There is a concerted media ploy to change the narrative on the massacre of hundreds of women and children in Gaza, on the grounds that it is Hamas’ fault for breaking the ceasefire. The Israeli account of the ceasefire breakdown is parroted relentlessly.
I have put some effort into discovering why the ceasefire broke down, including contacting sources in Gaza itself. What is plain is that there were multiple incidents shortly after the ceasefire deadline, of violations by both sides. This is actually normal – such ceasefires usually take a few hours to take hold as fighting in hot progress and operations under way get stopped. At leasy eleven Palestinians were killed by shellfire in the first hour after the ceasefire.
The media has however focused solely on a single incident, that which featured missing Israeli Lieutenant Goldin. What appears to have happened here was that the Israelis were continuing with their destruction of tunnels, as the ceasefire provisions allowed. They came across a group of Palestinian fighters sheltered in the tunnels, and not surprisingly the Palestinian fighters did not interpret the ceasefire as meaning the Israelis could kill them but they were precluded from fighting. In the ensuing firefight some on both sides were killed and injured, while Lt. Goldin has disappeared.
Incidentally it is worth noting that my information is that Hamas’ statement that the incident was a deliberate ambush, and occurred before the ceasefire, is also untrue.
The Israelis immediately called in massive shellfire and missile attack. It is not improbable Goldin was killed or wounded in the firefight – or possibly just hiding – and he and his body destroyed by an Israeli shell or missile. It is a sad norm of warfare that sometimes there is no recognisable body.
Why we are supposed to be more concerned about Goldin than about the twenty Palestinian children who have been killed since he vanished, is beyond me. But you see, killing those children is now OK again, because Hamas broke the ceasefire. The media have a nice narrative mapped out for them – and boy, are they milking it.
Craig, I’ve noticed the similarities between Zionism and Unionism, and also with the South African apartheid state, before. The siege mentality and the pretence of victimhood by those who hold the whip hand have always struck me as a way of channeling repressed guilt.
‘At Goldstein’s funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin claimed that even one million Arabs are “not worth a Jewish fingernail”. Samuel Hacohen, a teacher at a Jerusalem college, declared Goldstein the “greatest Jew alive, not in one way but in every way” and said that he was “the only one who could do it, the only one who was 100 percent perfect.’
Krazies but bloody dangerous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Goldstein
Cave of the Patriarchs massacre
‘On February 25, 1994, that year’s Purim day, Goldstein entered a room in the Cave of the Patriarchs that was serving as a mosque, wearing “his army uniform with the insignia of rank, creating the image of a reserve officer on active duty.” He then opened fire, killing 29 worshippers and wounding more than 125. Mosque guard Mohammad Suleiman Abu Saleh said he thought that Goldstein was trying to kill as many people as possible and described how there were “bodies and blood everywhere”. Eventually, Goldstein was overcome and beaten to death by survivors of the massacre. According to Ian Lustick, “by mowing down Arabs he believed wanted to kill Jews, Goldstein was reenacting part of the Purim story.”‘.
ISRAEL CREATED HAMAS TO STALL PEACE – HOW ISRAEL AND THE AMERICANS FOSTER ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM TO STALL PEACE WITH THE PALESTINIANS AND OTHER IMPERIALISTIC OBJECTIVES
The Israelis created Hamas. But before we explore that question, let’s start with a more important one. Let’s be honest with ourselves. If we can look at the situation from beyond the confines of current political discourse, and look at the emperor without his “new” clothes, we all know that Israel does not want peace. They want all of Palestine, and their belligerent settlement practices confirm that.
But the Israelis are taking advantage of the world’s ignorance of the realities in Palestine, and posturing as being willing to talk “peace”, only to actually stall that very peace process, so as not to interrupt the further colonization of Palestine.
So anything that can be offered as an excuse, will be. The most convenient ploy, presented with the sycophantic assistance of the media, is that of “terrorism”.
But the masses are naive, and fail to suspect the Machiavellian extremes that certain leaders will resort to to aggrandize their power. This includes creating a false enemy, in this case, Hamas, whereby the right-wing leadership of the Israelis can point the finger to some “enemy” to blame otehr than themselves for supposedly stalling the process.
The use of Islamic terrorism for the political ends of Western nations is nothing new. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1924, the British and Americans stepped in to fill the vacuum by providing their own versions of “Islamic” leaders. This started with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was created through a grant from the British. Under British sponsorship, the Brotherhood flourished, and today represents a sizeable and powerful force in the Islamic world, but most worryingly, as the institution behind almost every act of terror in the name of Islam.
