Oct 7: terrorism or strategic victory?

The October 7 story

Truth, Lies and the News

The news and the truth are not the same thing. (Walter Lippmann)

Recently, there have been many articles, even in the mainstream media, criticizing Israel and drawing attention to its vicious response to the “terrorist” attack of October 7.

The alternative media also initially focused on Israel’s disproportionate violence—in essence, its crimes against humanity.

But the media in general, have one very big “But”.

Because, you know, this October 7th attack. Which, you know, you have to keep repeating it was inhumane and atrocious and horrific and horrible. It killed 1400 people, 1200 of them men, women, children, grandmothers, babies, etc., was a horrible thing. Juan Cole

All stories depend on context—which may be true or fictional—but bias everything else.

The October 7 attack somehow frames the entire discussion. But was it “inhumane and atrocious and horrific and horrible”?

Was it in fact a real terrorist attack? Or was it a strategic military attack in which there was “collateral damage”?

Now it seems that many, perhaps even most of the deaths of unarmed civilians killed were at the hands of the Israelis themselves.

Such subtleties and nuances do not appeal to the mainstream media. Because:

a. Hamas is a terrorist organization

b. It just wants to kill Jews.

That is the basic premise.

Early on the media was inundated with scenes of Israeli young people fleeing a rave— supposedly under fire from Palestinians in motorized paragliders. There were also accusations of rape—the beheading of babies, and the like—although that never happened.

The victims were popularly alluded to as "teenagers"— even though most were between the ages of 20 and 40—military age and trained as part of universal conscription.

Then came scenes of massive destruction of Israeli homes. More dead civilians, including women and children and the elderly. Oh, and of course babies.

Its fighters murdered, tortured and raped.

So says George Monbiot in a Guardian article that pretends to be evenhanded and balanced as Guardian articles always do.

The Israeli government hoped that such imagery would excuse the IDF using genocidal brute force to decimate the Palestinian population and drive the survivors out of Palestine to Egypt—with no hope of return. That was the Zionist plan all along.

In this campaign, Israel had the full support of the Biden administration and the State Department.

But, as I've often said, the truth leaks. The mainstream media is a roof to keep us dry. The alternative media are umbrellas.

But now the basement is full of dirty water that has flowed in from the gutters and cannot be ignored.

Raving Mad

Let’s start with the now famous rave.

If you thought the music festival was attacked by guys in paragliders with machine guns— you're wrong. Lots of people running. Big field. Big sky. But…no “paragliders’—more correctly no paramotors in sight. I have seen images of just one or two—buzzing about—slowly—apparently under attack by the local Zionist crows.

In point of fact, the crowd was alerted by sirens indicating incoming missiles. Hamas forces appeared only after as the young people reached the perimeter of the field and the protection of local militias from the nearby Kibbutz. A firefight started.

Did the Palestinians fire on the ravers?

No doubt—once the ravers reached military protection: the kibbutz next door—Re'im—is also a military base.

Given their ages, the ravers would soon be armed, especially if they made it as far as their cars where they undoubtedly had weapons.

Pandemonium

Below you see the ravers’ vehicles.

Were these hit by Hamas missiles as the Israeli media suggest? Possibly. But maybe not.

Hamas does have some precision weapons such as drones now—but these are in short supply and reserved for hard targets like tanks, using shaped charges delivered from above.

The Gray Zone points out, that the charred bodies of ravers burned to death in their cars indicate hits by Hellfire missiles—which only Israel has—indicative of a panicked and discoordinated military response.

All this speaks to pandemonium.

Death by friendly fire happens all the time in wartime—and militaries usually go to great lengths to avoid such incidents. But Israel's Hannibal and Dahiya Directives establish a clear policy of killing Hamas fighters, even if it means killing your own.

The bodies shown here are too burnt to identify as friend or foe but from considering these directives, it does not matter.  The Israeli directives express a lack of consideration for human life—first Palestinian—then as a logical consequence, Israeli.

Ultimately, when you devalue the lives of one group of human beings, you devalue the lives of all. But that has become as much of a feature of right-wing Zionist culture as it was of the Nazis.

The Hamas attackers took hostages from the rave and moved on—perhaps even saving those hostages’ lives by removing them from the field of fire.

Taking hostages—not lives

Killing civilians was clearly not Hamas' goal—it wanted live bodies not dead ones—hostages—while simultaneously inflicting damage on Israel's military and its overblown myth of military competence.

