Wednesday, November 15: Victory Over a Hospital
The cowardice of the Israeli military is legendary
As if bombing hospitals wasn’t enough, yesterday the apartheid-defending army of Israel invaded Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, triumphing over the ruins of what used to be Gaza’s leading medical facility. How anyone could possibly declare victory over a hospital is beyond me, but suffice to say that yesterday a conscripted military, armed to the teeth with the shiniest, most expensive and deadly weaponry on the planet, stormed a hospital full of besieged, wounded, and starved medical workers, patients, and displaced people, who have barely survived weeks of endless bombing. Truly their cowardice is unlike any other.
The storming of Al-Shifa Hospital is presented as Israel’s only option to reveal the extensive tunnel system they claim Hamas is hiding underneath it. NOTE: There is obviously no such tunnel system under the hospital. Similar to the US going to war over allegations of “weapons of mass destruction”, this whole ethnic cleansing campaign has been in pursuit of revealing evidence that doesn’t exist. For anyone wondering why the death toll in Gaza has been hovering around 11,000+ for a few days now, the number of Palestinians killed hasn’t leveled off in the slightest, eleven thousand is simply the count when the systems to reliably record the dead began to collapse.
It’s always refreshing to see that our elected officials are able to cross the aisle and align with their ideological adversaries when it comes time to defend occupation and apartheid. Yesterday, our nation’s capital played host to the “march for Israel” aka the gathering of the genocide fan club. The event organizers inflated the numbers quite a bit, but tens of thousands of melanin-deprived apartheid advocates crowded the national mall, calling for more violence and ethnic cleansing. Of course some of these protesters were paid to attend, but all in all, the “largest pro-Israel protest in US history” numbered about 30,000 people. Not exactly the overwhelming show of unwavering American support that organizers were probably hoping for, but a crowd nonetheless.
One of the speakers at yesterday’s march, CNN’s Van Jones (a media-trained clown), was booed onstage when he called for an end to bombing innocent civilians. Ordinarily I can’t take anything Jones says seriously, I mean at one point the guy slipped up and said “Let’s take a stand against Muslim”, so forgive me if his thoughts on the matter don’t weigh too heavily on my mind. Still, the idiots who congregated in Washington DC began openly chanting, “No ceasefire” as Jones stood there like an idiot, calling for peace. These zionist cowards are out here booing peace and calling for more bloodshed, and people are still debating over whether chanting “from the river to the sea” qualifies as an antisemitic hate crime. “No ceasefire” is quite literally a rallying slogan explicitly endorsing further violence and calling for the continuation of ethnic cleansing, yet all the people endlessly hand wringing over Palestinian slogans are silent on this one. How interesting.
Speaker of the house Mike Johnson (another bozo) went so far as to tell protesters, "The calls for a ceasefire are outrageous. Israel will cease their counter-offensive when Hamas ceases to be a threat to the Jewish state.” The problem with this line of thinking is it suggests that “defeating Hamas” is a tangible goal of the Israeli military. The bloodthirsty apartheid forces have many goals (kill Palestinians, destroy as many homes as possible, film some decent PR for western media, etc.) but at this point “defeating Hamas” is about as abstract as the American “war on drugs” or the “war on terror” that only resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead Arabs. The only two foreseeable outcomes of the attack on Gaza are either indefinite military occupation by Israel or an eventual ceasefire and withdrawal. There are no paths to “success” as defined by Benny Netanyahu. But because a ceasefire would probably mean the end of Bibi, this war will continue until the US has decided enough is enough, which may not be for awhile.
In totally unconcerning news, New York’s governor Kathy Hochul (yet another clown) announced that the state was directing resources to conduct “special media surveillance efforts” to monitor online hate speech. So what I’m gathering is it’s almost time for Patriot Act 2.0! In other news, I sat down with my pal Zain last week to record the first episode of his podcast. We talked about the crumbling western empire, the role a newsletter like this plays in documenting imperial decline, and how collective action is really in all of our best interest. Tap in and give it a listen if you’re interested!
Side Items
Tough Guy Senator: Markwayne Mullin, a man so smooth-brained they gave him two names at birth, made an absolute joke of himself yesterday by challenging a Teamsters leader to a fistfight in the midst of a senate hearing. A word of advice, dear reader: if you're going to challenge a stranger to a fistfight, make sure they’re not going to immediately agree to said fistfight and embarrass you in front of your work friends. Eventually Bernard Sanders was able to restore order in the courtroom, but keep an eye out for Markwayne folks, his mother Brenda is worried about him because he’s apparently itching for a fight
Government Shutdown Avoided (For Now): The house of “representatives” voted yesterday to prevent a government shutdown, with new republican speaker Mike Johnson securing temporarily funding for the government into the new year. His proposal passed on a bipartisan 336-95 vote, so now we can rest assured that our federal government won’t shut down before January 1st