Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Iraq snapshot

Wednesday, June 26, 2024.  Jamaal Bowman loses his primary, Julian Assange is free, the slaughter in Gaza continues.


A lot to cover today.  Let's start with Jamaal Bowman.  



I don't know Jamaal Bowman.  I'm sure he's a wonderful person.  But watching the attempts to save his seat in Congress?  Bewilderment.

Who was this sitting member of Congress and why should I care?

Tomorrow night US President Joe Biden is scheduled to debate Convicted Felon and well known liar Donald Trump.  I hope we don't see the behavior on that stage from Joe, hope this is some new Democratic Party fad passed off as 'framing' or whatever.

Jamal is probably a nice person.


But watching the nonsense that I watched -- as a nonvoter (I don't live in his state, let alone district) -- I kept waiting for a coherent story as to why he mattered and I never got that.

Beggars can't be choosers, agreed.  And in a fight like this -- a Democratic Party primary -- he needed and probably took any support he could get.  

That's fine for the voting booth, that's not good for get out the vote.

So the first mistake his campaign made was in the selection of some of the mouth boxes they threw in front of the cameras.

Here's tip one:  Voters don't usually go for painted up whores.  If you're a member of Congress trying to support another member of Congress, minimize the make up.  That's especially true if you're wearing false eye lashes and even more so if those lashes are opening and closing repeatedly every time you speak.  Do you think anyone's listening to you when you can't stop batting your eyes with those two to three inch eye lashes on?  They're not.  They're laughing at you at worst.  The kinder ones are just distracted and maybe wondering if thick false eye lashes make it harder for you keep your eyes open.

Here's tip two (and see Marica's "The bald idiot needs to let someone else speak publicly"), you are trying to get them on the side of the person you're supporting.  Stop yelling at them.  It's one thing to be enraged about possible policy ramifications if the candidate you're supporting doesn't win.  But you push people away when you're just yelling or hectoring.  Nobody wants a big mouth trying to tell them what to do.

In fact, we could go on and on but we have a lot to cover so let's just sum the tips above and about 15 more I had as: Watch what Ayanna Pressley did and don't do that.  Any member of The Squad could have done a better job than Pressley did.

Ilhan Omar, for example, invites you into a conversation when she's advocating for someone or some issue.  Pressley, from the opening, leaves you off put.

Again, I don't know Jamaal.  More importantly, after weeks of his defenders taking to the media and YOUTUBE (I'm not referring to podcasters offering analysis, I'm referring to guests on those shows who were supposedly advocating on his behalf), I still don't know him.

AIPAC is awful and shouldn't be allowed to be involved in US races.  No foreign money should be allowed period.  And that's something people could have supported.  Israel sticking its nose in a US district election?  No one wants that anymore than they want France or China or even the UK flooding our 'home' elections.  

So you could have made that a strategy.  When AIPAC was raised, I understood what they were getting at but don't think most listening would.  They needed to make that a strong point and they needed to make it an easy to understand point.

But they failed at that.  

Just like they failed to tell us his record and failed to let us know his plans for the future.

AIPAC defined him as unworthy and all his supporters that spoke to the media did was say, "Oh, but he's a good guy."


That's not how you fight.



  • AIPAC spent at least $14.5 million on anti-Bowman ads through its PAC, United Democracy Project, as of June 20, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
  • Much of the spending came after a poll in March from pro-Israel group Democratic Majority for Israel showed Bowman trailing by 17 points.
  • Bowman has emerged as one of Congress' most vocal critics of Israel in recent years, with Latimer running as a pro-Israel alternative in the heavily Jewish, affluent suburban district.



Now with all the money that was spent to defeat Jamaal, there's a good chance it wouldn't have mattered what he or his supporters did.

And the AXIOS  article notes, "Said another Democrat more bluntly: 'AIPAC didn't pull a fire alarm. AIPAC didn't speculate about 9/11'."  Yeah, he had baggage.  

But that could have been defeated or at least strongly challenged and it wasn't.  I have no idea what he plans next.  He could run as an independent in this cycle.  And he could win.  I never would have thought when Ned Lamont defeated the awful Joe Lieberman in the Democratic Party that this country would have to endure Lieberman in the Senate again.  But he managed to pull off a miracle.  Bowman could do the same.  If he's planning that or if anyone else is being targeted by AIPAC, they need to make AIPAC the target.

"I'm trying to work for you" is the appeal to the voters "while this mega rich lobbyist group wants me out to install someone who will work on behalf of a foreign government.  Local politics does not translate as 'whatever Israel wants'."

In terms  of Thursday night, Joe Biden better explain what needs to be done and better stress that it's about making America all it can be for all Americans.  He better bring us into the dream he has for this country.  The media spokespeople  Bowman had did not do that for Jamaal. 



Progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman lost his reelection bid in New York's 16th Congressional District on Tuesday to an establishment-backed county official whose campaign was propelled by nearly $15 million in spending by AIPAC's Republican-funded super PAC.

The United Democracy Project's (UDP) spending made the Democratic primary contest the most expensive House race in U.S. history. According to a Sludgeanalysis of independent election expenditures dating back to 2001, UDP's $14.5 million onslaught to oust Bowman was "more than any other group besides those affiliated with a political party has ever spent on a House election."

The investment paid off, with Westchester County Executive George Latimer leading Bowman by a margin of 58% to 42% with close to 90% of the vote counted in the 16th District, which was redrawn ahead of the 2022 midterms to include more of suburban Westchester County and less of the Bronx.

Bowman, a former Bronx middle school principal who won his House seat in 2020 by defeating AIPAC favorite Eliot Engel, said in his concession speech late Tuesday that "we should be outraged when a super PAC of dark money can spend $20 million to brainwash people into believing something that isn't true."


Now let's move to Julian Assange.

I kept watching THE GUARDIAN's live feed yesterday to make sure this didn't end up a double cross.  I'm so relieved that it wasn't.  



WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been freed from Belmarsh Prison in London, where he has been incarcerated for the past five years, after accepting a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors. After a decade-plus of legal challenges, Assange will plead guilty to a single felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material for publishing classified documents detailing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan on WikiLeaks. The Australian publisher is expected to be sentenced to time served and allowed to return home, where he reportedly will seek a pardon. 


Some community members have e-mailed about how they wish he hadn't entered a guilty plea.  But they seem to understand why he did.  I've got at least ten in the public e-mail account raging that he betrayed journalism and blah blah blah.

In our current world there was one of two choices for Julian: Stay in prison or leave.

He has spent years fighting for a free press and will likely spend many more years doing so.  (However, if he wants to go to a private life and focus on his own personal life, he's more than done enough.)  

Was he just supposed to rot in jail?  That's what the ten appear to think.  For him to die in jail, they appear to think, would have been better.

It's a free world, we can think what we want and we can say what we want.

And I guess what I'll say back to the ten of you is:

Great, then you do you.  You make that your goal to so support journalism that you're a prisoner for years and you take it at least one more year than Julian did.  And I'll certainly applaud you for that and support you.  

 

Governments abandoned him, news outlets abandoned him.  

He fought and he fought bravely.  

He's free now and I'm happyy for him.

Kevin Gosztola addresses the latest in the video below.

 





 

             Younis lays disorientated on a green mattress in Nasser Hospital, in southern Gaza. His long brown eyelashes rest delicately on his pale sunken face, as he drifts in and out of sleep.

The 9-year-old Palestinian boy lies in his mother’s arms, clearly wasted from severe malnutrition and suffering from dehydration. His blue jogging bottoms hang off his emaciated legs, as his tiny ribcage protrudes from his billowy orange T-shirt.

“I call on people with conscience to help me find health care for my son, so that he can go back to normal,” his mother, Ghanima Juma’a, told CNN last week at the hospital in Khan Younis. “I am losing my son in front of my eyes.”

Two months ago, the family was forced to flee the southern city of Rafah as Israel ramped up its attacks there. These days, they struggle to survive, living along the polluted coastline of Asda’a — near the Al-Mawasi tent camp — where they cannot find enough food, water, or even shade from the Gaza heat.     

             “We have to keep moving from one area to the other because of the war and the invasion… Life is difficult,” his mother said. “We don’t even have a tent over our heads.”

Israel’s war in Gaza has depleted the territory’s health system, leaving staff unable to treat malnourished children. Doctors told CNN they are being forced to turn away parents begging for baby milk, unable to even triage young patients with chronic illnesses compounded by severe hunger.

And as Israel continues its siege on Gaza, preventing aid groups getting enough food into the enclave, parents say they have no choice but to watch their children starve to death. More than eight months of bombardment has shredded infrastructure, wiped out communities and laid waste to entire neighborhoods. Sanitation systems — already stressed by water shortages from extreme heat — have been heavily destroyed, according to the UN, diminishing access to clean water.     



For many months now, it has been no secret that one of America’s closest allies has been using hunger as a weapon against a civilian population. That hunger is being used by Israel is supremely ironic, given the particular role that privation from food plays both in Jewish philosophy and in the grim history of the Jewish people. It is a charge that the Jewish state has repeatedly denied in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Beginning this past winter, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam both condemned Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war. Governmental organizations have also begun to echo those accusations. “In Gaza, we are no longer on the brink of a famine, we are in a state of famine,” the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said several weeks ago. The Gaza population was facing a “man-made disaster”, Borrell reported. The United Nations World Food Program concurs: a “full-blown famine” is taking place in northern Gaza, according to the head of the program. This was followed by the international criminal court considering issuing warrants against leaders of both Hamas and Israel, and, in the case of the Israelis, for the war crime of starvation of civilians.

