On Israel, satire in The Onion gets closer to the truth than the news media

Israelis and their supporters in the US celebrated the moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem even as the Israeli armed forces killed dozens of unarmed protestors in Gaza. Jeremy Scahill writes about what happened and Norman Finkelstein’s new book about the harrowing conditions in Gaza.

ISRAEL HAS ONCE again conducted a premeditated, full-scale massacre in broad daylight, in front of the cameras of the world. Once again, it took place in Gaza.

On May 14, Israeli snipers and other forces gunned down more than 60 Palestinians, and wounded thousands of others, including civilians, journalists, and paramedics. “You try nonlethal means and they don’t work,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “So you’re left with bad choices. It’s a bad deal. You know, you try and you go for below the knee, and sometimes it doesn’t work, and unfortunately these things are avoidable.”

It appears that the only way not to be killed, according to Netanyahu, is to meekly accept imprisonment inside the prison of Gaza. Among those killed by Israeli forces was an 8-month-old infant. Her name was Laila al-Ghandour. They also killed at least seven other children and a man in a wheelchair, and that man had lost his legs after they had to be amputated following an earlier Israeli attack.

Israel has made it clear that it believes that it has the right to systematically murder Palestinians for the crime of continuing to exist. There is no defense for what Israel has done. None.

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Blowback from torture

Gina Haspel has been confirmed as head of the CIA with assistance from Democratic senators despite her appalling record of supervising brutal torture methods and then destroying evidence. Jeremy Scahill reports how Dr. Sondra Crosby, a professor of public health at Boston University and a doctor and a Naval reserve officer, described what she saw to the committee that was conducting the hearings, and that it was worse than what she had seen in torture victims in other places.
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How Facebook enabled Buddhist vigilante violence in Sri Lanka

The New York Times has a daily podcast where they discuss with their reporters a single story that they covered. On Wednesday, May 16 they had an episode titled When Facebook Rumors Incite Real Violence about how rumors on Facebook led to deadly violence in Sri Lanka. (Scroll down to find it.) The story provides yet another example of how religious majorities tend to be intolerant and that Buddhists, despite their reputation of being a ‘peaceful’ religion, are no less susceptible to violence than Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims. There is no religion that cannot be turned into a vehicle for intolerance and violence when they acquire the means to be so.
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Yet another mass school shooting

The ghastly series of needless gun-related deaths in the US continues with the latest in Texas this morning, with reportedly at least eight people killed by a fellow student, though initial reports of the numbers of dead and injured and identification of the shooter tend to be unreliable.

Police responded to reports of a shooter at Santa Fe high school about an hour from Houston on Friday morning before 8am local time. Students evacuated Santa Fe high school, about 35 miles south-east of downtown Houston, amid a heavy presence of law enforcement and medical first responders.

The Harris county sheriff, Ed Gonzalez, said in the late morning that at least eight and perhaps 10 people, including students and staff from the school, were dead. One male, a student at the school believed to be the shooter, has been arrested and a second “person of interest” has been detained, Gonzalez said. A school district police officer was among the injured and officers were searching the school, he added.

“The number varies; it could be anywhere from eight to 10 fatalities,” he said.

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The damage done by bullshit jobs

In a recent post about the idea of a universal basic income, I mused at the end about what would happen to people if they no longer had to work because they had a guaranteed income. Would they begin to feel that they were no longer contributing to society in some way by working for a living, and would that leave them with negative feelings about their own worth? What I did not consider was the fact that many people who work already feel that way because they see their jobs as pretty pointless.
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A new way for whistleblowers to share secret information

Given the secretive and coercive nature of the national security state, we have come to depend upon whistleblowers to tell us of the abuses that are committed by governments. Governments in turn retaliate by threatening to hand out extremely harsh punishments to those caught divulging information they do not want revealed, though high government officials will freely leak secret information to reporters when it serves their interests and such people not only do not get punished, they are rewarded for such actions and even for their deceptions and lies.
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