Scott Ritter: Israeli Assault on Gaza is Doomed to Fail

"Urban combat is extraordinarily difficult. It is made even more so when a defender can settle in amongst the rubble of a destroyed city. Ask the Germans at Stalingrad. Ask the French, British, Indians, and Poles who fought at Monte Cassino. Ask either the Ukrainians or Russians about Mariupol and Artemovsk (Bakhmut).

Digging a competent enemy out of the rubble of a destroyed city, especially when they have prepared and organized for such a battle, is deadly work. The Israeli troops who have been assembled outside of Gaza are not ready for this fight. They are not trained or equipped for this fight. They are not psychologically prepared for this fight."

https://sputnikglobe.com/20231011/scott-ritter-israeli-assault-on-gaza-is-doomed-to-fail-1114109205.html

Major new package of support for Ukraine's counter-offensive announced by Grant Shapps
The Defence Secretary will today announce a new package of support for Ukraine and the signing of further air defence contracts, procured through the International Fund for Ukraine.

A new package of military support for Ukraine, worth more than £100m, will be announced by the Defence Secretary today

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/major-new-package-of-support-for-ukraines-counter-offensive-announced-by-grant-shapps

Israel-Hamas “war” – another excuse to shut down free speech

Kit Knightly

As a brand new war-narrative unfolds, there’s already efforts underway to parlay the conflict into tighter controls on free speech and freedom of expression, both in person and on the internet.

The headlines have been filled with nothing but Israel and Hamas since the “surprise attack” on Saturday, with the predictable back and forth of historical grievances and accusations of racism, punctuated by unsubstantiated claims of atrocities.

“Atrocity Propaganda” is nothing new. It is the opening salvo of every war as state combatants try to win the public to their side.

For example, the totally…...

Read full article ...

https://off-guardian.org/2023/10/11/israel-hamas-war-another-excuse-to-shut-down-free-speech/

"Palestinian-American literary historian Edward Said showed how the West had the power to represent the colonial ‘other’ - while simultaneously leaving them silent." [2017]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QYrAqrpshw

"To take one of innumerable examples, the torrent of synthetic chemicals poisoning air, water, soil, oceans, and the bodies of every higher organism is certainly one of the most enduring “accomplishments” of capitalist technoscience. Scientists themselves, not just corporate executives, bear direct responsibility for the terminal wounding of living systems by plastics, herbicides, pesticides, and petrochemical fertilizers, as well as for the toxic impact of the 120,000 compounds (increasing every month) that saturate ourselves and the environment. These compounds have been produced for no other purpose than the facilitating of manufacturing and technical processes, including military applications, and for enhancing, in thousands of ways, the unnecessary “conveniences” of daily life and commerce. The global industrial complex is dependent on a continual stream of new products and is structurally incapable of limiting or regulating itself in any meaningful way. The actuality of a world made into a terminal waste dump by technoscience is not an anomaly that could have been, or might yet be, put right; it is intrinsic to the operations of scorched earth capitalism. When one considers the harmful innovations of synthetic biology, nanotechnology, social robotics, and autonomous weapons systems, to name just a few other areas, the kneejerk veneration of “science” can only be understood as a capitulation to the ongoing assault on the life-world. For philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, 'anyone who believes that science and technology will manage to provide a solution to problems created by science and technology, does not believe in the reality of the future.'"

https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2023/10/11/the-disastrous-inseparability-of-western-science-and-capitalism/

"The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation."

George Orwell, 1984

https://x.com/robinmonotti/status/1712308653334671599

Benjamin Netanhyahu. PM of Israel:
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
Haaretz: "His life’s work was to turn the ship of state from the course steered by his predecessors, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Olmert, and make the two-state solution impossible. En route to this goal, he found a partner in Hamas."

https://x.com/robinmonotti/status/1712401382240575616

https://www.truthforhealth.org/2023/10/covid-shot-turbo-cancer/

You may be aware that there’s a story doing the rounds that “mRNA vaccines may be administered via the air we breathe, after dropping the material from aircraft”.
While I do not dismiss ANYTHING on grounds such as “Nobody could be as evil as that”, I assess that it’s unlikely to feasible from a technical perspective.
This alarming story came up a couple of weeks ago and Dr Vliet, founder and chair of the Truth For Health Foundation, asked me to evaluate it.
This short piece in the TFHF newsletter is my thinking as of early October 2023.
Many thanks
Mike

Ps: you may find interesting material in the TFHF website, so please roam around briefly to learn what kind of thinks are there.

"Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.
Israel "aided Hamas directly -- the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO," said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies.
Israel's support for Hamas "was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative," said a former senior CIA official.
According to documents obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT) by UPI, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. Islamic movements in Israel and Palestine were "weak and dormant" until after the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel scored a stunning victory over its Arab enemies.
After 1967, a great part of the success of the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood was due to their activities among the refugees of the Gaza Strip. The cornerstone of the Islamic movements success was an impressive social, religious, educational and cultural infrastructure, called Da'wah, that worked to ease the hardship of large numbers of Palestinian refugees, confined to camps, and many of whom were living on the edge.
"Social influence grew into political influence," first in the Gaza Strip, then on the West Bank, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
According to ICT papers, Hamas was legally registered in Israel in 1978 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the movements spiritual leader, as an Islamic Association by the name Al-Mujamma Al Islami, which widened its base of supporters and sympathizers by religious propaganda and social work.
Funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel, according to U.S. intelligence officials. The PLO was secular and leftist and promoted Palestinian nationalism. Hamas wanted set up a transnational state under the rule of Islam, much like Khomeini's Iran.
What took Israeli leaders by surprise was the way the Islamic movements began to surge after the Iranian revolution, after armed resistance to Israel sprang up in southern Lebanon organized by an Iran-backed movement called Hezbollah that bore similitaries to Hamas, these sources said.
"Nothing stirs up the energy for imitation as much as success," commented one administration expert.
A further factor of Hamas' growth was the fact the PLO moved its base of operations to Beirut in the 1980s, leaving the Islamic movements to strengthen their influence in the Occupied Territories "as the court of last resort," he said.
When the intifada began, the Israeli leadership was further surprised when Islamic groups began to surge in membership and strength. Hamas immediately grew in numbers and violence. The group had always embraced the doctrine of armed struggle, but the doctrine had not been practiced and Islamic groups had not been subjected to suppression the way groups like Fatah had been, according to U.S. government officials.
But with the triumph of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, with the birth of Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorism in Lebanon, Hamas began to gain strength in Gaza and then in the West Bank, relying on terror to resist the Israeli occupation.
Israel was certainly funding the group at that time. One US intelligence source who asked not to be named, said that not only was Hamas being funded as a "counterweight" to the PLO, Israeli aid had a more devious purpose: "to help identify and channel towards Israeli agents Hamas members who were dangerous terrorists."
In addition, by infiltrating Hamas, Israeli informers could listen to debates on policy and identify Hamas members who "were dangerous hardliners," the official said.

In the end, as Hamas set up a very comprehensive counterintelligence system, many collaborators with Israel were weeded out and shot. Violent acts of terrorism became the central tenet, and Hamas, unlike the PLO, was unwilling to compromise in any way with Israel, refusing to acknowledge its very existence.
Even then, some in Israel saw some benefits to be had in trying to continue to give Hamas support: "The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the other groups, if they gained control, would refuse to have anything to do with the pace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place," said a U.S. government official."}

https://x.com/robinmonotti/status/1712408400405897387

Israeli Party Leader: "Hamas is a Strategic Asset" [2015]
“The P.A. is a liability and Hamas is an asset. On the international playing field, in this game of the delegitimization think about for a second, the P.A. is a liability and Hamas is an asset. It’s a terrorist organization. Nobody will recognize it, nobody will give it status at the ICC and nobody will let them push resolutions at the UN and they’ll need an American veto or we won’t need one.
“I’m not sure at all that given the current situation given the current facts that the central playing field we’re playing in is international there Abu Mazen (Abbas) is costing us serious casualties and Hamas in such a situation would be an asset. I don’t think we need to be afraid of that [Hamas taking over].” — Bezalel Smotrich, leader of Israel’s Religious Zionist Party

