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EXPOSED: Tony Blair & Israel’s Favourite Billionaire @maybulman @LHreports https://t.co/Odwuut8STw
Video Transcript AI Summary
- The report centers on nearly a year of investigation into the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) and Larry Ellison, the world’s second-richest man, highlighting a close relationship between Ellison and the Israeli government, including Benjamin Netanyahu, and noting Ellison’s donations to Friends of the IDF as their biggest donor. Oracle, co-founded by Ellison, is described as on the verge of taking over the US version of TikTok, a platform influential with American youth.
- The narrative emphasizes Ellison’s advocacy for the use of social media as a battlefield and identifies Oracle’s potential role in global information control through AI and data strategy.
- Safra Catz, Oracle’s former CEO, is quoted as saying she wants to embed love and respect for Israel into American culture. The transcript also notes a controversial LinkedIn policy stance on hate speech, with a claim about “from the river to the sea.”
- It is claimed that David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s son, owns Paramount, which recently took ownership of CBS News, run by Ari Wise, described as a “self-proclaimed Zionist fanatic.” The report asserts that anti-Zionism is equated with anti-Semitism in the narrative.
- The event coverage includes a Dubai World Leaders Summit in February where Ellison, interviewed by Tony Blair, spoke about AI. Ellison allegedly proposed unifying national data into a single, easily consumable database for AI models.
- The investigation indicates the UK government is starting to unify its data, with Blair’s Institute advising on this effort. Blair is depicted as a long-time advocate for ID cards and digital ID cards, proposing to bring together all personal data in one place.
- The discussion contrasts the potential benefits of digital ID (faster, cheaper, more reliable interactions with the state) with the potential dangers of centralized personal data controlled by a single private company, noting Blair’s push and Oracle’s willingness to take on the role. It is noted that Ellison advocated for ID cards as far back as 2001.
- The conversation expands to health data: a call to consolidate health care data, diagnostic data, electronic health records, and genomic data into a single unified data platform, arguing the NHS has a rich but fragmented population data set not easily accessible to AI models. These models are said to be trained mainly on data from the Internet, implying national health records are particularly valuable and not publicly available.
- The report asserts deep TBI involvement in Keir Starmer’s government, creating a risk that valuable UK data could be co-opted by Ellison and Oracle for private gain. It claims Oracle has earned over £1.1 billion in UK government contracts and Ellison has already benefited from such arrangements.
- It is alleged that Blair and Ellison have maintained a long relationship, with Blair appearing in Ellison’s yachts and on Lanai. Blair has recorded a video for Oracle; Ellison’s wealth and ventures are described through the rhetorical question about the difference between Larry Ellison and God, implying Ellison’s outsized influence and wealth.
- The piece asserts the potential for surveillance-driven monetization through AI and data consolidation, with Ellison stating that citizens will be on their best behavior as data is constantly recorded, “the camera’s always on,” and that recordings are accessible only with a court order.
- The report finishes by noting the influence of the Tony Blair Institute in UK policy, its international reach, and the concern that its promotion of big-tech and AI boosterism may overshadow the needs of local populations. It calls for further independent media scrutiny of big-tech lobbying and its impact on policy, inviting support for Double Down News on Patreon.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: For nearly a year, my colleagues and I have been investigating the Tony Blair Institute and Larry Ellison, the second richest man in the world. And what we found shocked us. Larry Ellison is a fascinating character. He is the second richest man in the world, second only to Elon Musk, who is his good friend. Ellison is very close with the Israeli government.
He's close with Benjamin Netanyahu.
Speaker 1: I have spent time to the people who govern the state of Israel. I feel a deep a deep emotional connection to the state of Israel and the Israeli people, defended by all the brave men and women of the IDF. So anything we can do to support them.
Speaker 0: He has donated large amounts to the friends of the IDF. He's their biggest donor. Ellison is cofounder of Oracle, which is a cloud computing company which has been around for decades now. Today, Oracle is on the verge of taking over The US version of TikTok, which is hugely influential among young people in America.
Speaker 2: We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we're engaged, and the most important ones are the social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is glass Parts? TikTok. Oh. TikTok, number one.
Speaker 0: Oracle's former CEO Safra Katz is on record as saying she wants to embed the love and respect for Israel in America's culture.
Speaker 3: It violates our policy to have from the river to the sea on your LinkedIn. Like, all that kind of hate speech. We're just bringing the consequences. And if you
Speaker 0: wanna boycott us, buckle up. David Ellison, Larry Ellison's son, is the owner of Paramount, which recently took ownership of CBS News. And CBS News is run by Ari Wise, who is self proclaimed Zionist fanatic.
Speaker 3: We need to say out loud that anti Zionism is anti Semitism. Full stop.
Speaker 0: We saw Larry Ellison on a large screen at this massive world leaders summit in Dubai back in February talking about AI. He was being interviewed by Tony Blair. Blair was asking him about the kind of AI revolution, and Ellison said
Speaker 1: We need to unify all of the national data, put it into a database where it's easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like.
