The Ovens This Time: Israel Firebombs Rafah Tents In Safe Zone Trap

Martyrs of the Rafah Massacre (Photo shared by Mondoweiss)

Israel responded to the ICC ordering it to stop committing war crimes by fire bombing Gazan refugees in tents in "safe" zones the Israeli government sent them to. Many children were among those burned to death in the bombings. The horror is beyond words, only pictures can really convey it.

Fire rages following an Israeli strike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on May 26, 2024. (Reuters TV / Reuters)

Or maybe videos. Like this one shared on Twitter, compelling evidence that eradicating Hamas is the least credible rationale for Israel's industrial scale slaughter of children.

https://x.com/richimedhurst/status/1795105646435549359

It was with Rafah burning in my brain that I encountered Maine's Zionist cheerleader Senator Angus King at a Memorial Day parade in his hometown of Brunswick. I shouted: "Free free Palestine!" which got his attention and then: "Angus King, you can't hide, I charge you with genocide! Stop arming genocide with my tax dollars, Angus!" He made no reply. There is really no place he can go now without facing protesters, even though the parade had banned Palestinian flags or even keffiyehs.

My granddaughter and I decided to wear watermelon clothing to be in the parade, an expression which some people noticed. In these times amid galloping suppression of dissent we will nevertheless find ways to speak our truth.

Driving home my son shared an analysis that made me feel a little hopeful. He noted that genocide is Biden's legacy for certain, and that ordinary people (he is in his 30's) are not at all sympathetic with war in general or with Israel's treatment of Palestinians. His view was not that the tide is turning, but that it has turned. The war on terror is now totally defunct as a concept anyone can support, and he predicted that slavish loyalty to Israel now will eventually hurt politicians. 

I'm always interested to hear from other generations about their zeitgeist. I just hope humans survive long enough for younger, better people to rise up and do what they need to do. I'm fearful that in the European and East Asian regions the U.S. and its gang are inching us closer to nuclear war with each passing day. For example, U.S./NATO dba Ukraine just bombed three space early warning facilities that are key to Russian missile defense and understood to be a red line. 

I didn't say that in the car, because there was a child present. 

How heart rending for Palestinian parents and grandparents to be unable to protect their little ones from genocide at Israel's hands, while the world looks on and makes a tidy profit. 

Time for this grandma to throw a spanner in the works.

U.S. Senators Don't Represent The Public On Gaza Genocide

Pictured above is my friend Ridgely Fuller outside Senator Angus King's home in Brunswick on Christmas Day. She made a sign, wrapped a baby doll in a keffiyeh, and called for a vigil that drew a baker's dozen of people and two dogs.

Back in the day, senators and others in Congress used to meet regularly with anti-war constituents to hear their concerns. At various times I've met with Senator Susan Collins via video from her office in Maine's capital and in person with the 2nd congressional district rep about U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This type of constituent access ended around the time one-term Rep. Bruce Poliquin ducked into a women's bathroom to avoid questions.

Now, even the town hall is a thing of the past and the only way you're going to be able to speak with the people who allegedly represent you and spend your taxes is...by accident.

Kudos to Jack a polite, insistent, well-informed constituent who made a video of Susan Collins spouting talking points and avoiding conversation about genocide in Gaza at Panera Bread in Augusta. The one aide accompanying Collins appears to push Jack, but he remains undeterred.

Those of us who gathered in response to Ridgely's call left messages for King all over his lawn and front porch as a dog barked inside with nobody home (one in the know said the family was likely at their "ski palace" in Sugarloaf). Earlier in the month King sent a fundraising email with the subject line: I've got BBQ on my mind (and received the reply: This makes you a monster).

Congress critters can go on raking in cash and ignoring the people, but they appear to be rapidly losing the consent of the governed. One manifestation of this is the fact that the imperial forces are having even more difficulties recruiting amid "a general disinterest or even distrust of the US Armed Forces following decades of wars predicated on dubious pretexts." 

U.S. senators serve those they consider to be their important constituents: war profiteers.

A report of a recent action at one of General Dynamics' profit centers in Maine may be found here. 

Hey senators, our message is loud and clear: stop funding genocide!

Stand On The Side Of The Planet And Free Speech

When we become aware of a great moral issue, it's good for the soul to decide which side we will stand on: with the riot police, or with the defenders of the coral reefs? This anonymous woman visiting South Korea from Hawaii was honored by villagers of Gangeong village on Jeju Island. They gifted her with the traditional Korean robe she wears so beautifully here, and she responded by playing a concert to lift the spirits of the activists. They have been standing firm for years now against the entombment of their beloved coastline and fisheries, against the destruction of the natural resources that gave them life for so many generations.

