Author: paulm100m

New Zealand Supports Gazans to Die Faster

The New Zealand government , unsurprisingly, has, along with 11 other Western countries, decided to withhold funding to UNRWA because of allegations by the Israeli apartheid regime in Tel Aviv that 12 of its thousands of staff in Gaza and the West Bank had been involved in the October 7th attack by Hamas on Israelis.

As Amnesty International makes exceptionally clear-‘At a time when Israel, the occupying power, continues to flagrantly violate its obligations vis-à-vis Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, UNRWA has long served as a sole lifeline, offering indispensable humanitarian aid, education and shelter. The agency also provides desperately needed aid for millions of other Palestinian refugees living in neighbouring Arab countries.”

As is made clear in the video below of an Israeli Knesset representative calling for the destruction of UNRWA several months ago-the elimination of aid to Gazans has long been a strategic goal of Israel as it continues to demolish and kill everything in its path in Gaza.

Please note that Noga Orbel’s statements are not the ravings of a lone psychopath, they are what passes for normal and acceptable in Israel’s parliament.

The United States, United Kingdom , Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Finland –and now New Zealand have all agreed that, despite the fact that they know Israel has been consistently lying for its 75 years of existence, to justify its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, that they should ‘suspend’ funding to the UNRWA which has been the literally sole lifeline of food and water to Gazans trapped in Gazan while Israel bombards them into oblivion and blockades and destroys all essential services to Gazans.

What additionally needs to be said about the pyschopaths coordinating this genocide?

What these 12 ‘white’ countries (Japan is an honorary obedient white country in their eyes) are doing is directly aiding and abetting the psychopaths in Tel Aviv, in the mass murder of Palestinians. Without UNRWA aid to Gazans, many many more Palestinians will die.

The Zionist’s bizarre ideology insists that only Jewish people can live in the land of Palestine, and anyone else who has lived there who is not Jewish must be removed one way or another- through murder, imprisonment in Israeli jails or the open air concetration camps of the West Bank and Gaza , or expelled to refugee camps in another country.

This 75 years old strategy, begun in 1948 by Israel’s military with the Nakba (the Palestinian ‘Catastrophe’), is apparently all kosher and ok with those 12 white countries.

That 2 million Gazans will now either starve to death, die by disease from polluted water, freeze to death from lack of shelter or lack of health services destroyed by Israel, is of course of no concern to these ‘civilised’ countries.

Purely coincidentally of course, the Israeli allegations and the very prompt response from Western nations to halt aid, comes just days after the interim ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which (despite the subsequent denials of Israel, its Zionist supporters and many of these same white nations) established a prima facie case of genocide by Israel against Gazans.

The so fondly quoted US “rule based international order”(which Scott Burchell  has aptly described as ” Washington’s confected alternative to international law, the so-called “rules-based international order”, is now exposed as nothing more than a hypocritical protection racket in free fall’.) and the western governments and their politicians and bureaucrats who so slavishly support it, has now been brutally exposed for what it is – the ghoulish face of racist psychopaths perfectly content to let millions die, in that so honorable cause of propping up their careers and profits.

Postscript

https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/02/02/nz-eyes-aukus-pillar-two-what-is-it-and-how-could-it-impact-us/

One might have thought that NZ politicians were not quite so stupid as their Aussie colleagues in signing up to the U.S. inspired AUKUS protection racket-confronting non-existent threats from Russia & China & wasting millions in taxpayers money.

Perhaps they might have been better to consult with the new Argentinian president’s dead dog?

____________________________

Links

Parliament debates NZDF Red Sea deployment | RNZ News

https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/49030

Has International Law Survived, or Has the Western Political Class Killed It?

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/israels-allies-accelerate-genocide-freezing-unrwa-funds

The Western club- with its own morals, rules and rewards

https://amnesty.org.nz/reverse-cruel-decision-to-withdraw-unrwa-funding

Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia
Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia
Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia
Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia
Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia
Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia
Gaza 2023 -Wikimedia

Fmr. UNRWA Spox Refutes Israeli Smears (usefulidiotspodcast.com)

New Zealand Aligns itself with Genocide

23/01/23

New Zealand’s new Coalition government has, as of 23rd January 2023, formally agreed to support Israel’s genocide in Palestine by agreeing (at US request) to provide a small military force to support the American ‘coalition” to bombard Yemen.

The New Zealand prime minister Christopher Luxon, has committed outrageous lies to say there is no connection between the Gaza terror and the actions of Ansarallah (Houthi). Ansarallah has made it abundantly clear that the reason it has been attacking shipping heading to Israel is to try and force Israel to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza.

