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CNN And Washington Post Busted For Pro-Israel Propaganda Shenanigans
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/fd9e3d8c14e508acd7c73bc3c5ed026a/href
Both CNN and The Washington Post have been caught engaging in some pretty shady journalistic malpractice with their Israel reporting in recent days.
In a new article titled “CNN Runs Gaza Coverage Past Jerusalem Team Operating Under Shadow of IDF Censor,” The Intercept reports that all of CNN’s reporting on Israel and Palestine is funneled through a bureau in Jerusalem which slants reporting to benefit Israeli information interests and is subject to regulation by Israeli military censors. The Intercept also reports that last year CNN “hired a former soldier from the IDF’s Military Spokesperson Unit to serve as a reporter” at the onset of the war on Gaza.
Unnamed CNN staff told The Intercept that CNN’s iron-fisted protocols for regulating information related to the Israel-Palestine issue have had a “demonstrable impact on coverage of the Gaza war”.
“‘War-crime’ and ‘genocide’ are taboo words,” the anonymous CNN staff member said. “Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’ attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed.”
Daniel Boguslaw on Twitter: "NEW: Internal CNN directives force all Israel news through the Network's Jerusalem Bureau, subjecting it to oversight by the IDF censor. CNN also hired a soldier out of the IDF Spokesperson Unit to cover the aftermath of October 7th. https://t.co/X2SJRppg3Z / Twitter"
NEW: Internal CNN directives force all Israel news through the Network's Jerusalem Bureau, subjecting it to oversight by the IDF censor. CNN also hired a soldier out of the IDF Spokesperson Unit to cover the aftermath of October 7th. https://t.co/X2SJRppg3Z
The Intercept reports that the former IDF spinmeister has been bylined in dozens of CNN stories since the attack on Gaza began, with one report being “little more than a direct statement released from the IDF.”
Kind of makes you wonder why CNN doesn’t just cut out the middleman and run all its reporting directly through IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. Seems like it would be a bit more efficient, and certainly a lot more honest.
Meanwhile The Washington Post has been caught assigning a reporter with a history of anti-Palestinian bias to write a smear piece on independent media outlets Electronic Intifada and The Grayzone for their critical reporting on Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza.
Both Electronic Intifada and The Grayzone received emails from a Washington Post reporter named Elizabeth Dwoskin, who said she’s writing a piece on “efforts to minimize or misdirect information about the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel” and interrogating them about their articles casting doubt on the official narrative about what exactly happened that day.
Laila Al-Arian on Twitter: "If I'm following, a reporter that has denied the fact that Palestinians existed before the state of Israel is allowed to cover Israel/Palestine and write about "misinformation" for @washingtonpost ? https://t.co/DmbUZC57rW / Twitter"
If I'm following, a reporter that has denied the fact that Palestinians existed before the state of Israel is allowed to cover Israel/Palestine and write about "misinformation" for @washingtonpost ? https://t.co/DmbUZC57rW
As Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah highlighted on Twitter, when Dwoskin was at Columbia University twenty years ago she was authoring Nakba denialist claims that Palestine never existed and that prior to Israel’s formation the land was inhabited only by “desert Bedouins without a sense of national identity as we know it today.”
It’s bad enough for The Washington Post to be attacking independent media for asking the critical questions and doing the real journalism the Post itself should also be doing, but to assign someone with a public history of egregiously anti-Palestinian rhetoric to the task is especially lacking in journalistic integrity.
“If I’m following, a reporter that has denied the fact that Palestinians existed before the state of Israel is allowed to cover Israel/Palestine and write about ‘misinformation’ for Washington Post?” tweeted award-winning journalist Laila Al-Arian of Abunimah’s revelation.
Neither of these instances will come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying critical attention to the amazingly awful reporting the western mass media have been churning out about the Gaza assault these last three months, but they do offer some rare insight behind the curtain into how the sausage gets made.
Alan MacLeod on Twitter: "Note the language used: Hamas "propaganda"Israel "media campaign"This is how Western media primes readers to support one side and reject the other. https://t.co/ieaYmsRTaM / Twitter"
Note the language used: Hamas "propaganda"Israel "media campaign"This is how Western media primes readers to support one side and reject the other. https://t.co/ieaYmsRTaM
The biggest misconception about propaganda is that it is something that happens to other people, and is done by other countries. Westerners like to think of themselves as free-thinking people whose worldviews are formed by facts and truth, contrasting themselves with nations like North Korea and China where populations are viewed as being subjected to conformity-enforcing propaganda. They believe that if propaganda does occur in the west, it comes here from nations like Russia trying to corrupt our minds and weaken our trust in our institutions, or if the propaganda is domestic in origin it only affects people in other political parties.
In reality the typical western mind has been marinating in domestic propaganda throughout its entire life, and its worldview has been manufactured for it by powerful manipulators who benefit from its intellectual compliance with their interests. The indoctrination into the mainstream western worldview began in school, and it continues throughout adulthood with the help of mainstream media outlets like CNN and The Washington Post.
If we’re ever to have a healthy civilization, we’re going to have to wake up from the propaganda-induced coma we’ve been placed in so we can begin pushing against the cage walls we’ve been indoctrinated our whole lives into ignoring and start using the power of our numbers to force real change in the systems which govern our world. Luckily the atrocities that have been taking place in Gaza have been rapidly waking people up, because it turns out there’s only so much propaganda spin you can put on the murder of thousands of children.
