Hamas
Israeli AI ‘using WhatsApp data’ to target Gaza families for bomb strikes
‘Lavender’ AI set to prioritise hitting targets at home with their families and is said to be using WhatsApp data for its process – but how is Israel getting hold of it?
Israel’s AI system for targeting people for murder in Gaza uses WhatsApp data among its targeting criteria, according to a report in the Israeli 972 magazine and analysis by Paul Biggar of Tech for Palestine.
The platform is marketed as encrypted ‘end to end’, supposedly offering complete security, and WhatsApp told Middle East Monitor that:
WhatsApp has no backdoors and we do not provide bulk information to any government. For over a decade, Meta has provided consistent transparency reports and those include the limited circumstances when WhatsApp information has been requested. Our principles are firm – we carefully review, validate and respond to law enforcement requests based on applicable law and consistent with internationally recognized standards, including human rights.
However, a 2021 Freedom of Information Request to the FBI revealed that WhatsApp’s owner provides ‘near real-time’ information to US authorities – not the content of messages in most cases, but of who is sending and receiving messages:
WhatsApp will produce certain user metadata, though not actual message content, every 15 minutes in response to a pen register [a special type of federal request], the FBI says. The FBI guide explains that most messaging services do not or cannot do this and instead provide data with a lag and not in anything close to real time: “Return data provided by the companies listed below, with the exception of WhatsApp, are actually logs of latent data that are provided to law enforcement in a non-real-time manner and may impact investigations due to delivery delays.”
This potentially fits with reports in Israeli media that Israel is using an artificial intelligence platform named ‘Lavender’ to identify thousands of human targets in Gaza and flag them for an airstrike, with WhatsApp data forming a key part of the AI’s decision process, based on the WhatsApp connections of supposed ‘militants’ – and that the system is designed to kill large numbers of civilians. One source told 972 that when Lavender identifies a target, Israeli forces:
bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.
But of course, people are in WhatsApp groups of all kinds of topics and for all kind of reasons – and merely being in a group which has a ‘militant’ member is no guarantee of any kind of ‘guilt’ – even if the right to resist occupation is disregarded, as Israel, the US and UK do.
This pattern raises the possibility that Israel is obtaining WhatsApp data, whether directly or from the US government. Another possibility is that Israel is accessing the data through the notorious ‘Pegasus’ hacking programme that has been shown to target WhatsApp users, hijacking their phones through WhatsApp even, in the later Pegasus versions, if they don’t open any suspicious links. Journalists, politicians, human rights activists and others are known to have been hacked by governments using the software, including its use by the Saudis against dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
So serious was the issue that in 2021 tech firm Apple sued NSO, the maker of Pegasus, for targeting Apple users. NSO claimed that the software is used only against ‘terrorists’ – as which Israel, the UK, US and some others have designated Palestinian resistance groups – but there is clearly no guarantee that the definition of ‘terrorist’ is not extended in practice to anyone targeted by Israel. Biggar has accused WhatsApp’s owners of breaking international law and violating human rights.
Facebook, which belongs to the same Meta parent group as WhatsApp, has been accused of shutting down the circulation of pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist posts and treating the term ‘Zionist’ as hate speech. In 2020, the company admitted changing its algorithms to filter out left-wing news and analysis from users’ feeds while allowing right-wing propaganda to flow unchecked.
However Israel is accessing the WhatsApp data it is said to be using to target Palestinians and their families, undoubtedly a war crime, the news that it is doing so is a warning for those who dissent from Establishment narratives and use ‘private’ messaging services to do so.
Meta continued its statement to Middle East Monitor:
Our principles are firm – we carefully review, validate and respond to law enforcement requests based on applicable law and consistent with internationally recognized standards, including human rights.
The US and UK governments, however, continue to insist that Israel is following international law and recognised human rights standards, even as it murders tens of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children.
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Campus Protests about Israel and the Palestinians (several updates)
This post is for discussion of the ongoing campus protests against Israel’s response to the October 7th, 2023 attack on it by Hamas, and in support of the Palestinians.
More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in its attack on Gaza, with two-thirds of the dead being women and children, according to the local health ministry, reports the Associated Press.
