It's very weird that Linux is broken up into Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Linux (non-WSL), Fedora, etc, etc. but none of the other OSes are. Example: Windows isn't broken into Server 2022, Server 2025, Windows 10 home, Windows 10 iot, Windows 10 S, etc, etc.
It's very hard to tell what the total numbers are as you can't just add these together, since an indivdual might use several.
I suspect it's because they allowed users to select multiple, 'cause if you add all the personal Linuxes together, you get 61% on their own.
Regardless, it's actually looking really good for Team Free Software.
and this year Android also surpasses Ubuntu for personal use (29% vs. 28%).
lol why bother with same OS category when you can just compare across whichever fields you want
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Patch 1.5.0 Notes! - Steam News
New Content
- Verso's Drafts, a new playable environment, taking the characters of Expedition 33 to a brand-new location with new enemy encounters and surprises to discover :)
Located on the World Map, next to Lumière - Accessible from Act III
Esquie’s Underwater ability is required! - New text and UI game localizations into Czech, Ukrainian, Latin American Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Thai, and Indonesian, bringing the total number of supported languages to 19, with more to come!
- New costumes for each member of the Expedition, giving even more customization options for players throughout their adventure
- New boss battles for late-game players to overcome in the Endless Tower - They are variations of iconic bosses from the main game, designed to be even more challenging
- Added new Luminas and Weapons
- Added the "Old Key" quest item to the final area of the game - Previously obtainable only during the Prologue, this addition gives players a second chance to collect all journals within a single playthrough
New Features
- Added Photo Mode with plenty of settings and options for players to get creative with while capturing your favourite moments from the game, accessible at any time from the pause menu!
- Added Lumina Sets feature, allowing players to save up to 50 different lumina loadouts for adapting to plenty of different fighting tactics at any moment
- Added Abandon Battle option in the pause menu which can now be opened in battle
- Added HUD Scale setting, allowing players to adjust the size of in-game HUD elements from 80% to 120%
- Added FSR 4 support, including AMD temporal upscaling for sharper visuals and Frame Generation for smoother gameplay on compatible GPUs
- Added new filters for Pictos and Luminas and improved the UI
- Added input remapping for controller
Handheld PC improvements
- The game is now certified on Steam Deck and ROG Xbox Ally!
- Global improvement of text legibility
- Fixed multiple fog and lighting issues:
Overly intense effects during the Flying Manor boss fight (which also impacted some cinematics)
Overexposed areas in the Visages
Overly dark areas in the Endless Tower - Fixed FPS being capped at 30 on Steam Deck
- VSync can now be properly disabled in the settings when playing on Steam Deck
- Graphic settings are now adjusted for Steam Deck users
- Improved first-time setup flow:
Controller input is now supported in installation wizards (no longer touchscreen-only) - External controllers now switch seamlessly with the Steam Deck controls
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue where using Battle Retry after a cinematic or automatic trigger could spawn the player out of the world if the last save was created in a different location
- The playtime displayed on save files now accurately reflects total playtime, including time spent on Game Overs
(Note: this fix does not retroactively update existing save files.) - Fixed inventory behaviour so that sort order now persists after closing the game menu
- Fixed issue preventing Intel XeSS Frame Generation setting from being accessible on PC Game Pass
- Fixed an issue where the usage of particular diacritic marks (e.g. ^, ~, ´, `) in Windows is blocked after launching the title
- Fixed Breaking Death always breaking all enemies when the character dies, it should only break the enemy that killed the character - As a result, it shouldn’t work when the character kills themself anymore
- Characters' turn order during a First Strike, triggered by attacking an enemy on the map, now correctly respects characters' Speed
- Fixed Boucharo giving +150% Critical chance instead of +50% Critical chance
- Fixed some Luminas giving unintended hidden +10% damage:
Sweet Kill
Teamwork
Dead Energy II
First Strike and others
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Patch 1.5.0 Notes! - Steam News
Content updates, fixes and changes in 1.5.0store.steampowered.com
Same, I only used it in the end as some kind of „fuck it, let’s go and break everything while searching some missed secrets“. I don’t want to completely let it destroy the game, but as a grand finale in post game content? Count me in!
At least they don’t mention, that they adjusted Stendhal, which I feel is broken in more ways than Game Breaking Death.
I absolutely love the idea of presets for Lumina as it encourages tweaking builds more. Now I should be able to just save a working build in one slot and a tweaked version in another and directly compare them and even restore the previous version easily.
It would fill up the break bar instantly for all enemies in the battle when you die. And when you do actually break an enemy you could stack it with other pictos that burn or modify (eg slow) the enemy on break.
Now it only fills the break bar of the enemy that killed you, the others remain untouched. So it also means that you can't combo it with auto death that insta kills you on battle start to fill up everyone's break bars from turn 1 and use it to your advantage. It definitely made some battles incredibly easy if you built around it.
Added Abandon Battle option in the pause menu which can now be opened in battle
Finally. No more waiting around to die to reset the fight when you mess up.
Terrorism: How the Israeli state was won
Note: This article was published in 2017
We are now approaching the centennial of the British Original Sin in this tragedy, the Balfour Declaration. The British role in Palestine was a case of ‘hit & run’: The Balfour Declaration, in which the British gave away other people’s land, was the hit; and thirty years later, Resolution 181—Partition—was the run, leaving the Palestinians abandoned in a ditch.
Zionism was of course among the incarnations of racial-nationalism that evolved in the late nineteenth century. Bigots were Zionism’s avid fans—it was the anti-Semites who championed the Zionists. Gertrude Bell, the famous English writer, traveler, archaeologist, and spy, reported, based on her personal experience, that those who supported Zionism did so because it provided a way to get rid of Jews.
The London Standard’s correspondent to the first Zionist Conference in 1897 I think described Zionism perfectly. He reported that
…the degeneration which calls itself Anti-Semitism [bear in mind that ‘anti-Semitism’ was then a very new term] has begotten the degeneration which adorns itself with the name of Zionism.
Indeed, most Jews and Jewish leaders dismissed Zionism as the latest anti-Semitic cult. They had fought for equality, and resented being told that they should now make a new ghetto—and worse yet, to do so on other people’s land. They resented being cast as a separate race of people as Zionism demanded.
They had had quite enough of that from non-Jewish bigots.
For others, the idea of going to a place where one could act out racial superiority was seductive. As the political theorist Eduard Bernstein put it at about the time the Balfour Declaration was being finessed, Zionism is “a kind of intoxication which acts like an epidemic”.
By the time the Balfour Declaration was finalised, thirty-plus years of Zionist settlement had made clear that the Zionists intended to ethnically cleanse the land for a settler state based on racial superiority; and it was the behind-the-scenes demands of the principal Zionist leaders, notably Chaim Weizmann and Baron Rothschild.
First-hand accounts of Zionist settlement in Palestine had already painted a picture of violent racial displacement. I will cite one of the lesser known reports, by Dr. Paul Nathan, a prominent Jewish leader in Berlin, who went to Palestine on behalf of the German Jewish National Relief Association. He was so horrified by what he found that he published a pamphlet in January, 1914, in which he described the Zionist settlers as carrying on
a campaign of terror modelled almost on Russian pogrom models [against settlers refusing to adopt Hebrew].
A few years later, the Balfour Declaration’s deliberately ambiguous wording was being finalized. Sceptics—and the British Cabinet—were assured that it did not mean a Zionist state. Yet simultaneously, Weizmann was pushing to create that very state immediately. He demanded that his state extend all the way to the Jordan River within three or four years of the Declaration—that is, by 1921—and then expand beyond it.
In their behind-the-scenes meetings, Weizmann and Rothschild treated the ethnic cleansing of non-Jewish Palestinians as indispensable to their plans, and they repeatedly complained to the British that the settlers were not being treated preferentially enough over the Palestinians. And they insisted that the British must lie about the scheme until it is too late for anyone to do anything about it.
In correspondence with Balfour, Weizmann justified his lies by slandering the Palestinians and Jews—that is, the Middle East’s indigenous Jews, who were overwhelmingly opposed to Zionism and whom Weizmann smeared with classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Palestinians he dismissed as, in so many words, a lower type of human, and this was among the reasons he and other Zionist leaders used for refusing democracy in Palestine—if the “Arabs” had the vote, he said, it would lower the Jew down to the level of a “native”.
With the establishment of the British Mandate, four decades of peaceful Palestinian resistance had proved futile, and armed Palestinian resistance—which included terrorism—began. Zionist terror became the domain of formal organizations that attacked anyone in the way of its messianic goals—Palestinian, Jew, or British. These terror organizations operated from within the Zionist settlements and were actively empowered and shielded by the settlements and the Jewish Agency, the recognized semi-autonomous government of the Zionist settlements, what would become the Israeli government.
There was no substantive difference between the acknowledged terror organizations—most famously, the Irgun, and Lehi, the so-called Stern Gang—and the Jewish Agency, and its terror gang, the Hagana. The Agency cooperated, collaborated, and even helped finance the Irgun.
The relationship between the Jewish Agency, and the Irgun and Lehi, was symbiotic. The Irgun in particular would act on behalf of the Hagana so that the Jewish Agency could feign innocence. The Agency would then tell the British that they condemn the terror, while steadfastly refusing any cooperation against it, indeed doing what they could to shield it.
The fascist nature of the Zionist enterprise was apparent both to US and British intelligence. The Jewish Agency tolerated no dissent and sought to dictate the fates of all Jews. Children were radicalised as part of the methodology of all three major organizations, and by extension, the Jewish Agency.
Britain’s wake-up call regarding the Zionists’ indoctrination of children came on the 8th of July, 1938. That day, the Irgun blew up a bus filled with Palestinian villagers. Now, this was not the first time the Irgun had done something of this sort, but this time the British caught the bomber. She was a twelve year old schoolgirl.
Teenagers, both boys and girls, were commonly used to plant bombs in Palestinian markets and conduct other terror attacks. Teachers were threatened or removed if they tried to intervene in the indoctrination of their students, and the students themselves were blocked from advancement if they resisted, even being taught to betray their own parents if those parents tried to instill some moderation. Jews who opposed and tried to warn of the emerging fascism were assassinated, and indeed most victims of Zionist assassinations—that is, targeted, rather than indiscriminate—were Jews.
From the beginning of World War II through to the summer of 1947, there were virtually no Palestinian attacks, even though Zionist terror against Palestinians continued. A British explanation for the Palestinians’ failure to respond in kind was that they understood that the attacks were a trap, intended to elicit a response that the Zionists would frame as an attack against which they would have to ‘defend’ themselves. This was a Zionist tactic noted by the British as early as 1918, and it remains Israel’s default strategy today, most blatantly in Gaza, but also in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
As late as the fall of 1947, the Jewish Agency was concerned by the Palestinians’ failure to respond to its provocation, but when the end of 1947 came and the Jewish Agency could wait no longer for the civil war it needed, it was simply a matter of ratcheting up the terror.
Throughout the Mandate period, the takeover and ethnic cleansing of Palestine remained Zionism’s unwavering goal. As but one illustration, I will summarize a key meeting of twenty people held in London on the 9th of September, 1941.
“To be treated as most secret” is the red ink heading of the transcript. Present were Weizmann, who had called the meeting, David Ben-Gurion, and other Zionist leaders such as Simon Marks (of Marks & Spencer); and the prominent non-Zionist industrialist, Robert Waley Cohen. Discussing the path to the proposed Jewish State, the conversation ran along the lines of George Orwell’s still-to-be-published Animal Farm, in which all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Anthony de Rothschild began by stressing that there would be no “discrimination … against any group of its citizens” in the Jewish state, not even “to meet immediate needs”. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion also assured the sceptics: “Arabs”—Palestinians—would have equal rights. However, they clarified that within that absolute equality, Jewish settlers would have to have special privileges. Weizmann’s ‘absolute equality’ included the transfer of most non-Jews out of Palestine while permitting “a certain percentage of Arab and other elements” to remain in his Jewish state, the insinuation being as a pool of cheap labour.
Anthony de Rothschild’s vision of equality and non-discrimination was equally compelling: it “depended on turning an Arab majority into a minority”, and to achieve this, there would be “no equal rights” for non-Jews.
Cohen found the scheme dangerous, submitting that the Zionists were “starting with the kind of aims with which Hitler had started”. Cohen did not stop there: he suggested that if a state with equality for everyone were indeed intended, the state should be named with a neutral geographic term. He suggested … ‘Palestine’. The others were horrified at this idea, arguing that if the state had a non-Jewish name, “they would never get a Jewish majority”, in effect acknowledging the use of messianic fundamentalism as a calculated political strategy.
In another obvious but rarely spoken admission, Ben-Gurion clarified that the ‘Jewish state’ was not based on Judaism; it was, rather, based on being a ‘Jew’, that is, by the Zionists’ racial definition.
Asked about borders of his settler state, Weizmann continued in the same surreal manner. He replied that he would consider the partition plan proposed by the Peel Commission four years earlier, in 1937, but that “the line” (the Partition) “would be the Jordan”. This was nonsensical: the Jordan was the Commission’s eastern border for the two states, and so Weizmann’s ‘partition’ meant 100% for his state, 0% for the Palestinians. He went further still: he would “very much” like to “cross the Jordan”, that is, take Transjordan along with Palestine.
At the end of the meeting Weizmann sought to put his proposals into effect officially in the name of all Jews worldwide. Those against his proposals were, in his word, “antisemites”.
