Saturday, April 20, 2024

Gaza

THE NATIONAL reports, "Billions of dollars in financial aid have been approved for Israel and Ukraine by the US House of Representatives, one of President Joe Biden's main priorities. The votes represent about $25 billion for Israel and includes $4 billion for Israel’s missile defences. There is also $9 billion in humanitarian aid including Gaza."  Megan Lebowitz (NBC NEWS) notes:


"Outraged," "point of no return" and "absolute disaster" are how some Muslim American organizers have described their reactions to an aid package for Israel that is making its way through Congress for President Joe Biden to sign into law.

Many Muslim Americans were already furious with the Biden administration over its handling of the Israel-Hamas war, with activists organizing Democrats to vote “uncommitted" rather than support the president in some state primaries this year.

For several activists and leaders of prominent Muslim American organizations, Biden's support for $26 billion in aid for Israel reaffirms their view about November's election: They cannot back Biden for a second term.


Was the hope that the nine billion marked for aid to Gaza would mitigate the billions in weapons -- weapons being used on Gaza?  If so, the administration is on some really hard drugs.  Apparently, they aren't the only ones.  Olivia Rosane (COMMON DREAMS) writes:


Nearly 40 House Democrats voted against a measure to send around $26 billion more to Israel as it continues its war on Gaza that human rights experts have deemed a genocide.

While the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act passed the Republican-led House by a vote of 366-58, party insiders said it was significant that such a large number of Democrats had opposed it, with more centrist lawmakers joining progressives who have called for a cease-fire since October.

"Despite the weapons aid package passing, this is the largest number of Democratic lawmakers to vote against unrestricted weapons aid for Israel in recent memory," senior Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid observed on social media. 


There goes Olivia with her accentuate the positive.

This is so sad -- the vote, yes, but even more so COMMON DREAMS' coverage.

"Nearly 40"!!!!

How many Dems are in the House right now?

I don't have time to trudge through Olivia b.s. article.  I made it to paragraph 14 before bailing.

213 is how many Democrats are in the House.  Olivia can't tell you that.  She's apparently not too good with numbers either.

37.  That's the number not in the headline or the text (a Tweet from Yasmine Taeb is included in the article and it notes that 37 Democrats voted against it).

She inflates 37 to 'almost 40' because 37 is too hard to type?

Or because she's part of Operation Happy Talk.  That would explain her failure to write the truth.

"176 House Democrats Vote To Keep Giving Weapons to Israel."  That would be a truthful headline or even just a truthful opening sentence.  Instead, let's round 37 up to 40 and pretend this is a success.


Protests continued against the assault on Gaza.  THE NATIONAL notes:

Anti-government protests continued in Israel on Saturday, where thousands of people gathered in Tel Aviv to rally against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and demand a hostage deal with Hamas.

Separate demonstrations were held across the city, according to Israeli media.

The largest protest, calling for elections, was held at the Kaplan intersection, while relatives of Israeli hostages gathered outside the Kirya defence headquarters to call for elections.

Family members of captives held in Gaza continued protests outside the Tel Aviv museum, demanding the government negotiate the release their relatives.



Protests took place in the UK with the plan for even larger protests next weekend.  THE UK SOCIALIST WORKER explains:

With around 40 local protests scheduled for this weekend the Palestine movement is not retreating from the streets.

Next Saturday’s national demonstration in London, and the workplace day of action on 1 May, are big tests for the movement.

Around 1,000 people were on a march in Bradford on Saturday and then joined others in the city Square.

Rob reports, “Most of the Palestine groups in West Yorkshire were represented. People were worried about any further escalation of the killings. They are suspicious that Joe Biden has done a deal with Israel that if it doesn’t attack Iran again then it will have a free hand to obliterate Rafah.” 


Meanwhile Sarah Huddleston and Shea Vance (COLUMBIA SPECTATOR) report on day four of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment:

As the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” entered its fourth day on Saturday, dozens of protesters prepared for the University’s second admitted students weekend of the semester by establishing a “People’s University Student Fair” and an “alternative tour” committee.

The encampment remained on South Lawn two days after University President Minouche Shafik ordered a massive police sweep of the demonstration during which the New York Police Department arrested 108 individuals. All individuals had been released from custody as of late Thursday evening.
Spirits remained high on South Lawn throughout the day as protesters intermittently repeated chants like “Minouche Shafik, you’re a clown, we demand that you step down,” and “Say it out, say it clear, liberation is here” while waving small Palestinian flags. Students lounged on the lawn on top of blue tarps, chatting among each other or working on laptops. Toward the north end of the lawn, food and blankets lay in protected piles.

