the College Football Playoff (CFP) should not happen unless Michigan is replaced by Florida State

    This past Saturday, I took a break from my hectic spoof presidential campaign to watch some of the Southeastern Conference Championship game, where the 11-1 (after a few narrow escapes) Alabama Crimson Tide barely squeaked,  27-24, by the #1 ranked 12-0 Georgia Bulldogs, after the 12-0 Washington Huskies had barely squeaked, by 3 points, for the second time, past the 11-1 Oregon Ducks in the Pacific Coast Conference Championship game.

    Also on Saturday, the 11-1 Texas Longhorns, who had out-muscled Alabama, 34-24, in the opening game of the season in Tuscaloosa, blew out the Oklahoma State Cowboys, 49-21, in the Big 12 Conference Championship. While the 12-0 Michigan Wolverines blanked the 10-2 Iowa Hawkeyes, 26-0.

    Saturday night, I watched the 12-0 Florida State Seminoles, without their lost-for-the season superstar quarterback, out-defense the 10-2 Louisville Cardinals, 16-6 in the Atlantic Coast Conference Championship game.

    That left 12-1 Texas and 12-1 Alabama and 13-0 Florida State competing for the two remaining places in the CFP tournament for the national championship.

    Sunday morning I watched on TV the CFP selection committee pick Texas and Alabama to join Michigan and Washington in the playoff tournament. In the first round, Alabama will play Michigan and Texas will play Washington.

    This morning, I posted this on Facebook and got a few nibbles.

Sloan Bashinsky

I read online yesterday, that when the Michigan team and its coaches learned Alabama had been selected over Florida State, there was “Oh” response. As in, they had hoped to play Florida State in the semi-final game. 
What I cannot wrap my mind around is Florida State, Washington, Texas and Alabama’s coaches, athletic directors and presidents did not, and still don’t, raise bloody hell about Michigan being allowed into the playoff after it was judged by the Big 10 to be guilty of stealing other teams' signals, and its head coach was suspended for three games (but not the conference playoff game against Ohio State). What kind of signal did that send to every power-5 college?

I think Alabama, Texas and Washington should tell the CPF selection committee, if they don’t remove Michigan and add Florida State, there won’t be a playoff. If Alabama, Texas and Washington don’t do that, they are accomplices after the fact.

South Alabama Elizabeth

My husband has been having words about that.

Sloan Bashinsky

I dunno, Eliza, maybe them coaches, ADs, presidents and selection committee members need to have a SIGNAL you once wrote swam up their hind ends where their heads already swam?:-)

Sloan Bashinsky
Ahem -

All want the security of the well fed pig.

Horror at the baseness unrecognized.

A lifetime spent in shirt stuffing.

And pen comparison.

Is truth more palatable when honeyed?

Is a stark soulscape less so with the eyes of Monet? 

May my affectations always be understood.

Sloan Bashinsky

Meanwhile, from Joe Goodman’s article in Al.com:

Before we get into the nasty business of Florida State dropping from No.4 to No.5 in the rankings despite a brilliant win against Louisville in the ACC title game, an even bigger disgrace by the College Football Playoff committee probably first needs to be addressed.

I’m talking about the no-good, dirty-rotten-scoundrel Michigan Wolverines, God bless’m.

Michigan, which won the Big Ten title game on Saturday against Iowa, is lucky to be included in the College Football Playoff at all after the sign-stealing scandal that led to coach Jim Harbaugh being suspended for three games. Michigan shouldn’t even be allowed to compete for a national championship this season, but the morally bereft CFP selection committee chose to turn its head to all that and ignore the fact that the Wolverines gained advantages in games this season by cheating.

So, not only did the CFP tell everyone that it’s OK to cheat by selecting Michigan, the selection committee also ranked Michigan No.1 because of its impressive defense. That leads me to the committee’s laughably corrupt omission of Florida State. Florida State’s defense was better than Michigan’s this season, and FSU didn’t even know what plays were coming.

Don’t take my word for it, though. Just ask the guy who’s probably going to win the Heisman Trophy. He’ll tell you all about it.

LSU’s Jayden Daniels had a great season. Had better numbers than Joe Burrow, or at least that’s what people are saying. Daniels looked pretty ordinary against the Noles, though. In LSU’s 45-24 blowout loss to FSU to begin the season, Daniels was lucky to get out of Orlando without an injury. Daniels had one passing touchdown to one interception in the game and was sacked four times. The Tigers only scored seven points in the second half and would have lost the game no matter who was at quarterback for FSU.

