Blinken Blames Hamas For Failure of Biden Ceasefire Deal

 

LINKJuan Cole does a decent job of explaining that it is Netanyahu's fascist coalition that has rejected Biden's deal.

On Sunday, according to the Israeli newspaper Arab 48, Netanyahu told the families of soldiers killed in the Gaza campaign, “There was no deal because we will not give up on completing the war objectives. The main disagreement with Hamas revolves around the commitment to end the fighting without completing the objectives.”

Netanyahu’s war goals are the complete destruction of Hamas (and apparently of Gaza in general). Netanyahu says he will not end the fighting until all his goals are fulfilled. He openly said that “there was no deal” because it would require stopping short of wiping out the people with whom he is negotiating.

Biden’s three-stage plan begins with a pause in the fighting and partial Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, then a prisoner exchange and complete Israeli withdrawal, and then the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip. But this plan implies that the fighting would end permanently so that rebuilding could start. Netanyahu is rejecting this third stage and pledging to start the war back up as soon as the hostage exchange is complete. You have to ask what is in the latter a proposal for Hamas, or for anyone in Gaza. Although Biden represented the plan as Israeli, Netanyahu has disputed that.

Elsewhere Cole lapses into his "responsible, mainstream centrist" persona that has tragically prevented him from seeing more clearly:

Yahya Sinwar and the other leaders of the Qassam Brigades, the Hamas paramilitary, who are doing the dickering are themselves wretched war criminals and you only wish they could be whisked off to the Hague for trial. If the Israeli military were merely trying to accomplish that goal, one could just wish it luck.

If you simply look at the nazi-level barbarism and the degenerate racist culture of the Israelis, then you would see what Hamas sees when they think about how to deal with it.  Which is not to say that I want to have a beer with anyone in Hamas and talk about going fishing with them.  I'm sure some of them are nasty, flawed, deranged individuals.  But the blame for this bloodshed rests mainly with the USA and the Israelis.  Hamas is a product of Israel's garbage culture of sadism and thievery.

The main thing that I want to say though is to read Cole's commentary with the understanding that Antony Blinken is the complete shit-for-brains that I've described him as here:

Blinken appears to believe that if he can get Netanyahu to pause the fighting and move to hostage negotiations, he can create momentum toward a truce and a cessation of hostilities, regardless of what the extremist Israeli government says in public.

But Blinken is naive if he thinks that Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich will yield to such mere diplomatic momentum.

Blinken is frustrated with Hamas because it wants more than a vague expectation of momentum toward a truce. It wants a genuine cease-fire and end of hostilities. This position implies that it does accept a ceasefire, it just doesn’t believe that the Israeli government does. And given how truculent and slippery the Israeli government has been on this issue, you can’t really fault this suspicion.

Thus we have an explanation for Blinken's nonsensical babbling.  Blinken is an arrogant, racist imbecile.  He's a shameless liar who is too stupid to know how to keep his story straight.  Inside of his skull is a relatively small, smooth brain that smells suspiciously like shit.  That's why everything he says is so disconnected from reality and insults the intelligence of normal people.

Trudeau's Clean Water For First Nations Promise

 

Yesterday I was reading an article about a various forms of colonialism and it mentioned Canada's failure to provide First Nations with clean drinking water on their reserves.  This was something that I'd made efforts to find out about in the past.  Trudeau had made the promise in his first election as leader of the Liberal Party.  I knew they'd started to work on the problem but then I had difficulty finding out what happened.  

On "The Lesser Evil Gambit"

 

Robert Koehler at Counterpunch deals directly with "The Lesser Evil Gambit."

The election paradox looms. Do I calm myself down, steady my hand, pull the lever for Joe, even though it feels like voting for Netanyahu? Even though it feels like I’m loosing another bomb on Gaza?

I’ve had a number of intense conversations with friends about this recently, the essence of the pro-Biden argument being: We have no choice!

...

So here are today’s primary questions, which eventually we must all answer: Do I support Joe Biden? Will I vote for him?  And beyond that: Will we ever have another election that’s about the greater good – nationally and internationally – rather than the lesser evil? Are we stuck from now on with a two-party nation that renounces further evolution, despite the problems the planet faces? Or has the time come to truly challenge the nation’s military-industrial status quo in this year’s election, no matter the consequences of doing so?

...

Biden, in minimally stunning contrast to the Republican viewpoint, “delayed” a shipment of bombs to Israel on May 8, including some 2,000-pounders. As Stephen Zunes pointed out:

“Though pausing the shipment of 3,500 bombs may not be that significant in light of the estimated 90,000 bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza since October, it should be seen as a reflection of the growing popular opposition to U.S. military support for Israel and, in that sense, a partial political victory for supporters of international humanitarian law.

“This is also the first time Biden has conditioned any aid to Israel. . . .”

So here’s where we are as election season approaches. The Israel assault isn’t the only matter on the table, of course. Biden, as Sanders noted, walked in a picket line with UAW workers. He’s pro-choice. He has forgiven some student loan debt and invested money into sustainable energy.