[original photo by Jay Janner/USA Today Network, via Reuters]
A round-up of recent news about protests at various college campuses can be found here.
Of particular interest are questions about how universities should (or should not) respond to these kinds of protests, and the principles, ideals, and practical considerations that underpin answers to those questions.
Details about what’s happening at your campus are welcome, as are links to news and commentary elsewhere, including links to particularly valuable social media feeds.
By way of background on the matter of free speech and campus protests, I recommend this piece by Jacob Levy (McGill). Some excerpts:
[U]niversities offer very robust protection for political and protest speech, but as an incidental byproduct, not in the same deliberate way that a liberal democratic society does. A university’s core commitment is to the discovery, transmission and preservation of knowledge – paradigmatically, what is done in research, in teaching, and in publication and library collection. The principle that defends that commitment is not freedom of speech as such, but rather academic freedom.
Academic freedom has a few moving parts:
First, the freedom to follow arguments and evidence where they lead, according to scholarly methods…
Second, the freedom to teach, within the confines of the scholarly mission of the class, and limited by the freedom of students to be secure that they will be assessed fairly…
And finally, freedom from evaluation on non-academic grounds, of which the traditionally most important are political and religious grounds. Members of the academic community are only to be academically evaluated, for purposes ranging from student grades to professors’ tenure, on the grounds of the success of their academic work. They may not lose academic standing (student enrolment, faculty employment and so on) for their views and speech on other questions. In the early 20th-century cases that helped shape this rule, universities came to the understanding that, say, an economist couldn’t be fired for being an atheist, a mathematician for being a socialist; what they had to say on those political and religious questions was irrelevant to their work. The technical phrase here is freedom of extramural speech – outside the walls of the laboratory, the classroom and the library. Protections of extramural speech are very strong, not primarily in order to protect that speech, but in order to protect the academic integrity of what goes on inside the laboratory, classroom and library.
A rule that has traditionally accompanied and strengthened academic freedom is institutional neutrality. If academic freedom is the ability of scholars and scholarly communities or disciplines to work without having an orthodoxy imposed on them, institutional neutrality is the commitment not to declare an orthodoxy in the first place. Just like a professor at the front of a classroom shouldn’t use it as a pulpit to announce their own political and religious views, so too should the university as a whole not adopt substantive political or religious opinions that would chill the freedom of its members to pursue their own ideas and arguments. A great deal of important political inquiry and debate happens at a university, but it’s undertaken by students and professors with differing views pursuing differing arguments, not by the institution as a whole declaring official conclusions…
These principles generate some surprising and strange outcomes. For example, the odd thing about the centrality of student protests to important moments in university life is that they are so irrelevant to the university’s mission. There is very strong protection for the freedom of protest, not because protest is important to a university the way it is to a democratic society, but because it’s academically irrelevant. It’s wrong to question a student’s (or professor’s) standing in the academic community because of what they say at a protest – or on social media, or in any other non-academic setting. The only appropriate limits are not about the content of what’s said, but about the conduct of the protest action; the university has to protect not only the safety of its other members but also the security of its academic functions. It can’t rule against the language on a sign, but it must intervene to prevent violence between students, or occupations and blockades that would prevent a class from meeting, or an invited speaker from speaking.
This is easier said than done…
I recommend reading the whole piece.
One thing to note is that the institutional neutrality Levy discusses is especially tricky, particularly in this context: one declared aim of some of the student groups is to get their universities to stop investing in companies involved in or profiting from Israel’s military efforts in Gaza. Should such investments themselves be considered a deviation from institutional neutrality, such that the student calls for divestment could be seen as a call for institutional neutrality? Or are such investments in principle relevantly different from what we might think of as paradigmatic departures from institutional neutrality, such as an official statement supporting a side in a political dispute? The details probably matter here, both on the extent to which investment in certain companies is intentional, and the extent to which such companies are “involved” with Israel’s war efforts.
And that’s just one issue.
OK, let’s see how this goes. (Comments are moderated. Please remind yourselves of the comments policy. Thanks.)
