6month and i am still waiting for the " #genocide", maybe #israel doesnt have the tools for a real #warcrime in #gaza, besides mistakenly bombing the wrong target? or maybe, there is no such thing intended? could it be, that israel just tries to destroy #hamas, which launches #rockets and hides itz #troops in #civil areas and causes the dead #civilians / #collateralDamage?
#hamasPropaganda #freeTheHostagesNow #freeGaza from hamas and #fightFascism! #amIsraelChai!
The #US #military has illegally occupied #Syrian sovereign territory since 2014, preventing Damascus from accessing its own #oil and #wheat fields. The Senate voted 13-84, rejecting a resolution to withdraw US #troops.
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/12/12/us-troops-occupy-syria-oil-congress-withdraw/
Video released by the Israeli military shows tanks and troops on a raid into Gaza, in what Israeli radio said was the biggest land incursion since the Octobe...#AlJazeera #AlJazeeraEnglish #Gaza #Hamas #Israeli #alJazeera #aljazeeraEnglish #aljazeeralive #aljazeeravideo #aljazeeraEnglish #aljazeeralatest #aljazeeralive #aljazeeralivenews #attack #biggest #incursion #land #latestnews #military #newsheadlines #radio #raid #troops
Israel carries out ‘biggest’ raid into Gaza | AJ #shorts
So why should anyone else? Neither #BenShapiro nor #YairNetanyahu, the son of the Prime Minister, have any interest in #defending their fellow #Israelis against #Hamas, #Hezbollah, or any other enemies who might harm them.
The #son of #Israel’s Prime Minister #BenjaminNetanyahu has been blasted for staying in #Miami while #reservists returned home to #fight against Hamas. Yair Netanyahu, 32, has been in #Florida since at least April, after his father told him to stop making inflammatory posts on social media, which saw him sued for defamation multiple times.
Meanwhile an unprecedented 360,000 #reservists have been called up – many of them dropping everything to fly back to Israel, even abandoning #honeymoons. But #Yair has remained in Miami, to the #irritation of some of the #troops. ‘Yair is enjoying his life at #MiamiBeach while I’m on the #front lines,’ one #soldier, a volunteer serving on Israel’s northern front, told The Times.
‘It’s us who are leaving our work, our families, our kids, to protect our families back home and the country, not the people who are responsible for this situation. Our brothers, our fathers, sons, are all going to the front line, but Yair is still not here. It does not help build trust in the leadership of the country.’
Israeli soldiers blast Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair, 32, for ‘abandoning’ them by staying in Miami while 360,000 reservists are called up to fight against Hamas, 24 October 2023
There should not be any discussion of one single #American soldier being sent to the #MiddleEast until every single #Jew #resident in the #USA between the ages of 18 and 40 has been sent there first. There is absolutely no reason to defend a #nation that literally refuses to defend itself.
And the fact that #Netanyahu’s own son is living the #high-life in Miami while his father #screeches about Hamas and Hezbollah should be sufficient cause to ignore all of the non-stop #propaganda. If it’s not their problem, it certainly isn’t ours.
#hamas #gaza #antisemitism #israel #pogrom #idf #zahal
What is meant by ‘proportionality’ in war? Let’s begin with Michael Walzer, author of the seminal Just and Unjust Wars, explaining what proportionality, in international law and in just #war thinking, is not.
Proportionality doesn’t mean ‘tit for tat,’ as in the family feud. The Hatfields kill three McCoys, so the McCoys must kill three Hatfields. More than three, and they are breaking the rules of the feud, where proportionality means symmetry.
But if proportionate does not mean symmetry, what does it mean? Walzer again:
The use of the term is different with regard to war, because war isn’t an act of retribution; it isn’t a backward-looking activity, and the law of even-Steven doesn’t apply. Like it or not, war is always purposive in character; it has a goal, an end-in-view.
