Palestinian Resistance Groups React: New Boss, Same As Old Boss

While U.S. election drama was underway, the Pentagon took steps to hasten WWIII: it moved nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to Qatar (with U.S. pilots), and it tested an intercontinental ballistic missile delivery system out of Vandenberg Air Base in California. The Democratic Party is seen as losing the White House and both branches of Congress in part because their wars -- in Ukraine and, with Israel, in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen -- are unpopular with voters, and because the austerity that endless wars require is deeply unpopular. 

https://x.com/BigBreakingWire/status/1854166174453375297

Our imperial overlords sneak their warmongering moves into the news cycle when they think it will be least noticed.

I thought it might be of interest to readers to see reactions from people impacted by U.S. foreign policy. This content is available on Telegram, but you will not see it in your corporate news feed.

New Secretary-General of Hezbollah,  Sheikh Na’eem Qasem (in translation, vetted by an Arabic-speaking friend):

https://x.com/swilkinsonbc/status/1854493691454345250 & see also https://x.com/V_Palestine20/status/1854505512777228688

From the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (English translation from same source):

Trump’s victory will reinforce the American anti-Palestinian approach, and the Democratic Party’s loss is a natural result of its direct involvement in the zionist war of genocide.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine affirms that Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s victory in the U.S. elections does not, in any way, signify a real change in the hostile approach that successive American administrations have pursued against our Palestinian people and their just cause. There is no fundamental difference between the Republican and Democratic parties; both have contributed to supporting the zionist entity and participated in the war of genocide against our people, whether through policies or unlimited military and diplomatic support.

Our people have never placed their hopes on any candidate from either the Democratic or Republican parties, as we have never witnessed any positive change in U.S. administration policies, which have consistently aligned fully with the zionist entity, providing it with military funding and all forms of political, legal, and diplomatic protection.

The Democratic Party’s loss is a logical result of its complicity with the zionist entity; it rejected calls from supporters of the Palestinian people, the Palestinian community, and Arab and Muslim communities in the United States to pressure for an end to the war of genocide in Gaza, continuing its support for aggression against our people. Today, the Democrats are paying the price for ignoring these demands at the ballot box.

We in the Popular Front do not expect any positive development from a Donald Trump administration; rather, we anticipate an escalation in hostile policies against our people, fully biased in favor of the zionist entity.

We call on supporters of the Palestinian people, as well as movements, organizations, and groups that stand with our cause in the United States, to intensify pressure on the new U.S. administration to end its support for the zionist entity. [emphasis mine]

We see in the popular and student movements that stand in solidarity with Gaza, along with the emergence of small, free voices and parties, a glimmer of hope that could contribute to even a slight change in the U.S. stance on our cause.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Central Media Dept, Nov 6, 2024

From the Popular Resistance Committees (English translation from same source):

The Republican and Democratic parties are two identical faces in entrenching American tyranny and supporting zionism in the genocidal wars it waged against our Palestinian and Lebanese peoples and our nation.

America is the enemy of peoples; it is a symbol of tyranny and arrogance, ruling the world with iron and fire, igniting wars and the flames of hatred across the entire globe.

America, with all its components, parties, and councils, stands behind the support for the zionist entity with all kinds of shells, rockets, and destructive weapons that wreak havoc on our people in Palestine and Lebanon.

Our people rely solely on their steadfastness, the valor of their resistance, and the support of the Axis of Resistance and the free people of the nation and the world in confronting the genocide and massacres they are subjected to. All successive American administrations are enemies of our people, our nation, and of free peoples.

Media Office of the Resistance Committees in Palestine

Wednesday 06 November 2024

https://x.com/gazanotice/status/1854491593207599356

From Hamas (English translation from same source):

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Press Statement on the Results of the U.S. Presidential Election

In light of the results indicating Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. election, we, in the Islamic Resistance Movement - Hamas, affirm the following:

1. Our position regarding the new U.S. administration will depend on its stances and practical actions towards our Palestinian people, their legitimate rights, and their just cause.

2. It is unfortunate to note that all successive U.S. administrations, since the occupation of Palestine in 1948, have held negative stances on the Palestinian cause. They have consistently been the primary supporter of the zionist occupation in all fields, and the previous administration followed a path biased towards occupation and aggression, providing political and military cover for zionist war criminals to continue some of the most horrific acts of genocide in modern history, solidifying its role as a full partner in the killing of tens of thousands of our people, including children, women, and the elderly.