Mr Luxon is self-evidently lying through his teeth in saying there is no connection between the Red Sea attacks by Ansarallah and Gaza. Unsurprisingly, our ‘great’ New Zealand journalists at the news conference where Luxon was interviewed on the Yemen announcement, blindly accepted these lies without a question.

The UK and US in their bombing campaign in Yemen are simply continuing the genocide that their previous Saudi proxy had waged in Yemen for 9 years from 2014, using American and UK weapons, American and UK military instructors and guidance systems, and in all likelihood, “retired” British and American pilots to bomb one of the poorest countries in the world.

New Zealand’s conservative National Party which Chris Luxon leads, has a long history of sucking up to every US war of atrocity- from Korea, (shelling North Korean fishing villages from our warships) Vietnam (sustained mortar fire into Vietnamese villages), Iraq( hiding in their military camp in Basra) , Afghanistan (supporting the US and Australians to murder and torture Afghans) to its proxy war in Ukraine ( providing logistics to Ukrainian neonazis to shell Donetsk City civilians with cluster munitions) ; but all tiny amounts of military support  intended to bolster the U.S.’s ‘legitimacy’ in fighting these wars on the world stage.

However, the United States no longer has the credibility or respect of the Global South or indeed much of the world; particularly because of its unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal savagery in Gaza.

As Caitlin Johnstone notes:

We live in a dystopian world where it’s completely normalized to subvert human interests to commercial interests, to toss tens of thousands of lives into the incinerator for wealth and convenience. Where war profiteers rake in vast fortunes for selling instruments of mass murder to genocidal governments, and where the most powerful empire in history declares a war to defend shipping containers at the cost of human life.

Don’t ever let these sick freaks convince you that this is normal.

The National Party, along with its right wing allies; New Zealand First and ACT, are stuck in a time warp where the “civilised’ white man rules the world, and might is right.

New Zealand’s credibility globally has just sunk to a new low.

_________________________-

Links

The Biden Administration’s Absurd Justification For Its Yemen War

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/01/hoping-that-china-will-help-with-yemen-is-delusional-bullshit.html#more

Humans’ ‘Intelligence’

I was reminded of human beings’ selective cognition by a wonderful recent quote from Patrick Lawrence: ‘The core purpose of ideology is to preclude all need of thinking of any kind’.

As Patrick succinctly points out- frameworks for thinking necessarily limit what we can see and understand- what is outside the framework is often invisible, and unknown to us, or simply incomprehensible or dangerous.

We are of course all limited by pre-determined reference points in our attempt to understand how the world works. The subtle and not so subtle messages we acquire by osmosis for those who care for us (or don’t) in our early formative years. There are a multitude of hypotheses about how that works- from Freud to Piaget to Vygotsky to Stephen Krashen.

Suffice to say that who we become and how we perceive the world is largely determined by our environment, and that environment is, in our early years at least, predetermined by others and random events that impact us. But even those ‘random events’ will be framed in our consciousness by what we have experienced before. One person’s experience and response to an event will often be entirely different to anothers..

And while our childhood provides the strongest framework for perception which may last our lifetime, we are constantly being impacted by new experiences which may subtly, or not so subtly, impact that framework; the experience of trauma for instance can profoundly rewire that mental framework.

And as that wired framework becomes more solid and impermeable to new experience, the lifelong construction of our egos begins. New experiences begin to predominantly simply validate our previous experience and mental framework, rather than providing new insights on the world and ourselves; we become progressively ‘locked-in’ to being ‘this particular person’- or rather this particular ego construction. Validation and inflation of the ego becomes the predominant ‘mind-set’ for many human beings for the remainder of their lives. In a way, our egos take up the brain space that might have been left for inspiration and insight!

And in addition, (going back to Patrick Lancaster’s point), we might choose one or other ideology, or fixed mindset, to further validate that sense of who we ‘think’ we are, and which group of humans we believe we belong to.

Taking all that into account, we might guess that those humans who desire to becomes ‘leaders’ of a particular section of the human race; their predominant driving force is not the furtherance of the good of that group they wish to lead – but the furtherance of their own egos. Once their egos are partially satisfied with that power that leadership endows, there is only one way forward; more power and a larger inflated ego!

And, as we have just stated, the bigger the ego,the smaller resultant brain power there is available to respond to events in innovative and open ways; the cliched, the prejudiced, the racist, or the violent response, is what comes first and easiest.

As 2024 begins to unfold in a multitude of often violent tumultuous ways, it is becoming abundantly clear that our current global leaders are definitively, not up to the job. Whether it be the weather balloon sized egos of Trudeau or Macron, the ruthless egos of Putin or Xi Jinping, or the demented ego of Joe Biden determined to bring the world down around his ears as his dementia unfolds. And let us not forget the pyschopaths like Israel’s Netanyahu, or the excessive intellectual limitations of Germany’s Olaf Sholtz or Britain’s Rishi Sunak!

