U.S. Officials Fear American Guns Ordered by Israel Could Fuel West Bank Violence
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MY GOODMAN: Professor Butler, I wanted to turn to John Kirby, the spokesperson for the National Security Council, who was speaking this week at a White House press briefing.
JOHN KIRBY: This is war. It is combat. It is bloody, it is ugly, and it’s going to be messy. And innocent civilians are going to be hurt, going forward. I wish I could tell you something different. I wish that that wasn’t going to happen. But it is. It is going to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: So, the killing of civilians is just going to happen. Judith Butler, if you could respond also, as a Jewish professor, for those in the Israeli government, like Naftali Bennett, who have said, “Are you seriously talking about Palestinian civilians?” that if you are to raise your concerns about Palestinians, that it somehow minimizes what happens on — what happened on October 7th, the killing of 1,400 Israelis, the worst killing of — mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust?
JUDITH BUTLER: So, when the national security spokesperson claims that it’s just too bad that civilians will lose their lives in Gaza, and that he wishes that it were not the case, he is, in fact, lying. Civilians are targeted. And I think we can also say that one of the things that is happening right now is that — and it has been happening for some time — is that the Israeli state claims that all these civilian targets it hits are shields for military installations. Well, that’s a very convenient explanation, but it doesn’t explain the bombing of homes, the bombing — and the targeting and bombing of people as they are fleeing the north to the south. So, I think that this is bad faith, at best, and a brutal lie, if we’re to be honest.
I think, as well, that there are, unfortunately, some Jewish groups and Zionist groups that care fully or exclusively or primarily about Jewish life, and their position is that the destruction of Jewish life is the worst possible thing in the world — and it is terrible. It’s absolutely terrible. But Jewish life is no more valuable than Palestinian life. And I think that you might find a number of people who agree with that in the abstract, but they take the massive targeting, the slaughter campaign against Gaza as justifiable, because no amount of violence can possibly compensate for their sense of injury.
I would just add that it is extremely difficult to get the media and the press to offer graphic and detailed descriptions of what the suffering is in Gaza. We hear much more, say, in The New York Times about Israeli lives and the losses they’ve endured. But we never get the same kind of coverage of Palestine. We sometimes get numbers. And as you’ve seen, those numbers could be disputed, even by Biden, even though they’re supplied by United Nations agencies or respectable agencies on the ground. So, there are all kinds of ways of minimizing and derealizing — that is to say, making fake or making illusory — Palestinian deaths. And I think our job, as scholars, activists, people in journalism, is to bring that into the open and make these lives and these deaths meaningful for the greater public.
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a message of deterrence
Or maybe more of support. Of the Israeli state. And not of Palestinians.
People often can see what leaders do when it differs from what they say.
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Statement by Principals of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, on the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, “We need an immediate humanitarian ceasefire”
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-middle-east-67324897
Hamas-run health ministry says more than 10,000 now killed in Gaza
The number of people killed in Gaza since Israel began bombing the territory has now reached 10,022, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza.
The figure comes after a night of intense Israeli strikes, with the Israeli military saying they hit hundreds of targets including a Hamas military compound.
The director of the largest hospital in Gaza City told the BBC earlier that some 200 people were killed.
A group of UN humanitarian agencies and charities have said the “horrific killings” of civilians in Gaza are an “outrage”. Thousands of children are believed to be among the dead.
Some politicians, including US President Joe Biden, have questioned the accuracy of the Gaza health ministry’s figures.
When asked about this, the World Health Organization said they believed the numbers were reliable. Like other government agencies in Gaza, the health ministry is controlled by Hamas, a proscribed terror group in the UK, US and EU.
Israel launched its attacks on Gaza after Hamas killed more than 1,400 people in Israel and kidnapped more than 200 others on 7 October. The Israeli military says its operation is aimed at destroying Hamas completely.
Israeli source:
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Israeli senior security official admits that 20,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, “most of them terrorists” they claim.
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Good news no one is actually dead…
The same, I suppose, for all those hostages and isrealis killed in the Hamas attack?
Man, that guy is so full of shit his eyes have turned brown.
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I think the Guardian is missing the point with Le Pen.
The rebranded RN is extremely populistic and its focus for at least the last 10-15 years has been promoting islamophobia. So is not like they are supporting Israel per se. If Israel was a progressive, left leaning state, they would not. They are supporting Israel’s islamophobia.
And that says much more about Netanyahu’s goverment than about Le Pen’s.
On another news… The Tacoma DSA is staging a protest to block the unloading of what they have named “the genocide boat”.
Oops, seems I missed that Vermes82 already posted this from a different source! Sorry!
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And of course, if she gets her way and they do indeed “cleanse” (brutally expel, I mean) the country of Muslims whether they are born in France or are immigrants, of course she’ll immediately turn on the Jewish citizens of France, because that’s almost always the end game of these fascist goons. If she can use Jewish fears of violence by Islamists, she will happily do that, to end up with a ethnically “pure” France…
God I despise that woman.
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Cécile Alduy, a professor at Stanford University and a specialist on Le Pen’s party said: “The Front National has a long history of antisemitism: one of its founders was a Waffen SS [member] and Jean-Marie Le Pen has been convicted several times for denying or minimising the Holocaust, or for antisemitic slurs. Jean-Marie Le Pen also expressed sympathy for the Palestinian people in the 90s, and was against any alignment on the US’s politics in the Middle East.
“But the party has always supported the existence of Israel – the young Jean-Marie Le Pen was an admirer of the Suez operation in 1956, and after September 11, 2001, the far right started to see Israel as an enclave of the west within the Arab world, in a war of civilisations.”
IIRC Jean-Marie Le Pen thought that French Jews should emigrate to Israel and defend Western civilisation there.
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