Sloan Bashinsky

Here’s what I wrote in an email to Goodman:

I wonder if you or an AI will get this?

I love your Florida State got the shaft article. Instead of being put into the sports Guantanamo, the Wolverines and their coach got coronated top of the immoral totem pole. I think the head coaches, ADs and presidents of the three schools that got on the totem pole should tell the selection committee, if they don’t remove Michigan and add Florida State, there won’t be a playoff.

Ciao,

Sloan Bashinsky (It bounced back)

Elana 

Thought it was Michigan State.

Sloan Bashinsky

It was Michigan. See my comment above to Eliza re Joe Goodman’s thoughts about it in his article.

Tom

Says: keep doing what you’re doing but don’t get caught!!

Sloan Bashinsky

I think it says, the playoff selection committee will take you even if you get caught.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

President Biden could end the carnage in Gaza with one phone call?

    Carrying forward from the previous If HAMAS had wanted Israel to back off, it would have offered to release all its hostages post, an amazing?, baffling?, otherworldly?, Alice in wonderlandly”, Wizard of Oddly? back and forth with someone using a fake name, which tends to give me the willies in important matters.

Feral Finster
Lord, Biden could end this with a phone call.

If he wanted to.

Sloan Bashinsky

He could try to end it with a phone call, but do you really think Israel would fold? 

Feral Finster

They would have no choice. The US not only provides material support but also strongarms any criticism of Israel.
That said, the point is academic 

Because Biden doesn't even try.  

Sloan Bashinsky

I wish he would try, and I think the fellow leading Israel might tell Biden to chill, if he wanted to keep breathing :-)

Feral Finster

Bull.

Sloan Bashinsky

I don’t think you have had much, if any, dealing with religious fanatics. Can you, instead, imagine the fellow leading Israel telling Biden to chill, or risk forcing Israel to use its nukes to insure its survival against Islam? I wager that threat already has been made behind the scenes. The fellow leading Israel already made the threat publicly.

Feral Finster

So Israel is going to murder the leader of their main base of support. Boy, good thing there's no Secret Service, no religious fanatics who want Biden dead already.

Sloan Bashinsky

You still demonstrate that you know nothing about religious fanatics. If Biden told his counterpart in Israel to stand down, and Trump told his MAGAS that Biden was betraying God, Israel, Christendom, The Holy Land, how do you think that might go for Biden? 

 

Feral Finster

So there never have been religious fanatics threatening the life of a president before?  

Sloan Bashinsky

There has never been anything like Donald Trump and his MAGAs since the North defeated the South. How’d that go for Abe Lincoln? 

 

Feral Finster

That assumes a lot of facts not in evidence. Booth wasn't a religious fanatic and there was no Secret Service to speak of in 1865.

Sloan Bashinsky

The Confederacy was a religion of slavery fanatics. 

How do you think the Kennedy family even today feels about the Secret Service? What happened to John F. Kennedy and Robert F .Kennedy, surrounded by Secret Service agents, and to President Ronald Regan, surrounded by Secret Service agents, is paled by what can happen to people Donald Trump fingers. A New York state judge and his law clerk know all about that. As do the Capitol police and every person in the US Congress on January 6, 2021, and that threat has only gotten much larger. Meanwhile, Israel is pounding Gaza again, and HAMAS is not offering to release all the remaining hostages in exchange for Israel standing down.  

 

Feral Finster

So basically anything you don't like is a "religious fanatic". And what stopped all manner of Muslim fanatics from assassinating every US president since Bush 1.0?

For that matter, if MAGA is this violent cult of Trump automatons ready to do anything their master's behest, what's stopping him from giving the order now?

Sloan Bashinsky

At the core, any kind of fanaticism is a religion. Blaming everything on Israel is a religion. Blaming everything on islam, or HAMAS, is a religion.
Trump gives his lemmings orders ongoing, and they listen carefully to what he is telling them. Look at how they responded on January 6, 2021.
Look how they responded to Trump's condemnations of the New York judge and his law clerk.
Imagine what it will be like for the judges in the other court cases where Trump stands trial. And for the prosecutors, witnesses for the prosecution and jurors. Imagine what it will be like if Trump is convicted. Imagine what it will be like if he is not elected president, again. 