And lets not go anywhere near Ukrainian comedians who become politicians!

With potential emergencies like global wars initiated in Ukraine or Taiwan, and the very real mammoth global disaster that is global warming and bio-diversity loss, the world desperately needs leaders who can put aside their egos, who can bring people together with really innovative ideas, and who then have the courage to make those ideas happen, for a sustainable and more peaceful world!

What global structure do we need to make that leadership pool happen?

Welcome to 2024! 

New Zealand as a Commodity for Sale

New Zealand’s new prime minister, Chris Luxon, has repeatedly stated that his job is to ‘run New Zealand’s economy’. He apparently does not understand that money is a commodity designed to facilitate transactions for the good of the whole population and is not an end in itself.

As the leader of the conservative New Zealand National Party, Luxon like his fellow right wing coalition parties, ‘ACT’ and ‘New Zealand First’, believes that reallocating more wealth and power to those who are already wealthy will be good for the country (though obviously not so good for those already on low incomes). As has been often previously quoted- ‘they know the price of everything and the value of nothing’.

In addition, the third leg of the coalition triad, the ACT Party, with an Ayn Rand-ish ‘pathology, is attempting to remove one of the key bases of what New Zealand is, a multicultural society where the indigenous Maori population have guaranteed rights, as enshrined in the Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti), signed between Maori and the British Queen in 1840. Thankfully, Maori are immediately rallying and demonstrating to make clear to this white government that a revision to the Treaty is unacceptable.

Te Tiriti flag-the Treaty of Waitangi flag

It is a sad indictment of NZ’s education system and society, that so many New Zealanders continue to believe that making more money is what matters. ‘Making money’ requires ‘development’, whose direct coefficient is further destruction of the environment. ‘Development’ and ‘environmental destruction’ are, and have always been, directly linkaged- but strangely few economists ever cost the environmental impacts of ‘development’ and ‘progress’ into their financial assessments.

But environmental issues are of little concern to our brave new coalition partners. What apparently matters is a strict ideological commitment to the ‘free market’ and the firm punishment of those who do not commit to “New Zealand values” (whatever those might be). Thus strategies such as ‘boot camps’ for young people who offend, stiffer prison sentences and more prisons for offenders (particularly our Maori population), removal of Maori as an official co-language of the state, more motorways rather than public transport or EV options, and a re-commitment to our long-term ally, the genocidal ‘international rule based order’ (not UN based order) United States… In other words, a return to a more predictable ‘safer’ and ‘whiter’ world of 30 years ago, so they apparently believe..

Evidence, facts and research are not part of the decision-making process of this coalition of the mindless, harking back to a non-existant past when everything was clear and certain.

Unsurprisingly, managing a country is not quite the same as a managing a budget,nor is managing a state budget the same as managing a company budget, whose only bottom line is profit, rather than the sustainable wellbeing of its population and environment.

While New Zealand’s coalition partners ‘ideals’ do not quite match up to the imbecilic status of the new neoliberal leader of Argentina, Javier Milei, who is most certainly poised to completely destroy what remains of Argentinian society and its economy, we can get a strong sense of New Zealand colaition leaders reflexively returning to old tried and true historic conservative policies which have been amply demonstrated to be ineffective and damaging to key sectors of the country -except for the wealthy

And, as the US and the West’s unqualified support for Israel’s latest war of indisputable evil on the Palestinian people has so clearly demonstrated – the West is not on the ‘right side’ of history, (nor has it ever been) . As a multicultural country with illusions of fair play and freedom, New Zealand needs to be seen to be standing solidly with the oppressed of this world; those in the South who have been abused, murdered and stolen from by the West for centuries. Instead we are cosying up once again to the global homicidal maniac- the United States!

New Zealand’s new Foreign Minister veteran politician Winston Peters has been quoted as saying Israel has a ‘right to self-defence’-obviously deliberately ignoring the UN’s declaration of rights that an occupying power (Israel) has a right an obligation to protect that population whose land it occupies ( Palestinians) Israel cannot therefore be legally be at war with its own people, the Palestinians, who it has corralled into concentration camps like Gaza and the West Bank for 75 years. While calling for a ‘cease-fire’, Mr Peters obviously places far more weight on being obsequious to the US, than eliminating long-term Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing.

