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pedalling for circumcised murderers....Unfortunately the Australian Friends of Palestine Association’s campaign to ensure that an Israeli team is not registered for any events in the International Cycling World Tour 2025 and especially in the South Australian Santos Tour Down Under has not met with success. Pedalling for Israel is peddling genocide By Margaret Cassar
We have just been informed that the Israeli branded team, Israel-Premier Tech, will definitely be racing in the 2025 Tour Down Under in Adelaide. Our pleas to the Union Cyclist Internationale (UCI) to follow the precedent set when they sanctioned the Russian and Belarusian teams did not prompt the UCI board to take any meaningful action. We appealed to individual members of the UCI board, their management and their Ethics committee and only received one reply. Australia’s representative, Ms Anne Gripper, wrote a polite note saying that members of the board were discussing our request informally. This was mildly encouraging as it showed the letters had been received and read however it was obvious sanctioning Israel was not going to be formally considered at a meeting. It is worth noting here that Israel’s representative, Ms Vered Deshe, is a member of the Ethics committee. Here in Adelaide our pleas fell on deaf ears as well. The director of the TDU 2025, Stuart O’Grady, did not acknowledge receipt of a letter sent by the Chairperson of the Australian Friends of Palestine Association (Afopa), Christa Christaki. South Australia’s Minister of Tourism and Multicultural Affairs, Ms Zoe Bettison, sent a short reply saying she is powerless to do anything as the UCI makes decisions about which teams will take part. This stance may please our Premier, Mr Malinauskas, who lit up, not one but four, public buildings in Adelaide, Parliament House, the Adelaide Oval, the Torrens Footbridge and Government House, in the colours of the Israeli flag in October 2023. This was at the same time Israel was raining 2000lb bombs on the trapped people of Gaza. However it will not please the people of Adelaide who do not want any sportswashing of Israel’s crimes at one of our most prestigious tourism events. The Australian government, in granting visas to a team whose specific role is to make Israel look good and glamourous in the eyes of the world, ignores international law. Our government has a legal responsibility to ensure that we are not complicit in enabling Israel to commit the crimes of genocide and apartheid with impunity. As I have mentioned before it is essential to recognise the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) of 19 July which requires member States, that is all States which nominate representatives to the UCI, to cease all ties with Israel, including sporting ties, until Israel ends the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands. In the year 2022/2023 14% of applicants for an Australian visa were denied. Here is an opportunity for the Australian government to redeem their 14 months of inaction on Gaza and cancel or deny visas to the Israeli team on character grounds. These team members have sold their talents to Israel-Premier Tech owner, Sylvan Adams, who has blatantly admitted he uses the team to create a worldwide advertising board to win hearts and minds to the Israeli cause. He neglects to mention that the Israeli cause employs ethnic cleansing and genocide to enable land theft. https://johnmenadue.com/pedalling-for-israel-is-peddling-genocide/
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.
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vanished netflix palestinian stories.....
In 2021, Netflix decided to create a new collection of films for its users.
“Netflix will launch the ‘Palestinian Stories’ collection, which will offer a selection of films from some of the best filmmakers in the Arab world,” the new group announced. “This collection is a tribute to the creativity and passion of the Arab film industry, as Netflix continues to invest in stories from the Arab world.”
Thirty-two films were selected, with more planned.
However, following a purge of at least 24 films from Netflix’s platform, the collection’s homepage now only contains one film accessible to US streamers: Lina Al Abed’s 2019 documentary “Ibrahim” [Ibrahim: A Fate to Define] – and that’s only from the US.
“Netflix’s erasure of Palestinian voices follows decades of suppression of Palestinian perspectives."
When accessing the page from an Israeli IP address, not only are the 24 films gone, but the “Palestinian Stories” collection doesn’t exist at all: the portal page’s URL leads to a 404 error page indicating that the site cannot be found. The Israeli page previously contained 28 films.