Meanwhile, World War II was raging. What was the Jewish Agency’s reaction to the most terrible enemy Jewry has ever known? From the beginning, it was to lobby the Yishuv, the Jewish settlers, not to enlist in the Allied struggle against the Nazis, because doing so would not serve Zionism—even taking advantage of May Day 1940 to lecture the Yishuv to stay in Palestine rather than join the war effort. Another reaction was to conduct a massive theft ring of Allied weapons and munitions, “as if”, as one British military record put it, “paid by Hitler himself”.
Much has been written on the collaboration between the Zionists and fascists during the war, the best known of course being the Haavara Transfer agreement that broke the anti-Nazi boycott. One of the least known was Lehi’s attempted collaboration with the Italian fascists. In its nearly concluded ‘Jerusalem Agreement’ of late 1940, Lehi would help the fascists win the war, and in return the fascists would uproot any Jewish communities not in Palestine and force their populations to Palestine.
If this sounds like a scheme so extreme that only fanatical Lehi could have conjured it, it is essentially what the Israeli state ultimately succeeded at in the early 1950s—most catastrophically, when it conducted a false-flag terror campaign against Jews in Iraq to destroy that ancient community and move its population to Israel as ethnic fodder.
Violence targeting Jews was, and I would argue remains, a core tactic of Zionism. In fact, the single most deadly terror attack of the entire Mandate period was not the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 as is commonly thought. Even some of the Irgun’s bombings of Palestinian markets killed more people than the King David attack. But the most deadly single terror attack was the Jewish Agency’s bombing of the immigrant ship Patria in 1940, killing an estimated 267 people, of whom more than 200 were Jews fleeing the Nazis.
The Jewish Agency bombed the Patria because it was bringing the DPs to Mauritius, where the British had facilities for them. The Agency needed the DPs to be settlers in Palestine without delay, and was willing to risk the lives of all aboard in order to get the survivors to remain—which, indeed, they did.
In further violence against its Jewish victims, the Agency framed the dead for the bombing. It spread the lie that the DPs themselves blew up the vessel, that they committed mass suicide rather than not go directly to Palestine, posthumously conscripting the dead to serve the Zionist myth.
This was no aberration, but the driving principle of the Zionist project: Persecuted Jews served the political project, not the other way around.
Another major tactic of violence against Jews by the Jewish Agency and American Zionist leadership was the sabotaging of safe haven in order to force them to Palestine. As but one example, in 1944 US Zionist leaders sabotaged President Roosevelt’s provisional success in establishing a half million new homes for European DPs, most of these homes in the United States and Britain. When Roosevelt’s aide Morris Ernst visited the Zionist leaders in an attempt to save the program, he was, in his words, “thrown out of parlours and accused of treason”— ‘treason’, because he was Jewish, and the Zionists owned Jews.
Nor were those already settled safe. In 1946, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Yitzhak Herzog, conducted a massive kidnapping operation of Jewish orphans that had been adopted by European families when their parents perished years earlier. Removing ten thousand children from their homes was the number he cited to the NY Times as his goal. In the National Archives, I found a copy of his own record of the trip.
Herzog railed against the fierce resistance he met in every country by horrified local Jewish leaders who tried to protect the children. But Herzog used his political clout to circumvent them. In France, for example, facing the steadfast refusal of the Jewish leaders to betray the children, Herzog
met the Prime Minister of France from whom I demanded promulgation of a law which would oblige every family to declare the particulars of the children it houses,
so that those of Jewish background could be exposed and put back in orphanages until they can be shipped to Palestine—quite a Kafkaesque twist on Passover for these children who had just been spared the Nazis.
Herzog’s justification for the kidnappings was that for a Jew to be raised in a non-Jewish home is “much worse than physical murder”. Yet even this ghastly justification fails to explain what was actually taking place, because at the same time Herzog was ‘rescuing’ Jewish orphans from this fate “much worse than physical murder”, his Jewish Agency colleagues were sabotaging Jewish adoptive homes in England for young survivors still in the camps. The real reason for all of it, of course, was that the children were needed to serve the settler project as demographic fodder.
To that end, the Jewish Agency had coerced President Truman to segregate Jewish DPs into Zionist indoctrination camps, despite objections that it echoed Nazi behaviour. For these people who had just survived the unthinkable, then severed from the rest of humanity into these brainwashing camps, there was no such thing as free thought.
The camps nurtured such fanaticism that it shocked a joint US-UK committee that visited in 1946. Before these camps, few DPs wanted to go to Palestine. But now the Committee found them in a delirious state, threatening mass suicide if they did not go to Palestine. Suggestions of new homes in the United States, which had always been the favored destination, were again met with threats of mass suicide.
DPs were also groomed to bring Zionist terrorism to Europe, bombing Allied trains and Allied facilities. The bombing of the British embassy in Rome in 1946, for example, was by DPs brainwashed in these camps, as was a near-catastrophe in the Austrian Alps in 1947 when DPs nearly blew a train off a steep trestle into a deep abyss, which would almost certainly have sent its two hundred civilians and Allied troops to their deaths.
German Jewish immigrants to Palestine during war were outraged by the Zionists’ exploitation of the Nazi horrors they had just fled. This outrage given voice by, among others, the prominent journalist Robert Weltsch, editor of Berlin newspaper until banned by the Nazis in 1938.
Weltsch warned that Zionist leaders
have not yet understood that the enemy seeks the destruction of the Jews … We who have been here only a few years, we know what Nazism is.
Zionists, rather, are “taking part in the crash of European Jewry only as spectators”, fighting the British and keeping Jews from joining the Allied struggle while getting comfortable and rich from their political project in Palestine. Recent immigrants from Germany and Central Europe, he said, have no representation among the Zionist ruling establishment. If they did,
we would have demanded that the Yishuv should put itself at the disposal of Britain for the fight against Hitler and Nazism.
But—and I am still quoting Weltsch—
They do not want to fight against Hitler because his fascist methods are also theirs … They do not want our young men to join the [Allied] Forces … day after day they are sabotaging the English War Effort.
These German Jewish immigrants were shunned by the Zionists, their publications and presses bombed. Even Kiosks were bombed for selling non-Hebrew papers to German Jewish immigrants.
In 1943, a man whom British records describe as “a Jew whose integrity is not open to question” risked his life to warn the British about the threat of Zionism. For his safety, he was referred to only by the code-name ‘Z’.
Z described Zionism as a parallel movement to Nazism. He warned that the Zionist indoctrination of Jewish youth was producing a society of extremists who will use any method necessary to achieve Zionist goals; and he pointed out that, as fascism in Europe has demonstrated, such a society is very difficult to undo once it has taken root. The result, I’m afraid, is what we, or more accurately the Palestinians, are facing today in the so-called ‘conflict’.
How trustworthy is this anonymous testimony? I found at the National Archives a private letter in which Z is identified — he was J.S. Bentwich, the Senior Inspector of Jewish Schools in Palestine.
Zionists
would have got further towards rescuing the unfortunates in Axis Europe, had they not complicated the question by always dragging Palestine into the picture
—so judged a report by US Intelligence in the Middle East, dated the 4th of June, 1943, entitled “Latest Aspects of the Palestine Zionist-Arab Problem”. It described “Zionism in Palestine” as
a type of nationalism which in any other country would be stigmatised as retrograde Nazism,
and stated that anti-Semitism was essential to it. Whereas
assimilated Jews in Europe and America are noted for being … stout opponents of racialism and discrimination,
Zionism has bred the opposite mentality in Palestine,
a spirit closely akin to Nazism, namely, an attempt to regiment the community, even by force, and to resort to force to get what they want.
US intelligence assailed “the crude conception” being spread of the Palestinian people as “a nomad tent-dweller … with a little seasonal agriculture”, as being “too absurd to need refutation”. The report noted the irony that it was from them that Zionist settlers learned the cultivation of Jaffa oranges. Whereas the Palestinians were self-sufficient, the Zionist settlements exist on massive external financing, and should Jews overseas ever tire of supporting the settlers, “the venture will collapse like a pricked balloon”. The conclusion of this early US intelligence report was however naïve, or at least premature: now that the world “has seen the lengths to which the Nazi creed has carried the nations”, it reasoned that the Zionists “are due to find themselves an anachronism”.
After the war, the Jewish Agency discussed its enemies. They were democracy; the Atlantic Charter, which of course became the basis for the United Nations; Reconstruction; and the fall in anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism having always been Zionism’s drug, without which it would be irrelevant. The Agency sought to exploit anti-Semitism and blamed declining anti-Semitism in the United States on America’s so-called “democratic attitude”.
Nor was this merely a post-war abuse. Even as Jews were still being carted off to the death camps, the New Zionist Organization’s Arieh Altman was typical in arguing that anti-Semitism must “form the foundation of Zionist propaganda”, and the Defence Security Officer in Palestine, Henry Hunloke, wondered if the Jewish Agency might even “stir up anti-Semitism … in order to force Jews … to come to Palestine”.
Now, today, when anything approaching this topic is raised, it is twisted by some into the pejorative misstatement that the speaker—in this case, me—is blaming Jews for anti-Semitism.
NO. Rather, it is the simple fact that Zionism requires anti-Semitism, is addicted to it, and seeks to insure that it, or at least the appearance of it, never ends. One need look no further than the satisfaction among many Zionists today at the true anti-Semitism of the incoming US administration of Donald Trump, with Israeli journalists like Yaron London openly applauding this anti-Semitism as welcome news. More about that in a few minutes.
I also mentioned Reconstruction. As one former settlement member, a man named Newton, explained, Zionist leaders were afraid that with the improvement of conditions in Europe the pressure on Palestine would subside. Any improvement in Europe was an anathema to their plans.
What was the Jewish Agency’s reaction to Britain’s role in defeating the worst enemy Jewry has ever known? It saw an opportunity for extortion. The war had devastated Britain’s economy; but when Britain turned to the US for a long term loan to recuperate from its battle against the Nazis, the Agency tried to pressure Washington to deny the loan unless Britain acceded to Zionist demands. The loan was of course ultimately approved, but still in 1948 Zionists assailed US Congressmen for being pro- Marshall Plan, and the Truman administration itself dangled the loan in front of British officials when they tried to bring attention to Zionist atrocities.
By 1946, Zionist terrorism had become the defining daily challenge of life in Palestine, and one hundred thousand British troops proved unable to contain it. Anyone or anything that kept Palestine a functioning society was a target of the Zionists. Trains, roads, bridges, communications, oil facilities, and Coast Guard stations were constantly being bombed. Utility workers, telephone repairmen, railway workers, bomb disposal personnel were murdered. Police were long a favoured target and were gunned down by the dozens.
Among the smaller terror organizations that popped up was one specifically dedicated to Zionists’ long-running fear of Jews befriending non-Jews, the ultimate fear of course being polluting what for the Zionists was the pure Jewish race. As a sample of its methods, the terror group doused a disobedient Jewish girl with acid, severely injuring her and blinding her in one eye.
Zionist terror was aided by the Jewish Agency’s phenomenal intelligence network. The Agency had informers all the way to high-placed sympathetic US officials that fed them intelligence, such that the British learned not even to trust direct messages to US President Truman.
When the UN’s Palestine committee, UNSCOP, visited Palestine in the summer of 1947, the Agency had replaced the committee members’ drivers with spies; had replaced the waiters at the main restaurant they frequented with spies; and most productively, sent five young women to serve at what was called a “theatre network” of house attendants at the building where the members, all men, were being housed. The young women were required to be smart and educated, but above all, in the Agency’s word, to be “daring”. Whatever ‘daring’ meant, they extracted a wealth of information from the key people who were deliberating Palestine’s future.
Jewish sex workers were involuntarily recruited as spies. They were told that upon the Zionist victory they would be executed for ‘sleeping with the enemy’, but might be spared if they cooperated now. The practice was so widespread that a standard questionnaire was printed up that the women were to fill out after each British customer. [note: see document detail, above]
To demonstrate the degree to which Jewish Agency plants infiltrated the government and everyday life, a couple of months after one coast guard station was attacked and bombed by the Hagana, it blew up again … but the British were baffled, because this time there had been no attack. They discovered that the construction crew that had rebuilt the station after the previous attack were Hagana, and had simply embedded explosives in the reconstruction, to be detonated when desired.
But the worst problem of infiltration was in the military service, where deadly sabotage by Zionist plants who had joined the forces led, tragically, to orders to remove all Jews from service in Palestine, because there was no way to tell the Zionists from the Jews.
By 1948, this problem spread to key medical personnel. After the Jewish Agency poisoned the water supply of Acre with typhoid in order to expedite the ethnic cleansing of this city that lies on the Palestinian side of Partition, the bacteriologist hired by the British proved to be a Hagana plant or sympathizer, an obstacle to the availability of the vaccine. [Note: see document detail, below. For the injection of typhoid into the aqueduct at Acre, see e.g., Ilan Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing, pp 100-101, and Naeim Giladi, Ben Gurion’s Scandals, pp 10-11]
Selling terror required effective marketing, and for that the Agency harnessed the plight of European Jews at the same time it was exploiting them. A very brief look at the iconic Zionist immigrant story is illustrative—that is of course the USS Warfield, renamed the Exodus for the obvious Biblical iconography.