And finally, New Zealand’s coalition partners, while no longer publicly expressing their scepticism about climate change, their new policies of ‘growth, growth and more growth and damn the environment’ clearly demonstrate their contempt of the stark environmental issues facing us all, and their blindness to its realities. No more light rail or subsidies for EV cars, more motorways,more tourists from places halfway round the world; it is like the last 20 years of growing environmental catastrophes simply did not exist!

Full speed ahead to that environmental brick wall, chaps!

The Psychopathic West

As of 19th November 2023, the Israeli “Defence” Force (IDF) continues to bomb, fire missiles, bulldoze and steadily destroy the Gaza Strip, the 177 square kilometre concentration camp set up by Israel in 1975 to contain Palestinians already enduring a blockade limiting food water electricity and other resources.

As the “occupying entity’ Israel under international law, has an obligation to protect that population. Israel ignores all such UN requirements, and has consistently brutalised the Gaza and West Bank Palestinian populations, as it has done since the Nakba (the Catastrophe) of 1948, when Israeli soldiers killed thousands and forcibly ejected millions from Palestine into refugee camps across the Middle East.

Israel was only able to achieve that ethnic cleansing and subsquent genocide of the Palestinian people with the unconditional military support of billions of dollars and pounds from the United States and the United Kingdom. These two entities have thus made a 75 year commitment to genocide of the Palestinian people to ensure that European Zionists can live their apartheid dream of a Jews only state in Palestine -thus condemning all non-Jews in Palestine; many of whom can trace their families back thousands of years in Palestine, to lives as non-citizens, or, in the words of many Zionists- sub-humans.

Thus while the IDF continues its barbaric bombing of women, children hospitals universities,essential infrastructure and residential areas in Gaza under the pretence of fighting Hamas; the US and UK “authorities” secretly celebrate the final solution to the Palestinian problem-sending more missiles and bombs to Israel so that the Gazan population can be finally eradicated or forced into Egypt.

A cease-fire therefore is not an option; that would just prolong the Palestinian problem and might lead, (“God”-forbid) to a negotiated settlement – a 2 or 1 state solution.

British and US “authorities” are therefore dismayed at the enormous groundswell of public revulsion in the West to Israel’s barbaric response to Hamas’s terror attack on October 7th, which lead to the deaths of over a thousand Israelis and about 250 hostages. Increasing evidence shows that many of those deaths were caused by Israeli helicopter gunships shooting at anything that moved.

https://goingunderground.castos.com/episodes/bombshell-max-blumenthal-exposes-israels-bidens-lies-deceit-over-gaza-bloodbath-october-7th

It is ironic that it is only now that Western publics are beginning to appreciate what Israel stands for- a quasi-religious fanatic apartheid state prepared to undertake any barbarity to fulfil its messianiac goal of a Jews-only state in Palestine.

These acts of barbarity and dehumanisation of Palestinians are not a one-off; they are part of a systematic process of extermination of Palestinians that has been steadily evolving and constantly refined by the Israeli state since the Nakba of 1948.

Those who criticise the Israeli entities actions are deemed to be ‘anti-semitic’; strangely ignoring the overtly deeply racist and murderous anti-Palestinian actions of the Israeli state and its settler thugs, and ignoring the explicit racism of a state that only recognises one section of its people as legitimate citizens.

For 75 years Israel has been milking the myth of it being the victim against Arab terrorism, a myth that Western mainstream media has enthusiastically endorsed, despite the evidence. e.g. Even today the New Zealand state television channel, TVNZ1 conveniently refuses (despite requests) to acknowledge the existence of the Nakba when outlining their history of the ‘Israeli/Arab’ conflict.

Purely coincidentally of course, we note that New Zealand’s ‘Five Eyes’ ally Australia is providing targetting data of Palestinians to be murdered by Israel, through its Pine Gap intelligence monitoring facility. Almost certainly, New Zealand is providing similar data to Israel via its signal intelligence facility at Waihopai.

So why does the US and UK and most of the West “unconditionally” support these 75 years of brutal savagery by Israel?

Because its suits them. Israel is supposedly a rational “Western” (read “white”) state entity in the Middle East amidst a torrent of ‘unpredictable Arabs’ -who also dont have the “right” religion! Israel is a predictable conduit for Western arms into the region. Israel can act as a proxy for Western ambitions in the Middle East, can spy for them, and can undertake savagery in the region with terrorists that would be hard to justify at home; including ongoing assassinations of Iranian scientists and providing support to ISIS jihadists in Syria.

