With the strewn blood and bones Of thousands born but yesteryear For slaughter at the Zionist altar Lies bespattered the politic Conscience of a world Bought and sold by Wall Street. Oh, the evil, unspeakable evil of it.
Those that do not capitulate To the brute usurper, With Samโs licence to kill, Face a holocaust fate. Those that were persecuted Persecute with redoubled hate.
Honour to the hoi polloi of the world Who come out in masses Even in Tel Aviv, To protest and to grieve.
Woe to governments Who count their gain And loss were they To stand on two legs Or crawl beneath Biden.
But, O Palestine, Yet again I salute your spine, Bolstered by unbending intellect, That you die in droves for justice But never whine.
How many are the nations now Oppressed who could take A leaf from your book, And to their tormentors say, โWe will stand too, not bow.โ *** Indian poet, political commentator and social critic Badri Raina, ๐๐ก๐๐ข๐ก ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐, A Collection of Poems
Israelโs outgoing ambassador to the US expects President Trump to supply Israel with a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs that President Biden paused, Axios reported on Monday.
Biden put a hold on a 2,000-pound bomb shipment and a 500-pound bomb shipment back in April as part of a public relations stunt to make it seem like he was putting pressure on Israel over its plans to invade the southern city of Rafah.
Israel ended up invading Rafah, capturing its border crossing with Egypt, and now the city lies in ruin. Other US weapons continued to flow to Israel, and the pause on the 500-pound bombs was lifted in July, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the pause on the 2,000-pound bombs to complain that Biden was restricting military aid.
Republicans in the US also claimed Biden was restricting military aid to Israel even though he supplied more weapons to Israel in a single year than any other president in history.
โWe believe that Trump is going to release, at the beginning of his term, the munitions that havenโt been released until now by the Biden administration,โ Israeli Ambassador Michael Herzog told Axios.
The release of the bombs is part of a series of agreements the Trump administration reached with Israel to get Netanyahu to agree to the hostage ceasefire deal.
โThe Trump team played a major role. They were resolved to get a deal but were very cognizant of our security concerns,โ Herzog said. โThey got some things from the Israeli side that allowed the deal to go through, and they gave us some things and will give more going forward.โ
Netanyahu has said he received assurances from Trump that he could resume military operations in Gaza if he chooses to do so, something Trumpโs National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has confirmed. But there are signs the Trump administration will push for the deal to stick.
Herzog also said he expects Trump to take action against the International Criminal Court (ICC) for issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
The only reasonable way to get out of the mindset of religious fanaticism is to turn to humanism and humane values that fanatics oppose. The road is indeed long and hazardous, but it is worth exploring. If rational people start thinking on these lines, they will also be walking along these lines. Accordingly, they will influence others. Otherwise, we will remain mired in the mud of religious fanaticism and barbarism.
Many people are justifiably afraid of the enormous influence the right-wing forces wield and exploit religions for their nefarious political agendas, communalism, hatred against other religious communities, creeds, oppose social justice and equal sociopolitical rights for all. These forces are a danger to all and are very active. They are a big danger to all human values, which are the foundation stones of modern democratic societies, their organization and functioning.
But we should keep in mind that many people are actively involved in combating and fighting against these forces of darkness and inhumanity. What our friends and sympathizers can do in this struggle is not to become only silent spectators and leave the field open to the fanatics, but to side with those who are involved in political struggles against the reactionary forces.
This work involves, among other activities, using the media for highlighting the harm the fanatics have caused by their indoctrination and falsehoods. This process strengthens the struggle of creating common bonds of humanity and respect for all members of society, where the development of all fairly and democratically is possible. That means rejecting religious fanaticism in all forms and advancing the cause of socialist democratic values and humanism.
The Israeli rulers had many objectives to pursue in their genocidal war against Gaza. They declared openly some, but they didn’t disclose all in this way. Despite the 15-month duration of one of the most devastating bombing campaigns of the twenty-first century they launched on the besieged Palestine of Gaza, they were unable to eradicate Hamas, despite killing some of their prominent leaders and members.