UPDATE 1 (4/25/24): The Department of Philosophy at Columbia University has issued the following statement:
The Philosophy Department is concerned for the safety, academic progress, and rights of our students. We condemn all forms of hate speech, harassment, and incitements to violence. We also regard it as quite implausible that erecting a tent on a lawn constitutes a clear and present danger, and we urge the lifting of suspensions of students whose charges stem from that act. Thus we support the joint statement by the Columbia and Barnard Chapters of the American Association of University Professors and the letter from the Columbia College Student Council. We want President Shafik to succeed, and for mutual trust between all parties on campus to be regained. Such success and trust requires visible engagement by the President and Trustees with the procedures of faculty governance.
UPDATE 2 (4/25/24): Noelle McAfee, professor and chair of philosophy at Emory University, was among those arrested for protesting at Emory.
WATCH: Among those arrested today were Noelle McAfee, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University.
I’ve asked for a comment from Emory on this arrest, no word yet.
This video provided to us by an #Emory PHD student. You can hear him in this video. @ATLNewsFirst pic.twitter.com/86aJgb7NUX
— Patrick Quinn (@PatrickQuinnTV) April 25, 2024
Thanks to several readers for bringing this to my attention. Original Tweet here.
UPDATE 3 (4/26/24): Sukaina Hirji, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, gave a speech to protestors there. Watch it here.
UPDATE 4 (4/26/24): Caroline Fohlin, professor of economics at Emory University, asks three law enforcement officers who appear to be on top of a student protestor on the ground, “what are you doing?” A fourth officer grabs her, pulls her away, twists her arm behind her back, and pushes her to the ground. A second officer joins in pushing her down, heedless of the fact her head is being pushed into the sidewalk.
FULL VIDEO OF ELDERLY AMERICAN ECONOMICS PROFESSOR CAROLINE FOHLIN BEING ASSAULTED BY POLICE
She is an over 65 year old American woman.
Americans attacked for Israel.
What if this was your mother/grandmother? pic.twitter.com/ne7uDsPGIX
— Sulaiman Ahmed (@ShaykhSulaiman) April 26, 2024
According to news reports, she was charged with disorderly conduct and battery of a police officer. This guy:
The post Campus Protests about Israel and the Palestinians (several updates) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Hobart and William Smith Colleges Fails Its Faculty and Its Students
Mark D. Gearan, president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, has removed political theorist Jodi Dean from her courses because she authored a pro-Palestinian blog post, published on April 9th.
In an April 13th statement posted on the college website, President Gearan wrote:
As a result of Professor Dean’s comments, there now may be students on our campus who feel threatened in or outside of the classroom.
It’s not unreasonable for a college administration to have as an aim that its students not feel threatened in or outside of the classroom. But there are restrictions on the means by which it is allowed to pursue this aim. Among those restrictions are the college’s policies, including those set forth in the faculty handbook.
Like many private institutions of higher education in the US, Hobart and William Smith Colleges includes a version of the AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure in its faculty handbook, part of which states:
College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.
Note that while the statement affirms faculty freedom from institutional discipline and sets forth special faculty obligations, it does not make the institution’s respect for that freedom conditional upon faculty’s satisfaction of those obligations. So even if one thought, for example, that Professor Dean’s blog post failed to exhibit “appropriate restraint”, that doesn’t license the institution to take her courses away from her—a clear form of institutional discipline.
By violating Professor Dean’s academic freedom, President Gearan has sent a message to all of the faculty at Hobart & William Smith Colleges: watch what you say, for if the president is in “complete disagreement” with your views, or finds them “repugnant”, or wants to “condemn them unequivocally,” he will not merely express his opinions, but will use his power to take measures that violate your academic freedom, too.
A petition has been launched to urge President Gearan to reverse his decision and refrain from further violations of academic freedom. You can sign it here.
The petition notes that
the text of Professor Dean’s article does not contain incitement to violence, is not directed at specific individuals, nor does it create a clear and present danger—standard tests for acceptable limitations to free speech as per U.S. law and traditions, and according to the guidelines adopted by the American Association of University Professors, endorsed also by Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Bizarrely, President Gearan’s statement includes this: “we can discuss hard issues upon which we may disagree. But we can never and will never condone or praise violence.” One hopes this is mere thoughtlessness, or a lie. Just imagine the variety of obviously justifiable activities the defense of which this prohibits. (And imagine what could be learned by hearing and grappling with defenses of what one takes to be unjustifiable violence.)