More correctly, the Brotherhood has been a tool shared my numerous Western intelligence agencies, starting with the Nazis, followed by the CIA, but also the Russians, French, Germans and Israelis.
Since the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, it has been a staple of foreign policy of the Cold War to exploit the Muslim Brotherhood to rally naive Muslims to reject “atheistic” Communism as an arch enemy of Islam. Ever since, the Americans and others have been able to manage the Brotherhood like a rabid dog on a leash to keep the Communist threat at bay.
With the collapse of the Cold War however, the Brotherhood has been used for new imperial objectives, where they pose as the bogey man which the Americans can chase with their armies into the Middle East and Central Asia, starting with Iraq and Afghanistan.
But, as NSC official Sheila Haslin explained, in a testimony at Senate hearings into illegal fund-raising activities, US policy in the region was to “promote the independence of these oil-rich countries, to in essence break Russia’s monopoly control over the transportation of oil from that region, and frankly, to promote Western energy security through diversity of supply.”
Israel has also maintained a long-standing relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, with its most recent manifestation being its participation in the founding of an offshoot organization, Hamas.
According to Robert Dreyfuss, who details the US’ troubling relationship with Islamic fundamentalism, in “Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam”:
“And beginning in 1967 through the late 1980s, Israel helped the Muslim Brotherhood establish itself in the occupied territories. It assisted Ahmed Yassin, the leader of the Brotherhood, in creating Hamas, betting that its Islamist character would weaken the PLO.”
According to Charles Freeman, a veteran US diplomat and former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, “Israel started Hamas. It was a project of Shin Bet [Isreali domestic intelligence agency], which had a feeling that they could use it to hem in the PLO.”
In 1965, Yassin had been arrested by Egyptian intelligence, but after 1967, when Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza, Yassin was freed. In 1973, under approval from Shin Bet, Yassin founded the Islamic Center, and began to establish effective control over hundreds of mosques. In 1976, Yassin created the Islamic Association, which membership branches throughout the Gaza Srip, and the movement grew.
Israel’s formal support for Islamic fundamentalism came with the election of the right-wing Likud party. In 1978, Begin’s new government formally licensed Yassin’s Islamic Association, as part of a strategy to undermine the power of the PLO. One aspect of that strategy was the creation of the Village Leagues, over which Yassin and the Brotherhood exercised much influence. Up to 200 members of the Leagues were given paramilitary training in Israel, among whom Shin Bet recruited many paid informers.
David Shipler, a former reporter for the New York Times, cites the Israeli military governor of Gaza as boasting that Israel expressly financed the fundamentalists against the PLO:
“Politically speaking, Islamic fundamentalists were sometimes regarded as useful to Israel, because they had conflicts with the secular supporters of the PLO. Violence between the two groups erupted occasionally on West Bank university campuses, and the Israeli military governor of the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, once told me how he had financed the Islamic movement as a counterweight to the PLO and the Communists. ‘The Isreali Government gave me a budget and the military government gives to the mosques,’ he said.”
As Dreyfuss notes, “during the 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza and the West Bank did not support resistance to the Israeli occupation. Most of its energy went to fighting the PLO, especially its more left-wing factions, on university campuses.”
US diplomats and CIA officials were aware that Israel was fostering Islamic fundamentalism among the Palestinians, but, as noted Martha Kessler, a senior analyst for the CIA, “we saw Israel cultivate Islam as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism”, but neither the CIA nor the State department did anything about it.
It was primarily Israel’s far right, Begin, Shamir and Ariel Sharon who pursued this policy. It is with them that we see the very cynical basis for the exploitation of Islamic fundamentalism in the region. This was explained by Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad officer who left the agency and became a strong critic, and wrote two books about the service:
“Supporting the radical elements of Muslim fundamentalism sat well with Mossad’s general plan for the region. An Arab world run by fundamentalists would not be party to any negotiations with the West, thus leaving Israel again as the only democratic, rational country in the region. And if the Mossad could arrange for Hamas… to take over the Palestinian streets from the PLO, then the picture would be complete.”
Very suspiciously, in 1983, Yassin was arrested by Israeli authorities, but although he was sentenced to 13 years in prison, he was released after only a year. Then in 1986-7, Yassin founded Hamas. According to Philip Wilcox, counterterrorism expert a former US ambassador who headed the US consulate in Jerusalem at the time, “there were persistent rumors that the Israeli secret service gave covert support to Hamas, because they were seen as a rival to the PLO.” Wilcox said the US officials in Jerusalem dealt “regularly and intensively” with Hamas.
