January 12, 2024
Since the Hamas attack against the Israeli military on October 7, Israel and its controlled propagandists in the Western media have repeatedly referred to the attack as an act of "terrorism," complete with savagery against Israeli civilians-including children and babies.
Larry Johnson helps unveil the truth of the October 7 attack in a report entitled Revisiting The October 7 Hamas Attack - Did Israel Kill Most Of The Israeli Civilians?
For those not inclined to read to the end, here's the bottomline - Israeli sources are admitting that the Israeli military killed its own civilians due to the oxymoronic term, "friendly fire."
The Government of Israel, in the aftermath of this debacle, worked furiously to proclaim the Hamas attack as mindless terrorism that had no other purpose than to slaughter Jews. Netanyahu's government lied about Hamas murdering 40 babies and raping women. Not true. The only children killed that day were victims of the Israeli military.
Israeli media reported earlier that a 12-year-old girl, Liel Hetzroni, was killed in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Kibbutz Be'eri in southern Israel.
According to the reports, following Liel's killing, her grandfather Avia, twin brother Yanai and aunt Ayala were taken to another location, where they were killed along with more than 10 other hostages and then Hamas allegedly set fire to the building....
However, after Yasmin Porat, who was in the house where the twins were held hostage, had said that the deaths were caused by Israeli tank fires, Hadas Dagan, the owner of the house where the hostages were held, also broke her silence.
In an interview with Channel 12 in Israel, Dagan confirmed that the Israeli army attacked the house where Israeli civilians were held by Hamas with tank fires and heavy weapons.
Recounting the horror over the killing of 14 people in the house, including her husband, Dagan talked about the moment Israeli soldiers arrived in front of their house. "At that point, it was clear to me that our role is to be a human shield between our (Israeli) forces that arrived and them (Hamas)."
As I noted in a previous post, Hamas hit elements of the elite Golani Brigade and killed 72 of its members. That is not terrorism, that is war.
Unverified claims circulated by Israel that Hamas militants beheaded 40 babies on 7 October were widely rejected as propaganda which, critics argue, was designed to garner sympathy for Israel to carry out collective punishment of Gaza's 2.2 million. However, a closer examination of events by The Grayzone tells a different story: one in which the Israeli military itself bears responsibility for numerous civilian deaths. The emerging details not only contradict the Israeli government's version of events, but indicate that, in the chaos of battle, reckless Israeli fire likely led to significant casualties among the Israeli population.
More evidence comes from witness Danielle Rachiel, who described nearly being killed after escaping from the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival. As she drove to safety, Israeli security forces shot directly at her vehicle until she shouted in Hebrew to identify herself as Israeli.
The Israeli news outlet, Yedioth Aharanoth, is reported saying that "the pilots realised that there was tremendous difficulty in distinguishing within the occupied outposts and settlements who was a terrorist and who was a soldier or civilian... The rate of fire against the thousands of terrorists was tremendous at first and, only at a certain point, did the pilots begin to slow down the attacks and carefully select the targets."
Meanwhile, footage from inside kibbutzes shows absolute devastation resembling Israel's repeated bombardment of Gaza over the years. Apache helicopter pilots have admitted to firing continuously without intelligence on targets, while tank crews were ordered to shell homes, regardless of Israeli hostages potentially inside.
People who may have doubted the GrayZone reporting now have additional evidence to weigh in the aftermath of Israeli soldiers murdering three Israeli hostages who escaped their Hamas captors. Israel spent years bolstering its reputation as a professional, capable military force. Now, in the span of almost three months, the Israeli military is facing a public relations disaster. Instead of disciplined soldiers commanded by capable officers, the world is seeing an army and air force that is undisciplined, reckless and quick on the trigger. The United States Army was tarred by the My Lai massacre. The Israeli military campaign in Gaza is My Lai on steroids.
And speaking of "human animals" (Netanyahu's term for Palestinians), here are two short video clips of IDF soldiers bragging about murdering children.
This one is a 14-second clip where an IDF soldier brags about shooting a 12-year-old girl, but only because he couldn't find any babies to shoot.
This one is a 17-second clip where an IDF soldier brags about shooting two little children in the head.
These are "God's Chosen People" that evangelicals everywhere keep telling us that God will not "bless" us if we do not support them?
I tell you straight out: "Christian" Zionism was birthed in Hell itself.
As Jesus told the original Zionists, the Pharisees: Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer [Emphasis added] from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. (John 8:44)
Evangelicals are unmoved by this wanton show of butchery because it is committed by Israeli soldiers-just as they turned their heads and looked the other way when Israel attacked the USS Liberty in 1967. I think most Christian Zionists would support the State of Israel if Israeli soldiers shot their own mothers.
The Israel Exception (from veteran journalist Glenn Greenwald)
The Trump-era American Right has carried within it largely hidden but quite massive internal conflicts that have finally exploded into public view. It was long past time for these unsustainable - and glaringly self-negating - doctrinal inconsistencies to be fully aired and confronted.
Exactly that is finally happening in the wake of the Biden administration's steadfast, unlimited financing and arming of Israel's war in Gaza, including Biden's request for an additional $14 billion for Israel's war, on top of the billions Israel automatically gets each year from the U.S. While Biden officials periodically leak statements of "concern" about the number of civilians Israel is killing in Gaza, largely to assuage their increasingly angry voting base, they have steadfastly refused to even consider the use of American leverage and aid to put any limits on Israeli actions.
