Was it the drugs? Probably. I'll come back to that. Pioneer Marty Kroft has died. VARIETY notes:
Marty Krofft,
who with his brother Sid produced memorable kids shows “H.R. Pufnstuf”
and “Land of the Lost” — as well as the 2009 feature based on the latter
— has died. He was 86.
Krofft died of kidney failure Saturday in Los Angeles, Calif., a family representative told Variety.
Often referred to as the King of Saturday Mornings, Krofft and his
brother also produced a number of primetime variety shows, including
“Donny and Marie” and “Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters.”
Sid and Marty Krofft began their careers producing children’s television with “H.R. Pufnstuf,” a live-action program about a boy (played by British actor Jack Wild) in a fantastic land with a dragon for a friend (H.R. Pufnstuf, voiced by Lennie Weinrib) and a witch — Witchiepoo, played by Billie Hayes — for an enemy; as conceptualized, the show followed the interactions between human actors; actors in colorful, oversized costumes; and life-size puppets with enormous heads.
LAND OF THE LOST was huge for 70s kids. It wasn't for me. I wasn't a kid, for one thing. But I had already fallen for the earlier shows.
The brothers really changed TV.
The visuals. Pretty amazing for their time. Could have probably only happened at the tail end of the sixties and the start of the seventies -- a nod to both pop art and the emerging drug culture of psychedelics.
HR PUFFNSTUFF was so popular that they even did a movie. Here's Cass Elliot performing "Different" from that film (she played Witchie Poo's sister).
As much as I loved HR PUFFNSTUFF, I loved THE BUGALOOS even more. Over a decade ago, TV LAND noted their contributions.
After designing the characters and sets for Hanna-Barbera's The Banana Splits (NBC, 1968–1970), the Kroffts' producing career began in 1969 with the landmark children's television series H.R. Pufnstuf.
The series introduced the team's trademark style of large-scale,
colourful design, puppetry, and special effects. Featuring a boy who has
been lured into an alternate fantasy world and can never escape, the
team also established a storytelling formula to which they would often
return. Some people suggested that the Krofft brothers were influenced
by marijuana and LSD, although they have always denied these claims. In a 2005 interview with USA Today,
Marty Krofft said, "No drugs involved. You can't do drugs when you're
making shows. Maybe after, but not during. We're bizarre, that's all."[5]
Referring to the alleged LSD use, Marty said in another interview,
"That was our look, those were the colours, everything we did had vivid
colours, but there was no acid involved. That scared me. I'm no goody
two-shoes, but you can't create this stuff stoned."[6]
Other shows that Krofft produced alongside his brother included Far Out Space Nuts (1975), The Lost Saucer (1975), Donny & Marie (1976), The Krofft Supershow (1976), The Brady Bunch Hour (1977), Pink Lady and Jeff (1980), Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters (1980), Pryor’s Place (1984), D.C. Follies (1987), Land of the Lost (1991), Mutt & Stuff (2015) and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters (2016).
In 2003, Marty and Sid were awarded the Lifetime Career Award at the
2003 Saturn Awards for being the creative minds behind the beloved
fantasy shows on television. In 2018, Marty and his brother received the
Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television
Arts & Sciences, and in 2020, they both received a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame, in celebration of their “Golden Anniversary.”
Friday, November 24, 2023. The pause passed off as a 'cease-fire' has
already seen Israeli forces kill two Palestinians as the assault on Gaza
continues, US President Joe Biden is upsetting the government of Iraq
with his ordered assault on their military forces, and much more.
Scott Newman, Daniel Estrin and Brian Mann (NPR) report, "A four-day [pause] between Israel and Hamas in Gaza went into effect
early Friday. The temporary truce sets the stage for the first exchange
of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners in the nearly seven-week
conflict." The pause has not stopped the violence. CBS NEWS reports, "CBS News producer Marwan al-Ghoul saw Israeli forces open fire Friday on
Palestinians who decided to risk heading back to their homes in
northern Gaza despite leaflets dropped by the IDF warning them against
it. Al-Ghoul said thousands of displaced civilians left the southern
Gaza city of Khan Younis to head back north, but when they reached a
crossover point in central Gaza, they encountered a line of Israeli
tanks and were fired on by Israeli forces." And, no, these weren't 'warning' shots. AFP adds, "Israeli troops fatally shot two Palestinians and wounded 11 others
as they headed toward the main combat zone in northern Gaza despite
warnings by the Israeli army to stay put. An Associated
Press journalist saw the two bodies and the wounded as they arrived at a
hospital in the town of Deir al-Balah in the southern half of Gaza." CNN notes, " A journalist told CNN that Israeli tanks were seen and gunfire could be heard on Salah Al-Din street."
Cease-fire?
It was never a cease-fire, it is a pause. And if that's not clear, the
two Palestinians shot dead by Israeli forces this morning prove there
has been no cease-fire.
Yes, the assault on Gaza continues.
CNN explains, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund." NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe
Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll.
The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom
believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza." The
slaughter continues. It has displaced over 1 million people per the US
Congressional Research Service. Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) points out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide." ABC NEWS notes, "In the neighboring Gaza Strip, at least 14,854 people have been killed
and 36,000 have been injured, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health
Ministry." In addition to the dead and the injured, there are the missing. AP notes, "About 4,000 people are reported missing." And the area itself? Isabele Debre (AP) reveals, "Israel’s military offensive
has turned much of northern Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape. Whole
neighborhoods have been erased. Homes, schools and hospitals have been
blasted by airstrikes and scorched by tank fire. Some buildings are
still standing, but most are battered shells."
The rhetoric of ‘humanitarian pause’ is
illustrative of a media disinformation campaign designed to affirm
certain attitudes and stigmatize others. For instance, the Israeli
pledge to resume the war after this brief interlude of relative calm
rarely includes critical comments on the sinister nature of this
commitment to reengage Hamas by recourse to genocidal warfare. In
contrast, when released hostages report humane treatment by their
captors this is either belittled or altogether ignored, whereas if
released Palestinian prisoners were to make analogous comments about how
they enjoyed Israeli prisons their words would be highlighted. We can
only imagine the harsh response of Western media outlets to Russia’s
participation in a comparable pause in the Ukraine War, dismissing any
humanitarian pretensions by Moscow as cynical state propaganda.
Unless properly addressed the whole
provenance of ‘humanitarian pause’ is misunderstood. Remember that
Israel’s political leaders went ahead with such an alternative only when
it was made clear that Israel had no intention of converting the pause
into a longer-range ceasefire, to be followed by ‘day after’
negotiations as to the viability of continuing occupation and a new
agreement as to governance arrangements for Hamas. Rather than
sustaining their nationalist cult by dismissing Hamas as ‘terrorists’
the security of Israel might be enhanced by treating Hamas as a
legitimate political entity, which although guilty of violations of
international law, is far less guilty than Israel if a fair evaluation
is made, and some account is taken of Hamas’ long-term ceasefire
diplomacy is considered as a preferable security alternative.
In retrospect, I understand better the
rationale behind this apparently genuine Hamas efforts, which I received
first-hand evidence of due to extended conversations with Hamas leaders
living in Doha and Cairo while I was UN Special Rapporteur for the
Occupied Palestinian Territories a decade ago. Israel could not take
seriously what appeared to be beneficial from its security perspective
of such Hamas initiatives or the 2002 Arab Peace Proposal issued in
Mecca. Both Hamas and the Arab proposal conditioned peace on withdrawal
from the Occupied Territory of the West Bank, which has long been in the
gun sights of the settler wing of the Zionist Project, and consistently
given priority over Israeli security by its leaders, long before
Netanyahu’s Coalition made this unmistakably clear when it took over in
January of 2023. Israel never accepted the internationally presumed
notion that a Palestinian state would include the West Bank and have its
capital in East Jerusalem.