The more people become aware that our civilization is built on deception and everything we’ve been told about the world is a lie, the closer we get to living in a truth-based society where nothing like the Gaza massacre would ever be permitted to occur.
____________
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 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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How Corporate Media Whitewash Israeli Crimes: A Personal Narrative
TRANSCRIPT // Like many of you, my heart is weighed down so heavily by the ongoing turmoil in Gaza. And every day, I witness in absolute horror what Israel is doing to Palestinians, as it commits war crime after war crime; it’s watching dismembered children with their limbs blown off or helpless fathers carrying their decapitated babies while collecting the body parts of their wives and children in plastic bags. Or mothers carrying the dead bodies of their children, crying and screaming for them just to wake up. Or the newlywed wife who embraces her deceased husband, her lover, and gives him her last kiss and hug goodbye. It almost feels like we’re watching a sadistic horror movie right on the screens of our smartphones, but we’re not — we are watching in real-time a genocide of my people unfold before our eyes.
And the death toll stands stark and horrific — over 20,000 Palestinians have been killed by merciless bombs, guided missiles, and white phosphorous — weapons handed directly to an out-of-control apartheid state by our government and paid for by our taxpayer money.
If anything good has come out of this horrific war, it’s that the moral depravity of the so-called “rules-based order” has been exposed to the masses. The mask has fallen from the Neoliberal class. For far too long, liberal Western politicians have tried to convince us that they live by the standards of human rights, freedom of speech, and democracy. These are the same individuals and countries that say Israel has a right to defend itself against the world’s largest concentration camp. Our so-called leaders in Washington, London, and Brussels have weaponized human rights to sell the world’s so-called humanitarian wars and to expand its settler colonial projects. But let’s not forget that this ruling class is what brought us the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Somalia and the brutal maximum pressure campaigns, sanctions, and regime change operations against sovereign nations like Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and so many more countries who are resisting Western imperialism. Israel’s war in Gaza is just an outward representation of what the Neoliberal class represents — a bloodthirst for war that fuels the military-industrial complex. Lockheed Martin and Raytheon applaud this genocide. Think tanks that are funded by these weapon manufacturers draft the war policies for our politicians to make these wars inevitable. We see dead children; they see their stock prices go up.
But it’s clear that no matter how many millions they spend to manufacture consent for their wars and support Israeli apartheid, Palestinians have won the hearts and minds of humanity. Never have I seen such global dissent and awakening to Israel’s war in Gaza. We’re seeing a global awakening. Millions have taken to the streets, mass sit-ins at our elected officials’ offices have been organized, and boycotts. The massive coffee company Starbucks lost 12 billion dollars in a matter of one month from our boycott campaign. We have to disrupt the money-making mechanisms that make these wars possible. The capitalist system is meant to make us feel powerless, but we have the power to stop this war. And Israel knows this.
That’s why Israel is spending millions on propaganda, but it’s also systematically targeting Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Over 100 journalists have been killed so far in less than 70 days. These courageous individuals, committed to unveiling the truth, have become direct targets of a regime desperate to cloak its genocidal actions from the world’s scrutiny. Israel doesn’t want the world to see the reality of its genocidal onslaught in Gaza, so it’s assassinating the messengers. In most parts of the world, wearing a flak jacket marked “press” gives you protection. But right now in Palestine, it may as well be a target, as Israel has turned Gaza into what the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has called a “cemetery for journalists.”
And you’d think mainstream corporate journalists would talk about the targeting of journalists in Gaza, but they’re not. If legacy media outlets like the New York Times or CNN cover Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza, they don’t have the basic journalistic integrity to say who killed them and fail to point out that Israel is systematically targeting them. Corporate media are whitewashing Israeli crimes and playing the fool, pretending not to understand where the missiles come from. They pretend not to hear the genocidal rhetoric emanating from Tel Aviv, who are openly calling Palestinians subhuman who need to be cleansed out of Gaza. Brave journalists have lost their lives trying to document the Israeli onslaught — we will not forget Palestinian journalist Ayat Khadoura, who was killed in her home by an Israeli airstrike. In her “last message to the world” posted on Instagram, she said: “We used to have big dreams, but now our dream is to be killed in one piece so they know who we are.”
Today, my dear friend and colleague journalist Motaz Azaiza has chronicled with full transparency the horrors of life under incessant bombs. And people around the world are flocking to his page to get live coverage of the war because it’s become evident that Western corporate media are biased towards Israeli apartheid, pushing atrocity propaganda about October 7th to justify Israel’s genocide… Western media leave out the context that Israel is occupying Palestinian land and fail to mention the many crimes against humanity Israel is committing every single day according to the Geneva Convention. It’s no coincidence. It’s because organizations like the New York Times Jerusalem bureau are built on a Palestinian house in al-Quds, which belongs to a noted Palestinian writer, Ghada Karmi, a survivor of the Nakba.
The NYT also cooperates with Israeli officials by receiving and obeying gag orders from the Israeli government. The New York Times Israel bureau chiefs Ethan Bronner, Isabel Kershner, and David Brooks had their adult children enlisted in the Israeli army while they were actively covering Israel and Palestine for the newspaper. The so-called paper of record never made this public to its readers, raising serious questions of bias and a conflict of interest. The New York Times also has a history of firing journalists like Gaza-based photographer Hosam Salem following an intervention from the Israel lobby group Honest Reporting. CNN and others who are embedded with the Israeli military have to get their footage approved by Israel before publishing it.