I don’t know if any students actually do feel threatened by Professor Dean’s blog post. Anything’s possible, and apparently, mere possibility of someone feeling threatened is sufficient, in President Gearan’s view, to justify a violation of academic freedom. Suppose some students do feel so threatened. There are many alternative, academic-freedom-respecting means the college could have taken to address those feelings: public events designed to convey support, provision of psychological assistance, extra campus security, for example. Perhaps the best bet would have have been a program for students about the value of academic freedom, and how an institution’s respect for it is not tantamount to the institution’s endorsement of what its faculty say when exercising that freedom.
(Relatedly, because the internet is full of stupid, let me note that my criticism of Mark Gearan’s violation of Jodi Dean’s academic freedom is not thereby an expression of agreement with what Jodi Dean said in her blog post. I don’t agree with her.)
The post Hobart and William Smith Colleges Fails Its Faculty and Its Students first appeared on Daily Nous.
Israeli media: Israel ‘totally defeated’ – and terrified of Iran
Source close to discussions about Iran says millions would be fleeing Israel if they knew what was being said
Israeli media are often far more honest about what their country is doing – and what is going on in it – than western ‘mainstream’ media are about the same issues. While UK ‘msm’ still maintain the lie that Hamas ‘beheaded babies’ and raped women on 7 October, Israeli media sometimes freely discuss the truth – and frequently and openly write about the ‘immense’ numbers of Israelis killed that day by the Israeli military.
And now, Israeli media are discussing two further truths that will not be aired by UK broadcasters or printed by UK papers.
First, Haaretz – one of Israel’s major dailies – has splashed a headline concluding that Israel has lost – totally lost – the ‘war’, the genocide, it has been raining down on the innocent civilians of Gaza. Lost so badly that Israel cannot be secure – and will not either regain by force the captives taken by Hamas, or end its pariah status:
And second, journalists with sources close to the Israeli regime’s discussions about Iran – which yesterday achieved a measured but compelling attack on Israel in retaliation for Israel’s bombing of Iran’s consulate in Damascus – are saying openly that those discussions are so terrifying that if the Israeli populace knew what was being said, millions of them would be flooding Israel’s main international airport to try to get out of the country:
The UK government, opposition and media are incorrigibly dishonest about Israel’s genocide and its terrible consequences for the millions of innocents in Gaza and the West Bank – and the ruination of both Israel’s and the West’s always-thin pretence as democratic, humane and law-abiding. But the truth is out there – and will percolate through.
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Greenstein takes police to court this week for return of seized electronics
Jewish anti-Zionist arrested by police in ‘fishing expedition’ in December still not charged, but computer and hard drive still not handed back to him
Tony Greenstein
Left-wing Jewish activist Tony Greenstein is taking the police to court this week in a bid to secure the return of a computer, hard drive and other electronics seized by anti-terror police last December when they raided his home and arrested him for a single tweet commenting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Four months later, Greenstein has still not been charged with any offence.
Greenstein, a well-known anti-Zionist prominent in the fight for Palestinian freedom and human rights, explained:
Just before Xmas I was arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 in a dawn raid on my flat. My ‘offence’ was not planning a terrorist act but the tweet below which it was suspected was supporting Hamas. In 2021 the political wing of Hamas was proscribed.
After nearly 4 months I have still not been charged and I am under ‘investigation’.
The Police removed my computers, mobile and just about any electronic device they could find.
At the two interviews I had, and contrary to legal advice I gave full answers to their questions, I was questioned solely about the tweet below, two posts on my blog and a speech on Youtube.
This is clearly and obviously a case of the Police using ‘Terrorism’ as a means of suppressing free speech in support of the Palestinians in Gaza undergoing genocide. The Police could, if they so wished, charge Cameron and Sunak with aiding and abetting the commission of war crimes under the International Criminal Court Act 2001 ss.52/53.
However as we know the Police are increasingly acting as the enforcement agency for the government in their desire to suppress Palestinian activism.
The theft of my computers has had an enormous effect on e.g. my ability to comply with my statutory duty to keep accounts for the charity of which I’m a trustee, the Brighton Trust and many other effects. I have had to purchase new computers to continue to e.g. publish my blog and undertake necessary work not least having access to the medical records of my son who is autistic.