It is this unwillingness to take account of
the master/slave structure of prolonged occupation that gives a
specious plausibility to both sides’ narratives embodying the delusion
that Israel and Occupied Palestine are formally and existentially equal.
Such narratives equate, or invert, the Hamas attack with the Israeli
genocidal onslaught that followed, regarding the former as ‘barbaric’
while the latter is generally sympathetically described as Israel’s
reasonable and necessary entitlement to defend itself. Variations of
such themes are integral to the apologetics of former US mediating
officials such as Dennis Roth or liberal Zionist casuists such as Thomas
Friedman.
The efforts to control the
narrative have failed. In the US, for example, those under 50 tend to
grasp the realities and the younger in adulthood you go, the greater the
percentage. Yet people continue to attempt to censor and practice
thought control. Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) reports on one such attempt:
The Nation this week published a piece about Israel's genocidal war on the Gaza Strip that the Harvard Law Review
commissioned from a Palestinian scholar but then refused to run after
several days of internal debate, a nearly six-hour meeting, and a board
vote.
The essay—"The Ongoing Nakba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palestine,"
by Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights attorney and doctoral candidate at
Harvard Law School—begins: "Genocide is a crime. It is a legal
framework. It is unfolding in Gaza. And yet, the inertia of legal
academia, especially in the United States, has been chilling."
The controversy over Eghbariah's own piece helps prove his point. In an email to Eghbariah and
Harvard Law Review president Apsara Iyer, online chair Tascha
Shahriari-Parsa, one of the editors who commissioned the blog article,
called the bid to kill it an "unprecedented decision" by the academic
journal's leadership.
The Interceptreported on that email and others from those involved:
"As online chairs, we have always had full discretion to solicit pieces
for publication," Shahriari-Parsa wrote, informing Eghbariah that his
piece would not be published despite following the agreed-upon procedure
for blog essays. Shahriari-Parsa wrote that concerns had arisen about
staffers being offended or harassed, but "a deliberate decision to
censor your voice out of fear of backlash would be contrary to the
values of academic freedom and uplifting marginalized voices in legal
academia that our institution stands for."
Both Shahriari-Parsa and the other top online editor, Sabrina Ochoa, told
The Intercept that they had never seen a piece face this level of scrutiny at the Law Review.
Shahriari-Parsa could find no previous examples of other pieces pulled
from publication after going through the standard editorial process.
In a statement, the
Harvard Law Review said
that it "has rigorous editorial processes governing how it solicits,
evaluates, and determines when and whether to publish a piece. An
intrinsic feature of these internal processes is the confidentiality of
our 104 editors' perspectives and deliberations. Last week, the full
body met and deliberated over whether to publish a particular blog piece
that had been solicited by two editors. A substantial majority voted
not to proceed with publication."
According to
The Nation, 63% of editors who participated in the anonymous vote opposed publication.
"At a time when the Law Review was facing a public
intimidation and harassment campaign, the journal's leadership
intervened to stop publication," 25 editors said in a statement shared
with The Nation and The Intercept. "The body of editors—none of whom are Palestinian—voted to sustain that decision."
"We are unaware of any other solicited piece that has been revoked by the
Law Review in this way," they added. "This unprecedented
decision threatens academic freedom and perpetuates the suppression of
Palestinian voices. We dissent."
Eghbariah wrote in an email to an editor: "This is discrimination. Let's
not dance around it—this is also outright censorship. It is dangerous
and alarming."
It is also part of a broader trend identified
by more than 1,700 lawyers and law students. In a letter to the
American Bar Association last week, they noted "increasing instances of
discrimination and censorship faced by Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, South
Asian, Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and other communities within law
schools, universities, law firms, and other corporate entities,
particularly due to their expression of support for the Palestinian
people."
In a post on X, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus welcomed the start of the
humanitarian pause and the entry of aid into Gaza, calling it a “step in
the right direction”.
“But much more is needed,” he warned.
“We continue to call for a sustainable ceasefire to end further civilian suffering.”
Around
the world, protests have taken place with people demanding a cease-fire
-- not a pause, a cease-fire. The world has said "enough." The world
has said a cease-fire is a must. AP notes, "Thousands of people led by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel marched
along Havana’s iconic boardwalk Thursday in a show of solidarity with
the Palestinian people and demanding an end to the war between Israel
and Hamas." WSWS adds, "In Germany, too, many thousands are defying the pro-Israel stance of the
Social Democrat-led Federal Government and Bundestag (parliament), to
participate in pro-Palestine demonstrations. In Berlin, a demonstration of more than 5,000, including whole families
with children, moved from the main train station to the Großer Stern on
Saturday afternoon." And they note, "High school students across the city of Melbourne went on strike
Thursday against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A crowd of students,
estimated at over 1,000, gathered outside Flinders Street Station in the
city centre. This marked the first of other planned school strikes
around Australia this week, including today in Sydney, Adelaide and
Wollongong." Australia's ABC NEWS notes:
Pro-Palestinian rallies have been going on for weeks across the country. The protests are dominated by young people.
That's
not a surprise for Associate Professor Tanya Notley, who leads the
Advancing Media Literacy research program at Western Sydney University.
"Young
people who are really highly engaged with news are also more likely to
be taking a range of civic actions in their communities, and on the
issues that matter to them," the media academic said.
Once again, it is our western governments that have endorsed and
supported Israel’s war of annihilation. And like the invasion of Iraq 20 years before, millions have taken to the streets to protest against a war launched in their name.
Gaza is also a war of narratives, of governments against their
people, with western corporate media attempting to hold a line in favour
of Israel’s legitimacy while millions in western countries are
increasingly seeing the scales fall from their eyes.
Last week, a group of 50 people drove onto the San Francisco-Oakland
Bay Bridge during the morning rush hour and stopped their cars, throwing
their car keys into the bay and blocking traffic for hours.
“Fifteen protesters covered themselves in shrouds and laid down in
front of vehicles to represent dead bodies in Gaza,” the New York Times
reported.
Meanwhile, in Washington State on 7 November, hundreds of
pro-Palestinian demonstrators rallied at the Port of Tacoma to block a
military supply vessel they believe was carrying weapons from the United
States to Israel.
“We want a ceasefire now. We want people to stop getting murdered
now. We want a real examination and action on US foreign policy and US
funding to Israel,” said Wassim Hage, community outreach coordinator
with the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, an organiser of the Tacoma
rally.
Other groups have blocked ports to prevent weapons shipments being
loaded onto ships for Israel, in California, Belgium, Australia, and at
a BAE arms factory in Kent, UK. This kind of direct action protest to block weapons shipments is spreading.
As our political elites give carte blanche support to Israel’s total
war on the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinians, global protests,
including direct actions and sit-ins at major rail terminals from New
York to London, are sweeping European and American cities.
Again, the world is demanding a true cease-fire; not a four day "pause" passed off as a cease-fire. Jordan Shilton (WSWS) writes:
The brief lull in Israel’s savage onslaught on the defenceless
civilian population of Gaza scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m. local time
Thursday is widely being presented as a “ceasefire,” or at least a
“humanitarian pause.”
Assuming the agreement is fulfilled, which
is by no means assured, it will amount to little more than an
operational pause in Israel’s military offensive to ethnically cleanse
Gaza by carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people.
The
terms of the agreement, mediated by Qatar and the United States,
include the release by Hamas of 50 women and children among the
approximately 240 Israelis captured by Hamas fighters during the October
7 incursion into Israel. In return, Israel will release 150 Palestinian
detainees, halt fighting in the Gaza Strip for four days, and permit
200 trucks carrying aid to enter the enclave each day. The number of
Palestinian detainees being released is minuscule compared to the over
10,000 Palestinians held in detention by Israel under the most brutal
conditions, including routine torture.