The Exodus was sold to the world as the desperate attempt of 4,515 Holocaust survivors to reach their last hope of safety and a new life, their promised land. The British, instead, forced them back, not just to Europe, but to their ultimate nightmare: Germany.
That was the story the US and European public got.
In truth, the Exodus was a monstrous propaganda event, grand theatre, not for benefit but at the expense of Jewish survivors. The Jewish Agency knew that Exodus passengers would be turned back, for, among other reasons, their flooding of Palestine with settlers was a tactic to force its political goals. And remember that the entire Exodus cargo of immigrants equalled less than one percent of President Roosevelt’s resettlement plan that the Zionists sabotaged. The DPs themselves were products of the Zionist camps and had been rehearsed to repeat, as one witness described it, whatever Zionist mumbo-jumbo was demanded of them.
As for the return to Germany, it was the Jewish Agency, not the British, that forced the DPs back to Germany. Attempts were being made to find new homes for the Exodus passengers elsewhere—Denmark was one possibility—but this was sabotaged by Ben-Gurion, because it would spoil the Exodus plot.
There was in fact already an alternative to Germany. All the Exodus DPs had the right to disembark in Southern France rather than Germany, but the Agency used violence to prevent them from leaving. The Exodus show required the pathetic spectacle of their forced return to Germany.
The British decided to call the Agency’s bluff. They visited Golda Meir (then Meyerson), and spoke as though it went without saying that the Agency would do anything to spare the DPs the horrific return to Germany. They said that perhaps the DPs do not realize that they are free to disembark in southern France if they wish, or do not believe the British, and suggested that the Agency send a representative to tell them. Meir refused. To paraphrase Israeli Professor Idith Zertal, the greater the suffering of these survivors of the Holocaust, the greater their political and media effectiveness for the Zionists.
A few months after the Exodus affair, the UN recommended partition, with the assumption that a Zionist state would follow. This decision was directly influenced by the certainty of continuing Zionist terror if they did not, as was the disproportionately large land area the UN gave the Zionists.
According to British Cabinet papers, giving the Zionists so much land up front was an attempt to delay the Zionists’ expansionist wars. They knew they couldn’t stop Israeli expansionism, but they hoped to delay it. This appeasement of course failed: within a few months of Resolution 181, the Zionist armies were already waging their first expansionist war, confiscating more than half of the Palestinian side of Partition.
But in a consummately Orwellian irony, the fact that the British were occupying Palestine enabled Zionist leaders to juxtapose their settler project as a liberation movement against British colonizers, and thus for their 1948 terror campaign of expropriation and ethnic cleansing to be spun instead as a war of ‘independence’ or ‘emancipation’.
This so-called war of independence was in truth, to quote the British High Commissioner at the time, “operations based on the mortaring of terrified women and children”. Its broadcasts boasting of their successes, “both in content and in manner of delivery, are remarkably like those of Nazi Germany”. The Zionists were “jubilant” he reported, with “their campaign of calculated aggression coupled with brutality”.
British intelligence, meanwhile, reported that “the internal machinery of the Jewish State and all the equipment of a totalitarian regime is complete, including a Custodian of Enemy Property to handle Arab lands”.
In the Yishuv itself, “persecution of Christian Jews”, by which I assume they meant converts, “and others who offend against national discipline has shown a marked increase and in some cases has reached mediaeval standards”.
All this, to be sure, was before any Arab resistance.
Finally, on the 15th of May, 1948, Britain fled the scene of its crime, for which the Palestinians have been paying ever since. The post-statehood period continued full throttle with the same violent messianic goals, evolving with the new dynamics.
Now, there is no point in my having taken up your time here, no point any tree wasting its paper on this book, unless I thought that it had some value in the collective effort toward ending the conflict. So … How do I think that this book, how do I think my approach, might be constructive?
The historical record makes plain what should already have been obvious from the present reality—that Israel’s and Zionism’s pretenses regarding Jews and Judaism, and in particular its pretense of being a response to anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution, is a fraud. Indeed quite the opposite, it thrives by exacerbating and capitalizing on these, and has turned them into a cynical, deadly business.
Exposing this, in my opinion, is Israel’s—and the conflict’s—Achilles Heel. And this should be a simple case of the Emperor’s New Clothes—except that every time the child points out that the Emperor is naked, he or she is labelled an anti-Semite and silenced.
The US and other governments empower the conflict for their own geopolitical reasons, but why do the publics of those allegedly democratic countries give their tacit acquiescence?
Israel has one of the world’s largest militaries, but its most powerful weapon, the one without which all its others would be impotent, is its Narrative, its creation myth, its auto-biography.
Under the Twilight Zone of this Narrative, Israel is not merely a political entity like any other nation-state, but is transformed into the Old Testament kingdom whose name it adopted for that strategic purpose, striking a powerful chord in the collective Western sub-conscious.
We all know the Narrative more or less, but in order for that Narrative to be ever-present, Israel has crammed it into a 3-word mantra: ‘The Jewish State’.
This phrase—Israel’s self-identity—is a unique construct in the modern world. It is qualitatively distinct from any other country’s relationship with any other religion or cultural group. Judaism is not Israel’s state religion in the sense of a national faith that any nation might adopt. Rather, it presents itself as THE Jewish state, the metaphysical embodiment of Jewry itself, of Judaism, Jewish history, culture, persecution, and most cynical and exploitative of all, the Holocaust.
No country claims it is the Catholic state. Costa Rica, for example, is a Catholic state; it does not suggest that it owns Catholicism, Catholics, or historic Christian martyrdom. We do not have the British government issuing guidelines as to when criticism of the Costa Rican government becomes anti-Catholic hate speech. Norway is a Lutheran state; Tunisia is one of several nations that maintains Islam as a national faith; Cambodia is a Buddhist state. Israel, in contrast, would never acknowledge even the possibility of another Jewish state because it has body-snatched everything Jewish, and holds it hostage to empower its crimes.
Criticise Israeli terror, you will instead hit this three-word human shield—‘The Jewish State’— that Israel hides behind.
What other country on this earth is permitted this perverse tribal claim over a religious or cultural group? This self-proclaimed exceptionalism should strike us as bizarre—even weird—yet we continue to be party to it.
We hear a lot about anti-Semitism these days, and there is of course anti-Semitism in the world, as there are all varieties of bigotry. But let’s just blurt out the obvious: Virtually all of the alleged anti-Semitism we hear about from the Zionists is a lie, smears calculated to silence anyone who seeks to end the horror.
This smear campaign has been compared to the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s, but it is in truth much worse, because whereas Communism is merely a political and economic theory that one can argue for or against, anti-Semitism is inherently evil. In other words, with McCarthyism, one could ultimately respond by saying, Well, let’s say I am a communist, so what?
Zionism’s abuse of anti-Semitism, its exploitation of Judaism and historic Jewish persecution for immoral ends, is profoundly anti-Semitic. Zionism, taken at its word, makes Judaism complicit in its crimes, and thus—taken at its word—succeeds where all the conventional bigots throughout the centuries were powerless.
Meanwhile, as we are seeing more bluntly than ever in the United States, true anti-Semitism is embraced by Zionists because it is invariably pro-Israel.
Terrorism: How the Israeli state was won
Terror was vital to the establishment of Israel. David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann planned for large numbers of Arabs to be expelled to assure a Jewish…Tom Suarez (Mondoweiss)
Terrorism: How the "Israeli" state was won
Crossposted from: lemmygrad.ml/post/10044105
Terrorism: How the Israeli state was won
Note: This article was published in 2017We are now approaching the centennial of the British Original Sin in this tragedy, the Balfour Declaration. The British role in Palestine was a case of ‘hit & run’: The Balfour Declaration, in which the British gave away other people’s land, was the hit; and thirty years later, Resolution 181—Partition—was the run, leaving the Palestinians abandoned in a ditch.
Zionism was of course among the incarnations of racial-nationalism that evolved in the late nineteenth century. Bigots were Zionism’s avid fans—it was the anti-Semites who championed the Zionists. Gertrude Bell, the famous English writer, traveler, archaeologist, and spy, reported, based on her personal experience, that those who supported Zionism did so because it provided a way to get rid of Jews.
The London Standard’s correspondent to the first Zionist Conference in 1897 I think described Zionism perfectly. He reported that
…the degeneration which calls itself Anti-Semitism [bear in mind that ‘anti-Semitism’ was then a very new term] has begotten the degeneration which adorns itself with the name of Zionism.
Indeed, most Jews and Jewish leaders dismissed Zionism as the latest anti-Semitic cult. They had fought for equality, and resented being told that they should now make a new ghetto—and worse yet, to do so on other people’s land. They resented being cast as a separate race of people as Zionism demanded.They had had quite enough of that from non-Jewish bigots.
For others, the idea of going to a place where one could act out racial superiority was seductive. As the political theorist Eduard Bernstein put it at about the time the Balfour Declaration was being finessed, Zionism is “a kind of intoxication which acts like an epidemic”.
By the time the Balfour Declaration was finalised, thirty-plus years of Zionist settlement had made clear that the Zionists intended to ethnically cleanse the land for a settler state based on racial superiority; and it was the behind-the-scenes demands of the principal Zionist leaders, notably Chaim Weizmann and Baron Rothschild.
First-hand accounts of Zionist settlement in Palestine had already painted a picture of violent racial displacement. I will cite one of the lesser known reports, by Dr. Paul Nathan, a prominent Jewish leader in Berlin, who went to Palestine on behalf of the German Jewish National Relief Association. He was so horrified by what he found that he published a pamphlet in January, 1914, in which he described the Zionist settlers as carrying on
a campaign of terror modelled almost on Russian pogrom models [against settlers refusing to adopt Hebrew].
A few years later, the Balfour Declaration’s deliberately ambiguous wording was being finalized. Sceptics—and the British Cabinet—were assured that it did not mean a Zionist state. Yet simultaneously, Weizmann was pushing to create that very state immediately. He demanded that his state extend all the way to the Jordan River within three or four years of the Declaration—that is, by 1921—and then expand beyond it.In their behind-the-scenes meetings, Weizmann and Rothschild treated the ethnic cleansing of non-Jewish Palestinians as indispensable to their plans, and they repeatedly complained to the British that the settlers were not being treated preferentially enough over the Palestinians. And they insisted that the British must lie about the scheme until it is too late for anyone to do anything about it.
In correspondence with Balfour, Weizmann justified his lies by slandering the Palestinians and Jews—that is, the Middle East’s indigenous Jews, who were overwhelmingly opposed to Zionism and whom Weizmann smeared with classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Palestinians he dismissed as, in so many words, a lower type of human, and this was among the reasons he and other Zionist leaders used for refusing democracy in Palestine—if the “Arabs” had the vote, he said, it would lower the Jew down to the level of a “native”.
With the establishment of the British Mandate, four decades of peaceful Palestinian resistance had proved futile, and armed Palestinian resistance—which included terrorism—began. Zionist terror became the domain of formal organizations that attacked anyone in the way of its messianic goals—Palestinian, Jew, or British. These terror organizations operated from within the Zionist settlements and were actively empowered and shielded by the settlements and the Jewish Agency, the recognized semi-autonomous government of the Zionist settlements, what would become the Israeli government.
There was no substantive difference between the acknowledged terror organizations—most famously, the Irgun, and Lehi, the so-called Stern Gang—and the Jewish Agency, and its terror gang, the Hagana. The Agency cooperated, collaborated, and even helped finance the Irgun.
The relationship between the Jewish Agency, and the Irgun and Lehi, was symbiotic. The Irgun in particular would act on behalf of the Hagana so that the Jewish Agency could feign innocence. The Agency would then tell the British that they condemn the terror, while steadfastly refusing any cooperation against it, indeed doing what they could to shield it.
The fascist nature of the Zionist enterprise was apparent both to US and British intelligence. The Jewish Agency tolerated no dissent and sought to dictate the fates of all Jews. Children were radicalised as part of the methodology of all three major organizations, and by extension, the Jewish Agency.
Britain’s wake-up call regarding the Zionists’ indoctrination of children came on the 8th of July, 1938. That day, the Irgun blew up a bus filled with Palestinian villagers. Now, this was not the first time the Irgun had done something of this sort, but this time the British caught the bomber. She was a twelve year old schoolgirl.
Teenagers, both boys and girls, were commonly used to plant bombs in Palestinian markets and conduct other terror attacks. Teachers were threatened or removed if they tried to intervene in the indoctrination of their students, and the students themselves were blocked from advancement if they resisted, even being taught to betray their own parents if those parents tried to instill some moderation. Jews who opposed and tried to warn of the emerging fascism were assassinated, and indeed most victims of Zionist assassinations—that is, targeted, rather than indiscriminate—were Jews.
From the beginning of World War II through to the summer of 1947, there were virtually no Palestinian attacks, even though Zionist terror against Palestinians continued. A British explanation for the Palestinians’ failure to respond in kind was that they understood that the attacks were a trap, intended to elicit a response that the Zionists would frame as an attack against which they would have to ‘defend’ themselves. This was a Zionist tactic noted by the British as early as 1918, and it remains Israel’s default strategy today, most blatantly in Gaza, but also in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
As late as the fall of 1947, the Jewish Agency was concerned by the Palestinians’ failure to respond to its provocation, but when the end of 1947 came and the Jewish Agency could wait no longer for the civil war it needed, it was simply a matter of ratcheting up the terror.
