Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church is the third oldest existing Christian church in the world, standing very nearly since the time of Christ.
Additionally, Israel today demanded the evacuation of yet another hospital in Gaza, the Al-Quds Hospital, claiming that it was also on the bombing list.
Former US Rep. Justin Amash (L-MI), who was the only US House Member representing the Libertarian Party, announced today on Twitter/X that several of his relatives were killed when Israel bombed Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church in Gaza. Amash’s relatives, along with many others, were seeking shelter in the Church as Israel continues to flatten Gaza.
I was really worried about this. 😔 With great sadness, I have now confirmed that several of my relatives (including Viola and Yara pictured here) were killed at Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church in Gaza, where they had been sheltering, when part of the complex was destroyed as… pic.twitter.com/w5k1xEeTgF — Justin Amash (@justinamash) October 20, 2023
As one commenter on Amash’s thread pointed out, Saint Porphyrius Church “symbolized coexistence. It’s worth noting that this church is located near the Jewish Quarter in Gaza as well.”
Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church is the third oldest existing Christian church in the world, standing very nearly since the time of Christ. Another commenter on Twitter added that “Gaza’s oldest church the Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius”…was a refuge for at least 380 civilians. At least 40 have been reported dead and more searches continue among the rubble.”
It should be clear to everyone by now that a huge percentage of the right wingers who criticized US proxy warfare via Ukraine did so only because they were worried it might take away from US proxy warfare via Israel.
The US-centralized empire is a giant network of allies, partners and assets spanning the entire globe. Many of the nations in this network, such as Israel, have strong ideologies and values systems that the empire must cooperate with to obtain their loyalty. But the empire itself has no ideology or values — it values nothing but planetary domination. The empire’s motives are no more ideological than the motives of a mugger are ideological.
So the empire has no ideology, but it is held together by cooperation with individual governments who do. The problem this creates is that sometimes the ideologies of those states cause them to do things that go against the interests of the empire as a whole. Israel can just up and decide to commit a genocidal massacre in front of everyone. Saudi Arabia can decide it’s going to dismember a Washington Post reporter with a bone saw. Proxies in Ukraine can keep saying Nazi things and sporting Nazi insignia in public. They do these things because unlike the top brass in the imperial power structure they are guided by ideology, with no regard for the need to preserve the empire’s image as a “rules-based international order”.
This often creates a PR crisis for the empire, because the public will cease consenting to the network of alliances, partners and assets if it becomes sufficiently aware of the depravity needed to hold it all together. This is typically easy to resolve because the US empire has the most sophisticated propaganda machine in the history of civilization, but that propaganda machine is operated by individuals — individuals who may have learned about Palestinian rights at university, or who were disgusted about the way their employer ran cover for Israel’s murder of Shireen Abu Akleh only to find out Israel did it and was lying. So they don’t always play along with the imperial machine in their reporting, thereby exacerbating the empire’s PR crisis.
The worst thing that could possibly happen, from the empire’s point of view, is for the public to start opening their eyes to its criminality. With Israel on a genocidal rampage as pro-Palestinian protesters flood the streets worldwide, we may be certain that the manipulators who are responsible for imperial perception management are in full crisis mode, because if a critical mass of people can pick apart this one lie, it opens up the possibility of their unplugging themselves from the whole propaganda matrix that keeps the empire operational.
The empire managers are standing by Israel’s side and doing everything they can to pretend its actions are right and just, but they are fidgeting uncomfortably, and behind the scenes we may be sure they’re in total damage control. That’s why we’re being slammed with such a mad deluge of propaganda right now, and that’s why they’re doing everything they can to censor and suppress and shut down voices who are critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Blinken also claimed Hamas is preventing American citizens from fleeing the Gaza Strip
“UNICEF says 1,524 children have been killed in the Gaza Strip during these bombings. Why isn’t the US calling for at least a temporary ceasefire?” Margaret Brennan, the host of CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” asked Blinken.
During the interview with Brennan, Blinken also claimed it was Hamas’s fault that American citizens in Gaza could not leave despite the fact that the enclave is under Israeli blockade and Egypt has not been letting people enter its territory from its one border crossing with Gaza.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday rejected the idea of the US calling for a ceasefire in Gaza when confronted with the massive number of child casualties in Israel’s onslaught.
“UNICEF says 1,524 children have been killed in the Gaza Strip during these bombings. Why isn’t the US calling for at least a temporary ceasefire?” Margaret Brennan, the host of CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” asked Blinken.
Blinken claimed that the death of children on both sides hits him “right in the heart” but did not criticize Israel’s vicious bombing campaign. He pointed to US efforts to get Israel to allow aid trucks to enter Gaza through Egypt, and Brennan then asked why the US isn’t pushing for at least a temporary ceasefire.