 

Feral Finster

So pretty much everything is a religion,.LO, so by that logic, religious fanatics will never go away, so how can any president do anything? I mean, by your logic, there are millions of "religious fanatics" who don't like Biden's Israel policy and yet Biden isn't cowering in fear of *them*. Nor are the judges who stand over Trump apparently swayed.

And you still don't answer what's stopping Trump from ordering his mindless zombies to attack.*right now*. Why wait?

Sloan Bashinsky

I have to give you credit for persistence, Feral Finster is a great fake name for you :-).
If Biden isn’t concerned for his own safety, and the safety of his family, over how he has dealt with Israel lately, then he truly is sleepy and unwoke, :-)
Yes, just about every movement that persists becomes a religion. That’s why it’s so important not to get tangled up and trapped in any herd. Visiting herds, mingling with herds for a while, is one thing. Becoming trapped in a herd is something else altogether. 
The Democratic Party is a religion. The Republican Party is a religion. Trump started his own religion - MAGA - and he is its Pope, or Führer, if you wish.
The so-called American Founding Fathers very well understood religions, having come from the British Isles, where the King was the Pope. Many early colonists had fled religious oppression. Amendment 1 was passed, among other reasons, to protect freedom  of religious worship and also to protect against any religion taking over the new nation. 
However, religion, or the Devil, if you wish, is very clever and tricky, and has ways of working its way into anything and taking it over and making a mess of things with it, as the American government and its political parties have demonstrated since the end of the Revolutionary War.
Yes, religious fanatics will never go away, because their religions are their reasons for being. That’s what I’ve tried to explain many times in this and other online forums. What’s going on in Gaza and Israel and that region of the world is the result of religious fanaticism. Meaning, there is nothing that will fix it, just as there is nothing that will change the way MAGAS think about Donald Trump, or what Trump thinks about himself. I deal with Democrats who are just as dug in about their religion and Biden. 
I think Trump is criminally insane, or, if you wish, demonically possessed. However, that does not mean he is an idiot. Like Hitler did with most Germans, Trump  figured out how to mesmerize almost half of the people in America. He figured out how to speak to them in code, what he very well knew would get him in a great deal of trouble if he spoke to them in plain English. Yet, he didn’t really speak to them in code leading up to and on January 6, 2021.
Now that Trump is not in office, and is being prosecuted civilly and criminally in courts over which he has no control, he has reverted to very clever guerrilla warfare. If he gets elected president again, he will be far more obvious in what he says.
Every Judge presiding over a court case against Trump knows his/her life is at risk. I know this, because I practiced law a good while in Alabama, and I tried my share of cases before judges and juries, and before that, I clerked for a United States District Judge in Birmingham. I knew that federal judges, who handed down civil rights decisions not pleasing to the KKK, put their lives at risk. A U.S. Court of Appeals Judge, who lived in B/irmingham, was killed by a letter bomb mailed to his home. His wife barely survived. Letter bombs were sent to other people involved in that appellate judge's civil rights decisions.
That said, if I were a judge presiding over Tump's court cases, I would appoint a panel of forensic psychiatrists to determine and advise me whether or not Trump is criminally insane. If they advised me he is criminally insane, I would order him locked up for the public’s protection in a place that houses the criminally insane. 
If the panel of forensic psychiatrists did not so advise me, either because they were sincere, or because they were terrified for their own safety, I would tell Trump and his lawyers that only his lawyers speak in the courtroom, unless Trump is on the witness stand, testifying, or I ask him a question. That’s how court cases operate when a party is represented by legal counsel. 
I would tell Trump and his lawyers, when Trump is on the witness stand, he answers questions in plain English, and if he goes off topic, he gets to go to jail for being in contempt of court, and he stays there until he agrees to conduct himself the way a party to a court proceeding is supposed to contact him or her self. 
If I let Trump out of jail and he ignores my order, I put him back in jail and have a one-way Zoom-like video beamed into his cell, so he can see and hear what is going on.
If at anytime, in court, on social media, or talking with the news media away from court, Trump says anything that I think threatens me, any court employee, the prosecution team, a witness, the jury, I hold him in criminal contempt of court, which is very different from civil contempt, and I leave him in jail until hell freeze over, or a higher court overrules me, and if that happens, I resign and invite the appellate judges to preside over the case.
Along the way, I fully expect to be killed. 

 

Feral Finster

Lol, by your meandering logic, any politician anywhere is unable to act at all. Because "religious fanatics", itself a term so broad as to be meaningl

And the only thing your insistence on beclowning yourself over and over is is to tell us about your prejudices.

