The United States is already at war

 Al Jazeera  English

Yesterday, Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israel’s assassination in Beirut of Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah last week and its assassination in Tehran of Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh in July.

United States President Joe Biden instructed the US military to assist Israel in neutralising the missiles – not that Israel is not already equipped with various layers of ultra-sophisticated protection against incoming projectiles, which permit it to go about slaughtering folks left and right while suffering minimal damage in return. . . .

Of course, not once has it occurred to the Biden administration to meticulously thwart Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, where officially more than 41,000 people have been killed in less than a year although the true death toll is without a doubt exorbitantly higher. Nor has the oh-so-skilled US military deemed it necessary to interfere in the wanton butchery currently going down in Lebanon, where Israel just killed more than 700 people in less than a week. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel’s assassinations can’t kill resistance

 Al Jazeera English

After assassinating Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah in a devastating air strike on Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighbourhood, the Israeli army took to the platform X to boast triumphantly that Nasrallah would “no longer be able to terrorize the world”.

Granted, the objective observer would be forgiven for failing to detect how it is that Nasrallah is supposedly responsible for terrestrial terror when he is not the one who has been presiding over genocide in the Gaza Strip for nearly a year. Nor, obviously, is he the one who just killed more than 700 people in Lebanon in less than a week.

Israel takes the credit for all of that, just as it takes the credit for pulverising numerous residential buildings and their inhabitants in the quest to kill Nasrallah – as good an example as any of “terrorising the world”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Big Brother without borders: Israel’s psychopathic warfare in Lebanon

Al Jazeera English

Exactly one week ago, on Tuesday, Israel remotely detonated hundreds of handheld pagers used by members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, killing at least 12 people. Two children were among the fatalities of the terror attack, which also wounded thousands and overwhelmed Lebanese hospitals.

The following day, walkie-talkies exploded across the country, ending 20 lives. Two days after that, on Friday, an air strike on a densely populated neighbourhood in the Lebanese capital of Beirut killed scores of people. And on Monday, the Israeli military commenced a patently psychopathic bombing spree over various sectors of Lebanon that has killed more than 550 people, including 50 children. . . .

To be sure, the very existence of the state of Israel has always been predicated on mass killing – an arrangement that has produced, inter alia, the continuing genocide in the Gaza Strip, where officially more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in less than one year but the true death toll is, no doubt, many times higher. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

The Lebanon pager attack: Israel’s terror playbook strikes again

 Al Jazeera English

On Tuesday, hundreds of handheld pagers used by members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah simultaneously exploded across Lebanon, killing at least 12 people, including two children. Nearly 3,000 others were wounded, many of them critically.

No one has claimed responsibility for the operation, but it is not hard to guess who is behind it: Israel, a nation that specialises in terrorising selected Arab civilian populations under the pretence of fighting terror. Since October of last year, this same nation has busied itself carrying out genocide in the Gaza Strip, where officially more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed but the true death toll is likely many times higher.

And while the ostensible targets of Tuesday’s attack were pager-wielding Hezbollah members, it was carried out with the full knowledge that the fallout would be indiscriminate and that massive civilian casualties would ensue. But that is the whole point of terrorism, is it not? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Netanyahu and the Israeli protesters are on the same genocidal page

 Al Jazeera English

In July 2014, shortly after the kickoff of Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” in the Gaza Strip – a 51-day affair that ultimately killed 2,251 Palestinians, including 551 children – Danish journalist Nikolaj Krak penned a dispatch from Israel for the Copenhagen-based Kristeligt Dagblad newspaper.

Describing the scene on a hill on the outskirts of the Israeli city of Sderot near the Gaza border, Krak noted that the area had been “transformed into something that most closely resembles the front row of a reality war theatre”. Israelis had “dragged camping chairs and sofas” to the hilltop, where some spectators sat “with crackling bags of popcorn”, while others partook of hookahs and cheerful banter. Fiery, earth-shaking air strikes on Gaza across the way were met with cheers and “solid applause”.

To be sure, Israelis have always enjoyed a good murderous spectacle – which is hardly surprising for a nation whose very existence is predicated on mass slaughter. But as it turns out, the applause is not quite so solid when Israeli lives are caught up in the explosive apocalyptic display.

For the past 11 months, Israel’s “reality war theatre” has offered a view of all-out genocide in the Gaza Strip, where the official death toll has reached nearly 41,000. A July Lancet study found that the true number of deaths may well top 186,000 – and that is only if the killing ends soon.

Now, massive protests have broken out across Israel demanding that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu enact a ceasefire and hostage deal to free the remaining 100 or so Israeli captives held in Gaza. On Sunday, when the Israeli military recovered the bodies of six captives, CNN reported that some 700,000 protesters had taken to the streets across the country. And on Monday, a general strike spearheaded by Israel’s primary labour union succeeded in shutting much of the economy down for several hours.

