Israel is a rogue nation. It should be removed from the United Nations

 

One rogue nation cannot declare war on the UN itself and continue to get away with it

Over the past year, Israel has launched attacks on multiple countries and occupied territories: the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.

Yet countries and territories aside, Israel has also targeted one specific organization with a series of unprecedented rhetorical and violent attacks.

Yes, the United Nations. We have all witnessed Israel, effectively, declare war on the UN.

Consider the record of recent weeks and months:

• Israel’s prime minister, while standing on stage at the UN general assembly, denounced the body as “contemptible”, a “house of darkness” and a “swamp of antisemitic bile”.
• Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the UN shredded a copy of the UN charter with a miniature paper shredder while also standing at the podium of the general assembly, and later said the UN headquarters in New York “should be closed and wiped off the face of the Earth”.
• Israel’s foreign minister falsely accused the UN secretary general of not having condemned Iran’s attacks on Israel, declared him “persona non grata in Israel” and announced that he had “banned him from entering the country”.
• The Israeli government actively obstructed a UN-mandated commission of inquiry trying to collect evidence on the 7 October attacks.
• Israel’s parliament is in the process of designating a longstanding UN agency, Unrwa, as a “terrorist organization”.
• The Israeli military has bombed UN schools, warehouses and refugee camps in Gaza for 12 consecutive months, and killed a record 228 UN employees in the process. “By far the highest number of our personnel killed in a single conflict or natural disaster since the creation of the United Nations,” to quote the UN secretary general.
• The Israeli military is now also attacking UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. According to the UN, “five UN ‘Blue Helmets’ serving with UNIFIL in Lebanon have been injured as Israeli forces inflicted damage on UN positions close to the ‘Blue Line’.”

How is any of this OK? Acceptable? Legal?

Perhaps the biggest question of all: how is Israel still allowed to remain a member of the UN?  (more...)

Israel is a rogue nation. It should be removed from the United Nations

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Israel’s Bond Sale to Americans – How to Stop the Big Steal

 

Just days before Iran and Arab forces launched their October 1 operation to expose Israel’s military vulnerabilities, four Palestinian Americans launched the most serious threat to Israel’s survival in the economic war that is under way in parallel.

On September 24 they filed an 89-page brief in a Florida state court to declare illegal US financing of Israel’s war against Palestine through the purchase of Israeli government bonds with American taxpayer money.  Their target is $700 million worth of Israel bonds purchased by the Palm Beach County treasury of Florida on the order of a single man, the county’s chief financial officer Joseph Abruzzo.  

Starting in September 2023, one month before Hamas launched its break-out from Gaza, Abruzzo signed a purchase of $40 million in Israel bonds. Then from October 10 through  March 2024 Abruzzo used county taxpayer funds to buy $660 million worth of securities the Israeli government was issuing to cover its warfighting costs.

Altogether, the Israeli plan is to raise at least $58 billion in new debt this year,  with an increasing proportion of this debt to be covered from the US where Goldman Sachs and Bank of America are placing the bonds with small-town officials like Abruzzo.   

In Abruzzo’s case, the court papers relate, “Palm Beach County is currently the world’s largest investor in Israel Bonds due to the Defendant’s [Abruzzo] $700 million dollar investment in Israel bonds. These $700 million dollars, sourced from Palm Beach County taxpayers’ property taxes, are being poured into a foreign economy that has an increased risk of default. Defendant purchased $700 million dollars of Israel Bonds amidst a housing crisis in Palm Beach County, an education crisis, and a funding shortfall of $732 million dollars in Palm Beach County’s budget that is leading to several capital-improvement projects such as athletic centers, parks, animal shelters, and bridges to be either delayed or cancelled. At the time the $732 million dollar shortfall in Palm Beach County’s budget was announced, Defendant had already invested $160 million dollars in Israel Bonds.”

After his own budget deficit and treasury debt were announced, Abruzzo “invested an additional $540 million dollars in Israel Bonds.”

In his public justification,  Abruzzo told the Miami press on October 10, 2023: “I am proud to show solidarity with the people of Israel and make Palm Beach County the first county in the nation to increase its investment in Israel Bonds following their declaration of war against Hamas.”  Six months later, Abruzzo attacked critics of Israel in the Democratic party as it began the presidential election campaign. “Do I hear, especially from the far-left wing of my Democratic party, concerns about investing in Israel? Yes. Are the public leaders in D.C. of the Democratic Party condemning support for Israel? Yes. . . But I would say to them, we’re not going to be deterred. They need to back off and we need to stand united with our greatest ally, Israel.”  (more...)

Israel’s  Bond Sale to Americans – How to Stop the Big Steal

Revealed: the Israeli Spies Writing America’s News

 

One year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.” So reads the title of a recent Axios article describing the Israeli prime minister riding on an unbeatable wave of triumphs. These stunning military “successes,” its author Barak Ravid notes, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassinations of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the pager attack against Lebanon.

The same author recently went viral for an article that claimed that Israeli attacks against Hezbollah are “not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach ‘de-escalation through escalation.'” Users on social media mocked Ravid for this bizarre, Orwellian reasoning. But what almost everybody missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy – or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former analyst with Israeli spying agency Unit 8200, and as recently as last year, was still a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces group.