Late Friday evening, all entrances into Morningside campus on Broadway were closed. Public Safety denied individuals carrying signs and blankets campus access.

At 12:36 a.m. on Saturday, Columbia University Apartheid Divest sent out a news release recapping the encampment’s programming from the day prior. CUAD highlighted the jummah prayer at 1:15 p.m.—where “supporters held up keffiyehs, scarves, and coverings to safeguard those in prayer”—and a Shabbat service at 7 p.m.


 




AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org.

Here in New York, riot police moved in on a peaceful student protest encampment, arresting at least 108 people at Columbia. Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called the NYPD to clear the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the campus’s South Lawn, where Columbia and Barnard students had set up one day earlier to demand university leadership divest from Israel. New York Police Chief John Chell said Shafik identified the demonstration as a “clear and present danger,” but that officers found the students to peaceful and cooperative. Shafik warned all students participating in the encampment would be suspended. At least three suspensions of Barnard students were confirmed Thursday before the arrests, including Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Congressmember Ilhan Omar.

Thursday’s showdown with the NYPD was the largest arrest on the Columbia campus since 1968, when police arrested over 700 students protesting the school’s ties to the Vietnam War and its plans to expand in Harlem by building a gymnasium there.

Following the arrests yesterday, students gathered on the campus throughout the night as large protests continued and are ongoing. Students got support from many Columbia faculty online and a visit in person from Union Theological Seminary professor Cornel West, just nearby, who is also a 2024 presidential candidate. Democracy Now! spoke to professor West after he climbed a fence to visit with the encamped protesters.

CORNEL WEST: Well, you know, in light of our stand in deep solidarity with our precious Palestinian brothers and sisters who are undergoing vicious genocide, wrestling with apartheid conditions for so long and still being ethnically cleansed, we want the world to know that their suffering does not have the last word. There is resilience, and there’s a willingness to fight.

And Columbia president ought to be shame on herself that she cannot zero in on an actual genocide taking place before our very eyes, and be concerned about a potential and possible call for genocide of Jews. Nobody here is calling for the genocide of Jews. Nobody is here calling for annihilation. We’re calling for the end of an actual genocide and the end of an actual annihilation.

How sad that Columbia University could teach so many courses on the canonical texts of Western civilization and can’t listen to Diderot or Karl Marx. They can’t listen to a Martin Luther King Jr. They can’t listen to a Muriel Rukeyser. Most importantly, they can’t listen to the cries of our precious Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

So, I’m in deep solidarity with these students. They represent the best, not just of Columbia, not just of the American empire, but the human spirit, fighting in the face of domination and occupation and subjugation, and doing it with tremendous determination.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s presidential candidate and Union Theological Seminary professor Cornel West speaking to Democracy Now! at Columbia University in the midst of the protest. Special thanks to Hana Elias. President Shafik called in the New York police a day after she testified in the U.S. Congress.

When we come back, we go to Cairo to speak with a Palestinian photographer who just left Gaza with his family. Stay with us.



SAMAA notes, "On Thursday, more than a hundred pro-Palestinian protesters were taken into custody on the Columbia University campus after the university president gave the go-ahead for New York police to clear a camp that students had established to protest Israel's policies in Gaza according to Reuters. Nemat Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, who faced criticism from Republicans the day before at a House of Representatives committee hearing on antisemitism on campus, announced that she had given the go-ahead for police to remove a group of about a dozen tents that demonstrators had set up early on Wednesday."  We included this in Friday's snapshot, but let's note in one more time, Jeffrey St. Clair (COUNTERPUNCH) notes:

Columbia students were right in 1968. History proved it. Columbia students are right today. The university has no good answers to their demands that the school stop investing in genocide. Calling in the NYPD proves it.

+ Abbie Hoffman: “The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it.” In Columbia’s case, the administration is doing the job for the students.

+ Columbia Professor Rebecca Jordan-Young: “The faculty who are supporting the students do not all agree on the issue of Israel and Palestine, [but] we are astonished and disgusted with the way the university has cracked down on the students.”

+ From Wednesday’s House interrogation of Columbia University’s President, Minouche Shafik…

+ God also wanted Abraham to slit his son Isaac’s throat, which is pretty much what Shafik did when she called the NYPD goon squad on the kids in her care. Giordano Bruno she’s not…In fact, Shafik is a former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, and also enjoys a life peerage in the House of Lords.




As the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia enters its fifth day, students at over a dozen universities across the country—and the globe—have begun protesting in solidarity with the encampment after 108 affiliates were arrested on campus by the New York Police Department on Thursday.

