Legacy media has conducted a near blackout of this damning report and the Biden administration is refusing to act to uphold international human rights law
Qasim, I am with you almost completely. Early in your summary, you refer to "war crimes" committed by Hamas. In a way, this is technically correct. But all Israeli governments, for several decades, have stood by while Palestinians were being abused by Israelis, and their land was being stolen. It is true that the designation of "Israel" as a home for the Jews was not without pushback from surrounding Arab countries, but I do not have information that the "Palestinians" rebelled. They started out as a mostly nomadic people, and many have tried to work their way up. They have had advocates, and Hamas has been one of those advocate organizations. Notably, it was Netanyahu who helped establish, and fund, Hamas. (He's not a good person, and clearly, he intended to "divide and conquer," but Hamas should have had more reason to be grateful to him than to be combative. But they, and the Palestinians, continued to be mistreated, and no one would come to their organized defense. So as much as I understand calling Hamas' actions of last year "war crimes," I am more regretful that they had no other choice than angry at them for being combative. And even since then, it has been the US, and Biden, who have enabled Israel to continue to beat on entirely innocent Palestinians and others.
Occasionally, Netanyahu will say that one attack or another was a "mistake." Have you catalogued how many times the Israelis have paid reparations, or rebuilt what they claim they wrongly destroyed?
People cannot handle this horrendous truth and these facts so they find it simpler to say you are lying rather than Israel. How Israel is getting away with this behaviour and even being backed by the West is so reprehensible and shocking beyond words. What do we do as individuals? I feel so useless. But the bloodshed and genocide needs to stop IMMEDIATELY. We are all a global village connected so quickly online these days. We have to work together somehow for peace. But how do we do it?
Continued coalition and pressure from the masses. We didn't get to this spot overnight, and sadly it won't be stopped overnight -- but we can pressure an continue to pressure until our electeds listen. And if we can't change their minds, we change their seats and vote them out permanently.
I have also noticed that Israel has managed to put itself into a very clever position. What we are seeing here in Australia and I would be intrigued to know and suspect it is repeated around the world. Because of the mass and horrific genocide of Jews by Hitler in World War 2, which is now over 70 years ago, someone has cleverly made it so that if people speak out against Israel and what they are doing - which is in fact mass genocide and war crimes - they are labelled anti-Semitic. This label seems to have particular connotations that can even go so far as to almost label a person a Nazi because of it. The way this has been done is clever, in that it is making people afraid to speak out publicly for fear of being seen as something awful themselves. People like yourself who speak the truth publicly are labelled and demonised. This is perhaps one of the greatest PR stunts ever and it is equally terrifying for what it is allowing to continue.
Some people say, But what about October 7th and what was done to the Israelis on that day. That is NOT forgotten and what happened was totally reprehensible and evil and of course deserves a response. But civilised society does not respond to that reprehensible act by destroying and killing everyone. Civilised society uses every means possible to identify the individuals who committed those crimes and any people that sent them there and ordered those crimes and then they go and find those people. THOSE people, not innocent civilians. Civilised society DOES NOT bomb anywhere those people might be or once were or could have been or just feels like bombing. Civilised society does not bomb hospitals and schools and kill and maim men, women and children.
Why Israel are not in front of the International Criminal Court explaining their actions is beyond me. Why anyone is giving them weapons is beyond me.
The quote attributed to Edmund Burke is scarily apt “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Can these reports be put in a shareable form so that they can be posted on X and Facebook? The reports of torture and genocide must be able to be seen by many more people. Being able to share the reports on social media would help to get the information out to a much larger audience. Thank you.
As an addendum, I have been sending letters to my congressional representatives and senators, signing petitions and writing to biden, but nothing happens to change the continued u.s. support for the genocider israel. What else can we do?
The Geneva Convention states that schools and hospitals must be spared from being targeted by war. Israel is violating every rule every where. He is attacking Lebanon and Iran because he says that Hamas and other leaders are hiding in those places. So if some were hiding in France or Italy,,would he attack them there. He’s trying to start a war. Turn him over to The Hague!
Thank you for this horrifying report. I recently wrote my Democratic member of Congress and asked for an end to arming Israel. I will write again using this report.
I am grateful for your factual reporting, Qasim. I am grateful that you urge us to use this information in sincere and assertive requests to our elected representatives and to the President and his State Department to radically pressure the Israeli government to cease these vile and inhumane military force actions and internal security actions, and to also insist that the President and Dept of State promptly put a novel policy into effect that gives exactly the same priority to human rights as is given to state self-defense and strategic security.