Sloan Bashinsky

Politicians act all the time, for better and for worse. Hedges is running an Inquisition against Israel and giving HAMAS a pass. I agree with prosecuting Israel, but don’t agree with giving HAMAS a pass. That’s where I seem to have split off from Hedges, you, and everyone else I have interacted with under Hedges's newsletters, and other other newsletters which take the same approach as Hedges. 

The Israel button in America is red hot. It has been red hot for a long time. The American religious right are fanatical to support Israel. Trump knows that, and he uses it to keep them loyal. President Biden is a pussy, in my opinion. He should have told Israel to lay low after October 7, or lose his support. Biden didn’t do that. Had he done it, he would have put his life and his family members’ lives at risk, even without Trump egging on the pro-Israel fanatics in America. I think you need to talk with someone else about all of that. Godspeed.

    After all of that happened, I “accidentally" stumbled across a December 2, 2023 London Times article, which reports sexual and other atrocities committed by HAMAS against women during the October 7 attack. The Times article should, but probably won’t, obliterate any notion that HAMAS is not an Islamic terrorist organization, which hoped Israel would respond as it has in Gaza.

    Here’s the text of the article.

First Hamas fighters raped her. Then they shot her in the head

The terrorists were ‘on a mission’ to carry out sexual attacks on October 7. Campaigners have asked why the UN stayed silent

December 2 2023, The Sunday Times

She had, he says, the face of an angel. Night after night Yoni Saadon, 39, wakes in anguish to the faces of women.

First, that of the young woman hiding next to him under the stage of the Supernova festival where he had been dancing to electronic music as the sun rose on October 7 and Hamas militants opened fire.

“She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too,” he said. “I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying ‘I’m sorry’.”

After an hour, he peeked out. “I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her. She was screaming, ‘Stop it — already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head.

“I kept thinking it could have been one of my daughters,” added the father of four. “Or my sister — I had bought her a ticket but last minute she couldn’t come.”

The horror did not end there. Hiding in bushes, he saw two more Hamas fighters. “They had caught a young woman near a car and she was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too,” he says.

Saadon, a shift manager in a foundry, told his story to The Sunday Times in a support area set up in Sitria, southeast of Tel Aviv, for survivors of the festival.

Three times a week survivors from around Israel get together with parents whose children were among those slaughtered. On Wednesday evening they gathered on sofas as people brought them beers and steaming bowls of vegetable soup, then went outside to sit round a firepit as the singer Rona Kenan strummed her guitar and sang ballads.

Volunteer therapists on hand included Bar Yuval-Shani, 58, who lost her only sister, Deborah, and brother-in-law, Shlomi Matias, both musicians and peace activists, killed on Holit kibbutz by militants who broke into their safe room. “She was eight years younger but [it was] as if we were twins,” she said tearfully. “I held all her secrets and I miss her terribly.”

Deborah died shielding her son Rotem, 16, who was shot in the abdomen then hid for nine hours as fighters returned again and again, and Yuval-Shani guided him over the phone in how to treat himself.

Yoni Saadon’s account is one of several witness accounts of rape Yuval-Shani has heard from festival survivors, all of whom, she says, are “deeply traumatised”.

Eight weeks after the attack in which 1,200 were killed and 240 taken hostage, there is mounting evidence of widespread rape on October 7. Israeli police have begun their biggest investigation into sexual violence and crimes against women. “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people,” says Shelly Harush, the police commander leading the investigation.

They have collected thousands of statements, photographs and video clips, which she says “as a Jewish mother the mind and soul cannot bear”, including “girls whose pelvises were broken they had been raped so much”.

The first indications came on the day itself when Hamas livestreamed some of the horrors it was perpetrating. Footage showed several women stripped of their clothing. One video showed a young woman with bloodstains on the crotch of her underwear.

“We didn’t understand at first,” says Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an expert on international law who heads a civilian commission into Hamas crimes against women on October 7. Survivors arriving at hospitals were not asked about sexual abuse or given rape kits for evidence.

However, those tasked with collecting the bodies began reporting that many of the women were naked and bleeding from the genitals.

Haim Outmezgine, commander of a special unit of Zaka, a voluntary religious organisation that collects the remains of the dead, including their blood, so they can be buried in accordance with Jewish tradition, has no doubt about what they saw.