The agreement remains
highly unstable, illustrated by the announcement late Wednesday by
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser
that the release of the first hostages would be delayed by up to 24
hours and only take place Friday. During the four-day pause, Israel will
refrain from operating aircraft and drones over southern Gaza, but in
the north they will only do so during a short window between 10:00 a.m.
and 4:00 p.m. each day.
All Israeli ground forces will remain in
place, ready to resume battle at a moment’s notice. As Netanyahu put it
at a press conference Wednesday evening, “When the pause is done, we
resume the war. It may be that we are forced to do so much earlier.” He
also rejected any suggestion that the pause applied to Israel’s northern
border, where the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have been striking
Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon. Underlining the point, War
Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz told the same press conference, “What’s
happening now in northern Gaza can also happen in southern Lebanon and
Beirut.”
The US government is not
listening to its citizens. And it appears to be offended by protests in
other countries. Iraq, especially in Baghdad, has seen one protest
after another against the assault on Gaza. They have rightly tied in
the occupation of Gaza to the occupation they experience from the US --
the US government recently gave 'independent' Iraq the permission to do a
gas deal with Iran.
US President Joe Biden
has put all US forces in the Middle East at risk, painted a target on
their backs, by refusing to support the Palestinian people. We've noted
that repeatedly. We've noted that the attacks in Syria and Iraq on US
forces, over fifty such since the assault on Gaza began, are not by
"Iranian-backed militias." We've explained repeatedly that these
attacks are carried by Iraqi forces.
Now let's move over to AP and their distortion of reality, "The U.S. on Friday imposed sanctions on six people affiliated with the Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Kataeb Hezbollah, which is accused of being behind a spate of recent attacks
against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria following the October 7 attacks
by Hamas against Israel." Oh, look, they name a group! They don't
identify it correctly, but they name it.
For
years, we opposed the notion of folding militias into the Iraqi forces
because of their history of abuses. But the Iraqi leaders decided to go
for it. Kateb Hezbollah is a part of the government force, the
official military. Opening sentence of their WIKIPEDIA entry, "Kata'ib Hezbollah (Arabic: كتائب حزب الله, lit. 'Battalions of the Party of God')[36] -- or the Hezbollah Brigades -- is a radical Iraqi Shiite paramilitary group which is part of the Popular Mobilization Forces, staffing the 45th, 46th, and 47th Brigades.[37]"
Again,
we spent years here calling out the notion of merging the militias with
the Iraqi military. And for years, it didn't happen. But the CIA's
long choice for prime minister, Hayder al-Abadi, became prime minister
in 2014 and, at the end of 2016, he did what Nouri al-Maliki had been
unable to, made the militias part of the Iraqi army.
Stop pretending this is a renegade. It's a part of the Iraqi military.
And
though the US is condemning its actions (as a radical renegade) there's
no outcry in the Iraqi press over the attacks. They have the blessing
on the Iraqi government, of the Iraqi people. Like most people around
the world, the Iraqis are appalled by the slaughter taking place in
Gaza.
On Wednesday,
the day before Thanksgiving, the US government attacked Iraqi forces.
Not "militias linked to Iran." They are Iraqi forces and that didn't
start yesterday.
Guess what? The US
government did not scare off Iraqi forces. No, they've attacked the US
military sites multiple times since Wednesday.
Now
I've said Joe painted the target on the backs of US service members.
And he has but, let's be clear, the US media has assisted him. They
continue to lie and pretend that these attacks come from Iran. No.
Stop lying.
The United States has conducted two retaliatoryairstrikes
against Iraqi militias this week after ballistic missile attacks
against America’s Al Asad Air Base, the latest in a troubling
tit-for-tat between the U.S. and Iran-backed militias in the region that
was triggered by the Israel-Hamas conflict.
CENTCOM appears to
believe that the status quo of attack and reprisal with Iraqi militias
is sustainable. There’s an assumption that Washington, Iran, and Iraq’s
militias understand each other’s red lines. However, this assumption
comes with a lot of risks.
The potential for one-upmanship between various Shi’a militias,
each trying to prove they’re more hostile toward Americans than the
others, is a concerning possibility. A deadly attack on U.S. troops
could prompt the Biden administration to respond more forcefully,
especially in an election year. What is the administration’s plan to
manage escalation and prevent a larger regional war (with heavy U.S.
involvement) if this were to occur?
While the timing and scale of
the war in Gaza may have been unpredictable, it was always evident that
the presence of scattered U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria posed a risk of
escalating the U.S. into greater conflict in such an unpredictable
region. That’s why I’ve long argued for rethinking America’s military posture in Iraq, including in new research this year exploring how Washington could conduct a phased withdrawal of troops and successfully recalibrate our approach to the country and region.
It
is true that the presence of U.S. military advisors in Iraq helps
maintain cohesion and a working relationship between competing factions
of Iraq’s military. U.S. troops also offer critical capabilities in the
fight to contain ISIS. But it is time for Washington to consider whether
these benefits are outweighed by the risk of malign actors using U.S.
troops to provoke a wider conflict – either intentionally or
inadvertently.
While the risks of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq are
apparent, the overall utility of their presence is unclear (particularly
in deterring attacks on themselves). With each new day comes a fresh
opportunity for crisis. It’s past time Washington grappled with the true
costs and benefits of our military presence.
I've
reposted that in full to be fair because that think tank is far to the
right of me. That's their opinion and in their words. Again, It's not a
'militia.' It is part of the Iraqi military forces. But grasp that
even the people at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft grasp
what the US press keeps ignoring.
The Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fuad Hussein, confirmed on
Wednesday that the recent US escalation is dangerous and violates the
sovereignty of Iraq.
Hussein’s statements took place during his meeting with the US
Ambassador to Iraq, Alina Romanowski, according to a statement cited by
the Iraqi News Agency (INA).
The Iraqi Foreign Minister conveyed the government’s disapproval of
the recent US strikes against sites belonging to the Popular
Mobilization Forces in the Babylon governorate’s Jurf Al-Nasr, without
the Iraqi government’s knowledge.
Earlier on Wednesday, the spokesperson of the Iraqi government, Basem
Al-Awadi, mentioned in a statement that the Iraqi government considers
the recent escalation a dangerous step involving an unacceptable
violation of Iraqi sovereignty.
At least five people were killed in the early hours of Wednesday
after PMF sites southwest of Baghdad were targeted by air strikes
carried out by US forces.
The US press -- and US
think tanks -- can lie all they want but the reality is that on
Wednesday, the US government physically attacked the Iraqi military.
And that's not just how the Iraqis see it -- which would be bad enough
-- that's how it actually is. Tom O'Connor (NEWSWEEK) notes, "Iraq, considered by the United States to be a regional security partner, has strongly condemned President Joe Biden's
decision to conduct airstrikes against militias accused of attacking
U.S. forces in the country, warning that a cycle of unrest threatens to
destabilize the nation." Julian Benocha (RUDAW) reports:
The Iraqi government said it “vehemently condemns” the US airstrikes on
Iran-backed Iraqi militia positions in Jurf al-Nasr on Wednesday as a
“blatant violation of sovereignty” as the strikes took place without
government knowledge.
“We vehemently condemn the attack on Jurf al-Nasr, executed without the
knowledge of Iraqi government agencies. This action is a blatant
violation of sovereignty and an attempt to destabilize the security
situation,” Basem al-Awadi, spokesperson for the Iraqi government, said
in a statement.
The statement came hours after US warplanes struck pro-Iran fighters in
Jurf al-Nasr (formerly Jurf al-Sakhar) in northern Babil province,
around 60 kilometers southwest of Baghdad. Popular Mobilization Forces
(PMF, or Hashd al-Shaabi) confirmed to AFP that the strikes left eight
fighters dead.
