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token rape arrests, more cunningly, are part of a strategy....

Israel’s token rape arrests, more cunningly, are part of a strategy to fend off genocide and war-crimes charges. Israel has become adept at narrative, repeating mantras about its unsurpassed morality. One lie embedded deep in the lattice of lies that is Israel is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises and individuals, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself ~ilana.

 

IsraHell Toils to Legalize Rape of Palestinians. Genocide, Snuff Films & Global Extra-Judicial Assassinations: Already Legal    BY 

 

First up, Israeli society’s latest demonstration of depravity: When they are not fantasizing and embellishing about rape (“Debunking ‘Screams Before Silence,’ Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 Oct. ‘mass rape’ film“), and raping Palestinian prisoners—the IDF and the state and societal structures that support it is fighting for the legal right to rape their enemies. Or justifying the twisted sensibilities of their military and countrymen. And, Israeli depravity is indeed endemic. (See “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?” Oh yes.)

According to Truthout.org, “the Israeli Knesset, on Monday [its lawmakers, no less] was debating whether or not sexual abuse was a legitimate tactic for Israeli soldiers. (International law considers sexual violence by soldiers to be a war crime.) … Members of the Israeli government have also defended the soldiers, claiming it is wrong for the government to charge the reservists.”

Real lovelies, aren’t they?!

To its patsy press, the AP, “The Israeli military said, Monday, that “it was holding nine soldiers for questioning following allegations of ‘substantial abuse’ of a detainee at a shadowy facility where Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians since Oct. 7.”

According to Middle East Monitor, “A Gaza detainee allegedly sexually abused by Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman … suffered ‘a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs’ as a result of the immense torture he was subjected to by Israeli occupation soldiers. …One of the nine Israeli soldiers arrested for abusing him was released without charge. Deliberations about the other eight are continuing.”

Next, by Democracy Now’s telling, “A right-wing mob including members of the Knesset broke into two Israeli military bases in an effort to prevent Israeli military police from detaining the nine soldiers who were under investigation for gang raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman facility.”

+972 Magazine’s Oren Ziv correctly elucidates that “the support of Israeli political leaders, including some members of the Knesset who participated in the riots, and the apathy of the military police all indicate that those protesting against the soldiers’ charges are ‘the face of the state,’ expressing what are “mainstream” views in Israeli society.” (Confirmed. See “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?“)

Israel’s token rape arrests, more cunningly, are part of a strategy to fend off the genocide and war-crimes charges. Israel has become adept at narrative, repeating mantras about its unsurpassed morality. One central lie embedded deep in the lattice of lies that is Israel is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself.

A new report authored by said 972 Magazine journalist “for the human rights group Yesh Din shows how the main role of Israel’s military law enforcement system is to maintain the appearance of internal accountability in order to shield itself from external criticism.”

Essentially, to fend off the very notion idea that this lawless thug state is not a lawless thug state, whose justice system is complicit in minting maniacal laws in support of lawless, unfathomable thuggery and cruelty.

Read my own analysis of how Israel and its courts “CO-OPT HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW” (In “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide”.)

Israel is a lattice of lies.

Rape of hostages, held in detention without charge, bleeds nicely into extra-judicial assassination.

Ismail Haniyeh, a major political leader representing the Palestinians of Gaza, who also enjoys wide support among the Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (as polls clearly show), was executed extra-judicially—how else?—by rogue state Israel.

Haniyeh is widely viewed among the people of the Arab world—not their ruling elites, who are puppets of the Axis of Genocide—as a uniter of Shia and Sunni. He was also beloved of his immediate neighbors in Gaza’s al-Shati refugee camp.

“Israeli forces [had] bombed members of Haniyeh’s family in the al-Shati refugee camp twice, killing at least three of his sons, two grandchildren, his sister and around 10 other relatives.” (Middle East Eye)

According to historian Ilan Pape (starting at around 18 minutes into this Electronic Intifada interview), such repulsive executions have been part of the Israeli State’s founders’ modus operandi since its inception, and before. Here is a likely inexhaustive Wikipedia list of the “zombie state killer’s” extra-judicial kills over the years. “Eight other times had Israel been accused of assassinations in Iran.”