“We collected 1,000 bodies in ten days from the festival site and kibbutzim,” he said. “No one saw more than us. “It was clear they were trying to spread as much horror as they could — to kill, to burn alive, to rape … it seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”

He describes finding two girls’ bodies in a field, both shot in the head, legs apart, one with shorts ripped and shot in the vagina and other with jeans pulled down and bruises on her legs. A father of six, he finds it hard to talk about. “One of my girls is 24, around the same age,” he says. His team are all receiving therapy.

Once the bodies were collected they were taken to the main morgue at the Shura military base to be identified and prepared for burial. Among volunteers in an all-female team to prepare female corpses was Shari, 60, an architect who lives in Jerusalem.

Working there day and night for two weeks starting the morning after, she describes scenes of unimaginable horror. “This is a huge building but there were literally body bags filling every room and lining corridors floor to ceiling, all oozing liquids.

“Opening the body bags was scary as we didn’t know what we would see. They were all young women. Most in little clothing or shredded clothing and their bodies bloodied particularly round their underwear and some women shot many times in the face as if to mutilate them.

“Their faces were in anguish and often their fingers clenched as they died. We saw women whose pelvises were broken. Legs broken. There were women who had been shot in the crotch, in the breasts … there seems no doubt what happened to them.”

Her team had to wait while doctors, dentists and DNA experts worked to identify the bodies before they could then gently put them in white linen burial shrouds. “We are just normal women not doctors, we never expected to see such horrors,” she said. Yet what really made them cry was the occasional flash of colour. “Some bodies we took out had pretty pink or bright purple nails — and we would all pause and at that point many of us broke down.”

As more and more reports emerged, Elkayam-Levy was shocked at the lack of international reaction from bodies such as UN Women. On the eighth day she gathered a group of international law and women’s rights experts, including 160 law professors, and drafted letters to UN agencies sharing everything.

The initial response, she says, was silence. “It was absurd that it was so documented yet accompanied by so much silence. One of the UN’s own values is ‘believe women’ as crimes against women are always denied but they failed to believe us — the very organisations meant to protect us failed us.”

The women established a civilian commission to collect videos, photos, and witness statements into a database, both as an archive but also to raise international awareness.

Elkayam-Levy says these make clear what Hamas was trying to achieve. “They wanted to terrorise us for generations to come and instil in us insecurity in the most basic way, and that’s why they targeted women in this way.

“I’m a feminist,” she adds, “I teach and fight for women’s rights, yet after October 7 I told my husband to get a gun. For me to want a weapon and put it in my house — against everything I believe in and ever believed in — shows what they did to us.”

Israel Defence Forces (IDF) sources claim that Hamas fighters captured in Gaza have told them in interrogations that they were instructed to “dirty” or “whore” the women. They also showed The Sunday Times photographs and footage not previously seen and too graphic to publish.

Some have questioned the accounts because of the IDF use of propaganda and the fact no victims have come forward. But Dr Dvora Baumann, director of the Bat Ami Centre for Victims of Sexual Abuse at Hadassah hospital, points out: “Usually people who are sexually abused don’t report it for a long time because it is so hard to talk about and they worry they will be judged. We have plenty of other evidence. I’ve been in this field over 20 years and I have never heard such horrific things.”

Most of the women are believed to have been killed or taken hostage. There are reports some survivors of the festival survivors have taken their own lives, while 18 are receiving treatment in mental institutions.

Some fear that those remaining are being held as sex slaves by Hamas commanders in the same way as Islamic State (Isis) did with Yazidis in 2014.

Paradoxically, in a world where rape is being used as a weapon of war everywhere from Ethiopia to Ukraine, this had been cited as one conflict where it did not happen.

Hamas denies that its fighters rape women. One official, Basem Naim, told The Washington Post that the group considers “any sexual relationship or activity outside of marriage to be completely haram” — forbidden by Islam.

Palestinian women say they too have suffered sexual violence in Israeli jails, a claim denied by Israeli officials.

The International Criminal Court has announced it will investigate the October 7 attacks and the situation in Gaza where about 15,000 people have been killed and fighting resumed on Friday. Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor, has spent the last two days in Israel meeting survivors and hostage families in Tel Aviv and visiting the West Bank. “We will investigate crimes within our jurisdiction … depending on the information we have and evidence potentially available,” he said. This is expected to include sexual violence.

For the past week, a delegation of Israeli feminists and human rights experts have been in Geneva and New York lobbying to be heard. Tomorrow they will protest outside the UN headquarters, and Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Facebook, will speak.