The Israelis currently hold 33 women and 170 children under the age of 18 in their prisons—as well as the elderly and disabled.  The only way to free those people is for Hamas to have their own hostages as trade. The Israelis do not negotiate with “terrorists”.

Since the rave was not an anticipated target with the site only announced by social media a short time before to prevent it being banned, the real targets in this area were the Re’im and Kisufim kibbutzes—sources of hostages and also military bases. 

Besides taking captives for barter, Hamas had to show the Zionists that they were militarily different from the Hamas of old, with new and more sophisticated capabilities.

Hamas today has evolved.

It is better organized, better armed, smarter, and more prepared. It is also less of a terrorist group than Irgun and other Zionist groups in Palestine before and during the Nakba.

After all, the Zionists had no claim on the land they coveted and stole—not then—not now. Hamas, by contrast, seek to take back what was stolen from them and to resist a brutal and demeaning occupation. That is not to say that they have not killed innocent civilians—just not on the scale of the Israelis – nor with the same brutality and cruelty. Israeli statistics reveal that most so-called "terrorist" attacks involve a single person—a "Palestinian"— on his own—acting more or less spontaneously.

The October 7 attack was something quite different—a well-planned, asymmetric attack—land, sea and air. 

Targets

Here are some of the targets, with three identified as places of massacre—supposedly carried out by the attackers.

But who killed who?

Hamas’ successes and taking of hostages prompted a hasty, desperate counterattack by the IDF—October 8 and 9th. It now seems an incontrovertible fact that the IDF executed its “Hannibal Directive” shelling houses where Hamas were sheltering with hostages, killing families inside along with the fighters—and then of course blaming the “terrorists”—even though the group doesn't have the weaponry to create the kind of destruction you see in the photos.

This also tends to lend credence to the Israelis slaughtering a lot of their own people at the rave previously.

Lies are the detritus of a broken culture.

Justin Podur in one of his many excellent articles, quotes Scott Ritter.

Israel’s lying to itself and the world because Israel doesn’t want the truth to come out about October 7, the absolute failure – political failure, military failure. And they definitely don’t want to talk about October 8. That’s the day they really don’t want to talk about. Because that’s the day that this undisciplined mob of Israeli Defense Force poured back into the settlements and slaughtered the settlers that were there… if they release the autopsies of all the bodies they picked up, you’ll find that the majority of them, more than the majority, were killed by 5.56mm rounds fired by Israel. There’s enough eyewitness testimony that supports this. And Israel doesn’t want to talk about this.   (Scott Ritter)

Proof?

They eliminated everyone, including the hostages…. There was very, very heavy crossfire” and even tank shelling. (Witness testimony)

It seems now that at least half of the people killed in the Hamas raid—even perhaps much more than half—were killed by the Israeli military or paramilitary. 

At least 112 Be’eri people were killed. Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble. (Haaretz)

The Protocols of Hamas?

You remember the Protocols of Zion. Now it seems to be the Protocols of Hamas.

Overall, the Zionist line is that Hamas are “animals” as Neve Gordon an Israeli scholar in London says, to legitimize war crimes. The mouthpiece for this officialized hate speech is the Israeli Times—which pretends to a consensus, if not unity in the Jewish community both within and without Israel that does not exist. You can see this dissonance from the Ha’aretz articles written by Hasson and Mitrod and of course Gordon and many others.

There was similar dissent in Germany before Hitler. So, he invented Aryanism and “natural enemies”—Jews and Slavs.

Hamas stands accused of rape, killing children and cutting off babies’ heads—none of which happened—but are broadcast to excuse the IDF’s policy of indiscriminate murder—and documented atrocities, including summary execution, torture, mutilation and defilement of the dead.

Such accusations are modernized inverted blood libel.

Hamas is evil? But Israel is just…what?—”ill advised” in its methods of "defending" itself?

So it is that even people as astute as Juan Cole buy into the demonization of Hamas and the danger of “terrorism” and by so doing tacitly mitigate Zionist atrocities

A culture of blood

Blood libel is one thing. But ZioNazi culture is a "blood" culture in diverse ways—certainly, in its insistence on racial destiny and exclusiveness expressed in open and biblical dehumanization of the Palestinian people. For Zionist extremists—and there are more and more of them as time goes on—only people with the “right” blood are human. Those who oppose the Zionist Reich—such as the Palestinians, and others are less than animals.

But let us not confuse Zionism with the Jewish tradition: if anything, Zionism is anti-Jewish.