The United States government can not honestly claim that it is doing all that it can. This information is essential to very bluntly point out the conscious denial going on in the Executive branch and in State.
Of course, having waited and waited, denied and denied, members of the Executive branch, State and of the think-tank institutions involved in foreign relations and international affairs, those sharing responsibility for unworkable foreign policy and relations with the Israeli government and with other governments of the Middle East and for watching these policies become distorted in order to facilitate militarization of the region while providing not any substantial support for emergence of tangible improvements in civil human rights norms nor tangible improvements in Palestinian's need for self-determination and the civil society protections self-determination can, democratically, lead to becoming rule of law,...members of these elites will make the excuse that their efforts would hardly change the course of history, the history which they helped author and that does reveal that tragedy has begot tragedy, violence has begot violence, mutual suspicions and mistrust only grow more extensive and dangerous. So yeah the situation is much much worse than before, but the policies made and enforced and the policies made and ignored have everything to do with the worst of the worst consequences.
President Biden's inaction in this particular 'chapter' in relations points to the dangers of public policy in America becoming partisan tools for partisan purposes, including using partisan and governmental power to do favors for 'friends' and supporters, and thereby become dangerous policies and tools to be used directly against ordinary people.
It has been pointed out in other substack venues that only ordinary people can work hard together to put into place ordinary policy that supports relations between people, domestically and internationally, humanitarian needs programs and shared human aspirations programs that respect people and that protect against dangerous alliances between elites and governments, alliances that treat people as expendable or as property of the elite-government hybrid projects.
Your work contributes to each of our abilities to think through these novel policy objectives, tools, and goals.
Right now we have to be very assertive with those we hope to elect to our national government in order to inform them factually and clearly about our intention to replace existing US foreign policy and reform US State Dept and Executive Branch expectations for deep and direct citizen involvement in foreign relations. The Palestinian tragedy is just one and among the most important for citizens to take direct action to end as quickly as possible and in a way the has the durability of genuine mutual human respect and respect for the lives to be lived by children -- all children everywhere! -- and their children.
It is a fact that the current situation does not need to go on, and it is a fact that in RE US foreign policy and military strategic planning that this situation could have been avoided if the US administrations, beginning in the late 1950s, had accepted the challenge of the postwar [post WWII] and provided support for building, carefully and pluralistic-ally building an international community effort toward humanist, democratic social institutions on both national and international scale.
The real political confrontation within the US and, to some extent, within the Atlantic western alliance and with relations with some nations in Asia and the Middle East, and which dominated much of US foreign policy development and foreign relations was the confrontation with the Soviet Union and the less tangible but perceived 'world Communist community'.
Strong military and foreign national political assets and strategic partnerships completely overshadowed, in the American, mostly conservative American, foreign relations and intelligence communities the obvious global peoples' efforts to reform their societies and governments under humanist, democratic, open society conceptual frameworks. Any dissent from the conservative vision and program, along with any emphasis on 'social' was suspect and was targeted for isolation and removal. Human rights within a democratic or social democratic and of local character was not to be tolerated.
The convergence of growing reliance on Middle East regional:
petroleum by the West;
and geostrategic military foreign clients and foreign territories and sea routes;
put the Middle East nations into one of the centers of global confrontation. Client state relations, no matter how they governed and what was the actual condition of ordinary people, were predicated on conformity with this American conservation ideological program, and client state elites and institutions were forced into the contest by means of various civil 'development' schemes and military development assistance projects.
We see what happens to people, whether in the US or in other places, when ideological confrontations, especially among dominant members of mutually suspicious empires or military alliances, become more important constituent elements to national character and governance than the people who actually live in them.
While we attempt to re-constitute and re-form foreign policy to better support people and support the living planet out of which we grew and in which, ecologically, we are living, we have to become very factually conscious and very honest in our use of lessons of history. These lessons give meaning to reform and act as factual restraint to run-away ideological fervor. These lessons point to the factually inescapable reality of striving together, striving together to further cooperation, to be better at managing areas of misunderstanding and disagreement, and to see the people living well together as national and international priority, and consciously supporting the planet's living ecologies. Commonly recognized and mutually supported rule of law governance do appear necessary within the context of these many lessons, and within this context, rule of law must needs an actively maintained character that is humane in the sense that the rules are equally made by and protective of all the people all the time and that demand the same factual honest accountability to each other.
