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as israhell is happy to sodomise palestinian prisoners....

From Ismail Haniyeh to Imad Mughniyeh, Israel’s policy of assassinations is a great example of winning the battle but losing the war, writes Emad Moussa.

Israel’s double assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, in Tehran, and Fuad Shukr, a senior military figure in Hezbollah, in Beirut, on July 31 has sent shockwaves around the world.

 

Israeli killing of Ismail Haniyeh: a futile act by a rogue state    By Emad Moussa

 

A major escalation that could spiral out of control into a regional war; Israel has lashed out, attacking two sovereign nations in 24 hours, all whilst knees deep in mass atrocities in Gaza.
But this is nothing new. In fact, Ismail Haniyeh is just the latest in a long history of Israeli assassinations.

In July 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada, an Israeli F-16 dropped a one-tonne bomb on al-Daraj neighbourhood in Gaza City.

The target was Salah Shehadeh, the head of Hamas’ military wing al-Qassam Brigades. An entire residential block was destroyed, killing Shehadeh and his family, along with 15 other people, including seven children.

The brutal raid was followed by a wave of assassinations of Hamas politicians and military officials, climaxing with the killing of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of the movement, in March 2022.

An Apache helicopter fired a Hellfire missile at him as he was being wheeled out of a Gaza mosque after prayer. The 67-year-old and nine other worshippers were killed.

A month later, Israel assassinated Hamas’ senior official, Dr. Abdul-Aziz Rantisi. And to complete the circle, in 2012, Israel killed Hamas Commander Ahmed Jabari.

Ahmed Jabari was second in command to Mohammed Deif, chief of the Al-Qassam Brigades and Israel’s most wanted for two decades. Deif survived multiple assassination attempts and lost his wife and children in one of them in 2014. The Israeli alleged attempt on his life in Mawasi in southern Gaza in early July resulted in a horrific massacre.

Israel’s policy of ‘targeted killing’ has become progressively comprehensive, indiscriminate, and mindlessly brutal in the past decade or so, reaching a level of mass atrocities in the current Gaza onslaught.

In October 2023, an Israeli jet levelled the heart of Jabalia refugee camp and killed fifty people to allegedly hunt a Hamas commander.

To kill Deif, several jet fighters were deployed and much more firepower was unleashed on an area designed as a ‘safe zone’ for the displaced Gazans by the Israeli army.

Throughout the war, the pattern has been repeated: level areas and kill dozens of innocent people to target a single individual. Not only in the war-torn Gaza Strip but also in the occupied West Bank, with the Israeli army resorting to drones and jet fighters to target Palestinian activists.

Israel: A rogue state

In his book Rise and Kill First, Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman claims that, since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world.

Up to 2019, the time of the book publishing, Israel carried out 2300 operations, killing several thousand people. There are no official figures to affirm the accuracy or lack thereof of Bergman’s claims.

However, no other nation has been more forthcoming, and openly comfortable, about assassination as a state policy and frequently executed practice as Israel.

Jewish terrorist group Lehi initiated the assassination policy in 1944 by killing British politician Walter Guinness, who opposed illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine.

After the Zionist state was established in 1948, assassination became an official state policy and went through three phases. The first phase came after the launch of the Palestinian armed struggle in 1965, where dozens of Palestinian key figures were eliminated. The second wave came after Oslo in the mid-1990s and targeted primarily Hamas operatives accused of masterminding suicide bombings in Israel. The Second Intifada in 2000 saw a third but particularly intense wave of assassinations that killed tens of resistance figures and, with them, more civilians.

Israel’s ‘targeted killing’ has repeatedly come under fire on legal and moral grounds; firstly because these assassinations are extrajudicial executions — and thus forbidden under international law — and secondly because of its sheer disregard for innocent lives.

However, Israeli decision-makers prioritise the perceived strategic value of these assassinations over the legal or moral costs, such as international criticism or excessive collateral damage.

Israeli officials argue that killing is a last resort when arrest is not an option. It also boosts the Israeli public morale. The goal is selective disincentives that up the cost of ‘militancy’ — anti-occupation resistance in Palestinian terms — and deter activists and organisations from planning or carrying out attacks against the occupying state or its civilians.

Another typical assessment would be that target killing is disruptive; it deprives dissident groups of valued members and forces them into hiding instead of focusing on resisting/fighting.

In part, the practice complements Israel’s doctrine of pre-emptive strike — hence the Talmudic reference: “rise and kill first”, as per Bergman’s book title as well.

The Hydra of Hamas and Hezbollah

That said, experience shows that Israeli extrajudicial killing has reaped tactical benefits by disrupting the target group’s command chain and ability to organise and recruit, but only for a short period.

None has amounted to a strategic gain in the long run. Quite the opposite, it often backfired in terms of revenge, re-recruiting, and boosting general antagonism toward the Zionist state.

