Mohamed Samadony

[Mohamed Samadony @SamadonyM]

@TechyNisarg @PilsZehn @thatrohit @zacbowden https://t.co/pYkWs25mBb

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The main reason I’ve focused so hard on Gaza these last six months isn’t so much because of how evil and horrific Israel’s mass atrocity is in and of itself, but because it’s so intimately intertwined with all our world’s other problems, and with the future of the human species.

In a very real way, the destruction of Gaza appears to be a moment in history where humanity is collectively mulling over whether it wants to keep behaving in a crazy, self-destructive way and continue along its trajectory into dystopia and toward self-inflicted extinction, or abandon this madness and push for something better. Whether it wants to keep buying into the lies and propaganda and tacitly consenting to the psychopathic murderousness of the powerful, or let the light of truth shine in.

A live-streamed genocide happening right out in the open forces a civilization to start asking questions about itself. If something like this can happen in plain view of everyone, and the people in charge not only do nothing but actively facilitate it, then you have to start wondering if everything about your entire nation is deranged, and if everything you’ve been told about the world is a lie.

If something so nakedly evil — undisguised by anything besides a thin veneer of Zionist gaslighting telling us we’re not seeing what we’re seeing — can be allowed to stand by those we’ve entrusted to run things, then it means our entire society is diseased. Our government. Our political systems. Our media. Our education systems. Our worldviews. Our culture. It’s all rotted and corrupted, right down to the core.

The future we are being shown through the window of Gaza is dark. Dark, dark, dark, dark. They’re currently using artificial intelligence to create kill lists and to determine when its targets will be at home with their families to ensure maximum civilian deaths. We used to worry about a dark future where humans send machines to go kill people indiscriminately, but it turns out it’s actually happening the other way around — we’re programming machines to tell us who to kill. The horror in our present dystopia isn’t so much autonomous murderbots as ethical decisions about killing being outsourced to AI.

We’re being asked to accept this and move forward in this direction into the future. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for our governments to knowingly support an unforgivable act of mass slaughter upon the inhabitants of a giant concentration camp. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for the mass media to lie and distort and misinform the public about a matter of such urgent importance day after day, month after month. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for a blatant genocide to take place right in front of our faces, and then move on as though nothing happened.

And right now we’re collectively ruminating on the question of whether we’re going to decide to do those things, or if we’re going to decide to do something else instead.

The Gaza genocide is such a massive thing in and of itself — the injustice, the murder, the loss, the unfathomable suffering. But what’s happening in Gaza is also about so much more than Gaza. It’s a moment in history where humanity is thinking seriously about real revolutionary change, and weighing the options between that and continuing along this tired old blood-soaked path we’ve been travelling on for millennia.

Gaza proves that our entire civilization is cancerous, and that everything we’ve been doing has failed. When you come across information which blows apart your worldview in your personal life, you can either collapse under the weight of cognitive dissonance until you find some way to plug yourself back into the comforting lies, or you can set about the hard work of forming a new way of looking at things. That’s the sort of moment we’re being collectively offered with Gaza. We’ll either accept the invitation, or continue our slide into darkness.

[Jakob Reimann @Jakob_Reimann]

Das hat das @bmj_bund im März 2023, also für Putin, aufgeschrieben.

Erkennt hier jemand eventuell die Beschreibung eines anderen Krieges, der gerade läuft?

[Norman Finkelstein @normfinkelstein]

STARVE OR LEAVE

Let’s cut to the chase: of course Israel deliberately targeted the WCK relief convoy. Not only do all the material facts point to this conclusion. There also aren’t any grounds to doubt it; the heavy burden of proof falls on Israel to demonstrate that it was not a premeditated strike. On October 8, 2023, Israel announced a total blockade of Gaza: no food, fuel, water, or electricity would be allowed in. The rationale behind this order was laid out by former Israeli National Security Council head Giora Eiland: “Israel should not allow any economic assistance. The people should be told that they have two choices: to stay and to starve, or to leave.” For the next two weeks, Israel blocked the entry of any aid into Gaza. Flagrant mass murder not being a good look, President Biden counseled Prime Minister Netanyahu to lighten up a bit. Israel tweaked its murder plan so as to pass muster with its enablers in Washington. But it did not alter the essence of its game-plan. Human Rights Watch documented in December that Israel was “using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.” Normally reticent senior international and humanitarian officials have in recent weeks openly charged that “Starvation is used as a weapon of war. Israel is provoking famine." (Josop Borrell, EU foreign policy chief) If—as everyone seems to agree—Israel’s declared objective is to starve Gaza’s civilian population, then: HOW COULD IT NOT PLUG THE HOLES IN ITS MURDER PLAN BY TARGETING INTERNATIONAL RELIEF ORGANIZATIONS? And in fact it’s mission accomplished: international aid operations in Gaza have largely ceased “as a result of recent attacks on humanitarian workers by the IDF.” (“Letter to the White House and National Security Council,” April 4, 2024) But it might be wondered: Wasn’t it foolhardy for Israel to risk international opprobrium? Not at all. Israel has targeted by various metrics an historically unprecedented number of hospitals, medics, journalists, and aid workers; it has killed an unprecedented number of women and children. It is ever testing the limits of the permissible. So far, it’s successfully crossed every downward threshold into barbarism with impunity. It’s impossible to predict in advance which story will be picked up by the fickle international media and which story will just get passing notice. The latest atrocity could just as easily have been subsumed in a paragraph on the inside pages under the title “Aid workers killed in Gaza.” The only error Israel might have—it’s too soon to tell—committed was anticipating that it would get another free pass. Indeed, Israel’s news bureau in the US, the New York Times, is already spinning the story to exonerate Israel: “botched operation ... mistakes and misjudgments ... accidental killing.” (“Back-to-Back Israeli Strikes Show Tragic Gaps in Choosing Targets,” April 4, 2024) It’s also being said that it’s not senior Israeli officials but on the contrary IDF field commanders and soldiers who are out of control, or that Israel’s resort to AI is behind the hecatomb in Gaza. That’s all bullshit. During its periodic “mowing-the-lawn” hi-tech murder sprees in Gaza (Operation Cast Lead, Operation Protective Edge), Israel has always used DISCRIMINATELY INDISCRIMINATE firepower to terrorize Gaza’s civilian population into submission. The nub of the problem is neither disciplinary nor technical. It’s Israel’s murder plan: to make Gaza unlivable and to force its people to decide—starve or leave.

