Syria-Lebanon-Iran | ||||||
Lebanon: Nasrallah agreed to a ceasefire just before Israel killed him | ||||||
2024-10-04 | ||||||
[MiddleEastMonitor] In an interview with CNN yesterday, Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib confirmed Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire with Israel moments before the occupation state killed its Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah last week. The Lebanese government had informed America and France of the decision, he explained, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also accepted the terms.
The revelation raises questions about Israel’s motives in escalating the conflict despite apparent progress towards a ceasefire. It’s been pointed out that Israel’s behaviour aligns with a long-standing strategy of avoiding what has been termed a “peace offensive” by the occupation state. The concept, first articulated by Israeli strategist Avner Yaniv in 1982, posits that Israel perceives a risk in Palestinians or their allies becoming too moderate or diplomatically credible. Such a scenario could force Israel to make peace or engage in talks, potentially undermining its military or political dominance in the Middle East. Critics argue that successive Israeli governments have historically used escalations in violence as a means to avoid peace negotiations. By provoking or continuing conflicts, Israel can justify military actions, prevent diplomatic solutions, and delay the establishment of a Palestinian state, allowing for continued illegal settlement expansion and the domination of Palestine. Israel has been offered full normalisation by the Arab world since 2002 through the Arab Peace Initiative.
The reluctance to pursue peace is evidenced further by the hateful charter of the most successful political party in Israel, Likud, led by Israel’s longest serving Prime Minister, Netanyahu. “The Jordan River will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel,” says the charter. “The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan River.” This latest claim about Israel rejecting peace in favour of a war with Hezbollah, will be seen as yet another attempt by the apartheid state to avoid diplomatic solutions in favour of continuing its illegal occupation of Palestine.
| ||||||
Link |
International-UN-NGOs |
Civilized world should ignore ICC's arrest warrant for Netanyahu |
2024-05-21 |
[Washington Examiner] The International Criminal Court again is proving itself a misbegotten menace, indeed an illegitimate body, as its top prosecutor, Karim Khan, seeks an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Actually, the two assertions here are separate, although the first helps demonstrate the second. First, the idea of warrants for the Israeli officials is outrageous. Second, even if it weren’t seeking to arrest the Israelis, the ICC is illegitimate in concept and design. As for Khan’s request for warrants, it also includes ones for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and two other top Hamas officials. The simultaneous warrant requests apparently are supposed to indicate how neutral and evenhanded the ICC’s team is. Instead, the purported "balance" is offensive. It essentially puts a terrorist group on the same moral and legal plane as the fairly elected leader of a genuinely representative democracy. It all but directly equates the deliberate targeting and torturing of innocent civilians during an unprovoked act of terrorism, on the one hand, with, on the other hand, the "just war" response of the injured party, one that goes out of its way to warn civilians of impending military action and to help provide escape corridors for their safe passage. Moreover, the specific accusations Khan made against the two Israeli officials are demonstrably false. He told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that the Israelis are guilty of "causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, deliberately targeting civilians in conflict. ... The fact that Hamas fighters need water doesn’t justify denying water from all the civilian population of Gaza." |
Link |
Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
ICC chief prosecutor seeks arrests for Netanyahu, Gallant and Hamas chiefs |
2024-05-20 |
[JPost] "Today.. we’ve applied for warrants to the pre-trial chamber of the ICC in relation to three individuals that are Hamas members," Khan said. The International Criminal Court Chief is seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammed Deif, its Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview on Monday. "Today.. we’ve applied for warrants to the pre-trial chamber of the ICC in relation to three individuals that are Hamas members," Khan said. "Sinwar who’s in charge on the ground... Deif, who’s in charge of the Al Qassam Brigade and Haniyeh who is [in charge of their] political bureau based in Doha," Khan said. His words ended the speculation about whether the ICC would issue such warrants, a step that its pre-trail chamber must still approve. The charges against the Hamas leaders are "extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention," he said, adding that these are "the key crimes that are alleged to have been committed by these three individuals." The world was shocked by Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel, he said, as he referred to the event in which over 