Wednesday’s strike came hours after the US Central Command (CENTCOM)
announced its first retaliatory strike targeting Iran-backed groups in
Iraq since the start of the attacks on American personnel in Iraq and
Syria over Washington’s support for Israel in its war against Gaza. The
first retaliatory strike resulted in “several enemy casualties,”
according to CENTCOM.
“The Iraqi government is solely dedicated to enforcing the law and
holding violators accountable, a prerogative exclusively within its
purview. No party or foreign agency has the right to assume this role,
as it contradicts Iraqi constitutional sovereignty and international
law,” the government statement said, labeling the recent escalations as
“a dangerous development.”
He further criticized the US-led global coalition against the Islamic
State (ISIS) for steering away from its intended mission of supporting
Iraqi armed forces in the fight against the jihadist group.
“The recent incident represents a clear violation of the coalition’s
mission to combat [Arabic acronym for ISIS] on Iraqi soil,” the
statement added.
It would
be bad enough if the American government was falling blindly into these
actions but that's not the case. Multiple people at the US State Dept
have lodged complaints about the US government's position on Gaza and
warned that it harming the opinion of the US in the Middle East. Joe
has ignored those warnings when they've reached him.
His
blind-support of the Israeli government is bad enough for what's
happening to the Palestinians but he's now also threatening whatever
stability the US had imposed on Iraq with its continued occupation.
He's putting US service members at risk and he's risking destabilizing
Iraq.
This is the time when people need to get
real and tell him reality not just agree with him. That's for the good
of the Palestinians and for the good of human rights but also good for
the United States.
In case we're not getting how fragile things are starting to get in Iraq, let me pull this from last night's entry:
Iraq? As we focus on the assault on Gaza, we mention
Iraq, we do not focus on it. Cilia e-mailed asking if there was
anything I felt we missed re: Iraq?
Yeah, Speaker of
the House Mohammed al-Halbousi was removed from his post. By the
country's Supreme Court. He was removed from office over an accusation
that he forged the signature of MP Laith al-Dulaimi. The court removed
al-Dulaimi from office as well.
The story we didn't
have time for. I read over the Iraqi Constitution and there's nothing
in there that gives the Federal Court the power to remove any MP from
office. The Council of Representatives has the power to remove one of
its members. But the Court has no say in that at all. They can't even
arrest for a felony (in Iraq, forgery is a felony) without the
permission of the Council of Representatives.
They've created a power for themselves that does not exist.
By
removing both the accuser and the accused (al-Dulaimi and al-Halbousi),
they've also made clear that they didn't determine guilt in the
matter. Now they would have had to have had permission to do that from
the Council. That's in the Constitution. So removing both the accuser
and the accused? That makes no sense. One was telling the truth, one
wasn't. I have no idea which.
But the Supreme Court
has no power to remove a member from the Council -- Speaker or
otherwise. This should could cause an outcry in Iraq for that reason.
It should also alarm legal observers around the world.
The
Supreme Court in Iraq now believes it can remove any member of
Parliament. And no one got convicted, by the way. Grasp that as well.
So anytime the Court doesn't like a member of Parliament or that
members politics, it's now claiming it can remove the member. That is
not how the government and its checks and balances are structured in the
country's Constitution.
Hope everyone had a good day. I did. I still am having one. I'm eating a small bowl of stuffing with gravy on it. I always love C.I.'s cornbread dressing but she's done something different to it this year that's made it even better. Plus, she's made her homemade peach iced tea which I love.
If you don't know the story, freshman year of college, everyone was going home for Thanksgiving. Rebecca had already left and C.I. was about to when she realized I wasn't. So she cancelled her plans, we went to the store and bought up whatever we could. Then she made the bulk of the food while I focused on desserts and appetizers. We invited the other students who weren't going home and it was a great Thanksgiving.
Since then, we've tried to do every Thanksgiving together. There were two that we did over the phone due to a pregnancy on each other's part that was too far along for plane travel.
There was so much food today, so much good food.
The Songwriters Hall of Fame has announced their nominees for induction in 2025. This was a big topic at Thanksgiving dinner (lunch) at C.I.'s because there were a number of musicians and producers present. Voting ends at the end of December. People are voting on three non-performing songwriters and three performing ones.
I was surprised because Narada Michael Walden was in non-performing. He's done 12 solo albums and had 9 top forty R&B hits. He's also had seven top forty dance hits including the number one "Divine Emotions." Furthermore, why isn't he already in the Hall? He's written and co-written so many hits including Whitney Houston's "How Will I Know," "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)"; Aretha Franklin's "Jimmy Lee," "Rock-A-Lott," "Until You Say You Love Me," "Who's Zoomin' Who" and "Freeway of Love"; Diana Ross' "Take Me Higher"; Mariah Carey's "Heartbreaker"; Jermaine Stewart's "Jody," "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off" and "Don't Ever Leave Me," Clarence Clemmons and Jackson Browne's "You're A Friend Of Mine"; Gladys Knight's "License to Kill" (from the James Bond film of the same name); and much more.
Performing songwriters? I can't vote in it but if I could? I'd vote for Tracy Chapman, Blondie (Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, et al) and Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart.
RUSTIN
captures a great moment for Bayard and for A. Philip Randolph, Dr Anna
Hedgeman, Dr King, Coretta and Ella Baker. It also captures Adam
Clayton Powell at his worst.
Again, maybe it's too much to expect someone to lead a life of strong activism?
Maybe we expect too much.
Take Joe Manchin and Andrea Mitchell, for example.
Neither would ever show up in PROFILES IN COURAGE. So maybe it's wrong to expect them to stand for anything?
Manchin,
the Democratic embarrassment, is finally leaving the US Senate. And
that should be cause for celebration. However, despite stating that he
doesn't want Donald Trump to win the 2024 election, his actions of late
seemed geared towards handing the election to Donald.
No
Labels. What is that? A generic copy of a better tasting canned
soup? Nope. It's a new political party. Joe Lieberman and others are
the public face for it and Joe's flirting with running for the US
presidency on the No Labels party. THE DAILY MAIL notes, "Slamming President Joe Biden for going too far left and former President Donald Trump for stooping to ;a level that he's normalized this visceral hatred,' the moderate Democrat said that everyone is 'sick and tired' of divisive politics."
This
is not a parody site. You read that correctly. Manchin is accusing
Joe Biden of "going too far left." That's what happens when you mix in
bitter with aging. And Manchin is aging. He's currently 76. He wants
to do a victory lap when, honestly, he'd be lucky to make it down the
hall without a walker. There's no glorious moments for a film about
Manchin to portray.
Which brings us to the newscaster. Friday
on MSNBC, we watched, mouths wide open in shock, as Andrea Mitchell
insisted that there were calls for a cease-fire and "a massive rally in
DC" for Israel "so really the war has energized people on both sides."
Huh?
They barely had 60,000 at the hate rally last week. Rallies in DC
calling for a cease-fire have resulted in far greater numbers
repeatedly. ABC NEWS, for example, used 300,000 for the DC rally on November 5th calling for a cease-fire.
The US media keeps trying to both-sides genocide. You have to wonder,
in a hundred years, what kind of a movie they'll make about Andrea
Mitchell? Is there even one brave moment they'll be able to work in?
Or will it just be an endless parade of cowardly moments from her 56
years and counting career?
That went up Monday night. Should have noted it sooner. I never got around, last week, to noting "Media: MY NAME IS BARBRA, my game is pity party" -- the review Ava and C.I. did of Barbra Streisand's memoir:
We know Jackson Browne and the singer-songwriter loves to talk about
how, as a songwriter, he sometimes has an unfair advantage because he
gets to write the story, he gets to record it and say what it is.
