by Kim Petersen

Last month, the Jimmy Dore Show invited investigative reporter Ben Swann to speak to the myriad facts and evidence uncovered that point to the Israeli government and Israeli intelligence having known well in advance of the planned 7 October Hamas attack and welcoming it. It should be an explosive news piece if not for the self-censorship of the US legacy media. Swann, thankfully, has put together a 7-part series on this with his team at Truth in Media.

https://youtu.be/Li164lMRR48?si=Hz71mee69KiSlZYE

Nonetheless, aside from the otherwise splendid investigative reporting by Swann, the interview raised a question: Why is a legitimate Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation (the borders are sealed to Gaza and the seas are closed to Palestinian fishermen) and oppression described by Swann as an “horrible and evil thing”?

Is not the Israeli slow-motion genocide (since 7 October it has been accelerated), occupation, racism, discrimination, and oppression not the “horrible and evil thing”? Is the horrible and evil theft of historical Palestine by European Jews not the cause of Palestinian resistance? Is it not, per se, horrible and evil to deride a legitimate resistance against the evil of Zionism?

Complicitly, the Whitehouse blamed Hamas, as did Canada’s government. Government officials in the US, Canada, and Europe spoke the same lame phrase, “Israel has a right to defend itself,” as if the slaughter being carried out by a world military power against a starving population could be construed as some kind of defense. Israel, the world’s most frequently cited violator of international law, a racist state, an occupation state built through violence and slow-motion genocide is being acknowledged as having the right to defend its criminality. This is preposterous; there is no right of an occupation regime to defend its occupation. Palestine, however, has a right to resist occupation!

Frequent guest of the Dore Show, comedian Kurt Metzger realizes the situation that Israel forces the Palestinians to live under: a “concentration camp.” The Palestinians in Gaza are presented with a choice to either live on bended knee or to resist.

However, Swann would double down on his vitriol against the Hamas resistance saying: “The Hamas attacks were violent and brutal.” The language is leading and unnecessary. Attacks by their very nature are usually violent and brutal. But why are these adjectives not applied to the violent and brutal Israeli occupation by Swann?

If there were no occupation of historical Palestine, if there were not millions of Palestinians living outside their homeland as refugees, if Palestinians were not being systematically humiliated by Israelis, if Palestinians were not being weeded out of existence by Israelis, if Palestinians were thrown the crumb of the decency to live peacefully alongside their racist usurpers in their historical homeland, would not the rise of a resistance have been obviated?

A progressivist principle should hold that: The oppressor bears responsibility for all casualties because without the oppression, there would be no need for resistance. Ergo, criticism of the resistance of Hamas is unprincipled.

As the show’s cast rummaged over whether Israel was now carrying out a genocide, Jimmy Dore felt it necessary to describe Hamas as a terrorist organization. Hello! There are likeliest over a 100,000 Palestinians slaughtered resulting from this bogus intelligence failure, so who are the terrorists?

Ed Herman, the first author of the acclaimed media analysis, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, noted:

For decades it has been the standard practice of the U.S. mainstream media to designate Palestinian attacks on Israelis as acts of “terrorism,” whereas acts of Israeli violence against Palestinians are described as “retaliation” and “counter-terror.” This linguistic asymmetry has been based entirely on political bias. Virtually all definitions of terrorism, if applied on a nonpolitical basis, would find a wide array of Israeli operations and acts of violence straightforward terrorism. (p 119)

The commonly bandied about death toll of 30 something thousand Palestinians is atrocious, but serious voices point to a serious undercount.

On 5 July 2024, the Lancet ran its numbers: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”

Ralph Nader had written months earlier: “From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.” [emphasis added]

This time, it appears that Zionist connivance has blown up in the connivers faces and the faces of the supporters of Zionism in western governments.

There has been a catastrophic blowback against the genocidaires. Houthis in Yemen have caused disruptions to Zionist-aligned shipping in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Even US and UK aircraft carriers fear Houthi attacks.