US and UK authorities continue to deny what is self-evident-that Israel is committing massive war crimes against the Palestinian people. Using the illegitimate excuse of ‘revenge’, Israel is indisputably committing the war crime of collective punishment. UK’s Labour leader (and bizarrely a human rights lawyer) Keir Starmer, has enthused about the right of Israel to commit collective punishment, knowing full well he is lying, and is thus complicit himself in genocide

The UK, France, and other Western nations have even attempted to make support for Palestine illegal (a gross human rights abuse in itself). Such is the desperation of the Western establishment to support apartheid Israel, no matter the cost. The effort to keep lying that Israel is a shining democracy with the right to ”self-defence’ by people like Germany’s Olaf Sholtz is astounding. Im not aware of too many democracies in the world that keep half their population in concentration camps, depriving them of basic necessities of life and human rights!- but such are the cruel fantasies that people like Sholtz have to make up to defend their complicity in genocide.

And all the while, Palestinian people of all ages are being massacred by the Israel state for the crime of not being Jewish.

Mothers, fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, young children and babies; blown to pieces by Western bombs and missiles used by a racist psychopath state.

But none of this should be any surprise -the West has been actively engaged in the murders of millions in the South over the centuries, where a profit can be made- why stop that little scam now?

The difference this time is that the role of the West in this ongoing savagery by Israel is visible for everyone to see- despite the fabrications and prevariciations of mainstream Western media.

The lies, duplicity, brutality, greed and racism of those who cling to power in the West are exposed for all to see.

_______________________________

Links

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/19/when-it-comes-to-the-israeli-led-war-on-terror-follow-the-money

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/israels-war-on-hospitals


New Zealand’s Media Complicity in Israeli War Crimes

The following is my letter of complaint to Television New Zealand 1, who published the following report on the context of the Palestine/Israel situation on 16th October.(at 23 minutes into the news)

https://www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/one-news-at-6pm/episodes/s2023-e289

‘Dear Sir/Madam,

Your news reporter, Simon Mercer undertook what was supposedly intended as an historical outline of the issues for Israelis and Palestinians on TVNZ1 news last night in relation to the current hostilities in Palestine/Israel.


Simon talked about the lead up to 1948 when Israel militants took control of Palestine (the Nakba), but for some strange reason neglected to mention the 700,000 Palestinians who were forcibly removed from their homes in Palestine and moved at gunpoint to refugee camps by the Israelis and later the two prison camps in Gaza and the West Bank. Simon also failed to mention the thousands of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in 1948 .

Simon also failed to mention the subsequent massacres of thousands of Palestinians in refugee camps by Israelis and their enablers since 1948 and the fact that every day since then (for 75 years) Israelis have been murdering, torturing , imprisoning and dispossessing Palestinians of their homes.

Western governments, particularly the US and UK and their media, have played a key part in colluding with these Israeli war crimes so that their populations are largely unaware of these events, and clearly TVNZ as an ‘independent’ news media outlet, also considers it important to omit these facts as well.

By doing so, TVNZ is colluding in the immensity of Israel’s war crimes over 75 years and allows that brutality to continue.

I would request that in the interests of no longer continuing to
collude in war crimes, as well as the safety of the Palestinian people, let alone compassion for their constant suffering, that you publish a fair and balanced historical outline of what has really happened in Israel/Palestine since 1947, as well as the current situation

Please note I will be publishing this complaint on my blog, as well as your response.”

TVNZ Response to Come…..

_________________________

Links

Western media’s parroting of official lies is paving way to genocide in Gaza (jonathan-cook.net)

New Zealand Politicians all support the “International Rule Based Order”

The recent tragedy of the attacks by Hamas on Israeli, are just one more example where NZ politicians rightly condemn the violent attacks by Hamas but do not condemn the root cause of them, the brutal 75 years of genocide against Palestinians by the Israeli government, military and their settler thugs.

As a New Zealander I have often made complaints to our State funded television broadcaster, TVNZ about their blatant bias towards a U.S. view of international events

Neither do our media or our gutless political science academics like Robert Patman ever report on the Nakba and Israel’s ongoing genocide. ‘For many Palestinians the status quo is not working for them“, Mr Patman says- not working?- you mean Palestinians are a bit annoyed about being murdered, tortured and imprisoned by a brutal racist regime for 75 years!-and the “international rule based order ” that Mr Patman so fervently eulogises about is the very one that has allowed the United States to brutally and genocidaly invade Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Libya ad infinitum, as Mr Patman well knows- but of course to Mr Patman those are not important issues.

And it is precisely because of the US’s self-defined ‘international rules based order’ that Israel has consistently over many years been able to be in breach of its obligations as a state to protect Palestinians, to return lands stolen by the state and settlers to their rightful Palestinian owners, and its illegal use of collective punishment of Palestinians.

So one can see that our NZ academics are as a-moral and gutless as our NZ politicians.