Among the undisclosed objectives was to cause maximum damage to the infrastructure, such as buildings, houses, factories, shops, towns, shopping malls, mosques, hospitals, schools, universities, colleges and other civic amenities of the people in Gaza and kill as many civilians as they wanted. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced and tormented by constant violence and destruction. Indeed, they have done this with the full support of America, Britain, Germany, and others. Israel has succeeded in all these infamies, barbarian acts and crimes against humanity.
They hope to carry on with the policy of annihilation of Palestinians after the negotiated ceasefire is over, if it is ever allowed to work. However, they are certain to cause as many difficulties and ambiguities as they desire during the implementation of the ceasefire agreement. Their ability to accomplish this task is not a secret. They’re masters of trickery, manipulation, and propaganda.
Mr. Dave Sheldon, I’m sorry to have missed replying to your first comment, which you mentioned. The MSM usually doesn’t give much or no information about the situation in the Gaza Strip (and also in the West Bank) where Israel is killing innocent civilians, including patients in hospitals, by indiscriminate aerial bombardments, missiles, and a marauding army.
But luckily, there are some people in the alternative media doing what the MSM, should also have paid due attention to. We know how the BBC under a Zionist has suppressed news and hid the facts as much as he could. The Zionist-dominated media and political establishment in Britain and other powerful Western nations operate this way.
This hapless situation forces me to share these facts with people. I believe, no person with human conscience and humane feelings can ignore what the Western-backed colonial-settler state has been doing, not only from September 2023, but for decades, starting from 1948.
I know, many people are indifferent to what has been happening in Gaza. There is also open support for Zionist ethnic cleansing in Palestine by some people; the process of ethnic cleansing is systematic to advance a long-term strategy of the Zionists. However, I concur with you that the Sudan war needs more attention. I will be pleased to see if people in this group start highlighting and finding the causes of the tragic civil war and the suffering of people there.
The problems of Zionist ideology and its ramifications are because of its political goals. It has nothing to do with religion, even though Israeli leaders have fully exploited the religious identities of Jews for their political ends.
When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that โwe will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israelโs defense.โ Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Bidenโs decision was a new low for his presidency.
Itโs logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gazaโs destruction.
While Boyer denounced โthe Israeli stateโs U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,โ she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nationโs leading liberal news organization: โI canโt write about poetry amidst the โreasonableโ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.โ
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasnโt really doing what he was really doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from โthe newspaper of record.โ
Content analysis of the warโs first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers โdisproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflictโ and โused emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,โ a study by The Intercept showed. โThe term โslaughterโ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and โmassacreโ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. โHorrificโ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.โ
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: โMy objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. โHow does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?โ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and thatโs true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.โ
Khalidi summed up: โThe mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.โ
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israelโs weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what heโd said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television. โThere are parents who will never see their child again,โ he said, adding: โTo lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . Itโs a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community thatโs left behind.โ And he asked plaintively, โWhy are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?โ
The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a โtwo-state solution.โ
Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter. Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Bidenโs weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric โ unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse โ rarely went beyond portraying Israelโs leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.
When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called โan ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.โ Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
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“Donald Trump will have no penalty for criminal wrongdoing, which is an affront to accountability and to a system where no one is above the law, though the judge had little alternative,” said one ethics expert.
After being convicted of 34 felonies in New York last year, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Friday received an unconditional discharge during a sentencing hearing that came just over a week before the Republican’s second inauguration.
Just hours after the U.S. Supreme Courtโwhich includes three Trump appointeesโallowed the hearing to proceed, New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan declined to impose fines or sentence Trump to prison for his crimes, which related to hush money payments to cover up sex scandals during the 2016 presidential election cycle.
“Donald Trump will have no penalty for criminal wrongdoing, which is an affront to accountability and to a system where no one is above the law, though the judge had little alternative,” said Noah Bookbinder, president and CEO of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “But now, formally, the next president of the United States is a felon.”
