Palestine In Pictures: July 2018

An elder waves the Palestinian flag during a protest held along the boundary with Israel, east of Gaza City, on 3 July. The protest was part of the Great March of Return series of demonstrations calling for an end to Israel’s siege on Gaza and in support of Palestinian refugees’ right to return to the lands from which their families were ethnically cleansed in 1948. Mohammed Zaanoun ActiveStills
The Electronic Intifada: July witnessed the most dangerous escalation in violence in the occupied Gaza Strip since Israel’s summer assault in 2014.
Nineteen Palestinians were killed thoughout the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip during the month and four more, including a child, died from their injuries after being shot by Israeli snipers during protests in Gaza in May and June.
More than 190 Palestinians have died by Israeli fire in 2018.
The shooting death of a soldier in July marked the first Israeli fatality resulting from Gaza fire since 2014.

Don’t The People Of Gaza Have The Right To Break Free From A “Concentration Camp”?

By Norman G. Finkelstein and Jamie Stern-Weiner: Since the overwhelmingly nonviolent demonstrations in Gaza began on March 30, 2018, the international community has strongly condemned Israel’s armed attacks.

A UN General Assembly resolution “deplore[d] the use of any excessive, disproportionate and indiscriminate force by the Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians,” while the UN Human Rights Council denounced Israel’s “disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force.” After Israeli snipers killed Razan al-Najjar, a twenty-one-year-old unarmed Palestinian paramedic, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process warned Israel that it “needs to calibrate its use of force.” In a devastating report, Human Rights Watch concluded that “Israeli forces’ repeated use of lethal force in the Gaza Strip … against demonstrators who posed no imminent threat to life may amount to war crimes.”

Welcome as these condemnations are, the question nonetheless remains whether they go far enough. Simply put, does Israel have the right to use any force under any circumstances against the people of Gaza?

James Whale Suspended By Talk Radio ~ For 'Being Rude To A Lady' ~ With A Vagina ~ Whilst Possessing A Penis

By Elizabeth Hobson:  James Whale has been suspended by Talk Radio – for failing to treat a female guest with adequate chivalry.

Nichi’s account of the segment and the offending clip itself can be found in The Guardian.

"Kill All Men": NYT's Newest Hire Also Hates Men, ...Not Just White People

"How can you kill all the men without a good vampy lipstick?"

By Tyler Durden: The New York Times' newest editorial board member, Sarah Jeong, was outed as a bigot yesterday after dozens of tweets from less than four years ago were unearthed, revealing extreme hatred of white people. 

The Times, in response, claimed to have known about the tweets - and said they were simply Jeong imitating racists. 

"Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers." -NYT

Except this was quickly dispelled after several tweets of Jeong's in which she drops casual bigotry such as "fuck white women" out of the blue were caught by other Twitter users. 
Now, as the Daily Caller's Amber Athey reports, Jeong's Twitter history also reveals hatred of cops and men.

The Holocaust And Its Deniers

'Just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the Jewish state ethnically cleansed the vast majority of indigenous Palestinians.'

By Gilad Atzmon: In the aftermath of the Holocaust, some Jewish intellectuals and humanists expressed the thought that ‘after Auschwitz Jews have to locate themselves at the forefront of the battle for humanity and against all forms of oppression.’

This is a principled and heroic ideal, but the reality on the ground has been somewhat different. Just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the Jewish state ethnically cleansed the vast majority of indigenous Palestinians. Two years later, in 1950, Israel’s Knesset passed the Law of Return, a racist law that distinguishes between Jews who have the right to ‘return’ to someone else’s land and the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees that were expelled by force from their villages and cities.
In the seven decades since, the Jewish State has committed every possible human rights abuse. It made Gaza into the biggest open-air prison in human history and has repeatedly dropped bombs on the most overpopulated place on earth.

MGM: Ripples Across The Pond - Dr. Antony Lempert

In contrast to the USA where a high percentage of boys are still routinely genitally mutilated shortly after birth, in Europe the practice is now mainly confined to children born into certain ethnic or religious communities. Over recent years, tradi-tional acceptance of ritual genital 'cutting' of male children in Europe has faced increasing challenge. The discrepancy between children as independ-ent holders of rights and parents as absolute arbiters of their children’s wel-fare has been noted and actioned by several medical, Governmental, non-Governmental and human rights organisations. There remains fierce re-sistance to change both from within and without the traditional genital mutilating com-munities.

Chomsky - Jewish State Israel, Not Multicultural Russia, Interferes With US Elections

If Americans Knew Excerpt from an interview with Professor Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now, July 23, 2018.

Honest Government Ad - My Police State!

thejuicemedia: The Australien Government has made an ad about the Police State it's creating, and it's surprisingly honest and informative.

Connected To The Matrix: Americans Spend Most Of Their Waking Hours Staring At A Screen

Authored by Michael Snyder: Before televisions and computers were invented, Americans didn’t spend any time staring at television and computer screens. They worked hard, raised their families, personally interacted with their communities (remember that?), and generally tried to make the world a better place.
But now for many of us, the “virtual world” actually seems more real than the “real world” does. In fact, as you will see below, average Americans now spend most of their waking hours staring at a screen. We have willingly connected ourselves to “the matrix”, and the amount of time spent connected is rising with each passing year. A report that was just put out by Nielsen found that we spend an average of 11 hours per day interacting with media...

Darren Deojee Interview

Ewan Jones interviews Darren Deojee at the International Conference on Men's Issues 2018. Darren teaches from the Toltec heritage of gender tradition. He works with groups, individuals, and couples on matters of gender and communication.

The Greek Disaster: State Inertia And The Market Economy

'The fire-fighting service had been financially starved, while its personnel had been recruiting new staff based on specific social criteria! In other words, firefighters entrusted with saving people from emergency situations were hired on the basis of their physical inability to deal with normal life situations.'

Authored by Andreas Andrianopoulos: What happened in Attica, close to Athens, is without precedent. An ordinary fire, like the ones that occur in this area almost every other summer, met up with a terrible, sudden wind that turned it into real galloping inferno. The tragic result was 87 dead Greek citizens and more than 20 still missing. Huge questions loom on the horizon and only very limited answers are forthcoming. Are some of the lessons from this tragedy related to the wider geopolitical and political-economic questions?

Public-sector clientelism is leading to disastrous inefficiency

Why do tragedies like these occur in social environments with firmly entrenched clientelist political systems and in political entities that operate on the periphery of major, bureaucratic, modern empires? Sweden saw huge uncontrolled fires this summer. However, there was no loss of life or major disasters that befell the urban centers.

Centrism Is Dead - And It Never Really Existed

By Michael Krieger: It’s a common refrain these days to hear people lament a decline of the so-called “center” in American politics. We’re supposed to look on in horror as “moderate” Republicans and Democrats become an engaged species of liberty-fighting patriots steamrolled by frothing, insane hordes of populist barbarians on their left and right flanks. They’re the voice of reason, lovers of apple pie and staunch defenders of our constitution and all that’s good and right in the US of A. We’re encouraged to run back into the blood soaked arms of establishment politicians like John McCain and Hillary Clinton — the only ones standing between us and the Donald Trumps and Bernie Sanders of the world. The center cannot hold, so we’re told.
It’s a nice story, the only problem is it’s complete and total nonsensical garbage. This mythical “center” is nothing more than a failed status quo attempting to rebrand itself in the wake of being outed as the corrupt charlatans they are. Russia, Trump and  Bernie Sanders didn’t destroy healthcare, bailout criminal bankers and invade Iraq based on fake news. No, moderate Republicans and Democrats did that. The so-called celebrated center did that.