Jackson will discuss this and wonder about the fairness of it and
reflect on it, even struggle with it.
Barbra has no such compulsion.
And
she's unfair and not at all about a free press. Please, Liz Smith
would run the most innocuous item on Barbra and the singer-actress would
be on the phone insisting Liz tell her where she got the story (Liz
would never tell her).
What does that have to do with the book?
A whole hell of a lot.
Howard Zieff.
He's in the book. He shouldn't be mentioned in the book.
Where's Will Smith to slap Barbra and tell her to keep Howard's name out of her damn mouth?
Howard
directed a lot of films including THE MAIN EVENT starring Barbra and
Ryan O'Neal, PRIVATE BENJAMIN starring Goldie Hawn, MY GIRL, HOUSE CALLS
. . .
In MY NAME IS BARBRA, she writes about THE MAIN EVENT:
So
I liked the cast, and I loved the cinematographer, Mario Tosi. But I
never developed much of a rapport with the director, Howard Zieff, who
was oddly detached. He didn't get that involved with the script, while I
was usually working with the writers, Gail Parent and Andrew Smth,
trying to punch up the dialogue, often right up to the moment we filmed
it.
More than halfway through the shoot, we still didn't
have an ending. I spoke to my friends on the set and asked them to
share any ideas with me. The first person who responded was the sound
man, who gave me an interesting suggestion. When I mentioned this to
Howard, he said, "The sound man? You want me to listen to the sound
man?"
"Yeah," I said. "Why not?"
I've always
felt you shouldn't be dismissive of anyone, because you never know where
an idea is going to come from. Even my driver wrote up a four-page
treatment, but I got nothing from Howard.
I guess he and I were not fated to connect.
First off, the supposed work she did on the script? People laugh at Barbra for saying things like that. And the ending?
It's the same ending.
That was always in the script?
Well,
yeah, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about the same
ending that was always in the 1936 film CAIN AND MABEL starring Marion
Davies and Clark Gable.
Barbra never acknowledges that
film despite the fact that THE MAIN EVENT ripped it off. (Laird Doyle
wrote the screenplay for CAIN AND MABEL -- and it's all there including
Marion throwing the towel into the ring just like Barbra does at the end
of THE MAIN EVENT but let's all pretend it was an original screenplay
and that Barbra added new and novel elements to it as they filmed it.)
As for Howard?
People who worked with Howard praised him.
Barbra's not bound by any rule to praise him if she didn't like him, we're not arguing that.
We're saying that she was obligated to keep her damn mouth shut.
Why?
Howard
couldn't talk about Barbra to the press. He was legally bound to stay
silent. She demanded an NDA from whomever directed the film. It was
her follow up to 1976's A STAR IS BORN and that director, Frank Pierson,
right before the film was released, published a lengthy article detailing what a nightmare working on that film was.
So
Barbra refused to allow Howard to ever speak to the press about the
film but now that he's dead, she's talking and it's not kind about him.
Doesn't seem fair. If she wouldn't let him talk about it while he was
alive, she shouldn't be able to write about it now.
Fair
really isn't a word that features in the day-to-day life of Barbra
Streisand; however, victim must pop up at least every hour.
If
the above hasn't made it clear to you, maybe these two sentence will,
"And then I got a call from Sue Mengers. She wanted me to take over
Lisa Eichhorn's role in the film Sue's husband, Jean-Claude Tramount was
making, ALL NIGHT LONG." Isn't Babs addicted to the comma, by the
way. We're accused of being addicted to the double-dash -- accused
frequently. And we'll gladly cop to it but does Barbra know any other
punctuation than the comma. Semi-colon even? It doesn't appear that
she does.
[. . .]
But back to ALL NIGHT LONG. She writes about it, about turning down
ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE years prior but this time she thought
she could play an untalented singer-songwriter. She thought Gene
Hackman was a great actor and was attracted to him. Sue failed her as a
friend and agent -- the rewrites she had told would be done never came
through and she hated the sexist poster of her sliding down a fire pole
as her skirt flew up and the men stood around looking at her. As her
agent, Sue should have protected her but the rewrites weren't done and
the studio told her she had no say in the poster for the film. Sue had
made her mad before (she told Peter Bogdanovich that Barbra objected to
him giving her line readings) but this time she had failed her. But she
was happy that Sue stood by the promise to get her "a deal that was
more lucrative than any actor, male or female, had ever had" -- four
million dollars. We'll tell you it was four million because Barbra
never manages to. Why be coy over the figure when you're the one
bringing up money and talking about doing a movie just for the money?
She
goes on and on about this and that. But let's go back to those two
sentences we quoted earlier. "And then I got a call from Sue Mengers.
She wanted me to take over
Lisa Eichhorn's role in the film Sue's husband, Jean-Claude Tramount was
making, ALL NIGHT LONG."
She insists that the money only
mattered because she "liked the idea of achieving that milestone for
women." The sisterhood, you understand. But where was the sisterhood
in her taking part in the firing of Lisa Eichhorn?
That is the self-obsessed Barbra Streisand. She steals a role from a younger actress (Lisa Eichhorn), gets her fired, grabs $4 million dollars in the process and tries to pass that off as a "milestone for women." She really is sad. No wonder she says she's had a very unhappy life.
Wednesday, November 22, 2023. A pause is not a cease-fire and more realities.
CNN notes, "Israel and Hamas have agreed to a four-day humanitarian pause to allow the release of at least 50 hostages– women and children – held in Gaza. The deal will also involve the release of 150 Palestinians, including women and children, held in Israeli prisons." ALJAZEERA provides more specifics:
Under
the truce, Hamas says the initial 50 captives will be released in
exchange for 150 Palestinian women and children held in Israeli prisons.
Israel’s justice ministry has published a list of 300 Palestinian prisoners who could be among those freed. Some details:
The list includes at least 33 women and 123 minors
The youngest detainees are 14, while the eldest is a 59-year-old woman
None of the male detainees listed is older than 18; they all have
been arrested since 2021, with the vast majority detained in the past
year
Most of those in the list are still awaiting trial
Their charges range from incitement to stone-throwing to attempted murder
Among the more well-known prisoners on the list is 38-year-old Israa Jaabis.
NBC NEWS adds, "The agreement which Hamas said will start tomorrow, was reached after
weeks of talks brokered by the U.S. and Qatar. It will also allow
humanitarian aid and fuel into the besieged Gaza Strip. The hostages'
families or others have 24 hours to appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court
to object to the deal."
If the deal holds, it's
not much at all. It's four days. The Israeli government -- which
continues to attack Gaza today -- has already stated that after the
pause, they will return to bombing and attacking. They're finally going
to allow fuel and humanitarian aid in? How sweet of them after people
have died in hospitals in the last week because of lack of fuel and
humanitarian aid (that was sarcasm). US President Joe Biden issued the
following statement:
I welcome the deal to secure the release of hostages taken by the
terrorist group Hamas during its brutal assault against Israel on
October 7th.
Jill and I have been keeping all those held hostage and their loved
ones close to our hearts these many weeks, and I am extraordinarily
gratified that some of these brave souls, who have endured weeks of
captivity and an unspeakable ordeal, will be reunited with their
families once this deal is fully implemented.
I thank Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani of Qatar and President
Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt for their critical leadership and
partnership in reaching this deal. And I appreciate the commitment that
Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government have made in supporting an
extended pause to ensure this deal can be fully carried out and to
ensure the provision of additional humanitarian assistance to alleviate
the suffering of innocent Palestinian families in Gaza. I look forward
to speaking with each of these leaders and staying in close contact as
we work to ensure this deal is carried through in its entirety. It is
important that all aspects of this deal be fully implemented.
