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Human Rights Watch: Yes, Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza

Human Rights Watch: Yes, Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza

by | Dec 24, 2024 |

The international human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) on December 19 issued a 186-page report concluding that Israel has been perpetrating crimes against humanity in Gaza, including the crimes of extermination and genocide.

HRW’s report follows a 294-page report from Amnesty International documenting Israel’s violations of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention).

The same day HRW issued its report, the international humanitarian medical organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, issued a 34-page report titled “Gaza: Life in a Death Trap”, documenting what the group calls “Israel’s campaign of total destruction”.

The medical group’s report states that

MSF’s firsthand observations align with those of an increasing number of legal experts and organisations, concluding that ethnic cleansing and genocide are taking place in Gaza. MSF calls on States, particularly Israel’s closest allies, to end their unconditional support for Israel and fulfill their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza.

By far the greatest facilitator of Israel’s genocide is the United States government. The Genocide Convention also prohibits acts of complicity in genocide, so US officials could also theoretically be prosecuted for the crime of genocide by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which on November 21 issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Whereas Amnesty International’s report took a broad approach to examining the question of whether Israel is violating the Genocide Convention, HRW focused largely on Israel’s policy of deliberately depriving the civilian population of water.

This includes “extensive damage and destruction to water and sanitation infrastructure, including the apparently deliberate, systematic razing of the solar panels powering four of Gaza’s six wastewater treatment plants by Israeli ground forces, as well as Israeli soldiers filming themselves demolishing a key water reservoir.”

Indeed, Israeli soldiers have been gleefully documenting their own war crimes, such as sharing videos to social media of themselves celebrating their wanton destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.

The horrific sanitary conditions in Gaza have risked an outbreak of polio, a virus transmitted primarily via the fecal-oral route. In August, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the first case of polio in Gaza in a quarter century, a 10-month-old child who became paralyzed in one leg due vaccine-derived poliovirus, which is caused by infection with the strain of the virus used in the “live” oral polio vaccine, which is attenuated but can revert to virulence and in rare cases causes the disease the vaccine is designed to prevent. This phenomenon has hindered the WHO’s goal of achieving global eradication. Since 2017, more cases of paralytic polio have been caused by the vaccine strain than the wild virus.

The HRW report also noted that the question of intent is decided by statements from Israeli officials openly declaring their aim of depriving the entire civilian population of Gaza of goods and services necessary for their survival. It cites, for example, the statement from then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9, 2023, ordering “a complete siege” of Gaza so that Palestinians would have “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed.”

“Since then,” the report observes, “Israeli authorities and military forces have matched these statements with actions.”

The rights group also notes that, in a case charging Israel with genocide brought by the government of South Africa, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on January 26, 2024, issued provisional measures requiring Israel to take steps to comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, including facilitating the entrance and distribution of desperately needed humanitarian aid.

While the ICC was established under the Rome Statue, the ICJ was established under the UN Charter, and as a UN member state, Israel is legally obligated to comply with the ICJ’s orders, which the court issued on the grounds that South Africa had presented a “plausible” case that Israel was committing genocide.

HRW notes that the ICJ subsequently issued two further provisional measures, including on May 24 ordering Israel to halt its military assault on Rafah in southern Gaza, where 1.5 million displaced Palestinian civilians were sheltering because they had been ordered by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to flee there.

“Since that time,” HRW’s report notes, “Israel has violated the ICJ’s measures, including preventing ‘the deprivation of access to adequate food and water.’”

As the report concludes,

Israeli authorities have over the past year intentionally inflicted on the Palestinian population in Gaza ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.’ This policy, inflicted as part of a mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza means Israeli authorities have committed the crime against humanity of extermination, which is ongoing. This policy also amounts to an ‘act of genocide’ under the Genocide Convention of 1948.

The rights group also calls for an arms embargo against Israel, reminding the US and other suppliers of arms to Israel of their own obligations under international humanitarian law and human rights law, including the Genocide Convention.

Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.

What Corporatism Actually Is

by | Dec 24, 2024 | ,

“The fundamental idea both of guild socialism and of corporativism is that every branch of business forms a monopolistic body, the guild or corporazione. This entity enjoys full autonomy; it is free to settle all its internal affairs without interference of external factors and of people who are not themselves members of the guild. The mutual relations between the various guilds are settled by direct bargaining from guild to guild or by the decisions of a general assembly of the delegates of all guilds. In the regular course of affairs the government does not interfere at all. Only in exceptional cases, when an agreement between the various guilds cannot be attained, is the state called in.

“[The guild socialists … aimed at self-government of each branch of industry; they wanted, as the Webbs put it, “the right of self-determination for each vocation.”  …[T]he guild alone should have jurisdiction over its internal affairs and the government should restrict its interference to those things which the guilds themselves cannot settle.

“However, within a system of social cooperation under the division of labor [i.e., the market economy] there are no such things as matters of concern only to those engaged in a special plant, enterprise, or branch of industry and of no concern to outsiders. There are no internal affairs of any guild or corporazione the arrangement of which does not affect the whole nation. A branch of business does not serve only those who are occupied in it; it serves everybody. If within any branch of business there is inefficiency, a squandering of scarce factors of production, or a reluctance to adopt the most appropriate methods of production, everybody’s material interests are hurt…. In the market economy the entrepreneur in making … decisions is unconditionally subject to the law of the market. He is responsible to the consumers. If he were to defy the orders of the consumers, he would suffer losses and would very soon forfeit his entrepreneurial position. But the monopolistic guild does not need to fear competition. It enjoys the inalienable right of exclusively covering its field of production. It is, if left alone and autonomous, not the servant of the consumers, but their master. It is free to resort to practices which favor its members at the expense of the rest of the people.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

The Pause That Refreshes

by | Dec 24, 2024 |

jwxmas

I will be spending the holidays with my children and grandchildren at an undisclosed bunker location in the inland Rocky Mountain west and off the ‘net until the new year when I will resume blogging at the Institute…

Since I paused Chasing Ghosts and started WarNotes, I have been firing episodes on a weekly cadence debuting every Monday to complete the Fixing Fight Club series assessing how the US and the West can take a knee and change its martial course from the present azimuth to oblivion.