Even Germany, which for obvious historical reasons has long been one of Israel’s staunchest allies, finally has begun to warn against using starvation to win a war. The Germans would know about such a tactic. During the second world war, 380,000 people were crowded into the Warsaw ghetto, barricaded, and left to die by the Nazis.

Much of what we know about the effects of long-term starvation comes from a manuscript smuggled out of the ghetto in 1942 and translated into English in the 1970s as Hunger Disease. The remarkable document was compiled by a heroic team of 28 Jewish doctors working under unimaginable conditions.

Hunger Disease tracks the effects of starvation with both precision and striking descriptions: in breaking starvation down into three stages, Hunger Disease catalogs stage one, when surplus fat disappears, as being “reminiscent of the time before the war when people went to Marienbad, Karlsbad, or Vichy for a reducing cure and came back looking younger and feeling better”. With time and no break in malnutrition, starvation enters stage two: “Gradually youth was drained and young people changed into withered old people.” Eventually, “like a melting wax candle”, patients slip into the final, terminal stage.

The suffering and the defiance of the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto have become touchstones for students of Jewish history, a story that every Jew knows well. As Holocaust museums struggle to address the Israel-Gaza war, the idea that we can somehow put what is happening in Gaza at a distant remove from the history of the Warsaw ghetto is grotesque.



The deaths continue to mount as the assault on Gaza continues.  Doctors Without Borders issued the following:

NEW YORK/JERUSALEM, June 25, 2024 — Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is outraged and strongly condemns the killing of our colleague, Fadi Al-Wadiya, in an attack this morning in Gaza City.

Al-Wadiya was killed along with five other people, including three children, near an MSF clinic. He was cycling to work at the time, on his way to provide medical care to others who had been injured. Al-Wadiya was a 33-year-old physiotherapist and father of three who joined MSF in 2018.

"Killing a health care worker while on his way to provide vital medical care to wounded victims of the endless massacres across Gaza is beyond shocking," said Caroline Seguin, MSF operations manager for Palestine. “It's cynical and abhorrent.”

MSF Physiotherapist Fadi Al-Wadiya does exercises with a young patient.
MSF Physiotherapist Fadi Al-Wadiya treats a young patient at Bitlahia Clinic in the north of Gaza, a health facility previously supported by MSF.
Palestine 2022 © MSF

Al-Wadiya's death marks the sixth killing of an MSF colleague in Gaza since October 7. This attack is yet another brutal example of the senseless killing of Palestinian civilians and health care workers in Gaza. In total, approximately 500 health workers have been killed in Gaza since October.

MSF is continuing to verify the details of this horrific incident.

An immediate and sustained ceasefire is critical to prevent more deaths and injuries and scale up the amount of aid getting into the Strip.


Each day that the assault goes on, the Israeli government loses more support and the Israeli state looks worse on the international stage.  How many doctors are going to be killed?  How many aid workers?  How many reporters?  How many children?

War Criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is out of touch with the real world and he is a serious threat to the safety of the state of Israel.  His actions are exhausting any good will left among the world's people.  We witness day after day a so-called assault on a terrorist or 'terrorist' group that has been defined in practice as an assault on anyone who is Palestinian -- of any age -- and on any foreign person who tries to aid the civilians of Gaza.  That's not targeting terrorism and after almost nine months the world rejects that lie.

It is a genocide.  Sharon Zhang (TRUTHOUT) reports:

The UN has reportedly told Israeli officials that it may soon be forced to suspend its various humanitarian aid operations in Gaza, after Israeli forces have spent months targeting and killing humanitarian workers in their genocidal assault.

Two UN officials told the Associated Press in a report published Tuesday that the UN sent a letter to Israeli officials this month saying that the UN’s aid operations in Gaza — which act in some capacities as government services — may have to come to a halt if Israel doesn’t stop targeting humanitarian workers.

The letter called for Israel to open up channels for humanitarian workers to communicate with Israeli officials about ensuring their operations are safe from the Israeli military, a process known as deconfliction, the letter reportedly said. The talks between UN and Israeli officials are ongoing, and no final decision has been made.



Gaza remains under assault. Day 263 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, "At least 37,718 Palestinians have been killed and 86,377 injured in Israel's war on Gaza since October 7, the enclave's Health Ministry said on Wednesday.  Over the past 24 hours, 60 people have been killed and 140 injured, the ministry added."    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, "In 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."







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