Throughout the Mandate period, the takeover and ethnic cleansing of Palestine remained Zionism’s unwavering goal. As but one illustration, I will summarize a key meeting of twenty people held in London on the 9th of September, 1941.
“To be treated as most secret” is the red ink heading of the transcript. Present were Weizmann, who had called the meeting, David Ben-Gurion, and other Zionist leaders such as Simon Marks (of Marks & Spencer); and the prominent non-Zionist industrialist, Robert Waley Cohen. Discussing the path to the proposed Jewish State, the conversation ran along the lines of George Orwell’s still-to-be-published Animal Farm, in which all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Anthony de Rothschild began by stressing that there would be no “discrimination … against any group of its citizens” in the Jewish state, not even “to meet immediate needs”. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion also assured the sceptics: “Arabs”—Palestinians—would have equal rights. However, they clarified that within that absolute equality, Jewish settlers would have to have special privileges. Weizmann’s ‘absolute equality’ included the transfer of most non-Jews out of Palestine while permitting “a certain percentage of Arab and other elements” to remain in his Jewish state, the insinuation being as a pool of cheap labour.
Anthony de Rothschild’s vision of equality and non-discrimination was equally compelling: it “depended on turning an Arab majority into a minority”, and to achieve this, there would be “no equal rights” for non-Jews.
Cohen found the scheme dangerous, submitting that the Zionists were “starting with the kind of aims with which Hitler had started”. Cohen did not stop there: he suggested that if a state with equality for everyone were indeed intended, the state should be named with a neutral geographic term. He suggested … ‘Palestine’. The others were horrified at this idea, arguing that if the state had a non-Jewish name, “they would never get a Jewish majority”, in effect acknowledging the use of messianic fundamentalism as a calculated political strategy.
In another obvious but rarely spoken admission, Ben-Gurion clarified that the ‘Jewish state’ was not based on Judaism; it was, rather, based on being a ‘Jew’, that is, by the Zionists’ racial definition.
Asked about borders of his settler state, Weizmann continued in the same surreal manner. He replied that he would consider the partition plan proposed by the Peel Commission four years earlier, in 1937, but that “the line” (the Partition) “would be the Jordan”. This was nonsensical: the Jordan was the Commission’s eastern border for the two states, and so Weizmann’s ‘partition’ meant 100% for his state, 0% for the Palestinians. He went further still: he would “very much” like to “cross the Jordan”, that is, take Transjordan along with Palestine.
At the end of the meeting Weizmann sought to put his proposals into effect officially in the name of all Jews worldwide. Those against his proposals were, in his word, “antisemites”.
Meanwhile, World War II was raging. What was the Jewish Agency’s reaction to the most terrible enemy Jewry has ever known? From the beginning, it was to lobby the Yishuv, the Jewish settlers, not to enlist in the Allied struggle against the Nazis, because doing so would not serve Zionism—even taking advantage of May Day 1940 to lecture the Yishuv to stay in Palestine rather than join the war effort. Another reaction was to conduct a massive theft ring of Allied weapons and munitions, “as if”, as one British military record put it, “paid by Hitler himself”.
Much has been written on the collaboration between the Zionists and fascists during the war, the best known of course being the Haavara Transfer agreement that broke the anti-Nazi boycott. One of the least known was Lehi’s attempted collaboration with the Italian fascists. In its nearly concluded ‘Jerusalem Agreement’ of late 1940, Lehi would help the fascists win the war, and in return the fascists would uproot any Jewish communities not in Palestine and force their populations to Palestine.
If this sounds like a scheme so extreme that only fanatical Lehi could have conjured it, it is essentially what the Israeli state ultimately succeeded at in the early 1950s—most catastrophically, when it conducted a false-flag terror campaign against Jews in Iraq to destroy that ancient community and move its population to Israel as ethnic fodder.
Violence targeting Jews was, and I would argue remains, a core tactic of Zionism. In fact, the single most deadly terror attack of the entire Mandate period was not the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 as is commonly thought. Even some of the Irgun’s bombings of Palestinian markets killed more people than the King David attack. But the most deadly single terror attack was the Jewish Agency’s bombing of the immigrant ship Patria in 1940, killing an estimated 267 people, of whom more than 200 were Jews fleeing the Nazis.
The Jewish Agency bombed the Patria because it was bringing the DPs to Mauritius, where the British had facilities for them. The Agency needed the DPs to be settlers in Palestine without delay, and was willing to risk the lives of all aboard in order to get the survivors to remain—which, indeed, they did.
In further violence against its Jewish victims, the Agency framed the dead for the bombing. It spread the lie that the DPs themselves blew up the vessel, that they committed mass suicide rather than not go directly to Palestine, posthumously conscripting the dead to serve the Zionist myth.
This was no aberration, but the driving principle of the Zionist project: Persecuted Jews served the political project, not the other way around.
Another major tactic of violence against Jews by the Jewish Agency and American Zionist leadership was the sabotaging of safe haven in order to force them to Palestine. As but one example, in 1944 US Zionist leaders sabotaged President Roosevelt’s provisional success in establishing a half million new homes for European DPs, most of these homes in the United States and Britain. When Roosevelt’s aide Morris Ernst visited the Zionist leaders in an attempt to save the program, he was, in his words, “thrown out of parlours and accused of treason”— ‘treason’, because he was Jewish, and the Zionists owned Jews.
Nor were those already settled safe. In 1946, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Yitzhak Herzog, conducted a massive kidnapping operation of Jewish orphans that had been adopted by European families when their parents perished years earlier. Removing ten thousand children from their homes was the number he cited to the NY Times as his goal. In the National Archives, I found a copy of his own record of the trip.
Herzog railed against the fierce resistance he met in every country by horrified local Jewish leaders who tried to protect the children. But Herzog used his political clout to circumvent them. In France, for example, facing the steadfast refusal of the Jewish leaders to betray the children, Herzog
met the Prime Minister of France from whom I demanded promulgation of a law which would oblige every family to declare the particulars of the children it houses,
so that those of Jewish background could be exposed and put back in orphanages until they can be shipped to Palestine—quite a Kafkaesque twist on Passover for these children who had just been spared the Nazis.Herzog’s justification for the kidnappings was that for a Jew to be raised in a non-Jewish home is “much worse than physical murder”. Yet even this ghastly justification fails to explain what was actually taking place, because at the same time Herzog was ‘rescuing’ Jewish orphans from this fate “much worse than physical murder”, his Jewish Agency colleagues were sabotaging Jewish adoptive homes in England for young survivors still in the camps. The real reason for all of it, of course, was that the children were needed to serve the settler project as demographic fodder.
To that end, the Jewish Agency had coerced President Truman to segregate Jewish DPs into Zionist indoctrination camps, despite objections that it echoed Nazi behaviour. For these people who had just survived the unthinkable, then severed from the rest of humanity into these brainwashing camps, there was no such thing as free thought.
The camps nurtured such fanaticism that it shocked a joint US-UK committee that visited in 1946. Before these camps, few DPs wanted to go to Palestine. But now the Committee found them in a delirious state, threatening mass suicide if they did not go to Palestine. Suggestions of new homes in the United States, which had always been the favored destination, were again met with threats of mass suicide.
DPs were also groomed to bring Zionist terrorism to Europe, bombing Allied trains and Allied facilities. The bombing of the British embassy in Rome in 1946, for example, was by DPs brainwashed in these camps, as was a near-catastrophe in the Austrian Alps in 1947 when DPs nearly blew a train off a steep trestle into a deep abyss, which would almost certainly have sent its two hundred civilians and Allied troops to their deaths.
German Jewish immigrants to Palestine during war were outraged by the Zionists’ exploitation of the Nazi horrors they had just fled. This outrage given voice by, among others, the prominent journalist Robert Weltsch, editor of Berlin newspaper until banned by the Nazis in 1938.
Weltsch warned that Zionist leaders
have not yet understood that the enemy seeks the destruction of the Jews … We who have been here only a few years, we know what Nazism is.
Zionists, rather, are “taking part in the crash of European Jewry only as spectators”, fighting the British and keeping Jews from joining the Allied struggle while getting comfortable and rich from their political project in Palestine. Recent immigrants from Germany and Central Europe, he said, have no representation among the Zionist ruling establishment. If they did,we would have demanded that the Yishuv should put itself at the disposal of Britain for the fight against Hitler and Nazism.
But—and I am still quoting Weltsch—They do not want to fight against Hitler because his fascist methods are also theirs … They do not want our young men to join the [Allied] Forces … day after day they are sabotaging the English War Effort.
These German Jewish immigrants were shunned by the Zionists, their publications and presses bombed. Even Kiosks were bombed for selling non-Hebrew papers to German Jewish immigrants.In 1943, a man whom British records describe as “a Jew whose integrity is not open to question” risked his life to warn the British about the threat of Zionism. For his safety, he was referred to only by the code-name ‘Z’.
Z described Zionism as a parallel movement to Nazism. He warned that the Zionist indoctrination of Jewish youth was producing a society of extremists who will use any method necessary to achieve Zionist goals; and he pointed out that, as fascism in Europe has demonstrated, such a society is very difficult to undo once it has taken root. The result, I’m afraid, is what we, or more accurately the Palestinians, are facing today in the so-called ‘conflict’.
How trustworthy is this anonymous testimony? I found at the National Archives a private letter in which Z is identified — he was J.S. Bentwich, the Senior Inspector of Jewish Schools in Palestine.
Zionists
would have got further towards rescuing the unfortunates in Axis Europe, had they not complicated the question by always dragging Palestine into the picture
—so judged a report by US Intelligence in the Middle East, dated the 4th of June, 1943, entitled “Latest Aspects of the Palestine Zionist-Arab Problem”. It described “Zionism in Palestine” asa type of nationalism which in any other country would be stigmatised as retrograde Nazism,
and stated that anti-Semitism was essential to it. Whereasassimilated Jews in Europe and America are noted for being … stout opponents of racialism and discrimination,
Zionism has bred the opposite mentality in Palestine,a spirit closely akin to Nazism, namely, an attempt to regiment the community, even by force, and to resort to force to get what they want.
US intelligence assailed “the crude conception” being spread of the Palestinian people as “a nomad tent-dweller … with a little seasonal agriculture”, as being “too absurd to need refutation”. The report noted the irony that it was from them that Zionist settlers learned the cultivation of Jaffa oranges. Whereas the Palestinians were self-sufficient, the Zionist settlements exist on massive external financing, and should Jews overseas ever tire of supporting the settlers, “the venture will collapse like a pricked balloon”. The conclusion of this early US intelligence report was however naïve, or at least premature: now that the world “has seen the lengths to which the Nazi creed has carried the nations”, it reasoned that the Zionists “are due to find themselves an anachronism”.After the war, the Jewish Agency discussed its enemies. They were democracy; the Atlantic Charter, which of course became the basis for the United Nations; Reconstruction; and the fall in anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism having always been Zionism’s drug, without which it would be irrelevant. The Agency sought to exploit anti-Semitism and blamed declining anti-Semitism in the United States on America’s so-called “democratic attitude”.
Nor was this merely a post-war abuse. Even as Jews were still being carted off to the death camps, the New Zionist Organization’s Arieh Altman was typical in arguing that anti-Semitism must “form the foundation of Zionist propaganda”, and the Defence Security Officer in Palestine, Henry Hunloke, wondered if the Jewish Agency might even “stir up anti-Semitism … in order to force Jews … to come to Palestine”.
Now, today, when anything approaching this topic is raised, it is twisted by some into the pejorative misstatement that the speaker—in this case, me—is blaming Jews for anti-Semitism.
NO. Rather, it is the simple fact that Zionism requires anti-Semitism, is addicted to it, and seeks to insure that it, or at least the appearance of it, never ends. One need look no further than the satisfaction among many Zionists today at the true anti-Semitism of the incoming US administration of Donald Trump, with Israeli journalists like Yaron London openly applauding this anti-Semitism as welcome news. More about that in a few minutes.
I also mentioned Reconstruction. As one former settlement member, a man named Newton, explained, Zionist leaders were afraid that with the improvement of conditions in Europe the pressure on Palestine would subside. Any improvement in Europe was an anathema to their plans.
What was the Jewish Agency’s reaction to Britain’s role in defeating the worst enemy Jewry has ever known? It saw an opportunity for extortion. The war had devastated Britain’s economy; but when Britain turned to the US for a long term loan to recuperate from its battle against the Nazis, the Agency tried to pressure Washington to deny the loan unless Britain acceded to Zionist demands. The loan was of course ultimately approved, but still in 1948 Zionists assailed US Congressmen for being pro- Marshall Plan, and the Truman administration itself dangled the loan in front of British officials when they tried to bring attention to Zionist atrocities.
By 1946, Zionist terrorism had become the defining daily challenge of life in Palestine, and one hundred thousand British troops proved unable to contain it. Anyone or anything that kept Palestine a functioning society was a target of the Zionists. Trains, roads, bridges, communications, oil facilities, and Coast Guard stations were constantly being bombed. Utility workers, telephone repairmen, railway workers, bomb disposal personnel were murdered. Police were long a favoured target and were gunned down by the dozens.
Among the smaller terror organizations that popped up was one specifically dedicated to Zionists’ long-running fear of Jews befriending non-Jews, the ultimate fear of course being polluting what for the Zionists was the pure Jewish race. As a sample of its methods, the terror group doused a disobedient Jewish girl with acid, severely injuring her and blinding her in one eye.
