The State of Israel as "Cartoonishly Evil"?

BY RON UNZ

Last week I published an article on the dramatic events in domestic American politics, including President Joseph Biden’s sudden disappearance from the presidential race and the elevation of Vice President Kamala Harris as the candidate in his place. Nothing like this had ever previously happened in American political history and it came only a couple of weeks after a highly-suspicious assassination attempt had nearly killed former President Donald Trump, the opposing Republican candidate.

But although the bulk of my article focused upon those matters, I also included a few paragraphs near the end presenting some shocking new disclosures in the ongoing Israel/Gaza conflict. As I wrote at the time:

Politico is one of America’s leading mainstream media outlets on politics and public affairs and ten days ago it published a very lengthy account by two experienced American surgeons who had visited Gaza to provide medical assistance and were utterly horrified by what they encountered there. According to Dr. Mark Perlmutter, in just a couple of weeks he saw more carnage inflicted upon civilians than he had in the combined total of his previous thirty years of humanitarian visits to war-zones around the world. In particular, it was obvious that Israeli snipers were deliberately shooting young Palestinian children and toddlers, aiming precision shots at their hearts and at their heads.

• We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.
  American surgeons who witnessed the civilian carnage of the Israel-Hamas war
  Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa • Politico Magazine • July 19, 2024 • 4,900 Words

Given that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli leaders have publicly identified the Palestinians with the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew God has commanded must be exterminated down to the youngest newborn baby, such atrocities may be shocking but are hardly surprising.

Running nearly 5,000 words and profusely illustrated with photographs, the Politico story seems to have broken the cordon of silence maintained in network television and Perlmutter was interviewed for a substantial segment entitled “The Children of Gaza” broadcast on CBS News Sunday Morning, during which he repeated his story:

war on children, many gunshot wounds in toddlers and many shot twice.

It’s obviously quite disturbing for American doctors to report that Israeli snipers are deliberately executing Palestinian toddlers with shots to the head and the heart, and the slight coverage of these facts in our mainstream media outlets is certainly welcome. But for anyone who had closely followed the Middle East conflict over the decades, these facts were not particularly new.  Even many years ago, Israelis had proudly produced numerous varieties of tee-shirts, which often carried the notorious slogan “One Shot, Two Kills,” glorifying the killing of pregnant women and young children by military snipers. I assume that the sheer volume of these current killings finally led some American media outlets to begin taking notice of this situation.

These stories hardly exhaust the roster of ongoing Israeli war-crimes. Despite the long history of oppression and poverty they have endured, the Palestinians are a highly educated population and over they years they had created an enviable medical infrastructure in their besieged Gaza enclave, with numerous excellent hospitals staffed by well-trained medical professionals.

The Israelis bitterly resented these achievements by a population whom they deeply despised and have now destroyed nearly all those hospitals while blocking any import of new medical supplies. Moreover, just a couple of days ago, the New York Timescarried a story describing the widespread Israeli detention and brutal torture of leading Palestinian surgeons and other medical workers, with many of these civilians soon dying from their ill treatment. Traditional Judaism includes a notorious Talmudic injunction that Jews should seek to kill “the best of the Gentiles” and since medical doctors constitute an elite of Gazan society, it makes perfect sense that they should be targeted for torture and death. Indeed, international organizations have reported that some 500 doctors and nurses in Gaza have already been killed, while another 300 are still being held in Israeli prisons.

Although I was pleasantly surprised to see the Times run such a candid piece, the same editors have entirely ignored many others of an even more explosive nature. For example, despite horrific bombardment, famine, and disease, the official Gaza death-toll presented by our mainstream media outlets has remained relatively unchanged in recent months, now set at around 40,000. But as I pointed out in early May, this is almost certainly an illusion:

During the first month or two of the massive Israeli attack, the Gazan Public Health Ministry had maintained very detailed rosters of the dead, including the names, ages, and ID codes of the victims, and regularly released updates of the total, so those numbers seemed absolutely solid. But the Israeli assault soon targeted all of Gaza’s government offices and hospitals, and by early December, the Gazan officials responsible for tabulating the dead had themselves been killed or gone missing, so the count naturally tended to stagnate, even as conditions horrifically worsened for the surviving Gazans.

The Lancet is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals and just last month it published a short piece concluding that Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza and its total destruction of the local infrastructure may be responsible for nearly 200,000 civilian deaths, a figure many times larger than any previous media estimate. Despite the Lancet‘s considerable international standing, this story received very little attention in the mainstream media.