From diplomatic attaches, to university professors, to scientists, to thinkers and men of words—as in activists—to military men, to jailed prisoners, to resistance figures and fighters, and some just “unknown” collateral-damage, for-fun kills: you name them; Israel has targeted them.

As I pointed out in “The U.S. As The Globe’s Judge, Jury And Executioner,” a 2020 column, “blind patriotism stateside, too, is predicated on accepting that it is up to the U.S. government and its ruling elites to determine who lives and who dies around the world.” Some say war criminal Netanyahu pushed for the murder of Qassim Soleimani, an Iranian major general. Among the Axis of Genocide, with respect to extra-judicial, illegal assassinations—it is safe to say that, while America emulates Israel, Israel is a kingpin crime boss on this front. Unmatched in picking off people with whom it doesn’t wish to talk diplomatically. Theoretically, that is almost everyone.

Ismail Haniyeh, “who served as the fourth Palestinian prime minister and the third political leader of Hamas, … [Hailed] from a family of refugees expelled from historic Palestine during the Nakba in 1948, he grew up in northern Gaza’s beachside al-Shati refugee camp. He ascended through the ranks of Hamas, starting as the secretary to the group’s founder, Ahmed Yassin, and eventually leading its political bureau.”

Haniyeh—also lead negotiator in the matter of the hostages, Palestinian and Israeli—had lost upwards of 60 members of his family, including children and grandchildren. His murder, on Iranian territory, “came hours after Israel bombed Lebanon on Tuesday evening, killing three civilians,” as well as murdering “Fuad Shukr, Hizballah’s most senior military official and its leader Hasan Nasrallah’s close confidant.”

In “an attack that killed at least 90 people and wounded 300 in al-Mawasi, an Israeli designated ‘safe zone’ west of Khan Younis,” the Coward Army, IDF, which bombs civilians from above, seldom engaging in face-to-face combat, had killed Mohammed Deif, commander of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. The genocide has made it unequivocally clear that, as I explained in logic (“Israel Indicted, Palestinians Validated In Fact, Law & Hoppean Argumentation,” 07/03/2024) that—boy, oh boy—do the Palestinians need their resistance.

When Ismail al-Ghoul, a young Gazan journalist, and Rami al-Rifi, his cameraman, went to report from Haniyeh’s humble home, in the al-Shati refugee camp—where kids had congregated to commemorate their neighbor, also the political leader of their resistance–-Israel assassinated them too. As is the case with all journalist targeted by the criminal enterprise Israel, they were “in a clearly identifiable press vehicle when a missile directly hit them. It killed both reporters and a young boy walking by. The strike left young Ismail al-Ghoul headless.”

Al-Ghoul’s colleague, Al Jazeera’s journalist Hind Khoudary, such a reserved young woman whose courageous reporting we’ve watched over ten months, broke down on air, inconsolable. Her utter despair was that of one who has followed the rules, but found that those were no deterrents to Israel’s wanton—clearly intentional—slaughter of Gaza’s best, brightest and bravest, young people in the full flowering of their vitality.

China was also quick to condemn the murder of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who had been acting as Israel’s lead interlocutor in hostage negotiations, as an “act of assassination.” An “unacceptable political assassination,” responded Russia’s foreign ministry. Türkiye’s president, Tayyip Erdogan, “condemned the assassination in Tehran and said the killing would not break Palestinians’ will.” (Reuters)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had pointed out, July 17, 2024, that,

Over the past 10 months or 300 days, nearly 40,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed and 90,000 wounded. The majority of them are children and women. The number of civilian victims [in Gaza] over the past 10 months is twice as large as the number of civilian victims in Ukraine on both sides of the conflict over the past 10 years since the [US sponsored] state coup in February 2014.

Correction: These are the confirmed deaths, where Gaza’s pitifully diligent Hamas-run government has managed to faithfully tally individual with his or her remains.

As I noted in November of 2004, during America’s war on Iraq, the august British medical journal The Lancet is ever late to its obligations . In character, and with regards to Gaza, The Lancet has finally, ten months into a genocide, awoken to the Truth:

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7-9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip.