In other words, the goal pursued by military action must be proportionate to the ongoing threat faced. Israel’s goal is the removal of Hamas as the controlling political and military power in #Gaza is proportionate because 7 October made clear that Hamas now poses an existential threat to #Israel.
Israel’s goal is proportionate to the revelation that the mass slaughter of all the #Jews of Israel will be attempted again and again by Hamas and #Palestinian #Islamic #Jihad until successful, with whatever technology and weaponry can be acquired or supplied, under the guiding hand and financial support of a nuclear threshold state religiously committed to Israel’s destruction, #Iran.
Although Hamas has declared this eliminationist goal openly, again and again, western #liberal opinion has refused to take it seriously. What Paul Berman calls our ‘liberal naivete’ (‘No, they can’t mean that! No one can mean that!’) has routinely trumped what Hamas, as the kids would say, literally tell us, in words and, as on 7 October, in deeds.
Here is what Hamas has said.
Muhammed Deif, then the Hamas bomb-maker, now one of its leaders, said in 2005 after Israel’s disengagement from the Strip, ‘We promise that tomorrow all of #Palestine will become hell for you.’
Hamas ‘foreign minister’ Mahmoud al-Zahar said in 2006, ‘Israel is a vile entity that has been planted on our soil, and has no historical, religious or cultural legitimacy. We cannot normalise our relations with this entity.’
Ahmad Al-Jabri, the Hamas military commander killed by Israel on day one of the 2012 conflict, called Jews ‘rats’ to be killed in the cause of liberating ‘Jerusalem, the West Bank, and then Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv’.
And, infamously, the Hamas Charter, its set of founding principles and its programme, adopted in 1988 and never revoked, declares: ‘Israel will exist and will continue to exist until #Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it’, and ‘[Hamas] strives to raise the banner of #Allah over every inch of Palestine’, so ‘Jihad becomes the individual duty of every #Moslem. In the face of the Jews’ usurpation’. And no, ‘Jihad’ does not here mean ‘spiritual struggle’. It means the #slaughter of 7 October. And all the slaughters they plan for the future. ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them’ says the Hamas Charter, quoting a hadith. ‘Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: “O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.”’
On 7 October 2023 the word became deed. That day should have brought an end to the games that westerners play with these #genocidal Hamas statements, to their clever-clever ‘translating’ of them into mere ‘rhetoric’, the ‘language games’ liberation movements play, just another ‘text’ or ‘discursive surface’ expressing the degree of its oppression and never the depth and intensity of its eliminationist antisemitism.
If you want to play those games you will find abundant resources within western intellectual culture to do so. (Actually, you will find little else these days.) But Israel’s neighbourhood is a bit different to the Modern Languages Association annual conference. In that region, when someone says they intend to kill you, they really intend to kill you. All of you.
After 20 years of Hamas terror attacks, suicide bombers, indiscriminate rocket and missile attacks, terror tunnels, drones, incendiary balloons, came a long-planned, meticulously prepared pogrom on such a scale that one has to go back to the Holocaust to find as many Jews murdered on a single day. And a pogrom of such a nature – Holocaust survivors shot in the head, #babies shot in the head, decapitations, #woman #raped and #executed, Jews burnt alive, young Jews hunted down and massacred en masse at a rave, Jews surviving by hiding under the dead bodies of their parents, atrocity videos uploaded to the internet – to make reasonable comparisons between Hamas and the #Nazi Einzatsgruppen units who carried out the Holocaust in eastern #Europe. (I taught the Holocaust at university and I could write an entire article just on the parallels: the eliminationist #antisemitic #ideology, the spirit of bacchanalia among the perpetrators, the monstrous baby-killing, the echo of those smiley photographs of cruelty the #German #troops sent home during the #Holocaust in the atrocity videos Hamas ‘militants’ (copyright: BBC) uploaded, sometimes to the social media accounts of those they were murdering, and more.