These are minor examples that don’t even scratch the surface of how other media outlets work directly with Israel to control the narrative on Palestine or even how BIG Tech works with NATO and Israeli-funded think tanks like the Atlantic Council and the ADL to crack down on alternative information on social media platforms. Consider this: In a matter of 60 days, Motaz amassed over 17.5 million followers. While the New York Times has 9.4 million digital subscribers…. We are winning the information war, and people are breaking through the propaganda. Journalists like Motaz Azaiza, Younis Tirawi, Muhammad Smiry, Motasem Mortaja, Wael Dahdouh, Hind Khoudary, and Bisan, to name a few, are showing us in real-time the courage it often takes to be a journalist.
As Israel continues to pound Gaza and we continue to see images of death, blood, and destruction, it’s easy to feel hopeless. It’s easy to be left speechless. But our story doesn’t end here… for every bomb dropped, every child left to survive but orphaned, limbs lost, every person pulled from under the rubble but left horrified… for every person left to survive… they survive to tell our story. We are the survivors — and our existence is our resistance. Israel thought it could bury us, but we turned out to be seeds. I was once that little girl who sat on her rooftop in Shufat–al–Quds and watched in horror Israeli jets drop bombs on homes in Ramallah. I was once that little girl who sat in her classroom only to look around to find my classmates missing each day because they were either killed or blocked from crossing a checkpoint to get to school…
I was once that little girl who was too afraid to look outside her window as Israeli soldiers pointed their rifles toward us during a militarized curfew… I was once that little girl who had her water cut off and had to hide in her barricaded home so that Israeli settlers wouldn’t come inside and attack her family. By 13 years old, I had already witnessed human rights abuses by a state that had convinced the world it was a civilized democracy. No child should have seen what I had seen, let alone what the children of Gaza are seeing today. By 13, I had already witnessed Palestinians subjected to discriminatory laws, having their travel controlled, and living behind a 30-foot-tall concrete apartheid wall separating them from the world. Every single day was a matter of survival while living under martial law and occupation. When I finally moved back to the US when I was 13 years old – to the pristine suburbs of Minneapolis, MN – where the lawns were perfectly mowed and perfect… life was calm… but my mind was racing with thoughts of children being killed by bombs, families left homeless from airstrikes, electricity and water cutoffs. I couldn’t stop thinking about the men and young boys who were abducted by Israeli police in the middle of the night raids and held in indefinite detention without trial and on no charge. I could not unsee what I had seen.
Little did I know moving overseas to Palestine as an American child would shape not only my perspective on the world but how the media operates. When we moved back to the US in 2001, it was just a few months before 9/11. I was absolutely traumatized. I suffered from what soldiers who fight in wars suffer from when they return home: PTSD, severe anxiety, and survivor’s guilt. I was just 13 years old and felt like no one understood what I had witnessed. While most teenagers in America were worried about football games, shopping, and partying, I turned to the media to stay up to date on the war I could not let go of. But what I got were images of Palestinian men covering their faces and bearing guns, stoking fear in the hearts of Americans while framing Palestinians as the aggressors. Media outlets like CNN and MSNBC gave Israeli leaders, and political figures paid millions of dollars by the Israeli lobby unlimited airtime on their networks to spew dehumanizing rhetoric about Palestinians and how much we hated ourselves, and that we wanted our children to die.
The media instilled fear in the hearts and minds of Americans to paint us as savages and barbaric to help justify Israel’s apartheid and fascist policies on a defenseless population. Why wouldn’t they? The US gives Israel over $10.4 Million a day to the apartheid regime. After 9/11 – the media propaganda machine went on steroids to dehumanize Muslims as barbaric and painted a caricature of jihad narrative about us to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – that left 4 million people dead. It became clear that Americans’ lack of understanding about the world was because of the media… And it’s as if they are all given the same script to talk about wars overseas. It’s no wonder six corporations own 90% of what Americans see, hear, and read. Americans are the most propagandized people on the planet.
Now, despite feeling alone, traumatized, misunderstood, and at times almost losing hope when I was 13, having lived under Israeli occupation and now living in a post 9/11 America, watching in horror on my TV screen US bombs being dropped on Iraq and Afghanistan…. It was this rock bottom place where I found courage and catharsis in pursuing journalism to speak up not just for Palestinians but for all people around the world who are living under war. It was at 13 years old that I decided to become a journalist. And in 2009, against all odds, I became the first American woman to wear the hijab while anchoring and reporting the news in the US. While I thought this was a great accomplishment at the time, I soon realized that very little change could be made within corporate media that is directed by marketing strategies and not actual journalism. I would just become the face of diversity at these stations while pushing dumbed-down stories to the masses.
This is why I started MintPress soon after when I was 24 years old – and about ten years later, MintPress is now a leading independent investigative news outlet in this country and around the world that exposes the profiteers of the war machine. Our investigations have been cited by politicians, major news organizations, academic journals, books, and much more across the globe. Our reporting has been used in negotiations between the US and Russia that helped stop a full-blown US invasion of Syria. But this route hasn’t been an easy one – my name has been dragged through the mud, I’ve been labeled and smeared… I’ve appeared on the front pages of major media outlets with my face plastered next to Bashar al-Assad, calling me an agent of Iran, of Hamas – you name it. MintPress has been targeted financially by British intelligence, who ordered Paypal to ban us – we’ve been banned by Tiktok, and our Wikipedia page has been written and edited by Israel lobby groups. I’ve lost friends on the way and have had my own family turn against me for standing staunchly against war and not falling for sectarian division.