Furthermore, I believe my “lying eyes.” Going by the “lying eyes” standard—satirist Richard Pryor’s wry phrase for he who has been caught in flagrante delicto—I believe my “lying eyes.” Those “lying eyes” speak to the scale of Israel’s depredations against Gazans. Once the “runaway Zombie Killing Machine” (Rami Khouri‘s coinage) is stopped, I believe it quite possible, given the scale of annihilation, that as many as half-a-million Palestinians will have been exterminated, with American imprimatur, and only the faintest protest.

BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, with BRICS announcing the admission of Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina as new member states) might want to consider an urgent course of action to stop Israel—an amoral pornographically violent terrorist state by any other name—or their leaders will be next. I venture that dissidents, activists or writers (whose careers have not yet been destroyed by neoconservative decades ago) are in danger, all, of death by the demon state.

The totem words and adjectives we use to describe Israel, the most perverse and pornographically murderous society imaginable, fail. In the tradition of bearing witness, at which all my Gaza Essays aim, I close with some recent Israeli feats of depravity visited upon Palestinians martyrs by their Israeli occupier-pornographer:

“In particular,” comments Ron Unz, unmatched in his courage, “it was obvious that Israeli snipers were deliberately shooting young Palestinian children and toddlers, aiming precision shots at their hearts and at their heads.”

Ron was alerting his readers to a belated and brief Politico awakening, in the form of an article,

“…it published. [A] very lengthy account by two experienced American surgeons who had visited Gaza to provide medical assistance and were utterly horrified by what they encountered there. According to Dr. Mark Perlmutter, in just a couple of weeks he saw more carnage inflicted upon civilians than he had in the combined total of his previous thirty years of humanitarian visits to war-zones around the world. In particular, it was obvious that Israeli snipers were deliberately shooting young Palestinian children and toddlers, aiming precision shots at their hearts and at their heads“.

American volunteer surgeons, Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, attest that Israeli snipers deliberately shoot Palestinian children and toddlers, aiming precision shots at hearts and heads.

… We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.

MORE:

“In the United States we would never dream of operating on anyone without consent, let alone a malnourished and barely conscious 9-year-old girl in septic shock. Nevertheless, when we saw Juri, that’s exactly what we did.

We have no idea how Juri ended up in the Gaza European Hospital preoperative area. All we could see was that she had an external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.

In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.

“Jesus Christ,” Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, “she’s just a fucking kid.”

THEN THERE WAS

The sight of thousands and thousands of semi-trucks parked alongside the highway for nearly 30 miles was truly something to behold — convoys of lifesaving aid turned into static walls of a tunnel directing us toward Gaza….

By Israel.

… health sector salaries are paid by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and are always cut off during Israeli attacks. …

Since October 7, at least 500 healthcare workers and 278 aid workers have been killed in Gaza. Among them was Dr. Hammam Alloh, a 36-year-old nephrologist at Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate when Israel besieged the hospital in October.

MORE HERE.

* The screen picture of the image, via the two doctors, depicts one young man in three stages of slow death inflicted by his Israeli torturers: The picture of the Palestinian man, a nurse, and what Israel visited upon him over three encounters, rendering him a husk, a shadow of the first image, in which his leg has been blown off, but he is still otherwise youthful. The man in the wheelchair’s wasted legs can no longer ambulate.

 

https://www.unz.com/imercer/israhell-toils-to-legalize-rape-of-palestinians-genocide-snuff-films-global-extra-judicial-assassinations-already-legal/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

 

no fear of godot....

 

BY 

 

On October 25, Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin told Arutz Sheva-Israel National News that “Muslims are not afraid of us anymore.”

 

Why Israeli Soldiers Rape, Torture, and Massacre
Instilling fear in the Palestinian people is not a side effect of the IDF's brutal violations of human rights. It is the strategy.

 

It might sound odd that Feiglin saw the element of fear as critical to Israel’s well-being if not its very survival. 

In actuality, the fear element is directly linked to Israel’s behavior and fundamental to its political discourse. 

Historically, Israel has carried out massacres with a specific political strategy in mind: to instill the desired fear to drive Palestinians off their land. Deir Yassin, Tantara and the over 70 documented massacres during the Palestinian Nakba, or Catastrophe, are cases in point. 