โChildren have reportedly been killed in several mass casualty events, including nighttime attacks in Gaza City, Khan Younis, and al-Mawasi, a unilaterally designated โsafe zoneโ in the south,โ UNICEF said on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, an Israeli strike on al-Mawasi in south Gaza killed five displaced children who were sheltering in tents. The IDF has repeatedly bombed al-Mawasi despite designating it as a so-called โhumanitarian safe zone.โ
Displaced Palestinian children sheltering at a school in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, on January 7, 2025 (IMAGO/APAimages via Reuters Connect)
Palestinian children are also dying due to the conditions caused by the Israeli siege and relentless bombing campaign. UNICEF said that since December 26, โeight infants and newborns have reportedly died from hypothermia โ a major threat to young children who are unable to regulate their body temperature.โ
Gaza health officials said in December 2023 that 17,000 children had been killed in the genocidal war, a number that does not include those missing and presumed dead under the rubble or indirect deaths caused by the siege.
Newborn babies are especially vulnerable since many have been born prematurely due to the health conditions of their mothers. Palestinian mothers in Gaza also struggle to make milk, and there have been shortages of formula and other baby products.
In October, The New York Times published accounts from American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza, including many who worked with babies. โI worked in a neonatal ICU. Several infants died every day due to lack of medical supplies and appropriate nutrition,โ said Dr. Amen Odeh, a pediatrician from Texas.
โWe had to make tough decisions about which very sick baby would be on the ventilator due to lack of equipment. I saw a family bringing in their dead 3-day-old infant who had been living in a tent,โ Odeh added.
Despite the slaughter of children and death of so many newborns under the siege, the Biden administration has continued to provide military aid and political support to Israel. President Biden is reportedly planning to approve one more major arms deal worth $8 billion before he leaves office.
Published date: 2 January 2025 11:10 GMT | Last update:5 days 3 hours ago
The incoming US president’s transactional approach to politics will see immigrants suffer, while suppport for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians will continue
A man shows support for US president-elect Donald Trump near his Mar-a-Lago resort on 14 December 2024 (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images/AFP)
Given his mercurial nature, shifting from the politics of revenge to the politics of accommodation without explanation or changed circumstances, it is foolhardy to predict what lies ahead as Donald Trump prepares to be US president for a second time.
His rhetoric and ideology seem untamed and extreme – and this time around, he enters the White House with a strong electoral mandate as Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, and the support of an ultra-conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
This would seem to ensure the prospect of Trumpโs total control over the governing process in the US, but there are some daunting bumps in the road ahead.
Some of the contours of Trumpโs presidency have become clear even before he officially returns to the White House. Firstly, it seems certain that he will make millions of undocumented immigrants in the US miserable from day one.It is not a good sign that Trump blamed the New Orleans car incident on weak border security considering it was the work of an American army veteran who recently converted to the Islamic State group.
His obsession with stopping asylum-seekers and immigrants from crossing the border without proper papers is certain to be acted upon. Already, the man Trump has selected as โborder czarโ has indicated his intention to deport entire families of undocumented persons, including naturalised citizens.
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Trump could get away with this approach, however cruel in application, for a while – but the economics of the labour market will soon pose a challenge, creating strategic labour shortages in such critical sectors as agriculture in the southwestern US, exacerbating inflationary pressures.
There are also considerations around the growing need for skilled workers in the high-tech sector, which will increasingly shape the countryโs economic future. These workers have been given high priority in relation to robust economic development, as Trumpโs chief adviser, Elon Musk, keeps reminding him.
These concerns will be magnified if Trump goes ahead with his announced plans to place 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, along with punitive tariffs on Chinese imports. Such policies are the surest way to start a mutually destructive trade war.
Global dangers
On foreign policy, the outlook for a Trump presidency is more mixed, but uncertain and globally dangerous. In the beginning, Trump will probably seek to portray himself as a peacemaker, particularly in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war.
This conflict is both an example of the type of โforever warโ he rejected during his first term in office, and an opportunity to explore whether a cooperative relationship with President Vladimir Putinโs Russia could circumvent the Atlantic alliance that has been a centrepiece of American foreign policy since the end of World War II.
Pushing for a ceasefire and diplomatic compromise was a grossly negligent missed opportunity during Joe Bidenโs presidency, which seemed determined to inflict a geopolitical defeat on Russia, even at the cost of causing a disaster for Ukraine and its people.
