In today's liberal democracy even a soft critique of Isreal's policy against Palestinians is seen as an anti-semitic act and might lead to cancelling someone out of the public debate. As long as Zizek didn't engage in debates around transpeople or Palestine he was seen as an interesting, maybe a bit eccentric public intellectual. We should build and support our own left-wing and independent media and slowly leave liberal public sphere, which is completely blind to so many important for us issues.
I don’t pretend to understand all that you say - and I don’t align myself with anything other than all of us and that us be peaceful. Yes how far fetched am I - thought I heard Netanyahu or at least a spokesperson of which take your pick use the term ‘my people’ - it wasn’t Moses anyway. But - to use your term, we are all my people. I don’t like exclusivity - and you will perhaps see all this as naive commentary. It is not the war it says it is and I don’t support the annihilation of Palestine people. Meanwhile the superpowers press on and Netanyahu does what he likes.
"While I fully condemned the attack and gave Israel the right to strike back, I also drew attention to the suffering of the Palestinians and to what goes on in the West Bank. For this, my speech was brutally interrupted..."
Striking back leads to Palestinian suffering. Not sure the brutality compares.
The problem with Zizek here (and also with Judith Butler's letter in reply to students at Harvard) was that their eagerness to indulge in facile moral condemnation destroyed any possibility of a proper systemic and structural account of *historical causality*. Butler and Zizek thus blinded themselves to the howlingly evident fact that Tel Aviv would use Oct. 7th as a pretext for further military-kinetic intensification of the decades-long Palestinian Genocide.
Judith Butler crapped on with some pseudo-theological "theory" about a bourgeois-liberal fantasy of hers about "agency". Zizek has a sectarian habit of referring to those he disagrees with as "pseudo-Left" etc. (Confessedly, I myself cannot claim innocence of such bitter factionalism (and am possibly indulging in it right this instant) but then I am a nameless nobody from nowhere whilst Zizek is a major, world-famous figure).
Video-gaming, sporting tropes such "right to strike back" can be seen to be the infantile, death drive reflex that they are if we understand the Palestinian Genocide *historically*.
In the geography and history of Palestine Israel conflict/genocide the overwhelming preponderance of *power* is with the two military-colonial, nuclear armed states - the USA and Israel. When searching for *historical causality* we naturally attend to the most powerful historical currents.
Amongst the most damnable of the many Evils of the Palestinian Genocide is the military-colonial generative Evil of Washington and Tel Aviv in creating the belligerent necropolitical conditions that give rise to the very entities and historical effects that are used as a pretext for further kinetic intensifications of the military-colonial mass-slaughter that occurs with sickening regularity.
The imperialist policies of London (of the Balfour Declaration), Washington and Tel Aviv are responsible for the creation and continued existence of Hamas in the same way that French colonialism brought into existence the FLN in Algeria; the Viet Minh in Indochina. In the same way that Britain was responsible for the existence of the Mau Mau in Kenya.
(For further detail, see e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein and his school of World-Systems Analysis)
This is a fortiori the case with regards to Hamas which was *actively* supported and funded by Netanyahu in a reckless divide and conquer strategy that has produced obvious blowback
Colonialism is driven and maintained by the wielding of necropolitical power as a means of inflicting violence in order to maintain control and exert domination. As Achille Mbmebe has described and analyzed, military-colonial necropolitics leads to the creation and maintenance of perpetually violent death-worlds within which both the colonizing power and their colonized subjects `are locked into a symbiotic interrelationship of the living dead.
These belligerent death-worlds are military-colonial zones of killing and apartheid iron walls of segregation that create
“contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death (necropolitics) (that) are deeply reconfiguring the relations between resistance, sacrifice, and terror. The notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death. Necropolitics, or necropower, accounts for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds , that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead . Some of the repressed topographies of cruelty (the plantation and the colony in particular) and today’s form of necropower blurs the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom.”
There are no activities that Palestinians attempt to engage in that are not immediately brutalized by hateful, arbitrary violence delivered by the iron boot of bloodthirsty Israeli military-colonial Terror.
It is impossible to display the Palestinian flag on Instagram, unaccompanied by any reference whatsoever to the Jewish people, without a barrage of Israeli airstrikes raining upon the poor unfortunate who stepped out of line.