As President, I have no higher priority than ensuring the safety of
Americans held hostage around the world. That’s why—from the earliest
moments of Hamas’s brutal assault—my national security team and I have
worked closely with regional partners to do everything possible to
secure the release of our fellow citizens. We saw the first results of
that effort in late October, when two Americans were reunited with their
loved ones. Today’s deal should bring home additional American
hostages, and I will not stop until they are all released.
Today’s deal is a testament to the tireless diplomacy and
determination of many dedicated individuals across the United States
Government to bring Americans home.
And
I'm sure he is grateful. Grateful that this fig leaf can be grasped by
the deluded at Thanksgiving gatherings tomorrow. Otherwise, family
members might force them to realize the reality of the slaughter that's
taken place. Instead the deluded and the elderly can cling to this and
close their minds to the truth.
If it holds, the Qatar-mediated hostage deal will mark a temporary
reprieve in what has been a catastrophic six-week war. Israel's response
to the October 7 Hamas-led attack—which killed roughly 1,200 people—has
decimated large swaths of the Gaza Strip, wrecking schools, homes,
hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure and killing more than
14,000 people, drawing accusations of genocide.
Israel's siege of the Palestinian enclave has left virtually the entire population on the brink of starvation
and forced many of the territory's overwhelmed hospitals to shut down
due to a lack of fuel and other critical supplies, depriving many
patients—including premature babies—of necessary treatment.
Progressive U.S. lawmakers who have been calling for a cease-fire for
weeks welcomed the newly announced hostage deal but said it's not
sufficient, particularly if the Israeli government resumes its
devastating bombing campaign once the four-day pause is over—as
Netanyahu has said he intends to do.
"A temporary pause in the violence is not enough," Rep. Rashida Tlaib
(D-Mich.) said in a statement. "We must move with urgency to save as
many lives as possible and achieve a permanent cease-fire agreement.
Over 14,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since this violence
began, including thousands of children, and 1.7 million Palestinians
have been displaced from their homes."
“Further displacement of Palestinians and forced annexation of their
land will only perpetuate this conflict," Tlaib added. "Expanding the
illegal occupation will never lead to a just and lasting peace. We must
address the root causes of this conflict."
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), the lead sponsor
of a cease-fire resolution in the U.S. House, said the pause
announcement "further proves the effectiveness of de-escalation and
diplomacy—not military force—as a means of saving lives and affirms why
we must keep up our push for a permanent cease-fire."
"When this agreement expires, the bombing will continue, thousands more
will die, and millions of people will continue to be displaced," said
Bush. "We must continue to vigorously push for a permanent cease-fire
that ends this violence, protects and saves lives, and ensures the safe
return of all hostages, including those who are being arbitrarily
detained."
The advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace echoed Bush and Tlaib, saying
that "the Israeli government's collective punishment and unfolding
genocide of Palestinians in Gaza cannot just be put on 'pause'; it must
be stopped."
Even if the truce
between Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Hamas results in the
promised four-day pause in hostilities – or longer – the horror
enveloping Gaza in terms of lives lost is worse than many people think.
Among those who oppose Israel’s onslaught, there are still those who do
not truly grasp it. It’s understandable that Israeli authorities are
seeking to sow doubt about the size of the death toll, because the
numbers expose the gravity of the crimes being committed. But we should
not be deceived.
Take the argument that the
health ministry is Hamas-run and, therefore, its figures can never be
trusted. It sounds like a reasonable enough claim on the surface, until
you realise that in previous conflicts the death toll reported by the
ministry was largely consistent with the UN’s and even Israel’s counts.
Last month, after doubts were raised by President Biden, the ministry
even released the names, ages and identification numbers of the victims.
Indeed, the health ministry’s official estimate – currently 13,300 dead after six weeks – could well be an underestimate, as a senior US official has conceded.
The figures do not include the dead buried under rubble who have not
been retrieved. According to the independent Euro-Mediterranean Human
Rights Monitor, which is chaired by US emeritus law professor and former
UN special rapporteur on Palestine, Richard Falk, the civilian death toll
as of 20 November is 16,413, with nearly 34,000 injured. This would
mean one in every 142 Palestinian civilians killed in a month and a
half.
Given that this slaughter may not end
soon, the current health ministry tally of 13,300 dead, when placed in
the context of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million, tells us something
about the sheer scale of what has happened. Comparisons with other
conflicts are truly eye-opening here. The Bosnian war loomed over my own
childhood as a case study of an unspeakable atrocity. About 40,000 civilians died in those killing fields in the years between 1992 and 1995. That was over three years, not six weeks, and it was in a country whose prewar population was about twice that of Gaza.
But
aren’t many of the deaths in Gaza not civilians, but Hamas militants,
you might ask? The evidence suggests not. Research by the Iraq Body
Count project, which diligently compiled violent civilian deaths after
the 2003 invasion, concluded last month
about Gaza that “few of the victims can have been combatants”.
Analysing the ministry of health data, they found only a “modest excess
of adult males killed”, which could be explained by their greater
exposure to risk in, for instance, rescue efforts. With an estimated 70%
of the dead being women and children – and many of the slain men
unlikely to have been combatants – their conclusion is difficult to
rebut.
The dead includes at least 102 United Nations workers. In fact, last week Hande Atay Alam and Helen Regan (CNN) reported, "More United Nations aid workers have been killed in Gaza than in any
other single conflict in the organization’s 78-year history, the UN said
Monday, a stark reminder that humanitarian staff from global agencies
have not been spared from Israel’s relentless bombardment of the besieged strip." The dead also includes journalists. From yesterday's DEMOCRACY NOW!
AMYGOODMAN:
It’s been another devastating 24 hours in Gaza and southern Lebanon for
journalists covering the 46-day Israeli bombardment. The Beirut-based
TV channel Al Mayadeen has just announced two of its journalists were
killed today in an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon. The network
says correspondent Farah Omar and camera operator Rabih Al-Me’mari were
deliberately targeted by an Israeli warplane after reporting on Israel’s
latest bombardment of south Lebanon.
Meanwhile, in northern Gaza, Ayat Khaddura, a 27-year-old digital
content and podcast presenter, has been reportedly killed along with her
family in an Israeli airstrike. This is Ayat, one of her last video
reports.
AYATKHADDURA:
[translated] This may be the last video for me. Today, the occupation
dropped phosphorus bombs on the Beit Lahia project area and scary sound
bombs and threw evacuation notices in the area. And, of course, almost
the entire area has evacuated. Everyone started running madly in the
streets. No one knows neither where they’re going to or coming from.
We’re separated, of course. I and a few others remain at home, while the
rest have evacuated, and we don’t know where they went. The situation
is very scary. The situation is very terrifying. What is happening is
very difficult. May God have mercy on us.
AMYGOODMAN:
On Sunday, the head of the Gaza Press House was also killed by the
Israeli military. Belal Jadallah was heading to southern Gaza when he
was killed by an Israeli tank shell in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza
City. Belal was known as the “Godfather” of Palestinian journalism. He
helped train generations of reporters and welcomed foreign
correspondents and sponsored them when covering the Gaza Strip.
The Committee to Protect Journalists Monday announced a grim
milestone had been reached with at least 50 journalists and media
workers killed since October 7th. Forty-five of the journalists have
been Palestinian. There have been three Israeli journalists killed, and
there have been at least three Lebanese journalists killed. CPJ reports 11 journalists have been injured, three are reported missing, and 18 have been arrested. According to CPJ,
the past month and a half has been the deadliest period of journalists
covering the conflict since the media group began tracking these deaths
over 30 years ago.
We go now to Philadelphia, where we’re joined by Sherif Mansour, the
Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to
Protect Journalists.