Zionist terror was aided by the Jewish Agency’s phenomenal intelligence network. The Agency had informers all the way to high-placed sympathetic US officials that fed them intelligence, such that the British learned not even to trust direct messages to US President Truman.
When the UN’s Palestine committee, UNSCOP, visited Palestine in the summer of 1947, the Agency had replaced the committee members’ drivers with spies; had replaced the waiters at the main restaurant they frequented with spies; and most productively, sent five young women to serve at what was called a “theatre network” of house attendants at the building where the members, all men, were being housed. The young women were required to be smart and educated, but above all, in the Agency’s word, to be “daring”. Whatever ‘daring’ meant, they extracted a wealth of information from the key people who were deliberating Palestine’s future.
Jewish sex workers were involuntarily recruited as spies. They were told that upon the Zionist victory they would be executed for ‘sleeping with the enemy’, but might be spared if they cooperated now. The practice was so widespread that a standard questionnaire was printed up that the women were to fill out after each British customer. [note: see document detail, above]
To demonstrate the degree to which Jewish Agency plants infiltrated the government and everyday life, a couple of months after one coast guard station was attacked and bombed by the Hagana, it blew up again … but the British were baffled, because this time there had been no attack. They discovered that the construction crew that had rebuilt the station after the previous attack were Hagana, and had simply embedded explosives in the reconstruction, to be detonated when desired.
But the worst problem of infiltration was in the military service, where deadly sabotage by Zionist plants who had joined the forces led, tragically, to orders to remove all Jews from service in Palestine, because there was no way to tell the Zionists from the Jews.
By 1948, this problem spread to key medical personnel. After the Jewish Agency poisoned the water supply of Acre with typhoid in order to expedite the ethnic cleansing of this city that lies on the Palestinian side of Partition, the bacteriologist hired by the British proved to be a Hagana plant or sympathizer, an obstacle to the availability of the vaccine. [Note: see document detail, below. For the injection of typhoid into the aqueduct at Acre, see e.g., Ilan Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing, pp 100-101, and Naeim Giladi, Ben Gurion’s Scandals, pp 10-11]
Selling terror required effective marketing, and for that the Agency harnessed the plight of European Jews at the same time it was exploiting them. A very brief look at the iconic Zionist immigrant story is illustrative—that is of course the USS Warfield, renamed the Exodus for the obvious Biblical iconography.
The Exodus was sold to the world as the desperate attempt of 4,515 Holocaust survivors to reach their last hope of safety and a new life, their promised land. The British, instead, forced them back, not just to Europe, but to their ultimate nightmare: Germany.
That was the story the US and European public got.
In truth, the Exodus was a monstrous propaganda event, grand theatre, not for benefit but at the expense of Jewish survivors. The Jewish Agency knew that Exodus passengers would be turned back, for, among other reasons, their flooding of Palestine with settlers was a tactic to force its political goals. And remember that the entire Exodus cargo of immigrants equalled less than one percent of President Roosevelt’s resettlement plan that the Zionists sabotaged. The DPs themselves were products of the Zionist camps and had been rehearsed to repeat, as one witness described it, whatever Zionist mumbo-jumbo was demanded of them.
As for the return to Germany, it was the Jewish Agency, not the British, that forced the DPs back to Germany. Attempts were being made to find new homes for the Exodus passengers elsewhere—Denmark was one possibility—but this was sabotaged by Ben-Gurion, because it would spoil the Exodus plot.
There was in fact already an alternative to Germany. All the Exodus DPs had the right to disembark in Southern France rather than Germany, but the Agency used violence to prevent them from leaving. The Exodus show required the pathetic spectacle of their forced return to Germany.
The British decided to call the Agency’s bluff. They visited Golda Meir (then Meyerson), and spoke as though it went without saying that the Agency would do anything to spare the DPs the horrific return to Germany. They said that perhaps the DPs do not realize that they are free to disembark in southern France if they wish, or do not believe the British, and suggested that the Agency send a representative to tell them. Meir refused. To paraphrase Israeli Professor Idith Zertal, the greater the suffering of these survivors of the Holocaust, the greater their political and media effectiveness for the Zionists.
A few months after the Exodus affair, the UN recommended partition, with the assumption that a Zionist state would follow. This decision was directly influenced by the certainty of continuing Zionist terror if they did not, as was the disproportionately large land area the UN gave the Zionists.
According to British Cabinet papers, giving the Zionists so much land up front was an attempt to delay the Zionists’ expansionist wars. They knew they couldn’t stop Israeli expansionism, but they hoped to delay it. This appeasement of course failed: within a few months of Resolution 181, the Zionist armies were already waging their first expansionist war, confiscating more than half of the Palestinian side of Partition.
But in a consummately Orwellian irony, the fact that the British were occupying Palestine enabled Zionist leaders to juxtapose their settler project as a liberation movement against British colonizers, and thus for their 1948 terror campaign of expropriation and ethnic cleansing to be spun instead as a war of ‘independence’ or ‘emancipation’.
This so-called war of independence was in truth, to quote the British High Commissioner at the time, “operations based on the mortaring of terrified women and children”. Its broadcasts boasting of their successes, “both in content and in manner of delivery, are remarkably like those of Nazi Germany”. The Zionists were “jubilant” he reported, with “their campaign of calculated aggression coupled with brutality”.
British intelligence, meanwhile, reported that “the internal machinery of the Jewish State and all the equipment of a totalitarian regime is complete, including a Custodian of Enemy Property to handle Arab lands”.
In the Yishuv itself, “persecution of Christian Jews”, by which I assume they meant converts, “and others who offend against national discipline has shown a marked increase and in some cases has reached mediaeval standards”.
All this, to be sure, was before any Arab resistance.
Finally, on the 15th of May, 1948, Britain fled the scene of its crime, for which the Palestinians have been paying ever since. The post-statehood period continued full throttle with the same violent messianic goals, evolving with the new dynamics.
Now, there is no point in my having taken up your time here, no point any tree wasting its paper on this book, unless I thought that it had some value in the collective effort toward ending the conflict. So … How do I think that this book, how do I think my approach, might be constructive?
The historical record makes plain what should already have been obvious from the present reality—that Israel’s and Zionism’s pretenses regarding Jews and Judaism, and in particular its pretense of being a response to anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution, is a fraud. Indeed quite the opposite, it thrives by exacerbating and capitalizing on these, and has turned them into a cynical, deadly business.
Exposing this, in my opinion, is Israel’s—and the conflict’s—Achilles Heel. And this should be a simple case of the Emperor’s New Clothes—except that every time the child points out that the Emperor is naked, he or she is labelled an anti-Semite and silenced.
The US and other governments empower the conflict for their own geopolitical reasons, but why do the publics of those allegedly democratic countries give their tacit acquiescence?
Israel has one of the world’s largest militaries, but its most powerful weapon, the one without which all its others would be impotent, is its Narrative, its creation myth, its auto-biography.
Under the Twilight Zone of this Narrative, Israel is not merely a political entity like any other nation-state, but is transformed into the Old Testament kingdom whose name it adopted for that strategic purpose, striking a powerful chord in the collective Western sub-conscious.
We all know the Narrative more or less, but in order for that Narrative to be ever-present, Israel has crammed it into a 3-word mantra: ‘The Jewish State’.
This phrase—Israel’s self-identity—is a unique construct in the modern world. It is qualitatively distinct from any other country’s relationship with any other religion or cultural group. Judaism is not Israel’s state religion in the sense of a national faith that any nation might adopt. Rather, it presents itself as THE Jewish state, the metaphysical embodiment of Jewry itself, of Judaism, Jewish history, culture, persecution, and most cynical and exploitative of all, the Holocaust.
No country claims it is the Catholic state. Costa Rica, for example, is a Catholic state; it does not suggest that it owns Catholicism, Catholics, or historic Christian martyrdom. We do not have the British government issuing guidelines as to when criticism of the Costa Rican government becomes anti-Catholic hate speech. Norway is a Lutheran state; Tunisia is one of several nations that maintains Islam as a national faith; Cambodia is a Buddhist state. Israel, in contrast, would never acknowledge even the possibility of another Jewish state because it has body-snatched everything Jewish, and holds it hostage to empower its crimes.
Criticise Israeli terror, you will instead hit this three-word human shield—‘The Jewish State’— that Israel hides behind.
What other country on this earth is permitted this perverse tribal claim over a religious or cultural group? This self-proclaimed exceptionalism should strike us as bizarre—even weird—yet we continue to be party to it.We hear a lot about anti-Semitism these days, and there is of course anti-Semitism in the world, as there are all varieties of bigotry. But let’s just blurt out the obvious: Virtually all of the alleged anti-Semitism we hear about from the Zionists is a lie, smears calculated to silence anyone who seeks to end the horror.
This smear campaign has been compared to the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s, but it is in truth much worse, because whereas Communism is merely a political and economic theory that one can argue for or against, anti-Semitism is inherently evil. In other words, with McCarthyism, one could ultimately respond by saying, Well, let’s say I am a communist, so what?
Zionism’s abuse of anti-Semitism, its exploitation of Judaism and historic Jewish persecution for immoral ends, is profoundly anti-Semitic. Zionism, taken at its word, makes Judaism complicit in its crimes, and thus—taken at its word—succeeds where all the conventional bigots throughout the centuries were powerless.
Meanwhile, as we are seeing more bluntly than ever in the United States, true anti-Semitism is embraced by Zionists because it is invariably pro-Israel.
Terrorism: How the Israeli state was won
Terror was vital to the establishment of Israel. David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann planned for large numbers of Arabs to be expelled to assure a Jewish…Tom Suarez (Mondoweiss)
And if you're about to start "but Israel..." save your time, I think they're monstrous fascists.
Installed Linux for the fist time in Feb, I've now started saving ISO's
like this
Auster likes this.
like this
Auster likes this.
Or if you want to install an entire iso in less than a minute, one of these.
I really like that one. I can move a terabyte in minutes, and unlike some other M.2 enclosures, this one is a heatsink sandwich, which enables sustained full-speed operation.
Sure.
But that's limited to SATA 3 speeds. A "mere" 600 MB/s. Not to mention SATA SSDs often can't sustain their theoretical maximums.
USB3.2x2 can do 2500 MB/s, and with heatsinks on an NVME drive you can actually reach and sustain that transfer speed.
When you're moving more than 500 gigs of something, or if you move ISO sized things often, it's really nice.
When I occasionally have to write an ISO to usb for macOS or when ventoy for some reason wont work, I get annoyed at how I actually have to wait a bit, even though my thumbdrives aren't slow.
They're just not NVME with a heatsink fast. I've gotten used to moving ISOs around like they're text files.
It may not work. I have two ssds like that and they both won't boot ventoy for some reason, but a hdd in a usb case worked no problem.
Also, unless you're using the usb3 interface it doesn't make much difference really.
I use this one professionally, yet to come across a PC that wouldn't boot from it.
And yeah, you won't benefit unless the PC also has both fast ports and fast storage.
But half of the time I'm using it to move files from a customers old PC to their new one, and more aften than not, even the old one has at least one quick usb C port.
I can assure you, you will never need them.
I got a USB stick with ventoy installed, got a gparted and an arch linux iso on that thing, I do use those regularly.
manjaro -> ubuntu -> most other distros
There are no "outstanding good distros", there are bad ones to avoid, and ones suited or not suited for your use case
I mostly found it funny they felt the neet to upgrade from mint on a family members computer to anything else, because I can't imagine mint not already working fine for them.
I fail to see the benefit in "Upgrading" to kubuntu (or anything else) in this case.
But yes u right hehe arch btw but also mby mint btw 🤔
First couple of years? I was in my early teens when trying out many distros within a couple weeks, for example Puppy Linux, Ubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, OpenSuse... Then I settled on Ubuntu and used that from 2008 to 2022, when I was fed up with Canonical shoving snapd down my throat and me having to uninstall it all the time. Since then I've used Debian exclusively, previously I only had it on some machines.
(I've also toyed a bit with the BSDs, but was missing systemd, so those never stuck with me.)
Several different operating systems, such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD (the latter one having a live system and being the easiest to try out). Those have their history based in BSD. But thatʼs all bit too much to fit in s reply here.
Unlike Linux distributions, those projects develop a kernel and the other parts together and make an OS.
Most software will be available on BSDs and on Linux distributions.
Linux and BSD have the same heritage, but took slighlty different paths... so they're cousins.
Look it up on Wikipedia, etc... it's an interesting bit of history.
UNIX was a proprietary operating system developed by AT&T that was originally shipped with source code.
BSD started as a set of enhancements to UNIX at Berkely University.
BSD developed into a fully independent UNIX distribution. BSD code was available for free and always non-proprietary.
In the early 90’s, AT&T launched a lawsuit to stop BSD from being distributed.
During that lawsuit, in 1991, Linus Torvalds created Linux. It was written from scratch to be like UNIX as Linus liked UNIX but could not afford it.
In 1993, BSD won its lawsuit and FreeBSD was born. But by then, Linux was already getting lots of attention. FreeBSD, while technically superior at the time, has never caught up in terms of popularity.
Linux uses the “design” of UNIX but is not UNIX. FreeBSD is considered “real” UNIX. Both implement the POSIX standard.
