Friday Roundup: Mpox, Kursk, Palestine
No surprise here, but you won’t be hearing this from the MSM:
RAW EGG NATIONALIST @Babygravy9
Monkeypox outside of Africa is an overwhelmingly gay disease, transmitted among men who have sex with other men. Why on earth would you vaccinate children against it? Unless...
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Insider Paper @TheInsiderPaper
NEW - Mpox vaccine maker seeks approval for use in teens https://insiderpaper.com/mpox-vaccine-maker-seeks-approval-for-use-in-teens/…
Kursk is going to be another disaster for NATO and Ukraine:
An entire unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces surrendered More and more military personnel are raising the white flag in the Kursk region. Keep informed with https://t.me/EastCalling
0:20
Obviously that’s out of context—lots are getting killed rather than surrendering. The way this war works, getting killed is a lot easier than surrendering, so these guys showed some ingenuity and determination. However, for an excellent overall summary, IMO, this video with Ania K and Scott Ritter is your ticket: about 5:00 to 17:00 is the core of it. Like me, Ritter sees these NATO/Ukraine guys dying in large numbers—they’re largely cut off with no meaningful air cover and spotty resupply if any. And Putin’s really mad. Ritter agrees that this was a massive Russian screwup—both in missing it and being unprepared but also in failing to initially understand the tactics involved.
SCOTT RITTER on situation in KURSK, and THE BOOK that FBI doesn't want YOU to read.
On to Palestine. Good news from the UK—dude in the FO has a conscience. Bad news from the UK—dude no longer in the FO, felt compelled to resign.
BREAKING:
British Foreign Office diplomat Mark Smith has resigned over Britain's support for the Israeli genocide British FCDO diplomat Mark Smith resigns from his position with a letter titled "FCDO complicity in War Crimes". He accuses Israel of war crimes & genocidal intent & says there's "no justification for the UK's continued arms sales to Israel. "Israeli soldiers take videos deliberately burning, destroying and looting civilian property and openly admits to the rape and torture of prisoners." he wrote in the letter."
That’s a good lead-in to this long read. The author is a world authority on the genocidal mentality—he studied the German Nazis. He was born and raised in Israel, but has mostly worked and taught on the university level outside Israel since 1989. Read it fwiw, but it’s worth your time:
This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history – and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree
By Omer Bartov
On 19 June 2024, I was scheduled to give a lecture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Be’er Sheva, Israel. My lecture was part of an event about the worldwide campus protests against Israel, and I planned to address the war in Gaza and more broadly the question of whether the protests were sincere expressions of outrage or motivated by antisemitism, as some had claimed. But things did not work out as planned.
When I arrived at the entrance to the lecture hall, I saw a group of students congregating. It soon transpired that they were not there to attend the event but to protest against it. The students had been summoned, it appeared, by a WhatsApp message that went out the day before, which flagged the lecture and called for action: “We will not allow it! How long will we commit treason against ourselves?!?!?!??!!”
Well, if all criticism of Israel is largely forbidden in America, why not in Israel?
As it happens, I’ve discussed Bartov’s ideas in the past, and in this article Bartov quotes from the article I discussed here:
In this article Bartov “goes there.” He compares the mentality of Germans before and during WW2 with that of Israelis—he doesn’t “go there” with regard to non-Israeli Zionists. He even finds eye opening parallels in the rhetoric of Nazis and Zionists. Most of all he focuses on the logic of endless violence:
One Israeli 95-year-old military veteran, whose motivational speech to IDF troops preparing for the invasion of Gaza exhorted them to “wipe out their memory, their families, mothers and children”, was given a certificate of honour by Israeli president Herzog for “providing a wonderful example to generations of soldiers”. No wonder that there have been innumerable social media posts by IDF troops in Gaza calling to “kill the Arabs”, “burn their mothers” and “flatten” Gaza. There has been no known disciplinary action by their commanders.
This is the logic of endless violence, a logic that allows one to destroy entire populations and to feel totally justified in doing so. It is a logic of victimhood – we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before – and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood.
All of that is worth reading. Here are the concluding paragraphs:
As I headed back to the United States at the end of June, I contemplated my experiences over those two messy and troubling weeks. I was conscious of my deep connection to the country I had left. ...
…
This may also have been the reason why this time, for the first time, I had been apprehensive about going to Israel, and why part of me was glad to leave. The country had changed in ways visible and subtle, ways that might have raised a barrier between me, as an observer from the outside, and those who have remained an organic part of it.
But another part of my apprehension had to do with the fact that my view of what was happening in Gaza had shifted. On 10 November 2023, I wrote in the New York Times: “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. […] We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.”
I no longer believe that. By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”.
These were issues that I could only discuss with a very small handful of activists, scholars, experts in international law and, not surprisingly, Palestinian citizens of Israel. Beyond this limited circle, such statements on the illegality of Israeli actions in Gaza are anathema in Israel. Even the vast majority of protesters against the government, those calling for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages, will not countenance them.
Since I returned from my visit, I have been trying to place my experiences there into a larger context. The reality on the ground is so devastating, and the future appears so bleak, that I have allowed myself to indulge in some counter-factual history and to entertain some hopeful speculations about a different future. I ask myself, what would have happened had the newly created state of Israel fulfilled its commitment to enact a constitution based on its Declaration of Independence? That same declaration which stated that Israel “will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations”.
What effect would such a constitution have had on the nature of the state? How would it have tempered the transformation of Zionism from an ideology that sought to liberate the Jews from the degradation of exile and discrimination and to put them on equal standing with the other nations of the world, to a state ideology of ethnonationalism, oppression of others, expansionism and apartheid? During the few hopeful years of the Oslo peace process, people in Israel began speaking of making it into a “state of all its citizens”, Jews and Palestinians alike. The assassination of prime minister Rabin in 1995 put an end to that dream. Will it ever be possible for Israel to discard the violent, exclusionary, militant and increasingly racist aspects of its vision as it is embraced there now by so many of its Jewish citizens? Will it ever be able to reimagine itself as its founders had so eloquently envisioned it – as a nation based on freedom, justice and peace?
It is difficult to indulge in such fantasies at the moment. But perhaps precisely because of the nadir in which Israelis, and much more so Palestinians, now find themselves, and the trajectory of regional destruction their leaders have set them on, I pray that alternative voices will finally be raised. For, in the words of the poet Eldan, “there is a time when darkness roars but there is dawn and radiance”.
And there’s much more.
https://original.antiwar.com/ramzy-baroud/2024/08/15/restoring-fear-why-israeli-soldiers-rape/
The quoted article states "nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood."
I agree, and I was saying that a few decades ago. It's almost eerie to see the same phrase.