Former US Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter sourced inactive Israeli generals: “Israel can’t win this war. Not only Israel can’t win this war, Israel is losing this war.”

Would an outcome where Zionist occupation, oppression, racism, genocide is defeated be a horrible and evil thing?

ACTIVE MEASURES
Alex Rubinstein • Kit Klarenberg

ACTIVE MEASURES
Jul 4, 2024

Netflix is now carrying a mockumentary purporting to showcase the heroism of Ukraine's 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, which is led by the infamous neo-Nazi Andriy Biletsky. The film's director has said the fake documentary will be privately screened for the Pentagon and US Senate.

If you liked this video, consider supporting our project on Substack, Patreon, or BuyMeACoffee. https://activemeasures.substack.com/ https://www.patreon.com/activemeasures8 https://buymeacoffee.com/activemeasures8
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OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT
Empire, Communication and NATO Wars

Elected President of Iran Masud Pezeshkian, July 5, 2024

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Billy Bob's Blowback Roundtable
THE WORLD THROUGH AN INDEPENDENT LEFT LENS

Cringe: Tweet provided by Russians with Attitude. (Two Russians maneuvering the hellscape of American cultural hegemony). Ukrainian vassals showing their love for the vampire American Empire, courtesy of the CIA's bottomless pockets, and the impressive manipulation talents of Hollywood and the biggest propaganda machine the world has ever seen. Ukies are good at making video clips like these. They don't see how pathetic and stupid the whole thing is. 

Iris246 

@Iris2465·

16h

 

I hate that these Ukrainians think there is goodness in being a US vassal state.

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Election Circus + Assange Revisited

Billy Bob

Streamed 7 hours ago

While the East continues to strengthen their ties, US empire vassals actually boast of their abject vassalage as seen in smoothly produced cringeworthy propaganda pieces circulating on social media, with Ukrainians celebrating the 4th of July, and Kosovars shamelessly licking the boot of the Empire by impersonating Americans and doing line dancing. Unfortunately, this kind of foolishness has awful consequences, as the Ukrainian nation is demonstrating. 

The panel also examines the Assange case, including a persistent cloud of accusations describing Assange as a spy or a limited hangout working for the CIA; or an operative working for or against the Russians or Chinese, or as a tool for or against the Republicans or Democrats. All that is nonsense says guest Alex Suarez, who claims authoritative knowledge of Assange. The activist, says Suarez, was not a tool of the Russians, nor was he a shady player helping the Trump campaign. (Trump actually persecuted Assange and, to deny the tsunami of Russiagate accusations, acted even more vicious toward Russia than Obama), If anything, says Suarez, Assange despises the US party duopoly, is feared by both capitalist parties, and probably would have gladly voted for Jill Stein had he been a US citizen.

 

As usual, this is a discussion with many rich insights and opinions of interest to genuine progressives, so we strongly recommend it to our audience. 

Ben Toth's summary provides a sense of the topics on the program.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE

Billy Bob is a dedicated anti-imperialist activist and blogger. He hosts the Blowback roundatable.  You can reach him at his Facebook page HERE.

Paul Edwards

Ron Kovic was literally born on the 4th of July, and truly believed in the American dream. Paralyzed in the Vietnam war, he became an anti-war and pro-human rights political activist after feeling betrayed by the country he fought for. Kovic was lucky to wake up from the dream, even though he paid a high price. Most Americans never see through the con. (Still: Tom Cruise as Kovic, in Born on the Fourth of July).

Come out from under your beds, America.  Get up off your knees and stop staring into the porcelain bowl.  It’s over.  Dry your eyes, stiffen your upper lip, grow a pair, and prepare to meet your fate like a man, woman, or person of indeterminate gender.  There is no escaping the coming Thermopylae of the American Empire.

