May 14, 2025

Subject line: Should Israel Be Declared A Terrorist Entity?

MASTER LIST of Articles DWF NEWS 5/14/25

Should "Israel" Be Declared A Terrorist Entity?

Kevin Barrett

Israel Is Spiraling

Ori Goldberg       The Nation

 'Our Position on Palestine Is Not Fringe'

Janine Jackson        FAIR

 Latecomers starting to join PEOPLE OF CONSCIENCE

Multiple Western Press Outlets Have Suddenly Pivoted Hard Against Israel

Caitlin Johnstone

False enemies a repeatedly used tactic to maintain the War Business

Why Western Governments Are Beating the Drums for Wars

Eric Zuesse     The Duran

How To Make Your Mind Harder For the Propagandists To Manipulate

Caitlin Johnstone

WELCOME TO WORLD PUBLIC INTEREST JOURNALISM

I have considered the Palestinian genocide to be an example of the "demonic": Jewish Zionists have conveniently convinced themselves that Yahweh (God) meant for them to own the so-called Promised Land. Israeli Zionists, as a result, are "tricked" into committing mass murder telling themselves that God meant it to be.

The Zionists use all kinds of clever mental excuses to try to justify Israel's massive killing of defenseless civilians, including thousands of children. Or to justify stealing Palestinian lands and homes: "Gaza and the West Bank are part of our Jewish homeland given by Yahweh, it never belonged to the Palestinians!"

Psychologists know that these intellectual explanations for immoral values and brutal criminal behaviors are rationalizations -- a means to emotionally maintain one's self-respect: "I'm not a bad person for doing this." "I had no choice." "If we didn't destroy them, they would destroy us." "Blame Hamas, not Israel!"

Except the facts on the ground for all to see are an ongoing Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people, a world crime that the UN with its flawed Charter cannot stop, and a reason to take seriously the need for a "new UN" with a democratic world parliament utilizing the Earth Constitution. -- R. Kotila, PhD

Should "Israel" Be Declared A Terrorist Entity?

Kevin Barrett

EXCERPTS

The whole notion of terrorism really ought to be retired. Invented to describe state violence at the time of the French Revolution, the term now oscillates nonsensically between two definitions: 1) Political violence against civilians, and 2) The behavior of people we really don’t like.

But before we relinquish the word terrorism, and teach AI to never, ever allow anyone to use it, even if the whole universe were at stake, let’s get some positive mileage out of it. Let’s use it to stop a genocide. How? By declaring “Israel” a terrorist entity.

That would be only fitting and just. “Israel” doesn’t merely fit both definitions of terrorism. It epitomizes them.

“Israel” is not a thing, it’s a process (like everything else, according to Whitehead) and that process is one long story of ongoing violence against civilians designed to kill some while terrorizing others into fleeing, leaving their property for the “Israelis” to steal. ...

The moment “Israel” is declared a terrorist entity, all members and supporters of “Israel” will immediately be subject to the above-mentioned sanctions, just like members and supporters of ISIS and al-Qaeda have been. Specifically, all so-called “Israeli citizens” will be deemed presumptive terrorists and dealt with accordingly. And anyone who has given money or any other kind of material support to “Israel” or to fronts like AIPAC, JINSA, or the ADL will likewise be singled out ... READ MORE

https://kevinbarrett.substack.com/p/should-israel-be-declared-a-terrorist

 Israel Is Spiraling

Ori Goldberg       The Nation

The government’s genocidal fervor is ripping through the carefully constructed layers of self-delusion that power this country. 

EXCERPTS

 Israel is spiraling. The bombardment, siege, and starvation of Gaza continue unrelentingly, and the direct genocidal incitement coming from senior members of the country’s government toward the people of Gaza is, somehow, getting worse. Betzalel Smotrich, minister of finance and minister for West Bank affairs at the Ministry of Defense, says that the plan is clear: move forward, occupy territory (not just in Gaza but in Lebanon and Syria as well), remove “enemy subjects” and hold that territory indefinitely. What could “removal” mean but genocide? Why does Israel consider itself above all existing international law? Why doesn’t “the world” stop Israel when this “world” is fully cognizant of what is happening? ...