Netanyahu‘s desire to halt his corruption trial and the fact that his government coalition only holds the exact correct number of seats in the Knesset to ensure that he stays in power and remains Prime Minister, likely drives a very large part of why the war has gone on this long and with this level of depravity.
A single defection from that morally corrupt far right government coalition would collapse his government. That’s not justification. That is atrocity in the service of a naked desire to stay in power and to avoid accountability. It would be embarrassing if it were within the capacity of any of these people to feel such.
What I will say is I do not understand President Biden’s not holding Netanyahu to (much) more account, especially given how much of a micromanagement stranglehold he has had for Ukraine, which is itself an an attacked country in an existential battle for its own survival, against an enemy who has no interest in negotiations short of complete surrender. Biden is genuinely the finest president since FDR in many ways, with the sour note of this one-two punch of moral turpitude.
I do not say this to equate Ukraine with Israel, but to recognize that I genuinely do not understand behaving one way with one country, and behaving the complete opposite way with another country. Especially when those countries are the opposite sides of being attacked versus being the aggressor fighting a war of chosen aggression.
I think it is entirely fair to couch it in these terms, even if Israel was grievously attacked on October 7. This war was not the sole option available for responding to October 7, it is and it was the worst and most unjustifiable approach to choose.
Thank you for looking squarely at the face of such immense suffering. It is awful. It is necessary.
Just like Hitler and his concentration camps. The difference is Bibi’s final solution is bombing and using drones to annihilate them into non existence, not gas chambers.
I expected the UN to get more involved after Israel started attacking UN outposts and UN schools. Do they have no power at all? Is there anything the UN can do in this situation, or why haven't they done anything?
Qasim, I am with you almost completely. Early in your summary, you refer to "war crimes" committed by Hamas. In a way, this is technically correct. But all Israeli governments, for several decades, have stood by while Palestinians were being abused by Israelis, and their land was being stolen. It is true that the designation of "Israel" as a home for the Jews was not without pushback from surrounding Arab countries, but I do not have information that the "Palestinians" rebelled. They started out as a mostly nomadic people, and many have tried to work their way up. They have had advocates, and Hamas has been one of those advocate organizations. Notably, it was Netanyahu who helped establish, and fund, Hamas. (He's not a good person, and clearly, he intended to "divide and conquer," but Hamas should have had more reason to be grateful to him than to be combative. But they, and the Palestinians, continued to be mistreated, and no one would come to their organized defense. So as much as I understand calling Hamas' actions of last year "war crimes," I am more regretful that they had no other choice than angry at them for being combative. And even since then, it has been the US, and Biden, who have enabled Israel to continue to beat on entirely innocent Palestinians and others.
Occasionally, Netanyahu will say that one attack or another was a "mistake." Have you catalogued how many times the Israelis have paid reparations, or rebuilt what they claim they wrongly destroyed?
People cannot handle this horrendous truth and these facts so they find it simpler to say you are lying rather than Israel. How Israel is getting away with this behaviour and even being backed by the West is so reprehensible and shocking beyond words. What do we do as individuals? I feel so useless. But the bloodshed and genocide needs to stop IMMEDIATELY. We are all a global village connected so quickly online these days. We have to work together somehow for peace. But how do we do it?
Continued coalition and pressure from the masses. We didn't get to this spot overnight, and sadly it won't be stopped overnight -- but we can pressure an continue to pressure until our electeds listen. And if we can't change their minds, we change their seats and vote them out permanently.
I have also noticed that Israel has managed to put itself into a very clever position. What we are seeing here in Australia and I would be intrigued to know and suspect it is repeated around the world. Because of the mass and horrific genocide of Jews by Hitler in World War 2, which is now over 70 years ago, someone has cleverly made it so that if people speak out against Israel and what they are doing - which is in fact mass genocide and war crimes - they are labelled anti-Semitic. This label seems to have particular connotations that can even go so far as to almost label a person a Nazi because of it. The way this has been done is clever, in that it is making people afraid to speak out publicly for fear of being seen as something awful themselves. People like yourself who speak the truth publicly are labelled and demonised. This is perhaps one of the greatest PR stunts ever and it is equally terrifying for what it is allowing to continue.