“Israel has to do everything it can to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Blinken said, referring to the October 7 Hamas attack. “Freezing things in place where they are now would allow Hamas to remain where it is and to repeat what it’s done some time in the future. No country could accept that,” Blinken said.
Blinken made a similar argument earlier this year when rejecting the idea of a ceasefire in Ukraine ahead of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, saying a pause in fighting would only benefit Russia. Now, it’s clear Ukraine’s counteroffensive has failed after months of brutal fighting and heavy Ukrainian casualties.
The administration may also request funds to spend on arming Taiwan
““America can certainly afford to stand with Israel and to support Israel’s military needs and we also can and must support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia,” Yellen said.
And Ukraine, and Taiwan using inflationary, debt increasing printed money. Is Yellen really that stupid?
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen insisted on Monday that the US could “certainly” afford to fund the war in Ukraine and Israel’s onslaught on Gaza as the White House is looking for more military aid for both conflicts.
Yellen’s comments came a day after President Biden said the US could fund both wars. “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history — not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense,” he said on 60 Minutes.
Yellen said the House needs to elect a new speaker so the new funding could be authorized. “We do need to come up with funds, both for Israel and for Ukraine. This is a priority,” she said. “It’s really up to the House to find, seat a speaker and to put us in a position where legislation can be passed.”
The White House has also discussed the possibility of rolling funding to arm Taiwan into the potential spending package. But Yellen did not mention Taiwan, and other Biden administration officials have made clear this week that Ukraine and Israel are the priority.
Gaza’s two million people subsist on the edge of starvation. Israel openly boasts that it allows just enough food into the enclave to prevent outright starvation. Chemicals to treat water are banned. Electricity runs only a few hours daily because the power plant was bombed by Israel’s U.S.-supplied air force. Hospitals have almost no medicines. In short, wartime conditions in the open-air prison. Even the wretched animals in Gaza Zoo are starving. Hamas fighters have reportedly even killed cats and dogs.
It’s not a real war. The bloody carnage in Israel and Palestine that we now witness is a large prison uprising being crushed by Israel’s military might.
M-16 lightweight rifles against Merkava tanks; home-made rockets (little more than flying pipe bombs) versus U.S.-state of the art F-15 and F-16 fighter bombers; a few thousand Hamas fighters versus 600,000 or more Israeli soldiers and police backed by drones and heavy artillery.
American-made bombs and rockets are now shattering what’s left of Gaza, one of the world’s most densely populated places. Israel, which suffered over 1,200 dead innocent civilians from a Hamas-led attack on a music festival and waves of rocket barrages, vows Biblical revenge on the Palestinians.
Interestingly, the U.S. supplied warplanes, bombs, and rockets pounding Palestinian fighters and civilians are being used in contravention of the U.S. Arms Control Act which forbids use of American arms against civilian targets.
Heedless of U.S. law, the Biden administration is in full pro-war hysteria over Gaza. The next U.S. elections are getting closer. The U.S. state-guided media is also in full war mode, portraying events in Gaza as an attack on the United States.
The war party in Washington is baying for war against Iran which, as far as we know now, had no primary role in the Gaza attacks. One will likely be found or manufactured by Israel’s right-wing militants and Fox News.
I have been watching and writing about the agony of Palestine for some 70 years. I’ve watched what was to have been a small Jewish enclave grow into a powerful Sparta with some 200 nuclear weapons and unprecedented control of the U.S. Congress and media.
Gaza, this miserable, squalid human garbage dump, is a giant open-air prison packed with 2.2 million Palestinian refugees driven from the newly created state of Israel in 1948. Israel and its close ally Egypt keep Gaza bottled up on its land and sea borders. Palestinians are only allowed to fish along the shore. Coastal gas and oil reserves have been expropriated by Israel and Egypt.
Israel has used White Phosphorus on the people in Gaza, another war crime. Israel has given all people in north Gaza, 1.1 million human beings, 24 hours to move to south Gaza. That is impossible and will not happen. It is an attempt of ethnic cleansing.
If Israel makes, as announced, a ground attack on Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon is likely to attack Israel. The U.S. has allegedly let Syria know (via France) that Damascus, and President Assad personally, would be attacked if that were to happen. This is a miscalculation. It is far from certain that Assad, or even Iran, has the means to hold Hizbullah back.
A U.S. attack on the government of Syria would bring Russia into the war. Iran would also respond which is exactly what some of the neocons want.
What is the reason for the ‘Al-Aqsa Deluge’, as Hamas had named its terror operation against the Zionists?
On October 8 Alastair Crooke, one of most experienced Middle East hands, wrote in AlMahadeen:
“Israel” has shattered into two equally weighted factions holding to two irreconcilable visions of “Israel’s” future; two mutually opposing readings of history and of what it means to be Jewish.