... The great majority of Israelis do not oppose the genocide, but it is important for them to justify it through the prism of “security,” the most sacrosanct of Israeli values. Security, in this context, means that Israelis are allowed to kill as many people as deemed necessary (including civilians) to keep their own lives safe. As long as Israel’s actions in Gaza are meant to “destroy Hamas,” it may be possible to think of the devastation of the genocide in terms of “we’re not starving Gaza; it’s Hamas that steals all the food from the population” or “in war, bad things happen to good people. ..."

Smotrich and Ben Gvir are also defined by their anger and sense of entitlement. They see their constituencies as having been denied effective power (Ben Gvir) or elite status (Smotrich) for too long. The populists are known for their greedy sense of urgency the world over, applying pressure to the state and leveraging every crack in the latter’s armor.

The settlers, who view the establishment of the Israeli state as the beginning of Israel’s divinely promised redemption, are just as greedy. Their reality has been one of constant bamboozling for decades, stealing Palestinian land seemingly on their own but with the discreet help of the Israeli state. But the era of discretion is over. As conditions appear more and more favorable, zeal and cupidity complement each other into a sense of “now or never.”

READ MORE

'Our Position on Palestine Is Not Fringe'

Janine Jackson        FAIR

 [J.J.'s CounterSpin interview with Danaka Katovich on attacks on activists]

EXCERPTS

 And the very next day or two days later, Sen. Jim Banks, in a different Senate hearing, repeated and regurgitated the same lies about us, and asked Pam Bondi to investigate CODEPINK for these fake and not real ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

And they’re doing that to—you know, we’re very in their face. We’re in Congress every single day, challenging them on the genocide in Gaza, and their support for the genocide in Gaza, and their constant willingness to ignore the American public. It’s their job to listen to the American public and represent us, but they don’t do that. And we’re very in their face, and they’re trying to intimidate us, and scare us into being quiet.

JJ: MAGA couldn’t hate CODEPINK any more than they do, to the extent that they know you exist. So is the hope to isolate CODEPINK, even among other pro-Palestinian groups?

DK: ... In my honest assessment, I think they are going after us because we’re a well-known group—online, at least—and we post everything that happens to us, and all the interactions that we have, to educate the public on what’s really going on in Congress. So I don’t think it’s to isolate us from the Palestine movement. If it is, it’s absolutely not working.

But when it’s a group, when it’s CODEPINK or all these other Palestine organizations, they don’t ask these critical-thinking questions that they’ve asked when it happens to individuals. So, when someone accuses a feminist organization in the US of being funded by a foreign government, I would like to hear them challenge that, because it’s a direct attack on civil society. We are a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and they’re trying to take us down a peg, and even mainstream media who claim to support women’s rights and all of these things don’t even question it at all. ...

READ MORE

Latecomers starting to join the PEOPLE OF CONSCIENCE

Multiple Western Press Outlets Have Suddenly Pivoted Hard Against Israel

Caitlin Johnstone

EXCERPTS

After a year and a half of genocidal atrocities, the editorial boards of numerous British press outlets have suddenly come out hard against Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza.

The first drop of rain came last week from The Financial Times in a piece by the editorial board titled “The west’s shameful silence on Gaza,” which denounces the US and Europe for having “issued barely a word of condemnation” of their ally’s criminality, saying they “should be ashamed of their silence, and stop enabling Netanyahu to act with impunity.”

Pro-Israel pundit Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, who had been aggressively denouncing campus protesters and accusing Israel’s critics of “blood libel” throughout the Gaza holocaust, has now come out and publicly admitted that Israel is committing a genocide which must be opposed.