This is the necropolitics of the Israeli military-colony extending all the way back Imperial capital of London from which emanated the original sins of the Balfour Declaration. As was this:
Every moment of every day of every Palestinian life is suffused with the bloody violence of Israeli necropolitical subjugation inflicted through a reign of military-colonial Terror.
“A Threshold Crossed
Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”
“About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Throughout most of this area, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
“Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity
The comprehensive report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, sets out how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.
Amnesty International is calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider the crime of apartheid in its current investigation in the OPT and calls on all states to exercise universal jurisdiction to bring perpetrators of apartheid crimes to justice.
“There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalized and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people. Apartheid has no place in our world, and states which choose to make allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history. Governments who continue to supply Israel with arms and shield it from accountability at the UN are supporting a system of apartheid, undermining the international legal order, and exacerbating the suffering of the Palestinian people. The international community must face up to the reality of Israel’s apartheid, and pursue the many avenues to justice which remain shamefully unexplored.”
Uwe Becker is a censorious precious princess who likes nothing better than to block people on Twitter and delete critical posts on his Facebook page.
"No discussion, no dissent"=democracy for Becker.
"Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland"
Paul Celan
Dirty secret of Israel’s weapons exports: They’re tested on Palestinians Weapons tested in each war Israel wages see a spike in global demand. The current Gaza war is the latest laboratory for its arms industry
In pictures: the heavy impact of Israeli strikes on Gaza’s children
Since October 7, more than 3,400 children have been reported killed in Gaza, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry. With another 1,000 children reported missing and assumed buried under the rubble, the real death toll is likely much higher. FRANCE 24 looks at the devastating consequences of the Israel-Hamas war on Palestinian children in Gaza. Warning: some of the following images may be distressing to viewers.
'One Palestinian child is killed every 10 minutes': Israel has turned Gaza into a graveyard for thousands of children
Gaza's children are bearing the brunt of Israel's bombs. Over 4,000 children have been killed by Israeli attacks since October 7. While the West continues to debate proportionality, Gaza's children will continue to die.
Number of Gazan children killed in under a month is 10 times higher than that of Ukrainian children killed in entire first year of Russia’s ongoing war
CPJ is investigating all reports of journalists and media workers killed, injured, or missing in the war, which has led to the deadliest month for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.
The disgusting spectacle of a recently remilitarized German state engaged in the most despicable and bloodthirsty forms of Genocide Denialism is especially damnable when considered within the German domestic political context in which a revived ultranationalism has been an ever-present danger for all of this century. Amongst its most notable aspects, this ultranationalism consists of a vicious Islamophobia as the xenophobic component that is an essential part of fascist movements.
“It also exposes the deep-rooted white supremacy in German society. Indeed, the reaction of the German authorities to what is going on in Gaza demonstrates that they want to strengthen and solidify racist hierarchies in German society: white Germans at the top and people from “the Third World”, including victims of Israeli violence, at the bottom, doing in silence dirty menial jobs and being expected to show their gratitude and “integrate” into German society.
Covering up German anti-Semitism
But there is something even more pernicious about misrepresenting anti-Semitism in Germany as a foreign “import”, brought to the country by non-white immigrants. This increasingly popular lie obfuscates Germany’s brutal, anti-Jewish history and somehow dumps blame for the suffering of Jewish people onto Palestinians who are victims of a European racist, settler-colonial regime.
It also covers up the German society’s anti-Semitic present. Anti-Jewish sentiment still persists in Germany. According to official statistics, the vast majority of documented anti-Semitic incidents are committed by the political right.
It is not coincidental that the far-right party AfD has reached an all-time peak in popularity in recent weeks. According to polls from mid-December, it is now standing at 23 percent, second only to the right-wing CDU and far ahead of any of the parties in the current governing coalition.
AfD representatives have glorified German ethno-nationalism and downplayed the crimes of the Nazi regime while consistently insisting that immigrants are anti-Semitic and demanding that the federal government prioritise combatting “imported anti-Semitism”.
This combination of Zionism and toxic German nationalism may further fuel racist violence against minorities, including the Jewish community.
