Israel
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.
###
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.
US Declines Israel’s Invitation To Start WW3 (For Now)
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/588c286922d65afdd2aa03f1a2f6429d/href
Iran has carried out its long-promised retaliation for Israel’s attack on its consulate building in Damascus, launching a massive barrage of drones and missiles which it claims hit and destroyed Israeli military targets, while Israel says they dealt only superficial damage with a few injuries. The US and its allies reportedly helped shoot down a number of the Iranian projectiles.
Just as we discussed in the lead-up to the strike, the western political-media class are acting as though this was a completely unprovoked attack launched against the innocent, Bambi-eyed victim Israel. Comments from western officials and pundits and headlines from the mass media are omitting the fact that Israel instigated these hostilities with its extreme act of aggression in Syria as much as possible. Here in Australia the Sydney Morning Herald write-up about the strike didn’t get around to informing its readers about the attack on the Iranian consulate until the tenth paragraph of the article, and said only that Iran had “accused” Israel of launching the attack because Israel has never officially confirmed it.
Antiwar.com on Twitter: "UPDATED: Iran Launches Major Drone and Missile Attack on IsraelTel Aviv condemned the move as a "dangerous escalation" and claimed to have repelled most incoming projectilesby Will Porter@TheWillPorter #Iran #Israel #IRGC #drones https://t.co/GOjbAm3OqU pic.twitter.com/Q2PtxbMAjy / Twitter"
UPDATED: Iran Launches Major Drone and Missile Attack on IsraelTel Aviv condemned the move as a "dangerous escalation" and claimed to have repelled most incoming projectilesby Will Porter@TheWillPorter #Iran #Israel #IRGC #drones https://t.co/GOjbAm3OqU pic.twitter.com/Q2PtxbMAjy
In any case, Iran says the attack is now over. Given that we’re not seeing any signs of massive damage, Iran’s reported claim that its retaliation would be calibrated to avoid escalation into a full-scale regional war seems to have been accurate, as does Washington’s reported claim that it didn’t expect the strike to be large enough to draw the US into war.
A new report from Axios says Biden has personally told Netanyahu that the US will not be supporting any Israeli military response to the Iranian strike. An anonymous senior White House official told Axios that Biden said to Netanyahu, “You got a win. Take the win,” in reference to the number of Iranian weapons that were taken out of the sky by the international coalition in Israel’s defense. Apparently helping to mitigate the damage from the Iranian attack is all the military commitment the White House is willing to make against Iran at this time.
And thank all that is holy for that. A war between the US alliance and Iran and its allies would be the stuff of nightmares, making the horrors we’ve been seeing in Gaza these last six months look like an episode of Peppa Pig.
But Washington merely declining to get involved is nowhere near enough. As the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi quipped on Twitter, “Biden needs to PREVENT further escalation, not just declare his desire to stay out of it.”
Trita Parsi on Twitter: "Not significant enough. Biden needs to PREVENT further escalation, not just declare his desire to stay out of it. https://t.co/KQ0paadDtY / Twitter"
Not significant enough. Biden needs to PREVENT further escalation, not just declare his desire to stay out of it. https://t.co/KQ0paadDtY
Indeed, Israel has already made it clear that it is going to be moving forward with an escalation against Iran. Israel’s Channel 12 cites an unnamed senior official saying the Iranian counter strike is going to receive an “unprecedented response”.
“Israel has already informed the Americans and governments in the region that its response is inevitable,” The Economist reports. “Its military options include launching drones at Iran, and long-range airstrikes on Iran, possibly on military bases or nuclear installations.”
It’s unclear at this time how much the latest message from the Biden administration will affect the calculations of this position, but the mass media are reporting that White House officials are worried Israel is getting ready to do something extremely reckless that could draw the US into a war it would rather avoid.
NBC News reports the following:
“Some top U.S. officials are concerned Israel could do something quickly in response to Iran’s attacks without thinking through potential fallout afterward, according to a senior administration official and a senior defense official.
“Those concerns stem in part from the administration’s views of the approach Israel has taken to its war against Hamas, as well as the attack in Damascus.
“President Joe Biden has privately expressed concern that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. more deeply into a broader conflict, according to three people familiar with his comments.”