[CBS News @CBSNews]

Chef José Andrés said the 7 aid workers killed by an Israeli airstrike were "targeted deliberately," and he believes the conflict in Gaza is "not a war against terrorism anymore" and instead, it's a "war against humanity itself." Israel blamed the strike on "misidentification."

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is without a doubt one of the most important pieces of reporting on Gaza, and by far one of the most disturbing: https://t.co/C8ahv3cpbx

All by Israeli journalist @yuval_abraham based on whistleblower accounts from within the IDF and intelligence agencies.

Israel has developed an AI called "Lavender" to generate kill lists, with almost no human verification to double check the targets selected by the machine: only a a “rubber stamp” check of about “20 seconds” just to make sure the AI target is male.

Moreover, the Israeli army "systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity". In fact Israel developed another automated system called “Where’s Daddy?” used "specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences" 🤮

One of the intelligence officers who spoke to Abraham is quoted in the article: “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity. On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

In fact the article reveals a ratio, I think for the first time: "according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians... The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander."

A ratio of 20 civilians killed for one target works out to about 95% civilian deaths.

Please do read the whole article as it describes in details how the whole process works with the Lavender AI. It's industrialized extermination the likes of which we haven't seen since... you know when.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Six months of this now. Half a year.

Half a year of genocide apologia.

Half a year of the most outrageous lies you can possibly imagine.

Half a year of seeing children's bodies ripped to pieces and starved to skeletons on our social media feeds.

Half a year of atrocities justified by something that happened way back in October, and didn't even happen the way the news media tell us it happened.

Half a year of western government officials pretending obvious evidence of war crimes is just some ineffable mystery that we'll hopefully have answers to someday.

Half a year of Israeli officials openly stating their genocidal intentions in Hebrew for their Israeli audience and paying lip service to human rights and compassion in English for their western liberal audience.

Half a year of seeing reports that the IDF did something unbelievably evil, thinking "That can't be right, let me check it out," and then going "Oh, nope, it's actually even more evil than I thought."

Half a year of the western political-media class trying to frame the direct sponsorship of an active genocide as something other than what it is.

Half a year of passive-language "Palestinian child walks into bullet" headlines from the mainstream press.

Half a year of insulting our intelligence.

Half a year of insulting our humanity.

Half a year of unfathomable suffering.

Half a year of irreparable trauma.

Half a year of irreplaceable loss.

This fucking sucks, man. It sucks so bad. I've always enjoyed doing commentary on the crimes of the empire, but these last six months have been truly harrowing. It's awful having to stare directly at hell on earth from day to day with compassion in your heart. The only thing keeping this project going is the fact that it needs to be done, and the knowledge that my own suffering isn't the faintest shadow of what the Palestinians are going through right now.

This needs to end. It needs to end with desperate urgency. But we're seeing no signs that it's about to.

I don't have anything wise or insightful to add to any of this right now. Some days all you can do is point to the nightmare and call it what it is, and we can all just be real about reality and feel our feelings about that.

I guess all I can really say is that at least we're not alone in seeing what we're seeing. The whole world is watching Israel commit a horrifying mass atrocity backed by the full might of the empire, and more and more eyes are opening to the reality of what this means for their society and everything they've been told to believe about it.

Every positive change in human behavior is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness, and Gaza is expanding western consciousness like nothing ever before.

So at least there's that. At least there's the possibility that something good might one day grow out of this steaming pile of shit.

And that's all I've got for you. That's the best I can do right now.