Speaker 0: Through our reporting, we found that The UK Government is starting to unify their data, And we've seen that the Tony Blair Institute has been advising them to do this. I mean, Blair has always been a big advocate for ID cards in The UK, and more recently, like digital ID cards. And the idea of that would be to bring together all personal data and have it in one place.
Speaker 4: Digital ID will make our interactions with each other and with the state faster, cheaper, and more reliable.
Speaker 0: There are arguments that it could be quite dangerous potentially to have personal data all in one place, and particularly if that system is run by one large private company. So it's interesting to see Tony Blair like pushing this so hard, and then Oracle kind of standing by, like potentially ready to take on this job. Important to say as well that Larry Ellison, back in 2001 after 09/11, advocated for ID cards then. So he's he's always been an advocate for this as well.
Speaker 4: Tell us a bit about what government should do in terms of its digital infrastructure, you know, ID, data centers, and so on.
Speaker 1: You have to take all of your health care data, your diagnostic data, your electronic health records, your genomic data. The NHS in The UK has an incredible amount of population data, but it's fragmented. It's not easily accessible by these AI models. We have to take all of this data we have in our country and move it into a single, if you will, unified data platform.
Speaker 0: NHS data is a unique thing, a set of data that's been around for many, many decades, and there's not really anything quite like it. People like Larry Ellison see this trove of data as a kind of treasure chest because it's incredibly, potentially, monetarily valuable for someone like him.
Speaker 1: These AI models are trained primarily by data that's publicly available on the Internet. Your national health records aren't available on the Internet. That stuff is not available, but that's that's very precious, very, very precious for your data.
Speaker 0: From our reporting, we found that the Tony Blair Institute, the TBI is really deeply embedded in Keir Starmer's government. There's a risk here that with TBI in the era of the UK government and Larry Ellison in the era of the TBI. The that very valuable thing that we've got in The UK right now is gonna be co opted. That means that we're not gonna benefit from that. Instead, this US millionaire is gonna be the one who benefits.
It also hands over all of our personal data, and that should concern all of us. Ellison and Blair were first pictured together in 2003 when Ellison donated supplies to specialist schools in The UK. And we know that since then, they've been close friends. They've been seen pictured together on some of Ellison's massive yachts and on his Hawaiian island that he basically owns Lanai Island it's called. Blair has recorded a video for Oracle.
Speaker 4: Oracle has decades of experience in healthcare and I've been immensely excited by the willingness to solve problems together for the greater good of humanity. And I appreciate Oracle's leadership position in this space.
Speaker 0: When Blair was in office, he gave Oracle quite a number of UK government contracts. And now we see that Larry Ellison, obviously founder of Oracle, is donating huge amounts to the TBI, north of £250,000,000. And the TBI has huge influence on the UK government and which companies it chooses for its own contracts. Ministers in the UK government regularly meet with TBI employees and discuss policy around AI, data capture, NHS data, and the future of health care and how AI can play a role in that, and where it's clear to see that Oracle, Larry Ellison's company, is set to benefit from those policies. Oracle has made over £1,100,000,000 from UK government contracts to date.
It's an incredibly lucrative place for Ellison and Oracle to be. So the fact that we now know that Ellison's interests are being pushed by TBI on the UK government is incredibly worrying because Ellison knows that this is a place where he's making a lot of money already, and he's just gonna be set to make even more clearly huge conflicts of interest here. The title of Larry Ellison's biography was what's the difference between Larry Ellison and God? God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison, which I think is quite telling. His wealth isn't just some kind of distant abstract thing.
Like, he's making a lot of money off the UK government and UK taxpayers and taxpayers around the world and making huge amounts from systems and tools that aren't necessarily set to benefit us. There's a lot around surveillance and bringing all the data together so that it's in one place so that governments can use it to surveil people. And Ellison's actually made this clear. He said
Speaker 1: Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. And the camera's always on. You don't turn it on and off. Oracle, I I need I need I need two minutes to take a bathroom break and we'll turn it off. The truth is we don't really turn it off.
What we do is we record it so no one can see it, But no one can get into that recording without a court order.
Speaker 0: And I think that should scare us to have one of the richest men in the world saying this. And at the same time, that same technology that's gonna enable this, he's ultimately gonna benefit from the use of that technology monetarily to make himself more money. That should concern all of us.
Speaker 1: I'm going to lunch with my friends or or going in an hour for privacy with lunch with my friends. God bless. We won't listen in unless there's a court order.
Speaker 0: The Tony Broad Street is a think tank in The UK, by far the largest. It has US levels of funding. Since Labour got into power, we've seen TBI have increasing influence on government policy. We know that Peter Kyle, the former technology secretary, that he was meeting Tony Blair himself every couple of weeks. It seems like ministers don't really have a full grasp of this stuff.