But this is by design – it’s a psychological war against the truth-tellers to intimidate us into stopping – to push us into a corner. No matter the information war waged against us, we will not back down because there are innocent lives at stake who need us to be their voice. Journalism became my outlet for the helplessness that I felt growing up when I suffered from PTSD, the trauma that I carry because of my life in a war zone and knowing that so many people I left behind in Palestine are still suffering, whether it be in Gaza or anywhere in the world living under war. Israel thought it could bury us, but we turned out to be seeds.
Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh
The post How Corporate Media Whitewash Israeli Crimes: A Personal Narrative appeared first on MintPress News.
US Admonishes Israeli Officials For Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud About Ethnic Cleansing
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/3da82658a8af0ebd898d5ab9396453fa/href
The US State Department has issued a statement indignantly finger-wagging at two Israeli officials who recently drew headlines for openly endorsing the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.
The statement reads as follows:
“The United States rejects recent statements from Israeli Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir advocating for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza. This rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible. We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the Government of Israel, including by the Prime Minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government. They should stop immediately.
“We have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land, with Hamas no longer in control of its future and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel. That is the future we seek, in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians, the surrounding region, and the world.”
Matthew Miller on Twitter: "The United States rejects the inflammatory and irresponsible statements from Israeli Ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir. There should be no mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. / Twitter"
The United States rejects the inflammatory and irresponsible statements from Israeli Ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir. There should be no mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.
The offending statements by Ben Gvir and Smotrich promoted the idea of “encouraging” Palestinians to flee Gaza en masse, absurdly referring to this hypothetical outcome as “voluntary migration” despite the fact that Israel has been doing everything in its power to make living in Gaza impossible.
You will note, probably without surprise, that the statement contains nothing but empty scolding. No mention is made of the faintest possibility of any consequence of any kind being brought to bear should Israeli officials continue to openly advocate for eliminating the Palestinian population of Gaza and replacing it with Jewish settlements. This is because the US has no intention of actually doing anything to hinder Israel’s ethnic cleansing agendas.
And make no mistake, that absolutely is Israel’s agenda. The State Department can claim all it wants that “such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government” and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has assured Washington that there are no plans to resettle Palestinians outside of Gaza, but Netanyahu himself has been publicly contradicting this claim with increasing brazenness.
Just last week at a Likud party meeting Netanyahu explicitly said that his government is working on finding countries who would be willing to “absorb” Palestinian refugees from Gaza, claiming that the world is “already discussing the possibilities of voluntary immigration.”
Antiwar.com on Twitter: "Netanyahu Says He's Looking for Countries to 'Absorb' Palestinians from GazaHis comments are the latest sign that Israel's goal is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestiniansby Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Netanyahu #Gaza #Palestine #Palestinians #Israel https://t.co/JJ46bpUvSV pic.twitter.com/T2nkfZzy1k / Twitter"
Netanyahu Says He's Looking for Countries to 'Absorb' Palestinians from GazaHis comments are the latest sign that Israel's goal is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestiniansby Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Netanyahu #Gaza #Palestine #Palestinians #Israel https://t.co/JJ46bpUvSV pic.twitter.com/T2nkfZzy1k
Indeed, it’s fair to say that the extreme-right ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich are not actually saying anything on this front that is significantly different from what Netanyahu himself has been saying. Bibi’s just a bit more polite about it, with Ben Gvir openly thumbing his nose at the State Department’s remarks saying “we aren’t another star on the American flag” and “facilitating the relocation of hundreds of thousands from Gaza will allow those in the Israeli Gaza border communities to return home and live securely while safeguarding the IDF soldiers.”
In fact, one could easily argue that Netanyahu as well as Ben Gvir and Smotrich have been entirely in alignment with the State Department’s own language on this subject. The idea of “voluntary immigration” does not contradict the position asserted by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the US vision for Gaza involves “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza — not now, not after the war.”
Notice Blinken’s careful insertion of the word “forcible” there. His wording makes it clear that the US would only object if Palestinians were actually forced onto ships or marched across the Egyptian border at gunpoint, as middle east analyst Mouin Rabbani recently observed on Twitter:
“Alarm bells should have started ringing in early November when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Western politicians began insisting there could be ‘no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza’. Rather than rejecting any mass removal of Palestinians, Blinken and colleagues objected only to optically challenging expulsions at gunpoint. The option of ‘voluntary’ displacement by leaving residents of the Gaza Strip with no choice but departure was pointedly left open.”
Aaron Maté on Twitter: "Blinken is such a cynical character. Every word he says is calculated to cloak evil in a diplomatic guise. https://t.co/LQqySYrqfe / Twitter"
Blinken is such a cynical character. Every word he says is calculated to cloak evil in a diplomatic guise. https://t.co/LQqySYrqfe
So contrary to its self-righteous moral posturing, the State Department is not actually upset with Ben Gvir and Smotrich for advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They’re just upset they said the quiet part out loud.
