Kevin Barrett is editor at Veterans Today who joins us. Welcome to the program, Kevin Barrett. I'm not too sure whether I should talk about the reference that the Osama Hamdan, the senior Hamas leader there, made to the Israeli regime force who wanted to kill children or to the other aspect of this war. But let's start with that one in particular, which is pretty gruesome and pretty shocking. Why do you think the Israeli soldiers are acting in that way unless they're being maybe instructed to kill babies? But then again, isn't that part of their psyche in terms of the training that they received in the past in their military?
Yes, the Israeli military is notorious for deliberately targeting and murdering children. Chris Hedges wrote about that in his famous article “A Gaza Diary” from 15 years ago, maybe 20, I think, actually. And he described how he had been in war zones and witnessed atrocities before, but until he went to Gaza, he had never seen soldiers barking out obscene insults over their bullhorns in order to lure Palestinian children within range of their gun sights so that they could be shot for sport. And he witnessed that happen to several Palestinian children. It's a common occurrence. The sport shooting of children is a regular part of what the Israeli Defense Forces do. And they never face any kind of justice. Because it’s open season on Palestinian childfen.
The Israeli Defense Forces hand out t-shirts that say, “one shot, two kills,” and they show a pregnant Palestinian woman with a target on her belly.
They are proud of killing children. Ayelet Shaked, the former Justice Minister, is notorious for calling for the mass murder of Palestinian children. She called them “little snakes.” And she said Israel should also kill their mothers. So there is something deep in the Israeli psyche that is twisted, mentally ill. They hate Palestinian children and want to kill them.
In this current war in Gaza there are mainstream Western reports attesting to the fact that Israel soldiers have been lured into ambushes by the resistance fighters broadcasting recorded sounds of children. The Israelis are always going to want to kill the children. That lures them into the ambush. And the Israeli military even admitted to this. So these are psychotic, genocidal child killers. And they are terrorists.
The Palestinian side is rationally calculating a military operation and trying to diplomatically negotiate a solution. The Israeli side is just psychotic and genocidal and they want to exterminate Amalek, as Netanyahu said, referring to the Hebrew Bible ordering the complete extermination of every man, woman, child and baby and even animal.
So there's something deeply wrong with the Israeli psyche.
So when you take a look at the future here, what are we looking at? At this point we are hearing about the losses that the Israeli regime forces are suffering on the ground, but it's not to the point where I don't think they're going to throw the white flag in. So are we looking at a war of attrition here? Are we looking at a long ways to go when it comes to this genocidal war?
It's really just a matter of how long the world puts up with genocide. And the longer it waits, the worse it will look in the eyes of history.
I have no idea at what point the proverbial straw will break the camel's back and the relevant forces in the world will shift enough to the point that the Zionists feel that they have no choice but to stop the genocide.
It could be a combination of things: Pressure from the Ansarullah forces of Yemen, who have been heroically targeting Israeli shipping and imposing their own blockade on the Israelis, who are of course themselves imposing a genocidal blockade on food, water, and medicine and fuel in Gaza. So that’s the biggest factor that’s got the Americans concerned about the possibility of a wider war. Naturally Netanyahu wants a wider war, because his whole political career, and maybe his staying out of jail, depends on his keeping the war going, and seeing how much mass murder of civilians he can get away with.
The resistance forces have been good at managing things to avoid the escalation that could lead to something utterly disastrous for the region. At this point Yemen is the only country meaningfully pressuring the US to put an end to this genocide.
LIVE RADIO! Piers Robinson on Academic Unfreedom; Mahmood OD on “One-State Solution by 2048”
Listen live Fridays noon to 2pm Eastern on Revolution.Radio later archived at KevinBarrett.Substack.com
First hour: Piers Robinson of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies has noticed that propagandists don’t like it when scholars study and analyze their propaganda. His latest ruminations on “The Perils of Studying Propaganda” begins with the observation:
“Acknowledging that powerful actors pour huge resources into managing the ‘information environment’, in order to manipulate perceptions, attitudes and behaviours, tends to play havoc with assumptions underpinning much of liberal political science.” The propaganda-saturated COVID era, he argues, made it even more obvious that such is indeed the case. But even absent COVID, people who annoy the biggest propagandists, from Julian Assange (thorn in the side of the US empire) to Prof. David Miller (who had the temerity to notice the Zionist role in promoting Islamophobia) have been known to experience severe pushback. So…does academic freedom protect the rights of scholars to study and critique Establishment propaganda? Piers Robinson is the right man to try to answer that question.
Second hour: Mahmood OD, a native Palestinian born in Haifa, is the author of 2048: A Manifesto for the One State Solution in Israel Palestine. In it, he considers the underlying causes of the violence and instability in the region, and proposes a simple and sensible solution, starting with: “The whole conflict can be solved with one thing: Equality. But to reach the stage of equality, one must establish basic understanding about the other side…”
How can we get from the current catastrophe—an accelerating genocide by Jewish Supremacists—to the world Mahmood envisions, in which both sides understand and acknowledge the humanity and equality of the other?
FFWN: “Next Year in Palestine” (2023-2024 roundup with E. Michael Jones)
Check out the year’s biggest stories now, and watch after 1 pm Eastern Saturday, HERE
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Why Are Israelis Obsessed with Killing Palestinian Children?