So they're kinda like, oh, TBI knows how to do it. TBI is like really good with technology. So we'll just listen to them and take on kind of whatever they suggest. TBI will publish a report and then within weeks or even days, the UK government has taken on their recommendations, essentially. And then on a kind of more international level, we see TBI as this more kind of consultancy advisory entity where you see TBI employees embedded within governments.
A lot of times in the global South, especially, we've seen that there's this kind of huge push by TBI for big tech and AI boosterism.
Speaker 1: At the Tony Blair Institute, we believe that technology is key to reimagining the state.
Speaker 0: There's a lot of concern among, TBI and former TBI employees about this. A lot of employees told us they decided to work for TBI because they really believed in the mission of kind of encouraging, governments to embrace technology, but in a kind of responsible, safe way. But that they realized it ended up being much more about trying to sell certain technologies. Staff were told to really push Oracle's services and that they were having to do this despite sometimes knowing that this wasn't the best option for the local populations. There were other companies offering better suited systems for those countries.
Tech sales for Oracle, that's how people described it. They were having to do tech PR, tech sales, and that was not what they got into this job for. The influence and power of big tech is seeping into people's consciousness more and more. There's now a slow realization that this isn't gonna benefit normal people. None of this is set to benefit us people on the ground.
And by shining a light on these issues, I'm also hopeful that more journalists will start to look into the big tech lobby and how they're having such a big say at the moment in our policies and to actually speak up against that and campaign for the big tech billionaires to have less influence. With our current media landscape in The UK, the importance of independent media is huge. If you wanna see more independent content like this, feel free to support Double Down News on Patreon.
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"Virginia Giuffre was a very strong women apart from this one man who she was terrified of, she used to say 'I’d go for him if I didn’t have children.' The number of Epstein clients who were sadomasochistic was extraordinary. One of them very nearly killed Virginia." @PulaRJS https://t.co/h5UFiHhT5n
Video Transcript AI Summary
Six years ago I made a film with Kathy Newman for Channel 4 called The Prince and the Pedophile about Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew. In the wake of that film, I had lengthy telephone conversations with Virginia Roberts Giuffre (Virginia Dufry), Epstein’s best known victim, who told me all the men she was farmed out to and that it would not surprise me if President Trump was striving to protect those people.
I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody. It’s pretty boring stuff. These people who gathered around Epstein were not outlandish freaks or outcasts; they were a representative sample of the American business, political, and academic world, the American elite. It’s hardly surprising that both parties, when out of power, demand openness around this case, but when in power they are less interested in all the names.
He’s dead. He’s gone. It’s all been a big hoax, perpetrated by the Democrats, with some foolish Republicans falling into the net.
Epstein was very probably connected to the intelligence services, to American and possibly Israeli intelligence. He may have had compromising material tapes of powerful men, contributing to why he got away with his actions for so long. He illustrates the power, privilege, and impunity of a tiny elite of fabulously rich people who effectively run the world.
Virginia was aware of Donald Trump as a sleazy presence around Epstein and moved in the same world. There was a period when they were close friends, though she was clear she was never abused by him. Virginia was recruited by Epstein while working at Mar-a-Lago. In a 2002 magazine profile, Trump called Epstein a terrific guy who likes women, many of them on the younger side. Trump and Epstein later had a falling out, but they were part of that world together.
Epstein died in a prison cell. Today, Trump is president. After coming to power, Trump’s Justice Department released the Epstein papers; the released versions were heavily redacted, while the versions we had were unredacted. I have the flight logs and the little black book. Alexander Acosta, Epstein’s ally and Trump’s Labor Secretary-designate, reportedly said in hearings that Epstein belonged to intelligence and to be left alone.
Epstein had connections to intelligence services, probably Mossad and American intelligence. Ghislain Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, had extensive intelligence links; he was buried on the Mount of Olives, with eulogies by Israeli figures. Virginia described the abuse she suffered at Epstein’s hands and the enablers around him, including Ghislaine Maxwell, whom Virginia called “Mary fucking Poppins” and described as a sadistic abuser and facilitator. Virginia told me she was abused by a string of men Epstein presented to her, including prominent figures in business and politics and, obviously, Prince Andrew and world leaders. The number of them who were sadomasochistic was extraordinary; one man nearly killed her. She was angry watching Prince Andrew’s interview, angered by his arrogance and belief he would get away with it.
I can tell you categorically I don’t remember meeting her; there are questions about a doctored photograph. Epstein’s smirking was noted by someone who knew him, as if he knew things others didn’t. The Little Black Book was Ghislain Maxwell’s book, as evidenced by the British numbers versus American numbers, with many entries overlapping with the flight logs. Epstein referred to Peter Mandelson as “Petey,” and Mandelson is one of the two pictured with Epstein in a casual outing and at Epstein’s birthday.