If there’s one thing Blinken and his cohorts understand, it’s that you’re not supposed to describe the evil things you want to do in evil-sounding language. You’ve got to tapdance gracefully around the actual depravity you intend to inflict, uttering flowery prose about humanitarian concerns and compassion for both sides to keep everyone dazzled and hypnotized while the killing machines are quietly rolled out in the background. You’ve got to be eloquent and elusive about your murderousness. Like Obama.
The US war machine is every bit as depraved as the state of Israel, and the Biden administration is just as culpable for the horrors being unleashed in Gaza as Netanyahu and his goons. Ignore their words and watch their actions. Don’t let them dazzle you with their feigned concern for human rights.
_______________
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 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 Adobe Stock.
Historical Roots: Exploring the Long-Term Zionist Plan for Demographic Control
Thousands of miles separate Uganda and Congo from the Gaza Strip, but these places are connected to Palestine in ways that traditional geopolitical analyses would fail to explain.
On January 3, it was revealed that the far-right Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is actively discussing proposals to expel millions of Palestinians to African countries in exchange for a fixed price.
The discussion on expelling millions of Gazans has supposedly entered the mainstream thinking in Israel starting on October 7. However, the fact that this discussion remains active over three months since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza indicates that the Israeli proposals are not an outcome of a specific historical moment, for example, the Al-Aqsa Flood operation.
Even a glance at Israeli historical records points to the fact that the mass expulsion of Palestinians – known in Israel as ‘Transfer’ – was, and remains, a primary Israeli strategy that aims at fixing Israel’s so-called ‘demographic problem.’
Long before fighters from the Al-Qassam Brigades and other Palestinian movements stormed the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel on October 7, Israeli politicians discussed, in fact, on many occasions, how to reduce the overall Palestinian population to maintain the demographic Jewish majority in historic Palestine.
The idea was not only confined to Israel’s extremists; it was even discussed by the likes of former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman when he suggested in 2014 a proposal for a ‘population exchange plan.’
Even supposedly liberal intellectuals and historians have supported this idea in principle and practice.
A top Israeli historian, Benny Morris, regretted in an interview with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz in January 2004 that Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, failed to expel all Palestinians during the Nakba – the catastrophic event of murder and ethnic cleansing that led to the creation of the state of Israel on top of Palestinian towns and villages.
Another proof that the idea of ‘Transfer’ was not concocted on the spur of the moment is that comprehensive plans were immediately produced after October 7. They include a position paper published by the Israeli think tank the ‘Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy’ on October 17 and a report released three days later by the Israeli news outlet Calcalist, which outlined a document proposing the same strategy.
The fact that Egypt, Jordan and other Arab countries openly and immediately declared their total rejection of expelling Palestinians indicates the degree of seriousness of those official Israeli proposals.
“Our problem is (finding) countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it,” Netanyahu said on January 2.
These comments were followed by others, including a statement by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich when he said, “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration.”
It was then that the Israeli official discourse adopted the term ‘voluntary migration.’ But there is nothing voluntary about the starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians, who continue to face an ongoing genocide and are being pushed systematically toward the border region between Gaza and Egypt.
In its legal case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the government of South Africa included the planned ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Tel Aviv as one of the main points listed by Pretoria, accusing Israel of genocide.
Due to the lack of enthusiasm on the part of pro-Israel Western countries, Israeli diplomats are circumnavigating the globe, looking for governments that are willing to accept ethnically cleansed Palestinians.
Imagine if this behavior stemmed from any other country in the world: a country that murders people en masse yet shops around looking for other states to accept the expelled survivors in exchange for cash.
Not only has Israel made a mockery of international law, but they have also set whole new standards of despicable behavior by any state, anywhere in the world, at any time in history, ancient or modern.
And yet, the world continues to watch, support, as in the case of the US, or gently or vehemently protest, but without taking a single meaningful action to stop the bloodbath in Gaza or to block the terrifying scenarios that could indeed follow if the war does not end.
But there is one thing that many people might not know: the Zionist movement, the very ideological institution that established Israel, had attempted to move the world’s Jewry to Africa to select a state before the choice of Palestine as the ‘Jewish homeland.’
This was called the ‘Uganda Scheme’ of 1903. It was raised by Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, at the Sixth Zionist Congress. It was based on a proposal by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain.
Declaration of the British Government allocating a “Jewish Territory” in East Africa, August 29, 1903
The Uganda Scheme eventually fell through, but the Zionists continued to shop for some other place, finally, to the misfortune of the Palestinians, settling on Palestine.
Suppose one compares the genocidal language of Israeli leaders of today and studies their racist references to Palestinians. They would find a significant overlap between their collective perception and how Europeans perceived Jewish communities for hundreds of years.
The sudden Zionist interest in Congo as a potential ‘homeland’ for Palestinians further illustrates the point that the Zionist movement continues to live in the shadow of its history, projecting the racism practiced against Jews on Israel’s racism against innocent Palestinians.
On January 5, Israel’s Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu proposed that Israelis “must find ways for Gazans that are more painful than death.” One does not need to struggle to find historical references of similar language used by German Nazis in their depiction of Jews in the early half of the 20th century.
If history does repeat itself, it has an odd and unkind way of doing so.
We have been told that the world has learned from the mass killings of previous wars, including the Holocaust and other WWII atrocities. Yet, it seems that the lessons have largely gone unlearned. Not only is Israel now assuming the role of the mass killer, but the rest of the Western world continues to play the role assigned to them in this historical tragedy. They are either cheering, politely protesting, or doing nothing at all.