Although many files were saved on the cloud there are others which I can’t access.
I have no idea whether or not the Police will eventually charge me but one thing is clear. They do not need my computers to charge me as my views are all in the public domain and accessible on The Internet.
What the Police are engaged in is an intelligence gathering exercise, a fishing expedition.
My solicitor advises me that the action I have brought to force the Police to return my property is almost unheard of. I do not have great hopes that in a case such as this the Magistrates will defy the Police and do what is just and equitable. Nonetheless I believe that I should make the attempt. If unsuccessful I will take it to appeal as what the Police are doing is stringing out their ‘investigation’ and in the meanwhile punishing me even if I am not prosecuted.
It would be of enormous help, since this is a highly political case, for there to be a full public gallery and maybe a demonstration outside the courts.
At a time when the Police are even arresting the ‘wrong sort of rabbi’ for ‘inciting antisemitism’ (burning an Israeli flag – thus equating Jews with Israel) we must resist what is the road to a police state.
If you are free this Thursday 2 pm you I invite you to attend the court. I cannot guarantee it will even be heard, as last time it was adjourned but your presence might also be of help in that regard.
So if you live in the Brighton area and aren’t otherwise engaged please come.
Greenstein’s case has been listed for 2pm on Thurs 18 April at Brighton Magistrates’ Court. Supporters able to attend should get there early:
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The ‘Human Shields’ Lie Has Been Conclusively, Irrefutably Debunked
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/b88eeb83b9e50f900e94d4f88e2992cf/href
One aspect of the recent revelations about the IDF’s Lavender AI system that’s not getting enough consideration is the fact that it is completely devastating to the narrative that Israel has been killing so many civilians in Gaza because Hamas uses “human shields”.
If you missed this story, a major report from +972 revealed that Israel has been using an AI system called Lavender to compile kill lists of suspected members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad which have been carried out with hardly any human verification. One automated system, psychopathically named “Where’s Daddy?”, tracks suspects to their homes so that they can be killed along with their entire families. The IDF has been knowingly killing 15 to 20 civilians at a time to kill one junior Hamas operative, and up to 100 civilians at a time to take out a senior official.
+972’s Yuval Abraham writes the following:
“Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called ‘Where’s Daddy?’ also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.”
(Another +972 report by Abraham back in November revealed that IDF AI systems ensure that the Israeli military is fully aware of every child it’s going to be killing in each airstrike, and that it deliberately targets civilian infrastructure as a matter of policy.)
https://medium.com/media/6fa21d3b2bff65a477b86af76b161392/href
When questioned about these systems by +972, the IDF Spokesperson responded that “Hamas places its operatives and military assets in the heart of the civilian population, systematically uses the civilian population as human shields, and conducts fighting from within civilian structures, including sensitive sites such as hospitals, mosques, schools and UN facilities. The IDF is bound by and acts according to international law, directing its attacks only at military targets and military operatives.”
The “human shields” narrative that’s become so popular in Israel apologia insists that the reason the IDF kills so many civilians in its attacks on Gaza is because Hamas intentionally surrounds itself with noncombatants as a strategy to make the innocent Israelis reluctant to drop bombs on them. But as The Intercept’s Ryan Grim recently observed on Twitter, this is soundly refuted by the revelation that Israel has been intentionally waiting to target suspected Hamas members when it knows they’ll be surrounded by civilians.
“Israel’s argument that they kill so many civilians because Hamas uses ‘human shields’ is torn apart by the revelation that the IDF prefers to attack its ‘targets’ when they are at home with their families,” tweeted Grim. “It is not Hamas using human shields, it is Israel deliberately hunting families.”
“A human shield is only a shield if your enemy values human life and seeks to minimize civilian deaths,” Grim adds. “Israel deliberately maximizes the number of civilians it can kill by waiting until a target is with his entire family. Palestinians are not shields to Israel, they are all targets.”
https://medium.com/media/8ba4585e7602afb35d1cc8fb31515b4c/href
This is such an important point. Advocates for Palestine like Abby Martin have for years been presenting compelling arguments against Israel’s “human shields” claims, and common sense shows that the presence of civilians is clearly not a deterrent to Israeli airstrikes, but because of these +972 revelations the lie has now been thoroughly, irrefutably debunked. Civilians aren’t getting killed because Hamas hides behind them, civilians are getting killed because the IDF waits until suspected Hamas members are around civilians to target them with high-powered military explosives.