Germany’s anti-Palestinianism needs to be viewed not as a reaction to, but rather a continuation of, Germany’s racist crimes. Palestinians and other victims of Israeli and German violence have never been considered human enough.
Like Germany’s colonial genocides and its support for apartheid in South Africa and racist regimes elsewhere – which never received sufficient attention in public discourse – its role in the genocide in Palestine upholds racist hierarchies and its own self-image as a “civilised” and “morally superior” nation.
The German-backed slaughter of Palestinians thus serves to strengthen the fantasies of white, ethnic German supremacy.”
Matters have reached such an abysmal level in Germany, that thinkers that ought to know far better such Jurgen Habermas have damned themselves to be banished into the history of genocidal infamy. The power of the German state has over-ridden the last vestiges of Critical Theory in its very home in Frankfurt. Habermas’s intellectually pathetic and morally reprehensible adoption of the role of lickspittle courtier to the power-elites in Berlin can be viewed as the death-knell of the German Enlightenment Project.
From “A Response to “Principles of Solidarity. A Statement” Human dignity for all”:
“we are deeply troubled by the apparent limits of the solidarity expressed by the authors. The statement’s concern for human dignity is not adequately extended to Palestinian civilians in Gaza who are facing death and destruction. Nor is it applied or extended to Muslims in Germany experiencing rising Islamophobia. Solidarity means that the principle of human dignity must apply to all people. This requires us to recognize and address the suffering of all those affected by an armed conflict.
(…)
We are concerned that there is no mention of upholding international law, which also prohibits war crimes and crimes against humanity such as collective punishment, persecution, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure including schools, hospitals and places of worship. Being guided by principles of international legal standards, solidarity and human dignity compels us to hold all participants in the conflict to this higher standard.
We cannot allow the atrocities to force us to abandon these principles.”
Sadly, two world wars completely destroyed the German mind and spirit. So much so, that they didn't dare to even bleat a word of complaint when Biden blew up their gas supply and destroyed their economy. Now they are back helping to kill Semitic women and children - just to prove they aren't Nazis. Of course, not all Germans are so abject, by the entire ruling class and media are.
Of course, the situation in Palestine today is entirely created by British Imperialism. The first British Governor of Palestine, Sir Reginald Storr, wrote that the British purpose in Palestine was to create "a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of hostile Arabism."
As an attempt to clarify any possible confusion, in the attempt that I have made elsewhere in this discussion thread to describe the history and geography of the Palestine Israel conflict/genocide, this is *not* written in “support” of Hamas, nor to “apologize” for their actions or any of the usual invidious crap that far too many of us have imbibed from the debased pamphleteering language of electioneering, bully-pulpit politicians.
My post was written to reject the entirety of the basis upon which such facile moralizing is made. And which are the intended result of the Inquisitor’s Question.
The intent of the Inquisitorial Question is to petrify the subject into a subordinate position. “Subject” here is to be understood not only in the epistemic sense, but more vitally in the monarchical sense of a subject disciplined to the regime of obedience demanded by the reign of the sovereign power. The Inquisitorial Question dictates the subjective perception of objective reality in moralistic terms and pronounces the subject condemned unless the subject accepts the account of material reality as the subject is commanded to by the diktat ex cathedra. The petrifying Question commands from its subjects, mental submission and moral obedience.
In this instance, Washington and Tel Aviv are engaged in the exercise of war criminal Lady Macbeth handwashing in their desperate attempts to erase the central causative role that their military-colonial policies played in both the creation of Hamas and in the creation of the necropolitical conditions in which the October 7th attacks took place.
Anti-intellectualism is a well-documented aspect of Fascist movements and of Fascist states.
Elise Stefanik and Annalena Baerbock as the chief inquisitors of a military-colonial Committee of Public Safety would bring about, have already begun to inflict, a State-Terroristic hell on earth.
As a more general theoretical point, my own thinking on most matters is from a position of “anti-humanist” systemic and structuralist analysis: Immanuel Wallerstein; World-Systems Analysis; Niklas Luhmann’s social-systems theory.
Shortcomings of the more commonplace “humanist” position can be seen here in Zizek’s statement above that Israel had the “right to strike back” despite Zizek possessing a detailed knowledge of the decades-long Palestinian Genocide. Norman Finkelstein’s support for the Hamas attacks can be seen to suffer from comparable analytical shortcomings.