Some people say, But what about October 7th and what was done to the Israelis on that day. That is NOT forgotten and what happened was totally reprehensible and evil and of course deserves a response. But civilised society does not respond to that reprehensible act by destroying and killing everyone. Civilised society uses every means possible to identify the individuals who committed those crimes and any people that sent them there and ordered those crimes and then they go and find those people. THOSE people, not innocent civilians. Civilised society DOES NOT bomb anywhere those people might be or once were or could have been or just feels like bombing. Civilised society does not bomb hospitals and schools and kill and maim men, women and children.
Why Israel are not in front of the International Criminal Court explaining their actions is beyond me. Why anyone is giving them weapons is beyond me.
The quote attributed to Edmund Burke is scarily apt “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Can these reports be put in a shareable form so that they can be posted on X and Facebook? The reports of torture and genocide must be able to be seen by many more people. Being able to share the reports on social media would help to get the information out to a much larger audience. Thank you.
As an addendum, I have been sending letters to my congressional representatives and senators, signing petitions and writing to biden, but nothing happens to change the continued u.s. support for the genocider israel. What else can we do?
Thank you for continuing to speak up, and yes thank you for sharing this across social media.
Sorry, apologies, just saw the shareable link. Thank you.
Thank you for bringing to light the horrors of the genocide happening to the Palestinians. It is GENOCIDE and needs to be named.
Thank you for reading and sharing.
What can be done about this. Letter writing to Biden and Harris does not seem to be effective.
Writing, peacefully protesting, marching in the streets, electing new leaders. It will require all of us to keep raising our voices.
The Geneva Convention states that schools and hospitals must be spared from being targeted by war. Israel is violating every rule every where. He is attacking Lebanon and Iran because he says that Hamas and other leaders are hiding in those places. So if some were hiding in France or Italy,,would he attack them there. He’s trying to start a war. Turn him over to The Hague!
Thank you for bringing attention to these atrocities, Qasim. They should not be happening in the dark.
Absolutely, Michele. It is critical we continue to shine a light on them and bear witness.
Thank you for this horrifying report. I recently wrote my Democratic member of Congress and asked for an end to arming Israel. I will write again using this report.
Thank you for continuing to raise your voice, Sally.
I am grateful for your factual reporting, Qasim. I am grateful that you urge us to use this information in sincere and assertive requests to our elected representatives and to the President and his State Department to radically pressure the Israeli government to cease these vile and inhumane military force actions and internal security actions, and to also insist that the President and Dept of State promptly put a novel policy into effect that gives exactly the same priority to human rights as is given to state self-defense and strategic security.
The United States government can not honestly claim that it is doing all that it can. This information is essential to very bluntly point out the conscious denial going on in the Executive branch and in State.
Of course, having waited and waited, denied and denied, members of the Executive branch, State and of the think-tank institutions involved in foreign relations and international affairs, those sharing responsibility for unworkable foreign policy and relations with the Israeli government and with other governments of the Middle East and for watching these policies become distorted in order to facilitate militarization of the region while providing not any substantial support for emergence of tangible improvements in civil human rights norms nor tangible improvements in Palestinian's need for self-determination and the civil society protections self-determination can, democratically, lead to becoming rule of law,...members of these elites will make the excuse that their efforts would hardly change the course of history, the history which they helped author and that does reveal that tragedy has begot tragedy, violence has begot violence, mutual suspicions and mistrust only grow more extensive and dangerous. So yeah the situation is much much worse than before, but the policies made and enforced and the policies made and ignored have everything to do with the worst of the worst consequences.
President Biden's inaction in this particular 'chapter' in relations points to the dangers of public policy in America becoming partisan tools for partisan purposes, including using partisan and governmental power to do favors for 'friends' and supporters, and thereby become dangerous policies and tools to be used directly against ordinary people.
It has been pointed out in other substack venues that only ordinary people can work hard together to put into place ordinary policy that supports relations between people, domestically and internationally, humanitarian needs programs and shared human aspirations programs that respect people and that protect against dangerous alliances between elites and governments, alliances that treat people as expendable or as property of the elite-government hybrid projects.
Your work contributes to each of our abilities to think through these novel policy objectives, tools, and goals.
Right now we have to be very assertive with those we hope to elect to our national government in order to inform them factually and clearly about our intention to replace existing US foreign policy and reform US State Dept and Executive Branch expectations for deep and direct citizen involvement in foreign relations. The Palestinian tragedy is just one and among the most important for citizens to take direct action to end as quickly as possible and in a way the has the durability of genuine mutual human respect and respect for the lives to be lived by children -- all children everywhere! -- and their children.
Thank you Bob, and well said. One of the most painful parts of all this is that this is preventable. It does not have to be this way.
