July 24, 2024
Ann Arbor
(Informed Comment) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a master of
misdirection, the technique master illusionists use to divert the viewer’s
attention from the trick and to pull the wool over their eyes. He uses his
slick American accent, his bulging eyes, his rhetorical flourishes, his
maniacal certainty, to fool people whenever and however he can.
Palestinian first responders assess the damage after a tent marked as
‘press’ was targeted in an Israeli attack in the central Gaza Strip. One
Palestinian writer and researcher was killed, and two others were
injured. According to the Gaza Media Office, 163 Palestinian journalists
and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7th. (Photo:
APA Images)
Netanyahu, the
Butcher of Gaza, boasted of destroying the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords that would
have resulted in a Palestinian state and an Israeli withdrawal from the
Occupied Palestinian Territories by 1997. He has consistently attempted to
annex Palestinian private property and covertly has paid for a movement of
Israeli squatters onto Palestinian land. He has engaged in collective
punishment of innocent noncombatants in order to quash any resistance to his
vast acts of grand larceny. He bankrolled Hamas for a decade with Egyptian and
Qatari funds deposited in Israeli accounts, which he transferred to Gaza, in
hopes of taming the organization by giving it Gaza as a fief. He thereby hoped
to continue to split the Palestinians, most of whom support instead the
secular, nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization. Most Israelis recognize
that Netanyahu’s brain-dead policies led to the October 7 terrorist attack.
One of the
twenty-first century’s worst war criminals, responsible for more deaths of
innocents and children than Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Netanyahu needs a bright
shiny object to distract the world from the threat his racist, fascist
Likud-led government, armed with 200 nuclear devices, poses to the planet.
Ben Norton at
The Real News Network has reviewed Netanyahu’s long history of blatant
warmongering lies:
In 1990, when
Netanyahu was deputy foreign minister of Israel, he alleged that Iraq’s nuclear
program was “fast accelerating.” In December, 1990, he said on the NBC News
Today Show of Iraq’s ruler Saddam Hussein: “The question is, really, how do we
ensure that these weapons of destruction, these missiles, these chemical
weapons, the nuclear program that is fast accelerating in Iraq, that these do
not pose a threat in the aftermath of the crisis, assuming, assuming it gets
out of Kuwait? This is an issue for the entire international community.”
Iraq’s chemical
weapons were used on Kurds and on Iranian troops but were not in a form where
they could be deployed outside the country. Iraq engaged only in anemic and
sporadic nuclear experimentation that never amounted to anything (they did not
have centrifuges, then or later). Iraq was a ramshackle third world country,
not a threat to Europe or the United States. Netanyahu just had a wish list of
wars he wanted other people to fight for him, and his exaggerations and
fantasies were tools toward that end.
Netanyahu
addressed a US Congressional hearing September 2002, saying:
“If you take out
Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive
reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door
in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of
such despots, is gone. There is a new age, something new is happening.”
Actually, all
the Arab countries are dictatorships, monarchies or failed states after the
disastrous US invasion and occupation of Iraq, which left tens of thousands of
veterans wounded and killed 4,492 US military personnel. The US operation in
Iraq gave rise to ISIL, which roiled the region for several years and conducted
terrorism against France, Belgium and other countries to which Saddam Hussein
had posed no challenge.
As for Iran’s
ayatollahs, the US destruction of the Baath regime in Iraq and the installation
of a Shiite-majority government strengthened them enormously.
Netanyahu told
Congress:
“Two decades ago
it was possible to thwart Saddam’s nuclear ambitions by bombing a single
installation. But today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,
because Saddam’s nuclear program has fundamentally changed in those two
decades. He no longer needs one large reactor to produce the deadly material
necessary for atomic bombs. He could produce it in centrifuges the size of
washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country. And I want to
remind you that Iraq is a very big country.”
He told Congress
before the Iraq War, “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking
and is working and is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons. No
question whatsoever. And there was no question that once he acquires it,
history shifts immediately. There is no question that he had not given up on
his nuclear program. None whatsoever. There is also no question that he was not
satisfied with the arsenal of chemical and biological weapons that he had and
was trying to perfect them constantly. Saddam is hellbent on achieving atomic
bombs, atomic capabilities as soon as he can.”
Netanyahu also
said, “The two nations that are vying, competing with each other, who will be
the first to achieve nuclear weapons, is Iraq and Iran. And Iran, by the way,
is also outpacing Iraq in the development of ballistic missile systems that
they hope will reach the Eastern seaboard of the United States within 15 years.
Now, the question is what’s your next step, knowing that three of these nations
are developing nuclear weapons? This is not a hypothesis. It is fact. Iraq,
Iran, and Libya are racing to develop nuclear weapons.”