Highly-visible atrocities over many months led the esteemed jurists of the International Court of Justice to issue a series of near-unanimous rulingsthat Israel appears to be undertaking a campaign of genocide against Gaza’s Palestinians, while the International Criminal Court more recently applied for arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others on similar grounds. These international judicial rulings may have set into motion a series of events that further demonstrated the unusual ideological beliefs governing much of the political class of the Jewish State.

With Hamas militants mostly secure in their underground tunnels, almost none of them have been captured, so instead the Israeli military and its frustrated troops have seized and incarcerated many thousands of Gazan civilians, holding them without trial or charges, and often under very brutal conditions. Indeed, the number of such Palestinians captives has become so enormous that it has severely overburdened the Israeli prison system, prompting National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to publicly propose last month that the prisoners should simply be shot in the head, thereby freeing up their space for additional waves of new ones.

But with the possibility of international arrest warrants hanging over their heads, top Israeli military leaders apparently sought to deflect those accusations by demonstrating that the Israeli army was willing to police itself and prosecute some of its members engaged in such illegal war-crimes. There have been widespread reports of the regular rape of Palestinian prisoners, both male and female, and the IDF decided to finally investigate one such case, in which nine of its soldiers allegedly gang-raped a male Palestinian, sodomizing him so brutally that he suffered severe physical injury. The military suspects were ordered held at a couple of army bases pending their interrogation.

However, the notion of Israeli Jews facing punishment for torturing or raping Palestinian prisoners stoked enormous outrage in major portions of the Israeli population. As a result, large, violent mobs stormed the military bases in hopes of freeing those accused soldiers, with the story widely covered in the Israeli media and many of the scenes available on social media.

According to Friday’s Grayzone podcast by Max Blumenthal, this embarrassing political conflict apparently led Ben-Gvir and other important members of the Israeli government to propose new legislation in parliament intended to head off any similar situations in the future by officially decriminalizing the torture or murder of non-Jews by Jews. Although such notions may be quite alien to Western societies, they are fully in accord with the fundamental tenets of traditional Judaism, and the proposal seems likely to be enacted into law at some point in the future. One of my articles from 2018 had described these controversial religious doctrines:

If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.

Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine and indeed obligatory to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.

As a further illustration of the seething hatred traditional Judaism radiates towards all those of a different background, saving the life of a non-Jew is generally considered improper or even prohibited, and taking any such action on the Sabbath would be an absolute violation of religious edict. Such dogmas are certainly ironic given the widespread presence of Jews in the medical profession during recent centuries, but they came to the fore in Israel when a religiously-minded military doctor took them to heart and his position was supported by the country’s highest religious authorities.

These developments were heavily reported by the Israeli media, but they were carefully excluded from any of our own mainstream outlets, so that few Americans who rely upon our newspapers or electronic broadcast media are probably aware of them.

However, social media is another story entirely, and younger Americans who rely upon those sources of information have been exposed to a great deal of such material, helping to explain the waves of student protests that swept across elite colleges a few months ago until they were harshly suppressed. Ironically enough, much or most of this controversial content has been produced by the Israelis themselves, proudly documenting the severe punishment they are successfully inflicting upon their hated Palestinian foes, but perhaps failing to recognize that the rest of the world may consider these same scenes in a very different light. As I wrote a few months ago:

Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Mobs of Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found bound and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.

I think that Anglin’s characterization has considerable value, with the crimes committed by the Israelis often being so monstrous and so barbaric that Americans and other Westerners find it difficult to accept their reality, much like big lies are less likely to be challenged than small ones.

For example, I suspect that most American Christians are probably convinced that the ongoing conflict in the Holy Land is essentially a struggle between Jews and Muslims, but this is entirely mistaken. Back in April, Tucker Carlson released a 43 minute interview with a Christian Palestinian pastor in Bethlehem who described the severe oppression that he and his Christian flock suffered at the hands of Israel’s extremist Jewish government and the militant settlers it supported. Carlson emphasized how strange it seemed that America’s conservative Christian leadership did absolutely nothing for their Christian brethren in the Middle East but instead wholeheartedly supported Israel’s anti-Christian activities with money and political support. The entire segment is quite powerful and definitely worth watching on Twitter or YouTube, but some of the most telling statements have been extracted and distributed on other Tweets, such as this one:

Tucker Carlson On Christians Supporting Israel "If you wake up in the morning and decide your Christian faith requires you to support a foreign government blowing up churches and killing Christians, I think you've lost the thread."

None of this was all that surprising to me since back in 2018 I’d drawn upon the seminal research of Prof. Israel Shahak of Hebrew University to describe the exceptionally strong hostility that traditional Judaism always directed towards its rival Christian faith:

And while religious Judaism has a decidedly negative view towards all non-Jews, Christianity in particular is regarded as a total abomination, which must be wiped from the face of the earth.