Robert Wright on Twitter: "Read this piece on why Bibi chose to radically escalate with his April 1 strike on Iran's diplomatic compound. It's by Paul Pillar, who knows the territory--he was once in charge of analysis of the Middle East for CIA & all other US intelligence agencies. https://t.co/w4dZjkdy3w / Twitter"
Read this piece on why Bibi chose to radically escalate with his April 1 strike on Iran's diplomatic compound. It's by Paul Pillar, who knows the territory--he was once in charge of analysis of the Middle East for CIA & all other US intelligence agencies. https://t.co/w4dZjkdy3w
People have been raising this concern for some time now. Earlier this month Responsible Statecraft’s Paul Pillar wrote up a solid argument that Netanyahu stands a lot to gain personally from drawing the US into a war with Iran to help him with his legal and political troubles and take the focus off of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Whether that’s the case or not it’s pretty absurd for the Biden administration to just sit around passively hoping this doesn’t happen as though it wouldn’t have a say in the matter, and as though there’s nothing it can do to prevent such an occurrence right now. Biden has had the ability to end this insane cycle of escalation in the middle east since it started six months ago by demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and demanding that Israel rein in its murder machine, just as US presidents have done successfully in the past.
Biden could end all this with one phone call. The fact that he doesn’t means he’s a monster, and no amount of mass media reports about how “concerned” and “frustrated” he is regarding Israel’s actions will ever change that.
_______________
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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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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Empire Managers Keep Acting Like Iran Is About To Attack Israel Without Provocation
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/5ad9bf314291fbcc4307b0bcb79ddfef/href
Iran appears to be poised to launch an attack on Israel in retaliation for the Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate building adjacent to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, which killed 16 people including multiple Iranian military officers. Iranian forces have already seized an Israeli-linked cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz, and Tehran continues to vow that it will soon retaliate for the embassy attack at an undisclosed time.
Iran has reportedly said through Oman that the scope of the attack will be calibrated to avoid escalation into an all-out regional conflict. Reuters reports that Washington does not expect the retaliatory attack to be large enough to draw the US into war, so both Washington and Tehran appear to be saying basically the same thing about what’s coming. So as things stand right now it seems both sides see it as unlikely that this will be the spark to ignite a new war of profound horror in the middle east.
What’s really interesting about this situation right now is how western empire managers and propagandists have been framing the coming Iranian retaliation to suggest that Iran is about to attack Israel out of the blue, completely unprovoked. As though bombing an embassy would not be considered an extreme act of war by any nation anywhere on earth.
MSNBC on Twitter: "In response to a reporter asking President Joe Biden what his message to Iran is in this moment, Biden responded "Don't.""We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed," Biden said. pic.twitter.com/zfPkl4i71g / Twitter"
In response to a reporter asking President Joe Biden what his message to Iran is in this moment, Biden responded "Don't.""We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed," Biden said. pic.twitter.com/zfPkl4i71g
They’ve seriously just been talking about it as though the embassy strike didn’t happen, babbling about defending Israel and Israel’s right to defend itself like any attack by Iran would be coming completely out of the blue. On Friday President Biden warned Iran not to attack Israel when questioned about the coming strike, saying, “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed.”
“The threats from Iran are completely unacceptable and we, like the Americans, fully support Israel’s right to defend itself,” said British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Thursday.
“Australia is deeply concerned by indications Iran is preparing military action against Israel,” chimed in Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, saying Iran should “use its influence in the region to promote stability, not contribute to escalation.”
“Israel is under threat of imminent attack by Iran,” said US Senator Tom Cotton on Twitter. “President Biden needs to warn the ayatollahs immediately that the United States will back Israel to the hilt and the joint American-Israeli retaliation for any attack will be swift and devastating.”
“Iran will bear the consequences for choosing to escalate the situation any further,” IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said following the cargo ship seizure.
Alan MacLeod on Twitter: "You'd never guess from this biased headline that Israel just bombed Iran's embassy. https://t.co/lxKiQ5kWhQ / Twitter"
You'd never guess from this biased headline that Israel just bombed Iran's embassy. https://t.co/lxKiQ5kWhQ
Mass media headlines have also been framing this as an attack that’s coming completely out of nowhere by an irrational aggressor.
“Netanyahu meets top officials as fear of Iran attack on Israel grows,” reads a headline from the BBC.
“Israel braces amid fears of Iranian strike; U.S. shifts forces to region,” a headline from The Washington Post says.
“Israel Bracing for Unprecedented Direct Iran Attack in Days,” blares Bloomberg.
“Major Iranian attack on Israel believed to be imminent,” warns CBS News.
The casual news consumer would see all this and assume that Israel and its allies have received some intelligence that Iran is preparing an attack without provocation, and are doing everything they can to deter this maniacal regime from doing so.