Where does Donald Trump stand on Israel, Palestine and the Middle East?
If this change of direction occurs, Nato loyalists will have to rethink European security arrangements, and the American deep state will have to swallow defeat, or use its untested leverage to back the primacy of the US in geopolitical realms by keeping Russia out and Nato in.
When it comes to the Middle East, the story is different in terms of policy priority.
Trump has given every indication of wanting to exceed Bidenโs unconditional support for Israel, including through the genocidal onslaught on Gaza, land grabbing, ethnic-cleansing operations and settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, and escalating unlawful violence against regional adversaries.
Trump, by his political appointments and undisciplined commentary, seems determined to โfinish the jobโ in Gaza, which can only be understood as erasing Palestine and Palestinians as obstacles to the rapid establishment of Greater Israel from โthe river to the seaโ.
Beyond this, he seems determined to confront Iran in a more muscular manner, possibly by destroying its nuclear facilities and taking more overt steps to provoke regime change in Tehran.
These policies, if actualised, would have many risks and adverse consequences, including the possibility of a wider regional war and a surge of anti-US sentiments. They would also cement Israel as the pariah state of our time, which could weaken it to the point of emboldening the peoples of the Arab world to rise up against their western-oriented repressive regimes, and unite behind the cause of liberating Palestine from settler-colonialism.
Contempt for internationalism
Finally, in every way, Trump and his entourage have signalled their opposition to internationalism. Trump has long displayed an unwavering commitment to an ultra-nationalist and transactional world view. He exhibits contempt for addressing global challenges, and for the benefits of cooperative problem-solving, even in the context of climate change.
In this sense, the UN will be valued only to the extent that it fully backs American strategic priorities – and should it dare to censure or oppose these priorities, Trump will surely threaten, and then cut, US funding, or even withdraw US participation.
Given such attitudes, it is not surprising that Trump is dismissive of the regulatory role of international law, especially if directed at restraining the US. Say goodbye to the cynical pretensions of Secretary of State Antony Blinkenโs โrules-based world orderโ, which has seemed more a synonym for US-led geopolitics than a genuine submission to universally applicable principles.
In the end, the Trump presidency may be forced to choose between a form of neo-isolationism and neo-imperialism
Trump may unintentionally provide a service to humanity by stripping away the liberal illusions shielding the reality that the US and its friends habitually avoid the constraints of international law that their rivals are bound to obey. In effect, Trumpโs nihilism may be preferable to Bidenโs hypocrisy.
In the end, the Trump presidency may be forced to choose between a form of neo-isolationism and neo-imperialism. If the isolationist alternative prevails, then an accelerated transition will likely occur from the post-Cold War world of unipolarity to a new era of complex multipolarity.
If the neo-imperialist model prevails, due to a compromise between the ultra-nationalist Trumpists and the globally ambitious American deep state, tensions will emerge between antagonistic forms of multipolarity and competing alliance networks, resembling in structure the Cold War, yet with differences, including the agenda of geopolitical rivalries.
The de-centring of conflict that includes the partial bypassing of Europe is all but certain. Europe is no longer the chief geopolitical prize, as it was in the three 20th-century global wars (including the Cold War).
Whatever else, the Trump presidency is likely to confound expectations, including these, while keeping busy the worldโs most influential media platforms.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. In 2008 he was also appointed by the UN to serve a six-year term as the Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
Dear Zarah Sultana MP, apparently PM Keir Starmer and Lammy don’t say they are supporting genocide and ethnic cleansing by providing weapons and diplomatic support to Israel. However, they follow the mouldy and odious mantra of Biden, Blinken and Scholz instead, and call Israel’s genocidal crimes against the Palestinians as ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’!
As we all know, it is a blatant lie, a lie on stilts, but it has no legs to stand on. It is akin to saying if I can give an example from Nazi Germany that Germany was exercising a right to defend itself when it attacked Poland to start with and then started the war against the USSR, not sparing England, including your constituency Coventry!
By 
Peace and Justice Post 
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