Feature photo | Theodor Herzl with a Zionist delegation in Alexandria, Egypt in 1898. Photo | Public Domain
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out.’ His other books include ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
The post Historical Roots: Exploring the Long-Term Zionist Plan for Demographic Control appeared first on MintPress News.
They’re Calling Ethnic Cleansing “Voluntary Migration” Now
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/88b7d0e16c8aa5a11213ef63cca93a9b/href
Israeli officials are now openly admitting that they’re working on “encouraging” the migration of Palestinians from Gaza, ridiculously claiming that this migration would be “voluntary” despite their having deliberately made the enclave uninhabitable over the last three months.
The Times of Israel reports:
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s two senior far-right partners endorsed the rebuilding of settlements in the Gaza Strip and the encouraging of “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians on Monday, while hawkish opposition MK Avigdor Liberman called for Israel to reoccupy southern Lebanon.
“Speaking during their parties’ respective faction meetings in the Knesset, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich presented the migration of Palestinian civilians as a solution to the long-running conflict and as a prerequisite for securing the stability necessary to allow residents of southern Israel to return to their homes.
“The war presents an ‘opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza,’ Ben Gvir told reporters and members of his far-right Otzma Yehudit party, calling such a policy ‘a correct, just, moral and humane solution.’
“‘We cannot withdraw from any territory we are in in the Gaza Strip. Not only do I not rule out Jewish settlement there, I believe it is also an important thing,’ he said.
“The ‘correct solution’ to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ‘to encourage the voluntary migration of Gaza’s residents to countries that will agree to take in the refugees,’ Smotrich told members of his Religious Zionism party, predicting that ‘Israel will permanently control the territory of the Gaza Strip,’ including through the establishment of settlements.”
Antiwar.com on Twitter: "Two Israeli Ministers Say 'Resettle' Palestinians from Gaza and Build Settlements in the StripAn Arab member of the Israeli Knesset said the two extremist ministers were inciting genocideby Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Gaza #Israel #Palestine #Palestinians https://t.co/SI3EjCnVx0 pic.twitter.com/RnGrC4fMDR / Twitter"
Two Israeli Ministers Say 'Resettle' Palestinians from Gaza and Build Settlements in the StripAn Arab member of the Israeli Knesset said the two extremist ministers were inciting genocideby Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Gaza #Israel #Palestine #Palestinians https://t.co/SI3EjCnVx0 pic.twitter.com/RnGrC4fMDR
The repeated use of the word “encourage” stands out in these remarks, given that encouraging Gaza’s inhabitants to flee their homeland is exactly what Israel’s actions since October have been doing. Once you’ve made 90 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants homeless with internal displacement, forced half the population into starvation via siege warfare, destroyed the enclave’s entire healthcare system to the point where disease is now running rampant, all while raining death and destruction from above in a wildly unpredictable manner with airstrikes routinely hitting designated safe zones, you’re offering the population some very strong “encouragement” indeed to vacate the region as soon as possible.
This obviously makes the argument for the “voluntary migration” of Gazans completely nonsensical, since violently coercing someone into doing something and ensuring that they’ll die if they don’t do it is the exact opposite of what the word “voluntary” means.
But that’s the slogan we’re seeing pop up again and again as Israel draws closer to its final solution to the Palestinian problem in Gaza. Netanyahu and his cohorts have been repeatedly uttering phrases like “voluntary resettlement” and “voluntary migration” to describe the plan for Gaza’s Palestinian inhabitants to either move to refugee camps set up in the adjacent Sinai Peninsula in Egypt or to be taken in by other nations around the world.
Netanyahu has said that a team must be established to “ensure that those who want to leave Gaza to a third country can do so.” Iraq invader Tony Blair was reportedly being eyed as a potential leader of such a team by Israeli officials, though Blair has denied this.
Mondoweiss on Twitter: "Benjamin Netanyahu announced his endgame in Gaza: the "voluntary migration" of Palestinians forced to choose between leaving or dying by bombardment and starvation. His goal is to end the Palestinians as a people and as a national movement.https://t.co/RDrm36aE0O / Twitter"
Benjamin Netanyahu announced his endgame in Gaza: the "voluntary migration" of Palestinians forced to choose between leaving or dying by bombardment and starvation. His goal is to end the Palestinians as a people and as a national movement.https://t.co/RDrm36aE0O
Mitchell Plitnick wrote the following on the absurdity of the “voluntary migration” talking point in an article for Mondoweiss last month:
“The term ‘voluntary emigration’ is likely to be heard quite a lot in the coming weeks and months, and it is one of the most cynical, dishonest terms one can imagine. There is, of course, nothing voluntary about people leaving Gaza. Israel has made the place unlivable, and that was before the current bombardment.
“Now, they are essentially being forced to leave under the threat of imminent death. The people of Gaza did not suddenly lose their attachment to Palestine. They will die if they stay, as will their children. If you cut off water, electricity, food, and medical care, destroy all the shelter, and then ask a person, ‘Would you still like to stay?’ their decision to leave is obviously not voluntary.”
But that’s the narrative they’re going with apparently.
And it’s nothing new; Israel has been falsely claiming for generations that its violent forced expulsion of Palestinians known as the Nakba was voluntary as well. In 2000 Palestinian academic Ghada Karmi wrote that “The Israeli version of history — that the Palestinians left voluntarily or under orders from their leaders and that Israelis had no responsibility, material or moral, for their plight — has been successfully marketed to the world community for decades.”