Biden, as top Israeli officials acknowledge, has spent his entire career as one of Israel's most devoted and steadfast supporters. His 𝕏 reverent speeches defending Israel over the decades make Bill Kristol sound restrained by comparison. Over many decades, Biden is the largest recipient of donations from the pro-Israel lobby, and for good reason. Few have been as steadfastly supportive of that foreign country. And ever since the October 7 attack on Israel, Biden has gone to extreme lengths to protect and support Israel, even bypassing the requirement of Congressional approval to secretly send Israel all the weapons it requests and is now using to obliterate civilian life in Gaza.
Even a Monday article in The New York Times designed to depict Biden officials as deeply pained over Israel's destruction of Gaza acknowledges that "no one inside [the White House] is really pressing for a dramatic policy shift like suspending weapons supplies to Israel - if for no other reason than they understand the president is not willing to do so."
The vast majority of Congressional Republicans support Biden's policy of arming and funding Israel, just as the vast majority of them supported Biden's policy of arming and funding Ukraine's war. But from the start of the war in Ukraine, there was a non-trivial sector of Republicans - composed largely of the more populist and anti-intervention wing - who opposed Biden's war policy and voted NO on American funding of Ukraine's war.
While only a handful of Congressional Republicans have applied the same rationale to Biden's financing of Israel's war, numerous influential conservative voices are now denouncing that war policy - and the broader U.S. financing and arming of Israel generally - by invoking the same non-interventionist and "America First" principles that led them to oppose similar American funding of Ukraine's war.
And many influential conservatives are now particularly scathing of the ongoing attempt to erode free speech rights in the U.S., and to impose various speech restrictions on American campuses and elsewhere, in the name of protecting Israel from criticisms and activism opposed to its actions.
For years, "the Israel Exception" has signified the demand of pro-Israel conservatives to abandon multiple ostensible defining political values in order to protect and finance Israel, and to impose repressive censorship and cancellations rules at home designed to punish or silence critics of this foreign country.
The Israelis are very well-aware that American presidents are politically barred from placing any limits on their actions, even when the U.S. is funding Israel's various wars and its military. In 2001, Netanyahu was 𝕏 caught on video mocking the notion that American leaders could impede Israel's attacks on Palestinians, boasting of the ease with which he could marshall American public support in Israel's favor, against any presidential attempts to stand up to Israel.
Just this week, several of Israel's most extremist ministers explicitly said that Israel's goal in its current war was to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. After the Biden White House announced that it opposes such an objective, Israel's Minister of Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, 𝕏 mocked the U.S.'s attempt to impose limits on his country, saying: "we are not another star on the American flag."
When Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) was elected Speaker of the House in October, he followed long-standing tradition by ascending to the House podium in order to unveil to Americans the top priorities that his Speakership would pursue. After first decreeing that "the greatest threat to our national security is our nation's debt," he then announced that the very first bill the new Speaker intended to bring to the floor was not one to address the many problems of American citizens or to address that national debt. Instead, he said beaming with pride, the first bill would be one "in support of our dear friend Israel."
As a result of all of this, numerous influential conservatives have begun quite vocally objecting to this Israel Exception championed by many Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits. It provoked Daily Wire hosts Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro to trade acrimonious criticisms of each other in public. Congressman Massie appeared on our show last month to reveal the large spending now being done by AIPAC to recruit a Kentucky GOP primary challenger against him in order to remove him from Congress for 𝕏 opposing Biden's insistence that the U.S. fund Israel's war.
A long-time complaint of conservatives against the American liberal-left is that they resort to bigotry accusations against their opponents in order to destroy reputations and stifle debates. That has always been an ironic grievance given that many pro-Israel conservatives, as their first tactic, hurl racism and bigotry accusations against their opponents more casually and aggressively than any purple-haired Social Justice Warrior at Oberlin that they claim to loathe.
Just as everyone knows they will be branded by liberals as a racist or Nazi for opposing, say, permissive immigration policies or affirmative action, everyone knows they will be branded by pro-Israel conservatives and various neocons as a bigot, Nazi and anti-Semite for criticizing the actions of the Israeli government or questioning U.S. financing of their wars. These two factions have far more in common, at least on a tactic level, than either likes to admit.
Bigotry accusations - specifically anti-Semitism - are and always have been the central tactic of America's most devoted Israel supporters. And there are few areas where this has worked more effectively than deterring, or sometimes even barring, American citizens from questioning why the burden falls on them to pay for Israel's wars and its military, and why the U.S. constantly sacrifices so much for this one single foreign country.
Of course, the answer to Greenwald's question "Why?" is ONE glaring reason: the ubiquitous false Israel-based prophecy teachings emanating from the vast majority of America's evangelical churches, television and radio broadcasts, Christian schools, colleges and universities, books and Bible notations.
Christian Zionism is a curse; it is a plague; it is the ultimate destroyer of everything that is true, honest and good.
And as Greenwald noted, Joe Biden is the single biggest recipient of Israeli lobby money, but he is certainly not the only one. The vast majority of congressmen and senators are "paid off" by Israel.
Just for fun, here is the list of the top ten political recipients of Israeli funding (aka bribes):
1. Joe Biden
2. Robert Menendez
3. Mitch McConnell
4. Chuck Schumer
5. Steny Hoyer
6. Ted Cruz
7. Ron Wyden
8. Dick Durbin
9. Josh Gottheimer
10. Shontel Brown
Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.