A popular quote attributed to former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir says “Someday we may be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we will never forgive them for making us kill their children.” You see this quote pop up all the time in varying iterations, shared approvingly by Israel apologists around the world as though it’s something wise and brilliant instead of a horrific defense of murdering children. But it turns out this morally depraved quote isn’t even true by the most generous of interpretations: Israel isn’t being “forced” to kill Palestinian children, it is knowingly choosing to.
The “human shields” narrative is just one more instance in which Israel pretends to be the victim while actually being the victimizer. They lied about beheaded babies so that they could get away with murdering babies. They lied about mass rapes so that they could get away with committing rape. They lied about Hamas using civilians as human shields so that they could kill civilians. They lie about being victims so that they can victimize.
________________
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Israeli propagandist behind Hamas ‘mass rape’ narrative exposed as grifter, fraud
Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the Israeli lawyer at the center of the campaign accusing Hamas of systematic sexual violence on October 7, now stands accused by Israeli media of scamming donors and spreading misinformation. The allegations appeared just days after Elkayam-Levy received the prestigious Israel Prize. As the founder of the so-called Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, Israel lawyer Cochav Elkayam Levy has been a go-to source for Western media organizations pushing the narrative that […]
The post Israeli propagandist behind Hamas ‘mass rape’ narrative exposed as grifter, fraud first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Israeli propagandist behind Hamas ‘mass rape’ narrative exposed as grifter, fraud appeared first on The Grayzone.
Video: Israeli Knesset member mocked and called liar by UN-linked parliament gathering
Hard right advocate of ‘levelling’ Gaza derided for repeating debunked atrocity propaganda to 148th Assembly of Inter-Parliamentary Union
Danny Danon, a hard-right Likud member of Israel’s Knesset, has been derided as a liar and jeered by attendees at the 148th Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), a UN-linked gathering of the world’s parliaments, which is taking place in Geneva.
Danon, who advocated for the ‘levelling’ of Gaza almost ten years before the Hamas raid on 7 October last year, blamed Hamas for Israel’s actions in Gaza, ignored the seventy-five years of illegal occupation and slaughter by Israel and regurgitated atrocity propaganda about child rapes and murders, which has been discredited for months – and was booed by delegates and angrily confronted by the Palestinian delegate, before being carpeted by Ireland’s representative for his ‘lots of lies’ on behalf of a ‘failed’ regime:
In 2013, Danon, an opponent of immigration from Africa to Israel – where discrimination against Black Jews is rife – advocated for punishment attacks against Palestinian civilians and infrastructure, including a suggestion that Israel “delete” one whole neighbourhood in Gaza in response for every rocket launched by the Palestinian resistance, an act of collective punishment that is a clear war crime under international law.
A year later, Danon advocated cutting off all electricity and fuel supplies to Gaza, prefiguring the blockade by Israel that has pushed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into famine. A month later, Danon said that Israel should respond to the kidnapping of an IDF soldier by “levelling Gaza”. Since the resistance raid, he has been a prominent advocate for the ‘voluntary’ removal of all Palestinians from Gaza to other countries, yet he clearly thinks he has the right to demand obedience and belief from the global community.
The IDF has admitted that the number of its own people that it killed during the Hamas raid was ‘immense’ – an admission ignored entirely by the UK media. Israel has murdered over 40,000 Palestinians since 7 October and wounded double that amount in its levelling of Gaza, mostly women and children. It is using starvation as a weapon of war and has killed dozens of Israeli hostages while taking thousands of Palestinian hostages and, according to the UN, carrying out summary executions of civilians and raping and abusing Palestinian women and girls.
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Don’t Equate The Violence Of The Oppressor With The Violence Of The Oppressed
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/35e62d041fc012fc04e3a9b2418bff9c/href
❖
Israel has once again stormed Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital. Israel spent the first few weeks of the Gaza assault churning out fake audio clips of Hamas fighters exonerating the IDF from attacking hospitals and healthcare workers, and has spent all the months since just unapologetically attacking hospitals and healthcare workers.