And it isn’t just the future threat from Hamas that is existential. It is existential now. No country, not the #UK, not the #US, not #France, not anybody, would accept the permanent mass trauma of citizens faced with a permanent threat of pogrom, or the possible depopulation of swathes of its country as fearful citizens flee from that threat.
How Israel sets about achieving the goal of removing Hamas as the power in the Strip is, of course, limited by prudential concerns (which I wrote about last week) and by the non-negotiable effort to minimise #non-combatant #casualties and maintain humanitarian corridors (which Jack Omer-Jackaman and I argued for in Fathom). The ratio of combatant to non-combatant deaths achieved by Israel in previous military operations to restore deterrence in face of Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket attacks has been consistently better – far, far better – than anything achieved in its wars by the US, the UK, not to mention #Russia. Every effort should be made to make it so again.
In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, pogroms didn’t have consequences for the pogromists because the Jews were powerless because stateless. Well, not any more. Since 1948 there is a Jewish state with the IDF on its ramparts. Hamas is going to find out that pogroms now have consequences. Its total removal from Gaza will be a proportionate response to its total threat it now poses to the only #Jewish homeland in the world.
The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) described the plan as a threat to #civilian #democracy in the #UK.
The PPU pointed out that #troops have no authority to arrest #civilians under UK law. They said that no-one has any obligation to co-operate with the armed forces or obey instructions from them.
Their comments follow the news that the Ministry of Defence has offered #soldiers to support armed #police officers in the Metropolitan Police after a number of police officers withdraw from firearms roles.
The PPU described the proposal to deploy troops as a particularly alarming example of everyday #militarism. They added that the last 20 years have seen a rise in #military involvement in civilian life, through initiatives such as the introduction of Armed Forces Day, military covenants and sharply increased funding for cadet units while other youth services have been cut.
Symon Hill, Campaigns Manager of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), said:
“Most British people do not want Britain to be the sort of country in which soldiers stand around on street corners brandishing guns. Deploying troops to carry out police functions is a threat to Britain’s traditions of democracy and civil liberty.
“No-one should feel obliged to obey instructions given by troops on the streets. We have our rights because our ancestors campaigned for them. We must not give up our freedoms by allowing ourselves to be subjected to military authority.
“The armed forces and their leaders are rarely held to account – even less so than the police. Certain police officers’ fears of accountability must not be used as an excuse for the armed forces to grab more power over civilian life.”
#pacifist #pacifists #pacifism #antiwar #antimilitarist #antimilitary #peace #propeace #HumanRights
Fotomontage für
Tucholsky, Kurt: Deutschland, Deutschland über alles
#heartfield #deutschland #untertanen #tucholsky #army #fotomontage #foto
#bourgeoisie #middleclass #citizens #descendance #soldier #military #uniforms
#troops
source: https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-pentagon-weapons-biden-1756387
A Military.com report cited comments by Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder that the inspectors would not be near the #frontline, and that "Ukrainians are working very closely with us to provide insight and tracking of those capabilities in places where it's not safe for U.S. personnel to go."
U.S. troops in Ukraine departed on February 14, 10 days before the #invasion, apart from those who provide security in the U.S. #Embassy in #Kyiv.
#war #usa #army #pentagon #DoD #security #defence #news #Russia #military
WTF is US doing in #Syria?
Three #US #troops were wounded in rocket attacks in Syria on Wednesday that came after the US launched airstrikes in the country, US Central Command (#CENTCOM) said.
The rocket attacks targeted the US base at Green Village and the #Conoco gas fields, which are both located in eastern Syria. CENTCOM said one service member was treated for a minor wound while two other soldiers are under evaluation for minor injuries.
30 days ago, on the 25th January, I told NATO to #deploy 40,000 troops, with defensive hardware, to Ukraine.
I did this after analysing the #strategic deployment & composition of #Russian troops surrounding #Ukraine & the type & quantity of Ukraine's #military.
