Stephen Lendman

The whole world's watching. Growing millions know. Israel is a rogue terror state. It is amoral, brutish, and ruthless. Arabs are murdered for not being Jews.

Gazans suffer most of all. Israel's been terror-bombing them daily. Civilians are maliciously targeted. Growing numbers are killed. Official totals way understate the toll. Many others are injured. Children are traumatized. Parents are frantic. How much more of this can people take?

Gazans dig through rubble for survivors. Others bury their dead. Media scoundrels assault truth. They run cover for Israel's worst crimes. Imagine supporting mass murder. Doing so makes them complicit.

A scurrilous New York Times editorial headlined "Hamas's Illegitimacy," saying:

"Hamas, which took control of Gaza in 2007 and is backed by Iran, is so consumed with hatred for Israel that it has repeatedly resorted to violence, no matter the cost to its own people."

Fact check: Vicious lies like this demand condemnation. Setting the record straight is vital. Hamas is Palestine's legitimate government. In January 2006, Palestinians elected their officials overwhelmingly. Israel and Washington imposed a West Bank coup d'etat regime. It's illegitimate. It's also pro-Israeli. Conflict followed. Hamas was wrongly blamed. Abbas serves illegitimately as president. Israel rigged his election. His term expired in January 2009. He won't step down or hold new elections. He's a longtime Israeli collaborator. He sold out at Oslo. He spurns his own people. He replicates Quisling harshness. He's an embarrassment to legitimate governance.

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Bill Van Auken

After initial reports Tuesday that a ceasefire agreement with Israel was imminent, a senior Hamas official, Izzat Risheq, told the media that a deal would not be finalized until Wednesday at the earliest, as Israel had failed to respond to proposed terms of a settlement.

With the world media focused on international efforts to broker a truce in the week-old military assault on Gaza, the war crime initiated by the Israeli government’s assassination last Wednesday of Hamas military leader Ahmed al-Jaabari continued to escalate.

The unrelenting attack by F16s, drones, warships, tanks and artillery has killed or wounded well over 1,000 Palestinians, in their great majority civilians. On Tuesday afternoon, it was reported that the death toll had topped 140, with at least 27 more people killed during the day. More than 900 others have been injured by bombs, missiles and shells.

The Israel Defense Forces increasingly appears to be hitting homes and other clearly civilian targets. In the wake of Sunday’s shocking massacre of 10 members of the same family—including four young children and four women—there have been a number of similar atrocities.

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Finian Cunningham

The body of 18-month-old Palestinian boy Eyad Abu Khosa,
killed in the latest Israeli airstrikes, lies on the floor during his
funeral in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza Strip on Nov.
18, 2012. (General info about the deadly strikes: PCHR)

Israel’s holocaust of innocents in Gaza has not sated the blood lust of its Zionist rulers, with the death toll rising to over 110 and the injured numbering more than a thousand - less than six days after the latest murderous offensive began.

Preparations for a ground offensive involving up to 75,000 troops threaten a repeat of the slaughter carried out by Israel four years ago in Gaza when more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed during a three-week killing orgy.

Then as now, most of the victims are children, their bloodied bodies pulled out from rubble, piled up in morgues; their innocent eyes in a frozen stare at the moment of horror visited on them in their homes.

How can the world tolerate such barbarity? Well, the majority of the world is not tolerating it. Humanity is horrified and aggrieved by these atrocities. All across the world, civic society and a good many governments are mobilizing, condemning Israel’s crimes against humanity.

But the seeming helplessness of the world to put an abrupt end to the holocaust is down to one simple, irrefutable fact. The perpetrators of such evil are supported by the government and ruling class in Washington. In a secondary support role to mass murder are the despicable governments in London, Paris and Berlin. But the ultimate author of this barbarity is Washington. The massacre of civilians in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine could be stopped right now with one phone call from US President Barack Obama.

One phone call telling the Israeli criminals-in-office that the USD 3 billion annual lifeline of economic and military aid from American tax-payers is being terminated would bring this killing machine to a halt.

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Paul Craig Roberts

The United States government and its subject peoples think of the US as “the world’s only superpower.” But how is a country a superpower when its entire government and a majority of the subjects, especially those members of evangelical churches, grovel at the feet of the Israeli Prime Minister? How is a country a superpower when it lacks the power to determine its own foreign policy in the Middle East? Such a country is not a superpower. It is a puppet state.

In the past few days we have witnessed, yet again, the “American superpower” groveling at Netanyahu’s feet. When Netanyahu decided to again murder the Palestinian women and children of Gaza, to further destroy what remains of the social infrastructure of the Gaza Ghetto, and to declare Israeli war crimes and Israeli crimes against humanity to be merely the exercise of “self-defense,” the US Senate, the US House of Representatives, the White House, and the US media all promptly declared their support for Netanyahu’s crimes.

On November 16 the Congress of the “superpower,” both House and Senate, passed overwhelmingly the resolutions written for them by AIPAC, the Israel Lobby known as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the only foreign agent that is not required to register as a foreign agent. The Global News Service of the Jewish People reported their power over Washington with pride. Both Democrats and Republicans shared the dishonor of serving Israel and evil instead of America and justice for the Palestinians.

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Elizabeth Murray

A whole family was killed in their home in Nasser street, Gaza
city. 4 children died, along with their parents and a grandmother.

Consortiumn News Exclusive: Israeli hardliners joke about the periodic need to decimate each new generation of Palestinian militants as “mowing the grass,” a process underway again in new bombardments of Gaza. This ugly metaphor has also penetrated the think-tank world of Official Washington.

In early 2010, one of Washington DC’s most prestigious think tanks was holding a seminar on the Middle East which included a discussion of Israel’s December 2008-January 2009 assault on Gaza which killed about 1,300 Palestinians. When the death toll was mentioned, one expert on the panel smiled enigmatically and intoned: “It’s unfortunate, but every once in a while you have to mow the lawn.”

The remark, which likened killing hundreds of men, women and children – many of them noncombatants – with trimming the grass, was greeted with a light tittering around the room, which was filled with some of Washington’s most elite, highly educated and well-paid Middle East experts. Not a single one objected to the panelist’s black humor.

On the contrary, several analysts and experts were grinning at the reference to Israel’s strategy of mounting periodic attacks on the Palestinians to cull each new generation of militants. Such is the nonchalance of Washington’s policy-advising cognoscenti toward the ongoing and systematic genocide of Gaza’s oppressed population.

The cavalier language is symptomatic of the policymaking community’s increasingly pervasive tendency to disregard and disparage the humanity of Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks, which are often waged by Israel’s high-tech drones and U.S.-supplied F-16’s. There is also a tendency to ignore or downplay Israeli war crimes.

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