Somehow all this matters to me about as much as a scoop of mashed potatoes – at least compared to the hell he’s complicit in inflicting on Gaza. I may go lesser-evil when I vote in November, but right now I remain uncertain. I’m still waiting to see Biden’s courage emerge, as he stands up to further militarism.

It would have been nice if Koehler also articulated a strategy to sweep aside the entire rotten system that leads otherwise decent, intelligent people to vote for the candidate committing a genocide. [And let's be honest here; Joe Biden's over-enthusiastic arming of Israel and his subsidizing the Israeli economy above and beyond the costs of supplying weapons, makes him a participant in this genocide.  His alleged "concerns" about the carnage, and the "pauses" in weapons deliveries that announces, are just as likely to be about public relations management as genuine.] Koehler does not, and therefore, his bleatings are to be dismissed.  People's lives sucked under Trump.  They have declined under Biden.  Not because Trump is better.  But because inflation has soared under Biden.  Homelessness has increased under Biden.  Things have gotten worse under every president since Lyndon Johnson.  Things have gotten worse despite all of the "victories" and "resistance" and "fighting back" of progressives against neo-liberalism.

I've said the same thing about Counterpunch's main guy Jeffrey St Clair.  The man has been at the helm of Counterpunch for 25 years and has had all that time to think about a revolutionary vision, a strategy and tactics.  And after all that, he has a website and a couple of books outlining particular abominations of the contemporary capitalist system.

I don't know why so many progressives need to have it explained to them that besides endlessly writing critiques of the system (punctuating that with peaceful afternoon protests making "demands" of our overlords that they blithely ignore) we should be spending much more time thinking, talking and acting seriously on how to get out of this mess.

Foreign Influence and D-Day

 I just can't get excited about this controversy of MP's being influenced by foreign governments.  A report claims certain parliamentarians colluded with foreign states — could they be charged? | CBC News.  The CBC story mentions China and India but hints there could be others.  China, of course, is the big one.  China is our enemy.  We're soon going to have to go to war with China.  Because, we're told, the Chinese are conducting a genocide.  And they're evil.  India is also mentioned because Modi is a racist authoritarian who did nothing to prevent or halt a Hindu-nationalist progrom against the Muslim population of the Indian state of Gujurat when he was governor there.  Plus, like China and Russia, he's a member of the BRICs and he hasn't been particularly helpful in punishing Russia for its evil, unprovoked, genocidal, evil, barbaric, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and all of the human rights violations that have resulted.

Armageddon and Antony Blinken

 

Recently I wrote a couple of posts about Antony Blinken's performance of "Rockin' in the Free World" in Kiev.  I argued that no matter which way you looked at it, said performance was indicative of crippling stupidity on Blinken's part.  I wrote those posts, not because I wanted to make fun of Blinken and feel superior to him.  I wrote them because Blinken is the US Secretary of State and is therefore a very powerful man.  And if we want to understand why the world is the way that it is and if we want to anticipate where the world will go as people like Blinken respond to subsequent events, it is imperative that we acknowledge the incredibly low level at which these freaks are operating.

Millions Against Genocide

 

Just thought that I'd say here what I've said (to little effect) to various activist groups.  Protest and "resistance" that doesn't do much more than make you feel good that you "did something" is what progressives seem to be happy to resign them to.  But peaceful afternoon gatherings (even of tens of thousands in our larger cities) obviously isn't going to end Canada's support for Israel's genocidal behaviour against the Palestinians.

Canada's ruling class (including their representatives in the LibroCon Party) have evidently weighed the pros and cons of disemboweling their future ability to yammer about "human rights" and other such topics versus angering the United States, betraying their devotion to the imaginary Israel as a beacon of morality and strategic asset ["The Future of an Illusion - CounterPunch.org"], and alienating Zionist voters, and decided that continuing to enable Israel's genocide is worth it.

The Population Needs To Shrink

 

There'll be two links below to speak more intelligently than I will about this subject.  But the fact is that the number of human beings on the planet Earth needs to start declining.  Through natural causes.  Through a lower birthrate arrived at by free individual choices.

BUT OLD PEOPLE ARE A MILLSTONE AROUND THE NECK OF THE LIVING!!!

To a degree the very aged ARE a burden.  But they CARRIED the burden when they were younger.  Still and all, as a pessimist I don't think that I'll have a problem allowing myself to die when there doesn't seem to be any point to it.  My continuing to eat and think and suffer from aches and pains isn't so fucking important that some poor immigrant woman should have to change my diapers and wipe my ass.

There's lots of stories about the cultural impact of an aging population coming out of Japan. They're interesting.

But we don't need an economy based on the frantic production of junk and garbage that nobody needs where we're all atomized as self-seeking individuals.  This world where old people suffer in loneliness is the end result of a society based on shit-head Margaret Thatcher's shit-head utterance of "There's no such thing as 'society.' There's just individuals and families."

A more collective, ecologically sane society that attends to genuine human needs rather than manufactured desires can do it.

Making More Babies to Drive Economic Growth - CounterPunch.org

Declining Population Thru Lower Birth Rates Is GOOD, Mmmmkay? – Ian Welsh

That'll do pig.