BD Harrington

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Think about what it means to order the killing of your own soldiers in order to prevent them from becoming part of a prisoner exchange.

It means that Israeli officials consider it a higher priority to keep detaining Palestinian men, women, and children without charge than to release some in exchange for those soldiers.

That logic is so obviously inhumane that Israel officially ended the Hannibal Directive policy on paper, yet obviously kept it in practice, because we now have many different reports of it being implemented on October 7. And we also know that the bombing campaign was organized through 2023 and 2024 in a way that many Israeli officials understood to be highly likely to kill captives Israelis in Gaza, as +972 has exposed.

[Palestine Deep Dive @PDeepDive]

"The Irish Were Called Terrorists Too"
@DropSiteNews | @jeremyscahill | @sharifkouddous | @AlnaouqA | @HalaHanina

Watch the full episode:
Every US counterterrorism law traces back to dissent on Palestine
https://t.co/vVdJhz2DbN

[Dawn Clancy @dawnmclancy]

"I have three questions today for Israeli people through this press conference. I want to speak to them directly," said Sidoti.

🔴What kind of people are your soldiers who would allow a 14 year old child to bleed to death over a 45 minute period?

🔴What kind of people are your military leaders that would inculcate a culture that soldiers feel free to do this, acting with total impunity?

🔴What kind of people are your leaders? When they give orders, they make statements that encourage this kind of conduct, not merely permit it, but encourage it?

[Reuters @Reuters]

Israeli authorities and security forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, and war crimes in the occupied West Bank, an independent UN inquiry said https://t.co/61poVhRzmR

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Keir Starmer was not merely a disappointment. He is a mendacious figure of ethical decrepitude, a man who won the Labour Party leadership based on promises that he jettisoned five seconds after winning - a Labour leader who dared banish from the Labour Party not only his predecessor but also remarkable human beings like director Ken Loach - the gentleman who has taken the historic Labour Party and transformed it into a vessel for the very oligarchy it was elected to restrain.

Consider the litany of Starmer’s moral and logical failures. He promised a 'different Britain', yet his actions were a masterclass in Tory-lite politics—using the same maxed-out credit card analogies that once served the austerity brigades to justify his own failure of vision. He promised a human rights lawyer’s approach but he embraced a racist-lite version of Farage.

On Europe, Starmer promised Brexiteers that Brexit is Brexit yet stood before those who yearn to rejoin the European Union, winked at them to make them feel that Britain would gradually reconnect, even rejoin, with the EU while offering nothing of substance. This is not leadership; it is a fraud.

And then there's the manner in which Starmer and his government rushed to offer Israel unequivocal support in pursuing its genocide in Gaza, sacrificing precious political and civil liberties in the UK by imprisoning grandmothers, priests and peaceful activists who dared support Palestine Action, an organisation that Starmer and his minions proscribed as terrorists for practising the usual activist tactics of trespassing to spray paint military planes that had demonstrably aided in the genocide. To add insult to injury, Starmer performed the diplomatic pantomime of recognising a Palestinian state, in a manner that ensured it would never happen.

But above all else, this is a government that has learned nothing from the post-2008 era. Starmer and his Chancellor are playing the same tired austerity game while enabling and empowering the Finance Curse perpetrated by the City of London, throwing in forgood measure cuts in international aid to fund a military spending trickle under the guise of a "Strategic Defence Review" . It is the same old doctrine: austerity for the masses, socialism for the financiers and the arms dealers.

History will remember Mr Starmer as a man without conviction, a Prime Minister who offers not a shred of honesty, but merely the cruel illusion of change. He is ethically decrepit because he had chosen, consciously, to abandon principle for power. And for that, history will indict him. Good riddance, I say.

https://t.co/sGfebPkDXR

[☀️👀 @zei_squirrel]

Keir Starmer began his ascent as a Zionist sleeper cell agent of the Israel lobby. His job was to stay in Corbyn's cabinet and sabotage it from within, and he was very successful through pushing the "second referendum" poison pill ahead of 2019 (and then never talking about remain again). But the job was not yet finished, Corbyn remained popular among the Labour mass base. So he put himself forward as a candidate for leader to replace Corbyn as a orthodox Corbynite. Some may be cynical, like that damn squirrel on twitter, but I know what to do to ease peoples' minds: I will make 10 firm concrete socialist left pledges, from nationalization to abolishing tuition fees, and I will put my signature underneath each of them and vow to be a "competent" version of Corbyn that will win the election and implement the same policy platform. Owen Jones, the dumb fucking idiot hack he is and has always been, was bedazzled and rallied to his side.