None of them
were racing to develop nuclear weapons. None. And none have the capacity to hit
the US with missiles. It is all intense and delusional fearmongering.
Once the US
military was on the ground in Iraq, it became clear that it had never had a
serious nuclear weapons program, and the little it had was mothballed by UN
inspectors in 1995. At the time that Netanyahu was speaking, Iraq had no
centrifuges or any enrichment program of any sort. It was all smoke and
mirrors, as tissue-thin and insubstantial as a paranoid nightmare. All those
“no questions” were expressions of a false certainty or outright lies.
Here’s an
interview Norton pulled up that Netanyahu gave on Iraq after 9/11:
INTERVIEWER:
“You’re making a connection between the Taliban and Iraq.
NETANYAHU: Yes,
I am. I’m saying that the, if you look at those who harbor terrorists, and
those who support terrorists, and-.
INTERVIEWER: I
guess I was looking for a connection between September 11, and my understanding
why we went to the Taliban is it was a connection there, they were harboring
somebody that we believed did the act of September 11.
NETANYAHU: Yes,
that’s the first reason why you did it, and-.
INTERVIEWER: Now
you’re going to take me from September 11 to Iraq, somehow?
NETANYAHU: Yes,
but I’m saying something else. I’m saying the connection is not whether Iraq
was directly connected to September 11, but how do you prevent the next
September 11? . . . And to the various critics, especially overseas, believe
that a clear connection between Saddam and September 11 must be established
before we have a right to prevent the next September 11, well, I think not.”
I once saw on
the web a captured Iraqi document from Saddam’s secret police warning of how
dangerous Ben Laden and al-Qaeda were and putting out an all points bulletin
for any al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq. Saddam was afraid of those people, not in
cahoots with them. We know that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq had
absolutely no plans or possibly even the capacity to stage a terrorist attack
on the United States homeland. Iraq was secular and Arab nationalist. There was
no connection with or resemblance to the fundamentalist Pushtun-speaking
Taliban or the equally fundamentalist al-Qaeda. Netanyahu was just pulling
things out of his ass, to drag the U.S. into a Middle East war that would break
the legs of Iraq, then a significant military power. As Norton pointed out, he
even asserted that the US needed no casus belli to go to war with Iraq.
Apparently paranoid suspicions are sufficient. Which explains a lot.
Iraq was not the
only butt of his calumnies. In 2012, Norton shows, Netanyahu told the UN
General Assembly, “By next spring, at most by next summer, at current
enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to
the final stage. From there it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks,
before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb. A red line should
be drawn right here, before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear
enrichment necessary to make a bomb.”
Iran has had a
civilian nuclear enrichment program since 2000. If it wanted a nuclear weapon,
it could have one by now. In fact, the CIA has repeatedly assessed that Iran
has no military nuclear program and cannot be shown to be trying for a bomb.
Netanyahu has
long tried to get the US into a war with Iran: “Obviously we’d like to see a
regime change, at least I would, in Iran, just as I would like to see in Iraq.
The question now is a practical question. What is the best place to proceed?
It’s not a question of whether Iraq’s regime should be taken out, but when
should it be taken out? It’s not a question of whether you’d like to see a
regime change in Iran, but how to achieve it. The application of power is the
most important thing in winning the war on terrorism. The more victories you
amass, the easier the next victory becomes. The first victory in Afghanistan
makes a second victory in Iraq that much easier. The second victory in Iraq
will make the third victory that much easier, too.”
Those
“victories” in Afghanistan and Iraq turned quickly to dust in America’s mouth,
and if the US government ever allowed the wily Netanyahu to trap it into a war
with Iran, it might well bankrupt the Republic for no gain.
Netanyahu tried
to derail the 2015 UNSC nuclear deal with Iran, in which it mothballed 80% of
its nuclear enrichment program in return for sanctions relief. Netanyahu
successfully pushed US Republicans to refuse the sanctions relief, helping
derail the treaty. He then went before the UN again, saying, “Well, tonight I’m
here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time. After signing the nuclear deal
in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret nuclear files.”
UN inspections
repeatedly showed that Iran was carefully abiding by the terms of the nuclear
deal. Netanyahu was just making shit up again. Norton quotes Robert Kelley, the
former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, on the falsity of
Netanyahu’s claims: “I thought many of the things that he presented were very
childish. I would think that a country like Israel that has its own nuclear
weapons, and has scientists who must be pretty competent, would be able to look
at the information we were shown and say right away, well, this is garbage. He
presented very early in the presentation a drawing which was supposed to be an
illustration of a nuclear device. And you look at that drawing, it’s a cartoon,
it’s a joke. You look at this and you see it’s completely amateurish,
completely childish, and trying to make something very important out of
something that’s not important at all.”