How many #NATO #troops were deployed to Ukraine? Zero.
Of course, I have no #power or #influence in the #world, so it's no surprise that nobody listened to me, but if they had, we'd have had a full month to prepare a significant #defense that would have been sufficient to dissuade #Russia, at least until they had built up so much that even the most obtuse of observers would have seen the probabilities.
Now it's too late to take action to defend Ukraine. #Congratulations.
https://gettr.com/post/pqjrus9777
https://parler.com/feed/71d8161a-a349-4e51-95e4-855c6eacfada
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ySeX7S85cA
Freedom over censorship, truth over narrative.
The not-so-'imminent' #Russian #invasion of #Ukraine: From #Russia being accused of amassing #troops at the border to February when country's troops returned to their bases after the end of drills.
The #PeacePledgeUnion (PPU) has today issued the following statement with regards to the prospect of #war over #Ukraine. The #PPU is #Britain's leading #pacifist organisation and the #British section of War Resisters' International.
The Peace Pledge Union shares the concern felt around the world about the possibility of war between #Russia and Ukraine. Sending more #troops and more #weapons to the area is only making the situation worse.
We oppose the actions of #politicians and #military leaders on both the #Russian side and the #NATO/Ukrainian side who are stirring up military #tension and using each other’s #aggression to justify their own. We stand with people in all countries who are resisting the drive to war.
We utterly reject any suggestion that to oppose NATO’s #militarism means supporting #VladimirPutin and Russian #forces. We oppose militarism on all sides.
We condemn the action of the Russian #government in building up troops on the #Ukrainian border. We do not accept their claim that this is not aggressive because the troops are in Russian territory. We similarly condemn the aggressive actions of NATO members, including the #US and #UK governments, in building up troops on Russia’s other borders. This follows NATO’s expansion eastwards since the 1990s, which has broken promises made at the end of the #ColdWar.
Each side uses the other’s aggression to justify their own. Each side claims that their actions are purely defensive. This situation has occurred countless times before in many parts of the world. It illustrates the futility of seeking to solve #conflict through #violence. Militarism anywhere fuels militarism everywhere.
As the British section of War Resisters’ International, the Peace Pledge Union stands in #solidarity with #pacifists and other #anti-militarists around the world. We are confident that the people of #Ukraine, Russia, the US, the UK and all the other countries involved have more in common with each other than with the #militaristic politicians, generals and arms companies who would wage war in their name.
As an organisation based in the UK, we note that UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss repeatedly states that UK troops and their NATO allies are promoting “freedom”. Yet the lack of #democracy and civil #liberties in Russia is mirrored in countries that the UK government counts among its military allies. NATO members include the #authoritarian regime of #Turkey. While Truss claims that UK troops in #Estonia are defending #freedom, other UK troops are training the #Saudi forces bombing #civilians in #Yemen. The Ukrainian government has recently imprisoned members of our sibling organisation, the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, for campaigning against militarism; these actions mirror the Putin regime’s repression of peaceful #activists in Russia.
There is no military solution to the #crisis over Ukraine. We urge both sides to withdraw troops from each other’s borders and to stop pouring further troops and weapons into an already highly volatile situation. We encourage them to focus on tackling the real dangers that threaten us all, including Covid, poverty and the climate emergency. We support people in all countries who challenge militaristic polices and we welcome the actions of individuals in the armed forces in any country who refuse to obey orders to fight or to prepare for war.
#peace #propeace #antiwar #ConscientiousObjection #HumanRights
source: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-60188509
Nato's secretary general has called for a "balanced approach" with regard to rising tensions over Ukraine, saying the alliance has no plans to deploy combat troops in the country.
Now that this is clear, everyone could calm down again.
This sort of blustery rhetoric tends to be dismissed by #Americans in the aftermath of the #wars against #Arabs in the #MiddleEast, but it shouldn’t be when it comes from #China in response to various diplomatic #provocations by the #US State Department using #European #proxies.