FreeBSD has always been focussed on servers. There are other BSD “distributions” that focus on different things: OpenBSD (security), NetBSD (portability), DragonFly BSD (innovation/performance). Some people consider macOS to be a BSD.
There are also “desktop” spins of FreeBSD like GhostBSD or MidnightBSD. FreeBSD recently has had more of a desktop push focussing on things like WiFi and power management. But it has nowhere near the hardware support that Linux has.
Linux, technically, is not a full operating system. It is just a kernel (the bit that talks to the hardware). The Linux kernel is released at kernel.org.
Linux “distros” collect a bunch of software to run on the Linux kernel to create a Linux distribution (full operating system). This includes key components like C library, core utilities, compilers, and init systems. Many Linux distros use software from the GNU Project for these components. But other Linux distros use non-GNU software for this, sometimes even software created by BSD.
As others have said, the BSD systems are built as an entire OS by a single team. FreeBSD 15 was just released. The entire software stack was created as a unit, including C library, utilities, compiler, and init system.
IRed Hat Linux is kind of developed as a full operating system as well as they are heavily involved in the kernel, are the primary contributors to the GNU tools, sheppard GNOME, and created Systemd. You could argue that Red Hat is the de facto Linux platform and that others distos build off that. But not everybody would agree.
So, Linux is more like UNIX but not UNIX (created in 1991) while BSD is UNIX (in continuous dev since the 70’s).
As a desktop OS though, Linux is substantially more popular than any BSD and so, these days, the tables have turned and the BSD variants often have to work to stay compatible with things that appear first on Linux.
I distro hopped them once on their media PC they just use to watch YouTube and series.
I don't see myself changing it again, Kubuntu & KDE is so nice
- you need Ventoy to stop formatting you're USB sticks
- Keeping lot of ISO is a bit useless just the few that you use daily.
- If you're keeping this ISO anyway, get them by torrent and keep sharing for helping the community
sha256sum <filename> (iirc, might be wrong, man is your friend)
First you need to download the provided file from the distro page. Something with Checksum in the name most of the time. The website should provide instructions. Please note that does not validate the gpg key.
Quick Method Terminal:
Open the terminal at the location of the ISO file or go there with cd. Type sha256sum NameOfIsoFile.iso - it takes a moment depending on your system.
Copy the output (some long numbers/letters). Compare it with the downloaded checksum-file - open the file, press ctrl-f or whatever you have for find and paste it. If it's found, it's the same.
Method KDE:
Right click the file, open properties, then go to tab "Checksums".
Paste same number/letter combination from above into the provided space "Expected checksums..." - if it's green, it's correct.
Your favorite operating systems in one place! | netboot.xyz
netboot.xyz enables you to PXE boot many Operating System installers and utilities from a simple to use menu powered by the iPXE project.netboot.xyz
About the BLOBs in Ventoy
In #2795 there are some discuss about the BLOBs in Ventoy. For a long time, I devoted my limited spare time to adding new features and fixing bugs and didn't get around to considering this. It shou...ventoy (GitHub)
Uh... you do know that people don't literally save a bunch of Linux ISOs, right? It's a euphemism for collecting less legit things, like pirated media or porn.
By the time you want to install the same distro again, it's likely that a new version will be out and you'll want to re-download it anyway.
Edit: okay, okay, some of y'all really do collect Linux ISOs. That's fine; I won't kink-shame.
I have quite a collection of ISOs.
One reason is that I have hardware that requires specific versions to boot (newer ones have removed support). Sometimes the distro still works just fine in that hardware but the live iso does not. So I can install with an older ISO and update.
Another is that use virtual machines regularly. I do not want to have to wait for the ISO to download every time.
This is a phase that most Linux enthusiasts go through at some point. It takes time to understand what a distro really is.
People see distros as being much more different than they really are because of the default settings between distros being so different from each other.
At the end of the day a distro is basically just a way of choosing which group of people you want to trust to package software for you.
It can be easily installed with a couple of install commands
Or
Fedora KDE
Don't "upgrade" to Kubuntu. I'm on it and want to upgrade away because Ubuntu. Fedora Kinoite is probably the best bet if you want KDE for a tech novice.
KDE is really annoying though. Kate is a horrible text editor if you're not a programmer, and Kwrite has weird default shortcuts without any preconfigured "Gnome/Windows style" available. The Dolphin File Explorer doesn't allow you to sort and group by different things. And Kparted isn't as easy to use as Gnome Disk Utility. Still, I like how KDE had better themes than Cinnamon and how it actually lets me move programs to different categories in the start menu.
media.ccc.de/v/5012-the-first-…
OpenSUSE is better than Fedora
The first encrypted Steam Deck runs openSUSE
The Steam Deck has transformed mobile gaming — but in one crucial area, it still lags behind: security. Until now, no Steam Deck-focused ...media.ccc.de
The way the users mostly understand it means stable software, no major bugs or crashes.
And while those two are linked, they're not the same. Anecdotally, I've used Arch for over 10 years and had only three breakages. Two because I forgot to check for manual intervention before upgrading and one because the battery of the laptop died during an upgrade. All were easily fixed from a live environment, no reinstall necessary. Yes, there were bugs and even crashes in software, but those were upstream issues. I admit that's not a distinction a user is likely to make. I still consider Arch the most stable distro I've ever used.
Ventoy for most, but some stuff doesn't work with correctly when booted from ventoy:
- ChromeOS Flex won't install to internal drive when ventoy booted, it will when flashed directly to a usb.
- also had Linux Mint 22 try to install to the ventoy drive (wiping it and then crashing halfway through)
- and dealing with really old 32bit bios laptops you'll have to use direct usb too (AntiX still supports 32bit)
Ugh... why? I mean it's a fun process to distro hop and better understand the different package managers, boot process, default services, etc but beyond that I'm confused at what the point is.
FWIW one can distro hop "virtually" in minutes using containers via Podman or Docker (or even QEMU to be more isolated) with images that do have a window manager, e.g. docs.linuxserver.io/images/doc… provides Alpine, Arch, Debian, Enterprise Linux, Fedora and Ubuntu with i3, KDE, MATE or XFCE. Switching from one to another takes minutes (basically download time of image content) and if you mount the right directory you can even use your own content for your tests.
Edit : if one wants to install nothing distrosea.com/ is quite neat but it's online.
Test Linux distros online
Instantly test run Linux distros online in the cloud for free, right from your web browser. No installation or live boot required.DistroSea
But the project itself is pretty cool
\
Just think of a distro & download it from like anywhere at that moment? Especially if there is a functioning PC you are about to "upgrade". That way you don't need to think ahead of anything & get the latest ISO.
It's their media PC, they literally just use to to watch YouTube and Series.
They're fine with the switch it makes no difference to them and KDE is nicer
How Trump's outreach to Europe's far-right aims to split EU
How Trump's outreach to Europe's far-right aims to split EU
Trump's national security strategy is the clearest sign yet of ideological alignment between MAGA and Europe's far-right parties. But experts say there could be more ― maybe even plans to split and weaken the EU.Anchal Vohra (Deutsche Welle)
One industry, one fight
One industry, one fight
by Games Workers // Video Game Unions Present a United Front Across Western EuropeNotes From Below
reshared this
#tech reshared this.
VPD Officer Was Quietly Investigated over an Abusive Relationship with Teen | The Tyee
A brief mention of an abusive relationship between a Vancouver police officer and a teen he met at school in a recent police watchdog report shows a need for more transparency around the identities of officers who commit misconduct, says a civil liberties advocate.
Without knowing the officer’s name, the public has no way of knowing if he went on to work with another police department or to work with young adults, said Meghan McDermott, policy director with the BC Civil Liberties Association.
“Where is he now? He might be working as a member of the RCMP somewhere and he might be in a school in the Okanagan. We don’t know,” McDermott said.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2025/12/12/VPD-Officer-Investigated-Abusive-Relationship-Teen/
Important context the headline misses: the teenager had graduated high school already, so was presumably of age.
Although not criminal in nature, the relationship was highly inappropriate. The officer was dismissed.
Okay so two adults have a legal relationship... why should the public deserve to know their names?
What power imbalance? Because he's a cop? Should police officers not be allowed to have relationships with non-cops?
(Yes, I know about the 40% rule -- but it was determined nothing illegal had happened here.)
After the student graduated, the two started an intimate relationship. The investigation summary says the officer lied to the student about his age and was both emotionally and verbally abusive towards the young woman.
I saw that yes. Let me put it to you this way -- Either the law should be amended so that what he did be illegal, or we should leave the former officer alone.
We don't know what he did, and some forms of abuse can't really be made illegal. Perhaps he was merely unfaithful, or called her a bitch when they fought -- should these really be crimes?
(and you didn't answer my question -- what power imbalance?)
How Zionists Invented 'Terrorism'
Since the Zionist entity’s 21st century Holocaust in Gaza began, Israeli officials, pundits, journalists, and their Western opposite numbers have endlessly invoked the sinister spectre of “terrorism” to justify the industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinians. It is due to the purported threat of “terrorism”, twice-failed US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton representatively wrote for The Atlantic in November 2023, “Hamas must be permanently erased.” Annihilated hospitals and schools, and civilians slaughtered en masse, are legitiate “collateral damage.” Such is the unparalleled evil of “terrorists.”
Yet, the relentless stream of heart-rending clips documenting the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) Holocaust deluging social media feeds the world over, and the ever-ratcheting child death toll, has compelled countless citizens the world over to ask, “if Hamas are terrorists, then what are Zionists?”. Similar questions were posed during the Empire’s long-running “War on Terror”. Then, the purported global threat of “terrorism” was exploited throughout the West to savage civil liberties and demonise Muslims at home, while waging relentless, criminal “interventions” abroad.
Mainstream usage of the term “terrorism” precipitously plummeted thereafter. It is only now regaining popular currency due to the Gaza genocide. This is no accident. Zionists - specifically Israel’s veteran leader Benjamin Netanyahu - were fundamental to concocting mainstream conceptions of “terrorism”, explicitly to delegitimize anti-imperial struggles, while validating Western state violence directed at oppressed peoples across the Global South. The impact of this informational assault can be felt in every corner of the world today - not least Gaza.
‘First Strike’
One might reasonably conclude the specific foundations of Nakba 2.0, which continues to unfold in grisly real-time right now, were laid decades ago, as a result of the connivances of Netanyahu, the international Zionist lobby, and US Central Intelligence Agency. What follows is the little-known history of how “terrorism” came to be. A majority of the world’s population - the Palestinian people in particular - live with the monstrous consequences of this subterfuge every day.
Our story starts in 1976, at the peak of détente between the US and Soviet Union. After nearly three decades of bitter enmity, the two superpowers finally resolved to peaceful coexistence. Moscow and Washington readily collaborated to systematically dismantle structures and doctrines that defined the immediate post-World War II era, such as Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.).
In May that year, the CIA produced its annual National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a comprehensive report combining data from various intelligence agencies, intended to be a basis for crafting US foreign policy. In keeping with the past five years, the NIE concluded the Soviets were in severe economic decline, favoured diplomacy over conflict, and desperately sought an end to the Cold War. Such findings motivated Washington’s push for détente, and Moscow’s eager acceptance of major disarmament and arms control treaties.
However, newly-appointed CIA director George H. W. Bush categorically rejected the NIE’s conclusions. He sought a second opinion, so constructed an independent intelligence cell to review the Estimate’s findings. Known as Team B, it was composed of hardcore Cold Warriors, defence industry-funded hawks, and rabid anti-Communists. Among them were several individuals who later became leading figures in the modern neoconservative movement, such as Paul Wolfowitz. Also present were infamous CIA and Pentagon dark arts specialists, professionally ostracised due to détente.
Team B duly rubbished each and every one of the NIE’s conclusions. Rather than dilapidated, impoverished and teetering on total collapse, the Soviet Union was, in fact, more deadly and dangerous than ever, having constructed a vast array of “first strike” capabilities right under the CIA’s nose. To reach these bombshell conclusions, Team B relied on a confounding hodgepodge of peculiar logical fallacy, paranoid theorising, crazed conspiratorial conjecture, unsupported value judgments, and amateurish circular reasoning.
For example, Team B repeatedly assessed that a lack of evidence Moscow possessed weapons systems, military technology, or surveillance capabilities comparable or superior to Washington’s own was inverse proof the Soviets were in fact posessed of such capabilities. Moscow’s innovations were just so sophisticated and innovative, Team B rationalised, they couldn’t be detected or even comprehended by the West. Team B’s analysis was confirmed to be total fantasy after the USSR collapsed. Yet, its unorthodox methods informed all subsequent NIEs throughout the Cold War, and likely endure today.
Then, on June 27th 1976, mere weeks after Team B set to work reigniting the Cold War, Air France Flight 139, en route to Paris from Tel Aviv, was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Redirected to a Ugandan airport, the plane was greeted on the runway by Idi Amin’s military, who ushered the passengers - the majority being Jewish or Israeli - into the terminal, watched over by scores of soldiers, intended to prevent their escape or rescue.