1,200 people were killed, and another 252 were seized as hostages, of which 128 remain in captivity. "People were ripped from their bedrooms, from their homes, from the different Kibbutzim in Israel. "People have suffered enormously, and we have a variety of evidence to support the applications that we've submitted to the judges," Khan stated. The Chief Prosecutor also laid out the charges in the arrest warrant for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for their role in the Gaza war. Hamas has claimed that over 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in that conflict, varying close to 25,000 of those deaths. Israel has said that 15,000 of those fatalities are combatants. Khan said that the charges against the Israeli Prime Minister are "extermination, causing starvation as a method of war including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies [and] deliberately targeting civilians in conflict."His applications for warrants come as the International Court of Justice is adjudicating South Africa’s accusations that Israel was in violation of the 1948 genocide convention. |
Link |
Home Front: Politix | ||||
Christiane Amanpour: Trump's NATO Comments ‘Literally Insane' | ||||
2024-02-13 | ||||
![]()
She continued, "Usually quite careful and diplomatic Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, came out immediately and dismissed this comment and said, you know, they expect any U.S. president, no matter what party or who that would be, to abide by the rules of NATO and the Article 5. So, the idea he used the words to encourage Russia to do what the hell it wants in Europe, is terrifying for Europeans and the rest of the world, especially in the defense of democracy and the international world order, which the U.S. has, you know, since World War II led. | ||||
Link |
Home Front: Politix |
Clarice Feldman: Hillary Drops the Veil on Her Party's Totalitarianism |
2023-10-08 |
![]() Whatever the reason, you know, make America great again was a bid for nostalgia to return to a place where people could be in charge of their lives, feel empowered, say what they want, insult whoever came in their way. And that was really attractive to a significant portion of the Republican base. So, it is like a cult. Amanpour was visibly taken aback at this candor, but didn’t press her as to how and for whom this deprogramming was to occur. In the past, whenever a Republican candidate for any office made an outrageous comment -- and this was supremely outrageous -- every candidate of his party would be asked if he agreed with it. I’d suggest the RNC encourage its candidates to take the same tack. Babylon Bee, my favorite satire site, made hay of this interview, “Viewers are perplexed by a CNN interview featuring a deranged old lady who recently escaped from an elder care facility, angrily ranting about wanting to ‘deprogram’ half of the nation’s population.” But there’s nothing new and nothing funny about the totalitarian impulse on the Left. Last January a Rasmussen survey indicated that one-third of Democrats thought children should be removed from the homes of unvaccinated parents (despite the very low rate of COVID infections and mortality in children) and a whopping 50% of them wanted to imprison the unvaccinated. Nor do we lack evidence that the Democrats have captured the intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies and used them to harass, muzzle, imprison and “unperson” those who dare to disagree with them. Indeed, the same week Hillary advocated deprogramming, Newsweek (which just a few years ago claimed we are all socialists now) reported that the FBI seeks to track and counter Trump supporters. The FBI and DHS report concludes: "Sociopolitical developments -- such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence -- will almost certainly spur some domestic terrorists to try to engage in violence." You’ll excuse me if I question the ability of the FBI to deal with the issue in a nonpartisan matter. We know how they violated the law when lying to the FISA court to snoop on the Trump campaign. This week we learned that it had the flash drive that authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop weeks before the election and never disclosed that when 50 former intelligence officials publicly asserted that the laptop story had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. That the Bureau has already been fully weaponized against MAGA supporters is beyond debate. The Bureau weaponized Jan. 6, 2021, against MAGA supporters. It is important to know that the majority of protesters on Jan. 6 were peaceful and that many of the individuals sentenced to years in jail did not do anything violent, and, in some cases, didn’t even enter the Capitol. Yet there were no consequences for violent pro-abortion activists who attacked and burned pro-life centers and churches, Antifa and BLM got off largely scot-free for burning and looting cities, and the government and media were strangely silent about violent “transurrections” at multiple state Capitols. Looking at the treatment of dissenters from the democratic agenda, like Trump and Elon Musk, Robby Stark makes a persuasive case that the totalitarian impulse of the left is already in force: @robbystarbuck Daily I get the impression we are living in the takeover of the country Sinclair Lewis described in It Can’t happen Here. Also: Hillary Clinton is an evil person |