There is no suggestion Mandelson was criminally involved, but he was seen in Epstein’s circle, presenting a mysterious closed world of power. Epstein’s death has raised questions about surveillance footage; three minutes are missing from the prison surveillance released by the American government. Epstein, a former Bear Stearns employee and later involved in a pyramid scheme with Steve Hoffenberg, moved into advising Les Wexner and other ventures. He received a sweetheart deal in Florida in 2006–2007, serving about a year with day release, and only faced justice again in 2019.
Epstein’s circle largely walked away unscathed. Virginia’s case did not progress in the UK; Prince Andrew was reportedly settled for about £12,000,000 to Virginia’s charity, a sum funded ultimately by the public. Virginia’s recent death involved a car accident and divorce troubles; conspiracies surround her death, though her family sees nothing suspicious. Virginia’s experiences, and the stories of Epstein, Maxwell, and others, highlight the power and privilege of the wealthy and privileged, and the need for independent media outlets like Double Dan News, which I urge you to support via Patreon.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Six years ago, I made a film with Kathy Newman for Channel four called The Prince and the Pedophile about Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew. In the wake of that film, I had a series of very lengthy telephone conversations with Virginia Dufry, who was Jeffrey Epstein's best known victim. Virginia told me all the men she was farmed out to, and that in itself is a lengthy and horrifying list of men. And it would not surprise me at all if president Trump was striving to protect those people.
Speaker 1: I don't understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody. It's pretty boring stuff.
Speaker 0: These people who gathered around Epstein were not outlandish freaks. They weren't outcasts. They were a very representative sample of the American business, political, and academic world, the American elite. So it's hardly surprising that both parties, when they're out of power, demanding openness and transparency around this case, once they're in power, seem to be a lot less interested in all the names coming out.
Speaker 2: He's dead. He's gone. It's all been a big hoax. It's perpetrated by the Democrats, and some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net.
Speaker 0: Jeffrey Epstein was very probably connected to the intelligence services, to American intelligence services, and to Israeli intelligence. He quite possibly had compromise compromising material tapes, recordings of powerful men. All of this will have contributed to why he got away with his actions for so long. But also, you have to see Epstein as an albeit extreme example of the power and the privilege and the impunity of the tiny elite of fabulously rich people who effectively run the world today.
Speaker 2: Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years.
Speaker 0: Virginia was certainly aware of Donald Trump as a sleazy presence around Jeffrey Epstein and moved in exactly the same world. In fact, there was clearly a period where they were quite close friends, although she was clear that she was never abused by him. Although Virginia was recruited by Jeffrey Epstein while working at Donald Trump's Florida home, Mar A Lago. In a magazine profile in 02/2002, Donald Trump described Jeffrey Epstein as a terrific guy, likes women almost as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. Trump and Epstein seem subsequently to have had a falling out, but they were absolutely part of that world together.
Epstein died in a prison cell. Today, Donald Trump is president of America. After coming to power, Trump got the justice department to release the Epstein papers. I don't think there was a single document that hasn't been sitting on my computer for six years. It was a completely bogus exercise.
And, actually, what was significant was the documents released by Trump's justice department were heavily redacted, whereas the versions we had were unredacted. I have the flight logs, I have the little black book. So Alexander Acosta, who was Trump's secretary for labor in the first administration, back at the time Epstein was arrested in 02/2007, 02/2008, He was the US attorney for Southern Florida. In his hearings to take the job of secretary for labor for Trump, he reportedly said that he had been told Epstein belongs to intelligence. Leave him alone.
It seems to me absolutely clear Epstein had connections to the intelligence services, probably to Mossad, probably to the American intelligence services. Of course, Ghislain Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, is well known as having had extensive links to the intelligence services. Robert Maxwell was buried on the Mount Of Olives in Jerusalem. His funeral was attended by six former heads of Israeli intelligence, and he was eulogized by the serving Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, who said he has done more for Israel than can today be told. Robert Maxwell very definitely moved in that world.
Whether Jeffrey Epstein had connections to the intelligence services in the same way that Robert Maxwell did, I should think it's quite likely. So I woke up on the morning of April 26 to the terrible news of the suicide in Australia of Virginia Dufry, who's the best known of Jeffrey Epstein's victims. The thing about Virginia was the abuse she suffered at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein was not the first abuse she had suffered. She'd been abused throughout her childhood. One of the the repellent things about people like Elaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein is they home in on.
They have an instinct for the vulnerable, for people who, in Virginia's own words, have been primed for abuse. She was angry, obviously, with Jeffrey Epstein. She was angry with the phalanx of women that surrounded Jeffrey Epstein and were his enablers and facilitators. Particularly, she was angry with Ghislaine Maxwell. Mary fucking Poppins, she used to call her.
She would say, I'd never have gone to that man's house if it hadn't been for that woman with her posh English accent. And of course, also during those long conversations, we talked about the men she had been farmed out to. She was abused by Jeffrey Epstein. She was abused by Ghislaine Maxwell, who she was quite clear was an abuser, a very sadistic abuser, as well as being a facilitator. Virginia told me she was then abused by a whole string of men who Jeffrey Epstein presented her to them, sort of on a plate as a sort of gift.