Unit 8200 is Israel’s largest and perhaps most controversial spying organization. It has been responsible for many high-profile espionage and terror operations, including the recent pager attack that injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. As this investigation will reveal, Ravid is far from the only Israeli ex-spook working at top U.S. media outlets, working hard to manufacture Western support for his country’s actions.

Ravid has quickly become one of the most influential individuals in the Capitol Hill press corps. In April, he won the prestigious White House Press Correspondents’ Award “for overall excellence in White House coverage”—one of the highest awards in American journalism. Judges were impressed by what they described as his “deep, almost intimate levels of sourcing in the U.S. and abroad” and picked out six articles as exemplary pieces of journalism.

Most of these stories consisted of simply printing anonymous White House or Israeli government sources, making them look good, and distancing President Biden from the horrors of the Israeli attack on Palestine. As such, there was functionally no difference between these and White House press releases. For example, one story the judges picked out was titled “Scoop: Biden tells Bibi 3-day fighting pause could help secure release of some hostages,” and presented the 46th President of the United States as a dedicated humanitarian hellbent on reducing suffering. Another described how “frustrated” Biden was becoming with Netanyahu and the Israeli government.  (more...)

Revealed: the Israeli Spies Writing America’s News

this is amazing. Barak Ravid, who is considered by the Western media class to be the greatest most objective neutral "journalist" on the ongoing Gaza genocide even though he served in Israeli military intelligence and constantly launders Israeli propaganda, is now openly… pic.twitter.com/lYldfmVqaC

— ☀️👀 (@zei_squirrel) September 6, 2024

I resigned from Canada’s largest broadcasting corporation over its complicity in Israel’s genocide

 

I resigned from CBC after voicing my concerns over their coverage of Palestine. I have since seen how the CBC's policy on impartiality helped manufacture consent for genocide.

Words can empower, arm, and evoke sentiments that stimulate new ideas, worldviews, and policies. Being the only Muslim in the newsroom, I feared the language the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was using to talk about Palestinians and resistance could ignite similar emotions that justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq and mass killings of innocent civilians in 2001. 

Days after October 7, 2023, I sat across from a CBC executive who appeared uneasy yet curious about my concerns over CBC’s coverage of Hamas’ attack on Israel. I was appalled by CBC’s lack of historical context between Israel and Palestine and the language used to defend Israel’s massacre of Palestinians.

The executive appeared empathetic but then quoted CBC’s stance on impartiality and the importance of “balanced coverage”. But, I argued, when crimes against humanity are being committed, there is no such thing as both sides to a story. There is only the truth.

After sharing my concerns with the executive, I was strategically dismissed from daily pitch meetings for a few weeks. But as the war amplified and I returned to my seat at the table, I continuously brought up to my peers and editors that labeling genocide as the “Israel-Hamas war” falsely portrays that both Palestinians and Israelis are on even-playing fields. This narrative ignores that for 76 years, Palestinians have been forcibly ousted from their homes, confined to the barbed wires of the Gaza Strip, and have been under constant surveillance of Israeli settlers.  (more...)

I resigned from Canada’s largest broadcasting corporation over its complicity in Israel’s genocide

The Present State of Israel vs. the Israel of the Bible: Understanding the Difference.: “The Present State of Israel Is Not the Israel of God”

 

The modern State of Israel, established in 1948 in the land of Palestine, is often erroneously equated with the Israel of the Bible, to whom God made significant promises. Many Christians, due to a misinterpretation of biblical prophecy and misunderstanding of historical facts, continue to view the current State of Israel as a continuation of biblical Israel, believing it to be the fulfillment of divine promises. However, this perspective is based on a flawed exegesis and a misunderstanding of the political motivations behind the establishment of the modern Israeli state. It is crucial to differentiate between the biblical Israel, a covenant people of God, and the modern state, which was created through political maneuvers and carries a Zionist agenda that is largely secular.

The modern State of Israel was established through the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a document that signaled British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This was not an act of divine fulfillment, but a political deal made between the British government and influential figures like Baron Rothschild. The Balfour Declaration was part of a broader strategy during World War I, when Britain sought support from the Zionist movement—a political movement that aimed to establish a national homeland for Jews. Zionism, however, was not a religious movement. It was driven primarily by political and nationalist motives.

Zionism sought to gather Jews from around the world to form a state in Palestine, but it was not a movement grounded in the religious or moral mandates of the Bible. In fact, many leading Zionists were secular or even atheists. They envisioned a Jewish state not as the fulfillment of God’s covenant with the Israelites, but as a solution to the Jewish diaspora’s challenges, particularly after centuries of persecution and, most devastatingly, the Holocaust.  (more...)

The Present State of Israel vs. the Israel of the Bible: Understanding the Difference.: “The Present State of Israel Is Not the Israel of God”

US reporter held by Israel

 

The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate on the Israeli police's persecution of US journalist Jeremy Loffredo, who is currently being held in the country.

Unraveling Empire

 

Today's topics include Zelensky's so-called victory plan, new North Korean military technology that turns its soldiers invisible, and the collapse of France's imperial projects in Africa.