Exactly as I and some others said he would do, he immediately began ripping up the "ten pledges" he made and that he was elected on. And then he began waging an all-out total war on the entire socialist left in the party, including Corbyn himself who was expelled for "anti-Semitism", meaning for Starmer's Israel lobby masters. And he revealed what he always already was, a neocon neoliberal Blairite Zionist Israel First scumfuck degenerate war criminal. Owen Jones himself "swung behind him", and demanded "anyone with progressive sympathies" to do the same. Great political analysis again from our epic based radical leftist permanent Guardian sinecured hero, just like when he published a book shortly before the Gaza genocide saying that Zionism and Israel are Holy and Sacrosanct causes that the entire left, "anyone with progressive sympathies", must support because otherwise you're an evil anti-Semite who denies the "Jewish right to self-determination", one of his many Zionist derangements. Thank God he was able to make millions off the genocide media grift.

Returning to Keir Starmer, he of course gleefully backed the genocide when it began, he instituted the most fascist censorship laws in modern British history in service of his Israeli Zionist Jewish supremacist masters, he gave them whatever they wanted without even a moment's hesitation, because that's the lowlife degenerate slave he is and has always been since his early epic pseudo-radical Trot days in Oxford.

This is not a deserving end for him, and all those who supported him. No, it's far from it. A fitting end is being arrested and charged and judged in accordance with the Nuremberg principles that hanged Julius Streicher and co.

[Andrew Feinstein @andrewfeinstein]

Keir Starmer is gone: the most mendacious, dishonest, authoritarian, warmongering politician of the modern era, & the bar is very low. I hope he soon resigns as our MP too so that we can elect someone who is honest, accountable, democratic & honourable, someone who represents the people of Holborn & St. Pancras rather than his billionaire donors, corporate paymasters, Netanyahu & Trump

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

Sentenced and imprisoned on grounds of “terrorism” that no jury ever convicted them of.

Meanwhile, the British government continues to aid and abet the greatest crime of our time.

A historic miscarriage of justice — and a truly dark day for civil liberties in this country.

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

An audience member at a Q&A recently asked me why I'm so apocalyptic. The genocide in Gaza, beyond being a tragedy, marks an irreversible shift in the global world order. Before the genocide, the imperialist ambitions of the Western oligarchic class were partially constrained by the utopian ideal of the rules-based order. Now that ideal is gone, and unrestrained barbarity will characterize the methodology of the war-making ruling class. In other words — our future is an apocalyptic one.

[Lewis Goodall @lewis_goodall]

This is counter-productive, authoritarian and chilling. The British state should not be in the business of banning commentators and journalists from entering the country, without compelling reason. Finding their views objectionable is nowhere near enough.
https://t.co/GqUMVB5bqj

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

My reaction to Keir Starmer's last ditch press conference - an unsurprising reaction but possibly a helpful one (at least to those who, like me, consider him an abysmal PM).

Like many, I approached Keir Starmer's prime ministership with deep-seated pessimism, my expectations already set at rock bottom. Yet, I confess: I failed to foresee the clinical precision with which he and his inner cabal would sabotage their own administration and scar Britain.

The crux of their debacle lay, first, in a distinctly dictatorial, authoritarian reflex. And second—crucially—in a seething contempt for those who lent them their votes, while simultaneously performing a grotesque pantomime of flattery toward those who never would, and never will, support them.