Sherif, welcome back to Democracy Now!, under horrific
circumstances. The U.N. secretary-general says that the number of
civilian deaths is “unparalleled and unprecedented.” Of course,
journalists are civilians. As I woke up this morning, I got one text
after another, first the young woman and her cameraman in southern
Lebanon killed about an hour after she posted a video report. She’s
standing in a field in southern Lebanon, and she’s talking about the
Israeli military killing civilians. She and her cameraman are then hit
and killed. And then, as I’m learning their names, another text comes
in. This young reporter in northern Gaza is killed, even as she says in
her report, “I fear I will die.” Can you talk about this latest news and
then a man you have come to know, who worked with you on a CPJ report, the head of the Gaza journalists’ association, also killed in an airstrike?
SHERIFMANSOUR: Thank you, Amy, for having me.
I remember being on your show a little bit more of a month ago and
saying, for journalists in the region, this is a deadly time. And it was
the deadliest week back then. It became the deadliest month and now the
deadliest six weeks on our record. I was not exaggerating. I was not
speculating.
The killing of Belal Jadallah, who helped us document this deadly
pattern of journalists being killed by Israeli fire over 21 years — just
in May, we made a profile of 20 journalists. The majority, 18, were
Palestinians. And he, Jadallah, his center have helped identify them,
their families, get us their pictures. And on Sunday, he became a victim
of this same deadly pattern when he was killed in his car. Jadallah has
also provided crucial safety equipment for journalists in order to do
their job safely. And he opened the Press House for journalists to use
the electricity and internet when there was no other place.
This deadly pattern has existed before. It’s getting more deadly per
day. We are investigating the three more killing today, adding to 50 as
of yesterday. We’ve never seen anything like this. It’s unprecedented.
And for journalists in Gaza specifically, the exponential risk is
possibly the most dangerous we have seen. Journalists were killed in the
very early stages at the two entry and exit points from Gaza — in the
south, the Rafah crossing; in the north, the Erez crossing. And since
then, they were killed everywhere in between. They were killed in the
south in Rafah City, in Khan Younis, where they were told it’s going to
be safe. They were killed in the middle in the Gaza Strip. And they were
killed in the north in Gaza City. They have no safe haven. They have no
exit.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sherif,
could you talk, as well, about the arrests of journalists in Gaza and
the Occupied Territories? And also, your organization has criticized, as
well, Israel for its censorship within Israel of the press in Israel.
Could you talk about that, as well?
SHERIFMANSOUR:
Well, we have documented separately from the casualties list, which
includes journalists going missing, injured, the escalation of arrests.
As of yesterday, 18 Palestinian journalists from the West Bank were
arrested. Many of them were put in administrative detention, in military
prosecutions. In addition, dozens of cases of censorship, direct
censorship, cyberattacks, physical assaults, obstruction from coverage
within the West Bank and within Israel.
In Israel, an emergency legislation has now given the government for
the first time the unprecedented power of shutting down international
media organization, including acting on Al Mayadeen — which two
journalists were killed today in Lebanon — banning them in Israel, and
allowing the government also to jail even Israeli journalists for up to a
year under suspicious and these accusations of harming national morale
and harming national security.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Also, here
in the United States, we are getting much coverage on the commercial
media of the war, of the Israeli war in Gaza, but it’s all of U.S.
journalists that are basically based in Israel, and there are no U.S.
journalists that I’ve seen that are actually in Gaza. And those who do
go in only go in with the Israeli army and under the condition that
Israel must review all of their videotape beforehand and approve it
before it can go out. I’m wondering your sense of how the American
people — what kind of story they’re getting as a result of these
conditions?
SHERIFMANSOUR:
Well, these conditions put local Palestinian photojournalists and
freelancers at the most risk. They are the ones on the frontlines. We
have not — we have seen a dwindling number of international media and
international journalists within Gaza over the years because of the
risks involved. And right now the Palestinian journalists are bearing
the brunt of this risk and this heavy toll.
Of course, these casualties, the censorship is also coupled with
communication blackouts for, to date, since the start of the war, that
makes this more often news blackout, not just communication blackout.
And, of course, that denies journalists a voice. It also denies people
in the region and worldwide of essential media coverage, lifesaving
information for 2 million Palestinians who are struggling to find food,
clean water and shelter right now, but millions and hundreds of millions
all over the world who are following this heartbreaking conflict and
try to understand it, including in the U.S.
AMYGOODMAN:
So, as Juan said, Sherif, you have — the Israeli military says they
cannot guarantee the lives of journalists that go into Gaza. In early
November — I’m just thinking back to a few weeks ago — the Palestine
News Agency reported that their journalist Mohammad Abu Hattab was
killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza Strip along
with 11 members of his family, including his wife, son and brother. His
colleague, journalist Salman Al-Bashir, burst into tears during a live
broadcast upon learning of Abu Hattab’s killing. As he spoke, Al-Bashir
tore off his helmet and protective vest, labeled “press,” and threw them
to the ground. And then there was a split screen, as he ripped off his
gear, saying, “Why do we bother wearing this if we’re going to be killed
anyway?” They showed the anchor back in the Palestine news studio as
she wept as Al-Bashir tore off his helmet and protective vest. Your
response to this situation and this whole issue of embedded journalism
is the only way the U.S. media can get those reports inside Gaza, where
their news reports are reviewed, and the Gazan journalists on the ground
being killed one after another, dozens of Palestinian journalists
killed?
SHERIFMANSOUR:
Well, the Israeli army cannot escape or evade their responsibility
under international law not to use unwarranted lethal force against
journalists and against media facilities. It would constitute a possible
war crime to do so. We have raised directly with Israeli officials the
need for them to reform the rules of engagement, to respect press
insignia and to ensure there are safeguards, checks when civilians and
journalists are around. We have called for Israeli allies, including the
U.S. government, European allies, to raise directly these issues, and
publicly, with their Israeli counterparts. And we have called for the
U.N. Security Council to include safety of journalists on the agenda in
any diplomatic discussion.
Of course, the Israeli government are obliged under international law
to protect journalists as civilians, but it’s also journalists’ vital
role in time of war providing accurate, timely, independent information
that gives them these protections under international law. And we want
to make sure that the Israeli army, as well, do not continue to push
false narratives and smear campaigns to try and justify the killing of
those journalists.
AMYGOODMAN:
Sherif Mansour, we want to thank you for being with us, Middle East and
North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect
Journalists, speaking to us from Philadelphia.
Palestinian health officials in Gaza said Tuesday that they have lost
the ability to count the dead because of the collapse of parts of the
enclave’s health system and the difficulty of retrieving bodies from
areas overrun by Israeli tanks and troops.
The Health Ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza, which carefully tracked casualties
over the first five weeks of war, gave its most recent death toll of
11,078 on Nov. 10. The United Nations humanitarian office, which cites
the Health Ministry death toll in its regular reports, still refers to
11,078 as the last verified death toll from the war.
Israeli propaganda is bad, really bad, comically bad.
There are fake stories about Hamas beheading babies, and even beheading a fetus. There are outlandish claims of “mass rape so brutal that they broke their victims’ pelvis – women, grandmothers, children.”
There is a fake Al Qaeda manual found on a dead Hamas fighter emblazoned with “Al Qaeda” in English on its cover. There’s a pristine copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf found in a child’s room of a Hamas “terrorism hub.
There’s the Israeli video of a fake nurse at
al-Shifa Hospital ranting about Hamas stealing morphine and fuel that
was seen more than 12 million times before being deleted. There’s
Israeli footage of a Hamas tunnel under a hospital that turned out to be
a Swedish Cold War-era bunker.
