Suppression in White House and Capitol Hill

DC 1.23am

The extent to which media attention has minimized such individuals and groups and instead given U.S. Zionists the big platform to speak on behalf of Jews in general — at a time when thousands upon thousands of Palestinians are getting slaughtered — is a triumph of the Israel lobby’s influence and propaganda. 

Insane delusion from the AIPAC Congress. Killing 9,000+ kids is "defending yourself". Saying Palestine should be free (from occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing) is a “call for genocide”. More than 24k Palestinian killed in Gaza since October 7th, and 273 - 280 killed in West Bank. 3% of all people in Gaza have been killed or injured. For perspective, that would be 10,000,000 Americans indiscriminately killed or injured.

Antony Blinken — who became secretary of state by invoking his father’s surviving the Holocaust — is today a shell of a man. Look at him on CNN.

That achievement comes with the potentially dire consequence, however, of associating Jewish people and American citizens, generally, with the Israeli government’s genocidal violence.

Numerous enemies can be created by such a devious process.  

And as Cara MariAnna recently warned in her article “Israel Lobby’s Disastrous Domination,”

U.S. security and standing in the world are suddenly more precarious than they have been the whole of its history. The U.S. is being damaged — is seriously damaging itself — by its continued unwavering support of a nation that is so clearly out of control and that has been recognized by many human rights organizations as an apartheid state. Supporting Israel is no longer in the best interest of the United States, if ever it was, and is becoming an increasing liability.

The hand of the Israel lobby can also be assumed to be at work in the crackdown on people of conscience, who are speaking up and doing what they can to alter the evil course of events.

They are in the streets shouting about the liberation of Palestine “from the river to the sea;” they are throwing paint on the buildings of weapons makers, they are confronting politicians with their inaction while children are getting killed.

These are all our everyday heroes, displaying a dedication to justice and compassion. These are the citizens we should be proud to join and know. Instead they are getting vilified, arrested, intimidated and, inevitably now it seems, cast as anti-Semites. 

Americans are often encouraged to consider the situation in Israel too complicated to understand. It can be viewed as “that situation over there,” where they “just hate one another” to be dismissed with a fed-up gesture of the hand. Zionists rush in to fill this void with Hasbara versions — drawn from Israel’s “public diplomacy” or propaganda — of history. 

Even though it doesn’t take a deep knowledge of the region to grasp the great wrong being done, a few bullet points might help create a general context: 

–Israel was not created on a land without people for a people without a land. There was a thriving Palestinian society and Israel was established in 1948 by destroying hundreds of villages, killing thousands of Arabs, driving 750,000 Palestinians from their country and not allowing them to return as documented by Israel’s “new historians,” particularly by Professor Ilan Pappé (אילן פפה, pronounced [iˈlan paˈpe]) in his The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

—Israel’s status among human rights groups today is that of an apartheid state since Palestinians occupied illegally on the West Bank and Gaza by Israel since 1967 (in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions) have no rights;

–West Bank Israeli settlers attack Palestinians and drive them out of their homes and off their land in a slow continuation of the cleansing begun in 1947-8, now sped up in Gaza;

—Israel’s military justice system holds Palestinians in detention for years, without ever charging them with a crime; many of them children;  

—Gaza is widely known as an open-air prison. 

Against this basic backdrop comes the daily overload of atrocities in Gaza, which provide plenty of moral clarity, for any who are willing to follow them. Just some of the painful realities exposed daily now:

—Thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, are getting slaughtered by constant bombing. 

—Israeli doctors providing written support for their military to bomb hospitals in Gaza. (Doctors gave the OK to bomb hospitals, it’s worth repeating since it’s so shocking.) 

—Conditions so harsh that the rampant outbreak of disease could become an even bigger killer than all the bombing. 

A video has recently surfaced showing about a hundred Palestinian men — the total number of civilians among them not yet known —  stripped and kneeling in front of gun-wielding captors.  

