post VIDEO: Armenian Christians under siege by Israel first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post VIDEO: Armenian Christians under siege by Israel appeared first on The Grayzone.
Vid: Mason’s deranged Corbyn smear – ‘He’s disarming Ukraine and tolerating antisemitism’
Corbyn apparently travelling the length and breadth of Europe to stop the neo-Nazi Ukrainians from ‘fighting fascism’…
Paul Mason was caught last month in a full-blown meltdown of deranged accusations, at a woman who dared to challenge Israel’s mass slaughter of innocent civilians and the unhealthy influence of pro-Israel lobby groups in British politics – and also caught misrepresenting what she had said, when a recording of her comments and his diatribe was revealed.
And he was caught on the same evening in another deranged rant, when he accused Jeremy Corbyn of ‘touring’ Europe ‘tolerating antisemitism’ and ‘disarming the Ukrainian people in their struggle against fascism’:
Audio capture by @UrbanDandyLDN, subtitles by Skwawkbox
As ‘Urban Dandy’, who recorded Mason’s ramblings, commented:
Mason’s suggestion that Jeremy Corbyn tolerates antisemitism is false, just as the widespread, mainstream claims that there was a serious antisemitism problem in Labour under Corbyn’s leadership were false, and have been debunked repeatedly. The MP for Islington North is taking legal action against Nigel Farage for similar defamatory statements, while another political commentator favoured in the mainstream media recently had to make a humiliating public apology for his baseless allegations against Corbyn.
Screengrab from X / johnmcternan
Disarming the Ukrainians
Paul Mason’s second allegation against Corbyn, that the MP has been on a European tour aimed at disarming the Ukrainian people, is also false. Corbyn has never called for the disarming of Ukraine. The anti-war veteran who fronts the Peace & Justice Project has spoken in many European cities since Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, mainly at events organised by peace campaigners. Corbyn has called for diplomacy instead of escalation, and expressed skepticism about the relentless arms sales by western companies.
Mason’s claim that the left wants to somehow stop Ukrainians ‘fighting fascism’ is also bizarre enough to verge on the delusional. Ukraine is well known, despite the best efforts of the UK media to rewrite history, to be rife with actual nazis, some of whom are in influential positions in the Zelenskiy regime. Zelenskiy himself has seized control of Ukraine’s media, stripped workers of their rights and shut down opposition groups, all key identifiers of fascism.
Mason’s reputation, already falling apart because of his support for Keir Starmer, was shredded in 2022 when The Grayzone revealed his emails plotting with security-state figures to take down left-wing news outlets, accompanied by a notorious, sprawling chart showing the links he imagined among left groups Russia and China – and boasting of ‘cauteris[ing] Corbyn and Stop the War’ so that ‘no MP will touch them:
Mason’s support for Starmer despite the so-called ‘Labour leader’s backing for Israel’s genocide in Gaza has left him a risible figure, yet he keeps spouting his nonsense despite the inevitable backfiring and mockery.
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Idiot Republicans Are Saying Genocide Joe Has ‘Abandoned Israel’
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/c9c1dafb4502deb41ac7d589797b4c85/href
Dopey Republican pundits and politicians have begun claiming that Joe Biden has “abandoned Israel” and has fallen under the control of Hamas, because this is a presidential election year and everything needs to be ten times dumber than usual.
Donald Trump said on the campaign trail on Wednesday that “Any Jewish person that votes for a Democrat or votes for Biden should have their head examined,” saying of Biden, “He totally abandoned Israel.”
Trump’s comments were made in response to Biden saying that Israel should declare a ceasefire of six to eight weeks, seemingly suggesting that Israel should do so without conditioning the ceasefire on the release of Israeli hostages. This hopeful statement was swiftly dispelled by Biden himself, however, with the president reiterating the same keep-killing-children-until-Hamas-gives-us-everything-we-want position that this administration has stood by for six months. Apparently Biden’s dementia-addled brain is just struggling to keep its story straight.
Meanwhile Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro has been pushing the narrative that Biden has “saved” Hamas by capitulating to demands from the left on Gaza, going so far as to declare that “Hamas is now in control of the Biden administration.”