Prominent men from the worlds of business and politics in The United States, obviously Prince Andrew, world leaders. And what was extraordinary was you discovered that when very powerful men who can pretty much have whatever they like in life are offered a 16 year old girl on a plate, bizarrely, what they seem to want to do is to hurt her. The number of them who were sadomasochistic was extraordinary. One of them very nearly killed Virginia. Virginia was a very strong woman, apart from this one man who she was terrified of.
She used to say, I'd go for him if I didn't have children. Because I have children, I won't do that. I remember talking to Virginia about her watching the Prince Andrew interview. She was furious. She was so angry watching that interview.
And what angered her was his arrogance, his belief that he would get away with it.
Speaker 3: I can tell you categorically, I don't remember meeting her. Nobody can prove whether or not that photograph has been doctored. I didn't sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was shot at.
Speaker 0: And I remember she said, that 1%, they believe they are above the law, that 1%. Now you listen to other Epstein victims talking at length in interviews, and they say exactly the same thing. The thing that absolutely enraged them and repelled them was the elitism of Epstein and all of the people who surrounded them. The belief they were above the law, the belief they existed in this gilded club of wealth, power, influence, and connections. It was a gilded club they belonged to, and very firmly, you did not.
And anyone who did not belong to that club was worthless. We had Jeffrey Epstein's infamous Little Black Book. It was enormous, hundreds and hundreds of names. The first thing to understand about the Little Black Book, and this isn't commonly understood, is it was really Ghislain Maxwell's book. And you can tell this because the numbers, for the most part, have American prefixes, but they don't when it's a British number.
So for the most part, it's her book. Virginia used to point out Jeffrey was actually a rather weird, strange, nerdy person. What Ghislain did was she was his sort of social lubricant. She opened up social worlds to him. This was Ghislain's entry point to his world.
It was her selling point, and she was keen to show off. The people who matter in the Little Black Book are people who also appear in the notorious flight logs, and also in the Little Black Book who have numerous numbers. There are over 20 telephone numbers connected to Bill Clinton. Donald Trump, 14 numbers. Alan Dershowitz, 11 numbers.
There are seven numbers for Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel. Also, 10 numbers for Peter Mandelson, who is now the British ambassador to The United States, of course. There are two pictures, of course, that exist of Mandelson with Epstein, and they're not pictures at some public event where they just happen to be standing near each other. The first one, they're out shopping together. They're the only two people in the picture.
The second one, it's clearly Epstein's birthday. Somebody's bringing him a cake. Jeffrey Epstein referred to Peter Mendelsohn as Petey. That was Jeffrey Epstein's name for Peter Mandelson. He called him Petey.
Why was Peter Mandelson spending time with Jeffrey Epstein? It's a really interesting question. We have to be crystal clear. There is absolutely no suggestion that Peter Mandelson was involved in any criminal wrongdoing. One suspects Mendelson was attracted to the whole world of Jeffrey Epstein and certainly the image that Jeffrey Epstein sought to convey of moving in a mysterious world, a mysterious closed world of power, influence, and connections.
I remember talking to one man who knew Epstein well. He said, my memory of Jeffrey is he was always smirking. He was always smirking. I said, what was he smirking about? And he thought for a bit, and he said, he was smirking because he knew things you didn't.
He wanted to convey the image anyway that he was part of a closed world of connections and power and secret maneuverings that you could never enter. He knew secrets about an awful lot of people, obviously there's speculation around his death. He had been placed in a cell where he was on suicide watch. He was taken out of that cell. His cellmate was taken away, and on the night he died, the two prison officers who were meant to be regularly checking on him slept through the night.
The American government has now released surveillance footage from the prison where Epstein died. Three minutes of that surveillance footage are missing. Those are the the bold facts. It's clearly an extremely suspicious death. Jeffrey Epstein was a financier.
He'd originally worked at Bear Stearns. He'd been sacked from Bear Stearns sort of fiddling his expenses. In the eighties, he worked in a very murky world, in the world of arms dealing, and I suspect made lots of connections there. He then went into businesses with this man called Steve Hoffenberg, and they basically ran a pyramid scheme. In the early nineties, Hoffenberg was sent to prison for quite a long time.
Jeffrey walked away scot free, one of the early mysteries in Epstein's life. He then worked as sort of financial adviser to Les Wexner, who was the CEO of Victoria's Secrets, and seems to have made a lot of money from him. Around 02/2006, 02/2007, the Palm Beach Police down in Florida, where he had a home, launched a very serious investigation into Epstein and gathered a load of information on him, a mass of evidence on him. Now had he been a poor black man, he would have spent the rest of his life in prison. There's absolutely no doubt about that.
He got a ridiculous sweetheart deal, about a year in prison. He had day release. He was actually able to go and work at his office. He got a punishment that in no way fitted his crimes at all. Justice didn't catch up with him again for more than a decade until he was arrested in 2019.