When Trump got
in, Netanyahu whispered into his ear that he should rip up the 2015 Iran
nuclear deal, which Trump did with alacrity. As a result, Iran felt stabbed in
the back. It never got sanctions relief. Its leaders felt free to enrich
uranium to higher levels than the treaty had allowed.
Having destroyed
the best chance for denuclearizing Iran, Netanyahu will now tell Congress to go
to war against that country because “there is no question” that Tehran is
attempting to get a nuclear bomb with which to attack the United States.
Netanyahu has
all the variation in his speeches of a myna bird, and squawks just as
annoyingly. After his decades of lies, misrepresentations, undermining of the
US government’s foreign policy, and now his maniacal genocide, no one in
Washington should be willing to listen to a word he says.
Note that
Netanyahu was afraid of having any layovers on his way to Washington in any
civilized countries for fear he’d be dragged off to the Hague for trial.
Congress has brought eternal and indelible shame on itself by inviting this war
criminal to address it.
Tareq S. Hajjaj
July 23, 2024
On Monday morning, July 24, an
Israeli strike targeted a tent housing journalists inside the courtyard of the
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, killing
one Palestinian and injuring two others.
According to witnesses and those
familiar with the area, the tent that was targeted had a ‘press’ sign hanging
on its door, and was known in and around the hospital as the tent where press
would stay.
The tents adjacent to the
journalists’ tent were not targeted, and the people sheltering inside were
reportedly not harmed. The precise nature of the strike led many to believe
that it was a targeted drone attack on the journalists. Mondoweiss could not independently
confirm the nature of the strike.
Video clips of the explosion and its
aftermath were published on social media, showing the journalist’s equipment,
press vests, helmet, laptop, and camera strewn inside the tent, while a man
lays on the ground, his head burned and some of his organs spilling out. He was
identified as Hidar al-Mussader, a lecturer at Gaza University, and a
researcher and writer whose work had been published on Al Jazeera. The Gaza
media office identified al-Mussader as a journalist and member of the press.
The attack on the journalist tent
was the latest in a series of Israeli attacks on the press since, and before,
October 7th. Throughout Israel’s war on Gaza, it has targeted Palestinian
journalists in Gaza and Lebanese journalists in southern Lebanon in their field
of work, in their homes with their families, and in journalists’ tents and
shelters like the one at the Al-Aqsa martyrs hospital.
The government media office in the
Gaza Strip issued a brief statement after the bombing of the journalists’ tent
on Monday, in which it said that the number of journalists killed by Israel
since the beginning of the war had reached 163 journalists.
Earlier this year, a report by the
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) noted that more than 75% of all
journalists killed around the world in 2023 were killed in the Gaza war.
In addition to the deliberate
killing of journalists in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army has arrested dozens
of journalists in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war, some of whom
remain unaccounted for.
Despite the frequent attacks on
journalists, Monday’s bombing struck a nerve among journalists in the area.
Hanu Abu Rizq was just a few tents away when the bombing occurred. “I was
surprised, despite my prior knowledge that the Israeli army targets journalists
and does not differentiate between a journalist, a displaced person, a rescuer,
or a citizen,” Abu Rizq told Mondoweiss. “Everyone is targeted in the Gaza
Strip.”
Hani confirmed what other witnesses
in the area said: that there was a sign on the “door” of the tent clearly
marking that it was a tent for journalists. “We were stunned by the sound of
the missile, only to discover that a journalist was killed and two others were
injured,” Abu Rizq recounted of the moment the strike hit.
“Fortunately, the missile was of a
light caliber,” he continued, decrying the fact that the journalist was
targeted on the grounds of a hospital, which is currently sheltering thousands
of displaced civilians. “If it had been of a heavy caliber, it would have
killed hundreds in this place, which is overcrowded with tents for the
displaced.”
Abu Rizq lamented the killing of
Hidar al-Mussader on Monday, saying that each time a journalist is killed, it
makes his work, and the work of other journalists in Gaza, that much more
difficult. “When you see your colleague dead or injured, you then try to avoid
going to the places he went to and avoid talking about the topics he was
talking about.”
“But despite all this fear, we
continue to convey the image to the world. My national, emotional, and social
duty motivates me to continue working,” Abu Rizq said.
“Everything around me forces me to
continue. Especially in the memory of so many of my colleagues who were with
us, working together, laughing together, and eating together, until the Israeli
army killed them. We are here to continue their path and convey the messages of
the Palestinian people to the world, and to convey the barbarity of the Israeli
occupation.”
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