It is particularly dismaying – and incidentally an argument against the mainstream humanism that Zizek seems wedded to – that even after the recent ICJ ruling, Zizek has not modified this position.
In other places, Zizek’s promethean-humanist account of 1917 can be contrasted with Immanuel Wallerstein world-systems analytical account of world-systemic political revolutions.
See e.g.
“Structural Crisis in the World-System: Where Do We Go from Here?”
In today's liberal democracy even a soft critique of Isreal's policy against Palestinians is seen as an anti-semitic act and might lead to cancelling someone out of the public debate. As long as Zizek didn't engage in debates around transpeople or Palestine he was seen as an interesting, maybe a bit eccentric public intellectual. We should build and support our own left-wing and independent media and slowly leave liberal public sphere, which is completely blind to so many important for us issues.
I don’t pretend to understand all that you say - and I don’t align myself with anything other than all of us and that us be peaceful. Yes how far fetched am I - thought I heard Netanyahu or at least a spokesperson of which take your pick use the term ‘my people’ - it wasn’t Moses anyway. But - to use your term, we are all my people. I don’t like exclusivity - and you will perhaps see all this as naive commentary. It is not the war it says it is and I don’t support the annihilation of Palestine people. Meanwhile the superpowers press on and Netanyahu does what he likes.
We are living in dire times and voices like yours need to be heard, so thank you for making points when they are most needed with great clarity.
It’s amazing that Germans think they are on the side of good here.
Lenin was a great leader for Russia
1. Workers got 8 hour working day
2. Women got equal rights
3. Workers got paid holidays
4. He has started the mass use of electricity
5. Before him 80% of population did no education. He has started to teach people
and many other achievements. For Russia revolution was positive breakthrough
"While I fully condemned the attack and gave Israel the right to strike back, I also drew attention to the suffering of the Palestinians and to what goes on in the West Bank. For this, my speech was brutally interrupted..."
Striking back leads to Palestinian suffering. Not sure the brutality compares.
The problem with Zizek here (and also with Judith Butler's letter in reply to students at Harvard) was that their eagerness to indulge in facile moral condemnation destroyed any possibility of a proper systemic and structural account of *historical causality*. Butler and Zizek thus blinded themselves to the howlingly evident fact that Tel Aviv would use Oct. 7th as a pretext for further military-kinetic intensification of the decades-long Palestinian Genocide.
Judith Butler crapped on with some pseudo-theological "theory" about a bourgeois-liberal fantasy of hers about "agency". Zizek has a sectarian habit of referring to those he disagrees with as "pseudo-Left" etc. (Confessedly, I myself cannot claim innocence of such bitter factionalism (and am possibly indulging in it right this instant) but then I am a nameless nobody from nowhere whilst Zizek is a major, world-famous figure).
Video-gaming, sporting tropes such "right to strike back" can be seen to be the infantile, death drive reflex that they are if we understand the Palestinian Genocide *historically*.
In the geography and history of Palestine Israel conflict/genocide the overwhelming preponderance of *power* is with the two military-colonial, nuclear armed states - the USA and Israel. When searching for *historical causality* we naturally attend to the most powerful historical currents.
Amongst the most damnable of the many Evils of the Palestinian Genocide is the military-colonial generative Evil of Washington and Tel Aviv in creating the belligerent necropolitical conditions that give rise to the very entities and historical effects that are used as a pretext for further kinetic intensifications of the military-colonial mass-slaughter that occurs with sickening regularity.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/18/america-root-cause-war-israel-gaza-palestine/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/18/israel-killing-rage-fuel-conflict-50-years-warns-ex-uk-defence-secretary-ben-wallace
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/11/israel-hamas-gaza-war-us-middle-east-policy-saudi-biden/
The imperialist policies of London (of the Balfour Declaration), Washington and Tel Aviv are responsible for the creation and continued existence of Hamas in the same way that French colonialism brought into existence the FLN in Algeria; the Viet Minh in Indochina. In the same way that Britain was responsible for the existence of the Mau Mau in Kenya.
