Lindsey “Dr. Strangelove” Graham, Critic of Putin’s Atrocities, Urges Nuking of Gaza’s Civilians

Juan Cole

May 13, 2024

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina let his inner genocidal maniac loose on Sunday, defending Israel’s total war on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and he appeared to urge the nuking of Gaza. He said on NBC,

“When we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbor, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by the bombing [of] Hiroshima [and] Nagasaki with nuclear weapons. That was the right decision.”

 

The weaselly Mr. Graham slides easily from one position to another, having lambasted Donald Trump in 2016 and then having ended up kissing the ring (or other parts of the anatomy) once Trump won. It is therefore hard to take him seriously, since he pioneered the role of “Congressional troll,” later taken up by nonentities such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. It is now possible to fundraise nationally off clownish bombast, and flamethrowers play to an increasingly unhinged GOP base.

His argument is that when the United States faced an existential threat in 1945, it used nuclear weapons, killing on the order of 200,000 civilians in Japan. The problems with this argument from any rational point of view are manifold. First, the United States was not facing an existential threat from Japan in 1945 — the empire had been defeated. The only question left was the terms of Japanese surrender. The US vaporized hundreds of thousands of children, women and noncombatant men in hopes of forcing an early capitulation on terms favorable to the US. It was not about protecting the American mainland.

Second, Israel is also not facing an existential threat. Only 2.2 million Palestinians lived in Gaza, while Israel’s population is 9.5 million. Hamas only had, by Israel’s count, some 30,000 armed men in the Qassam Brigades, along with a few thousand irregulars from other groups, such as Islamic Jihad. The group has no Air Force, no fighter jets, no armored divisions, no significant artillery, and its homemade rockets typically land uselessly in the desert.

Israel has 169,000 active duty military personnel and 465,000 reservists. It is ranked as in the world’s top 20 military powers. NDTV notes that Israel has “241 fighter jets [including highly advanced F-35s], 48 attack helicopters, and 2,200 tanks. . . . Israel also has over 1,200 artillery units; this includes 300 MLRS, or multiple launch rocket systems. This includes smart bombs that can strike targets with minimum collateral damage.”

So the Qassam Brigades do not pose an existential threat to Israel, though they are capable of guerrilla actions and terrorist strikes. Israel lost 2,500 or so troops in the 1973 war, over twice the death toll (some 650 of them innocent civilians) lost on October 7. So the latter attack was not in existential threat territory, however horrific and disgusting it was.

Even if a country were existentially threatened, it would be immoral and illegal to target innocent noncombatants, and also would be stupid and ineffective. If an enemy military is attacking in such a way as to pose an existential threat, then you should be concentrating your firepower on the military instead of wasting it on grandmas and toddlers.

Graham not only delivered himself of a response suitable to a war criminal, he also talked out of both sides of his mouth.

Because Graham has postured over the killing of innocent civilians quite a lot, when his enemies rather than his friends have done it.

Here is what Mr. Graham said on “CBS Mornings,” “Conversation With Sen. Lindsey Graham,” on Thursday, March 3, 2022, about Russian war crimes in Ukraine:

TONY DOKOUPIL: On the war crimes question, what was the breaking point for you before this extraordinary press conference yesterday?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): When they started using banned munitions like cluster bombs, vacuum bombs. Everything he is doing is illegal under the Law of War . . .

There is no rule of law in Russia to hold Putin accountable. So this international tribunal [the International Criminal Court] is the right way to go . . .

Economic sanctions, aid to the Ukrainians so they can fight back. But I want every military commander in every pilot to know in Russia, that if you carry out these atrocities against the Ukrainian people, you do so at your own peril, you`re going to wind up in the dark.

So if a sniper shoots a Russian soldier from an apartment building, what we would do is try to isolate the sniper. What they will do is destroy the apartment building.

He`s going scorched earth here. He`s going to start disassembling all resistance. He has no — look at Aleppo. If you want to know the playbook for Putin, Chechnya — he leveled the place. Aleppo, Syria, barrel bombs coming out of helicopters. That`s the Russian game plan and they`re all war crimes and the world complain, but we moved on. We can`t move on when it comes to Ukraine.

The Syria example recalls an old crusade for Mr. Graham. In 2016 at the height of the Russian/ Syrian campaign against Aleppo, he issued a statement with the late Senator John McCain: “For four long years, Aleppo has been at the center of the Assad regime’s war on the Syrian people. Together with its Russian and Iranian allies, the Assad regime has relentlessly targeted women and children, doctors and rescue workers, hospitals and bakeries, aid warehouses and humanitarian convoys.”

The Israeli military, of course, has a long history of insisting on using cluster bombs in southern Lebanon, and has been condemned for it by the U.S. government and some of Mr. Graham’s colleagues in Congress. The U.S. sent two shipments of cluster bombs for use in Gaza to Israel last fall.

