Humanitarian..

 

The United States government’s credibility on democracy and the rule of law has always been shaky. By supporting Israel’s war crimes and the ongoing illegal settlements and the theft of Palestinian lands in the occupied West Bank, U.S. credibility has dissolved completely. 

Yes, war crimes. Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have detailed war crimes, from the use of white phosphorous to the bombing of schools and hospitals. AI and HRW, along with the Israeli human-rights organization B’Tselem, had already documented Israel’s crimes of apartheid. 

Israel has murdered over 100 members of the United Nations staff in Gaza. And we are to believe the Israeli ambassador to the UN, who says that those staff members, too, are Hamas? Absurd and criminal. 

Bret Gustafson | Professor of Anthropology November 16, 2023

Border..

 

Blinded..

 

The war in the Gaza Strip is generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.

By mid-December, Israel had dropped 29,000 bombs, munitions and shells on the strip. Nearly 70% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and about half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The bombing has damaged Byzantine churches and ancient mosques, factories and apartment buildings, shopping malls and luxury hotels, theaters and schools. Much of the water, electrical, communications and healthcare infrastructure that made Gaza function is beyond repair.

Most of the strip’s 36 hospitals are shut down, and only eight are accepting patients. Citrus trees, olive groves and greenhouses have been obliterated. More than two-thirds of its schools are damaged.

President Biden, all of sudden, is unable to see the destruction of schools, Hospitals, Places of worship and killing of innocent civilians, women, elderly and children. 

Plants..

 

Hammer..

 

Struggle..

 

Senator Susan Collins is developing legislation to compel the U.S. military to follow state-level red and yellow flag laws for service members.

The proposed law is a response to the 2023 attacks in Lewiston, Maine, carried out by a U.S. Army Reserve member.

The bill aims to ensure that military branches use state-level weapons restriction laws when they believe a service member poses a threat to themselves or others.
The legislation is intended to address instances where existing red and yellow flag laws were not utilized despite concerns about a service member’s behavior.

According to CNN, law enforcement was notified that the Maine shooter could “snap and commit a mass shooting” but they did not activate the yellow flag process.

We train ordinary young people, send them to the war we create time and time again, and upon return, they struggle with all these issues including suicidal tendency.  Just a thought.

Miss..

 

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), likened Israel's war against Hamas to the Holocaust on Wednesday and said that Israel will make you "miss Hitler."

On October 7, Hamas led the deadliest Palestinian militant attack on Israel in history. Israel subsequently launched its heaviest-ever airstrikes on Gaza. Israeli officials have said that 1,200 people in Israel were killed in Hamas' attack, according to the Associated Press, while more than 21,100 Palestinians have been killed, officials from the health ministry in Gaza said.

Erdogan compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to that of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's treatment of the Jews and other marginalized groups in the 1940s. The Nazi party and their collaborators killed about 6 million Jewish men, women and children, along with millions of non-Jewish people, during World War II.

Re-Routing..

 

President Xi Jinping’s to Vietnam, a rare 2023 trip outside his country, showcased how he isn’t standing idly by while Washington attempts to diminish China’s role in supply chains that end in American consumption. 

On the surface, US friend-shoring moves appear to be having an impact, with Chinese goods making up a diminishing share of American imports, direct investment in China on the wane and investment in other emerging markets soaring. 

A closer look also shows that Chinese exports to nations that are rising in the ranks of US import sources—like Mexico—are climbing. This suggests China is simply re-routing a chunk of its shipments. And back home, Xi’s government is doubling down on investing in high-value-added manufacturing to replace the lower-end production that’s shifting abroad. 

When Western capitals realize their friend-shoring project is being undermined, the risk is a new wave of protectionist backlash. Just a thought.

Isolation..

 

Israel’s edge over Hamas is so large, that any outcome other than victory is unthinkable. Nine weeks into bombardment and no end.

The question is in what timeframe and at what cost.

Hamas rallies a besieged population in Gaza around it in anger and helps collapse the Palestinian Authority government by ensuring Palestinians see it even more as a feckless adjunct to Israeli military authority. 

Meanwhile, Arab states move strongly away from normalization with Israel, the Global South aligns strongly with the Palestinian cause, Europe recoils at the Israeli army’s excessive indiscriminate bombardment, and massive human loses in Gaza, and an American debate erupts over Israel, destroying the bipartisan support Israel has enjoyed here since the early 1970s. 

Isolation from humanity is the real loss.

Show..

 

Around 61 migrants, including women and children, have drowned following a “tragic shipwreck” off the coast of Libya, said the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).

“The central Mediterranean continues to be one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes,” the UN agency said in the post.

Earlier in 2011

Libya and the 2011 NATO intervention there have become synonymous with failure, disaster, and the Middle East being a “shit show” (President Obama’s colorful descriptor). It has perhaps never been more important to question this prevailing wisdom, because how we interpret Libya affects how we interpret Syria and, importantly, how we assess Obama’s foreign policy legacy. Just a thought.