The disappearance of the films, whose imminent absence had been flagged by Sunjeev Bery, comes a year after Israel’s relentless assault on the Gaza Strip and escalation in the West Bank—an escalating war against the very Palestinians Netflix sought to promote with its collection of stories.
“This erasure of Palestinian voices by Netflix follows several inglorious decades of suppression of Palestinian perspectives and narratives by Western news and entertainment media,” said a letter demanding the reinstatement of the films, from 30 pro-Palestinian organizations, including Freedom Forward, of which Bery, an Intercept contributor, is executive director.
SOURCE: The Intercept, Nikita Mazurov
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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
joe biden genocide....
In his final weeks as president of the United States, Joe Biden is using whatever remaining time and capital he has to continue his lockstep support for Israel as it continues violating the so-called ceasefire in Lebanon, as it further immiserates, starves, and destroys what remains in Gaza, and as it codifies the ethnic cleansing and permanent settlement of Northern Gaza. In a 24-hour period two weeks ago, The Times of Israel reportedthat the Biden White House aggressively lobbied “Democrats to reject [the] progressive push to block arms transfers to Israel” (which most ultimately did). And Biden’s UN ambassador, Robert Wood, vetoed yet another UN resolution calling for an immediate, lasting ceasefire in Gaza and a return of all Israeli hostages.
This fact is at odds with a broader excuse-making media regime that assured readers over the past few months that Biden was only backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza because he was compelled to by mysterious outside forces: a bearhug “change things from the inside” strategy, electoral considerations in the lead-up to Nov. 5, the Israel lobby, or a broader assumption he is simply too helpless to do anything. Once Biden was no longer constrained by these factors, it was assumed, the White House would finally make some effort to rein in Israel. But the election came and went and Biden’s support for Israel has only intensified, capping off with a scathing admonishment and delegitimization of the International Criminal Court, which finally issued an arrest warrant last month for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Recently in The Nation, I detailed how this elaborate excuse-making regime emerged over the last year, and how US media helped shape, promote, and disseminate this regime to the broader public. The three major media tropes are as follows:
To quote the late British theorist Stafford Beer, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” We can say that Biden supports genocide because, for almost 14 months, this is exactly what he has done. Everything else is window dressing, moral performance, unfalsifiable theory of mind assumptions, and collective partisan delusion. These media genres fed into a broader excuse-making regime that also includes popular assumptions about Biden being held back by electoral considerations and being subject to the undue influence of the Israel Lobby.
Biden supports genocide because, for almost 14 months, this is exactly what he has done. Everything else is window dressing, moral performance, unfalsifiable theory of mind assumptions, and collective partisan delusion.
On the issue of electoral considerations, this excuse, even if true, was never morally useful. If “winning elections” justified everything—and surely genocide would be the most extreme example of a policy that ought not be permitted simply because it could “win” an election—then every single bad thing Trump does could be defended along the same lines. Mass deportations are popular. Does this make Trump campaigning on them and carrying them out justified? Of course not.
But even accepting the logic of the excuse, it falls apart. Poll after poll shows support for an arms embargo would have helped Harris defeat Trump: The massive reduction in support from Arab and Muslim voters, young voters, and the fact that there were 6.2 million fewer votes overall compared to 2020, clearly indicates that Gaza helped depress turnout. It wasn’t the decisive factor—indeed, no single factor was—but it no doubt was a major contributor in alienating core constituencies and helped doom Harris’ campaign. And we know those running her campaign thought so because her superficial distance from Biden on Gaza was, according to a leaked internal memo prior to Biden dropping out, listed as a major factor in her favor. ”She’s broadly considered to be to Biden’s left on Israel-Palestine, an issue where he has major vulnerabilities,” it read. The day after the election (before the usual scapegoats were settled on), the New York Times reported that campaign officials “conceded that Ms. Harris had paid a price for not breaking from Mr. Biden’s support of Israel in the war in Gaza.” The premise that the general voting public was crying out for more shredded Palestinian toddlers on their social media timeline was always a dubious one. Yes, the public supports Israel in the abstract. But when asked specifically about an arms embargo and ceasefire, the public was—even despite the overwhelming power of bipartisan polarization—opposed to the Biden/Harris policy of unqualified support for Israel’s “war in Gaza.”