The plot to relocate Palestinians from territories desired by Israel is also far from new. In a 2002 article for The Guardian titled “A new exodus for the Middle East?”, Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that the agenda to “transfer” Palestinians to other countries has existed for as long as modern Zionism:
“The idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century. And driving it was an iron logic: There could be no viable Jewish state in all or part of Palestine unless there was a mass displacement of Arab inhabitants, who opposed its emergence and would constitute an active or potential fifth column in its midst. This logic was understood, and enunciated, before and during 1948, by Zionist, Arab and British leaders and officials.
“As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the prophet and founder of Zionism, wrote in his diary in anticipation of the establishment of the Jewish state: ‘We shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country … The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.’”
This is a very, very old agenda, being presented as something brand new that is only just occurring to Israeli officials just now. They didn’t just come up with this. It’s been fantasized about for as long as Israel was a twinkle in its founding fathers’ eyes.
This is the real objective in Gaza. Not the “elimination of Hamas” (whatever the hell you want to pretend that would look like in practice), but the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
Hamas is not the target in Gaza. Hamas is just the excuse.
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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 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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Report on the 2023 BIEN Congress held in Seoul, South Korea
by Annie Miller “When I was invited to give the Opening Address, I wondered ‘What could I talk about?’. However, I realised that, even after more than three decades in the business, I am still learning new things that I could share. I had also had the privilege of attending the first of the current […]
Israel Says It’s Anti-Semitic To Invoke The Genocide Convention Over Gaza
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/75283568091a83892e2f0fd824926c39/href
South Africa has invoked the Genocide Convention, formally launching a case at the UN’s international court of justice accusing Israel of genocide for its mass atrocities in the Gaza Strip. Israel immediately responded by (deep sigh) accusing South Africa of “blood libel”.
Blood libel, for those who don’t know, refers to the way medieval Europeans would falsely accuse Jews of murdering Christians in blood sacrifices in order to justify persecuting them. Which is to say, Israel has responded to South Africa’s accusations by accusing South Africa of anti-semitism.
Read Let This Radicalize You on Twitter: "South Africa is formally accusing Israel of genocide. Responding with "that's antisemitic" is not gonna cut it. pic.twitter.com/YPYR7VLo6K / Twitter"
South Africa is formally accusing Israel of genocide. Responding with "that's antisemitic" is not gonna cut it. pic.twitter.com/YPYR7VLo6K
False accusations of anti-semitism are all Israel and its defenders have left. It’s the only tool left in their toolbox. Once you’ve exhausted the “But Hamas!” and “But October 7!” excuses they make for Israel’s deliberate butchery of civilians via airstrikes and siege warfare, false accusations of hating Jews is all that remains.
And it’s so sick, because it exploits a healthy impulse in those of us who oppose racism and genocide, and does so in order to defend racist acts of genocide. It causes people who care deeply about human rights to take a step back and say “Hold on, am I guilty of embodying the same hateful prejudices which led to the Holocaust?” and shuts us down and shuts us up, even as Israel rolls out its own holocaust against Palestinians.
It exploits a noble, healthy inclination we cultivate in ourselves in good faith in order to support the horrific genocidal nightmare in Gaza in entirely bad faith. It exploits our good nature to advance a profoundly evil cause. It’s despicable. It’s depraved.
Israel apologists always speak as though all critics of Israel are constantly obsessing over Jews, when nothing remotely like that is happening. It’s a fantasy. The only reason people like me ever make any mention of Jewishness is because 90 percent of the arguments made by Israel’s defenders rely on babbling about Jews and antisemitism, and those arguments need to be addressed.
jeremy scahill on Twitter: "This is a significant move, particularly because the action is being brought by South Africa, a nation that fought for its own liberation against an apartheid regime supported for decades by the US. https://t.co/m0VBm0uofY / Twitter"
This is a significant move, particularly because the action is being brought by South Africa, a nation that fought for its own liberation against an apartheid regime supported for decades by the US. https://t.co/m0VBm0uofY
If Israel’s defenders weren’t constantly babbling about Jews and antisemitism, it would never even occur to me to think about those things in relation to what’s happening in Gaza, and I’m quite sure the vast majority of people on my side of this issue are the same. When you see mass atrocities of unfathomable horror unfolding in real time in a nonstop deluge of video and photo evidence, the very last thing on your mind is what religious faith the perpetrators espouse. It’s not something normal people think about.
Throughout my life I’ve had a positive view of Jews and Jewish culture because so many of the people I’ve admired and been influenced by have been Jewish, but other than that it’s not something that I’ve really thought about much. This notion that opposition to the criminality of the Israeli government is driven by a demented hatred of Jewish people is a complete work of fiction. People in our society simply do not feel that way about Jews. Real antisemitism does exist, but it’s a small fringe view. Normal people just want the mass slaughter of children and the ethnic cleansing to stop.
If I saw someone murdering a child, there are many things I might say and do, but the very last thing that would ever occur to me would be to wonder what religion he is. It’s the silliest, most nonsensical narrative in mainstream politics and media today.
And that’s why fewer and fewer people are buying it. There’s only so many times the boy can falsely cry wolf before the villagers stop running to his defense. Hopefully this desensitization that Israel and its apologists have created doesn’t have dark consequences in the future. It’s just one more ugly thing they have birthed into the world that the rest of us will have to bring consciousness to.