And our New Zealand news media are also as guilty and corrupted in this process, as the following article about RadioNZ and its “Putin Propaganda’ concerns, clearly demonstrates. https://consortiumnews.com/2023/10/07/new-zealands-russian-edits-scandal-how-a-national-broadcaster-demonized-the-truth/. The RNZ journalist had re-edited propaganda articles from Reuters and other sources about the Ukraine war to instead provide factual information and greater background- and of course telling the real facts was just playing to ‘Putin’s agenda’ -as the RNZ CEO pointed out!

One of our main online news media in New Zealand, ‘Stuff’ recently posted an article about Hamas and Israel entitled ‘Hamas Apologists are Siding with Evil -End of Discussion’. The author, one Damien Grant is supposedly a ‘libertarian”- although clearly the liberties that Grant espouses dont apply to Palestinians. Disregarding all facts, Damien exhorts his readers to believe that Israel is not a genocidal entity that has imprisoned Gazans for 18 years- and for many of them; since 1948-is not an entity that rations food and water and all other services. Damien assures us that ‘For those in the territories, Israel allows as much self-governance as its security can tolerate”. In his most superbly farcical and tragically criminal statement Damien states ‘to be sure, sometimes their (Israeli) security forces respond to militant attacks that result in Palestinian civilian deaths, but no Palestinian music festival has seen hundreds attacked, murdered, and kidnapped’. Is Damien trying to suggest that Palestinians are permitted by their persecutors to hold music festivals? Perhaps while Palestinian families are searching for their next meal? Such is the level of ‘ignorance’ (to be charitable) that continues to condemn Palestinians to a life of imprisonment and persecution under Israeli rule.

What is obviously more important than truth and facts is to follow the ‘Rule Based International Order” ( or there will be repercussions…)

__________________________________

Links

New Zealand’s ‘Russian Edits Scandal’ — How a National Broadcaster Demonized the Truth
Chris Hedges: Palestinians Speak Israel’s Language
Craig Murray: Condemnation

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/10/13/lawless-in-gaza-why-west-backs-israel-no-matter-what/

The Immorality of Western Politicians

On 7th October , the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, Hamas, a militant group in Gaza , the home to three quarters of a million Palestinians imprisoned behind concrete and wire fences by Israel since 1967, launched a surprise attack against Israelis.

Moon of Alabama talks about this new Hamas raid (doomed to failure against overwhelming military odds) as a retaliation against Israel’s recent military support for Israeli settler thug’s invasion of the Muslim Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

In reality, this is one more desperate attempt by Palestinians to reassert their legitimate rights as free Palestinians, rather than prisoners of the Israeli apartheid regime – which many have described as slow motion genocide, since the 1948 Nakba (The Catastrophe) when Israeli soldiers, with the full support of the US, UK and many other Western countries, killed thousands of Palestinians and brutally forced many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes into refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria.

247 villages in Southern Palestine were ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces in 1948. The refugees from those villages were then forced into a concentration camp that came to be known as the Gaza strip.

And while any responsible government should deplore any violence by any party in another part of the world; the response from Western governments, including my own New Zealand government, has been to condemn Hamas’ violence, without in any way acknowledging that the causes for this violence are the direct result of the barbaric actions of multiple Israeli governments since 1948. A long-standing pattern of ‘legalised’ (by Israeli courts) sustained violence against Palestinians for their crime of owning land that Israeli settlers wanted to acquire at no cost.

Let us not pretend that Western politicians are not aware of these barbaric crimes by the Israeli state- crimes which continue to this day, and every day, and yet somehow, year on year, we do not hear condemnation of these crimes by the Israeli state and the settler thugs they support. Instead we hear that Israel is a key partner of the US, the UK and the EU in helping conducting the West’s business of extortion of Arab and Iranian assets in the Middle East.

And for many years the United States purported to act as an ‘honest broker” between the Israeli state and Palestinians; pretending that a Palestinian state was still a viable option, while all the while providing unlimited military and other resources to the Israeli regime to continue it expansionist agenda in Lebanon and Syria, and almost nothing to the West Bank and Gaza enclaves.

This is one moment in this decades’ long war against Palestinians where Western countries could really do the honourable thing, and strongly pressure Israel to ensure it complies with international law by tearing down the walls containing Palestinians in their tiny prison encampments, grants them full rights as Israeli citizens, allows the right of return for all Palestinians since 1948 and fully compensates Palestinians for the theft of their lands.

Do we in fact have any Western politicians with any honour?

____________________

Postscript

As Jonathan Cook so lucidly outlines ,the West’s enthusiastic swooning over Israel’s ‘retaliation’ is sick-making; and who gives a flying f*** that Israel’s much vaunted ‘intelligence” (read ‘Terrorist’) services didn’t have advanced warning of Hamas’s attack? How about some long term justice for the Palestinian people (after 75 years of Western enthusiastic support for Israeli injustice). As Jonathan says; ‘This moment rips off the mask and lays bare the undisguised racism that masquerades as moral concern in western capitals’.

