Toronto school promoting Israeli military deemed ‘charity’
Canada’s largest private high school recently
organized a genocide solidarity trip in which students cooked for
Israeli soldiers. In a sane world, the school’s charitable status would
be revoked.
At the start of March, 36 students at TanenbaumCHAT, Canada’s largest
private high school, traveled to a state that has slaughtered 15,000 children over the past seven months. The Toronto high school described it
as a “Solidarity Mission to Israel.” In its description of the trip,
the school reports that students were “BBQ-ing for soldiers on an army
base”.
The group also met privately with
Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who reportedly told them, “You are here
— the first school since 7/10 — standing with us, and we stand with
you. There are many voices against us, but I say to you all, be proud,
stand strong. Together we will prevail.”
The students who participated in the “Solidarity Mission” reported
back to the entire school about visiting a state committing genocide........
Well friends, the verdict is in! If you are
opposed to Israel’s slaughter of something like forty thousand
Palestinians, mostly women and children, or the clearly enunciated plans
by that nation’s government to ethnically cleanse the rest of historic
Palestine, making the developing Eretz or Greater Israel a legally
Jewish state, and are prepared to protest or speak up about it, then you
are an antisemite Jew-hater and probably even a holocaust denier. If
you are a student demonstrating against the slaughter you are
increasingly being referred to by talking heads and the media as a
pro-Hamas terrorist. That you must be condemned and sanctioned or even
criminalized as a consequence of the labels is only fair in a country
that apparently has come to believe that Jews and Israel, uniquely,
cannot be criticized due to their cited ad nauseam victimhood
and their anointment by God no matter what the First Amendment to the US
Constitution relating to freedom of speech might say. After all, it’s
just an old piece of paper though it might strike some as a bit odd that
a group of people carrying out a genocide are being given a pass while
those trying to stop it are being beaten, going to jail and, in some
cases, being denied that degree they earned from four years at college................
Opposing The War Machine Is Cool Again, And The Empire's Getting Nervous
American rapper Macklemore has released a single titled “Hind’s Hall”,
the name given to Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall by anti-genocide
protesters in honor of the six year-old Hind Rajab who was murdered in
Gaza by Israeli forces. The artist says all proceeds from the track will
go to UNRWA.
The song with its accompanying video is
such a scathing indictment of the US-backed destruction of Gaza that
Google-owned YouTube promptly age-restricted it.
Macklemore attacks Biden, the brutal police crackdowns on protesters,
the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, US politicians and
the Israel lobby, with lines that will haunt you for days like “The
Nakba never ended, the colonizer lied.”
This marks the
first really mainstream artist to take on this issue in their chosen
medium with a track intended for widespread circulation. It probably
won’t be the last. Opposing the Gaza genocide is quickly moving from the
right thing to do to the cool thing to do, which is a major problem for
the empire......
George Galloway @georgegalloway Member of Parliament of the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 talking about how Elon Musk @elonmusk turned openly and publicly in support of #Israel ( Occupied #Palestine 🇵🇸 ) and large scale suppression alternative points of view on his platform @X.… pic.twitter.com/ftguEfL9z0
The last article by T.P. Wilkinson made me think of Elon Musk as the "Unbecoming American" because that's how I think of the boss of Twitter. He's become the king of hypocrites, IMO.
The children hear the dogs snarling outside, just beyond the flimsy plastic of the tent.
The
seven children of Rehab Abu Daqqa crowd around their mother. She is the
last safe harbour in their lives. They have shared things, these
children and their mother, which cannot be communicated to those who
have not seen the things they have seen. Is there a word to express what
a child feels knowing that just a few yards away, animals are dragging a
body from a grave?
The vocabulary of childhood is inadequate amid the horrors of this emergency cemetery in Rafah.
Scared is the word Rehab Abu Daqqa uses.
That
is accurate. But there is more to it, she knows. The children have seen
dogs eating the bodies. A human leg lying by a fence. So yes they are
scared. But revolted too, and uncomprehending. The children who once had
a home, went to school, lived according to the established rhythms of
their family and community, are now refugees in a place that reeks of
death.
"This
morning the dogs took out a body from one of the graves and were eating
it," Rehab Abu Daqqa says. "From night until dawn the dogs do not let
us sleep… our children keep holding on to me because of how scared they
are.".....
This account of U.S. interference in Ukraine, which can be traced to
fateful decisions made by the Obama administration, including then-Vice
President Biden and his top aides, is based on often overlooked public
disclosures. It also relies on the personal testimony of Andrii
Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat and Democratic Party-tied
political consultant who worked closely with U.S. officials to promote
regime change in Ukraine.
