Palestine and Israel: Desperate Peoples sometimes lash out

As the much and wrongly maligned Neville Chamberlain correctly observed, There will be no winners only losers...  Hamas backed fighters launched a massive assault from the Gaza Strip against Israel.  Besides the massed rocket attacks and small arms fire-fights, the Hamas extremists took many hostages during deep incursions into Israel, using a combined air, sea, and land operation.

Hurt people, hurt people.  This attack is not an Ex Nihilo event and there is no point in claiming who has suffered more or who started what whose grievances are greater because no one has the moral high ground, no one can claim their suffering is superior to others. Whatever analysis you read, understand a lot of innocent people are going to die because of the extremist leaders of Israel and Hamas.

But, some understanding of why Hamas would indeed launch such an attack knowing that the Israeli reprisal is likely to be massive and indiscriminate.  The Gaza Strip is tantamount to an open-air prison, or a Ghetto if you will.  The 2 million peoples there live in an area smaller than the area of the city of Chicago.

Besides the settlers taking land (officially "stopped" in 2005), the Israeli government controls water and power for the people living there and has engaged in less-than-careful killing of civilians during the short Hamas/Israel wars in 2009 and 2014.  The penning in of civilians in Gaza has been a slow grinding genocide, punctuated by brutality from IDF soliders.  This story from 2020 recounts how Israeli snipers wounded hundreds of demonstrators, 

"I know exactly how many knees I’ve hit," says Eden, who completed his service in the Israel Defense Forces as a sniper in its Golani infantry brigade six months ago. For much of the time, he was stationed along the border with the Gaza Strip. 

But, the propaganda value of "Palestine" and the plight of the Palestinian people long ago lost it's luster in the Arab World.  But, let's ignore the unctuous rightwing take of Newt Gingrich's who declared there are no Palestinians only Arabs since the inference would mean there are no Americans only Europeans in North America (and the Indigenous peoples we slaughtered, cheated, and swindled out of their land). 

I fear the Israeli military reprisals for these Hamas terrorist attacks, savage kidnappings, and brutal murders are going to be draconian, blood-thirsty, with little care for collateral damage, and a near-total disregard for Gaza residents.  I'm imagining a 10:1 ratio or worse.

"I can tell you tonight that the people of Gaza will have to take into consideration that they will have to pay a price and we will advise them to take steps to avoid any casualties,” Danny Danon, a member of the Israeli Knesset says it will “not be easy” for the people of Gaza tonight. told Al Jazeera from Tel Aviv. “We will be efficient, and we will do whatever it takes to hunt them [Hamas] down.”

Civilians in Gaza have no where to go so, Nehtanyahu's warning for non-combatants to leave is trite at best and tantamount to justifying the coming war crimes.  Already the death count is over 1000 and the expected long Israeli counter-offensive is sure to involve ground forces conducting Urban Warfare.  Benjamin Netanyahu is a Fascist as is his Likud Party. His absurd lies helped to push the US into War with Iraq;

"If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region."

And Netanyahu has pushed lies trying to get the US to attack every Islamic Nation.  But, his corruption, militant authoritarian beliefs, and current attempts to completely subvert the tattered Israeli Democracy were his whole focus leading up to this attack.  And perhaps worst off all Netanyahu encouraged the rightwing domestic Israeli extremists in 1995, who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin.  When Rabin was murdered the two-state solution was killed with him.  Since then, the official Israeli plan has been a slow-moving elimination of the Palestinian people and state.

But, it's never time to criticize Israel or Israeli apartheid policies.  So, we have a War.   

In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers. -  Neville Chamberlain 1938

Chicago Blackhawks Pride Night and the Coming Night of the Long Guns

"It's important to show Hockey's for everyone..."  Defenseman Connor Murphy was asked about the Blackhawks decision concerning NHL Pride Night 

 

The NHL came up with a Pride Night and like all major leagues it's kind of plastered onto the sport as a way to sell tickets and merchandise.

Major League Baseball has had a Memorial Day and Mother's Day branding for years.  This mainly been a cynical cash grab via the sale of pink bats, caps, wristbands, and other gear and camo-festooned baseball equipment.

Unfortunately, the Chicago Blackhawks fumbled their Pride Night and it didn't go unnoticed by fans who attended specifically for "Pride Night".  The Hawks scrapped plans to have players wear the Pride sweaters during pre-game skate around citing concern for their Russian players - and their families still in Russia.

In case you were unaware Putin's Russia, when not committing war crimes in Ukraine, has draconian Anti-Homosexuality laws which it's violent state apparatus is more than willing to enforce.  So, the NHL decided to offer teams the ability to opt out entirely as well as allowing Russian born players to decline to wear any Pride gear.

But, the NHL and Blackhawks ham-handed Pride Night foibles took a back page to the mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.  And the violent eliminationist rhetoric which the Right feels absolutely free and comfortable in expressing in the aftermath.

Republicans criminals and Rightwing terrorists over-the-top Kill Them All tweets were so bad even Elon Musk's Twitter had to respond by suspending accounts and taking down tweets from elected Republicans like the Leader of the Republican Party Major Traitor Greene.

Tucker Carlson and other lesser rightwing provocateurs are preparing Normie Society for upcoming Republican Concentration Camp proposals; i.e. the systematic rounding up members of the LGBTQ community and shipping them to camps for "re-education" or "de-lousing".

As we can recall from Umberto Eco's seminal work Ur-Fascism, Trans people are cast as both too powerful and yet too weak, and Republicans have all coalesced around the demonization of the Trans community, including busting out the Bush Era Terrorists! smear. 

Get ready.  Because it's been pointed out that if you ever theorized what you would have done when the Nazis were in power in Germany you'll soon have a real world scenario.  It's coming...  On-line rightwing provaceuters are stoking and prepping their followers to commit mass murder.  Combined with the rapid rush to criminalize Trans people specifically and the entirety of Queer culture, expect the melding of State Power and Rightwing Paramilitary fanaticism, to result in a Night of the Long Guns, as conservatives Make America Great Again by murdering people.

Update:

I speculated that Hale, a former student at The Covenant School, was subjected to molestation.  And via Crooks & Liars, comes the revelation that during the 2007-2012 timeframe a church elder John Perry an ardent friend of Mike Huckabee was molesting at least one 11 year old.

Remember this when those on-line tough guys declare if any man dressing up like a woman goes into their girls' bathroom they will kill them.  It's all false bravado and covering-up the fact that we know whose molesting children and its' not Trans persons but Church Men, but conservatives and QAnon psychos never seem to be able to find those sexual abusers.

Hurt people... hurt people... And that's, most likely, why we haven't seen a scintilla of Hale's so-called Manifesto, it probably implicates multiple people at the Church.