(For further detail, see e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein and his school of World-Systems Analysis)
This is a fortiori the case with regards to Hamas which was *actively* supported and funded by Netanyahu in a reckless divide and conquer strategy that has produced obvious blowback
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-netanyahu-bolstered-hamas/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html
Colonialism is driven and maintained by the wielding of necropolitical power as a means of inflicting violence in order to maintain control and exert domination. As Achille Mbmebe has described and analyzed, military-colonial necropolitics leads to the creation and maintenance of perpetually violent death-worlds within which both the colonizing power and their colonized subjects `are locked into a symbiotic interrelationship of the living dead.
These belligerent death-worlds are military-colonial zones of killing and apartheid iron walls of segregation that create
“contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death (necropolitics) (that) are deeply reconfiguring the relations between resistance, sacrifice, and terror. The notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death. Necropolitics, or necropower, accounts for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds , that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead . Some of the repressed topographies of cruelty (the plantation and the colony in particular) and today’s form of necropower blurs the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom.”
(grammar of quote slightly modified)
https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=93E4DDDA3887FEB0B3EC196302C39739
There are no activities that Palestinians attempt to engage in that are not immediately brutalized by hateful, arbitrary violence delivered by the iron boot of bloodthirsty Israeli military-colonial Terror.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjA6qqtTJB8
It is impossible to display the Palestinian flag on Instagram, unaccompanied by any reference whatsoever to the Jewish people, without a barrage of Israeli airstrikes raining upon the poor unfortunate who stepped out of line.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220108-emma-watson-post-shows-israels-anti-semitism-smears-are-beginning-to-break-down/
This is the necropolitics of the Israeli military-colony extending all the way back Imperial capital of London from which emanated the original sins of the Balfour Declaration. As was this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sergeants_affair
Every moment of every day of every Palestinian life is suffused with the bloody violence of Israeli necropolitical subjugation inflicted through a reign of military-colonial Terror.
“A Threshold Crossed
Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”
“About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Throughout most of this area, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
“Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity
The comprehensive report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, sets out how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.
Amnesty International is calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider the crime of apartheid in its current investigation in the OPT and calls on all states to exercise universal jurisdiction to bring perpetrators of apartheid crimes to justice.
“There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalized and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people. Apartheid has no place in our world, and states which choose to make allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history. Governments who continue to supply Israel with arms and shield it from accountability at the UN are supporting a system of apartheid, undermining the international legal order, and exacerbating the suffering of the Palestinian people. The international community must face up to the reality of Israel’s apartheid, and pursue the many avenues to justice which remain shamefully unexplored.”
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/
Uwe Becker is a censorious precious princess who likes nothing better than to block people on Twitter and delete critical posts on his Facebook page.
"No discussion, no dissent"=democracy for Becker.
"Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland"
Paul Celan
Dirty secret of Israel’s weapons exports: They’re tested on Palestinians Weapons tested in each war Israel wages see a spike in global demand. The current Gaza war is the latest laboratory for its arms industry
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/17/israels-weapons-industry-is-the-gaza-war-its-latest-test-lab
In pictures: the heavy impact of Israeli strikes on Gaza’s children
Since October 7, more than 3,400 children have been reported killed in Gaza, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry. With another 1,000 children reported missing and assumed buried under the rubble, the real death toll is likely much higher. FRANCE 24 looks at the devastating consequences of the Israel-Hamas war on Palestinian children in Gaza. Warning: some of the following images may be distressing to viewers.
https://www.france24.com/en/slideshow/20231031-in-pictures-the-brutal-impact-of-israeli-strikes-on-gaza-s-children
'One Palestinian child is killed every 10 minutes': Israel has turned Gaza into a graveyard for thousands of children
Gaza's children are bearing the brunt of Israel's bombs. Over 4,000 children have been killed by Israeli attacks since October 7. While the West continues to debate proportionality, Gaza's children will continue to die.