The photo above was posted by one of the bravest of many brave activists, Sung Hee-Choi, who has been arrested as well as physically attacked for putting himself between the UN World Heritage Site and the trucks that the Samsung corporation is using to destroy it. 

Source: http://www.iied.org/iucn-world-conservation-congress-begins

South Korea has been required by the U.S. to build a deep water port from which to menace the South China Sea. It needs to be big enough to handle ships like Aegis destroyers.

Aegis nuclear-equipped destroyers are ships which are built far away, at Bath Iron Works in Maine. Maine's newest Senator Angus King visited the General Dynamics facility this week to pay homage to his campaign contributors, and to vow to fight cuts to the Pentagon's budget (currently at 57% of total discretionary spending) to save the 5,500 jobs there. "Jobs" being a mythically powerful word that is repeated like an incantation by politicians looking to deliver on the favors that corporations purchase at election time.

Angus was once a hippie who hung around in the north woods smoking pot and building geodesic domes. Somewhere along the line he succumbed to either greed (he became quite wealthy on industrial wind investments) or the lust for fame. Possibly both. 

Now Angus favors fracking because his aide told me "it can be done safely" and anyway we must do it because heating oil is too expensive and we need natural gas as a "transition fuel."

Source: 8020 Vision -- Use their inteactive diagram to see what fracking does to ground water.

The inspiring example of the Jeju Island resistance will be useful when Mainers are resisting the planned corporate looting of our own wealth of natural resources. Tar sands pipelines, an East-West Corridor with mining rights and hundreds of feet wide right of way, private-public partnerships to cash in on eminent domain, a mammoth (13 stories high) LP gas tank on the Penobscot Bay, mountain top removal open pit mining, and expansion beyond the seven already existing wells to pump out the spectacular Maine aquifer are all planned.

Hearings where you can stand on the side of Mother Earth include Searsport High School on Monday, Feb 25 at 6pm with Thanks but no tank, and Fryeburg.

SAVE THE DATE - Mark your calendars! There will be a PUBLIC HEARING in Fryeburg, Maine on Thursday, March 7, 6pm at the Fryeburg Legion Hall on Bradley Street across from the Fryeburg Academy gym next to the baseball field about Nestle having an unprecedented long term contract with the Fryeburg Water Company, a public utility.

Source: Defending Water For Life in Maine

Indigenous people of Hawaii have lived for generations with corporate degradation and pollution of their island paradise. Jeju Islanders have called on international solidarity in their struggle. Idle No More has connected the First Nations of Canada with earth defenders all over the planet.

Which side will you be on? I'm happy to say I will be on the side that has the best culture workers -- the artists and musicians and dancers and writers who lift our hearts while we struggle on in the face of the obscene wealth and greed of corporations who think they own the Earth.

Today I'll be standing in Portland, Maine for information hero Bradley Manning. February 23 is his 1,000th day in jail for sharing news of war crimes and U.S. State Department complicity in corporate hijacking of resources all over the planet. Here's the poster that Kansas artist/activist Marc Saviano made specially for the occasion:

Angus Favors Fracking + No Photos Of Guards Allowed

We arrived a few minutes early for our staff meeting at Maine's new senator Angus King's office in Augusta, the state capital. The federal building has a metal detector and about seven middle aged guards at the door, and it took us considerably longer than we had planned to pass through security.

My friend Abby Shahn had to remove her belt, shoes, and get wanded by a metal detector.

I had to drink the water from my water bottle in front of the one female guard, to prove that it was actually water. No, she was not kidding.

Marge Kilkelly -- who was a Democratic legislator in Maine before becoming senior policy advisor to Angus -- was in state for the congressional recess week, and she said it took her a really long time to get through security, too.

Apparently the guards at the federal building have been told to give the order that no one is supposed to photograph "a guard doing his (sic) work." An aggressive older man ordered me to erase the photo I took of Abby getting wanded, and I did it because 1) I wanted to get to my appointment and 2) apparently the guards did not realize that when someone holds a pink rectangle up in the air, she is also taking a picture. So we still got the clandestine photos above.

We did our meeting, which we had requested soon after Angus got elected in November, by presenting a lot of information we thought might lead Angus to conclude that riding the "stop war spending, it's bankrupting the Treasury" platform might be a path to public acclaim. 

Some info was to show that the will of the people of Maine is overwhelmingly in favor of low spending on "defense"( Penny Poll article  from the Kennebec Journal). National Priorities project trade offs and charts showed that the federal government is seriously out of whack, currently spending 57% of the discretionary budget on military. We also left behind a case study of Bring Our War $$ Home campaign as a coalition effort in Maine and in many other parts of the U.S. and articles about the U.S. Conference of Mayors resolution pleading with the federal government to spend less on wars, and more investing in the cities where people live.