https://x.com/robinmonotti/status/1712410494957428737

Who lives in Gaza?
1 million children

https://x.com/robinmonotti/status/1712413355573383337

"Israeli Right: Keep Hamas In Power" [2019]
"In the eyes of the right today, every Israeli patriot must wholeheartedly support the Hamas regime in Gaza. Leftist traitors, they say, support the possibility that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who rules over the West Bank, take control of the Gaza Strip, bringing Israel closer to the “pit of the two-state solution,” as right-wing pundit and former IDF Major-General Gershon Hacohen put it.
The policy of “separating” the West Bank from Gaza isn’t new. It began in the late 1980s, with various prime ministers — from Yitzhak Rabin to Netanyahu — finding ways to make it more sophisticated it over the years. Now comes the reasoning behind the separation. No longer are we dealing solely with the question of ostensible security benefits that result in severing Gaza from the West Bank. Today, Hamas’ rule has added value, and maintaining its regime justifies Israeli civilian casualties (Palestinian lives, of course, don’t matter). In order to keep Hamas on its feet, writes Distal Abtaryan, Netanyahu is willing to pay “an almost inconceivable price — half the country paralyzed, children and parents in post-trauma, bombed houses, people killed.”
Why is Netanyahu willing to pay this price? The answer is simple: “Every home needs a balcony, and Israel is a home,” writes Distal Abtaryan, “the balcony of this home is Samaria… if Hamas crumbles, Mahmoud Abbas may rule the strip. If he rules it, voices on the left will encourage negotiations, a political settlement, and a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria as well… this is the real reason Netanyahu doesn’t annihilate Hamas, everything else is bullshit.”
Erez Tadmor, one of the founders of the far-right Im Tirzu movement and who headed Likud’s information campaign in the last elections, struck a similar tone on Twitter. “The split between Abbas’ Judea and Samaria and Hamas’ Gaza is optimal for Israel,” he tweeted after the ceasefire was announced. “When necessary, we can strike Hamas in Gaza and not be forced to withdraw to the Auschwitz borders in Judea and Samaria,” Tadmore wrote.
Yonatana Orich, who managed Likud’s campaign alongside Tadmor and is one of Netanyahu’s closest advisors, made similar remarks. “He (Netanyahu – M.R.) succeeded in disconnecting between Gaza and Judea and Samaria, and effectively shattered the vision of a Palestinian state in these two areas. Part of the achievement is linked to the Qatari money that comes to Hamas every month,” he explained in an interview to Makor Rishon before the latest round of fighting erupted.
Netanyahu’s supporters on the right aren’t alone. Although MK Betzalel Smotrich, who may soon become a minister, expressed disappointment over the fact that Israel did not kill 700 Palestinians — in retaliation for every rocket fired from Gaza — back in 2015 he called Hamas an “asset” and Abbas a “burden.”
In an interview with right-wing news website Mida, Gershon Hacohen, known for his criticism of Netanyahu from the right, explained that by refraining from taking down Hamas, Netanyahu “prevented Abbas’ plot to establish a united Palestinian state. We need to take advantage of the situation of separation between Gaza and Ramallah. This is a top Israeli interest, and it is impossible to understand the campaign in Gaza without understanding this context.”

As opposed to Netanyahu’s admirers, Hacohen is aware that support for Hamas is a trap for Israel. “Hamas created, with the threat of rockets, a difficult equation that cannot be denied,” he admitted. “Each day of rockets paralyzing the country carries heavy financial costs. That is why Hamas can cause us to prefer considerations of containment, because the price we pay is high.” Hacohen supports a severe response to Hamas but worries that such a response would be too successful. “To avoid a situation in which we have defeated Hamas but have fallen into the pit of a two-state solution,” he said, “we must, first of all, regulate control over Area C and stop the attempts of the PA to take over other areas under the auspices of the European Union.” First we annex, then we topple Hamas.
In the eyes of the Israeli right, the real threat to Israel is not Hamas’ violence and terrorism — the danger is a peace agreement with the PLO, Abbas, and the establishment of a Palestinian state. In the struggle against this danger, Hamas is viewed as an almost ideological partner. It, too, opposes Abbas, and has no interest in the PA ruling Gaza. That is why whatever strengthens Hamas is good for Israel, and whatever weakens it is bad for Israel. An Israel that wants to continue its occupation of the West Bank will want to continue to stand on the balcony and gaze at the Palestinians from above."

https://x.com/robinmonotti/status/1712416233000243582