Protests ranged from walkouts to marches to encampments in solidarity with the Columbia efforts, garnering anywhere from 50 to hundreds of protesters. At Yale University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, students started encampments in solidarity with the Columbia “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”

In a Friday evening Instagram post, the national chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine called on all chapters to follow Columbia SJP’s lead and pressure their administrations to divest from Israel.

“Our universities have chosen profit and reputation over the lives of the people of Palestine and the will of their students,” the national SJP chapter wrote in the post. “President Minouche Shafik’s cowardly testimony to Congress heralds an unfortunate shift: university administrators have capitulated to the pressure of the Zionist lobby and allied Right Wing, selling out the Student Movement for Palestinian liberation to save face in the eye of the state.”


Gaza remains under assault. Day 197 of  the assault in the wave that began in October.  Binoy Kampmark (DISSIDENT VOICE) points out, "Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion.  The ongoing campaign in Gaza by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction.  But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge for the propaganda outlets:  How to justify it?  Fortunately for Israel, the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence."   CNN has explained, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund."  ABC NEWS quotes UNICEF's December 9th statement, ""The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Scores of children are reportedly being killed and injured on a daily basis. Entire neighborhoods, where children used to play and go to school have been turned into stacks of rubble, with no life in them."  NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll. The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza."  The slaughter continues.  It has displaced over 1 million people per the US Congressional Research Service.  Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) points out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide."   The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza is grows higher and higher.  United Nations Women noted, "More than 1.9 million people -- 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza -- have been displaced, including what UN Women estimates to be nearly 1 million women and girls. The entire population of Gaza -- roughly 2.2 million people -- are in crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse." THE NATIONAL notes, "On Saturday, the Gaza Health Ministry said that at least 34,049 Palestinians have been killed and 76,901 injured in Israel's military offensive since October 7.  The ministry said that 37 people were killed and 68 injured in the 24 hours to noon on Saturday."  Months ago,  AP  noted, "About 4,000 people are reported missing."  February 7th, Jeremy Scahill explained on DEMOCRACY NOW! that "there’s an estimated 7,000 or 8,000 Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of their former home."  February 5th, the United Nations' Phillipe Lazzarini Tweeted:

 



April 11th, Sharon Zhang (TRUTHOUT) reported, "n addition to the over 34,000 Palestinians who have been counted as killed in Israel’s genocidal assault so far, there are 13,000 Palestinians in Gaza who are missing, a humanitarian aid group has estimated, either buried in rubble or mass graves or disappeared into Israeli prisons.  In a report released Thursday, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that the estimate is based on initial reports and that the actual number of people missing is likely even higher."
 

As for the area itself?  Isabele Debre (AP) reveals, "Israel’s military offensive has turned much of northern Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape. Whole neighborhoods have been erased. Homes, schools and hospitals have been blasted by airstrikes and scorched by tank fire. Some buildings are still standing, but most are battered shells."  Kieron Monks (I NEWS) reports, "More than 40 per cent of the buildings in northern Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, according to a new study of satellite imagery by US researchers Jamon Van Den Hoek from Oregon State University and Corey Scher at the City University of New York. The UN gave a figure of 45 per cent of housing destroyed or damaged across the strip in less than six weeks. The rate of destruction is among the highest of any conflict since the Second World War."


The Israeli government continues to slaughter children.  AP's Mohammad Jahjouh and Samy Magdy report, "An Israeli airstrike on a house in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah killed at least nine people, six of them children, hospital authorities said Saturday, as Israel pursued its nearly seven-month offensive in the besieged Palestinian territory."  THE NATIONAL adds of the airstrike, "It happened hours after doctors delivered a baby following the death of its mother in a strike on Rafah." The House vote that Oliva praised above ensures that the Israeli government will continue to slaughter children.  ALJAZEERA notes:

Netanyahu has welcomed the billions of dollars in US assistance, writing on X it “demonstrates strong bipartisan support for Israel and defends Western civilization”.

But the Palestinian presidency condemned it as “an aggression against the Palestinian people” and a “dangerous escalation”.

The money would “translate into thousands of Palestinian casualties in the Gaza Strip” and the occupied West Bank, said Nabil Abu Rudeina, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.



The Palestinian Ministry of Health condemned two separate incidents involving emergency medical crews operating in the West Bank on Saturday.

An ambulance driver was killed by Israeli settlers as he tried to rush injured Palestinians to safety, and another ambulance crew member was detained and questioned by the Israel Defense Forces outside a West Bank hospital, according to the ministry and Palestine Red Crescent Society.

"The Ministry urgently calls on international health organizations, human rights institutions, and the International Committee of the Red Cross to urgently act to curb the escalating practices of the occupation and settlers against treatment centers and medical crews, and to allow them to perform their humanitarian duty," the ministry said.



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