Epstein died in 02/2019, but the the coterie of men who he farmed these young girls out to, for the most part, have just walked away scot free from all of this. Virginia was very frustrated that the legal cases in The UK didn't go anywhere. Now under legislation at the time, as I understand it, Prince Andrew actually wasn't guilty of a crime. The age of consent was 16, she was 17. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell potentially were guilty of a crime trafficking.
But having been initially greatly encouraged by the attitude of the police, suddenly that went nowhere. Virginia was never able to establish why, but one can only assume that pressure was brought on the police from above. So Prince Andrew, it's reported he eventually paid £12,000,000 to Virginia's charity to settle with Virginia. Now, of course, this is money ultimately that comes from us. I mean, Prince Andrew never earned £12,000,000 in his life.
It was essentially us, the public, that ultimately paid for Prince Andrew's alleged crimes. Now as for Virginia, it was clear that in recent months she'd been having a bad time. She posted recently following apparently a car accident. I think she was going through a very messy divorce. I actually reached out to her on the number I used to have for her, but I didn't get a response.
Inevitably, there are conspiracy theories around her death. Her family don't seem to feel there is anything suspect or suspicious about her death. But what I would say, Virginia used to say to me, sometimes I don't get the exact date right, sometimes I get the locations wrong, but believe me, you never forget the face of a disgusting old man grinding away on top of you. And I think the faces of those men were etched into her soul. She was a very brave, courageous, fun woman.
She and the other women were told they were nothing. They were worthless. She took back the power and transferred the shame. But within her, she clearly carried around this enormous, enormous weight, the enormous weight of a whole childhood of abuse. It would seem that in the end, that weight crushed her.
And even if they were not directly responsible for her death, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and all of the other men who abused her, all of whom have walked away scot free, they are all responsible for her death. Virginia's Jewfrey's story is a casebook study in how the powerful, the wealthy, and the privileged are all too often not called to account for their crimes. It flags up more than ever the need we have for independent media outlets like Double Dan. And I would urge you to contribute to Double Dan news through Patreon.
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Israel's DARK SECRET Genocide Economy EXPOSED @FranceskAlbs https://t.co/fG1wUqkN3P
Video Transcript AI Summary
"An economy of occupation just turned into an economy of genocide." "The Tel Aviv stock exchange has increased its value 179%, 70 billions in the last month alone." "Sixty thousand people have been killed." "Over one hundred thousand have been maimed." "One third of the killed ones are children." "This genocide has been enforced through weaponry technology and surveillance systems of the twenty first century." "Israel has violated the right of self determination of the Palestinian like the rights to exist on the little land that remains to them politically, culturally, economically." "The report exposes an economy of occupation, which has turned into an economy of genocide." "Airbnb and booking.com advertised properties on land that settlers and the state of Israel have stolen from the Palestinians." "Hyundai has been providing machinery that has been used to demolish Palestinian infrastructure in the West Bank."
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: An economy of occupation just turned into an economy of genocide. The Tel Aviv stock exchange has increased its value 179%, 70 billions in the last month alone. Why? Arms manufacturers and security slash surveillance system has been profiteering a lot through the customization of weaponry and how Israel has perfected certain techniques of surveillance or hitting, killing Palestinians throughout this genocidal war. Palestine has always been a laboratory for Israel, and Israel must be understood as a military state.
In order to preserve itself as an ethno state, it has had to rely significantly on the use of force, on military force. And the Palestinians have provided an endless pool of resources on which to test surveillance techniques, technology, and other kinds of weapons with zero accountability, zero scrutiny, and a lot of return. One people enriched and another erased. Eastern's economy is a business of erasure, of elimination. Sixty thousand people have been killed.
Over one hundred thousand have been maimed. One third of the killed ones are children. The harm that has been done to the Palestinians is enormous and can hardly be met by justice. However, there is something absolutely abominable in the way this genocide has been committed. This is a genocide that has been enforced through weaponry technology and surveillance systems of the twenty first century.
If I look back right now after three years of this mandate as a special rapporteur, I see a continuum in various pieces of work that I've done. Israel has violated the right of self determination of the Palestinian like the rights to exist on the little land that remains to them politically, culturally, economically. It does strangle the possibility for them to have an economy by controlling their land, fuel, gas, and diverting them and the profits that others could make out of them toward itself. And this is why I insist today we need to stop feeding this illusion that there is a good Israel and a bad Israel, a good Israel with whom it's okay to do business while if you cross the green line and you get into the colonies, then it becomes problematic. No.