The fissure could not be more complete. Except it is. One faction, which holds a majority in parliament, is broadly Mizrahi — a former underclass in Israeli society; and the other, largely well-to-do liberal Ashkenazi.
Mizrahi are mostly the original Middle Eastern Jews and often on the religious far right, Ashkenazi are mostly liberal European ones. The current Netanyahoo government is the first which includes far-right Mizrahi ministers.
Most Mizrahi follow the Sephardi religious rites. They want an religious state based on Jewish law. They are as radial as ISIS.
The high court of Israel has 14 Ashkenazi judges and one Mizrahi one. It is one of the reasons why the Netanyahoo government wants the parliament to be able to vote down high court judgements. There have been large, U.S. sponsored ‘regime change’ protests in Israel against that move. The leaders of the military and security services, mostly Ashkenazi, have also opposed the government move against the court.
I therefore think that it is quite possible that there was intelligence pointing to the Hamas attack, but that it was not revealed to let Netanyahoo fall into a trap. We have however no evidence that there were reasonably precise intelligence warnings, or that they were held up.
There are already demands for Netanyahoo to go. If only for his long term sponsoring of Hamas as a counterweight to the more secular Fatah Palestinians. Should he no longer be prime minister the courts will take up the three bribe cases against him which are currently pending. He would likely end up in jail.
Another reason for Hamas’ success was the fact that three of the four infantry battalions, with 800 soldiers each, that usually guard the Gaza strip, had been moved to the West Bank to protect right-wing Zionist settlers during a religious holiday. This allowed for Hamas’ easy breach of the fence.
If this were to occur, the Gaza gas fields would be integrated into Israel’s offshore installations, which are contiguous to those of the Gaza Strip. (See Map 1 above)
These various offshore installations are also linked up to Israel’s energy transport corridor, extending from the port of Eilat, which is an oil pipeline terminal,
Almost 15 years ago in December 2008, Israel invaded Gaza under “Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009).”
The following article was first published by Global Research in January 2009 at the height of the Israeli bombing and invasion under Operation Cast Lead.
Author’s Note and Update
Early Saturday October 7, 2023, Hamas launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” which wasled by its Military Chief Mohammed Deif. On that same day, Netanyahu confirmed a so-called “State of Readiness For War.”
Israel has now (October 7, 2023) officially declared an illegal war on Palestine.
Military operations are invariably planned well in advance. Was “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” a “surprise attack”? Did Netanyahu and his vast military-intelligence apparatus have foreknowledge of the Hamas attack?
Was a carefully formulated plan to wage an all out war against Palestine envisaged prior to the launching of “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm”?
According to Dr. Philip Giraldi,
“As a former intelligence officer, I find it impossible to believe that Israel did not have multiple informants inside Gaza as well as electronic listening devices all along the border wall which would have picked up movements of groups and vehicles.”
[Did Netanyahu have foreknowledge] about developments in Gaza and chose to let it happen so they can wipe Gaza off the map… in retaliation” (Philip Giraldi, October 8, 2023)
It should also be understood that Netanyahu’s October 7, 2023 illegal declaration of war against Gaza is a continuation of its 2008-2009 invasion of Gaza under “Operation Cast Lead.” The underlying objective is the outright military occupation of Gaza by Israel’s IDF forces and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.
Flash Back: Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009)
Gaza belongs to Palestine. In December 2008, Israeli forces invaded the Gaza Strip under Operation Cast Lead. The justification for this invasionwas “persistent terrorist activities and a constant missile threat from the Gaza Strip directed at Israeli civilians.”
What was the hidden agenda?
The purpose of Operation Cast Led was to confiscate Palestine’s maritime natural gas reserves.
In the wake of the invasion, Palestinian gas fields were de facto confiscated by Israel in derogation of international law.
A year following “Operation Cast Lead,” Tel Aviv announced the discovery of the Leviathan natural gas field in the Eastern Mediterranean “off the coast of Israel.”
At the time the gas field was: “ … the most prominent field ever found in the sub-explored area of the Levantine Basin, which covers about 83,000 square kilometres of the eastern Mediterranean region.” (i)
Coupled with Tamar field, in the same location, discovered in 2009, the prospects are for an energy bonanza for Israel, for Houston, Texas based Noble Energy and partners Delek Drilling, Avner Oil Exploration and Ratio Oil Exploration. (See Felicity Arbuthnot, Israel: Gas, Oil and Trouble in the Levant, Global Research, December 30, 2013
The Gazan gas fields are part of the broader Levant assessment area.
What has been unfolding is the integration of these adjoining gas fields including those belonging to Palestine into the orbit of Israel. (See map below)
It should be noted that the entire Eastern Mediterranean coastline extending from Egypt’s Sinai to Syria constitutes an area encompassing large gas as well as oil reserves.
