Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused the Iranian-backed armed group Hezbollah of attempting to kill him and his wife after his vacation home was targeted by a drone launched from Lebanon.

On Saturday morning, three UAVs loaded with explosives were spotted flying towards the coastal town of Caesarea in northern Israel. Two drones were intercepted by the Israel Defense Force (IDF), while a third one exploded near the PM’s private residence. Netanyahu and his wife were not home during the attack, and there were casualties on the ground. 

While Hezbollah did not claim responsibility for the strike in Caesarea, the pro-Palestinian group announced new attacks on north and central Israel on Saturday, according to Al Jazeera.

In a message on X, Netanyahu issued a strongly worded warning to Hezbollah and its allies in Tehran. “The attempt by Iran’s proxy Hezbollah to assassinate me and my wife today was a grave mistake,” the PM said, adding that the attack “will not deter me or the State of Israel from continuing our just war against our enemies in order to secure our future.”

I say to Iran and its proxies in its axis of evil: anyone who tries to harm Israel’s citizens will pay a heavy price,” he continued. The PM pledged to rescue the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza and to facilitate the safe return of Israeli residents to the border areas with Lebanon, which have frequently come under Hezbollah fire.

“Israel is determined to achieve all our war objectives and change the security reality in our region for generations to come,” he concluded.

Some 70,000 Israelis have been forced to flee their homes due to Hezbollah attacks since October 2023. The IDF intensified airstrikes in Lebanon last month, killing several high-ranking Hezbollah operatives, including the group’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Overall, more than 2,000 people have been killed during Israeli strikes in Lebanon, according to the country’s Health Ministry.

On Friday, Hezbollah announced that its military confrontation with the Jewish State was entering “a new and escalatory phase.” The group vowed to continue firing rockets and drones across the border in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, where Israel has been waging a war against Hamas for over a year.

https://www.rt.com/news/605963-netanyahu-claims-hezbollah-tried-to-assassinate/

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

The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) has just published “The Most Moral Army”- an excoriating review of Israel’s continuous reliance on deceitful medical imagery to disinfect its horrific abuse of power in Gaza

On October 7, the former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbot, after a transitory lament about civilian casualties in Gaza added, “and we admire the way that Israel has been so incredibly fastidious in trying to avoid them”.

Dr Mary Turfah does not share this perspective. She begins her essay in the LARB by emphasising how Israel has weaponised medical language, in particular, in an attempt to reframe their genocide in Gaza. Turfah continues by spelling out that a “tent massacre”, once the medicalised excuse-fog is removed, means:

The dropping of bombs on people several times displaced and sheltering in makeshift tents tentatively planted in sand in designated “safe zones” (in this instance, Al-Mawasi) along Gaza’s coast. As an intended consequence of the bombs, many of the tents caught fire. People nearby later testified to the screams, how they found themselves emptied. Unable to intervene.

Later she provides more fine-grained, traumatising detail of another surgical strike:

In the immediate aftermath of the morning prayer massacre, one surgeon at Al-Ahli tweeted a description, in Arabic, of “one of the most difficult and horrific bloody scenes [he] witnessed” that day: that of “a young boy, 16 years old, who arrived to us with his lower body shattered and crushed, his left hand amputated, and deep wounds and burns all over his body.” The boy was taken back for emergency surgery, and the surgeon continued to express his shock to find “another person’s head crushed between the bones of his shattered legs,” only recognisable “by his mouth and chin. It was a scene,” he added, “beyond the capacity of the heart and mind to bear!!!!”

Meanwhile, lethal Israeli censorship of media coverage in Gaza (over 120 journalists killed) continues: “’We’ll come for you next: Israel Threatened to Kill Teen Journalist – Then Did”. Research by The Guardian has also just revealed that the oldest recorded, fastidiously-unlucky Gaza genocide victim so far is a great, great grandfather aged 101 and the youngest, a baby girl who lived for two hours.

