Tag: Max Blumenthal

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Tomgram: The Next Gaza War by Max Blumenthal

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In the aftermath of Protective Edge’s massive destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, the Israeli government set out to obstruct any reconstruction process and extend the suffering of Gaza’s civilian population. When diplomats including American Secretary of State John Kerry gathered in Cairo last October to discuss repairing and rebuilding some of the $7 billion in damage caused by Protective Edge, then-Israeli Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz assured them that their efforts were ultimately futile. “The Gazans must decide what they want to be: Singapore or Darfur,” Katz said, ominously invoking the threat of Sudanese-style genocide. “If one missile will be fired, everything will go down the drain.” The nature of his warning was not lost on the diplomats in Cairo, where one complained of “considerable donor fatigue.”

“No one can expect us to go back to our taxpayers for a third time; to ask for contributions for reconstruction and then we simply go back to where we were before all this began,” a diplomat complained to a reporter. Another conceded: “There isn’t a terrible amount of political commitment or hope.”

Continue reading at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176024/tomgram%3A_max_blumenthal%2C_the_next_gaza_war/#more

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UN Gaza Report Part II: Israel’s Counterinsuurgency Apologist: Colonel Richard Kemp by Richard Falk

Parroting the worst elements of Israeli hasbara, Kemp sets forth this grotesque characterization of Hamas tactics: “Unable to inflict existential harm on Israel by military means, Hamas sought to cause large numbers of casualties among its own people in order to bring condemnation and unbearable diplomatic pressure against Israel.” To make such an extreme allegation without bothering to cite evidence is to portray Hamas as seeking the genocidal annihilation of its own people… David Swanson, the noted anti-war activist, titles his review of Blumenthal’s book, “the 51-day Genocide” As Swanson puts it in his review of the book, “I can think of a few other words that characterized the 2014 assault on Gaza in addition to ‘war,’ among them, occupation, murder-spree, and genocide. Each serves a valuable purpose. Each is correct.”

Continue reading at https://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/un-gaza-report-part-ii-israels-counterinsuurgency-apologist-colonel-richard-kemp/

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The 51-Day Genocide by David Swanson

Max Blumenthal’s latest book, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza,tells a powerful story powerfully well. I can think of a few other terms that accurately characterize the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza in addition to “war,” among them: occupation, murder-spree, and genocide. Each serves a different valuable purpose. Each is correct.

Continue reading at http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/07/the-51-day-genocide/

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Politicide in Gaza: How Israel’s Far Right Won the War by Max Blumenthal

For Israel’s right-wing rulers and the future leaders of its military, there was no doubt as to what the practice of politicide* achieved during Operation Protective Edge: Haneen Zoabi had been silenced; the leftists were leaving; Gideon Levy could not walk through Tel Aviv without a bodyguard; Palestinians of East Jerusalem were too terrified to travel outside their neighborhoods; and Gaza had been literally flattened. The “people of Israel” had gotten their revenge. Meanwhile, Colonel Winter re-armed and readied for the next round. “I cannot promise you, like the song does, that this will be the last war,” he declared, “but I promise that this war, which is so just, will push the next war a good few years away.”

* “Politicide has three related but distinct meanings. It can mean a gradual but systematic attempt to cause the annihilation of an independent political and social entity,[1] such as the destruction of the apartheid system in South Africa.[2] Others have used the term to mean the deliberate physical destruction of a group whose members share the main characteristic of belonging to a political movement; this definition has been used because the systematic destruction of such groups is not covered asgenocide under the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). The CPPCG only covers the deliberate physical destruction of national, ethnic, racial and religious groups.[3]” ~ Wikipedia

 

Continue reading at http://www.palestine-studies.org/jps/fulltext/186669

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