Read Let This Radicalize You on Twitter: "We've reached the moment you've all been waiting for: "Joe Biden is Hamas" pic.twitter.com/mWmh6PJbTF / Twitter"
We've reached the moment you've all been waiting for: "Joe Biden is Hamas" pic.twitter.com/mWmh6PJbTF
To be clear, this is all foam-brained nonsense. Biden has spent six months pouring weapons of mass murder into Israel without any conditions whatsoever, and his administration has been justifying and spinning and making excuses for all of Israel’s heinous actions in Gaza this entire time. No US president in history has done more to directly serve the murderousness of the Israeli war machine than Joe Biden.
Right to this very day the president is declaring “ironclad” support for Israel as fears mount that Iran may retaliate for the Israeli strike on its consulate building in Syria which killed multiple Iranian military officers, despite the fact that Iran has made it clear to the White House that if the US comes to Israel’s defense it will make the US a target as well. Biden is so fanatically pro-Israel that we could be near the precipice of the worst-case nightmare scenario of all possible middle eastern conflicts because of his unwavering support for the genocidal apartheid state.
In reality, the only reason Republicans have begun trying to frame Biden as anti-Israel is because only through fiction and fantasy can America’s two mainstream parties pretend there are any significant differences between them. They’re both insanely supportive of Israel and its crimes. They both support war, militarism, imperialism, capitalism and oligarchy. The only areas in which there’s any meaningful disagreement between them are the issues that don’t inconvenience the powerful in any way like whether or not you’re allowed to have an abortion or whether it’s good or bad to be mean to trans people — and even those issues are only used to keep everyone’s interest and attention locked into mainstream politics and diverted from revolutionary sentiment.
https://medium.com/media/a0b83d4b530fca2203bd7a1db2d9b00f/href
So they make up these moronic fictional battlegrounds to fight on, because that’s the only way they can actually have anything to fight about. Joe Biden is a Hamas agent. Donald Trump is a Kremlin agent. Joe Biden is controlled by “the CCP”. Donald Trump is going to be another Hitler instead of another shitty Republican. The Democrats want to steal your guns and make your son wear a dress. The Republicans want to dismantle NATO and let Vladimir Putin take over the world.
Absolutely none of this is real, but if Republicans and Democrats were forced to campaign against each other solely on issues in which they truly disagreed, they’d have very little to talk about, and it would give the whole two-party scam away. Before you know it you’d have them arguing about things like whether it would be best to ramp up nuclear aggressions with China first or prioritize taking out Russia, and people would start to notice that neither of these parties have the interests of normal human beings at heart.
So they keep up their kayfabe combat schtick, and sell it as hard as they can to make sure as many Americans as possible are clapping along to the pretend drama of the two-handed puppet show.
Can’t wait til this election is over and done with so we can go back to the normal levels of stupid.
_______________
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Exclusive: Unite officers accuse Graham & team of breaching collective to ‘crush’ staff
National Officers’ group complains to exec and legal about ‘anti-trade union’ actions, intimidation by union management and breach of collective agreement
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham and her management team have been accused of contempt for Unite staff’s collective agreement on grievances – and of a string of other abuses, including the use of legal action to silence and intimidate workers and avoid transparency, banning workers from their workplace under an implied threat of dismissal – and putting people into ‘special measures’ to control the union’s internal democracy.
A damning letter from Unite’s ‘Officers’ National Committee’ (ONC) explains that the group has been forced to take the ‘unprecedented’ step of going outside the usual collective agreement to notify the union’s elected executive and its legal director of their grievance, in the hope of getting some action to resolve the grim situation. It then goes on to outline the serious abuses they say they are facing – and to imply that if they are not resolved, staff will be balloted for strike action:
ONC Collective Grievance over Unite management’s interpretation of the Unite Grievance Collective Agreement and the Dignity At Work Collective Agreement.
A Collective Grievance under section 5 of the Unite Grievance Collective Agreement is required to be presented to the Director of Human Resources however because our Collective Grievance is about the way Procedures are being interpreted and changed and how the content of the employees’ grievances necessitates additionally an unprecedented involvement of the Legal Director and the senior lay officials of the Executive Council.
The ONC feels justified in making this decision because repeated representations are getting us nowhere. If employees cannot feel that the Grievance Collective Agreement is to be respected by the Union then as trade unionists we know how to respond. But out of respect for our members and to provide the Executive Council, as the ultimate employing body, with the opportunity to hear our concerns that the rights and protections of Unite workers are being undermined and denied we want to avoid a dispute.