Another theme addressed in the LARB article is the way thoughtfully crafted reporting helps to shift responsibility from human actors towards the military equipment employed:

Media coverage of Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to generate kill lists has quoted Israeli intelligence officials celebrating their technologies’ ability to execute “coldly” and “easily.” The wording of one such article even suggests that the technology itself is “directing” the “bombing sprees”—a framing that not only implies distance between actor and machine but also, in so doing, subtly shifts responsibility away from the former and onto the latter.

Which brings to mind a singular essay entitled, “The Knife Went in”, written 30 years ago by Theodore Dalrymple, observing how convicted killers regularly explained their lethal attacks by ascribing determinative power to the murder weapons employed:

As it happens, there are three stabbers (two of them unto death) at present in the prison who used precisely the same expression when describing to me what happened. “The knife went in,” they said when pressed to recover their allegedly lost memories of the deed. The knife went in—unguided by human hand, apparently. That the long-hated victims were sought out, and the knives carried to the scene of the crimes, was as nothing compared with the willpower possessed by the inanimate knives themselves, which determined the unfortunate outcome.

Turfah also highlights a remarkable letter sent by 100 Israeli doctors in November 2023 where:

Despite significant evidence to the contrary, [they argued that] Palestinians hospitals are “terrorist nests,” that Palestinians are trying “to take advantage of western morality, they are the ones who brought destruction upon themselves […] Attacking terrorist headquarters is the right and the duty of the Israeli army.”

In fact, Turfah’s article (along with many others) documents what astonishing progress Israel has made over the last year – backed by the US and its most obedient pilot fish – in recasting Western morality as an increasingly entrenched, globalised contradiction-in-terms.

https://johnmenadue.com/sanitising-genocide/

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

By Juan Cole / Informed Comment

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli military has begun giving southern Lebanon the Gaza treatment. Some 25% of Lebanese are under “evacuation orders,” which is to say that Israel is expelling them from their homes in preparation for further military operations against the Hezbollah Party-Militia.

The U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Lebanon, Imran Riza, said Wednesday, “Health care facilities, mosques, historical markets, residential complexes, and now government buildings are being reduced to rubble. Displaced families continue to feel at risk, even after fleeing to safe areas.”

Lebanon is a small country of perhaps 4 million citizens and nearly 2 million refugees. The UN says that some 1.2 million people have been displaced, with 275,000 people leaving for Syria. This latter number includes both Lebanese leaving their own country and Syrian refugees in Lebanon returning to the Baathist dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. The equivalent of such a vast displacement of residents in the United States would be 51 million internal refugees. It is unimaginable.

We saw this movie in Gaza. It is total war.

Even the humanitarian aid workers attempting to help people get through the violence and displacement are being targeted by the Israeli military. Humanitarian Coordinator Riza added, “This morning a devastating attack claimed the lives of yet more civilians and local authorities working to provide relief, with the strike occurring just as a crisis meeting was convening at the municipality of Nabatieh in South Lebanon. I deplore and mourn the deaths of Ahmad, Sadeq, Mohammed, Qassem – members of a relief team with whom the UN and humanitarian partners have been working for more than a year – and all other victims of this conflict that must stop, urgently.”

The attack referenced by the UN official was an Israeli airstrike on the City Hall of the Lebanese city of Nabatieh, which is a civilian object, not a military one. The Israelis killed the mayor, Ahmed Kaheel, council member Sadeq Ismail, photographer Mohammad Baytar, and employees Qasem Hijazi and Mohammad Zohri. Sadeq Ismail and Qasem Hijazi, along with Mayor Kaheel, were the humanitarian relief team to which the UN official referred to above. The Lebanese Ministry of Health (and no, it isn’t “Hezbollah controlled”) said that the strike killed 16 persons in total and wounded 52.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Miqati condemned the bombing, noting that the city council had been meeting about humanitarian aid issues before they were blasted to smithereens.