3. We call for an end to the blind bias toward the zionist occupation and for serious and genuine efforts to stop the war of extermination and aggression against our Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, to end the aggression against our brotherly Lebanese people, to halt the provision of military support and political cover for the zionist entity, and to recognize our people’s legitimate rights.

4. The elected U.S. President is urged to heed the voices that have risen from within American society itself for more than a year since the zionist aggression on Gaza, rejecting occupation and genocide and objecting to support and bias toward the zionist entity. [emphasis mine]

5. The new U.S. administration must understand that our Palestinian people will continue to confront the abhorrent zionist occupation and will not accept any path that detracts from their legitimate rights to freedom, independence, self-determination, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital.

Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas, Wednesday, 04 Jumada al-Awwal 1446 AH, Corresponding to: 06 November 2024 

Soft Propaganda, Opiate Of The Masses

The quintessential guilty pleasure of the 21st century may be binge watching shows on platforms like Netflix. Guilty, because your favorite series was probably designed to serve as a smoothly effective soft propaganda vehicle for policing, military funding, and war. Take the case of the BBC's Call the Midwife one of my all time favorites as it combines socialized medicine, public health, disability rights, and the womanly art of midwifery in a setting that has evolved over seasons to resemble my now vintage childhood. 

That Midwife has been doing hasbara for Israel for a few years will probably not surprise you. To be fair, the show also portrays London's Muslim immigrant community sympathetically, but the Holocaust industry is on full display in more than one episode where the word "Israel" is uttered with a reverence that again is reminiscent of my youth. And of course it is the mighty U.S. and the plucky UK that vanquished Hitler. (Red Army? What Red Army?)

So I was more disgusted than surprised when the new season devoted an entire episode plus bits of a few others to glorifying the U.S. space program.

I'm already surrounded by soft propaganda for the "warfighting domain" undergoing the most rapid expansion in funding and mission at the moment.  

Getting students pumped about space begins in preschool 

and runs right through post graduate research at universities on behalf of aerospace profiteers. 

That this is an Anglicized effort is revealed by Australian educators sick of their government injecting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) curricula with pro-U.S., pro-militarized space content. Also revealed by the rubber bullets fired at resisters to AUKUS and other manifestations of the vassal status of Australia vis a vis the U.S./NATO war machine.

We see Hollywood and professional sports and corporate media and corporate public education work in concert to promote positive views of the military, including Space Force, and the never-admit-it's-military NASA.

All NASA programs are military in nature, no matter what pr they put out to the contrary. You remember how NASA was founded by Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun, right? He was one of many who knew that the next world war would undoubtedly be fought using outer space and that space therefore needed to be dominated by the U.S. before Russia or China could gain a toehold.

So it is that the fictional residents of the East End of London gather around the television for breathless witness of the moon landing. Perennial child Sister Monica Joan is the most rapt (and, incidentally, the character most addicted to what we'd now call screen time), her blissed out wrinkled face lit up by the light emanating from the boob tube. 

Some might call it coincidence but the context of U.S. Space Force presently supporting construction of  multiple rocket launch sites in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia seems relevant. RAND think tankers noted that militarizing outer space would be the largest industrial undertaking in the history of the human race. Thus, very expensive. How to get citizens to willingly give up pensions, health care, public transit and other necessities that their corporate overlords have decided they can no longer afford?

https://x.com/TheSurvivalPodc/status/1834300137105227782

Russian President Putin today made crystal clear the role that space technology plays in the current NATO proxy war escalations when he observed that long-range, precision-guided missiles can only be controlled via satellites Ukraine lacks. So, Russia would consider such strikes as evidence of NATO attacking Russia. WWIII immediately began trending on Twitter.

It's what the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space has been saying all along. The GN's latest video "US/NATO Dangerous Alliances" gives the details and invites concerned citizens of the world to join in with Keep Space for Peace activities October 5-12.

Religion was once the opiate of the masses. Television and other forms of digitized entertainment have long since surpassed it. As we face down a potential nuclear Armageddon, keep a clear head if you can.

Pivot To Asia Ramping Up Ominously

Source of map: researchgate.net

The only nation that has hundreds of military bases outside its own borders is about to open a new one. 

A huge new U.S. Marine Corps base on the island of Guam was paid for, in part, by Japan. Why would Japan do this? I read that it was part of a deal during the Obama administration's "pivot to Asia" to get Marines out of Okinawa. Locals there despise the presence of gaijin (foreigners) who rape and kill girls and women, and Okinawans have been struggling for decades to get rid of them.