❖
CNN’s Dana Bash just gave an adoring rimjob of an interview to Benjamin Netanyahu, telling him “You’re not Hamas. Israel is a democracy, and as a Jewish state supports and believes in every life mattering.”
If Netanyahu was interviewed by an actual journalist he’d be forcefully interrogated with extremely uncomfortable questions about his genocidal atrocities in Gaza. When Netanyahu goes on CNN the anchor recites all of his pro-genocide talking points for him so he that doesn’t have to.
❖
The underlying assumption behind the claim that Hamas needs to be eliminated is that Israel should be able to inflict nonstop violence on Palestinians day after day, year after year, generation after generation, without ever receiving any violence in return.
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You can’t equate the violence of the oppressor with the violence of the oppressed. They’re not the same, and the oppressor is the ultimate source of the violence from both sides.
Say you’ve got a group of blue guys and a group of green guys. If the blue guys have power over the green guys and are constantly oppressing them, stealing from them, using violence on them and generally making life intolerable for the people they have power over, then the blue guys have no moral standing to get indignant and outraged when the green guys start responding to this with their own violence. That would be a ridiculous and illogical position for anyone to take.
In fact, if you look at what happened in our hypothetical scenario here, the blue guys are morally responsible for both their own violence AND the violence of the green guys, because they created the dynamics in which both happened. Had the blue guys not been oppressing and abusing the green guys, the green guys would not have responded with violence.
And you can argue “But the green guys aren’t making things any better with their violence! It’s just making the blue guys madder and more violent!” But that’s completely irrelevant to the question of responsibility, and to the fact that if the blue guys stop their violence and abuse there will be a cessation of violence from both sides.
The solution therefore is not to spend any energy whatsoever yelling at the green guys to stop being violent, the solution is to demand the blue guys stop being violent, abusive and oppressive toward the green guys — because that is the source of violence between the two groups. The violence of the blue guys is a cause, while the violence of the green guys is only an effect. You cannot therefore regard them in the same way, either morally or practically.
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Niger kicking the French military out of the country was interesting and potentially significant. Niger kicking out both France and the US is a major development. To borrow a line from Django Unchained, gentlemen you had my curiosity, but now you have my attention.
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The US is backing a genocide and waging a proxy war against a nuclear superpower while the American people struggle with stagnant wages, a broken healthcare system and soaring costs of living, so naturally Americans are being told they need to be very, very worried about China.
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Right wingers who regard themselves as bold anti-establishment freethinkers are currently defending the world’s most powerful government supplying bombs to drop on a giant concentration camp with arguments that ultimately boil down to “But the TV would never lie to me!”
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If opposition to an active genocide shocks and offends you, that’s a character flaw, and you should change that about yourself. If it shocks and offends you because of your religious identity, that too is a character flaw. Supporting mass murder because of your religion is not a legitimate position to have.
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FBI Warns Gaza War Will Stoke Domestic Radicalization “For Years to Come”
In the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza, the intelligence community and the FBI believe that the threat of Islamic terrorist attack inside the United States has increased to its highest point since 9/11, according to testimony of senior officials. “It’s long been the case that the public and the media are quick to declare one threat over and gone, while they obsess over whatever’s shiny and new,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point earlier this month. Wray said that though many “commentators” claimed that the threat from foreign terrorist organizations was over, “a rogue’s gallery of foreign terrorist organizations [are calling] for attacks against Americans and our allies.”
Though Wray cites Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and ISIS as making new threats against America, he said that the bureau was actually more focused on “homegrown” terrorists — Americans — as the primary current threat. “Our most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home,” he said at West Point.
Soon after the Gaza war began, Wray appeared before the House Committee on Homeland Security and said that homegrown violent extremists, or HVEs, posed the single greatest immediate foreign terrorist threat to the United States.
According to the FBI, while inspired by the actions of foreign terrorist groups, HVEs are lone actors or members of small cells disconnected from material support of the established extremist groups they draw inspiration from. Though Wray isn’t willing to discount the likelihood of a 9/11 magnitude attack — in fact, at West Point he cites the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel as the equivalent of an attack on the United States that would have killed nearly 40,000 people in the single day — he says small-scale and “lone wolf” attacks are more likely. “Over the past five months, our Counterterrorism Division agents have been urgently running down thousands of reported threats stemming from the [Israel-Hamas] conflict,” Wray said on March 4.