After the Palestinian uprising of 1987, the PLO accused Hamas and Yassin of acting “with the direct support of reactionary Arab regimes… in collusion with the Israeli occupation.” Yasser Arafat complained to an Italian newspaper: “Hamas is a creation of Israel, which at the time of Prime Minister Shamir, gave them money and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities and mosques.” Arafat also maintained that Israeli prime minister Rabin admitted to him in the presence of Hosni Mubarak that Israel had supported Hamas.
Essentially, as analyst Ray Hannania pointed out, in “Sharon’s Terror Child”, published in Counterpunch, “undermining the peace process has always been the real target of Hamas and has played into the political ambitions of Likud. Every time Israeli and Palestinian negotiators appeared ready to take a major step forward achieving peace, an act of Hamas terrorism has scuttled the peace process and pushed the two sides apart.”
This pattern continued throughout the shifting developments of the stalled peace process. In 2001, when the PLO secured a Hamas pledge to halt its terrorist attacks, then prime minister Ariel Sharon ordered the assassinations of one of their top officials. As Alex Fishman commented in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot, “whoever gave the green light to this act of liquidation knew full well that he was thereby shattering in one blow the gentlemen’s agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority”.
In “Hamas and the Transformation of Political Islam in Palestine”, for Current History, Sara Roy wrote:
“Some analysts maintain that while Hamas leaders are being targeted, Israel is simultaneously pursuing its old strategy of promoting Hamas over the secular nationalist factions as a way of ensuring the ultimate demise of the [Palestinian Authority], and as an effort to extinguish Palestinian nationalism once and for all.”
Essentially, the Muslim Brotherhood, with its many manifestations like Al Qaeda and bin Laden, serve as a Samuel Goldstein of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, an ever-present and manufactured “terrorist” threat, used constantly as a pretext to justify repressive measures at home and expanded imperialistic objectives abroad.
Because, despite all the rhetoric employed in the War on Terror about the threat of “political Islam”, unbeknownst to the general public, the manipulation of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the world is still a mainstay of American foreign policy.
According to Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer with experience in Iraq and the Middle East, as well as a neo-conservative hardliner with the notorious American Enterprise Institute:
Most American liberals and conservatives will strongly resist the idea that Islam’s clergymen and lay fundamentalists, who usually dislike, if not detest, the United States, Israel, and progressive causes like women’s rights, are the key to liberating the Muslim Middle East from its age-old reflexive hostility to the West. There men, not the much admired liberal Muslim secularists who are always praised and sometimes defended by the American government and press, are the United States’ most valuable potential democratic allies.”
As Robert Dreyfuss ends his book, “the devil’s game continues.”
This article was originally published as “Reflections on the ‘Peace Process'” on 2011-05-28.
http://www.terrorism-illuminati.com/blog/israel-created-hamas-stall-peace#.U9ziifldV1A
Death Toll Surges As Israel Hunts For Soldier
Dozens are killed in fresh airstrikes as Israel hunts for a missing soldier – but Hamas say he could already be dead.
+1,600 dead now.
http://news.sky.com/story/1311786/death-toll-surges-as-israel-hunts-for-soldier
Rusbridger’s crowd are very interested in the Israeli ammunition. Sick.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2014/jul/26/gaza-ceasefire-takes-hold-in-pictures
Are they just images to them? No back story.
These lives are lost too. What a waste. For what? Israel is loathed.
http://www.idfblog.com/blog/2014/07/19/fallen-soldiers-operation-protective-edge/
Mitch
Are the conned leaders of political Islam any straighter or more enlightened than the conners in this devil’s game? They are bent as hairpins and they have millions of followers who are bent as springs.
The game is to attract the trust of the enemies of Islam by undermining the true leaders of Islam. When they have the trust of the Zionists, they will take weapons and power from them. When they are in a strong position they will bite the hand that gave them power and establish true Islam.
That’s the plan, but that’s not what happened in reality 100 years ago when the Kurdish conspired against Turkey for the Caliphate. Britain took Palestine and gave it to the Zionists and then carved up Kurdistan.
Only the very, very stupid could believe the charade of Gaza, if they knew that ISIS was given the go ahead by Zionist USUKIS leaders a few mile away in Jordan.
This is the birth pangs as they would believe of the Greater Israel. 200,000 dead in Syria, 2 million dead in Iraq, 1,400 in Gaza. It’s nothing to the Zionists.