https://www.newarab.com/features/gazas-children-are-living-hell-or-buried-beneath-rubble
The 'horrendous toll' on children caught in the Israel-Gaza conflict
Hundreds of children have been killed so far, with the true total still unclear.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/horrendous-toll-children-caught-israel-gaza-conflict/story?id=103873428
Number of Gazan children killed in under a month is 10 times higher than that of Ukrainian children killed in entire first year of Russia’s ongoing war
https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/5903/Number-of-Gazan-children-killed-in-under-a-month-is-10-times-higher-than-that-of-Ukrainian-children-killed-in-entire-first-year-of-Russia%E2%80%99s-ongoing-war
"Hundreds & hundreds of children have been killed and injured" in Gaza, UNICEF says
https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-news-hamas-war-10-13-23/h_a224f96f06be015d3ec8ae67e64d545d
‘Bearing the brunt’: the suffering of children in the Gaza-Israel conflict – photo essay
Children in their early teens have lived through four wars, with the fear, loss and trauma that brings
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/19/bearing-the-brunt-the-suffering-of-children-in-the-gaza-israel-conflict-photo-essay
Over 10,000 infants and children killed in Israel’s Gaza genocide, hundreds of whom are trapped beneath debris
https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6020/Over-10,000-infants-and-children-killed-in-Israel%E2%80%99s-Gaza-genocide,-hundreds-of-whom-are-trapped-beneath-debris#:~:text=ARMED%20CONFLICTS-,Over%2010%2C000%20infants%20and%20children%20killed%20in%20Israel's%20Gaza%20genocide,whom%20are%20trapped%20beneath%20debris&text=Geneva%20%2D%20Israel%20has%20killed%20more,in%20a%20statement%20issued%20Saturday.
Two Thirds of Gaza War Dead Are Women and Children, Briefers Say, as Security Council Debates Their Plight
https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15503.doc.htm
Gaza children being killed or mutilated in ‘very extreme’ numbers, Australian doctor says
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/21/gaza-children-being-killed-or-mutilated-in-very-extreme-numbers-australian-doctor-says
Palestinian children tortured, used as shields by Israel: U.N.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE95J0FR/
Israel pummels Gaza as 500 Palestinian children confirmed dead
https://www.itv.com/news/2023-10-12/israel-targets-network-of-tunnels-in-gaza-as-death-toll-rises
Dead Palestinian children in Gaza tell story of impunity
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-soueif-gaza-israel-20140801-story.html
No end to suffering of Gaza children as Israeli attacks rage on
Thousands of children and minors killed and missing under the rubble amid relentless Israeli bombardment.
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/12/4/no-end-to-suffering-of-gaza-children-as-israeli-attacks-rage-on
‘A curse to be a parent in Gaza’: Inside the region where more than 3,600 children have been killed
https://www.euronews.com/2023/11/02/a-curse-to-be-a-parent-in-gaza-inside-the-region-where-more-than-3600-children-have-been-k
Gaza is becoming a 'graveyard for children', UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres says
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-07/israel-gaza-war-death-toll-estimate-surpasses-ten-thousand/103072006
Why Israel's push into Gaza is killing so many children
https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-gaza-hamas-civilian-casualties-children-deaths-airstrikes-palestinian-2023-10
Child casualties in Gaza “a growing stain on our collective conscience”
UNICEF is calling for an immediate ceasefire and for sustained and unimpeded access for humanitarian assistance
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/child-casualties-gaza-growing-stain-our-collective-conscience
What trauma do children suffer in Israel’s war on Gaza?
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/inside-story/2023/10/27/what-trauma-do-children-suffer-in-israels-war-on-gaza
Death and trauma stalk Palestinian children
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/palestinian-children-death-trauma-israel-bombing-hamas-rcna122113
Over 1,600 children killed in Gaza in two weeks - Palestine's DCI
https://www.nst.com.my/world/world/2023/10/969937/over-1600-children-killed-gaza-two-weeks-palestines-dci
The Cost of War Will Be Counted in Children’s Lives
Thousands of kids have reportedly died since this war began. Those who survive might be scarred forever.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/unicef-cost-gaza-war-children/675780/
West Bank: Spike in Israeli Killings of Palestinian Children
End Systematic Impunity for Unlawful Lethal Force
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/28/west-bank-spike-israeli-killings-palestinian-children
“The Settlers Can Do Whatever They Want With Us”
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-settlers-can-do-whatever-they-want-with-us
“Things are different now: The soldiers and settlers are just waiting for a chance to kill you.”