Another popular excuse, which often veered into antisemitism, was that Biden only backed genocide in Gaza because the Israel lobby forced him to do so. While there is obviously an influential Israel lobby in Washington, its impact is largely relegated to the margins of Congress, having recently been decisive in pushing out Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. Biden, a self-identified Zionist for decades, with nothing to lose in the 2024 election, early on supported the genocidal logic of Israel’s campaign in Gaza—and likely never thought much about it beyond that. While backing Israel was no doubt helpful to Biden’s rise in politics (and certainly essential to pro-Israel groups spending millions targeting Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary), pro-Israel lobby groups had little influence over Biden in his final year in office. Even after he dropped out of his ill-fated re-election bid, even after his replacement lost the election itself, Biden continued and continues to this day to do nothing but arm, protect, and justify Israel’s countless war crimes. This is why there is a whiff of antisemitism to this popular line: If Biden had been Jewish, his ironclad commitment to Zionism would simply be seen as an earnest ideological commitment. But because he’s Catholic, there has to be dark and mysterious forces making him do bad things against his will.
But if the past 14 months have shown anything, it’s that Zionism is a colonial ideology that requires no religious or ethnic identity. It is as American as apple pie, and the simplest explanation—that Biden just agrees with Israel’s genocidal campaign and thinks it’s justified—is all there needs to be. No lobby pressure necessary.
Even after he dropped out of his ill-fated re-election bid, even after his replacement lost the election itself, Biden continued and continues to this day to do nothing but arm, protect, and justify Israel’s countless war crimes.
But these excuse-making regimes aren’t only about providing a moral cover for President Biden. They’re very much about creating—to use a vogue term of the day—a permission structure for liberals to go about the usual work of Professional Politics. They permit compartmentalization, however tenuous. This system, over the past 14 months, has allowed, above all, liberals to enjoy politics. From TikTok memes to MSNBC to the social settings of campaigns and government workers, people develop a parasocial relationship with those in power, especially those leading their own party. Uncle Joe, Joe of the Parks and Rec cameo, Obama’s lovable sidesick, Joe of the AOC selfie, Joe of the “a decent man who has done nothing wrong” fame—surely he can’t back the genocide of Palestinians. This reality is too difficult to face; it offends both our chauvinism and partisan identity which, in key ways, is more essential to people’s sense of self than religion or race. So the incentives to build these excuse-making regimes, to provide thin journalistic legitimacy for them, and to push out into our airwaves and Twitter timelines pat thought memes—“… Biden’s bear-hugging Netanyahu so he can influence him as a friend…,” “… he has to back Israel to win the 2024 election…,” “… It’s the Israel Lobby…,” “… he’s working for a ceasefire…,” “…even if he cut off Israel, it wouldn’t matter…”—is tremendous.
It is not only essential to ameliorating cognitive dissonance, it is essential to the basic functioning of civil society and our liberal body politic. So it developed, became a career-maker for many, and largely served its function. But this doesn’t make it any less of a lie. There was never any outside force compelling Biden to back the wholesale destruction of a people, and there was nothing compelling liberals to look the other way. There was nothing forcing progressives, nonprofits, labor unions to endorse Biden, or his equally pro-genocide replacement, without conditioning said endorsement on a change in Gaza policy. These were choices they made. And when it’s all said and done—when the legacy of the Biden administration is invariably written about and debated—the choices we make, more than any hand wringing or “change things from the inside” self-rationalization, are all we have and all we are.
https://therealnews.com/biden-supports-genocide-in-gaza-because-he-agrees-with-it
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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.