The Zionists do not regard what they are doing as crimes against humanity because they do not believe Palestinians are human. However, for Jews in the humanist tradition, this is anathema—an insult to everything they believe in—and to the suffering of their forefathers. They know all about dehumanization and how it works, having suffered it. For them, the Zionists may be Jews but not Jewish (as my adoptive father Jacob would say—there is a difference.)

Jews worldwide remember—even as others forget.

Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate—both Jewish—suggest this evolving culture encourages institutionalized societal “sadism” and “bloodlust”. A Nazi thing once again.

As a result, it isn't only secular American Jews supporting Palestine. It is religious Jews too. They recoil at such depravity committed in their name.

While the mainstream media make the pretense of being evenhanded, things get worse.

Israelis have killed as many as 10,000 Palestinians, including perhaps 4,000 children and 3,000 women at the time of writing.  With the numbers increasing by the hour.

They bomb hospitals and refugee centers.  And say they have to do these things, blaming Hamas for using civilians as human shields.

As we have seen, if Gazans kill Israelis—it’s “terrorism”. If Israelis kill Gazans—its “collateral damage.”  But the media hesitate to show what is really happening—as if anyone with a heart could be neutral in such a situation.

Will the Zionists win?

The October 7 attack—which Hamas called Al Aqsa Flood—was a victory for Hamas. It demonstrated that this is a new Hamas which has evolved as Zionism has regressed.

The Palestinians insist that their attack was preemptive —that the Israelis were planning moves to take all of Israel starting with the destruction of the al Aqsa mosque and the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple on the Mount which it hoped would spike immigration to Israel and force the creation of a Greater Israel. That could only be achieved by ethnic cleansing and taking all of the West Bank and Gaza.

The October 7 attack brought things to a head.

Israel and the US’s overreaction was a victory to the extent that it discredited both in the eyes of the world and drew attention to the main issue.

Hamas has been preparing for major war for years with hundreds of miles of tunnels underground, food and water and supplies—so spiking Israeli bloodlust with a pre-emptive attack incited a sudden and violent conflict that the Israelis could not hope to resolve quickly, would cost them many dead and allow time for Hamas to gather support.

That support has been coming.

The Israelis are now fighting a border war with Hezbollah—and losing. Yemen is launching drone and missile strikes on Israel and Saudi Arabia is allowing those strikes to cross its air space. Turkey has broken off relations with Israel. Militias across the Middle East are attacking American bases. Israeli / Saudi / US rapprochement is dead. At least six countries in Latin America have condemned Israel. Public opinion in North Africa is solidly in support of Hamas. The US veto of cease-fire resolutions at the United Nations has alienated the global South and strengthened the influence of China and Russia.

Israel is fast becoming a moral pariah—as is the United States—which is the real loser. Israel cannot continue without American support. Life has been good in Zionist Israel for years, but that good life has been paid for with American tax dollars.

Should that support ever evaporate, Israel becomes vapour too.

That's why the American fleet is in the Mediterranean—a demonstration of fake power. Carrier groups are of no use in this war—and merely vulnerable.

This is not to say that anything will change right away—in international politics change takes time. But it’s a new game.

Doggy Tales

Here you have two breeds of wolves (canis lupus).

And...

The Yorky here is an adult and not all that different from what it was as a puppy.

The wolf pup will grow into something that looks different—but, like Yorkies, likes to play.

But aren’t wolves ferocious hunters? Yup. So are Yorkies. They are superb rat killers—if you give them the chance. Just like a wolf will bring a haunch of deer home to feed his/her kids, your Yorkie will bring a big, juicy, freshly killed rat home...um...for the kids. Not that different from what you get at McDonald's. Enjoy.

No, no, you say. Yorkies are family animals! Wolves live in packs, constantly fighting for dominance. Like...umm...people.

Right – and also wrong. Yorkies are family animals. But so are wolves. They naturally form familial groups—siblings and parents, and, of course, kids—with maybe someone to bully—more or less affectionately.

“Packs” are un-natural groups formed when unrelated dogs or wolves are thrown together and have to fight for a place and social standing, rather than just being born into it.

Yes, the leaders of a wolf “pack” are Mommy and Daddy Wolf—and its members, the kids.

To a Yorky, you are Mommy or Daddy. And it doesn't do what you want because it fears punishment because it loves you and wants your love.

Us upgraded monkeys don't do that kind of stuff because we are "civilized" which is maybe why it takes so much longer to toilet train a kid than a dog or a wolf.

So, who is superior—man or dog? Maybe I should say—man or wolf?

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