On Friday night UN Women finally issued a statement condemning the October 7 attacks. “We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during these attacks,” it said.

Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, who spent 12 years as a committee member on the UN convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (Cedaw), said: “This is the statement they should have issued two months ago.

“It’s mindblowing. We were there for our sisters when terrible things happened across the ocean, when they took away abortion rights in US, the killing of women in Iran, the abduction of Yazidis … but with us they looked away and I can’t think of a reasonable answer.”

Ayelet Razin Bet Or, the former director of Israel’s authority for the advancement of the status of women, does have an answer. “Israeli women have been betrayed,” she said. “What they are saying is MeToo except if you’re a Jew.”

slooanbashinsky@yahoo.com

If HAMAS had wanted Israel to back off, it would have offered to release all its hostages

    Widely respected American war correspondent Chris Hedges and a whole lot of people seem to ignore, if HAMAS had wanted Israel to back off, HAMAS would have offered to release all of its hostages.

The Chris Hedges Report

Israel Reopens the Gaza Slaughterhouse

Phase One of Israel’s genocidal campaign on Gaza has ended. Phase Two has begun. It will result in even higher levels of death and destruction. 

CHRIS HEDGES

DEC 1, 2023

Slaughterhouse - by Mr. Fish

The skies over Gaza are filled — after a seven-day truce — with projectiles of death. Warplanes. Attack helicopters. Drones. Artillery shells. Tank shells. Mortars. Bombs. Missiles. Gaza is a cacophony of explosions and forlorn screams and cries for help beneath collapsed buildings. Fear, once again, is coiling itself around every heart in the Gazan concentration camp. 

By Friday evening, 184 Palestinians — including three journalists and two doctors — had been killed by Israeli air strikes in the north, south and central Gaza, and at least 589 injured, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. Most of them are women and children. Israel will not be deterred. It plans to finish the job, to obliterate what is left in the north of Gaza and decimate what remains in the south, to render Gaza uninhabitable, to see its 2.3 million people driven out in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing via starvation, terror, slaughter and infectious diseases. 

The aid convoys, which brought in token amounts of food and medicine — the first batch was shrouds and coronavirus tests according to the director of al-Najjar hospital — have been halted. No one, least of all President Joe Biden, plans to intervene to stop the genocide. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel this week, and while calling for Israel to protect civilians, refused to set conditions that would disrupt the $3.8 billion Israel receives in annual military assistance or the $14.3 billion supplemental aid package. The world will watch passively, muttering useless bromides about more surgical strikes, while Israel spins its roulette wheel of death. By the time Israel is done, the 1948 Nakba, where Palestinians were massacred in dozens of villages and 750,000 were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias, will look like a quaint relic of a more civilized era. 

Nothing is off limits. Hospitals. Mosques. Churches. Homes. Apartment blocks. Refugee camps. Schools. Universities. Media offices. Banks. Sewer systems. Telecommunications infrastructure. Water treatment plants. Libraries. Wheat mills. Bakeries. Markets. Entire neighborhoods. Israel’s intent is to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure and daily kill or wound hundreds of Palestinians. Gaza is to become a wasteland, a dead zone that will be incapable of sustaining life. 

Israel began to bomb Khan Younis on Friday after dropping leaflets warning civilians to evacuate further south to Rafah, located on the border crossing with Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians had sought refuge in Khan Younis. Once Palestinians are pushed to Rafah, there is only one place left to flee — Egypt. The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, in a leaked report, calls for the forcible transfer of Gaza’s population to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. A detailed plan to intentionally displacethe Palestinians in Gaza and push them into Egypt has been embedded in Israeli doctrine for five decades. Already, 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza have been driven from their homes. Once Palestinians cross the border into Egypt — which the Egyptian government and Arab leaders are seeking to prevent despite pressure from the U.S. — Palestinians will never return. 

This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against Palestinians.

Israeli strikes are generated at a dizzying rate, many of them from a system called “Habsora” — The Gospel — which is built on artificial intelligence that selects 100 targets a day. The AI-system is described by seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials in an article by Yuval Abraham on the Israeli sites +972 Magazine and Local Call, as facilitating a “mass assassination factory.” Israel, once it locates what it assumes to be a Hamas operative from a cell phone, for example, bombs and shells a wide area around the target, killing and wounding tens, and at times hundreds of Palestinians, the article states.

“According to intelligence sources,” the story reads, “Habsora generates, among other things, automatic recommendations for attacking private residences where people suspected of being Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives live. Israel then carries out large-scale assassination operations through the heavy shelling of these residential homes.”