Israel has also utilized torture, rape and other forms of sexual assault to achieve similar ends in the past, to exact information or to break down the will of prisoners. 

UN-affiliated experts said in a report published on August 5 that "these practices are intended to punish Palestinians for resisting occupation and seek to destroy them individually and collectively."

Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has manifested all these horrific strategies in ways unprecedented in the past, both in terms of widespread application and frequency. 

The Israeli army uses torture as a centralized strategy.

In a report entitled ‘Welcome to Hell’, published on August 5, the Israeli rights group, B’tselem, said that Israel’s detention “facilities, in which every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering operate as de-facto torture camps”.

A few days later, the Palestinian rights group, Addameer, published its own report, “documented cases of torture, sexual violence, and degrading treatment”, along with the “systematic abuses and human rights violations committed against detainees from Gaza.”

If incidents of rape, sexual assaults and other forms of torture are marked on a map, they would cover a large geographical area, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and Israel itself—mostly notably in the notorious Sde Teiman Camp.

Considering the size and locations of the Israeli army, well-documented evidence of rape and torture demonstrates that such tactics are not linked to a specific branch of the military. This means that the Israeli army uses torture as a centralized strategy. 

Such a strategy has been associated with the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister. His aggressive statements, for example, that Palestinian prisoners should be “shot in the head instead of being given more food”, are perfectly aligned with his equally violent actions: the starvation policy of prisoners, the normalization of torture and the defense of rape. 

But Ben-Gvir did not institute these tortuous policies. They have predated him by decades and were used against generations of Palestinian prisoners, who are granted few rights compared to those enshrined by international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention.

But why does Israel torture Palestinians on such a large scale? 

Israeli wars against Palestinians are predicated on two elements: a material and a psychological one. The former has manifested itself in the ongoing genocide, the killing and wounding of tens of thousands and the near destruction of Gaza. 

The psychological factor, however, is intended to break the will of the Palestinian people. 

Law for Palestine, a legal advocacy group published a database of over 500 instances of Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, inciting genocide in Gaza. 

Most of these references seem to be centered on dehumanizing the Palestinians. For example, the October 11 statement by Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog, that "there are no innocent civilians in Gaza", was part of the collective death sentence that made the extermination of Palestinians morally justifiable in the eyes of Israelis. 

Netanyahu's own ominous biblical reference, where he called on Israeli soldiers to seek revenge from Palestinians, stating "Remember what Amalek has done to you", was also a blank check for mass murder.

While choosing not to see Palestinians as humans, as innocent, as worthy of life and security, Israel has granted its army carte blanche to do as it saw fit to those, in the words of Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, "human animals". 

The mass killing, starvation and widespread rape and torture of Palestinians are a natural outcome of these shocking dialectics. But the overall purpose of Israel is not simply to exact revenge, though the latter has been quite important to Israel's desire for national recovery. 

By trying to break the will of the Palestinians through torture, humiliation and rape, Israel wants to restore a different kind of deterrence, which it lost on October 7. 

Failing to restore military or strategic deterrence, Tel Aviv is invested in psychological deterrence, as in restoring the element of fear that was breached on October 7.

Raping prisoners, leaking videos of the gruesome acts, and carrying out the same horrific deed, again and again, are all part of the Israeli strategy—that of restoring fear. 

But Israel will fail, simply because Palestinians have already succeeded in demolishing Israel's 76-year matrix of physical domination and mental torture. 

The Israeli war on Gaza has proven to be the most destructive and bloody of all Israeli wars. Yet, Palestinian resilience continues to grow stronger, because Palestinians are not passive, but active participants in the shaping of their own future. 

If popular resistance is indeed the process of the restoration of the self, Palestinians in Gaza are proving that, despite their unspeakable pain and agony, they are emerging as a whole, ready to clinch their freedom, no matter the cost.

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/idf-rape-torture

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

lotsa murders....

 

Chris Hedges: Thou Shalt Not Commit Genocide

 

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

There is only one way to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is not through bilateral negotiations. Israel has amply demonstrated, including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire. The only way for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons shipments to Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political party that fuels this genocide.