Your shock is great.  You kept the faith.  You believed we were Number One.  Clinging to that baseless hallucination, you let yourself be financially sodomized for decades, paying ever more in taxes, to make great, big weapons, to kill people you’d never even heard of, believing that those fiendishly expensive gizmos would work great, and that if it took killing millions of little, brown people for you to make your rent and car payments, why, fine!

You couldn’t believe most of that pricey hardware didn’t work, or never got fixed, or was never even made, and your money went to make rich pricks richer.  Government, see, is a wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. Inc., of which you are not a stockholder, love.  Shares in the War Machine are definitely not in your portfolio.

There are those who would tell you that this has been obvious since before you were born, but, shucks, it doesn’t matter now.  Now the clothes are truly off the Emperor.  The Clash of Cretins did the Full Monte for all to behold.  You’ve seen the Elephant.  And the Ass, as well.  And what you saw in that hog wrassle of psychopaths—America’s Beavis and Butthead—is what you’re going to get.

It would be amusing to continue to make fun of this present situation, if it were not for the fact that our lives are at great risk, and it is almost certain that we are looking down the barrel of a gigantic catastrophe, no matter which of these sorry, stinking excrescences of our diseased, paralyzed criminal empire wins.

Nothing can save this nation because it has ceased to be a nation.  A nation is a political entity that represents and defends the interests of a people.  America, in contrast, is dirty Capitalism embodied.  It is an enormous machine whose only purpose is to grind out profit for its owners, the vacuous billionaire coven.

It has no ideal, no ethic or principle, and so, no animating spirit at its core.  If it ever had, beyond lust for money and the power to get it, that spirit has burned out in the bonfire of those vaunted, never implemented, virtues that were its best-selling points.

For it was never the thing it represented itself to be at its outset.  The Founding Cons designed it and built it for themselves, counting Blacks as two-thirds of a person, and Indians as none at all.  They made three branches of government for the vastly rich, whom they called “The People”, to control, stacking the legislature and judiciary with plutocrats, insuring one of them would front the scam, and bragged that they had no king.

All an old story.  Their chicanery was bold, but what followed has been stupefying.  No need to detail it.  You know it and feel it.  In the space of one long lifetime Capitalist necrophiliacs exhausted an industrially virgin continent, ripped up its earth, cut down its trees, acidified and poisoned its land and water, obliterated its wildlife, privatized and fouled its natural wonders, and used it up ecologically for money, none of which you ever saw.

In return, they have grudgingly furnished you a vicious tax hustle, a dirt poor, propagandizing education farce, a money-grubbing, inhumane healthcare con, a network of crumbling, collapsing, antique infrastructure, and a rusted, defunct system of public transportation that is the butt of the whole world’s jokes.

They have done all this while wanking you off about being the “exceptional nation”, the City on the Hill, the Light of the World, and having their loud, proud Military whipped by skinny, hungry men in sandals with M-1s, while claiming to be the toughest, baddest, regime changer and nation builder ever.

What further degradation remains to an arteriosclerotic hegemon already so disgraced and humiliated?  Can a nation commit suicide?  But we’re doing that already.

The recent burlesque of two geriatric, doddering reprobates, armed with mental nerf bats, flailing each other in ludicrous impotence, for the booby prize of fronting a creaking, groaning, political apparatus in the terminal stages of meltdown and failure, has just shown you the Punch an’ Judy show of our future.

I suppose one should be grateful that the country is not aflame with civil war right now, but somehow that fails to elate me.

We, Americans, our nation, are now so irremediably corrupted in all aspects of our public lives, so devoid of genuine principles in our political behavior, so submerged and absorbed in the most trivial and infantile distractions with our electronic toys and our imbecile entertainment, that the idea of it being all obliterated, so that the survivors could take another run at crafting a beneficent, humane culture seems dangerously attractive.

Empires, like individuals, have their span and end.  Like people, they are judged by their deeds, not their talk of power and glory.