Some 15,000 Palestinians, including 6,000 children and 4,000 women, have been killedsince Oct. 7. Some 30,000 have been wounded. Over six thousand are missing, many buried under the rubble. More than 300 families have lost 10 or more members of their families. More than 250 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, and more than 3,000 injured, although the area is not controlled by Hamas. The Israeli military claims to have killed between 1,000 and 3,000 of some 30,000 Hamas fighters, a relatively small number given the scale of the assault. Most resistance fighters shelter in their vast tunnel system. 

Israel’s playbook is the “Dahiya Doctrine.” The doctrine was formulated by former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who is a member of the war cabinet, following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dahiya is a southern Beirut suburb and a Hezbollah stronghold. It was pounded by Israeli jets after two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. The doctrine posits that Israel should employ massive, disproportionate force, destroying infrastructure and civilian residences, to ensure deterrence.

Daniel Hagari, spokesman of the IDF, conceded at the start of Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza that the “emphasis” would be “on damage and not on accuracy.”

Israel has abandoned its tactic of “roof knocking” where a rocket without a warhead would land on a roof to warn those inside to evacuate. Israel has also ended its phone calls warning of an impending attack. Now dozens of families in an apartment block or a neighborhood are killed without notice. 

The images of mass destruction feed the thirst for revenge within Israel following the humiliating incursion by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7 and the killing of 1,200 Israelis, including 395 soldiers and 59 police officers. There is a sadistic pleasure voiced by many Israelis over the genocide and a groundswell of calls for the murder or expulsion of Palestinians, including those in the occupied West Bank and those with Israeli citizenship. 

The savagery of the air strikes and indiscriminate attacks, the cutting off of food, water and medicine, the genocidal rhetoric of the Israeli government, make this a war whose sole objective is revenge. This will not be good for Israel or the Palestinians. It will fuel a conflagration throughout the Middle East. 

Israel’s attack is the last desperate measure of a settler colonial project that foolishly thinks, as many settler colonial projects have in the past, that it can crush the resistance of an indigenous population with genocide. But even Israel will not get away with killing on this scale. A generation of Palestinians, many of whom have seen most, if not all, of their families killed and their homes and neighborhoods destroyed, will carry within them a lifelong thirst for justice and retribution. 

This war is not over. It has not even begun.  

    

Feral Finster

"Nothing is off limits. Hospitals. Mosques. Churches. Homes. Apartment blocks. Refugee camps. Schools. Universities. Media offices. Banks. Sewer systems. Telecommunications infrastructure. Water treatment plants. Libraries. Wheat mills. Bakeries. Markets. Entire neighborhoods. Israel’s intent is to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure and daily kill or wound hundreds of Palestinians. Gaza is to become a wasteland, a dead zone that will be incapable of sustaining life."

All of this is entirely intentional, as the recent article in the Israeli publication +972 confirms. 

The question remains - what is anyone going to do about it?

staircase whit

Do about it? The "elites" will benefit financially, and by the time they are up for election, most of the normie nod-alongs will have shrugged it off.

Because most people are watching this like it's a tv show for their entertainment, opportunities to pontificate about the propaganda they drink down like the alcohol that helps them deal with their miserable, worthless lives. I am there, you are there, among these fuckwits - family and "friends" alike. I had hope that word would spread, that eyes would open. Nope.They will wait for the next episode. They will do nothing.

Sloan Bashinsky

Can anyone do anything about it, except the people running Israel and the people running HAMAS? The UN is going to invade GAZA and Israel? What if HAMAS had released all the hostages yesterday? We’ll never know. But what looks crystal clear to me is, this is the result HAMAS wanted when it launched the October 7 attack.

Penelope Pnortney

Which makes Palestinians, including children who don't even know what Hamas is, acceptable collateral damage? There is no justification for what we're witnessing, none.

Sloan Bashinsky

I completely agree with you - there is no justification; yet, this is what HAMAS hoped would happen, to destroy Israel’s reputation. HAMAS views the dead and wounded Gazans as martyrs for HAMAS’ cause. When HAMAS was founded, its stated intent was to destroy Israel. It’s a religious war, and I don’t see any solution for as long as Israel exists in Palestine. The American Christian right and even the left back Israel’s right to exist. And, that’s Christendom’s Holy Land, where Jesus was born and crucified at the behest of Jewish leaders. They want Israel to protect their Holy Land, and they really believe God promised that land to Israel, because their Bible says so.