As for “vacuum bombs,” these are also called “thermobaric bombs.” Israel has used them extensively in Gaza. The Financial Express writes, “the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have employed Thermobaric bombs, a devastating and controversial weaponry previously unused on civilians. These weapons have resulted in 4th degree burns and caused significant harm to those unfortunate enough to be within their blast radius.”

When these bombs are dropped, the first compartment causes an explosion and create a cloud and, FE continues, “a second charge ignites the cloud, resulting in a massive fireball, a formidable blast wave, and the creation of a vacuum that absorbs all surrounding oxygen. This weapon has the capacity to demolish reinforced buildings, destroy equipment, and cause harm or casualties to people within its range.”

Israeli fighter jet pilots are behaving in Gaza in precisely the way Russian pilots behaved in Syria: “So if a sniper shoots a Russian soldier from an apartment building, what we would do is try to isolate the sniper. What they will do is destroy the apartment building.” Israel has behaved so much like this that a majority of domiciles in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed and over 34,000 people have been killed, with likely another 10,000 under the rubble of those buildings that the Israelis knocked down no less assiduously than the Russians knocked down buildings in Syria.

It is scorched earth.

As for violations of International Humanitarian Law, even the State Department of Antony Blinken, the chief defense counsel for Israel’s extremist cabinet, has admitted that Israel is in breach of it, though mysteriously avoiding the conclusion that US arms should be cut off as required by the Leahy Act.

And nothing could better describe the Israeli military’s behavior in Gaza than Graham’s denunciation of Russia and al-Assad for having “relentlessly targeted women and children, doctors and rescue workers, hospitals and bakeries, aid warehouses and humanitarian convoys.”

So it turns out that not cluster bombs, nor vacuum bombs, nor thumbing his nose at international law, nor targeting women, children, physicians, aid workers, hospitals and bakeries were actually what ticked Mr. Graham off about Mr. Putin. Otherwise he would be similarly peeved with Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu.

Graham just found a political and personal benefit in grandstanding on Syria and Ukraine and in being a Russia hawk. No principles are involved here, no actual concern for innocent life, since those are universal and not tribal.

Meanwhile, South Carolina is 42nd in the US for life expectancy.

In contrast, it is the 8th highest state for deaths of mothers in childbirth.

And there is an “alarming” increase in the infant mortality rate in South Carolina.

Perhaps Mr. Graham might concentrate on doing something about these health statistics in his state, which are in the gutter, rather than daydreaming about playing Slim Pickens riding a nuke, in the last scene of Dr. Strangelove.

 

‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 220: Resistance returns to the north, UNRWA says 300,000 people fled Rafah

QassamMuaddi

The Israeli army has intensified its renewed assault on Jabalia refugee camp and the Zeitoun area in northern Gaza as resistance factions regroup there, months after the Israeli army said it had "defeated Hamas" in the north.

Casualties

• 35,034 + killed* and at least 78,755 wounded in the Gaza Strip.*
• 498+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.**
• Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,139.
• 620 Israeli soldiers have been announced as killed by the Israeli army since October 7, and at least 3,415 have been announced as wounded.***

*Gaza’s Ministry of Health confirmed this figure on its Telegram channel on May 9, 2024. Some rights groups estimate the death toll to be much higher when accounting for those presumed dead.

** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. According to the PA’s Ministry of Health on May 12, this is the latest figure.

*** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” The number of Israeli soldiers wounded, according to Israeli media reports, exceeds 6,800 as of April 1.

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Key Developments

• Israel kills 130 Palestinians, wounds 241 since Friday, May 10, across Gaza, raising the death toll since October 7 to 35,034 and the number of wounded to 78,755, according to the Gaza health ministry.
• The U.S. ambassador to Tel Aviv says that U.S. assistance to Israel will not be interrupted and that nothing strategic has changed in the U.S.-Israel relationship.
• Netanyahu says that Israelis are “determined to achieve absolute victory.”
• Israel’s war minister says that war will continue until “dismantling Hamas.”
• Israeli forces escalate assault on Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza City.
• Israeli bombing intensifies on Rafah as hundreds of thousands flee the city.
• Israel kills one Palestinian and wounds 11 in military raids on Nablus in the West Bank.
• Israeli settlers torch a house in Duma, south of Nablus.
• UNRWA says that it will stay in Rafah “as long as possible,” while warning of societal “collapse.”
• UNRWA closes its Jerusalem office following fire in its surroundings. The agency accuses Israeli assailants.
• Hezbollah attacks several Israeli military positions across the border amidst new Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon.

Israel kills 130 Palestinians since Thursday, fighting intensifies in Jabalia and Zeitoun

The Gaza-based Palestinian health ministry announced that the remaining hospitals in the Gaza Strip received 130 Palestinians who were killed in Israeli strikes since Thursday, May 9, while 241 others arrived wounded.