The hijackers relayed a demand to the government of Israel. Unless a ransom of $5 million was paid to them and 53 Palestinian prisoners were released from Zionist entity dungeons, all hostages would be executed. In response, 100 elite IOF commandos launched an audacious action to free the hostages. Their mission – known as the Entebbe Raid – was a stunning success. All but four hostages were rescued alive, and the IOF lost just one commander - Yonatan (Jonathan) Netanyahu, the older brother of Israel’s current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
For years by that point, Israeli officials had attempted to popularise the term “terrorism” to explain the motivations and actions of Palestinian freedom fighters. That way, righteous and legitimate Palestinian fury at Zionist repression could be reframed as a destructive ideology of violence for violence’s sake without rationale, and Western-supported settler colonial tyranny as warranted self-defence. This effort became turbocharged in September 1972, when the kidnapping of 11 Israeli athletes at that year’s Olympics in Munich by Palestinian militants ended with all hostages murdered.
This particularly public bloodshed centred world attention on Israel, leaving Western citizens wondering what could’ve possibly inspired such belligerence. Zionists had hitherto managed to largely conceal their systematic, state-enforced repression and displacement of Palestinians from the outside world. Journalists were kept well away from the scenes of major crimes. At the same time, Amnesty International’s Israeli branch was secretly financed and directed by Tel Aviv’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to whitewash facts on the ground.
For the Netanyahu family, the Entebbe raid was a tragedy - but also an ideal opportunity to validate and internationalise the concept of “terrorism,” as espoused by Zionists. In 1979, Benjamin Netanyahu founded the Jonathan Institute, in honour of his slain brother. Its purpose, he said, was:
“To focus public attention on the grave threat that international terrorism poses to all democratic societies, to study the real nature of today’s terrorism, and to propose measures for combating and defeating the international terror movements.”
In July that year, the Institute convened the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism (JCIT) in Jerusalem’s Hilton Hotel. It gathered together a 700-strong mob of Israeli government officials, US lawmakers, intelligence operatives from across the ‘Five Eyes’ global spying network, and Western foreign policy apparatchiks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many representatives of Team B were in attendance. Over four days and seven separate sessions, speaker after speaker painted a disturbing picture of the worldwide phenomenon of “terrorism.”
They unanimously declared that all “terrorists” constituted a single, organised political movement that was being secretly financed, armed, trained, and directed by the Soviet Union. This devilish nexus, it was claimed, posed a mortal threat to Western democracy, freedom, and security, requiring a coordinated response. Eerily, as academic Diana Ralph later observed, the JCIT’s collective prescription for tackling this purported menace was precisely what transpired just over two decades later during the War on Terror:
“[This included] pre-emptive attacks on states alleged to support ‘terrorists’; an elaborate intelligence system apparatus; slashed civil liberties, particularly for Palestinians targeted as potential terrorists, including detention without charge, and torture; and propaganda to dehumanize ‘terrorists’ in the eyes of the public.”
Israel’s then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin addressed the JCIT’s opening session. He set the tone by claiming Western state violence was ultimately “a fight for freedom or liberation” and, therefore, fundamentally opposed to “terrorism.” He concluded his remarks by imploring the assembled throng to go forth and promote the conference’s message once it was over. Which they did.
‘Insufficient Evidence’
Among JCIT’s attendees was American author and journalist Claire Sterling, who cut her teeth as a reporter decades earlier at the Overseas News Agency, an MI6 propaganda operation seeking to boost US public support for entering World War II. Following the conference, she frequently amplified the claims of JCIT speakers in articles for prominent newspapers, leading to an epic March 1981 front-page exposé in The New York Times - Terrorism: Tracing The International Network.
A book published later that year, The Terror Network, expanded significantly on Sterling’s oeuvre, firmly cementing the notion of Moscow as a grand spider sat in the middle of a vast, globe-spanning web of deadly political violence in the Western public mind. It caused a sensation upon release, receiving rave reviews from major news outlets, being translated into 22 languages, and becoming a bestseller in several countries.
The Terror Network had a particularly potent impact on newly-inaugurated President Ronald Reagan and his CIA chief William Casey. Committed anti-Communists, they entered office desperately seeking a pretext for brutally crushing left-wing, nationalist opposition to US imperialism in Latin America. Sterling’s work provided ample ammunition for achieving that bloodsoaked objective and was key to the White House decisively shattering détente, a process begun by Team B five years earlier.
Consequently, The Terror Network was circulated among US lawmakers and heavily promoted overseas on the Reagan administration’s dime. Casey furthermore tasked the CIA with verifying its thesis. They quickly assessed Sterling’s work to be irredeemable garbage, ironically enough, as it was heavily influenced by Agency black propaganda. Enraged, Casey demanded the evaluation be revised. An updated appraisal was less scathing, but nonetheless stressed the book was “uneven and the reliability of its sources varies widely,” while “significant portions” were “incorrect.”
Still dissatisfied, Casey asked a CIA “senior review panel” charged with scrutinising Langley’s formal estimates to write its own report on the subject. They concluded the Soviets did offer limited financial, material and practical assistance to a handful of anti-imperial Global South liberation movements, some of which Western powers labelled “terrorists”. But there was “insufficient evidence” of Muscovite culpability for the entire global phenomenon of “terrorism,” let alone funding and directing such activities and/or entities as dedicated policy.
Undeterred, when Casey personally delivered the report to Reagan, he allegedly said of its findings, “of course, Mr. President, you and I know better.” So it was CIA-backed death squads ran roughshod across Washington’s “backyard” throughout the 1980s, in the name of neutralising alleged Soviet influence in the region. Their actions were heavily informed by the Agency’s guerrilla warfare manual, which encouraged assassinations of government officials and civilian leaders and deadly attacks on “soft targets” such as schools and hospitals. “Terrorism”, in other words.
‘We Are All Palestinians’
Another example of Reagan’s “terrorism” was sponsoring Afghanistan’s Mujahideen resistance fighters in their battle with – ironically enough – the Soviet Red Army. This policy endured after the “Evil Empire” was vanquished. The same militants were transported by the CIA and MI6 to Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, to aid and abet Yugoslavia’s painful, forced death.
When these covert actions produced “blowback” in the form of the 9/11 attacks, several individuals who attended the JCIT, and their acolytes, were elevated to the Bush administration due to their supposed “terrorism” expertise. Meanwhile, with public and state-level fears of “terrorism” ramping up significantly the world over, many Western countries turned to Israel for advice and guidance on how to tackle the issue. As Nentyahu bragged in 2008:
“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”
This was not only because 9/11 “swung American public opinion in [Israel’s] favour.” In a blink, Zionist repression and slaughter were transformed from a source of international embarrassment and obloquy into a compelling sales pitch and unique selling point for Tel Aviv’s welter of “defence” and “security” firms. The Occupied Territories became laboratories, their inhabitants test subjects, upon whom new weaponry, surveillance methods, and pacification techniques could be trialled by the IOF, then marketed and sold overseas.
It is not for nothing that graphic videos showcasing IOF “surgical strikes” on Palestinians, their homes, schools, and hospitals are proudly displayed at international arms fairs, while private demonstrations of invasive surveillance tools such as Pegasus routinely wow repressive foreign security and intelligence agencies behind-closed-doors.
On top of a significant financial benefit, there is a diplomatic dividend too. Israel secures invaluable censure-stifling goodwill from customers, therefore permitting the Zionist project of permanently purging Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants to persist untrammelled. While the streets of almost every major Western city have regularly teemed with pro-Palestine fervour ever since the entity’s attack on Gaza began in October 2023, protesters’ elected representatives are at best silent, at worst actively complicit.
Impassioned chants of “We are all Palestinians!” have been a frequent fixture at these events. This rallying call is highly apposite, for in addition to expressing sympathy and solidarity with the Palestinian people, it is urgently incumbent upon us all to reflect upon how the very same techniques and technologies of control and oppression to which they have been so cruelly subjected daily for decades are now firmly trained on us as well, as a result of Israel’s invention of “terrorism.” It is no exaggeration to say Palestinians are canaries in the coalmine of humanity.
How Zionists Invented 'Terrorism'
Editor’s Note: This investigation was previously published by MintPress News, a crusading independent media outlet well worth your time, and consideration.Kit Klarenberg (Global Delinquents)
How Zionists Invented 'Terrorism'
Crossposted from: lemmygrad.ml/post/10043786
How Zionists Invented 'Terrorism'
Since the Zionist entity’s 21st century Holocaust in Gaza began, Israeli officials, pundits, journalists, and their Western opposite numbers have endlessly invoked the sinister spectre of “terrorism” to justify the industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinians. It is due to the purported threat of “terrorism”, twice-failed US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton representatively wrote for The Atlantic in November 2023, “Hamas must be permanently erased.” Annihilated hospitals and schools, and civilians slaughtered en masse, are legitiate “collateral damage.” Such is the unparalleled evil of “terrorists.”Yet, the relentless stream of heart-rending clips documenting the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) Holocaust deluging social media feeds the world over, and the ever-ratcheting child death toll, has compelled countless citizens the world over to ask, “if Hamas are terrorists, then what are Zionists?”. Similar questions were posed during the Empire’s long-running “War on Terror”. Then, the purported global threat of “terrorism” was exploited throughout the West to savage civil liberties and demonise Muslims at home, while waging relentless, criminal “interventions” abroad.
Mainstream usage of the term “terrorism” precipitously plummeted thereafter. It is only now regaining popular currency due to the Gaza genocide. This is no accident. Zionists - specifically Israel’s veteran leader Benjamin Netanyahu - were fundamental to concocting mainstream conceptions of “terrorism”, explicitly to delegitimize anti-imperial struggles, while validating Western state violence directed at oppressed peoples across the Global South. The impact of this informational assault can be felt in every corner of the world today - not least Gaza.
‘First Strike’
One might reasonably conclude the specific foundations of Nakba 2.0, which continues to unfold in grisly real-time right now, were laid decades ago, as a result of the connivances of Netanyahu, the international Zionist lobby, and US Central Intelligence Agency. What follows is the little-known history of how “terrorism” came to be. A majority of the world’s population - the Palestinian people in particular - live with the monstrous consequences of this subterfuge every day.
Our story starts in 1976, at the peak of détente between the US and Soviet Union. After nearly three decades of bitter enmity, the two superpowers finally resolved to peaceful coexistence. Moscow and Washington readily collaborated to systematically dismantle structures and doctrines that defined the immediate post-World War II era, such as Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.).
In May that year, the CIA produced its annual National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a comprehensive report combining data from various intelligence agencies, intended to be a basis for crafting US foreign policy. In keeping with the past five years, the NIE concluded the Soviets were in severe economic decline, favoured diplomacy over conflict, and desperately sought an end to the Cold War. Such findings motivated Washington’s push for détente, and Moscow’s eager acceptance of major disarmament and arms control treaties.
However, newly-appointed CIA director George H. W. Bush categorically rejected the NIE’s conclusions. He sought a second opinion, so constructed an independent intelligence cell to review the Estimate’s findings. Known as Team B, it was composed of hardcore Cold Warriors, defence industry-funded hawks, and rabid anti-Communists. Among them were several individuals who later became leading figures in the modern neoconservative movement, such as Paul Wolfowitz. Also present were infamous CIA and Pentagon dark arts specialists, professionally ostracised due to détente.
Team B duly rubbished each and every one of the NIE’s conclusions. Rather than dilapidated, impoverished and teetering on total collapse, the Soviet Union was, in fact, more deadly and dangerous than ever, having constructed a vast array of “first strike” capabilities right under the CIA’s nose. To reach these bombshell conclusions, Team B relied on a confounding hodgepodge of peculiar logical fallacy, paranoid theorising, crazed conspiratorial conjecture, unsupported value judgments, and amateurish circular reasoning.
For example, Team B repeatedly assessed that a lack of evidence Moscow possessed weapons systems, military technology, or surveillance capabilities comparable or superior to Washington’s own was inverse proof the Soviets were in fact posessed of such capabilities. Moscow’s innovations were just so sophisticated and innovative, Team B rationalised, they couldn’t be detected or even comprehended by the West. Team B’s analysis was confirmed to be total fantasy after the USSR collapsed. Yet, its unorthodox methods informed all subsequent NIEs throughout the Cold War, and likely endure today.
Then, on June 27th 1976, mere weeks after Team B set to work reigniting the Cold War, Air France Flight 139, en route to Paris from Tel Aviv, was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Redirected to a Ugandan airport, the plane was greeted on the runway by Idi Amin’s military, who ushered the passengers - the majority being Jewish or Israeli - into the terminal, watched over by scores of soldiers, intended to prevent their escape or rescue.
The hijackers relayed a demand to the government of Israel. Unless a ransom of $5 million was paid to them and 53 Palestinian prisoners were released from Zionist entity dungeons, all hostages would be executed. In response, 100 elite IOF commandos launched an audacious action to free the hostages. Their mission – known as the Entebbe Raid – was a stunning success. All but four hostages were rescued alive, and the IOF lost just one commander - Yonatan (Jonathan) Netanyahu, the older brother of Israel’s current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
For years by that point, Israeli officials had attempted to popularise the term “terrorism” to explain the motivations and actions of Palestinian freedom fighters. That way, righteous and legitimate Palestinian fury at Zionist repression could be reframed as a destructive ideology of violence for violence’s sake without rationale, and Western-supported settler colonial tyranny as warranted self-defence. This effort became turbocharged in September 1972, when the kidnapping of 11 Israeli athletes at that year’s Olympics in Munich by Palestinian militants ended with all hostages murdered.