A study by the US Department of Justice shortly after the end of the Second Intifada concluded that Israeli targeted killing did not have a significant impact on the rate of Palestinian attacks on Israeli targets. It did, in fact, result in increased attacks over a short or long period.
One reason for the failure is the inability, or sheer impracticality, of the Israeli intelligence to strike a balance between the ‘repression’ of Palestinian dissidence and stopping the flow of resources, which is a replacement for the assassinated leader.

It fails to fully appreciate that — theoretically — demoralising Palestinians by murdering their leaders does not — realistically — amount to a mass or long-term acceptance of the status quo. A reason above all else is the settler colonial context, which leaves Palestinians no options but to fight Israel’s occupation, regardless of the cost. The alternative would be the loss of their right to self-determination and, subsequently, national oblivion.

Every Palestinian or Arab key figure that Israel has assassinated, including senior leaders, since 1948 has been replaced.

Israel killed most of the active frontline members of the PLO between 1965 and 2005, but the movement took the blows and readapted. The Mossad killed Fathi al-Shiqaqi, the founder of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in Operation ‘Kidon in Malta in 1995, but today’s PIJ is much fiercer and better armed.

The core leaders of Hamas — Yassin, Rantisi, and Jabari — were all assassinated, but they were replaced by Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif who are less compromising than their predecessors and have successfully reshaped Hamas’ military wing into a capable army-like militia to fight Israel’s occupation.

The same goes for Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s military chief, Imad Mughniyeh, was killed in a car bomb in a joint US-Mossad operation in Syria in 2008, but the Lebanese group has since grown in strength and is today actively and successfully engaging the Israeli army in Northern Israel in support of Gaza.

Israel may have rationalised and justified extrajudicial murder as a way to provide security. But doing so augmented the very antagonism that makes it insecure. Instead of tackling the root of the problem, the occupation and colonialism, Israelis can only see and deal with the symptoms of their deeds.

This headhunting never worked and will not work in the future, unless repeating the same thing over and again and expecting a different result is no longer the definition of insanity.

 

Re published from THE NEW ARAB, July 31, 2024

 

https://johnmenadue.com/israeli-killing-of-ismail-haniyeh-a-futile-act-by-a-rogue-state/

genocide...

 

The impact of the Israeli missile was so powerful it flung Sidra out of the building she was in, leaving her mutilated body dangling from the ruins of the destroyed building with her also-killed mother’s arm still attached to her. Rafah, Gaza 14.2.2024.

جثامين الأطفال عالقة بين الأنقاض ..
مجزرة #رفح pic.twitter.com/tVPFfTBWlP

— Dr. Abdallah Mohammed (@jjjjwza) February 12, 2024

 

This is what a genocide looks like.

Our politicians and media have become immune to the Palestinian tragedy.

Pearls & Irritations will continue to post these gruesome pictures until the genocide stops.

 

 

https://johnmenadue.com/the-hanging-body-of-7-year-old-sidra-hassunah/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

killing people....

 

When Presidents Kill

    by 

 

Sometime before he withdrew from the presidential race, President Joe Biden secretly reaffirmed his own self-willed and self-created authority to kill persons in other countries, so long as the CIA and its military counterparts have “near certainty” that the target of the homicide is a member of a terrorist organization. That standard was concocted by the George W. Bush administration in 2002.

There is no “near certainty” standard in the law, as the phrase is oxymoronic and defies a rational definition – like “nearly pregnant.”

Just as one is either pregnant or not, one is either certain or not. There is no “near” there.

Yet, the creation of this standard underscores the lamentable absence of the rule of law in government today. The Biden administration and its three immediate predecessors have all deployed drones to kill persons who were not engaged in acts of violence at the time of their killing, irrespective of the near certainty of their membership in any organizations.

“Terrorist” cannot be a standard for extrajudicial murder because it is subjective. To King George III, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were terrorists. To the poor folks in Libya and Syria, to the popularly elected governments toppled by CIA-inspired violence in Iran in 1953 and in Ukraine in 2014, to the innocents tortured by the CIA at black sites around the world, the CIA is a terrorist organization.

The presidential use of drones to kill persons overseas began in 2002 with Bush-ordered targeted killings. It continued under President Barack Obama — who even killed Americans overseas. The rules for killing were made up by each president. They were relaxed under President Donald Trump, who gave CIA senior personnel and military commanders the authority to kill without his express approval for each killing. Trump’s folks infamously murdered an Iranian general and his companions on their way to lunch with Iraqi generals to negotiate peace between the two countries.

The Biden administration quietly took back the Trump grants of authority so that today only the president can authorize targeted killing. Yet, there is no moral, constitutional or legal authority for these killings. But presidents of both political parties do it anyway.

The laws of war — a phrase itself that is oxymoronic — which are generally codified in the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter, all of which were spearheaded, written and ratified by the United States, mandate essentially that lawful wars can only be defensive and must be proportional to the threat posed or the harm already caused. Stated differently, treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory restrain the president from killing persons in other countries with which the U.S. is not lawfully at war.