Whereas pious Muslims consider Jesus as the holy prophet of God and Muhammed’s immediate predecessor, according to the Jewish Talmud, Jesus is perhaps the vilest being who ever lived, condemned to spend eternity in the bottommost pit of Hell, immersed in a boiling vat of excrement. Religious Jews regard the Muslim Quran as just another book, though a totally mistaken one, but the Christian Bible represents purest evil, and if circumstances permit, burning Bibles is a very praiseworthy act. Pious Jews are also enjoined to always spit three times at any cross or church they encounter, and direct a curse at all Christian cemeteries. Indeed, many deeply religious Jews utter a prayer each and every day for the immediate extermination of all Christians.

Over the years prominent Israeli rabbis have sometimes publicly debated whether Jewish power has now become sufficiently great that all the Christian churches of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other nearby areas can finally be destroyed, and the entire Holy Land completely cleansed of all traces of its Christian contamination. Some have taken this position, but most have urged prudence, arguing that Jews needed to gain some additional strength before they should take such a risky step. These days, many tens of millions of zealous Christians and especially Christian Zionists are enthusiastic advocates for Jews, Judaism, and Israel, and I strongly suspect that at least some of that enthusiasm is based upon ignorance.

Although back in the 1970s and 1980s, most Jewish religious leaders doubted that they had yet acquired the power to finally eradicate Christianity, the balance of political forces seems to have increasingly shifted in their direction. In early May I noted that under the guise of combatting antisemitism, clever pro-Israel lobbyists had persuaded Congress to enact legislation that seemed to ban the Christian bible in American society:

Some years ago a former senior AIPAC official once boasted to a friendly journalist that if he wrote anything on a simple napkin, within 24 hours he could get signatures of 70 Senators to endorse it, and the political power of the ADL is equally formidable. Therefore it was hardly surprising that last week an overwhelming bipartisan 320-91 majority in the House passed a bill broadening the meaning of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the anti-discrimination policies of the Department of Education by codifying the definitions used in our Civil Rights laws to classify those ideas as discriminatory.

Although I haven’t tried to read the text, the obvious intent is to force colleges to expunge such noxious activities as anti-Israel protests from their campus community or face loss of federal funds. This represents a striking attack against academic freedom as well as America’s traditional freedom of speech and thought, and may also pressure other private organizations to adopt similar policies. In a particularly ironic twist, the definition of antisemitism used in the bill clearly covers portions of the Christian Bible, so the ignorant and compromised Republican legislators have now wholeheartedly endorsed banning the Bible in a country in which 95% of the population has Christian roots.

This same increasing conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism and the growing efforts to suppress both those attitudes in American society has ironic implications, as I had noted back in February:

This is certainly an odd situation, warranting careful analysis and explanation. The word “antisemitism” merely means criticizing or disliking Jews, and in recent years, Israel’s partisans have demanded with some success that the term should be extended to encompass anti-Zionism as well, namely hostility to the Jewish state.

But let us suppose that we concede the latter point and agree with pro-Israel activists that “anti-Zionism” is indeed a form of “antisemitism.” Over the last few months, the Israeli government has brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of helpless civilians in Gaza, committing the greatest televised massacre in the history of the world, with its top leaders using explicitly genocidal language to describe their plans for the Palestinians. Indeed, the South African government submitted a 91 page legal brief to the International Court of Justice cataloging those Israeli statements, prompting a near-unanimous ruling by the jurists that millions of Palestinians faced the prospect of genocide at Israeli hands.

These days most Westerners claim to regard genocide in a decidedly negative light. So does this not syllogistically require them to embrace and endorse “antisemitism”? Surely a visitor from Mars would be very puzzled by this strange dilemma and the philosophical and psychological contortions it seems to require.

It is rather surprising that the extremely “politically correct” ruling elites of America and the rest of the Western world are loudly cheering on the racially-exclusivist State of Israel even as it kills enormous numbers of women and children and works very hard to starve to death some two million civilians in its unprecedented genocidal rampage. After all, the far milder and more circumspect regime of Apartheid South Africa was universally condemned, boycotted, and sanctioned for merely the tiniest sliver of such misdeeds.

The Israel/Gaza conflict has now lasted nearly ten months, producing an absolutely unprecedented amount of global media coverage of the underlying struggle between Zionists and Palestinians, whose roots stretch back for more than a century. As a result, I think that many millions or even tens of millions of Americans have discovered shocking facts that they had never previously suspected.