This particularly public bloodshed centred world attention on Israel, leaving Western citizens wondering what could’ve possibly inspired such belligerence. Zionists had hitherto managed to largely conceal their systematic, state-enforced repression and displacement of Palestinians from the outside world. Journalists were kept well away from the scenes of major crimes. At the same time, Amnesty International’s Israeli branch was secretly financed and directed by Tel Aviv’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to whitewash facts on the ground.
For the Netanyahu family, the Entebbe raid was a tragedy - but also an ideal opportunity to validate and internationalise the concept of “terrorism,” as espoused by Zionists. In 1979, Benjamin Netanyahu founded the Jonathan Institute, in honour of his slain brother. Its purpose, he said, was:
“To focus public attention on the grave threat that international terrorism poses to all democratic societies, to study the real nature of today’s terrorism, and to propose measures for combating and defeating the international terror movements.”
In July that year, the Institute convened the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism (JCIT) in Jerusalem’s Hilton Hotel. It gathered together a 700-strong mob of Israeli government officials, US lawmakers, intelligence operatives from across the ‘Five Eyes’ global spying network, and Western foreign policy apparatchiks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many representatives of Team B were in attendance. Over four days and seven separate sessions, speaker after speaker painted a disturbing picture of the worldwide phenomenon of “terrorism.”They unanimously declared that all “terrorists” constituted a single, organised political movement that was being secretly financed, armed, trained, and directed by the Soviet Union. This devilish nexus, it was claimed, posed a mortal threat to Western democracy, freedom, and security, requiring a coordinated response. Eerily, as academic Diana Ralph later observed, the JCIT’s collective prescription for tackling this purported menace was precisely what transpired just over two decades later during the War on Terror:
“[This included] pre-emptive attacks on states alleged to support ‘terrorists’; an elaborate intelligence system apparatus; slashed civil liberties, particularly for Palestinians targeted as potential terrorists, including detention without charge, and torture; and propaganda to dehumanize ‘terrorists’ in the eyes of the public.”
Israel’s then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin addressed the JCIT’s opening session. He set the tone by claiming Western state violence was ultimately “a fight for freedom or liberation” and, therefore, fundamentally opposed to “terrorism.” He concluded his remarks by imploring the assembled throng to go forth and promote the conference’s message once it was over. Which they did.‘Insufficient Evidence’
Among JCIT’s attendees was American author and journalist Claire Sterling, who cut her teeth as a reporter decades earlier at the Overseas News Agency, an MI6 propaganda operation seeking to boost US public support for entering World War II. Following the conference, she frequently amplified the claims of JCIT speakers in articles for prominent newspapers, leading to an epic March 1981 front-page exposé in The New York Times - Terrorism: Tracing The International Network.
A book published later that year, The Terror Network, expanded significantly on Sterling’s oeuvre, firmly cementing the notion of Moscow as a grand spider sat in the middle of a vast, globe-spanning web of deadly political violence in the Western public mind. It caused a sensation upon release, receiving rave reviews from major news outlets, being translated into 22 languages, and becoming a bestseller in several countries.
The Terror Network had a particularly potent impact on newly-inaugurated President Ronald Reagan and his CIA chief William Casey. Committed anti-Communists, they entered office desperately seeking a pretext for brutally crushing left-wing, nationalist opposition to US imperialism in Latin America. Sterling’s work provided ample ammunition for achieving that bloodsoaked objective and was key to the White House decisively shattering détente, a process begun by Team B five years earlier.
Consequently, The Terror Network was circulated among US lawmakers and heavily promoted overseas on the Reagan administration’s dime. Casey furthermore tasked the CIA with verifying its thesis. They quickly assessed Sterling’s work to be irredeemable garbage, ironically enough, as it was heavily influenced by Agency black propaganda. Enraged, Casey demanded the evaluation be revised. An updated appraisal was less scathing, but nonetheless stressed the book was “uneven and the reliability of its sources varies widely,” while “significant portions” were “incorrect.”
Still dissatisfied, Casey asked a CIA “senior review panel” charged with scrutinising Langley’s formal estimates to write its own report on the subject. They concluded the Soviets did offer limited financial, material and practical assistance to a handful of anti-imperial Global South liberation movements, some of which Western powers labelled “terrorists”. But there was “insufficient evidence” of Muscovite culpability for the entire global phenomenon of “terrorism,” let alone funding and directing such activities and/or entities as dedicated policy.
Undeterred, when Casey personally delivered the report to Reagan, he allegedly said of its findings, “of course, Mr. President, you and I know better.” So it was CIA-backed death squads ran roughshod across Washington’s “backyard” throughout the 1980s, in the name of neutralising alleged Soviet influence in the region. Their actions were heavily informed by the Agency’s guerrilla warfare manual, which encouraged assassinations of government officials and civilian leaders and deadly attacks on “soft targets” such as schools and hospitals. “Terrorism”, in other words.
‘We Are All Palestinians’
Another example of Reagan’s “terrorism” was sponsoring Afghanistan’s Mujahideen resistance fighters in their battle with – ironically enough – the Soviet Red Army. This policy endured after the “Evil Empire” was vanquished. The same militants were transported by the CIA and MI6 to Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, to aid and abet Yugoslavia’s painful, forced death.
When these covert actions produced “blowback” in the form of the 9/11 attacks, several individuals who attended the JCIT, and their acolytes, were elevated to the Bush administration due to their supposed “terrorism” expertise. Meanwhile, with public and state-level fears of “terrorism” ramping up significantly the world over, many Western countries turned to Israel for advice and guidance on how to tackle the issue. As Nentyahu bragged in 2008:
“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”
This was not only because 9/11 “swung American public opinion in [Israel’s] favour.” In a blink, Zionist repression and slaughter were transformed from a source of international embarrassment and obloquy into a compelling sales pitch and unique selling point for Tel Aviv’s welter of “defence” and “security” firms. The Occupied Territories became laboratories, their inhabitants test subjects, upon whom new weaponry, surveillance methods, and pacification techniques could be trialled by the IOF, then marketed and sold overseas.It is not for nothing that graphic videos showcasing IOF “surgical strikes” on Palestinians, their homes, schools, and hospitals are proudly displayed at international arms fairs, while private demonstrations of invasive surveillance tools such as Pegasus routinely wow repressive foreign security and intelligence agencies behind-closed-doors.
On top of a significant financial benefit, there is a diplomatic dividend too. Israel secures invaluable censure-stifling goodwill from customers, therefore permitting the Zionist project of permanently purging Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants to persist untrammelled. While the streets of almost every major Western city have regularly teemed with pro-Palestine fervour ever since the entity’s attack on Gaza began in October 2023, protesters’ elected representatives are at best silent, at worst actively complicit.
Impassioned chants of “We are all Palestinians!” have been a frequent fixture at these events. This rallying call is highly apposite, for in addition to expressing sympathy and solidarity with the Palestinian people, it is urgently incumbent upon us all to reflect upon how the very same techniques and technologies of control and oppression to which they have been so cruelly subjected daily for decades are now firmly trained on us as well, as a result of Israel’s invention of “terrorism.” It is no exaggeration to say Palestinians are canaries in the coalmine of humanity.
How Zionists Invented 'Terrorism'
Editor’s Note: This investigation was previously published by MintPress News, a crusading independent media outlet well worth your time, and consideration.Kit Klarenberg (Global Delinquents)
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Floodwaters force new evacuation orders in Abbotsford as Highway 1 closes
Floodwaters reached Highway 1 in Abbotsford, located approximately 70 kilometres southeast of Vancouver on Thursday night, prompting new evacuation orders for seven properties close to the highway as water began spilling onto the roadway.
Those orders come on top of evacuations already affecting the region. Nearly 460 properties have so far been ordered to leave and another 1,069 properties remain on evacuation alert in Abbotsford.
The city says the flooding has forced the closure of Highway 1 in both directions between Sumas Road and No.3 Rd. Drivers are being asked to avoid the area and check DriveBC for updates as conditions continue to change.
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Disagree. I actually feel like things are ALWAYS good enough for most gamers, and the entire industry is slipping. In general. There are still a few great things around here and there, but overall, a lot of it really is rehashes of the same things.
One thing that I do to mentally cut through all the bullshit is ask myself "what is the game?" And a lot of the time, it's the same things, or even literally nothing. If a game doesn't have a fail state, I don't think it's technically even a game, I think it falls under a puzzle or an interactive story. Not to say those things are bad, I like both of those, but just as an example of the gaming industry slipping and being lazy. Because making innovation in the gaming industry is hard. But, we are gamers, and we learn and need challenges and novelty.
And I think that most buyers of games spend money on bad games, which incentivises CAPITALISM and investment firms to do whatever it can to make money, including gambling, fomo, and all the other dirty destructive and lazy tricks to hook gamers who don't know any better to continue chasing easy dopamine.
Like, there's a reason big money has noticed gaming, and that companies that consistently do evil shit continue to stay in business and make fucking awful games that are actively terrible for the community. There's a reason that like half of kids now want in game currency for Christmas.
I had the same feeling. Most of the trailers shown were shooters, action RPGs, live service games, sequels, wuxia and anime.
No wonder Expedition 33 won so many prizes. The competition is too busy regurgitating the same slop over and over and over...
2026 has some stuff coming that is either already announced or MIGHT be announced/released that is going to make the year amazing. The show didn't have much for me, but there's a lot of very real hype for the year.
Gta6, steam hardware, steam software, hl3 for real?, and there are several other huge games waiting for announcements like kh4 and es6. And that's not even mentioning the vr space!
Epstein Ran Pro-Israel Philanthropy Machine, Emails Reveal
Six months after Jeffrey Epstein’s death in August 2019, the philanthropic foundation founded by billionaire fashion tycoon Leslie Wexner published an “independent review” of Epstein’s involvement in the organization, in response to concerns raised by donors and alumni of foundation-funded programs. The Wexner Foundation is one of the largest contributors to pro-Israel causes in the U.S.
The review claimed that Wexner Foundation staff had “no contact” with Epstein after his resignation as a trustee in September 2007, and, before that, he had “played no role in the management or administration of the Foundation’s operations,” had “no meaningful role in the Foundation’s budget [or] finances,” and “did not make decisions regarding the use of Foundation’s funds.” None of that is true.
Hundreds of leaked emails from Epstein’s Yahoo inbox, spanning from 2005 to 2008, contradict the Wexner Foundation report. Inside the Wexners’ family financial office in Ohio, staff treated Epstein as de facto chief financial officer, where major decisions about taxes, lines of credit, eight-figure funds transfers, and politically sensitive grants were routed through Epstein’s lawyer, and required Epstein’s approval.
"Ask Jeffrey": Epstein Ran Wexner's Pro-Israel Philanthropy Machine, Emails Reveal
The Wexner Foundation has long claimed Epstein "did not make decisions regarding the use of Foundation’s funds.” New emails show that is flagrantly false.Ryan Grim (Drop Site News)
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Alberta Lawmakers Pass Law to Restrict Trans Youths’ “Right to Life”—For Now
Alberta Lawmakers Pass Law to Restrict Trans Youths’ “Right to Life”—For Now
Using an emergency measure that won’t expire until 2030, the Alberta legislature gutted avenues of legal opposition to its anti-trans laws.s. baum (Erin In The Morning)
I’m so incredibly mad about this.
Alberta seems to have all the time to whine, pass anti trans laws, and generally try to fuck up the rest of Canada, meanwhile they can’t take care of their own people and healthcare system?
I hate the notwithstanding clause, and it should be a death sentence for any political party to use in all but the most dire situations. And I mean wartime do or die type situations.
The fact we’ve normalized and accepted it means the dream of a free Canada or any perception of freedom is dead.
This is disgusting. And the abuse of power for really no good reason except to harass vulnerable children is gross. If Daniel smith and apparently the whole UCP think they’re smarter than doctors, they should maybe try to fix their healthcare system.
Trans rights are human rights. You can’t take away trans rights without trampling the others. These people hurt nobody. And their advice from their doctors in their own circumstances trumps every politicians feelings every time.
Fuck off Alberta you brainwashed shit stain of a province.
Quebec's used it for decades. Provinces could use it to 'notwithstanding' PP anti-trans legislation at a federal level if the conservatives get in next time around.
I don't think your issue is with the mechanism, you're just not in favour of how Alberta's using it on this particular social issue.
Well, I certainly agree with that, we can improve our electoral system a bit. There are limits on this of course, given there are mathematical proofs that there can't be any perfect voting scheme (with more than 2 parties).
Still though, 40% of voters being bigots is already an incredibly massive problem, trying to save minorities by changing the voting system, reducing provincial powers (removing the notwithstanding clause), or otherwise carefully balancing things, it all seems like a bandaid at this point.
that there can't be any perfect voting scheme (with more than 2 parties).
I agree that no electoral system is perfect however there are countries functioning fine with 10 parties in their parliaments like Denmark and they tend to perform better on issues than we do.
Den 20 juni körde en spårvagn på Vasagatan rakt fram i kurvan vid Valand och krockade rakt in i en kiosk som blev totalförstörd. Som av ett under dödades ingen person vid olyckan men några personer blev skadade.
blog.zaramis.se/2025/12/12/spa…
Spårvagnsolycka orsakad av sjukdom - Svenssons Nyheter
Spårvagnsolycka orsakad av sjukdom. Den 20 juni körde en spårvagn på Vasagatan rakt fram i kurvan vid Valand och krockade raktAnders_S (Svenssons Nyheter)
Magister
in reply to Lunio • • •