Diplomatic measures alone are obviously not enough. If the US and the #Taiwan island change the names, they are suspected of touching the red line of China’s Anti-Secession Law, and the Chinese mainland will have to take severe #economic and #military #measures to combat the #arrogance of the US and the island of Taiwan. At that time, the mainland should impose severe economic sanctions on the island and even carry out an economic #blockade on the island, depending on the circumstances.
Militarily, Chinese mainland’s fighter #jets should fly over the island of Taiwan and place the island’s #airspace into the patrol area of the #PLA. This is a step that the #mainland must take sooner or later. The name change provides the Chinese mainland with sufficient reason to strengthen our #sovereign #claim over the island of Taiwan. It is anticipated that the Taiwan army will not dare to stop the PLA fighter jets from flying over the island. If the Taiwan side dares open fire, the Chinese mainland will not hesitate to give “Taiwan independence” forces a #decisive and #destructive blow….
Will #peace come if the Chinese mainland puts up with all this and swallows its anger for the sake of peace? If the mainland doesn’t strike back decisively, US #warships will dock at the island of Taiwan, its fighter #aircraft will land on the island and its #troops may be stationed in the island again. At that time, where will be China’s #prestige as a #great #power? How can the country maintain its system of defending its #interests on the international stage?
The fact is that a #contest of #will has been formed regarding the Taiwan question. Since China has declared that the Taiwan question is a matter of our #core interests, we must take resolute actions to protect the bottom line of this exact national interest at any cost. If the #DemocraticProgressParty authority really dares to take the risk of triggering a war to push for a name change, and the US, which just suffered a #debacle in #Afghanistan, is not afraid of being involved in a new war, then what is there for the mainland to be scared of?
It seems that sooner or later, the #TaiwanStraits will be plunged into a #storm that will change the situation there drastically. And judging from the current actions of the US and the island of Taiwan, we can be sure that even if they will have to take this step back, they will step forth again soon. Thus, right now we need to be fully prepared to blow them out of the water in the Taiwan Straits.
Global Times, 12 September 2021
There is a rational argument for the US #military provoking a #confrontation with China sooner rather than later, as the technological and production trends are clearly working in China’s favor. The Chinese are fully aware of these trends, which is why they have resolutely avoided military confrontation with the USA for decades. And that’s why it is so significant that at least some parties in China believe, and are willing to publicly declare, that the right time for resolving “the Taiwan question” is right now.
US Guided-missile destroyer #USS #Benfold trespassed in waters near the #Meiji-Reef in the #SouthChinaSea Wednesday without permission from China. The Chinese side mobilized aircraft and ships to warn off and expel the ship from the waters. In a 7th Fleet news release, the US side acknowledged that USS Benfold sailed within 12 nautical miles of Meiji Reef. But it said the warship was asserting navigational rights and freedoms. It claimed the Meiji reef “is not entitled to a territorial sea under international law,” and “the land reclamation efforts, installations, and structures” built on the reef “do not change this characterization under international law.”
China and the US don’t agree on the nature of the 12 nautical miles of Meiji Reef. Other different views exist worldwide. But international law doesn’t empower any country to challenge others’ sovereign claim with an intrusion by a warship. The US in particular has no right to do so given the fact that it has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Global Times, 13 September 2021
America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.
The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”
This is how a military empire occupies the globe.
#global #war #military #troops #corruption #peace #freedom #liberty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZM6bLLLbms
https://amplifireproject.com/2021/08/30/caitlin-johnstone-the-completion-of-the-afghanistan-withdrawal-is-nothing-to-celebrate/
#richardmedhurst #medhurst #theend #troops #leave #afghanistan #neocons #us #uk #occupation #war #warmongers #joebiden #cia #contractors #mercenaries #special-forces #mi6 #sas #media #msm #journalism #war-sells #caitlinjohnstone #johnstone