Although he once welcomed Washington’s influence in Ukraine,
Telizhenko now takes a different view. “I'm a Ukrainian who knew how
Ukraine was 30 years ago, and what it became today,” he says. “For me,
it's a total failed state.” In his view, Ukraine has been “used directly
by the United States to fight a [proxy] war with Russia” and “as a rag
to make money for people like Biden and his family.”
The State Department has accused
Telizhenko being part of a "Russia-linked foreign influence network."
In Sept. 2020 it revoked his visa to travel to the United States.
Telizhenko, who now lives in a western European country where he was
granted political asylum, denies working with Russia and says that he is
a whistleblower speaking out to expose how U.S. interference has
ravaged his country. RealClearInvestigations has confirmed that he
worked closely with top American officials while they advanced policies
aimed at severing Ukraine’s ties to Russia. No official contacted for
this article – including former CIA chief John Brennan and senior State
Department official Victoria Nuland – disputed any of his claims............
The European Parliament on Tuesday voted by a very large majority in
favour of adding—as a minimum—the practice of surrogacy to its legal
definition of human trafficking.
The vote counted 563 in favour, 7 against, and 17 abstentions,
demonstrating the existence of a very broad consensus on condemning the
practice of surrogacy among members of the European Parliament, whatever
their political persuasion.
This was a revision
of the 2011 European directive on trafficking in human beings, which
will now include “the exploitation of surrogate motherhood,” as well as
illegal adoption and forced marriage. The revision was initiated by MEP François-Xavier Bellamy,
who is once again heading the list for the French centre-right Les
Républicains party, a member of the European People’s Party (EPP).
To coincide with the vote, Bellamy organised a conference at the
European Parliament on the issue of surrogacy in association with Olivia
Maurel, a Frenchwoman who was herself born through surrogacy, now the
spokesman for the Casablanca Declaration, the international organisation
to ban surrogacy. Bernard Garcia Larrain, the Declaration’s
coordinator, was at her side.................
Israel used a US weapon in a March airstrike which killed seven healthcare workers in southern Lebanon,
according to a Guardian analysis of shrapnel found at the site of the
attack, which was described by Human Rights Watch as a violation of
international law.
Seven volunteer paramedics,
aged between 18 and 25, were killed in the 27 March attack on an
ambulance center belonging to the Lebanese Succor Association in the
town of al-Habariyeh in south Lebanon on 27 March.
The Guardian examined the remnants of a 500lb Israeli MPR bomb and a
US-manufactured Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) recovered by first
responders from the scene of the attack. Pictures of the shrapnel sent
by the Guardian were further verified by Human Rights Watch and an
independent arms expert.......
By Juan ColeAnn Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Committee to Protect Journalists on
Sunday condemned the Israeli cabinet’s decision to ban the Al Jazeera
news network in Israel. The network’s office was closed and its
equipment was confiscated. Israeli cable channels were forced to delete
Al Jazeera from their offerings, and even its website has been blocked
for Israeli residents. Since Israeli news channels do not show the
effects of the government’s total war on Gaza civilians, the Qatar-based
channel had been one of the few sources of comprehensive coverage of
the Gaza campaign for those Israelis who know English or Arabic.
On April 1, the Israeli parliament, dominated by the country’s far
right parties, passed a law permitting the government to halt the
broadcast of foreign channels in Israel “if the content is deemed to be a
threat to the country’s security during the ongoing war.”
Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi called Al Jazeera an “incitement
channel” and a “mouthpiece of Hamas.” It was a ridiculous charge for
anyone who actually watches the live stream of Al Jazeera English.
Carlos Martinez de la Serna, the New York-based director of the
Committee to Protect Journalists, said, “CPJ condemns the closure of
Al-Jazeera’s office in Israel and the blocking of the channel’s
websites. This move sets an extremely alarming precedent for restricting
international media outlets working in Israel. The Israeli cabinet must
allow Al-Jazeera and all international media outlets to operate freely
in Israel, especially during wartime.”..........
A
disagreement or a criticism, before it turns into a fight, or a fight
which might be reduced to a mere disagreement or criticism: Where we
start or end is the frontier between phrases and fists. It really is
that simple. The only way to prove any idea to be false is to kill
everyone who holds it. At least that is certainly one of the more
popular ways to resolve incoherence between verbal and non-verbal
behaviour. My temperament at the end of the 18th calendar week was
shaped considerably by the recognition that the disputes which dominate
the public debate, gaols and battlefields, not to mention the queues of
suffering, have been quite successfully reduced to exchanges between
those armed with fighter-bombers, assault rifles, judges and police and
those whose principal responses are restricted to hide and/or die.................