This is ridiculous. If Iran had bombed a US embassy and killed multiple US military officials, the US would be raining bombs on Tehran within hours and everyone knows it. But Israel bombs an Iranian embassy and everyone acts like it didn’t happen and starts yelling at Iran instead.
It’s like if someone ran up and sucker-punched somebody at the bar, and then everyone started screaming at the guy who just got punched that he’d better leave the other guy alone and stop being a bully.
Iran is probably going to attack Israel, because at some point it does have to push back on Israeli violence to create some deterrence. Hopefully it will indeed be limited, hopefully the violence will not spiral into something nightmarish, and hopefully enough people are able to see through all the propaganda spin enough to understand what’s actually happening.
________________
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
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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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If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.
Fresh audio product: the World Court, the secret history of Jelly Roll Morton
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
April 11, 2024 Heidi Matthews on the World Court and the cases against Israel pending there • Elijah Wald, author of Jelly Roll Blues, on Jelly Roll Morton and the hidden history of early blues
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.
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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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Collateral Genocide: Inside Israel’s Official ‘Legalisation’ of Mass Civilian Killings
An Israeli Government legal analysis published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs inadvertently reveals how mass destruction of civilians in Gaza is built into the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) calculations of legitimate proportionate violence, according to an exclusive Byline Times analysis.
Drawing on two previous investigations, the analysis shows that the Israeli Government’s legal justifications for mass civilian casualties are consistent with an official policy of deliberately using disproportionate force against civilians, which is conducive to genocidal violence.
After six months, the IDF war on Gaza has resulted in the killing of 33,200 Palestinians and the destruction of over 70% of all homes in Gaza, leaving 1.9 million Palestinians displaced. Over 2% of Gaza’s children were killed or injured. Eight out of every 10 schools has been destroyed, along with 84% of all health facilities.
The scale of the violence has caused UN experts to accuse Israel of complicity in genocidal violence. Last year, South Africa launched an unprecedented application to the International Court of Justice calling for the Israeli actions to be recognised as genocide. The court has not yet issued a verdict, but did conclude that the case presented was “plausible” – and urged Israel to take measures to prevent a genocide.
It was only until seven World Central Kitchen aid workers were executed in IDF drone strikes in early April that Israel’s closest allies began to question the IDF’s conduct.
However, so far both the US and UK have largely accepted the IDF’s account that they were a result of grave errors in breach of IDF procedures.
A man displays blood-stained British, Polish, and Australian passports after an Israeli airstrike, in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, in April. Photo: AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana/ Alamy
Two major investigations by Byline Times have unearthed evidence that contradicts this narrative. Our reporting revealed that the head of the IDF’s internal inquiry, Major General Yoav Har-Even, had numerous conflicts of interest which raise questions about his ability to conduct a credible inquiry. Not only was Har-Even a participant in the IDF’s “Dahiya doctrine” involving the deliberate use of disproportionate force against civilians in the 2006 Lebanon War, he directly supported the IDF’s war in Gaza from up to February 2024, and is connected to senior Israeli military figures who architected the Dahiya doctrine’s institutionalisation into official IDF policy.
We also exposed how the Obama administration had closely monitored the IDF’s adoption of the Dahiya doctrine, an IDF strategy that justifies countering an enemy by systematically targeting its national civilian population with overwhelming disproportionate force. Obama aides had received credible information that the Dahiya doctrine’s implementation during Operation Cast Lead had resulted in deadly targeting of civilians, and knew that the IDF was incapable of complying with international humanitarian law without significant international pressure. The US Government later colluded with IDF leaders to refute credible evidence of the Israeli military’s complicity in war crimes.
As early as 2010, the US Government was told by the Israeli delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that IDF commanders had considerable leeway in making decisions about proportionality when considering civilian casualty ratios, did not adequately distinguish between civilians and combatants, and routinely created kill zones in areas where civilians had been ordered to evacuate where soldiers could freely shoot “anything that moved”. As a result, even civilian aid convoys had been targeted.
In this context, IDF procedures purportedly created to protect civilians – such as leaflet dropping, roof knocking, warning calls and texts to residents – end up providing a pretext to justify disproportionate violence targeted at civilian areas on a huge scale.
As noted by Larry Lewis, former State Department advisor on civilian harm mitigation, the Israeli Government’s claim that the IDF operates a “gold standard” on civilian protection is “misguided” because: “… the gold standard for civilian harm mitigation is not a checklist of steps but rather an iterative process to learn and adapt. Israel has yet to demonstrate that it has embraced this process. More importantly, the data – not just the staggering death toll, but key attributes of the campaign – suggest Israel’s steps are not working.”
more investigations by nafeez
‘Legalising’ Criminal Impunity
US support has created a climate of impunity allowing the IDF to categorise mass violence against Gazan civilians as a ‘legitimate’ strategy to destroy Hamas.