But as for myself, none of these disturbing developments have been all that surprising or unexpected and to some extent they were almost implicitly suggested in a series of articles that I had published just over six years ago:

• American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
  Ron Unz •  The Unz Review • July 16, 2018 • 7,800 Words
• American Pravda: The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 23, 2018 • 6,900 Words
• American Pravda: The Nature of Anti-Semitism
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 30, 2018 • 5,500 Words
• American Pravda: Jews and Nazis
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 6, 2018 • 6,800 Words

In those pieces, I did my best to cautiously draw upon highly reliable sources for my material, but much of it seemed so totally discordant from the narrative presented in my standard history books and media outlets that I sometimes inwardly wondered whether it could possibly be correct. I’m sure that a very substantial fraction of the hundreds of thousands of other readers had a similar reaction, but in far more extreme form. However, everything I had suggested now seems to be fully confirmed by the daily reports coming out of Israel and Gaza. As I emphasized in a May article, this may be one of the most important lasting consequences of these current Israeli actions, and perhaps extremely damaging to the future of the Jewish State

• Israel/Gaza: The Masks Come Off in American Society
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 6, 2024 • 6,800 Words

The fourth article in that 2018 series ran six years ago Tuesday and it might be especially surprising to many Americans, describing and documenting the strong ties between the Zionist movement led by David Ben-Gurion and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Not only was the Nazi-Zionist economic partnership of the 1930s absolutely crucial for the establishment of the State of Israel, but even after war broke out in 1939, a smaller right-wing Zionist faction sought to enlist in Axis Powers as a Nazi military ally.  Yitzhak Shamir who served as Israel’s prime minister for eight years during the 1980s and 1990s had been the leader of that strongly pro-Nazi faction, and indeed according to later claims by Israeli insiders, he retained a seething hatred of the United States during all decades that followed, never forgiving America for having failed to support Hitler during World War II.

Once these surprising facts are fully absorbed and assimilated, other revelations may become much less difficult to accept. For example, although the horrific Nazi atrocities of eighty years ago are still regularly described on almost a daily basis in the Times and our other mainstream media outlets, as far as I can tell, few if any of them ever actually happened and they were just as fictional as the lurid recent propaganda-hoaxes of Hamas militants beheading or roasting Israeli babies or gang-raping Israeli women.

• American Pravda: Israel and the Holocaust Hoax
  Ron Unz

https://www.unz.com/runz/the-state-of-israel-as-cartoonishly-evil/

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Borrell ‘horrified’ by Israeli airstrike on Gaza school

There is “no justification for these massacres,” the EU high representative for foreign affairs has said

Israel’s airstrike on a school in Gaza cannot be justified, top EU diplomat Josep Borrell said on Saturday. The attack by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) earlier in the day reportedly killed around 100 people.

Borrell said he was “horrified by the images” from the scene. The Tabeen school in central Gaza City was reportedly used to shelter displaced people. Women and children were among the victims, the local authorities said, adding that the death toll could rise since some people have yet to be pulled from the rubble.

According to media estimates, up to 6,000 people may have been sheltering at the school when it was hit by three Israeli missiles. West Jerusalem claimed that it was targeting a “Hamas control center” in the facility. The Gaza-based Palestinian militant group denied having a base at the school.

“At least 10 schools were targeted in the last weeks. There’s no justification for these massacres,” Borrell wrote on X (formerly Twitter). He went on to say that the EU is “dismayed by the terrible overall death toll”in the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The fighting broke out after Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on October 7 last year. The militants killed around 1,100 people in a raid on Israeli settlements near Gaza and took more than 200 people hostage.

West Jerusalem responded with bombing campaign followed by a ground operation in Gaza. The hostilities have claimed the lives of around 39,8000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Borrell put the number at 40,000 in his post.

Earlier on Saturday, Moscow condemned the Israeli attack, saying it is “deeply shaken” by the developments. Russia is calling on Israel to “refrain from attacks on civilian targets,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, adding that “there is no and can be no justification for such actions.”

Several nations, including Qatar, Egypt, and the US, have sought to mediate a truce between the warring parties. On Thursday, the White House published a joint statement from Washington, Doha, and Cairo calling on both sides to conclude a ceasefire and trade the hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian detainees in Israeli custody.

The proposal was slammed by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who called it a “surrender” and a “dangerous trap.” His words sparked outrage in Washington. White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby said the administration of President Joe Biden “won’t allow extremists to blow things off course.”

Borrell also criticized Smotrich on Saturday, condemning the finance minister’s opposition to the deal. “A ceasefire is the only way to stop the killing of civilians and secure the hostages’ release,” he said.

https://www.rt.com/news/602429-borrell-horrified-israel-school-strike/

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