Sadeq Ismail owned an electronics store in the city and had been involved in trying to develop it, based on what he had seen in Turkey and China. Nabatieh is ordinarily a city of around 40,000, similar to Maryland’s capital, Annapolis, with another 85,000 people living in the metropolitan area. It is now a ghost town, with Israeli threats and strikes having expelled almost everyone from their homes. Only 150 people remain, mostly elderly. Ismail had been organizing help for them. He had the means to leave but chose to remain and aid others. He told journalist Samir Sabbagh a few days ago, “We provide them with bread daily, along with medicine and some canned food, but the situation is getting more dangerous.”

Nabatieh is majority Shiite Muslim, and Israel’s targeting of its municipal building may be a manifestation of the increasing hatred of Shiites visible in Israeli social media, which sometimes sound like Sunni extremists such as ISIL. The city, however, also has substantial Maronite Christian and Eastern Orthodox Christian communities and many churches and mosques. Although Hezbollah is popular there because it does charity work, some Shiites instead favor the rival AMAL Party. It has many old markets and serves as an inland trade node for the Mediterranean city of Tyre, which is much mentioned in the Bible. The Shiites of Nabatieh are known for commemorating the death of the Prophet’s grandson, Husain, with processions and dramatic performances.

A city dedicated to remembering the martyrs is being martyred itself.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/10/21/juan-cole-gazafying-lebanon-israel-blows-up-nabatieh-city-hall-kills-mayor-and-aid-workers/

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

BY RON UNZ

I’ve often suggested that our media functions as a powerful tool of mind-control, not too dissimilar from what might be found in the plotlines of classic science fiction. After spending weeks or months immersed in such a controlling narrative, thinking independent thoughts let alone completely breaking free becomes a very difficult undertaking. For most individuals, the whisper in the back of their skulls overwhelms their logical reasoning, while their emotional reactions are turned on or off as if by a switch.

A perfect example of this came in the infamous U.S.S. Liberty incident of 1967. While peacefully sailing in international waters, our naval vessel was attacked by the Israelis, whose air and sea forces killed or wounded more than 200 American servicemen, and only by chance failed in their effort to sink the ship with no survivors. This constituted America’s worst naval loss of life since the huge battles of World War II, and surely if any other nation in the world had been responsible, our swift and overwhelming military retaliation would have bombed its major cities to rubble and killed many thousands of its citizens, while perhaps also hunting down and executing all the enemy leaders who had ordered that unprovoked attack.

But instead our government completely covered up that incident at the time it occurred, and the only consequence was that the annual financial tribute we paid to the Jewish State steadily increased in size. Even when the facts finally came out a dozen years later, any outrage was confined to just a small sliver of our population, while the majority who heard the story vaguely assumed that since the media told them “nothing to see here” they should move on and pay no attention. Something that under normal circumstances might have been expected to provoke a major punitive war merely produced a few uncomfortable shrugs.

Given its large size and advanced weaponry, America stood as a physical colossus on the world stage of the 1960s, with no other country able to directly challenge our might. But we were still helpless before the nation that had attacked use because the small pro-Israel Jewish minority deployed its tools of media mind-control to transform us into helpless marionettes, jerked about by invisible strings.

I discussed that strange historical episode several years ago.

• American Pravda: Remembering the Liberty
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 18, 2021 • 11,400 Words

More than a half-century has passed since that incident, and during most of those decades the power of such media mind-control over our population has remained enormous, even steadily growing more extreme.

Just a few weeks ago, the Israeli Mossad suddenly detonated thousands of booby-trapped pagers in Lebanon, whose simultaneous explosions killed or severely maimed around 500 civilians including some children, while wounding many times that number. Not only was this an obvious war-crime but given the scale of the attack and the terrifying public impact of converting ordinary electronic devices into deadly bombs throughout an entire country, it probably constituted one of the worst terrorist attacks in the history of the world, while setting extremely dangerous precedents for future strikes against other countries, certainly including our own. If our media had portrayed the incident one way, outraged Americans would surely have demanded that the terrorist state responsible be wiped from the face of the earth; but instead the media presented a different narrative, so our citizens either merely shrugged their shoulders or sometimes even cheered.

In a recent article, one of our contributors described the reaction he encountered at a dinner with some of his conservative Catholic friends, and I think his experiences are worth quoting at length:

https://x.com/CensoredMen/status/1777810791254638877?