There’s video of IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari, the face of Israeli
propaganda, touring a fake Hamas bunker where he said hostages were
imprisoned under a children’s hospital. In the video Hagari points to a
schedule in Arabic posted to a wall where “every terrorist writes his name” to take turns guarding hostages. In reality, the paper was a shift timetable with dates and days and no names.
As laughably bad as the propaganda is, it gets worse. After besieging
hospitals in North Gaza for a week, Israel says it has proof that the
largest hospital, al-Shifa, was a Hamas command center. Its evidence? An
IDF video showing “about 10 guns.”
That’s it — 10 guns, some ammo, vests, uniforms. That’s all the “evidence” the Israelis could muster in a sprawling 10-acre complex with six separate hospitals and medical facilities. Shifa is so large that in October, 50,000 Gazans were sheltering there from relentless Israeli bombing.
That simple fact, 117,000 displaced Gazans had
taken refuge at Shifa and other hospitals in North Gaza, points to the
real story. On Oct. 13 Israel issued orders for hospitals in North Gaza
to evacuate, which the World Health Organization called a “death sentence” for thousands of injured and sick patients. Amnesty International said the orders amounted to “forced evacuation” and would violate international humanitarian law.
That is Israel’s main goal in its war on Gaza hospitals. It is
attacking places with the greatest protection under international law to
show no place is safe. Routing terrified refugees from shelter in
hospitals is necessary for Israel to ethnically cleanse the northern
half and perhaps the entirety of Gaza.
Leaders of major emerging economies called
for an end to Israel’s war on Gaza on Tuesday, and for a cessation of
hostilities on both sides to ease the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian
crisis in the Gaza Strip.
In a virtual summit chaired by South African President Cyril
Ramaphosa, the BRICS grouping denounced attacks on civilians in
Palestine and Israel, with many leaders calling the forced displacement
of Palestinians, within Gaza or outside the territory, “war crimes.”
“We condemned any kind of individual or mass forcible transfer and
deportation of Palestinians from their own land,” a chair’s summary
read. The group, which did not issue a joint declaration, also
“reiterated that the forced transfer and deportation of Palestinians,
whether inside Gaza or to neighbouring countries, constitute grave
breaches of the Geneva conventions and war crimes and violations under
International Humanitarian Law.”
The BRICS is made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South
Africa, all major emerging economies looking for a greater say in a
global order long dominated by the United States and its Western allies.
These countries are often viewed as leaders of what is referred to in
international policy speak as the “Global South”.
In the US? Amy Goodman (DEMOCRACY NOW!) notes, "Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon became just the second senator
to demand a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, joining Illinois Democrat Dick
Durbin. Merkley wrote, 'By waging a war that generates a shocking level
of civilian carnage rather than a targeted campaign against Hamas,
Israel is burning through its reserves of international support. Too
many civilians and too many children have died, and we must value each
and every child equally whether they are Israeli or Palestinian'." From yesterday's DEMOCRACY NOW!
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
We turn now to the growing calls for a ceasefire in Gaza coming from
lawmakers in Washington. On Monday, Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of
Oregon became the second senator to demand a ceasefire, joining Dick
Durbin of Illinois. According to one count, 42 members of Congress have
now called for a ceasefire or cessation of hostilities in Israel and
occupied Palestine.
We’re joined now by Democratic Congressmember Becca Balint of
Vermont. Last week she became the first Jewish member of Congress to
call for a ceasefire.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Congressmember Balint.
Thanks so much for joining us. Talk about why you’ve made this decision.
You’re senator from Vermont. Bernie Sanders is not there yet, but you
are. Talk about why.
REP. BECCABALINT: So, I want to be really clear, Amy, with folks who are listening and watching, that I wrote the op-ed
to express to Vermonters — it was really geared towards my
constituents, and I should have anticipated that it might get national
attention, but I actually didn’t. So, I wrote it for Vermonters, and
what I wanted to do was really give voice to all the things that I had
been feeling and thinking and wrestling with since the beginning of
October, and wanted to articulate clearly for Vermonters what I thought
needed to happen, so, you know, wanted to just lay it out there: The
horrific violence has to stop. Hostages must be released. We have to end
the suffering in Gaza. Palestinians and Israelis both deserve safety
and security. And now more than ever, I believe that we need a true,
negotiated ceasefire to get to a two-state solution.
And as you mentioned, both my senators here in Vermont have not yet
made the call. But I know, in my conversations with them, that we
actually want the same things. Where we differ is just in the strategy
that is needed to get us there. But we all want to find a way to stop
the violence, to stop the bombing. We don’t want to continue to see
innocent civilians, including so many children and babies, die. And I
just felt that it was really important for me to articulate clearly for
Vermonters all of the complexity I was holding. And I honestly — when we
released the op-ed, I was very focused on how my constituents would
feel about what I said, and I didn’t anticipate that I was the first
Jewish member of Congress to call specifically for a negotiated
ceasefire, because I know we’ve been saying a lot of the same things for
weeks. So, what I do know is there are no exact words right now that
will sum up the totality of what we are all thinking and feeling about
this situation, but I do know that we have complete agreement on an
immediate cessation of hostilities, pausing the violence, ending the
suffering, and trying to get to a negotiated ceasefire that will hold.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And,
Representative, you’ve said that you and Representative Rashida Tlaib
have been brought together by your people’s suffering and are now
friends. Could you talk about the vitriol directed toward her as the
only —
REP. BECCABALINT: Yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — Palestinian congresswoman?
REP. BECCABALINT:
Yes. I really appreciate the question. It’s disgusting. The
Islamophobia right now is completely and totally out of control. And I
was disgusted by the fact that colleagues are trying to go after the one
Palestinian American member of Congress.
And as I said, you know, Rashida and I became friends early on in my
tenure. We were brought together, I think, by — we both have big hearts.
And she’s known a little bit like a mama bear in the caucus. She is
very loving and gentle towards, you know, specifically new members, like
making sure we have what we needed. I was really drawn to her because
we are, as I said, two people that have people within our family that
have endured suffering over a very long time. We are both parents to
teenagers, and we share the struggles of that.
And actually, I don’t think it’s betraying a trust to say, you know,
she sent me a message last week saying what she hopes is that in the
future she and I will be able to walk together in a true democratic
Palestine and in Israel, both of us together as friends, as people who
understand the horrific suffering that is going on right now.
And I have really tried to use my platform, and will continue to do
so, to stand up against the Islamophobia, and also the antisemitism. And
we’ve discussed this, as well, that you can be critical of Israel, and
you should be critical of Israel and Netanyahu and the policies — and
I’ve never shied away from that — and I also am very uncomfortable in
this moment by some of the outrageous antisemitism hurled at Jewish
members of Congress, specifically progressive Jewish members of Congress
who are trying to do the right thing in figuring out the correct
strategy going forward. But, you know, Rashida will always be what I
call one of my heart people.
AMYGOODMAN: Well, on the day after Rashida Tlaib was censured by the House of Representatives, we brought on Marione Ingram, 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, protesting outside the White House, calling for a ceasefire, and she condemned the censure —
REP. BECCABALINT: Thanks.
AMYGOODMAN: — of your colleague, [Representative] Tlaib.
I want to thank you very much, Democratic Congressmember Becca Balint of Vermont. She is the first openly LGBTQ
member to represent Vermont in Congress, the first congresswoman to
represent Vermont, and now the first Jewish member of Congress to call
for a ceasefire in Gaza. We’ll link to her op-ed in the VTDigger headlined “Cease-fire needed to stop bloodshed in Israel-Hamas conflict.”
AMYGOODMAN:
“En el país de la libertad,” “In a Country of Liberty,” by the
Argentine León Gieco, who signed a letter protesting Milei’s erasure of
the horrors of Argentina’s 1976 to 1983 right-wing dictatorship that
killed over 30,000 Argentinians.