We had printed a copy of the Pollin & Pelletier report "The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending," which refutes the claim that military spending is a good jobs program. I consider this the clincher because it refutes the b.s. that is always trotted out when there are threatened cuts to the Pentagon budget: But we will lose jobs locally if this funding is cut! Read the report to find out why investment in several other ways produces far more jobs -- more than twice as many, in some cases.

It fell to Codepink associate Pat Taub to get down to business on drones. Since Angus had made a splash in the news asking a few pointed questions about drones of John Brennan, nominee for CIA director. He had also suggested a special court to review the extrajudicial assassination plans, but only those targeting Americans, so Pat had brought Desmond Tutu's op-ed calling for a respect for all the humans on the planet. She had much documentation of the effects of drone strikes, including photographs, and a copy of Medea Benjamin's book Drone Warfare, which is well-researched and current. 

Buy one for your senator.

We also shared a copy of NYU/Stanford law school report "Living Under Drones" a most substantial refutation of the claim that drones are in Angus' words a "humane" weapon as currently used by the U.S. 

Abby, going as usual to the heart of the matter, wanted to ask: How can the people's voices can be heard in government? She observed that this has consistently failed to happen. She has a long memory so she started back at Vietnam naming all the wars people haven't wanted that the U.S. has waged anyway. (A large campaign contribution would no doubt amplify the people's voices just like it does for corporations.) I wondered aloud who Angus would be representing in Congress: the people of Maine, or General Dynamics?


Then we all talked about energy policy and we found out that because Maine is so dependent on heating oil, Angus favors natural gas as a "transitional fuel" and that he favors FRACKING!!!!!

Objections to the folly of polluting ground water were waved away by Marge with the mantra "transitional fuel." 

We pointed out that we had been in "transition" since Jimmy Carter wore that cardigan and turned down the thermostat in the White House, which was so long ago it was the first presidential election where I was old enough to vote. Also that there is vast hydropower leaving the state on long distance lines, leaking energy as it goes, for the profit of wealthy people, while the Mainers whose rivers were dammed to make the electricity do not benefit from it. Also that many of us heat with renewables, use solar energy, and want to see sustainable sources like tidal and geothermal and wind explored.

As we were leaving I thanked Marge because she had supported all middle school kids and teachers in Maine getting laptops through a learning technology grant when she was in the state legislature and Angus was governor. Amazingly enough, this program is still in place years later, and it did revolutionize middle school. (It didn't solve the equity problem, though, because the local school districts were supposed to fund the high school end of the program, and if they were poor, fagedaboudit.)

In the absence of meaningful congressional oversight of the executive branch waging wars both overt and covert, it is hard to justify teaching kids about checks and balances as if they actually existed. I probably shouldn't have said that because it's one more black mark in my file.

I know many will think we were fools to waste our time and probably get iris scanned and who knows what else to meet with a representative of a broken government that no longer represents the people. We are all grandmothers and idealistic and we did once believe in the democracy we supposedly lived in. We're worried about the future for our grandchildren, like pretty much everybody is nowadays. So we visit our senators. But since money equals political speech, and we don't leave behind a big fat check, it mostly amounts to going through the motions.

We do it because you still can. That is, if you can get past Homeland Security.

Codepink associates with Angus King's senior policy advisor Marge Kilkelly in Augusta today.

@SenAngusKing, Are Drones "Creepy" Or "Humane"?

Candidate Angus King already heard from CODEPINK associate Mark Roman last July 4th in Bath, Maine. Mark asked Angus, "If you are elected will you help to bring our war dollars home to fund human needs like education and health care?" and Angus answered, "It sounds like a good idea."

Our U.S. Senators have been coining some interesting terms this week as they consider whether to make torture apologist and drone czar John Brennan head of the "CIA death squad." That's what Medea Benjamin called our national intelligence gathering agency in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! citing the thousands killed or maimed and the multiple thousands terrorized by living with the possibility of death-by-robot hovering noisily overhead.

Medea was one of the eight "CODEPINK Associates" whom Senate Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein called out and finally kicked out for staging a sequence of disruptions. They were arrested for loudly calling on the committee -- which allegedly represents the interests of U.S. citizens -- to reject Brennan on the basis that he has been responsible for the deaths of so many innocents, including numerous children in various parts of the world. They repeatedly interrupted Brennan's recitation of his own family members ("my 91 year-old mother" and so on) to present lists of children killed by drones under his regime. Feinstein finally stopped the proceedings and cleared the room.