https://jewishcurrents.org/dispatches-from-the-west-bank
Al-Shifa Hospital under Israeli control, turned into center for 'detention and torture'
“Israeli drones are shooting anything moving inside the hospital,”
https://new.thecradle.co/articles-id/12536
‘Terror’ amid Israel’s raid on Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital
Israel’s army raids Gaza’s largest hospital, visiting violence and humiliation on patients, staff and displaced people trapped inside, witnesses say
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/15/terror-witnesses-recount-israels-raid-inside-gazas-al-shifa-hospital
Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
CPJ is investigating all reports of journalists and media workers killed, injured, or missing in the war, which has led to the deadliest month for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.
https://cpj.org/2023/11/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/
The disgusting spectacle of a recently remilitarized German state engaged in the most despicable and bloodthirsty forms of Genocide Denialism is especially damnable when considered within the German domestic political context in which a revived ultranationalism has been an ever-present danger for all of this century. Amongst its most notable aspects, this ultranationalism consists of a vicious Islamophobia as the xenophobic component that is an essential part of fascist movements.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/7/why-is-germany-so-viciously-anti-palestinian
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/16/10-murders-3-nazis-and-germanys-moment-of-reckoning/
“It also exposes the deep-rooted white supremacy in German society. Indeed, the reaction of the German authorities to what is going on in Gaza demonstrates that they want to strengthen and solidify racist hierarchies in German society: white Germans at the top and people from “the Third World”, including victims of Israeli violence, at the bottom, doing in silence dirty menial jobs and being expected to show their gratitude and “integrate” into German society.
Covering up German anti-Semitism
But there is something even more pernicious about misrepresenting anti-Semitism in Germany as a foreign “import”, brought to the country by non-white immigrants. This increasingly popular lie obfuscates Germany’s brutal, anti-Jewish history and somehow dumps blame for the suffering of Jewish people onto Palestinians who are victims of a European racist, settler-colonial regime.
It also covers up the German society’s anti-Semitic present. Anti-Jewish sentiment still persists in Germany. According to official statistics, the vast majority of documented anti-Semitic incidents are committed by the political right.
It is not coincidental that the far-right party AfD has reached an all-time peak in popularity in recent weeks. According to polls from mid-December, it is now standing at 23 percent, second only to the right-wing CDU and far ahead of any of the parties in the current governing coalition.
AfD representatives have glorified German ethno-nationalism and downplayed the crimes of the Nazi regime while consistently insisting that immigrants are anti-Semitic and demanding that the federal government prioritise combatting “imported anti-Semitism”.
This combination of Zionism and toxic German nationalism may further fuel racist violence against minorities, including the Jewish community.
Germany’s anti-Palestinianism needs to be viewed not as a reaction to, but rather a continuation of, Germany’s racist crimes. Palestinians and other victims of Israeli and German violence have never been considered human enough.
Like Germany’s colonial genocides and its support for apartheid in South Africa and racist regimes elsewhere – which never received sufficient attention in public discourse – its role in the genocide in Palestine upholds racist hierarchies and its own self-image as a “civilised” and “morally superior” nation.
The German-backed slaughter of Palestinians thus serves to strengthen the fantasies of white, ethnic German supremacy.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/7/why-is-germany-so-viciously-anti-palestinian
Matters have reached such an abysmal level in Germany, that thinkers that ought to know far better such Jurgen Habermas have damned themselves to be banished into the history of genocidal infamy. The power of the German state has over-ridden the last vestiges of Critical Theory in its very home in Frankfurt. Habermas’s intellectually pathetic and morally reprehensible adoption of the role of lickspittle courtier to the power-elites in Berlin can be viewed as the death-knell of the German Enlightenment Project.
From “A Response to “Principles of Solidarity. A Statement” Human dignity for all”:
“we are deeply troubled by the apparent limits of the solidarity expressed by the authors. The statement’s concern for human dignity is not adequately extended to Palestinian civilians in Gaza who are facing death and destruction. Nor is it applied or extended to Muslims in Germany experiencing rising Islamophobia. Solidarity means that the principle of human dignity must apply to all people. This requires us to recognize and address the suffering of all those affected by an armed conflict.