It's Israel which commits violations of the right of self determination, which maintains an unlawful occupation, which advances annexation, and therefore, it's Israel which today must face sanctions, divestment, and based on what civil society is increasingly and successfully doing boycotts. The report exposes an economy of occupation, which has turned into an economy of genocide. For decades, Israel has advanced its settler colonial project enabled, supported by a network of private entities, which range from the armed sector, Elbit system, Lockheed Martin, surveillance sector, Palantir, whose tools, and equipment have been used to forcibly displace the Palestinians from their lands, to destroy their lands and livelihoods, their homes, and then to segregate and surveil them with walls, fences, CCTV cameras, etcetera. And then they've been replaced. So they've been displaced and replaced in in a way in which the private sector has proven instrumental in creating a new habitat, a new ecosystem made of homes, services, infrastructures where Israeli Jews and others and their partners, their associates have replaced the Palestinians.
Think of the construction of the colonies, roads, water, and electricity infrastructure, extracting Palestinian natural resources, and then producing goods and services and circulating them, connecting to a domestic, regional, and international sets of markets. If Palestine was a crime scene, it would have the fingerprints of all of us. So for example, Airbnb and booking.com advertised properties on land that settlers and the state of Israel have stolen from the Palestinians, we continue to normalize the occupation through a click. And this is not even the end of the story because there has been a network, a web of enablers made of banks like BNP or Barclay, financial entities like BlackRock and Vanguard, and even universities which have landed legitimacy and financial means, funds, endowments to the system to thrive so that Israel could continue business as usual. It is displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in a vicious circle.
Now I could have written this report decades ago. And still, what has happened now is that instead of disengaging from this economy of occupation, which is unlawful, and we need to understand the legal framework there because it implies responsibility and possibly liability of companies and their executives is that instead of disengaging these companies, I've maintained their entwinement with this economy and have even profited more. Hyundai has been providing machinery that has been used to demolish Palestinian infrastructure in the West Bank. And now that machinery is being used to pulverize Gaza. Same with Volvo.
Volvo has been providing buses used to connect the colonies and the colonies to Israel or thinks of the weaponry that has been enhanced and rendered more sophisticated through the support of artificial intelligence and other technologies in order to become more lethal at a reduced cost of life for the Israelis, like command technologies, quadcopters, killing drones. So all these has generated an incredible, incredible economy, very high profits. But also think of the water industry or the diary industry that should have complained for losing the market that Gaza represented. Right? No.
They've not made a peep because there's ideologically, they support what the state of Israel is doing. And universities have not disentangled from partnership with with the Israeli universities or with the Israeli defense sector and other forms of research in the name of neutrality. But there is nothing neutral, nothing innocent in engaging with a state which commits and is accused of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. So this is the red line that companies have continued to cross with knowledge, intent, and purpose. And so this is why I say these people have no realization, no sense of what has been going on in Gaza.
I mean, the harm that has been done in Gaza or if they do, they support it. And this is why I say they must be held accountable. And of course, the companies can say, well, but what can I do? It's Israel. You making the user wants of our goods.
Yes. But you are enabling it. You are profiting from an unlawful endeavor. The fact of being directly linked to this economy enmeshes you in an economy of occupation. And if you are not held accountable in court, well, you will have face accountability through the choice of your consumers.
The strength of this report is in how it explains and exposes a system of entanglement and complicity of private actors with an unlawful endeavor. The International Court of Justice says that the occupation is unlawful. It should be withdrawn totally and unconditionally. And so the question is, how can ever been envisaged that the private sector can do what is prohibited to states like recognizing the legal consequences of an unlawful act, which is criminal, and trading, aiding and abetting, supporting these unlawful endeavor? This is why I say the only legal legal move that companies can make is unplugging, just pulling out of their entanglement with with Israel.
Private entities are allowed to get away with their violations of international law because this is what they've always done. Historically, private entities have been enablers and drivers of settler colonial enterprises, dispossession, dismemberment, and subjugation of entire nations. Indigenous peoples bear like living testament of these. Palestinians are the last to be genocided in the pursuit of profit. However, as the post Holocaust industrialist trials marked the end of an era of full lack of accountability and South Africa post apartheid has advanced the development of a normative framework to regulate the conduct of business.
This is the test. Palestine is forcing us to take the opportunity to test that legal framework and to make sure that whatever businesses have done until now, meaning pursuing profits without zero accountability and zero scrutiny, changes once and for all. People who are enriching themselves out of this catastrophe have to be looked for everywhere they are and held accountable. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a slap in the face of eighty years of multilateralism and humanitarian assistance. Whatever they are doing is not aid.
It's a shame to call it aid. How come that the state that is accused of committing acts of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity against the Palestinians, including using starvation as a weapon of war is the state that is allowed to distribute food to the Palestinians. All the more, whatever that thing, the so called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is, it looks more like a joint criminal enterprise with zero accountability, zero scrutiny, but especially zero purpose because, first of all, aid is a complex endeavor. It's not just throwing bags of flour at people. There are reports that refer to the presence of bills appear to be narcotics in the flower, but also the way the flower is distributed.