The way in which this has led to an inherently genocidal logic is reflected in a new Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs briefing on legal aspects of the conflict in Gaza, published in December 2023.
Set against the background of the Dahiya doctrine, the foreign ministry briefing reveals that the very steps the IDF says it is taking to protect civilian life are being used to justify the disproportionate targeting of them. By defining Israel’s sought-after military advantage at such a high-level – requiring the total obliteration of Hamas capabilities – the obliteration of almost any degree of Palestinian civilian life to achieve this goal can be deemed ‘proportionate’.
The briefing sets out the IDF’s military objectives as follows: “The military advantages that the IDF is seeking include destroying enemy military assets, targeting militants, degrading and denying enemy ability to command and control operations, neutralising underground tunnels and infrastructure used for military purposes, and denying positions (such as sniper, anti-tank and surveillance posts) which endanger IDF ground forces, all of which contribute to the overall objective of securing the release of the hostages and removing Hamas’s capability to attack Israel and its citizens.”
Yet these objectives are so broad and comprehensive, that a proportionality assessment of the permitted civilian casualties incurred in pursuit of them becomes extraordinarily permissive: “LOAC [Law of armed conflict] provides that a proportionality assessment is based on the military commander’s judgement at the time of the attack, not on hindsight: the test is conduct-oriented, not result-oriented.
“As a matter of law, civilian casualties or damage to civilian objects, while tragic, do not of themselves allow for a conclusion in regard to proportionality without an informed assessment of both the expected civilian harm and the military advantage anticipated at the time of the attack.”
The document is thus able to claim that while Israel “wishes no harm to civilians” and is solely targeting military assets and objectives, since Hamas assets are embedded throughout the civilian population and infrastructure of Gaza, these can all be destroyed in the process of targeting them.
This highlights how carefully crafted legal language is used to conceal the IDF’s intentionality in targeting civilians. However, the document reveals that far from being unintended, the IDF deliberately conflates civilian structures with Hamas combatants to the extent that the deliberate and foreseeable mass destruction of “civilian objects” becomes legitimate: “Given this reprehensible strategy, many ostensibly civilian objects may become legitimate targets, as LOAC prescribes that civilian objects become legitimate military targets when, inter alia, they make an effective contribution to military action by their purpose or use. Moreover, under LOAC, Hamas militants who fail to distinguish themselves from the civilian population are legitimate targets, as are civilians taking direct part in hostilities. As a result, it cannot be concluded from the mere fact that seeming ‘civilians’ or ‘civilian objects’ have been targeted, that an attack was unlawful.”
Legitimising the Partial Destruction of Gazans
Exactly how these pseudo-legal parameters are being interpreted by the IDF in executing its war was clarified in an eye-opening briefing by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), published about a week after the 7 October terrorist attack.
Its author is Colonel Pnina Sharvit Baruch, former director of the International Law Department of the IDF’s Military Advocate General (MAG), which advises commanders on the law.
As Byline Times has previously reported, the INSS – which is the most influential think-tank in Israel among the military establishment – had documented the adoption of the Dahiya doctrine as official IDF policy since 2008.
The new INSS briefing illustrates how the above IDF interpretations of international humanitarian law invert the role of proportionality in the law of armed conflict to justify massive disproportionate targeting of the entirety of Gazan society: “According to the laws of armed conflict, even when attacking a military target, it is forbidden to attack if the collateral damage expected from the attack to civilians and civilian objects is excessive in relation to the military advantage expected from the attack. In view of the enormous threat that Hamas currently poses to Israel, the denial of its military capabilities is expected to give Israel a great security advantage. Without achieving this goal, Hamas will succeed in de facto denying Israel the exercise of its sovereignty in the areas adjacent to the border with the Gaza Strip. In light of this significant military advantage, even if many civilians in Gaza are harmed during the attacks, this is not necessarily excessive incidental damage and therefore would not be disproportionate attacks that are illegal.”
By this standard, due to the purported legitimacy of the military advantage to be obtained by seeking to completely degrade Hamas’ military capabilities – and the existential threat to Israel if this goal fails – the mass destruction of Gazan civilians in the process of achieving this goal can be categorised as “proportionate” even if it is on a huge scale.