Although certain wannabe peaceniks among the international commentariat have blindly attributed the protests to a desire to end the bloodshed, the fact of the matter is that Palestinian blood is not high on the list of concerns. Rather, the only lives that matter in the besieged, pulverised, and genocide-stricken Gaza Strip are the lives of the captives – whose captivity, it bears underscoring, is entirely a result of Israeli policy and Israel’s unceasing sadistic treatment of Palestinians.  READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The US is Israel’s accomplice, not a ceasefire mediator

 Al Jazeera English

On July 21, 2006, nine days into the 34-day Israeli war on Lebanon that killed 1,200 people, United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice opined that “an immediate ceasefire without political conditions does not make sense”.

In response to a journalist’s question at a press briefing, the secretary declared that she had “no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante”. . . .

Fast forward 15 years to Israel’s straight-up genocide in the Gaza Strip, which is undoubtedly a more effective means of eradicating the “status quo ante” – at least if we take “status quo ante” to mean Gaza and its inhabitants. With official fatalities now exceeding 40,000 Palestinians and predictions that the real death toll may in fact be many times higher, an immediate ceasefire is the only non-genocidal option on the table.

And while US President Joe Biden has repeatedly stressed the urgency of just such a ceasefire, it is a bit tricky to stop a war when you have just approved an additional $20bn in weapons transfers to the party that has officially killed nearly 17,000 Palestinian children since October. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

‘Less flexible?’ Just say it NYT, Israel is sabotaging a ceasefire deal

 Al Jazeera English

Once in a while, The New York Times has to tell inconvenient truths regarding Israel, the preferred partner in crime of the United States and the recipient of billions upon billions of dollars in American aid and weaponry.

However, just because the US newspaper of record has to tell the truth doesn’t mean it has to do so in a straightforward way.

There was that time in 2014, for example, that The Times reported on the Israeli missile strike that killed four young boys playing football on the beach in the Gaza Strip. While the text of the article did unflinchingly convey the fact that Israel had slaughtered four children, the headline was rendered preposterously vague: “Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife”.

Now that the Gaza Strip has become not only the “centre of Mideast Strife” but the site of a straight-up genocide, The Times has once again found itself creatively diluting the news, as in Tuesday’s headline: “Israel Was Less Flexible in Recent Gaza Cease-Fire Talks, Documents Show”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel is not interested in peace

Al Jazeera English

Just when you thought the situation in the Middle East couldn’t get any more incendiary, the assassination of Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh has propelled regional tensions to a whole new level of bad.

Haniyeh was killed in a strike late on Tuesday in Tehran, the capital of Iran, where he had attended the inauguration ceremony of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. The assassination is without doubt the handiwork of – who else? – the state of Israel, although the Israeli government seems to have adopted a “no comment” policy for the moment.

One Israeli official, Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu, apparently couldn’t contain his exuberance, and took to X to proclaim: “This is the right way to clean the world of this filth … Haniyeh’s death makes the world a little better.”

In his social media post, Eliyahu also swore that there would be “no more imaginary peace/surrender agreements”, and that “the iron hand that will strike is the one that will bring peace and a little comfort and strengthen our ability to live in peace with those who desire peace”.

That’s a lot of usage of the word “peace” for folks who fundamentally don’t want, well, peace. To be sure, killing one of the main negotiators for a ceasefire deal in the Gaza Strip is a pretty good way to thwart any prospect of peace for the time being. READ MORE AT ALJAZEERA ENGLISH. 

Israel is in no place to talk about ‘red lines’

 Al Jazeera English

On Saturday, July 27, at least 12 children from the Druze community were killed in a rocket attack on the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

Israel blamed the strike on Hezbollah, declaring that it constituted “the crossing of all red lines”. Hezbollah, which generally has no qualms owning up to its handiwork, vehemently denied the accusation.

Regardless of who is responsible, it is no less than ludicrously obscene that Israel should fancy itself qualified to talk about “red lines” when the Israeli army is presently perpetrating straight-up genocide in the Gaza Strip. Since October 7, nearly 40,000 Palestinians have officially been killed in Gaza. A recent Lancet study suggests the true death toll could exceed 186,000.

Israel’s education minister, Yoav Kisch, called on his government to respond “with full force” to the Majdal Shams attack and threatened the possibility of “all-out war” with Hezbollah. Again, it takes a special sort of logic to threaten war in retaliation for an attack on a territory you are illegally occupying.

But, hey, that’s how Israel rolls. Aggressor becomes victim, occupier becomes rightful owner, genocide becomes self-defence. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Biden is out, but American plutocracy carries on

Al Jazeera English

And so it has come to pass.

United States President Joe Biden has dropped out of this year’s presidential race, bowing to pressure from fellow Democrats who feared that his train wreck of a performance in the June presidential debate with Republican candidate Donald Trump – among other episodes – would render the octogenarian less than appealing to the US electorate.

So much for Biden’s decree that only the “Lord Almighty” could convince him to withdraw from the race. Or maybe the Lord had a hand in it, after all. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.