Shortly after the now-infamous Israeli pager, radio and solar panel attacks in southern Lebanon, I met for dinner with a group of friends and acquaintances at the home of a local Catholic priest. After we had eaten and made the obligatory small talk, the conversation naturally turned towards politics and the expanding situation in the Middle East. Having already met with the group a handful of times during the past year, I was familiar with the position held by most of the men present concerning the issues of Israel/Palestine and international Jewish power. To a man they’re of the opinion that Israel is an indispensable ally of America and a defender of those hallowed ‘Judeo-Christian’ values in an otherwise uncivilized and bestial Middle East. (Perhaps, someday, a study will be conducted examining the reasons Christians so vehemently support the people who reject their Lord and Savior and have constructed an entire theological edifice based upon that rejection, even as they murder and maim their co-believers in the Middle East.)

On that last point, those Christians are probably unaware that traditional Judaism abominates their religion, with many Jewish leaders having sworn to eradicate Christianity from the Holyland, as was suggested in this short clip from Tucker Carlson’s long interview of a Christian pastor from Bethlehem earlier this year

That same dinner conversation then turned to the current Gaza conflict and the use of those exploding electronic devices.

The conversation started out with a flurry of the usual vacuous platitudes about Israel having a right to defend itself and to respond accordingly to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. The wholly asymmetrical response by Israel which, according to the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, has already killed close to 200,000 Palestinians, hasn’t been sufficiently robust, at least to the mind of one of the faithful in attendance at the dinner. When the subject of the pager attacks in Lebanon arose, a few of the men, including the priest, began hootin’ and hollering their approval of the Jews’ egregious violation of international law. I began to hold forth on the immorality and far-reaching consequences of such an attack but was swiftly denounced by my willfully obtuse interlocutors who informed me that it was, in fact, a brilliant attack and quite proportionate after all, considering the mass rapes and other atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7. Leaving aside the obvious irrationality of their argument, I resolved to make the case that Israeli intelligence most likely planned the operation years in advance and relied upon their deep infiltration of tech industries to rig the devices for detonation at the manufacturing level. Such penetration of key industries, I informed them, poses great risk to all people around the globe and this novel attack may very well have set a dangerous precedent. My suggestion that Israeli intelligence possesses the capability to pre-plant explosives into consumer products elicited snorts of derision, and, following a brief but equally remarkable discourse on the so-called Holocaust, the conversation moved on to more mundane matters.

Such severely skewed American reactions are hardly a new phenomenon. On December 7, 1941, the military forces of Japan launched a surprise attack against those of our own country, and I’m sure that the parents or grand-parents of the conservatives at that dinner had judged that as one of the most treacherous blows ever struck in warfare, providing permanent proof of Japanese villainy. Many Americans later regarded our nuclear annihilation of the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as just retribution for that unexpected 1941 military blow.

But one generation later, Israel did much the same thing, using a surprise 1967 attack to destroy the air forces of Egypt and Syria on the ground, thus allowing the IDF to easily win the war and seize territory from both those countries. Yet because of its media presentation, nearly all Americans at the time cheered on plucky little Israel for its brilliant military success.

In the aftermath of World War II, America and its allies established the United Nations to enforce international law and maintain the peace. Our fervently pro-Israel media has often described the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 as one of the UN’s proudest early moments, with that international body giving a national homeland to the long-suffering Jewish people.

Then earlier this year, the UN General Assembly voted to admit Palestine as a member state, thereby providing a similar national homeland to the long-suffering Palestinian people, and as a consequence, Israel turned against its creator with a fierce vengeance. In a blistering address, Israel’s UN Ambassador had publicly—and literally!—shredded the UN Charter before the other members, denouncing that body as illegitimate and “antisemitic,” thereby seeming to declare his country’s bitter hostility to the entire world. I’m not sure that any similar scene had ever occurred at the UN rostrum, let alone coming from a country that owed its entire existence to the UN.

READ MORE:

https://www.unz.com/runz/the-total-madness-of-the-state-of-israel/

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