“The FBI assesses HVEs as the greatest, most immediate international terrorism threat to the homeland,” Wray said in his November testimony to Congress, adding that “HVEs are people located and radicalized to violence primarily in the United States, who are not receiving individualized direction from [foreign terrorist organizations] but are inspired by FTOs, including the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (“ISIS”) and al-Qa’ida and their affiliates, to commit violence.”
Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, commander of U.S. Northern Command, which is responsible for North America, echoed Wray’s concern in his testimony this month before Congress. “The likelihood of a significant terrorist attack in the homeland has almost certainly increased since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Multiple terrorist groups — including ISIS and al-Qa’ida — have leveraged the crisis to generate propaganda designed to inspire followers to conduct attacks, including in North America. The increasingly diffuse nature of the transnational terrorist threat challenges our law enforcement partners’ ability to detect and disrupt attack plotting against the homeland and leaves us vulnerable to surprise.” Guillot’s counterpart in U.S. Southern Command, responsible for the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, Gen. Laura Richardson, did not raise the domestic terror threat during her congressional testimony.
Though the FBI is focused on homegrown threats, Wray does say that after months of chasing down an influx in leads, his counterterrorism division has started “to see those numbers level off,” adding that “we expect that October 7 and the conflict that’s followed will feed a pipeline of radicalization and mobilization for years to come.”
Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence and the highest-ranking U.S. intelligence official, agreed with Wray’s view, testifying this week, “The crisis has galvanized violence by a range of actors around the world.”
“While it is too early to tell, it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism,” she warned, setting the stage for a renewed priority of Middle East terrorism at the very time when much of the intelligence apparatus had shifted to a different type of domestic terrorist threat after January 6. In the Director of National Intelligence’s annual threat assessment, praise for the October 7 attack by the Nordic Resistance Movement, a European neo-Nazi group, was cited as evidence of the spread of extremist ideology. No direct neo-Nazi plots, however, were identified.
The Intercept also recently wrote of the homeland security agencies’ expanded interest in domestic extremism, specifically targeting anarchists and leftists in the wake of Aaron Bushnell’s death.
Among the foreign threats raised during his West Point address, Wray mentioned Hezbollah support and praise for Hamas posing “a constant threat to U.S. interests in the region,” Al Qaeda issuing its most specific call to attack the United States in the last five years, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or Yemen, calling on jihadists to attack Americans “and Jewish people,” and ISIS urging its followers to target Jewish communities in both Europe and the United States.
To embellish the domestic threat picture, earlier this week, Wray said that immigrant crossings at America’s southern border were extremely concerning, with foreign terrorist organizations infiltrating into the country through drug smuggling networks. “There is a particular network that has — some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have — ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about, and we’ve been spending enormous amounts of effort with our partners investigating,” he said.
Picking up where Wray left off, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told Fox News this week that illegal immigration was one of the greatest catalysts for America’s imperilment. “The terror threat to this country is enormous.” Cruz said. “It is greater than it’s ever been at any time since September 11th.”
Other members of Congress have similarly seized on Wray’s warnings about the Hamas threat to push for their own policy objectives. As Wired reported this week, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Mike Turner, R-Ohio, met with lawmakers in December in an attempt to dissuade them from initiating reforms that could cripple the FISA 702 authority, a law enshrining the intelligence community’s ability to conduct warrantless surveillance.
According to the report, Turner “presented an image of Americans protesting the war in Gaza while implying possible ties between the protesters and Hamas, an allegation that was used to illustrate why surveillance reforms may prove detrimental to national security.”
In the past three months, the only Hamas-connected prosecution carried out by the Department of Justice appears to be the arrest of Karrem Nasr, a U.S. citizen who allegedly traveled from Egypt to Kenya in an effort to wage jihad with the Somalia-related terrorist group al-Shabab. “Karrem Nasr, motivated by the heinous terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, devoted himself to waging violent jihad against America and its allies,” the U.S. attorney’s office wrote in a press release, saying that they had been able to disrupt his plot.
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