If I was an Israel supporter I’d be thinking very carefully about the things I’m posting online in the build-up to what could end up being regarded as one of history’s worst genocidal massacres. The internet doesn’t forget. What you’re tweeting today could haunt you for life.
❖
The Israel-Palestine issue is not complicated; an apartheid regime abuses and oppresses an indigenous ethnic group who don’t have the same rights as others. The only reason anyone thinks it’s complicated is because they assume if it were simple, the news would’ve told them so.
Really Israel-Palestine is one of the easier conflicts to understand on the world stage; conflicts like Ukraine or Syria are much more complicated. It’s obvious at a glance that there’s one group in power and another group being treated very badly by that group, but because the press frames it as a complicated issue with its sympathies wildly slanted toward the apartheid regime, people assume it can’t be as simple as what it looks like at first glance.
It is, though. Israel is exactly the abusive apartheid regime it looks like on the surface. Remember this as the bodies pile up and Gaza is turned into a smoldering crater. This is exactly what it looks like.
Think about this: on Saturday, May 12th, with barely an hour’s notice, Israel took out the al-Jalaa Tower, a high-rise building in Gaza City that housed the Associated Press, al-Jazeera, and other media outlets. That act of destruction, among so many others, caused shock globally and protests not just by those media groups but by previously Israeli-supporting Democrats in Congress. As it happens, the weapon that destroyed that tower was a GBU-31, a Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM (aka a “smart bomb”) that was manufactured in the United States. Not only that, but in the midst of the ongoing carnage in impoverished, increasingly devastated Gaza (as well as in Israel), the Biden administration has been pushing through a new $735-million package of just such weaponry for Israel, ensuring more of the same to the horizon.
This has even disturbed key pro-Israeli congressional figures like Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who, according to the New York Times, “told Democrats on the panel… that he would ask the Biden administration to delay a $735 million tranche of precision-guided weapons to Israel that had been approved before tensions in the Middle East boiled over.” Later, he would pull back on his threat, but Bernie Sanders has actually introduced a resolution in the Senate aimed at halting the future delivery of that weaponry (as several Democrats have already done in the House).
As the invaluable Pentagon specialist and TomDispatch regular William Hartung notes today, the U.S. leads all other nations on this planet by a country mile in selling the latest weaponry globally, as has been true for almost three decades. In other words, this country has been number one (U.S.A.! U.S.A.!) when it comes to such weapons sales (and so future destruction) forever and a day. In the case of Israel, those sales, however, are a secondary matter. For years, the U.S. has annually been giving — yes, giving — nearly $4 billion in military aid to Israel, a relatively wealthy country. Since 2001, Israel has, in fact, received more than half of all the “military financing” approved by this country. Imagine what those tens of billions of dollars might have done had they been used instead for America’s fading infrastructure or other domestic investments.
In other words, Washington is complicit in the ravaging of Gaza in these last weeks, just as it has been in the devastation of Yemen in these years (thanks to similar sales of weaponry to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates). It’s a money-making, military-industrial tale from hell and Hartung tells it today in all its grim horror. Tom
When it comes to trade in the tools of death and destruction, no one tops the United States of America.
In April of this year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) published its annual analysis of trends in global arms sales and the winner — as always — was the U.S. of A. Between 2016 and 2020, this country accounted for 37% of total international weapons deliveries, nearly twice the level of its closest rival, Russia, and more than six times that of Washington’s threat du jour, China.
Sadly, this was no surprise to arms-trade analysts. The U.S. has held that top spot for 28 of the past 30 years, posting massive sales numbers regardless of which party held power in the White House or Congress. This is, of course, the definition of good news for weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, even if it’s bad news for so many of the rest of us, especially those who suffer from the use of those arms by militaries in places like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates. The recent bombing and leveling of Gaza by the U.S.-financed and supplied Israeli military is just the latest example of the devastating toll exacted by American weapons transfers in these years.
Media coverage and social media posts went wild when Palestinian photojournalist Muath Amarneh was blinded in his left eye after he was hit by a rubber bullet while covering a protest in the West Bank.
However, Amarneh was far from unique; Israeli snipers targeting participants in Gaza’s weekly Great Return March protests have aimed for the legs – and eyes. To date, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reports that 50 protesters have been shot in the eye since the demonstrations began March 30, 2018 – leaving them permanently blind.
“Some of these protesters and journalists were hit in the eye with teargas canisters, but most were targeted directly with what is commonly called a ‘rubber bullet,’ giving the impression they are somehow benign,” says Ashraf Alqedra, MD, a treating physician at Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital and spokesperson for the Ministry of Health.
“But there is still steel at the core, and although these bullets don’t usually kill, they do grave damage. It is impossible to save an eye hit directly by a rubber-coated steel bullet.” Read the rest of this entry »
MCViewPoint 