Thank you, Qasim.
It is a fact that the current situation does not need to go on, and it is a fact that in RE US foreign policy and military strategic planning that this situation could have been avoided if the US administrations, beginning in the late 1950s, had accepted the challenge of the postwar [post WWII] and provided support for building, carefully and pluralistic-ally building an international community effort toward humanist, democratic social institutions on both national and international scale.
The real political confrontation within the US and, to some extent, within the Atlantic western alliance and with relations with some nations in Asia and the Middle East, and which dominated much of US foreign policy development and foreign relations was the confrontation with the Soviet Union and the less tangible but perceived 'world Communist community'.
Strong military and foreign national political assets and strategic partnerships completely overshadowed, in the American, mostly conservative American, foreign relations and intelligence communities the obvious global peoples' efforts to reform their societies and governments under humanist, democratic, open society conceptual frameworks. Any dissent from the conservative vision and program, along with any emphasis on 'social' was suspect and was targeted for isolation and removal. Human rights within a democratic or social democratic and of local character was not to be tolerated.
The convergence of growing reliance on Middle East regional:
petroleum by the West;
and geostrategic military foreign clients and foreign territories and sea routes;
put the Middle East nations into one of the centers of global confrontation. Client state relations, no matter how they governed and what was the actual condition of ordinary people, were predicated on conformity with this American conservation ideological program, and client state elites and institutions were forced into the contest by means of various civil 'development' schemes and military development assistance projects.
We see what happens to people, whether in the US or in other places, when ideological confrontations, especially among dominant members of mutually suspicious empires or military alliances, become more important constituent elements to national character and governance than the people who actually live in them.
While we attempt to re-constitute and re-form foreign policy to better support people and support the living planet out of which we grew and in which, ecologically, we are living, we have to become very factually conscious and very honest in our use of lessons of history. These lessons give meaning to reform and act as factual restraint to run-away ideological fervor. These lessons point to the factually inescapable reality of striving together, striving together to further cooperation, to be better at managing areas of misunderstanding and disagreement, and to see the people living well together as national and international priority, and consciously supporting the planet's living ecologies. Commonly recognized and mutually supported rule of law governance do appear necessary within the context of these many lessons, and within this context, rule of law must needs an actively maintained character that is humane in the sense that the rules are equally made by and protective of all the people all the time and that demand the same factual honest accountability to each other.
Heart wrenching. Thank you for being brave and reporting it.
Thank you for reading and sharing, Myra.
Your info is perfect, National Media journalist should read your letters, opinion pieces etc. before they write a single word.
Congratulations Jan
Thank you, Jan. Doing what I can but need to keep pushing.
Netanyahu‘s desire to halt his corruption trial and the fact that his government coalition only holds the exact correct number of seats in the Knesset to ensure that he stays in power and remains Prime Minister, likely drives a very large part of why the war has gone on this long and with this level of depravity.
A single defection from that morally corrupt far right government coalition would collapse his government. That’s not justification. That is atrocity in the service of a naked desire to stay in power and to avoid accountability. It would be embarrassing if it were within the capacity of any of these people to feel such.
What I will say is I do not understand President Biden’s not holding Netanyahu to (much) more account, especially given how much of a micromanagement stranglehold he has had for Ukraine, which is itself an an attacked country in an existential battle for its own survival, against an enemy who has no interest in negotiations short of complete surrender. Biden is genuinely the finest president since FDR in many ways, with the sour note of this one-two punch of moral turpitude.
I do not say this to equate Ukraine with Israel, but to recognize that I genuinely do not understand behaving one way with one country, and behaving the complete opposite way with another country. Especially when those countries are the opposite sides of being attacked versus being the aggressor fighting a war of chosen aggression.
I think it is entirely fair to couch it in these terms, even if Israel was grievously attacked on October 7. This war was not the sole option available for responding to October 7, it is and it was the worst and most unjustifiable approach to choose.
Thank you for looking squarely at the face of such immense suffering. It is awful. It is necessary.
Just like Hitler and his concentration camps. The difference is Bibi’s final solution is bombing and using drones to annihilate them into non existence, not gas chambers.
I expected the UN to get more involved after Israel started attacking UN outposts and UN schools. Do they have no power at all? Is there anything the UN can do in this situation, or why haven't they done anything?
The security council has already passed a binding resolution. They have the power to enforce it. The USA won’t let them.
Holy moly, we are really being nasty this year.