Link |
Home Front: Politix |
Hillary Clinton: MAGA ‘cult members' need ‘deprogramming' |
2023-10-07 |
[HILL] Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton railed against supporters of former President Trump during a new CNN interview, comparing those who still support the former president after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to members of a cult. “Maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members,” she said in a clip released late Thursday. “And sadly, so many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure,” Clinton added. “He’s only in it for himself.” She predicted Trump will likely be the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, and she believes President Biden can beat him again. “One will wreck our democracy. One violates the law on a regular basis. One appeals to the worst in our collective psyche. The other gets things done,” she said in the interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “Why is that a hard choice?” A Trump-affiliated super PAC denounced Clinton’s comments early Friday, saying they are akin to her wanting “re-education camps.” “President Trump has said countless times that they are only coming after him, because he stands in their way from coming after you — and Hillary Clinton just confirmed that to be true,” Make America Great Again Inc. spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said. “Tens of millions of Americans will reject the Democrat Party’s re-education camp agenda in November 2024 when we make Donald Trump the 47th President of the United States,” |
Link |
Home Front: Politix |
Out-of-Touch Obama in Massive Self-Awareness Fail |
2023-06-28 |
![]() I inhaled. That was the point... — the descendent of Africans and white people — dared to criticize Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) — the descendent of actual slaves and a son of the state where the Civil War started — for being optimistic about the state of race in America today, the former president weighed in on what he thinks spurs on "right-wing populism." In an interview with Ace newshound Christiane Amanpour on CNN ...formerly the Cable News Network, now who know what it might stand for... , Obama said, "It’s very hard to sustain a democracy when you have such massive concentrations of wealth." He went on to blather about "ladders of opportunity" and a "stronger safety net" before concluding that "if we don’t take care of that, that’s also going to fuel the kind of mostly far-right populism, but it can also potentially come from the left, that is undermining democracy because it makes people angry and resentful and scared." First off, with all due respect to the Condescender-in-Chief — which is none as far as I’m concerned — we’re a republic, not a democracy. Second, it’s an awfully Marxist argument to pin the problem and solution solely on economics. But what I want to focus on is Obama’s utter lack of self-awareness. After all, if anybody should know about "massive concentrations of wealth," it’s Barry. As Jim Geraghty points out at National Review: Obama and his wife signed the largest book deal in history, $65 million, for their memoirs. The Obamas signed a separate production deal with Netflix worth an estimated $50 million. The Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground, signed a $25 million deal with Spotify that lasted three years. Barack Obama reportedly makes as much as $400,000 per speech, but reportedly made almost $600,000 for speaking at a conference in Colombia. Michelle Obama makes $200,000 per appearance. The Obamas rent a mansion in Kalorama (a neighborhood in Washington, D.C.); bought a mansion and estate in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.; bought another house in Rancho Mirage, Calif.; and still have their old home in the Hyde Park neighborhood of reliably Democrat Chicago, aka The Windy City or Mobtown ...home of Al Capone, the Chicago Black Sox, a succession of Daleys, Barak Obama, and Rahm Emmanuel... In April 2010, then-president Obama declared, "At a certain point, you’ve made enough money." Apparently, Obama hasn’t reached that point yet. Ouch. Barack might need some ointment for that burn. The other area where Obama is showing a painful lack of self-awareness is in his estimation of the roots of populism on the right. Naturally, as someone who sat at the feet of socialists for much of his formative years, Obama defaults to the economic reasons, with big government and the redistribution of wealth (someone else’s, not his own) as the solution, but what he either ignores or doesn’t realize is that one of the main catalysts for right-leaning populism is people’s belief that their government is against them. And we have Barack Obama to thank for laying that foundation. President Gun-to-a-Knife-Fight is the Godfather of the division and weaponized government that Joe The Big GuyBiden ...46th president of the U.S. S I'm not working for you. Don't be such a horse's ass.... turned into an ugly art form, and he did so without any pretense of being a man of the people like Lunchbucket Joe. This is the man who, in his first campaign for the White House, decried the peons who "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." This is the president who sicced the IRS ...the Internal Revenue Service; that office of the United States government that collects taxes and persecutes the regime's political enemies... and other federal agencies on conservatives with abandon. Joe Biden merely told his old boss, "Hold my, um, well, you know, the drink thing." We mustn’t forget that this current strain of populism on the right came about largely as a result of Barack Obama and his policies. He lacks enough self-awareness to realize it himself. |