“It took me a long time to get to this point, but it’s time to face it. Israel is committing genocide in Gaza,” Ephraim tweeted recently. “Between the indiscriminate bombing of hospitals, starvation of the population, plans for ethnic cleansing, slaughter of aid workers and cover ups, there is no escaping it. Israel is trying to eradicate the Palestinian people. We can’t stop it unless we admit it.”

It is odd that it has taken all these people a year and a half to get to this point. I myself have a much lower tolerance for genocide and the mass murder of children. If you’ve been riding the genocide train for nineteen months, it looks a bit weird to suddenly start screaming about how terrible it is and demanding to hit the brakes all of a sudden.

These people have not suddenly evolved a conscience, they’re just smelling what’s in the wind. Once the consensus shifts past a certain point there’s naturally going to be a mad rush to avoid being among the last to stand against it, because you know you’ll be wearing that mark for the rest of your life in public after history has had a clear look at what you did.  READ MORE

False enemies a repeatedly used tactic to maintain the War Business

Why Western Governments Are Beating the Drums for Wars

Eric Zuesse     The Duran

EXCERPTS

 And the way to do this is the type of scare-mongering that European Governments are doing right now to the effect that Russia is planning to conquer their countries, and that America’s Government is doing right now in order to scare-monger Americans to the effect that China is planning to conquer America — and that the U.S. Government had used also in 2002 and 2003 in order to scare-monger Americans into thinking that Iraq was preparing to attack America. This is the basic marketing plan for those billionaires, and it has always been extremely profitable for them.

The only parts of American, German, British, French, and Italian industry that are booming right now, are their armaments manufacturers — the companies that sell far more to governments than to consumers, and that therefore boom while the economy busts. These are the companies that need to control the Government in order to control their biggest market (which IS the Government), and so their controlling owners, the billionaires who control their boards, need to control the influencers of the public, in order to get their candidates elected into Government so as to increase Government spending on their products and services, and to either increase the national debt or else cut the Government’s expenditures for the health, education, and welfare, of the voters.

Those “influencers of the public” are news-media, and are also the prestigious universities, and think tanks, whose professors and experts they hire as opinion-writers etc. to validate what these billionaires want to be validated so that the public will then vote for the politicians who support this idea of increasing the public debt and decreasing public spending for the benefit of the public, in order to increase military spending.      READ MORE

How To Make Your Mind Harder For the Propagandists To Manipulate

Caitlin Johnstone

The domestic propaganda that westerners are fed by the powerful does not typically consist of whole-cloth fabrications, but rather of distortions, half-truths, manipulated emphasis, and lies by omission.

EXCERPTS

The worst mistake you can make when reading the news is to assume there’s a good reason why the mass media report on something in the way that they do. ... ... That there must be a valid and legitimate reason why one story gets more coverage than a seemingly far more important story, like how the release of one Israeli-American hostage is currently getting far more news media coverage than the deliberate starvation of an entire enclave full of civilians.

In reality there is no valid and legitimate reason why such things are covered the way they are. The coverage happens in the way that it happens because it serves the information interests of Israel and the western empire, and for no other reason.

The only way to get around this is to maintain an acute awareness of what’s being reported while ignoring distorting factors like frequency, emphasis and tone. ...  ... If you come across a key piece of information about the empire’s criminality you’ve got to hold onto it and remember its significance for yourself, because the imperial press sure aren’t going to remind you. They’re going to be acting like it never happened by next week.

It’s bizarre once you start noticing how much of a disconnect there is between reality and the mass media’s reporting on world events. They’ll occasionally mention actual important things, but there’s no accurate sense of proportionality to any of it. It’s like if you were at a restaurant with a friend and a waiter’s uniform caught fire, and your friend just casually mentioned “Oh that guy’s on fire” before going back to talking about the meal for the rest of the conversation while the guy burned to death at the other end of the room. It is utterly surreal.   READ MORE

 https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/05/13/how-to-make-your-mind-harder-for-the-propagandists-to-manipulate/