Why export the misery to Guam? The indigenous population of Okinawa understands all too well what it's like to live under Japanese imperialism. And taxpayers in Japan are by no means on board with ramping up military spending and abandoning Article 9 as the U.S. is demanding. 

Source: "Japan's rearmament is a worrying sign" by Jamil Ragland, CTNewsJunkie

Demonstrations against Japan's remilitarization are common in Tokyo and other Japanese cities these days -- but don't expect to read about it in the U.S. corporate media.

Instead, those who consume corporate media should expect to read more ranting from psychopaths like U.S. Air Force general Michael Minihan. He was in the news this week due to a memo (that the Pentagon disavowed, for what that's worth) urging preparations for war with China which he predicted will be underway by 2025.

He ordered his underlings to practice shooting targets in the head to prepare.

He's been quoted as believing that,

“[W]hen you can kill your enemy, every part of your life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger."

No comment on what we're all imagining about Minihan's marriage.

Meanwhile another ex-Marine, weapons inspector Scott Ritter, shared his examination of the shift in U.S./NATO policy toward east Asia and also the "war-fighting domain" of outer space.

A recent statement by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) head Bill Nelson that the US was in a space race with China, when combined with recent moves by both the US and China to militarize space, could send the US on a policy trajectory that transforms established policy regarding space-based activities as being exclusively exploration-driven in nature, to one where conquest and domination become the dominating factors. 

Why do I pay attention to these "coulds" when the clear and present danger of Ukraine escalating into a nuclear confrontation grows daily?

Because weakening Russia and overthrowing Putin is the first stage of the neocon plan to take out China as the U.S.'s only feasible economic competitor. 

"Paratroopers take part in a joint military drill among Japan, the US, Britain and Australia at Narashino exercise field in Chiba prefecture on January 8, 2023. Yuichi Yamazaki/AFP/Getty Images"   Source: "'History might repeat itself': Chinese ambassador warns Australia to be wary of Japan", CNN

But the sanctions that were supposed to cripple Russia's economy have instead strengthened it, and boomeranged on the economies of the U.S. and NATO nations.

Early indications are that sanctions on China are having a similar effect: weakening the dollar, and pushing the targeted nation toward more cooperation with others and diversification of its industrial capacity.

Reporting in The Verge:

[Dutch tech manufacturer] ASML CEO Peter Wennink previously told CNBC that China accounted for around 15 percent of the company’s sales in 2022. 

Wennink has said that any restrictions are unlikely to prevent China from building its own versions of the machines eventually. “If they cannot get those machines, they will develop them themselves,” Wennink told Bloomberg. “That will take time, but ultimately they will get there.”

On the Japanese side, the restrictions are expected to impact companies such as Nikon and Tokyo Electron.

As its old ally Germany has suffered under U.S. leadership from helping to conduct war on Russia via Ukraine, I think it's reasonable to expect Japan to suffer from helping its old enemy conduct a proxy war on China via Taiwan.

Certainly Australians as traditional allies of the U.S. military empire are increasingly concerned about being targeted as a consequence of hosting bases and spying outposts on their soil, and of their economy unraveling if their extensive trade with China is disrupted. And some observers have speculated that neighboring New Zealand saw the recent resignation of PM Jacinda Ardern because she had lost the battle for Kiwis to remain neutral and nuclear-free.

In the U.S. we have half a million people unhoused and at risk of freezing to death this winter. We have 1 in 5 children growing up impoverished and hungry, and the federal government tells us there is no money for universal health care, student loan forgiveness, or to house and feed the people. Yet, at $858 billion for 2023, the military budget is at it highest point ever, and ominously increasing every year.

Historically, wars have caused untold suffering for populations who had little to no interest in pursuing them. War profiteers hijacked their governments and raked in profits while their people starved and died. 

Are we doomed to repeat these disasters?

Open Letter To Rep. Chellie Pingree On Ukraine

My photo of members of Maine's peace lobby meeting with Rep. Chellie Pingree in Portland during her first term of office.

I don't live in her district in Maine but I get Rep. Chellie Pingree's newsletter anyway and today it was truly appalling. She ran as an peace candidate with a background in organic family farming. How far she has drifted from serving the people to serving the wealthy during her 13 years in office! 

Here's my response to her recent messaging in the form of an open letter that might reach her.

Dear Rep. Pingree,

I read your email message today with interest. By spreading the demonstrably false claim -- "As Russia continues its unprovoked attack on the people of Ukraine" -- you appear to be either dangerously naive or a knowing promoter of lies about NATO and U.S. involvement in the region.