You can call Feinstein's office and let her know you want her to ask Capitol police to drop the charges against these citizens for exercising their 1st Amendment right to free speech: 202-224-3841.

A network news correspondent covering the hearing tweeted:

Which term did one of the two Maine senators on the Intelligence committee coin? Angus got right on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show to parade a feeble understanding of U.S. imperial history and make that claim that drones are "a more humane weapon" and "a lot more civilized," though he didn't offer much support for this claim beyond positing that they are not like firebombing entire cities. Here's the entire quote:

To be honest, I believe that drones are a lot more civilized than what we used to do. You know, when Sherman shelled Atlanta or when the Allies firebombed Dresden in World War II, it was all collateral damage. It was virtually all civilians. And that's the way -- that was the way of war until very recently. 

The drone, although there is some collateral damage, basically is a very smart artillery shell. And we've been shooting artillery shells over miles and iles for many years and hoping they hit the right target. I think there's just something creepy about drones that they can be controlled and people are uneasy about it. But if you put it in a context of 1,000 years of war, I think it's actually a more humane weapon because it can be targeted to specific enemies and specific people. (Source where you can see the entire clip: The Daily Caller.)

I think the unspoken reasons he and other deluded imperialists think drones are humane is that they don't put the warriors for our side at risk. This retreat to remote control killing would have been seen as cowardly by most soldiers in times gone by. And in fact until the U.S. got into the show of deadly force game, warfare mostly resulted in the death of warriors. Angus apparently needs to do some homework. He might start by reading scholarly studies like the NYU and Stanford Law School report "Living Under Drones" which documents extensive civilian deaths and civilian terror in the border region of Pakistan near Afghanistan. He also might want to extend his understanding of the word "history" back to, say, 1,000 years ago -- rather than myopically limiting it to the relatively brief, very bloody few hundred years reign of the U.S.

I also think that Angus asked a few pointed questions (with no follow-up, causing Wired for War author Jeremy Scahill to coin yet another term when he dubbed this display "Kabuki oversight") and suggested a "secret court like the intelligence court that has already been set up" to review the president's kill list because Angus is a newbie in the Senate and hopes to make a name for himself at the national level. Also, he has a lot of progressive constituents in Maine and it's important to fool some of the people some of the time. He's counting on them caring as much as he does about the distinction between targeting a U.S. citizen under the Fifth Amendment, and about the check the Senate is supposed to exercise over a policy he described as "whatever the executive decides is ok" which he says he thinks is a problem.

Source: Excellent article by Nicola Abé "Dreams In Infrared: The Woes Of An American Drone Operator".                Photo credit: Gilles Mingasson / DER SPIEGEL

If a sniper can sell a lot of books bragging about all the people he has personally killed because "I'm not over there looking at these people as people" will a joystick operator soon be writing his memoir about how tough he is for sitting in an air conditioned trailer in the Nevada desert sending hellfire missiles down on little children and grandparents in Yemen?

All of this is progress in the sense that mainstream media have now discovered the killer drones story and the general public is now hearing dissenting voices. Unfortunately almost no one asked the questions Medea, who last year authored the book Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control, posed in her article on Common Dreams last week.

Here are the questions I am going to ask Angus as soon as we get to meet with him again:

What is the profit motive for Maine weapons manufacturers if the CIA and the Pentagon continue buying and using drones?

Source: Glenn Greenwald writing in The Guardian, Tariq Aziz (centre, second row) attending a meeting about drones strikes in Waziristan, held in Islamabad, Pakistan oin 28 October 2011. Three days later, the 16 year old was reported killed by a drone-launched missile. Photograph: Pratap Chatterjee/BIJ

Why are drones are only used to kill people with dark skin? People in countries with large Muslim populations?

What do you think of such inhumane practices as "double tap" which targets those who go to the rescue of the humans whose bodies are crushed and burnt by drone bombings?

Source: "Drones: Instruments of State Terror" by Steven Lendman on the blog Another World Is Possible.

How could terrorizing entire civilian populations with a death machine that makes a distinctive noise and is overhead 24/7 be called "humane"? What is your definition of "humane"?

What did you think that you swore to do when you took your oath of office?

Where do you think this kind of death-dealing by the CIA, which is supposed to be a civilian organization, will lead?

How much safer are you making your constituents in Maine by supporting a program that even Gen. Stanley McChrystal admitted stirs a "visceral hatred" among victims toward the U.S. and its people?

Source: The Guardian which ran this photo with the caption,  A protest against US drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal regions. Photograph: SS MirzaAFP/Getty Images