Craig sits catching shrimps in rockpools while the world goes by. The big question that interests me is whether the Islamo-Zionist NWO fascists are prepared to kill every single human being who has a heart and brain to see through them.
It’s not just the innocents of Gaza who are getting in their way of masonic supremacy, it is the whole collectivity of human spirit. They are small, we are many. We have to take on board the utter duplicity of their fake news, before we ourselves become fake news. like: All the money in the banks has been stolen. Sorry, already seen that headline.
Passerby
When George Orwell wanted to fight for Spain, he tried to enlist with the communists but they wanted to brainwash him so he turned them down. later he found that there was a good deal of collusion between the fascists and Communists. The war was being played out at second, third or fourth hand by the big political players.
I am sorry if I confuse you. This the time for confusion. We are being lied to so big time we’ve forgotten what we stand for and where we’re going. The scholars of Islam in Saudi Arabia fully understand this religion, but they are doing the opposite of Islam. So long as the guys with the big bucks are spending it the way Israel wants them to it’s hard to hold onto the truth.
The Zionists in British politics actually think that the scholars of Islam are doing Islam by spending trillions on sectarian warfare. But the enemy of Islam is the UKUSIS they love and obey, who taught the Shi’a their deviance, not the ordinary Shi’a men women and children.
Thankyou again Craig, for using your contacts to bring more of the truth than is generally available once again.
Water in the desert.
Zionism and Unionism (in the Orange Order sense) are simply ultranationalist ideologies. They attract the same sort of people and inspire the same kind of groupthink, in which questioning the ideology is discouraged by peer-group coercion. To be strictly fair, Hamas and the Provos probably have the same mindset.
A history lesson of which everybody should be aware. By Ruel Pepa.
http://newsjunkiepost.com/2014/08/01/jews-muslims-and-christians-once-lived-harmoniously-in-palestine/
O/T Sadly I am in the library again. My sixth computer in the last decade was brought down on Thursday, two of them brought down from the input lead overheating. Yesterday I used a friend’s computer. Today he got a message indicating that there were problems at start-up for the first time ever. I only accessed Facebook, Hotmail, My Blog and Craig Murray’s blog. Having suspicions as to who is behind it is not tantamount to proof unfortunately.
Even Barbarians allowed the removal of the fallen from the battlefield. I can’t imagine why Israel was allowed to be in close proximity completing tunnel ops during the cease-fire, but I’m sure many were desperate to find loved ones and tend to the wounded and give some dignity to the dead, so they agreed to the flawed truce.
That they can’t is inhuman.
“there is a strong correlation between Zionism and Unionism”
In that case and judging by the opinion polls over half of Scots are Zionists, which I doubt somehow. Even if the SNP’s official policy differs, the idea that Alex Salmond could stand up to the Israel Lobby for more than about four seconds is laughable.
“Having suspicions as to who is behind it is not tantamount to proof unfortunately.”
Never stopped you before.
Israel’s action is ‘foolish’ says Ashdown.
Not ‘barbaric’ or ‘inhuman’.
John Kerry’s frown cannot be far away…
Murdering children while they sleep deserves nothing less.
Someone on here said ask every candidate in the next election what their views of the “conflict” are. An excellent way of rooting out the apologists for genocide.
Both Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper and his gay foreign minister John Baird have come under fire for blaming Palestinian resistance Hamas for the three-week slaughter of Gaza civilians by the Jewish army. Many Muslim and Christian organizations, individuals and even the Jewish-controlled US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) have condemned both Harper and Baird for blaming the victim party in the on-going Israeli war on Gaza.
Anti-Israel rallies have been held in Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver and several other large cities. The protestors have condemned Ottawa’s blind support for the Zionist regime.
On July 16, the “Iranophobe” John Baird said: “Hamas will be solely to blame for any further loss of life,” and that Hamas is not interested in peace.
The HRW in its statement said: “Baird’s comment amounts to a green light for more unlawful Israeli attacks that kill civilians.”
“Even if Hamas broke the ceasefire (which it did not), it doesn’t make it responsible for more Israeli attacks that hits schools and hospitals or kill children on a beach. If Canada is so concerned about reaching peace, it should pressure all parties to abide by the laws of war, and demand justice for the horrible abuses that Israel have committed,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW director for ME and North Africa.
http://rehmat1.com/2014/08/02/canadians-reject-harper-governments-blind-support-for-israel/
Rehmat
“Both Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper and his gay foreign minister John Baird…”
___________________
“gay” foreign minister?