Feral Finster

Israel is the one dropping the bombs, not your preferred culture war enemies, reprehensible as their support is.

Sloan Bashinsky

I don’t like either side, but this is what HAMAS hoped would happen, and so I blast them, too, and I blast people who don’t blast them, too :-)

Selina Sweet

So, Mr. Bashinsky, had a block of Jewish prisoners in Buckenvald concentration camp managed to overcome their captors, escaped and mowed down every German on sight, you'd view them as you view Hamas?

Sloan Bashinsky

Not in the least, i would view them as saints. But that’s not what this is about. HAMAS’ was founded to destroy Israel. Israel knows that and believes it. HAMAS got the result it wanted when it attacked Israel on October 7, which was my birthday. I simply cannot imagine why Hedges and Israel bashers cannot see that, and why they aren’t bashing HAMAS, too.

Selina Sweet

You may want to check out Caitlin Johnstone's piece today (www.caitlinjohnst.one) entitled "The Goal Is Ethnic Cleansing, Not Defeating Hamas."

Sloan Bashinsky

I started reading Caitlan’s newsletter after she subscribed to mine about 2 weeks ago and invited me to subscribe to hers. She’s just as reluctant to lay any blame on HAMAS as Hedges and lots of other people at her and Hedges’ platforms.

Feral Finster

Assumes facts not in evidence.

Sloan Bashinsky

The facts are in plain view :-) Of course Israel is trying to put pressure on HAMAS. Unfortunately, Israel is doing what HAMAS hoped Israel would do. You clearly do not understand religious fanatics. 

Feral Finster

You present no facts.

A damning new report from +972 Magazine published on Thursday exposes how Israel has been deliberately striking civilian targets in Gaza as a matter of policy because they believe it will “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas.” It makes it clear that the IDF is very much aware of where the civilians are, and that when they kill children it’s because they calculated that it would be strategically worthwhile to do so.

Sloan Bashinsky

The facts in plain view are what HAMAS did and how Israel responded, and still is responding. If HAMAS had wanted to stop Israel, it would have offered to release all its hostages. 

 

Penelope Pnortney

And Israel was ready and willing to turn the Palestinians into martyrs, great teamwork if what you said is true.

Sloan Bashinsky
Do you think any of this would be happening, if HAMAS had not done what it did on October 7? Do you seriously think HAMAS did not know how Israel would respond? The October 7 attack was bait, plain and simple. Israel took the bait. If I were a Gaza citizen, still living, I would be really pissed off at HAMAS and Israel. 

 

Penelope Pnortney

Numerous Israeli officials have been clearly stating their intentions toward Palestine and Palestinians since long before the Hamas provocation. Acting like Israel's current acts of brutality would not be occurring had the Oct. 7th attack not happened is unbelievably dishonest, the most you can claim is that it might not be occurring *right now*. I wouldn't feel warm fuzzies toward Hamas if I were Gazan but I would hate with the heat of ten thousand suns the people dropping bombs on me, destroying my home and killing my friends and relatives.

Sloan Bashinsky

That’s what I’m saying. The Oct 7 attack is the reason for what is occurring right now, and HAMMAs did not offer to release all its hostages in exchange for Israel not attacking Gaza further.  

 

dorothy slater

One could also say that this is precisely what Netenyahu wanted. It is now known that the Israelis knew a year before the attack that Hamas was plaanning something and warned Netenyahu and yet what did he do? He removed tha security forces . One captured Hamas "terrorist" said that they were anticipating being shot death the minute they crossed into Israel but the entire place was empty. Now one COULD say - and some have - that the attack gave Netenyahu the freedom to do what he has always wanted to do- get rid of the Palestinians once and for all - and so 1200 Israelis died, collateral damage and all of that. If Hamas is a terrorist group - who exactly are Netenyahu and his Likud supporters?

Sloan Bashinsky

Terrorists. Both sides you named.
If I had been America’s president, I would have told Israel privately that the October 7 attack was Israel’s version of 9/11, which Israel’s government had done its part to cause, like America had done its part to cause 9/11, and If Israel attacks Gaza, then, as far as I have any say, Israel is on its own, my administration has nothing to do with it. I then would hold a nationally televised press conference and tell America and the world what I had told Israel privately. I then would expect me and my family members to receive oceans of death threats from the American right wing, and a smaller number of death threats from the American left.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com