The arguments against a boycott of the two ruling parties are familiar: It will ensure the election of Donald Trump. Kamala Harris has rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe Biden. There are not enough of us to have an impact. We can work within the Democratic Party. The Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which owns most members of Congress, is too powerful. Negotiations will eventually achieve a cessation of the slaughter. 

In short, we are impotent and must surrender our agency to sustain a project of mass killing. We must accept as normal governance the shipment of hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to an apartheid state, the use of vetoes at the U.N. Security Council to protect Israel and the active obstruction of international efforts to end mass murder. We have no choice.

Genocide, the internationally recognized crime of crimes, is not a policy issue. It cannot be equated with trade deals, infrastructure bills, charter schools or immigration. It is a moral issue. It is about the eradication of a people. Any surrender to genocide condemns us as a nation and as a species. It plunges the global society one step closer to barbarity. It eviscerates the rule of law and mocks every fundamental value we claim to honor. It is in a category by itself. And to not, with every fiber of our being, combat genocide is to be complicit in what Hannah Arendt defines as “radical evil,” the evil where human beings, as human beings, are rendered superfluous.

The plethora of Holocaust studies should have made this indelible point. But Holocaust studies were hijacked by Zionists. They insist that the Holocaust is unique, that it is somehow set apart from human nature and human history. Jews are deified as eternal victims of anti-Semitism. Nazis are endowed with a special kind of inhumanity. Israel, as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington concludes, is the solution. The Holocaust was one of several genocides carried out in the 19th and 20th centuries. But historical context is ignored and with it our understanding of the dynamics of mass extermination.

The fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which writers such as Primo Levi stress, is that we can all become willing executioners. It takes very little. We can all become complicit, if only through indifference and apathy, in evil. 

“Monsters exist,” Levi, who survived Auschwitz, writes, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” 

To confront evil — even if there is no chance of success — keeps alive our humanity and dignity. It allows us, as Vaclav Havel writes in “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth, a truth the powerful do not want spoken and seek to suppress. It provides a guiding light to those who come after us. It tells the victims they are not alone. It is “humanity’s revolt against an enforced position” and an “attempt to regain control over one’s sense of responsibility.”

What does it say about us if we accept a world where we arm and fund a nation that kills and wounds hundreds of innocents a day? 

What does it say about us if we support an orchestrated famine and the poisoning of the water supply where the polio virus has been detected, meaning tens of thousands will get sick and many will die? 

What does it say about us if we permit for 10 months the bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, villages and cities to wipe out families and force survivors to camp out in the open or find shelter in crude tents? 

What does it say about us when we accept the murder of 16,456 children, although this is surely an undercount? 

What does it say about us when we watch Israel escalate attacks on United Nations facilities, schools — including the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where over 100 Palestinians were killed while performing the Fajr, or dawn prayers — and other emergency shelters? 

What does it say about us when we permit Israel to use Palestinians as human shields by forcing handcuffed civilians, including children and the elderly, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings in advance of Israeli troops, at times dressed in Israeli military uniforms? 

What does it say about us when we support politicians and soldiers who defend the rape and torture of prisoners?

Are these the kinds of allies we want to empower? Is this behavior we want to embrace? What message does this send to the rest of the world?

If we do not hold fast to moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will triumph. It means there is no right and wrong. It means anything, including mass murder, is permissible. Protestors outside the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago demand an end to the genocide and U.S. aid to Israel, but inside we are fed a sickening conformity. Hope lies in the streets.

A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief.

“But what of the price of peace?” the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, who was sent to federal prison for burning draft records during the war in Vietnam, asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood:”

I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost — because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

The question is not whether resistance is practical. It is whether resistance is right. We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe. We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is censorious. We are called to defy — through acts of civil disobedience and noncompliance — the laws of the state, when these laws, as they often do, conflict with moral law. We must stand, no matter the cost, with the crucified of the earth. If we fail to take this stand, whether against the abuses of militarized police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system or the genocide in Gaza, we become the crucifiers.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

 

https://scheerpost.com/2024/08/16/chris-hedges-thou-shalt-not-commit-genocide/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.