(…)
We are concerned that there is no mention of upholding international law, which also prohibits war crimes and crimes against humanity such as collective punishment, persecution, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure including schools, hospitals and places of worship. Being guided by principles of international legal standards, solidarity and human dignity compels us to hold all participants in the conflict to this higher standard.
We cannot allow the atrocities to force us to abandon these principles.”
https://publicseminar.org/2023/11/a-response-to-principles-of-solidarity-a-statement/
I stay in Justin Bieber's hometown when in Canada but in St. Petersburg I sleep in Smolny.
Bravo!!
Brilliant
Sadly, two world wars completely destroyed the German mind and spirit. So much so, that they didn't dare to even bleat a word of complaint when Biden blew up their gas supply and destroyed their economy. Now they are back helping to kill Semitic women and children - just to prove they aren't Nazis. Of course, not all Germans are so abject, by the entire ruling class and media are.
Lenin was the greatest criminal of all time, with Stalin and Mao also on the dais
I see Zelensky is not the only comedian around here.
It is intresting to me how much more lenins actions algined with Mao or Mao with Trotsky compaired to stalin
Is there a Marxist critique to be made of the Gaza tragedy? Is this ultimately haves vs have-nots?
Of course, the situation in Palestine today is entirely created by British Imperialism. The first British Governor of Palestine, Sir Reginald Storr, wrote that the British purpose in Palestine was to create "a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of hostile Arabism."
As an attempt to clarify any possible confusion, in the attempt that I have made elsewhere in this discussion thread to describe the history and geography of the Palestine Israel conflict/genocide, this is *not* written in “support” of Hamas, nor to “apologize” for their actions or any of the usual invidious crap that far too many of us have imbibed from the debased pamphleteering language of electioneering, bully-pulpit politicians.
My post was written to reject the entirety of the basis upon which such facile moralizing is made. And which are the intended result of the Inquisitor’s Question.
The intent of the Inquisitorial Question is to petrify the subject into a subordinate position. “Subject” here is to be understood not only in the epistemic sense, but more vitally in the monarchical sense of a subject disciplined to the regime of obedience demanded by the reign of the sovereign power. The Inquisitorial Question dictates the subjective perception of objective reality in moralistic terms and pronounces the subject condemned unless the subject accepts the account of material reality as the subject is commanded to by the diktat ex cathedra. The petrifying Question commands from its subjects, mental submission and moral obedience.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CommunismMemes/comments/17iiur0/but_do_you_condemn_hamas/
https://twitter.com/TenzingLamsang/status/1717378089255412194
In this instance, Washington and Tel Aviv are engaged in the exercise of war criminal Lady Macbeth handwashing in their desperate attempts to erase the central causative role that their military-colonial policies played in both the creation of Hamas and in the creation of the necropolitical conditions in which the October 7th attacks took place.
Anti-intellectualism is a well-documented aspect of Fascist movements and of Fascist states.
Elise Stefanik and Annalena Baerbock as the chief inquisitors of a military-colonial Committee of Public Safety would bring about, have already begun to inflict, a State-Terroristic hell on earth.
As a more general theoretical point, my own thinking on most matters is from a position of “anti-humanist” systemic and structuralist analysis: Immanuel Wallerstein; World-Systems Analysis; Niklas Luhmann’s social-systems theory.
Shortcomings of the more commonplace “humanist” position can be seen here in Zizek’s statement above that Israel had the “right to strike back” despite Zizek possessing a detailed knowledge of the decades-long Palestinian Genocide. Norman Finkelstein’s support for the Hamas attacks can be seen to suffer from comparable analytical shortcomings.
It is particularly dismaying – and incidentally an argument against the mainstream humanism that Zizek seems wedded to – that even after the recent ICJ ruling, Zizek has not modified this position.
In other places, Zizek’s promethean-humanist account of 1917 can be contrasted with Immanuel Wallerstein world-systems analytical account of world-systemic political revolutions.
See e.g.
“Structural Crisis in the World-System: Where Do We Go from Here?”
https://monthlyreview.org/2011/03/01/structural-crisis-in-the-world-system/
“Utopistics or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century”
https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=E7731F38BB2E8F17FDC45F0B149DD9A1