Where is your moral compass? Did you have one back in the day but years in Washington DC serving the Democratic Party and its corporate ownership eroded it?

If you actually believe Russia's intervention in Ukraine's civil war was unprovoked, and that roughly 14,000 casualties in the Donbas were mythical or perhaps not important, please find some better sources of information. 

Source: Covert Action Magazine

For starters, you might want to read this expose, U.S. Lied About Funding “Dangerous Pathogen” Research in Secret Ukrainian Biolabs, Newly Leaked Documents Reveal, by Dilyana Gaytandzhieva published March 22.

Or maybe you already know about this from your congressional briefings? 

Russia is the enemy du jour and mostly a pathway to rendering China without a major ally as the world moves away from U.S. domination of its trade and finance. 

Was blocking the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany worth risking a nuclear world war? I suspect your children or grandchildren might have a different opinion. There is no amount of wealth that would compensate them for a WW3 with nukes.

How about supporting diplomacy instead fanning the flames of conflict? 

Or is conflict what your military-industrial campaign donors require? 

Source: OpenSecrets.com Donors to Rep. Pingree's campaign coffers by industry

As the U.S. produces little other than weapons nowadays, endless war is a marketing scheme.

Lisa Savage 

Solon

Headline Sums Up The Mess We're In: Tax Breaks For BIW, World War III For Us

Is it alarmist to suggest that corporate welfare for the 5th largest weapons corporation in the world will lead to WWIII, as did Portland's the bollard in its February issue? I don't think so.

The giant warships known as destroyers that are built by General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works (BIW) in Maine are indeed sent to menace China.

Destruction of a UN World Heritage Site coral reef over the last several years to create a deep water port for those destroyers on Jeju Island, South Korea was resisted vigorously by the people who live and fish there. They did not want their coastline used as a staging area for a showdown between their powerful neighbor and the U.S. -- of which South Korea is a client state since it was partitioned during the Cold War.

One of the best quotes I've ever seen from the many articulate protesters who have gathered at BIW warship christenings[sic] was from Peter Morgan, a Veteran for Peace. He reportedly told the Portland Press Herald of a warship that cost $4.1 billion to build,

"I’m not sure how the destroyer addresses terrorism, exactly."

Hmm...

Yesterday I noticed news that the U.S. government is set to borrow $955 billion in 2018, a huge increase over previous years. This is likely in response to revenue lost because of the tax "reform" that slashed taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals. Much of what is borrowed will funnel back to those same corporations in the form of lucrative contracts to build massive weapon systems. And those same corporations will give campaign contributions to the legislators who voted for their big tax break.

When I protested at BIW with a sign that said WAR = DEBT I meant this literally. 

Today faux news is reporting that ISIS is "defeated" and that the U.S. will be redeploying troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. (What could go wrong?)

ISIS, a direct result of the U.S. invading and occupying Iraq, has largely been funded by U.S. ally Saudi Arabia. If it is "defeated" I'm guessing this means its funding streams are drying up.

With China and Russia as enemies to justify mad borrowing that funds "defense" spending, who really needs Islamic militants?

If the U.S. is indeed pulling troops out of Iraq (as they've promised many times to do) I'm guessing it may have something to do with the fact that "our" moderate rebels shot down a Russian warplane over Syria a couple of days ago.

As we hold our breath in fear of nuclear war, this is an alarming development.

Chris Busby of the bollard has the sense to connect the dots of LD1781, which is a bill before the Maine Legislature to provide a $60 million tax break for GD/BIW, and the threat of global war.

I was arrested while holding the WAR = DEBT sign in front of BIW's gate. Justice Dan Billings just ruled that the shipyard was wrong to exclude me from a public event just because they didn't like my message. Also that the Bath Police Department was really wrong to be taking its orders from BIW.

It's the karmic debt of our warmongering for profit that worries me most. Sixteen plus years in Afghanistan and no end in sight. U.S. bases proliferate around the globe. Africa is crawling with Pentagon outposts established during the Obama administration. People want foreign military bases out of their countries: Okinawa, Italy, Germany, Australia, and so on. 

Politicians in the U.S. will go on claiming that Pentagon contracts are a good jobs program. They are not.

The Ottoman Empire, the British Empire and the French monarchy found what happens when a nation keeps borrowing to fund wars it cannot afford.

The German and Japanese people found where the road led from committng their national manufacturing might to weapons and death dealing.


The U.S. is on that same road right now, and more corporate welfare for weapons manufacturers will only hasten our demise.