Under the Constitution, treaties sit alongside the Constitution itself as the supreme law of the land. The last four occupants of the White House have ignored this when it comes to secret killings. Each has claimed publicly or secretly that the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001, or its cousin, the AUMF of 2002, somehow provide congressional authorizations for presidents to kill whomever they please — and somehow Congress can lawfully authorize these killings.

Yet the AUMF of 2001 purported to authorize Bush to hunt down and kill the folks whom he failed to see coming on 9/11 (those would be his friends, the Saudis), and whom he reasonably found caused 9/11. The AUMF of 2002 authorized Bush to invade Iraq in pursuit of the weapons of mass destruction that he was told by experts inside and outside the CIA Saddam Hussein did not possess. Both AUMFs no longer have a valid purpose today, yet they remain the law.

The Constitution authorizes Congress to declare war against foreign countries, not random killings of persons. Neither of the AUMFs was or is a valid declaration of war, which the Constitution requires as a predicate for all extrajudicial presidential killings. A declaration of war defines the target and sets the end. It is not open-ended as the last four presidents have claimed with respect to these two Bush-era statutes.

If the presidents are right, and the AUMFs authorize them to kill whomever they wish — including Americans — then they are not presidents answerable to the law and the Constitution, but kings who can kill on a whim without transparency or legal consequence.

The whole purpose of confining the war-making power to Congress and the war-waging power to the president was to keep those powers separate. History is littered with examples of tyrants using the powers of the state to kill for no moral purpose. American presidents have given themselves the power to kill. It is the functional equivalent to a loaded gun in a drawer of the president’s desk.

Abraham Lincoln was the first head of state in world history to target civilians militarily and the first to engage in the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians of his own country. Franklin D. Roosevelt slaughtered thousands of innocent helpless German civilians at the end of World War II by carpet-bombing German cities, rather than targeting the German military. Harry Truman slaughtered many thousands of Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

All these murders were met with popular approval, as the targets had been demonized by the machinery of government — just like the “terrorists” Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden have killed.

But demonization of human targets and popular approval of their murders cannot turn an immoral act into a moral one. An act is moral when it is consistent with the Natural Law. According to the Declaration of Independence, under the Natural Law, all persons are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The right to live is the foremost natural right and the great divine gift to all persons — not just Americans.

No person may morally be targeted for death by government for any reason unless it is presently necessary to stop that person from actively killing an innocent. In the cases cited above, the presidential killings were done to terrify political opponents, as the civilian targets were helpless. And the killers were lauded as heroes.

Today, American troops are on the ground in Ukraine showing Ukrainian forces how to use American weapons to kill Russian troops and in Israel showing the IDF how to kill civilians in Gaza. This was done by secret presidential orders that have never been publicly acknowledged. Russian troops and Gazan civilians pose no threat whatsoever to life, liberty or property in America.

Why do American presidents kill? Because they can get away with it.

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

 

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/when-presidents-kill/

 

 

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Washington's green light....

 

HANIYEH ASSASSINATED AFTER US GREEN LIGHT: ATTACK LAUNCHED FROM US BASE IN IRAQ TO AVOID RUSSIAN RADARS – SOURCE/CONFIRMED

 

Iran’s Intelligence Minister Ismail Khatib

Iran’s intelligence minister says the Israeli regime’s assassination of senior Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran was carried out with Washington’s approval.

Ismail Khatib made the remarks on Friday in a message of condolence that he issued on the occasion of Haniyeh’s martyrdom.

The assassination claimed the lives of Haniyeh, the Palestinian resistance movement’s Political Bureau chief, and one of his bodyguards in the Iranian capital on Wednesday.

The resistance leader was in the city to attend the inauguration ceremony of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

“Martyr Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination took place at the hands of the usurping Zionists with the United States’ greenlight,” he said.

Throughout decades, Washington has unexceptionally defended the regime against punitive international measures, served as its biggest arms purveyor, and provided it with close intelligence cooperation toward both protecting it and facilitating its desired atrocities.

 

Netanyahu coordinated assassination operations with US: Ex-Lebanese MP

A former Lebanese MP says Netanyahu

“The assassination once again put the Zionist regime’s bestial nature on display,” Khatib added.

The minister also suggested that the Israeli regime had perpetrated the assassination in reprisal for the resistance’s successful implementation of the al-Aqsa Storm operation.

The operation saw the Gaza Strip’s resistance movements, including Hamas, staging a uniquely daring retaliatory attack against the occupied Palestinian territories on October 7, capturing hundreds of Israeli troops and settlers.

The assassination “is beyond doubt an indication of al-Aqsa Storm’s victory and a sign of the regime’s disintegration,” Khatib said.

The remarks echoed those made by the late Hamas’s leader following the operation, during which he said, “The Al-Aqsa Storm operation marked the beginning of the disappearance of the occupation of our land.”

 

https://www.theinteldrop.org/2024/08/02/haniyeh-assassinated-after-us-green-light-attack-launched-from-us-base-in-iraq-to-avoid-russian-radars-source-confirmed/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.