Thirteen arrested as protesters tell Senators Menendez and Booker 'No More Blank Check for Israel’s Crimes'

On Tuesday August 26, 2014, more than 50 demonstrators protested outside the Newark, New Jersey, offices of U.S. Senators Robert Menendez and Cory Booker demanding that the legislators stop providing a blank check for Israel’s crimes. Thirteen demonstrators were arrested inside the building as they read out the names of some of the nearly 500 Palestinian children killed in Gaza.

(When B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, had tried to run a radio ad merely listing the names of five of the hundreds of children killed, the Israeli Broadcast Authority banned them from doing so.)

The U.S. Senate has played a shameful role during the recent Israeli assault on Gaza, twice voting 100-0 to give its full support to Israel, saying nothing about its violations of international humanitarian law (indeed, condemning the United Nations’ Human Rights Council for deigning to investigate war crimes), nothing about the blockade of Gaza, and nothing about the occupation, while promising Israel still more weapons.

All this, while more than 2,100 Gazans have been killed, with civilians constituting 85 percent of those whose status has been determined thus far. Families were blown to smithereens in their homes. More than 100,000 people lost their homes. UN refugee shelters were repeatedly struck. Artillery was used in densely populated areas, leveling entire neighborhoods. High-rise buildings were demolished. Water and power facilities were struck.

Complete story at - Thirteen arrested as protesters tell Senators Menendez and Booker 'No More Blank Check for Israel’s Crimes'

MSM War on Gaza

Journalists daring to criticize Israel responsibility face likely dismissal and banishment from MSM employment.

Once again, Israel waged cold, calculated premeditated aggression against near defenseless Palestinians.

An Israeli Goliath mercilessly attacked a Palestinian David. It did so for unjustifiable reasons. Mass slaughter, destruction and human misery followed.

Non-combatant men, women and children suffered most. They were deliberately targeted. They comprised over 80% of deaths and injuries.

Israeli casualties hardly compare to around 2,000 mostly civilian Palestinian deaths, up to 10,000 injured, large parts of Gaza in ruins, hundreds of thousands forcibly displaced, and families losing all their possessions.

Operation Protective Edge is the most devastating Israeli aggression on Palestinians since its 1947-48 war.

A shaky ceasefire could end any time. Heavy Israeli shelling and bombing could resume. Palestinian casualties could continue mounting.

The fate of about 1.7 million Gazans hangs in the balance. They're trapped in the world's largest open-air prison. They're unable to find refuge anywhere.

Every square inch of Gaza is fair game. Israel inflicts collective punishment mercilessly. Civilian men, women and children are considered legitimate targets.

So are schools, hospitals, mosques, residential neighborhoods and vital infrastructure unrelated to military necessity. Terror bombing and shelling reflect longstanding Israeli policy.

Precision weapons can mass slaughter with technological ease. Banned terror weapons are used against defenseless civilians in densely populated residential areas.

They include 4cm-long metal darts called flechettes. They're anti-personnel weapons able to penetrate bone deep enough to inflict horrific injuries.

One artillery shell can deliver up to 8,000 of them. On impact, rupturing releases them at high speed in a funnel-shaped pattern over an area of about 300 meters.

White phosphorous is devastating to human flesh. It's a flammable chemical. Israel uses it as an incendiary weapon and smoke screen.

When exposed to air, it spontaneously ignites. It burns to the bone. It keeps burning until consumed or deprived of oxygen.

Complete story at - MSM War on Gaza

Gaza: this shameful injustice will only end if the cost of it rises | Seumas Milne | Comment is free | The Guardian

For the third time in five years, the world’s fourth largest military power has launched a full-scale armed onslaught on one of its most deprived and overcrowded territories. Since Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip began, just over a week ago, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed. Nearly 80% of the dead are civilians, over 20% of them children.

Around 1,400 have been wounded and 1,255 Palestinian homes destroyed. So far, Palestinian fire has killed one Israeli on the other side of the barrier that makes blockaded Gaza the world’s largest open-air prison.

But instead of demanding a halt to Israel’s campaign of collective punishment against what is still illegally occupied territory, the western powers have blamed the victims for fighting back. If it weren’t for Hamas’s rockets fired out of Gaza’s giant holding pen, they insist, all of this bloodletting would end.

“No country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders,” Barack Obama declared, echoed by a mostly pliant media. Perhaps it’s scarcely surprising that states which have themselves invaded and occupied a string of Arab and Muslim countries in the past decade should take the side of another occupier they fund and arm to the hilt.

But the idea that Israel is responding to a hail of rockets out of a clear blue sky takes “narrative framing” beyond the realm of fantasy. In fact, after the deal that ended Israel’s last assault on Gaza in 2012, rocketing from Gaza fell to its lowest level for 12 years.