Meanwhile, local media sources reported that in the past 24 hours, Israeli forces continued a renewed offensive on the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza City’s south for the fifth day in a row. Israeli incursions were accompanied by intense airstrikes on the Zeitoun, Sabra, and Shuja’iyya neighborhoods, as well as on the Jabalia refugee camp, where Israeli forces have also entered by ground.

Airstrikes have killed an unspecified number of people in Gaza City, including 17 members of a single family in the last 24 hours. Among the killed was Tala Abu Zarifeh, a senior leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP).

In the central Gaza Strip, thousands of Palestinians continued to flee to Deir al-Balah from Rafah in the south. Meanwhile, Israeli strikes targeted the Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps.

In the southern Gaza Strip, Israel continues its invasion of the eastern part of Rafah amid air strikes on all parts of the city. Palestinian medical sources said that rescue teams cannot reach victims in some parts of the city due to Israeli drone strikes. Israeli forces have also demolished several buildings in eastern Rafah.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces continue to close both the Rafah and Karam Abu Salem land crossings for the seventh consecutive day, preventing the entry of aid into Gaza.

Simultaneously, intense fighting has been reported between Israeli forces and Palestinian resistance groups across Gaza City and in Rafah. On Friday, the Israeli army announced that four soldiers were killed in combat with Palestinian fighters in the Zeitoun neighborhood, while several more were wounded.

Later, the Israeli army said that the number of its soldiers who were killed in Zeitoun rose to five and that some 50 more were wounded, marking the highest number of Israeli soldiers wounded in a single day since the beginning of Israel’s ground invasion. Among the wounded, according to the Israeli army, is Brig. Gen. Yogav Bar Sheshet, deputy defense establishment controller. Bar Sheshet is the highest-ranking Israeli officer to be wounded in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war.

Israeli forces first invaded Gaza City in October, and later declared “full operational control” in the area. Israel’s new offensive in Zeitoun is the third, and in Jabalia is the second, since the beginning of the war.

UNRWA says 300,000 Palestinians have fled Rafah since last week

The UN agency responsible for the relief of Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on Saturday that no safe places are left in the Gaza Strip. UNRWA’s Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini said in a post on X that “the claim of safe zones is false and misleading.”

Meanwhile, UNRWA’s X account said that 360,000 Palestinians have already left Rafah since the Israeli army started its invasion of the city last week, many fleeing Israeli bombs for the sixth and seventh time since October. In public comments from Geneva, Lazzarini said that Palestinians in Gaza have fled Israeli bombings since October at a rate of once per month.

UNRWA also said that it will not evacuate Rafah and would remain in the city to provide aid to the Palestinian population for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, the agency’s offices in Jerusalem were forced to close after an Israeli mob set fire to the perimeter of the offices twice on Thursday. UNRWA said that the fire was started while UNRWA staff was inside the offices and that they had to put the fire down themselves as Israeli fire trucks took too long to show up. Several videos circulated on social media showing fire around UNRWA’s Jerusalem offices, while Israelis could be heard chanting.

Israel has been calling to shut down the agency, which was established in 1949, in the aftermath of the Palestinian Nakba. Israel has accused UNRWA of having several Hamas operatives among its employees. The claims were deemed to bear no evidence by an independent investigation commissioned by the UN and by the European Union’s top humanitarian aid official. Accusations led 16 countries to withdraw their funding from UNRWA. Later, most countries resumed their funding, including the U.S.

Israel kills one Palestinian, wounds 11 in the West Bank

Israeli forces killed a Palestinian man and wounded 11 people during a military raid on Balata refugee camp in Nablus on Sunday. The raid was confronted by Palestinian fighters in the camp and other parts of the city.

The Nablus-based Palestinian resistance group, the Lions’ Den, mourned the slain man in a statement as one of its fighters, identifying him as Samer Rummanah, 27, adding that he was killed in action while fighting off the raid.

Meanwhile, in Hebron, Israeli forces demolished six Palestinian houses across the southern West Bank governorate, all with the excuse of the lack of building permits. Demolitions took place in Masafer Yatta, the collection of twelve Palestinian villages in the south Hebron Hills declared a “firing zone” by Israel in 1981, and in the village of Beit Ummar, north of Hebron.

In Beit Ummar, Israeli forces demolished a 170 square meter house belonging to Nadim Sabarneh, a Palestinian detainee in Israeli jails. The house was home to nine people, including Sabarneh’s parents, wife, and children. Sabarneh is a member of Beit Ummar’s municipal council and has spent a total of 12 years in Israeli jails. He has been held in administrative detention, without charge, for the past 16 months.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club said that Israeli forces have arrested at least 8,725 since October. Currently, Israel holds 9,500 Palestinians in its jails, including 80 women, 200 children, and over 3,600 detainees without charges.