You will not see an episode debut on MON 30 December 2024 but the next WarNotes (Episode 007) will be published MON 6 January 2025.

Chasing Ghosts: An Irregular Warfare Podcast will resume operations in February 2025.

Make sure you get to the range because you will never exceed your highest level of training.

Merry Christmas and Happy Winter Solstice.

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Good Plan Means My Plan

by | Dec 23, 2024 | ,

“All this passionate praise of the supereminence of government action is but a poor disguise for the individual interventionist’s self-deification. The great god State is a great god only because it is expected to do exclusively what the individual advocate of interventionism wants to see achieved. Only that plan is genuine which the individual planner fully approves. All other plans are simply counterfeit. In saying ‘plan’ what the author of a book on the benefits of planning has in mind is, of course, his own plan alone. He does not take into account the possibility that the plan which the government puts into practice may differ from his own plan. The various planners agree only with regard to their rejection of laissez faire, i.e., the individuals’ discretion to choose and to act. They entirely disagree with regard to the choice of the unique plan to be adopted. To every exposure of the manifest and incontestable defects of interventionist policies the champions of interventionism react in the same way. These faults, they say, were the results of spurious interventionism; what we are advocating is good interventionism, not bad interventionism. And, of course, good interventionism is the professor’s own brand.

“Laissez faire means: Let the common man choose and act; do not force him to yield to a dictator.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Who Needs What?

by | Dec 22, 2024 | ,

“[I]t is evident … that the man, who first made himself clothes and built himself a cabin, supplied himself with things which he did not much want, since he had lived without them till then; and why should he not have been able to support in his riper years, the same kind of life, which he had supported from his infancy?”

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Equality

“Under laissez faire, says the planner, it is not those goods which people ‘really’ need that are produced, but those goods from the sale of which the highest returns are expected. It is the objective of planning to direct production toward the satisfaction of the ‘true’ needs. But who is to decide what the ‘true’ needs are?”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Whose Plan?

by | Dec 21, 2024 | ,

“The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself, or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action; it is autonomous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus government omnipotence.

“Laissez faire does not mean: Let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: Let each individual choose how he wants to cooperate in the social division of labor; let the consumers determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. Planning means: Let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

What Full Liberalism Is Not About

by | Dec 20, 2024 | ,

“Liberalism is a doctrine directed entirely towards the conduct of men in this world. In the last analysis, it has nothing else in view than the advancement of their outward, material welfare and does not concern itself directly with their inner, spiritual and metaphysical needs. It does not promise men happiness and contentment, but only the most abundant possible satisfaction of all those desires that can be satisfied by the things of the outer world.

“Liberalism has often been reproached for this purely external and materialistic attitude toward what is earthly and transitory. The life of man, it is said, does not consist in eating and drinking. There are higher and more important needs than food and drink, shelter and clothing. Even the greatest earthly riches cannot give man happiness; they leave
his inner self, his soul, unsatisfied and empty. The most serious error of liberalism has been that it has had nothing to offer man’s deeper and nobler aspirations.

“But the critics who speak in this vein show only that they have a very imperfect and materialistic conception of these higher and nobler needs. Social policy, with the means that are at its disposal, can make men rich or poor, but it can never succeed in making them happy or in satisfying their inmost yearnings. Here all external expedients fail. All
that social policy can do is to remove the outer causes of pain and suffering; it can further a system that feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and houses the homeless. Happiness and contentment do not depend on food, clothing, and shelter, but, above all, on what a man cherishes within himself. It is not from a disdain of spiritual goods that liberalism
concerns itself exclusively with man’s material well-being, but from a conviction that what is highest and deepest in man cannot be touched by any outward regulation. It seeks to produce only outer well-being because it knows that inner, spiritual riches cannot come to man from without, but only from within his own heart.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, 1927

 

Greeks Refuse to Purchase Fifty Million Dollar Floating Dumpsters From the US Navy

by | Dec 20, 2024 |

LCS corrosion no serious problem, U.S. Navy and analysts say - al.com

These floating dumpsters cost the American taxpayer 500-600 million per ship.

The US Navy is trying to garage sell these malfunctioning ships to Greece and they are onto the scam. The Greek Defense Minister is smarter than the average bear.

Glad to see that even foreign navies with very tight budgets have the discipline not to take on ineffective and ultimately, fatally flawed surface ships.

“As far as the agreement with the United States is concerned, I am proud of the two military agreements with the United States that bear my signature, as well as the agreements with France and the UAE. The agreements with the United States, ladies and gentlemen, put Alexandroupolis on the map. And this is absolutely essential for national reasons, as you all know, and there is no disputing that.

The United States has honored what was outlined in these agreements, colleagues. Do you know what they did not honor? What is outlined in the Blinken letter. What Secretary of State Blinken wrote to the Prime Minister was not honored by the United States, and I said so plainly. And for this, neither the Greek Government, nor the Greek Prime Minister, nor our country bears any responsibility.

They mentioned LCS and proposed LCS vessels to us without fixing the propulsion system. It would have been absurd to accept them! And, on top of that, with a requirement to pay 50 million for each of them? No. A thousand times no. And you would have made the same decision I did.”

– Nikos Dendias, Defense Minister of Greece during his speech at the Parliament on December 14, 2024

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/12/no-a-thousand-times-no-greek-defense-minister-on-lcs-deal/

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