The length of time that grievances and investigations are taking to reach a conclusion is not acceptable in a modern workplace. When employees are waiting months after submitting a grievance due to a refusal of some to participate in the process, being banned from your workplace when not even suspended, and an application of “special measures” to distort democratic structures – none of these are acceptable or are in the traditions of Unite.
The use of suspension powers should only be used with clear justification and always with a review to evaluate the impact of suspension on an individual’s mental health before the suspension stretches to weeks and months.
Using legal privilege to justify enforcing a refusal to allow an employee to present their grievance is disgraceful and anti-trade union. If we believe that part of our role is to challenge power in the workplace where that power is used to suppress workers seeking transparency, expressing their genuinely held views or seeking protection from abuse.
Threats of legal action for raising a grievance cannot be ignored or endorsed. It is contrary to ACAS guidance, a breach of our collective agreement on grievance and Dignity At Work and a denial of natural justice. For any worker to exhibit the courage to voice their concerns about their opinions of inappropriate behaviour against them or others is a right not to be denied. If it is to be crushed or swept away simply because the employer is more powerful and we do nothing about such unfairness in the workplace then who are we standing up for?
In seeking to declare a grievance invalid the employer has cited the issues of trust and confidence. This, in our view, is a further matter of deep and unprecedented concern. Loss of trust and confidence is a legitimate reason for dismissal by an employer so to reference it is to further intimidate the worker. Its use by our management is nonsensical since by definition any grievance is reliant upon trusting your employer to investigate and adjudicate on the matters raised.These concerns raised by the ONC are based on the senior management team of the union having agreed them which is why in our view the Executive Council is the only body that can hold a special meeting to restore the integrity of the Collective Agreements entered into with the Bargaining Units of the Unite workforce.
We want the following as the resolution to our Collective Grievance. 1) All grievances raised by employees in the union should be investigated, with Unite as our employer honouring its’ obligations by following collective agreements with the bargaining units. 2) The senior management team should work constructively with the ONC to establish a new protocol to ensure grievance and disciplinary investigations should be carried out in an appropriate and timely manner to balancing the right to be heard and natural justice alongside resolving issues that lead to investigations.
Emphases added by Skwawkbox
The explosive allegations compound the long list of alleged issues with Graham’s running of Unite. Her tenure as Unite boss has also been marked by a string of other allegations – which neither she nor the union has denied – including destruction of evidence against her husband in threat, misogyny and bullying complaints brought by union employees. She is also embroiled in a defamation lawsuit, and a tribunal case for discrimination, brought by Irish union legend Brendan Ogle for the union’s treatment of him and comments made about him by Graham and her close ally Tony Woodhouse.
She has also been alleged by insiders to have:
- banned Unite officials and national banners from pro-Gaza protests
- banned and smeared films and books exposing the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam
- placed an official under investigation who refused to cancel a Palestine solidarity fringe event at Labour’s 2023 annual conference
- told her chief of staff to threaten a soon-to-retire official with the loss of a pension bonus if he did not soften his support for Palestinians
Her supporters also prevented debate and votes on Gaza at a meeting of the union’s elected executive earlier this month. She campaigned for the general secretary position on the basis of a focus on protecting workers and disavowing political interference.
A senior union insider told Skwawkbox:
The Exec would never normally get involved in employee management matters. They would never usually get involved in employee grievances. The officers have emailed them directly to basically say we are getting nowhere with this general secretary, she is out of control using the worst of employer tactics against union employees, we know you don’t deal with our grievances but you are the union’s ultimate body and we are saying to you – do something or we will ballot.
Unite was contacted for comment:
- It’s clear from this that ONC feels trust has broken down between Unite staff and its management – how has Ms Graham allowed things to fall apart so badly?
- Unite would never – I hope – tolerate another employer treating staff in this manner, so why is Unite doing so?
- What is Ms Graham’s explanation for trying to declare grievances invalid rather than resolving them – especially (and ironically) on grounds that ‘trust and confidence’ in the person(s) making the grievance(s) are the issue, which employees are regarding as attempted intimidation?
- The ONC says that Unite is using legal privilege as an excuse for preventing workers from presenting grievances. Is this true?
The union did not respond by the deadline for publication.
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