Relevance to the rest of your comment or indeed to anything?
Demographic changes will diminish support in the US for Israel.
On #Gaza, #Israel is losing the #Obama coalitionhttp://warincontext.org/2014/08/01/on-gaza-israel-is-losing-the-obama-coalition/
Can’t happen soon enough but how long will the Palestinians have to wait is the question. Will they all be dead or exiled by then?
“Blair out” (of Peace Envoy role) petition on change.org now over 50000. But needs much more…)
PS Is David Miliband making a pitch for this role?
http://warincontext.org/2014/08/01/on-gaza-israel-is-losing-the-obama-coalition/
MJ
Yes – one explanation is that the polls are wrong.
Conjunction
To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t difficult. It wouldn’t be difficult for real journalists, if they existed.
Running Orders
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
They call us now.
Before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think “Do I know any Davids in Gaza?”
They call us now to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of
war time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter that 58 seconds
isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2014-08-02/poem-from-gaza-you-have-58-seconds-to-run/
Mary
“Demographic changes will diminish support in the US for Israel.”
_______________________
They might, but on the other hand they might not. The prospect of Jews becoming a minority in Israel proper over time might actually increase support for Israel in the US, at least in the short to medium term (in any event, that prospect would certainly be played to the limit by Israel’s supporters).
@ All
Can we PLEASE have less of the prose which is masquerading as poetry on here? We have the above, we have recently had two efforts by Mike Rosen (he wrote much better for Isis and Cherwell, but that was…prose), and there have been sundry other lamentable efforts over the past few months.
When, oh when, will people learn that taking a long(ish) piece of prose and chopping it up into short lines does not poetry make??
In the name of the literary canon, please desist!
Posted by The Medialens Editors on August 2, 2014,
The Murder of Gaza: a special issue of ColdType edited and designed by the brilliant Tony Sutton.
Download your free pdf copy here:
http://coldtype.net/
http://www.medialens.org/images/stories/alerts_images/ColdType88.JPG
Alice Miller in Gaza
by Anis Hamadeh / August 1st, 2014
The researcher Alice Miller became worldwide known because of her investigations of childhood traumas. A dozen of her books is translated into thirty languages. Miller shows the mechanisms, with which victims can turn to perpetrators, and she shows the ubiquity, even the inevitability of this danger. The big hits the small who in turn will transmit it to their own children if the circle does not get interrupted. Miller (a Jewish victim herself) also examined the Nazi generation in Germany in order to understand how Germany could develop such a genocidal racism. Today, Miller’s findings are standard knowledge, and nobody questions her basic theses in principle.
When I asked her during a small correspondence why she never wrote anything about Palestine, where Jewish victims had settled to seize the land, she answered that she would give no more interviews – it was shortly before her voluntary death. As a matter of fact, she did write something about Israel in one of her books, but she never wrote about the influence of the Nazis on the Jewish victims and never about Palestinians. When I told her about the origins of my father, she instantly thought I could interview parents of suicide bombers. The fact that Israelis, too, are prone to these psychological mechanisms, was never mentioned by Ms. Miller. She probably never even noticed that. That Jewish victims can turn to perpetrators is something that still is taboo in Germany. So Miller’s theses are valid everywhere, except for the case of Israel.
/..
http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/08/alice-miller-in-gaza/
Habbabkuk (La vita è bella), sorry to hurt your “Pinkness”….. but….
http://dailyxtra.com/toronto/news/the-cbc-censoring-canadians-protect-john-baird
The missing soldier is more than likely dead but he’ll still be well used by the Israeli’s, just as they used the 3 murdered students in the West Bank rampage which in turn created the rocket response which allows the carnage that we’ve observed over the last few weeks. If nothing, the Israeli’s are resourceful, very little goes to waste. Anybody seen Mark Regev lately? In case anyone hasn’t seen it, Emily Maitlis reduced him to a dithering wreck a few days ago and I haven’t seen him since.
Perhaps this poem by my American half Jewish friend will go down better with our friend here who seems to be disturbed by poetry. Too many emotions aroused perhaps?
Gary’s father was second generation Sicilian and his mother second generation Russian Jewish. His wife is Japanese.
I love the broad sweep of history contained in this. I first read it 8 years ago and it moved me greatly.
We are the Palestinians.
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/we-are-the-palestinians/#.U90hs3JwbSc
Habbabkuk:
When were you elected the spokesman/moderator and took responsibility for what ‘we’ should do and not do, see and not see?