[Guardian Weekly @guardianweekly]

How Israel created a water crisis for Palestinians – video https://t.co/ilC3RkOTu6

[Mohamed Samadony @SamadonyM]

@karasuwich1 @yanisvaroufakis https://t.co/uvGXpVbQV4

[Robin Monotti @robinmonotti]

"Your carpet explanations for your carpet bombing will not fly!"
State of Palestine representative at the UN demolishes the genocidal rhetoric of Israeli politicians, exposing their genocidal intent for all the UN to see.
Now it's time for Palestine to #InvokeGenocideConvention at the International Court of Justice (NOT ICC).

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

It shocks me that I keep coming across in my threads variations of the following tweet:

"The Palestinians have it within them to rise up against Hamas to free themselves. Or Hamas can willingly surrender. Two real choices there."

This view isn’t just being promoted in bad faith by Israeli apologists. It seems to resonate with ordinary people who presumably know very little about the histories either of Palestine or of settler colonial movements such as the Zionist movement that founded Israel.

So let’s delve briefly into both.

First, settler colonial movements are distinguished from standard colonialism – like British rule in India – by the fact that the settler population wishes not just to steal the native population’s resources but to replace the native population itself.

There are lots of examples of this: European settlers dispossessed native peoples in what we today call the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, for example.

The definition of genocide in international law exactly describes what those Europeans did to the local population: mass killings; inflicting conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of all or part of the native community; preventing births within the local population; and forcibly transferring native children to the settler population.

European settlers who today call themselves Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders never had to account for their crimes against those native peoples. Which possibly explains how commonplace the tweet above is – and why European countries and their settler colonial outgrowths are today lining up againt the rest of the world to support Israel as it intensifies industrial genocide in Gaza.

The truth is the “western” world order was built on genocide. Israel is just following in a long tradition.

Settler colonial movements do not always end up committing genocide. In South Africa, a heavily outnumbered settler colonial population came to an “accommodation” with the native population: apartheid. The white group took all the resources and privileges. The black group was allowed to live but only in ghettoes and squalor.

In such circumstances, peace is possible only when the settler colonial project is abandoned, power is shared and resources distributed more equitably. This happened, imperfectly, with the fall of apartheid.

The final model for a settler colonial population is to drive the native population over the border, in an act of ethnic cleansing. This was Israel’s preferred option in 1948 and again in 1967, when it decided to expand its borders by occupying remaining Palestinian lands in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

The Palestinians in Gaza are an object lesson in the various ways a native population can be abused by a settler colonial movement.

Most are refugees or descended from refugees from Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations of 1948. In other words, their family homes are in what we today call Israel. They were driven off their lands into a tiny enclave, to be ruled for the next 19 years by Egypt.

When Israel seized Gaza during the 1967 war, it had to fall back on the second settler colonising option: apartheid. So it turned the enclave into an open-air prison, or – if we’re going to be more honest – a long-term concentration camp.

Gaza was a larger – and, with Israel’s 16-year siege, increasingly much harsher – version of the townships that held the native black populations in apartheid South Africa.

What we are seeing now is Israel finally recognising that the apartheid model has failed to subdue the Palestinians’ desire for freedom and dignity.

Unlike white South Africa, Israel is not looking for peace and reconciliation. It is revisiting other settler colonial options.

In the current attack on Gaza, it is implementing a mixed model: genocide for those who remain in Gaza, ethnic cleansing for those who can get out (assuming Egypt finally relents and opens its borders).

None of that has anything to do with Hamas. The most one can say is that Hamas’ resistance has forced Israel’s hand. It has had to abandon its siege-apartheid model – the long term imprisonment of a population with no resources, no freedom of movement, no clean water, no jobs.

Instead, it has returned to the tried-and-tested formulas of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Hamas is a symptom of the decades of trauma Palestinians in Gaza have been through, not the cause of that trauma.

Palestinians overthrowing Hamas, or Hamas surrendering, would not turn Gaza into a Dubai-on-the-Mediterranean. Palestinians there would still be prisoners, though possibly allowed slightly better conditions.

If you doubt that, look to the West Bank, which is ruled not by Hamas but by the supine Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas. He calls security cooperation with Israel – suppressing on Israel’s behalf the Palestinians' craving for freedom – a “sacred” duty. His biggest aspiration is a diplomatic solution that creates a severely circumscribed Palestinian mini-state.

If Israel can’t allow freedom to the West Bank under Abbas, how is it ever going to give freedom to tiny Gaza, even without Hamas, after the United Nations declared the enclave as fundamentally “uninhabitable” in 2020?

Israel could never allow the Palestinians out of their Gaza prison because their rapid growth in numbers is seen as a threat to Israel’s Jewish majority.

Remember: settler colonial populations are there to replace the native population, not to make peace with them, not to shares resources, not to give them their freedom.

Israel is doing the only thing it knows how to do. And as long as the West is cheerleading, that includes genocide.

[Mohamed Samadony @SamadonyM]

(يا أيها الذين آمَنُوا اتَّقُوا اللَّهَ وَلْتَنْظُرْ نَفْسٌ مَا قَدَّمَتْ لِغَدٍ وَاتَّقُوا اللَّهَ إِنَّ اللَّهَ خبير بما تعملون)[الحشر:18]