An Al Jazeera reporter said the images of those Palestinian men, photographed kneeling and naked, “echo the history of the region, where stripped men are taken to unknown locations.”

Experts on the region could rattle off a much longer litany of Israeli crimes. But the point is that this list has gotten longer every day since Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7. Any American can take a position at this point, without holding an advanced degree in history. 

The extent to which Israeli crimes are being reported is shrinking as the death toll among journalists rises. More than 80 journalists and media workers in Gaza [and 3 in Lebanon] have been killed so far. 

Altar for the 80+ journalists killed in Gaza at the vigil at the Chicago Art Department. saw so many beloved people amidst the grief. The messages will be part of an installation at the Chicago Art Department until April.

Renowned Global Opinionator the Washington Post Rana Ayyub

Rana Ayyub

and Plestia Alaqad. Rana Ayyub is the first Indian to be an honorary member of the US National Press Club. Interview with Plestia maybe around [Dec 11] 1pm New Delhi and 8pm Melbourne [Plestia]. Plestia evacuated to Melbourne after eye witnessing horror [at least] until 49 days of war in Gaza. As of now 12/12 [Dec 12] means Day-67 of war.

link:

Interview with Palestinian journalist Plestia Alaqad

Over the Thanksgiving break three college students of Palestinian descent — two of them reportedly wearing the keffiyeh, the black-and-white scarf that can symbolize Palestinian solidarity — were shot while in the state of Vermont. Last week the last of them was released from hospital, paralyzed from the waist down, and heading to rehab.  

“The shooting came as threats against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities have increased across the U.S. in the weeks since the Israel-Hamas war erupted in early October,” local press reported. 

Surely this increase in threats is a problem to solve — most effectively and obviously by working to stop Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinian people, which arouses understandable passions along with plenty of misunderstandings. 

No one in their right mind should feel safe while this atrocity is grinding on, day after day, without any end in sight. The unhinged, vengeful violence, based on openly genocidal intentions, should freeze all our blood. So should the behavior of U.S. lawmakers last week. 

Sunday, Dec. 10, by macabre timing, is United Nations’ Human Rights Day. What better time to reflect on the extent to which the U.S. and Israel violate the enormous humanitarian effort made after World War II to steer the world away from the horrors of further war. In a recent ranking of nations’ compliance with the U.N. Charter, Israel and the U.S. come last. 

For human rights to be restored in Palestine, the people of Israel and Palestine need to be given the chance to live in one civil society together, sustained by international law and some means of protection to rebuild.

But before anything so ambitious and hopeful can be attempted, the urgency now is to stop the bloodshed, insist on a ceasefire and attend to the wounds and suffering. 

American popular pressure is required to achieve an end to the killing and to overcome the mind games of war-crime apologists. Don’t be “Good Germans,” who are condemned by history for secretly disagreeing with the Nazis, but averting their gaze and doing nothing to stop their atrocities. 

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I know a lot of high-ranking media, such as New York Times, Guardian, Anadolu, BILD, Spiegel, Financial Times, Strait Times, Washington Post etc subscribed my substack. Plestia ‘Bosbos’ Alaqad ready to be your Stringer or Keynote Speaker or Source about [everything related] Gaza, as Global Opinionator the Washington Post Rana Ayyub doing 20 hours ago, please contact Plestiaa2011@gmail.com or collab@plestiaalaqad.com

Toddler with Plestia, before war, living in Northern Gaza and they evacuated to Southern Gaza. Since Friday, Oct 13, when Israel announced to every Gazans from northern move to southern, more than 5,000 killed in southern, not counting barbaric bombing in northern Gaza. Northern Gaza is being depopulated, while even residents in the south are ordered to evacuate as the israelis implement their ethnic cleansing. Refugee literally fulfilled Israel warning, and still killed with barbaric bombing by Israel. Documentation by Plestia Alaqad

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