_____________________________

Links

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/10/palestine-strikes-back.html#more

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight

Remembering the Nakba

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-israel-west-hypocrisy-jailbreak-stomach-turning

https://kevinbarrett.substack.com/p/gazans-break-out-of-worlds-biggest?publication_id=314817&post_id=137770975&isFreemail=true&r=5hf4x

– IMEMC News International Middle East Media Center

https://richardfalk.org/

PCHR: “Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Weekly Update | September 14-20, 2023)” | – IMEMC News

Mansour: Israel’s ‘License to Kill’
Chris Hedges: Palestinians Speak Israel’s Language

Media in an Unstable World

The world for humans continues to become more uncertain and more unstable; although you would largely not know that from our mainstream media. Climate Change is a little problem but we are working on it ,they say. Lets just ignore that we nowhere near achieving any of our much vaunted global targets of containing, let alone reducing, Co2 emissions- we are therefore definitely heading for global climate disasters in less than a decade.

Catastrophes like the recent flood devastation in Dera in Libya are third world issues, not our problem (and absolutely nothing to do with the avaricious Western world’s destruction of Gadaffi’s prosperous Libya (and his brutal death with a bayonet up his anus by Western supported jihadists, which US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton subsequently delightedly cackled about).

We are witness to an existential war in Ukraine, where, we are told, Ukraine will inevitable triumph against Putin and the evil Russians, but where in fact the West continues to coerce the Ukrainian military into sending thousands and thousands of its troops into slaughter against overwhelming superiority of Russian arms (Russian total air superiority, vast mine fields and overwhelming artillery capacity) .

And once independent academic analysts like Robert Patman in New Zealand along with the rest of the West, now regurgitate the nonsense of China being a threat to the West (and to New Zealand) and thus the appropriateness and necessity of the West continuing its brutal and sadistic “rule based international order” to confront both Russia and China.

Strangely too we hear very little mention in Western mainstream media of the drumbeat of a new multi-polar world. A world where the West can no longer dictate the economic terms through violence, war and blackmail of the South. Perhaps the images of African Sahel countries finally booting out their French colonial occupation forces raises some eyebrows in countries other than France, but there appears little recognition that this anti -Western movement is gaining steam across the South.

And strangely we how somehow not informed by mainstream media that the $6 billion that the US government has now so generously released to suppliers of essential goods to the Iranian population for the release of five Americans held by Iran for spying, was in fact Iranian state money stolen by the United States with their unilateral illegal sanctions against Iran, because of Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons development.

Or perhaps you missed the very quiet admission by the US’s General Milley recently that the much hyped Chinese ‘spy’ balloons that drifted over the United States in February 2023 actually didn’t have any spy gear installed on them at all.

But hey, who needs facts when you need to inflame good white folks against the evil Russians,Chinese and Iranians ( let alone the North Koreans that the US committed 3 years of brutal genocide against in the Korean War).

And let’s just forget about climate change, what is more important than ensuring our global economy and consumerism keeps expanding?- right to the very end…

_________________________

Links

Climate Collapse – The Grim Silence Of Our Leaders
New Zealand’s priority is helping defeat Russia in Ukraine
Why the media aren’t telling the whole story of Libya’s floods
Why the media aren’t telling the whole story of Libya’s floods

How Americans released in swap deal engaged in espionage activities in Iran (presstv.ir)

Boiling Frogs-again…

You of course know the old (true) metaphor) that frogs in a pot which is slowly heated up, can’t register when the water is too hot for their survival and get boiled alive..

Well, something very similar is now happening for humans across the Northern hemisphere.

Source photo: https://showyourstripes.info/c/europe/all

And something very similar is likely to begin occurring in the Southern Hemisphere in early 2024 with the advent of El Nino and the rapid rise in Pacific ocean temperatures.