Link |
-Great Cultural Revolution |
Propaganda Acolytes: 54 Soros-Tied Figures Linked to Major Media |
2023-01-19 |
[MRCbusiness/NewsBusters] The over $32 billion that leftist billionaire George Soros poured into his organizations to spread his radical “open society” agenda on abortion, Marxist economics, anti-Americanism, defunding the police, environmental extremism and LGBT fanaticism around the globe has paid dividends. In fact, his funding has helped him establish ties with some of the biggest name media personalities in the United States and abroad which help indoctrinate millions with his views on a day-to-day basis. MRC Business found at least 54 prominent media figures (e.g. reporters, anchors, columnists, editors, news executives and journalists) who are tied to Soros through their connections to organizations that he funds. These include personalities like NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt and The Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee. This is the final report in a three-part series that reveals the extent of Soros’ influence over the international media. MRC Business’ extensive research has uncovered 253 journalism and activist media groups across the world financed to the tune of $131 million between 2016 and 2020 by Soros’ enormous network of philanthropic organizations, which allows him to leave an unparalleled footprint on global media. This network of media ties allows Soros to hold sizable influence over the stories that the media covers, how they cover those stories, and what stories they don’t cover. Soros once told The New York Times that he was working to “bend” the arc of history “in the right direction,” and he’s using his global media clout to do it. The media influence and ties that Soros bought was enough to insulate him from being seriously investigated by most journalists. Whenever a conservative critic dared to raise any objections to Soros’ spending and major political footprint, the liberal media worked overtime to characterize those critics as anti-Semites, as Bongino Report Content Manager Matt Palumbo told MRC Business in an exclusive interview. But mostly what Soros buys is silence. The full report can be accessed at the link, along with links to the previous two reports. |
Link |
Home Front: Politix |
Texas Catholic Bishop J. Strickland Labels Hillary Clinton an 'Evil Woman' |
2022-12-05 |
![]() Amanpour began her so-called interview with Clinton by asking for her thoughts on the "unfinished business" on women’s rights: "I just wonder when you hear it again and see what’s happening to women around the world. What do you think as you say, "unfinished business?" |
Link |
Home Front: Politix |
PBS Suggests DeSantis, Republicans To Blame For Hurricanes |
2022-10-01 |
[NEWSBUSTERS] As Hurricane Ian devastates Florida, PBS’s Ace newshound Christiane Amanpour used Thursday’s Amanpour and Company to welcome environmental politics professor Leah Stokes to suggest that Gov. Ron DeSantis![]() and other Republicans are responsible for the storm. Amanpour led Stokes by wondering where Florida goes from here, "And as you say, it is becoming a recurring pattern. And as the president said, it is still moving across the state and perhaps to other areas. Which means that flooding is going to continue and it is continuing apace. What happens now in the wake of this or in its, literally, its wake, in the waters, that people are finding themselves? And we already heard millions of Floridians and others are cut off from electricity." After discussing more immediate concerns, Stokes turned to the bigger picture, "So, this is why we can't stop ignoring the climate crisis. And unfortunately, the governor of Florida, DeSantis, he is not really willing to talk about climate change. In fact, earlier this summer he said that the state could not be investing pension funds, public dollars, in a way that is aligned with climate change. This is terrible. He is acting in ways that are undermining the safety and well-being of his own constituents in Florida." Instead of correcting the record about DeSantis’s ESG order or noting that despite Ian, 2022 has been a below average year for hurricanes, Amanpour expanded the conversation even further: Leah, how far out of step is he or not with the majority of American opinion? I ask you this because as you know, in President Trump's administration, they rolled back some 100 environmental rules and regulations. And the Supreme Court ...the political football known as The Highest Court in the Land, home of penumbrae and emanations... , as you know, just curbed the EPA's ability to fight climate change. And you just mentioned DeSantis and his views. Have Americans changed their views? Are the deniers less, you know, powerful than they used to be when this was, you know, a matter of debate? |
Link |
Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
31 killed in Iran protests, as people torch cop shoppes |
2022-09-23 |
[PUBLISH.TWITTER]
|
Link |