In other words, the mere fact that the IDF’s military objective is to destroy Hamas is wielded to deny responsibility for the war’s conduct resulting in what the IDF knows will involve mass destruction of Gazan civilians. Such deliberate mass destruction is not being denied, but simply categorised as ‘proportionate’ against the law of armed conflict.
A Phony Defence
Israel’s key defence is that it is not intending to destroy Gazans, but to destroy Hamas - so what happens to Gazans in the process is therefore not intentional. The mass killings of Gazans is portrayed as tragically incidental to the Israeli military objective of eliminating Hamas. This logic would suggest that the war cannot be construed as falling under the definition of the UN Genocide Convention, which refers to “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” including “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
But this defence fails because the IDF’s military strategies rooted in the Dahiya doctrine show that this supposed distinction in intentionality is specious.
US President Joe Biden meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Israel, in October 2023. Photo: White House/ZUMA Press Wire/ Alamy
According to the Israeli Ministry of Affairs’ own legal brief, IDF military doctrine explicitly calculates the disproportionate destruction of Palestinian civilian life and infrastructure, resulting in the partial physical destruction of the group, as a necessary and inevitable corollary of trying to secure its military advantage.
As indicated by numerous statements from senior IDF figures previously reported by Byline Times (such as IDF advisor Colonel Gabi Siboni or Major General Giora Eiland, an advisor to defence minister Yoav Gallant whose company supplies technology to the IDF for targeting purposes in Gaza), this calculation potentially encompasses the whole of the ‘enemy’ society.
The Dahiya doctrine and its extension to the Israeli operation in Gaza reveals that the destruction of Gazan civilian life is not ‘incidental’ at all to the IDF’s mission, but is an integral feature of its military objective (total defeat of Hamas) – precisely because that objective, by the IDF’s own calculation, cannot be achieved without the comprehensive and indiscriminate destruction of Gazan society and people.
Responsibility for Foreseeable Destruction
Adding to this picture, in 2004 the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia (ICTY) set a crucial precedent. It clarified that a person can be found guilty of genocide even if they do not have a specific intent to destroy an ethnic or religious group in whole or in part. As long as the person enters a joint criminal enterprise in which genocide is a reasonably foreseeable consequence, they can be found guilty. The comprehensive destruction of Gazan society in breach of international humanitarian law has clearly been a foreseeable consequence of the ongoing IDF operation.
Over the last 16 years, the Dahiya doctrine was institutionalised into standard IDF policy by senior Israeli military leaders who are directly involved in Israel’s operation in Gaza.
Leaked State Department documents examined by Byline Times confirm that this logic of disproportionate violence in Gaza has evolved under the watchful eye of the United States. Through years of US support, coaching, and international cover, the IDF has been empowered to construct a sophisticated legal justification for the Dahiya doctrine’s advocacy of disproportionate violence against Palestinian civilians.
In the wake of the 7 October terrorist attack, the logic of the Dahiya doctrine has become increasingly radicalised. The greater the perceived existential threat, the greater the degree of collateral damage considered justifiable to eliminate that threat. The Israeli government’s legal constructions around the proportionality of collateral damage against perceived military advantage have thus become increasingly genocidal.
With the Hamas strike seen as representing a potential existential threat to Israel requiring the total annihilation of Hamas as a military objective, these legal constructions calculate that the disproportionate destruction of large sections of Gazan society is entirely ‘proportionate’ to the military advantage being legitimately pursued.
In effect, IDF military doctrine now makes any amount of destruction of Gaza appear ‘proportionate’ to the goal of annihilating Hamas. Far from actually protecting civilians, IDF civilian harm mitigation procedures instead become mechanisms to facilitate the deployment of overwhelming disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure across Gaza, seen by the IDF as operating symbiotically with Hamas.
This also means that the intentionality behind this destruction cannot be denied because it is inherently factored into the IDF’s proportionality calculations and rendered legitimate as an inevitable but regrettable corollary of pursing the military objective of eliminating Hamas. The simple moral mistake here is the false assumption that pursuing a military objective automatically implies that killing civilians in the process is unintentional.
That is why so many senior figures across the Israeli Government have been able to openly articulate the idea that the partial or even total destruction of Gaza is a necessary if perhaps regrettable mechanism to achieve the goal of eliminating Hamas.
Attempting to move Gaza’s wholesale destruction to the realm of collateral damage, however, does not negate its genocidal nature. When that scale of collateral damage entailing the collapse of Gazan society is recognised by the Israeli Government as a direct outcome of the pursuit of military objectives, then this remains an intended outcome of its actions even if it is cast as tragic and regrettable.
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.
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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.