Source: https://research.csiro.au/acc/fifty-years-of-carbon-dioxide-co2-measurements-in-the-background-atmosphere-of-se-australia/

But it’s obviously all ok, because all our politicians around the world have far more important things to worry about– their next election defeat for starters, cosying up to big business for another, or sending another billion dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine. It’s as though climate catastrophe doesn’t really matter- if we just talk about it from to time and do nothing- that will placate the masses…

The response to the Greek Islands’ wildfires largely caused by climate change are just one of so many hypocritical and insane responses to climate change. The primary purpose of the fire response is not to eliminate the risks to vegetation and wildlife- oh no!-its to ensure that more tourists can flown in next year – and consequently ensuring that CO2 production from the thousands of tourist jets flying in and out of Greece ensure further climate catastrophe. Or we may give the example of why Paris has spent billions to clean up the Seine River -not to ensure river wildlife can return to the river after a century, but to ensure there will be millions of humans attending the Paris Olympics- all coming in on those CO2 producing jet planes from around the world…

Source : EDO https://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu/edov2/php/index.php?id=1000

We need to ensure our communities can more easily adjust to the changes to our world and lifestyles that will occur whether we like it or not. Global trade will shrink as a result of more dangerous weather and destruction of sea, air and land routes. Transport insurance costs have already risen and will continue to escalate sharply as risks increase exponentially in the next few years. Local weather is becoming more and more unpredictable and dangerous. Multiple points of access to resources at a local level will become a priority.

In addition, to try and mitigate some of the impacts of global warming, species loss and destruction of soils and all the other species that we rely on for our survival, we need to urgently action the following.

In no particular order of priority (because they are all priorities), the following initiatives need to be initiated—NOW! …..

  • All food and products are produced within a 20km radius of major population centres. This limits both the transit/CO2 costs to the customer, and the transit costs of the producer.
  • Essential resources that cannot be produced or accessed locally are stockpiled in key places locally.
  • Transportation routes to other countries and locally, are multi-dimensional- ie different modes of transport which minimise biodiversity and climate harm.
  • All sales of goods account for their real costs to the environment.
  • All government and local government decisions take into account the environmental impact on emissions and biodiversity.
  • Businesses annually account and taxed for the environment costs of their business operations. All sales of goods account for their real costs to the environment.
  • All homes and businesses are retrofitted with high standard insulation. Where feasible solar panels are installed which link to the electricity grid.
  • Water from roofs is stored for either personal use or recycled into the water supply.
  • Urban areas and individual housing must have trees planted in every available area where food is not being produced.
  • All towns and cities are required to provide free or very low-cost community gardens and individual allotments for citizen food production.
  • Other species have the same rights as humans. A formal recognition by the UN and all state actors that all life is sacred and do not exist solely for humans’ benefit.
  • All products produced are capable of repair (or cannot be sold) and real recycling and repair occurs locally.
  • Governments and businesses are required to restore indigenous biodiversity to an agreed percentage each year.
  • Air travel is banned unless for absolutely essential business and family issues (e.g. tourism, global sports and cultural events are limited).
  • Solar, wind-powered or sustainably charged battery-powered sea, air and train vessels are developed and effectively utilised.
  • Farming is required to transition to sustainable practices within 10 years (no sprays, chemical fertilisers, and no ploughing- (use of permaculture, organic farming and biochar among other tools).
  • Indigenous trees are planted on a vast scale, on the understanding that they will never be cut down and ‘harvested’.

_____________________

The above initiatives may seem extreme to you- or even perhaps ridiculous and totally unnecessary. Why, you might say, can’t we, as Bill McKibben argues in his New Yorker article, simply return to 1960s levels of consumption?

The reality is that we have gone too far- way too far, beyond that. We have since had 80+ more years of consumption gone crazy, of CO2 production through the roof and an enormous amount of the biosphere destroyed. We not only need to stabilise humans’ impact on the living world we rely on for our existence, we need to start to actively repair it.

And yes, many of these proposals will have an impact on jobs; but without this forward planning job losses are going to be least of our worries- there will be little long term employment ins world of climate uncertainties and ongoing climate disasters.

Planning and actioning changes now, to cope with some of the enormous impacts climate change will have on our lives, will reduce some of the high risks of loss of income, food and essential resources that every one of us will face in our new climate world.

The alternative does not bear thinking about.

Postscript

In response to the recent US Congressional hearings on whether UFOs and aliens really exist, many of the U.S. public have stated that we really need to know whether we as human beings are really ‘alone’ in the Universe.

The unequivocal answer is of course that we are not alone, there are millions of sentient species right here on this planet that we have never bothered to try and communicate with as equitable partners. They may not look like us, behave like us, destroy the planet in the way that we do, (just like in fact our hypothetical alien friends from outer space would do), but they are, nevertheless our partners on this little world- and we are NOT alone!- let’s start to behave as though they really are our partners on this world!

______________________________________________

Links

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/to-save-the-planet-should-we-really-be-moving-slower?mc_cid=75c3f2d013&mc_eid=895987eb5b

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/05/230517122123.htm

https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/why-action-on-the-climate-crisis?

We need an Earth System Treaty to save civilisation. And we need it now

http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue96/Rees96.pdf

https://theecologist.org/2023/jul/31/future-what-future