The latest violence is supposed to have been triggered by the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the occupied West Bank in June, for which Hamas denied responsibility. But its origin clearly lies in the collapse of US-sponsored negotiations for a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the spring.

Complete story at - Gaza: this shameful injustice will only end if the cost of it rises | Seumas Milne | Comment is free | The Guardian

Massacre of the Innocents: Slaughter in the Gaza Ghetto | The Smirking Chimp

by Chris Floyd

The horror of Israel’s latest slaughter in Gaza speaks for itself — despite the mountainous flow of media sludge designed to obscure the reality of the aggression. Even the New York Times has been forced to print a few stories about the high number of civilian deaths being caused by the Israeli assault on the “Warsaw Ghetto” they have made of Gaza, noting the hospitals and mosques and private homes where dozens of innocent people have been blown to pieces by Israel’s weaponry (much of it American-made).

Israel has imprisoned the people of Gaza in a stateless limbo while carefully controlling almost every aspect of their lives, including what medicines they can have, what manufacturing and building materials they are allowed and even, at times, how much food they are allowed to eat to keep the population weakened but just above malnutrition levels.

This brutal regimen in daily life is of course punctuated with regular night raids, bombings, kidnappings, “disappearings” and almost weekly civilians deaths at the hands of Israeli overseers. This has gone on year after year. Yet Western media — and Western politicians — are presenting a picture of a nuclear-armed, American-backed ultra-militarist Israel “under siege” from a handful of ineffective rockets fired by factions in Gaza which are answering violence with violence.

But as we all know, the West demands that Palestinians show superhuman, Gandhi-like forbearance in the face of murderous oppression and relentless, widespread violence killing their children and families. They are never to respond in kind — unlike the Americans, who have killed hundreds of thousands of people in response to a single attack on their soil. This after killing, by Washington’s own admission, more than half a million children in Iraq with peacetime sanctions — against a nation which had never attacked the United States and posed no threat to it. The merest hint of a possible threat remotely occurring sometime in a barely imaginable future is justification enough for the Americans to lay waste to whole nations and kill thousands of people. (Of course, in many states in America this principle is now enshrined in law on an individual basis: you can shoot dead anyone you feel might be a “threat” to you — whether they are or not. The ‘stand your ground’ laws are a perfect example of a nation rotting from the head, as the murderous militarism and adherence to violence embodied by the bipartisan elite seep down through every strata of society.) This is the true — the only — meaning of “American exceptionalism”: the right to ruin, rape and murder in perfect moral purity.

Complete story at - Massacre of the Innocents: Slaughter in the Gaza Ghetto | The Smirking Chimp

Massacre of the Innocents: Slaughter in the Gaza Ghetto | The Smirking Chimp

by Chris Floyd

The horror of Israel’s latest slaughter in Gaza speaks for itself — despite the mountainous flow of media sludge designed to obscure the reality of the aggression. Even the New York Times has been forced to print a few stories about the high number of civilian deaths being caused by the Israeli assault on the “Warsaw Ghetto” they have made of Gaza, noting the hospitals and mosques and private homes where dozens of innocent people have been blown to pieces by Israel’s weaponry (much of it American-made).

Israel has imprisoned the people of Gaza in a stateless limbo while carefully controlling almost every aspect of their lives, including what medicines they can have, what manufacturing and building materials they are allowed and even, at times, how much food they are allowed to eat to keep the population weakened but just above malnutrition levels.

This brutal regimen in daily life is of course punctuated with regular night raids, bombings, kidnappings, “disappearings” and almost weekly civilians deaths at the hands of Israeli overseers. This has gone on year after year. Yet Western media — and Western politicians — are presenting a picture of a nuclear-armed, American-backed ultra-militarist Israel “under siege” from a handful of ineffective rockets fired by factions in Gaza which are answering violence with violence.

But as we all know, the West demands that Palestinians show superhuman, Gandhi-like forbearance in the face of murderous oppression and relentless, widespread violence killing their children and families. They are never to respond in kind — unlike the Americans, who have killed hundreds of thousands of people in response to a single attack on their soil. This after killing, by Washington’s own admission, more than half a million children in Iraq with peacetime sanctions — against a nation which had never attacked the United States and posed no threat to it. The merest hint of a possible threat remotely occurring sometime in a barely imaginable future is justification enough for the Americans to lay waste to whole nations and kill thousands of people. (Of course, in many states in America this principle is now enshrined in law on an individual basis: you can shoot dead anyone you feel might be a “threat” to you — whether they are or not. The ‘stand your ground’ laws are a perfect example of a nation rotting from the head, as the murderous militarism and adherence to violence embodied by the bipartisan elite seep down through every strata of society.) This is the true — the only — meaning of “American exceptionalism”: the right to ruin, rape and murder in perfect moral purity.

Complete story at - Massacre of the Innocents: Slaughter in the Gaza Ghetto | The Smirking Chimp