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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 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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At This Point We Have To Always Assume Israel Is Lying Until Proven Otherwise
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/842efb1906dc51387b92a4f29407020b/href
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Israel is killing children at a historic rate, is killing an unprecedented number of journalists, and is starving half a million civilians while raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp. No part of this is complicated. No part of this is two-sided.
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On Tuesday Israel killed a Palestinian baby girl who was born during the IDF bombing campaign on Gaza. They’ve been killing children so aggressively for so long now that they’re starting to kill children who were born after the child-killing began.
Seventeen days. Al-Amira Aisha got seventeen days on this planet before being crushed to death by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Rafah, alongside her two year-old brother Ahmed and 25 others who’d been living in the same apartment building. She never knew a day of peace.
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A Washington Post investigative report into Israel’s attack on al-Shifa Hospital has found that “the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center.” The Post reports it came to this conclusion after “analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery and all of the publicly released IDF materials.”
At this point the default assumption of any thinking person should be that all claims made by Israel are lies until proven otherwise by mountains of rock-solid evidence.
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The belief that Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties is based on literally nothing. It has no evidentiary basis whatsoever. People believe it because they want to. Because believing it is more emotionally comfortable than facing the obvious reality.
Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده on Twitter: "Gaza was once here, then the barbarians came to wipe it off the map. We will not forgive, and we will not forget. #GazaGenocide pic.twitter.com/1v2qRNZDnS / Twitter"
Gaza was once here, then the barbarians came to wipe it off the map. We will not forgive, and we will not forget. #GazaGenocide pic.twitter.com/1v2qRNZDnS
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There are two aspects to the war on journalism over Gaza. The first is a highly concentrated assault in Gaza itself where journalists are actively being assassinated, and the second is a worldwide assault where journalists who don’t follow the official line are being purged.
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It’s so weird watching western rightists babble about how barbaric they think Muslims and their culture are while western culture amasses a mountain of ten thousand child corpses in Gaza.
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When you see how effective the Houthis have been at using Yemen’s critical location to shut down Red Sea traffic, you understand why the US spent years backing a horrific genocidal military campaign trying to get rid of them.
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It’s not okay for progressive Democrats to talk about how sad and bad the Gaza massacre is and how important a ceasefire is without naming Biden, as though it’s some remote foreign conflict that your president is just passively witnessing instead of actively facilitating.
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Biden backed a genocide in Gaza, sabotaged peace negotiations in Ukraine to launch a world-threatening proxy war, and now we’re all praying that he doesn’t launch a new full-scale war with Hezbollah and/or Ansarallah. But you’re still meant to fiercely support his re-election.
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Bush’s wars were dumb when they happened under Bush, and they’re even dumber now two decades later as they’re happening again after learning precisely nothing.
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Claiming to support a “two-state solution” that Israel has never had any intention of permitting lets liberals pretend they can support Israel without supporting murder, tyranny, apartheid and abuse, and thus never need to experience any guilt or dissonance about their position.
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There’s a single news story about international conflicts which keeps repeating itself again and again in different iterations, and that story is this: “US-centralized empire fights to secure domination of planet Earth, and some populations resist this.”
You’re seeing this story with Hamas, Hezbollah and Ansarallah today. That’s what you’ve been seeing with all the standoffs with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. That’s what you see when the US-centralized power structure terrorizes nations in Latin America like Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua.
It’s a giant empire attacking nations who have the temerity to insist on their own national sovereignty rather than being absorbed into the imperial blob. It uses full-scale wars, proxy conflicts, starvation sanctions and blockades, drone wars, CIA coups and deliberately fomented color revolutions to subvert any government which defies the US agenda of securing total planetary domination.
If you can understand this, you can understand pretty much any major international conflict in modern times.
___________
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 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 Adobe Stock.
Shooting in Philosophy Building at Charles University in Prague (updated)
Eleven people were killed and approximately 30 more injured in a shooting that took place at Charles University in Prague, in the building that houses the university’s Department of Philosophy. The shooter is dead.
The shooting took place this afternoon in the downtown Prague building on Jan Palach Square, according to multiple news outlets. The philosophy department was evacuated and the square was cordoned off.
Reportedly, some people hid from the shooter by crouching on a ledge on the outside of the building:
[photo from X/Twitter; said to be people hiding from a shooter at Charles University in Prague]
No details regarding the identity of the victims or the shooter, or the possible motivations of the shooter, have been made available at this time.
[People evacuate the building at Charles University in Prague where the shooting took place. photo: AKtu.cz]
UPDATE: Reportedly, the shooter has been identified as a 24-year-old student at the university, who may have been on the run from police who were investigating his involvement in a violent death in a town outside of Prague.
UPDATE 2 (12/21/23): The New York Times reports:
- the shooter killed 14 people
- the shooter was a history student
- police believe he shot his father at their family home in Kladno before heading into Prague
- the shooter is believed to have been inspired by mass shootings that had taken place in Russia, based on social media posts he is believed to have made. One of the posts says, “I always wanted to kill. I thought I would be a maniac in the future.”
- a police spokesman said of the shooter, “He had a lot of guns, special army guns, but all of these guns were legal.”
- police had information “that an attack at the school was imminent” and so were already nearby when the shooting began.
The post Shooting in Philosophy Building at Charles University in Prague (updated) first appeared on Daily Nous.