Having exorcised from the Labour Party its most authentic voices—people of unimpeachable integrity, such as Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, a purge that eluded even Tony Blair’s repertoire—Starmer embarked on a rampage:

He slashed disability benefits; armed and fed intelligence to the Israeli government as it executed genocide in Gaza; channeled his own inner Farage, perhaps his inner Enoch Powell, to vilify migrants and treat refugees as vermin; gutted international aid to masquerade as a defender of defence spending; bulldozed wildlife and their habitats; unveiled a new lexicon of draconian anti-protest laws; left trans people suspended in legal limbo; clung with religious fervour to absurd, socially ruinous fiscal rules; allowed Rachel Reeves to squander £100 billion covering the Bank of England’s outrageous and wholly unnecessary Quantitative Tightening losses—a gift that keeps giving to the City’s banks—while imposing yet another round of austerity on government departments and public services.

Once the great hope of the downtrodden, Starmer’s Labour has become the villain - the genuinely nasty party.

Once a human rights lawyer, he has single-handedly plunged Britain into a shoddy, incompetent authoritarianism.

https://t.co/wIjnc9NfmJ

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

Rafah is *at least* 42 times older than the State of Israel.

It was one of humanity's earliest settlements, and is referenced in texts from Bronze-age pharaohs.

Now it is no more. Totally destroyed before our eyes.

[John O’Brennan @JohnOBrennan2]

Extraordinary that any journalist has to say this. Christina Lamb is one of the most respected foreign correspondents in the world.

She has to say it because it is true: Israel, in particular, is getting away with murdering journalists on a regular basis and with impunity.

[Steve Sweeney @SweeneySteve]

They could barely bring themselves to say her name and when they did used the dog whistle “Hezbollah aligned” in order to dehumanise Amal and justify her killing by I$rael.

Amal Khalil was a friend to me and many others having worked in the field since the 2006 war. What she did was unique, reporting from the south and raising the voices of the people there who are subjected to brutal treatment and attacks from I$rael.

Amal had herself received numerous death threats, some warning her to leave and if she didn’t her head would be removed from her shoulders. It’s a testament to her that she defied those threats and up until the end continued to expose I$raeli war comes.

She was a brave and courageous journalist, a daughter of the south and her mic and her pen was a tribune of the people. This is what made her so dangerous, with I$rael fearing a camera and a pen more than a Hezb0llah fighter.

Her body wasn’t “found under the rubble” as though it had been mysteriously placed there. I$rael targeted a car in front of her, when she sheltered in a building it was struck collapsing it, then the emergency operations were delayed for at least 7 hours as ambulances and civil defence workers were fired on.

This was a deliberate assassination and a war crime. But try as they might they will never stop journalists here from reporting the truth.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

This premeditated attack on journalists, carried out over multiple hours with medics and a huge part of the public begging Israel to stop, should really be enough to lock up Netanyahu for life. This is just blatant murder.

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

The greatest crisis facing journalism today is Israel

The apartheid state is the world’s leading murderer of journalists, assassinating courageous reporters from Gaza to Lebanon as a matter of policy and with impunity

In the US, Israeli cutouts like the Ellisons are establishing a monopoly, buying every social and legacy media property possible, to prevent these facts from reaching the public

All across the West, Israel works to destroy the reputations and careers of journalists who demonstrate solidarity with colleagues targeted by its killing machine

In such a dire climate, true independent media is necessarily and explicitly antizionist

[Dr. Jill Stein🌻 @DrJillStein]

Russia brings oil. China bring solar energy.
The US brings starvation and darkness.
Tells you all you need to know.

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

The hardest thing to relate to is *why* Starmer wants to remain in office.

He has no ideological vision, no commitment to bettering the lives of others, doesn’t appear comfortable happy in his skin. Does he really want to stay just to be blamed for the local election wipeout?

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

This image was posted by an Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon. Israeli soldiers have been posting imagines of their war crimes and cultural desecration for two and a half years straight without interruption.

[Saagar Enjeti @esaagar]

It is now a time for choosing: The era of trying to be the reasonable voice inside is over. Anyone with an ounce of integrity should follow the lead of @joekent16jan19 and resign with honor or take immediate public steps to forestall disaster

If you do not we will not forget