It's a punch in the face of the principle of dignity, humanity not doing no harm, and it's absolutely undignified. The only recommendation I have, and I urge member states to do that, break the blockade yourself. Every state which has ports in the Mediterranean area, European states and Arab states must send their navy with humanitarian personnel and humanitarian supplies for the people of Gaza. Enough of them starving, being killed, tormented day and night. This nightmare must end for the Palestinians, for the Israelis, and for what remains of our humanity.
A ceasefire is not the answer, especially according to the Israeli way of observing ceasefires where others sees Israel fires. This is how ceasefires are normally implemented. This is not about ceasefire. The paradigm needs to shift from self defense, whatever it is, to self determination. I'm really worried also about how member states from Arab states to western states are discussing the reconstructions of Gaza.
This is not a business. We need to recover a population which is surviving genocide and we need to heal them. We will also need to take care and heal the Israelis who have committed this genocide because this is a society that when we will realize what it has done, will face a moral and moral collapse, but they will also have to face accountability for what they have done. Look, there is no other way to stop the genocide than stopping it. The genocide will and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from what remains of Palestine will not stop by inertia.
It must be stopped. And international law has in itself the road map to end it. End the genocide now. End the occupation by September year because this is what the general assembly upon the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice has decided. And then end apartheid.
Whatever political solutions Palestinians and Israelis will decide, it cannot be anything else than full rights and freedoms for anyone regardless of their religious or political cultural identity between the river and the sea. Meanwhile, private and public actors from government officials to CEOs of companies have to be held accountable. The role that civil society, lawyers, private sectors, and anyone as a consumer or as part of a public or private institution can play is enormous. Use your role to bring accountability forward. We do build change at every step and this is the moment to prove it.
May this be the last genocide in human history and may this be the last crime that is committed against the Palestinians. Look, have one regret not to have investigated media as the first corporate entity which should be held accountable, but it's coming. So thank you independent media to do what corporate media has not been able to do, telling the truth.
@DoubleDownNews - Double Down News
Many Israeli citizens were killed by Israeli forces on October 7. 28 Apache helicopters used all their ammunition and had to be reloaded. Mainstream media is finally catching up to this mass Hannibal Directive. Here’s our report with @pularjs on what really happened on Oct 7: https://t.co/g5xhsNRJVQ
Video Transcript AI Summary
Al Jazeera's investigative unit conducted a forensic examination of October 7, uncovering crimes by Hamas and others, and crimes that did not happen, which the Western press largely ignored. Israelis were aware of the plans; Hamas were training openly for this operation, and "training videos online." On the night of October 7, spotters along the fence reported to headquarters, and the head of Shin Bet and the head of military intelligence concluded it's "just another training exercise" and did not raise the alert level. When Hamas burst through the fence at 06:30, defenders were in their beds; Hamas anticipated most fighters would be killed trying to get through the fence; only a small number were. The Hannibal Directive was revived midday on October 7; "70 vehicles were hit"; "27 people were clearly taken hostage... died somewhere between their homes and the fence"; "18 people were pretty much certainly killed by the police and the army as they arrived." Two babies killed on Oct 7; "one is a 10 old child"; "the other dies after an emergency cesarean, a Bedouin child." No beheadings; no evidence of widespread and systematic rape. It critiques Western media focus on crimes that did not happen and promotes Doubledown News.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: At Al Jazeera's investigative unit, we've conducted a forensic meticulous examination of the events of October 7. We uncovered very real crimes committed by Hamas and others. But I think what was perhaps most significant were the crimes we discovered that did not happen. And it's hugely concerning that these revelations have been virtually entirely ignored by the Western press. What's extraordinary is the Israelis were aware of the plans.
Hamas were actually training quite openly for this operation, and they were actually placing the training videos online so anyone could view them. On the very night of October 7 before dawn, spotters along the fence are reporting back to headquarters. And the head of Shinbet and the head of military intelligence take this seriously enough that in the middle of the night, they're up and talking to each other, and they conclude it's just another training exercise. And what is extraordinary is that they don't even raise the alert level to number one. You know, the most basic alert level would have made a huge difference.
And they don't do that, which means that when Hamas bursts through the fence at 06:30 in the morning, they catch many of the defenders in their beds. I mean, you can see many of the soldiers are killed in their beds. Hamas had anticipated most of their fighters would be killed trying to get through the fence. In fact, only a small number were killed trying to get through the fence. They were as much taken by surprise as anyone by the performance of Israeli intelligence and the Israeli military.
Crucially, also, they were taken by surprise by this very large music festival that was taking place, which they don't seem to have been aware of. Having overrun the military bases, the game plan was to grab hostages and take them back. And they do this on a large scale, but they also clearly kill very large numbers of of unarmed civilians as well. The Israelis were then extraordinarily slow to respond. Now they scramble Apache helicopters, but there's no ground control.
It's pretty clear that in the chaos, some hostages at least were hit by Apache helicopter fire. We've identified 27 people who were clearly taken hostage, taken captive, and were taken away from their homes but never made it to the fence, died somewhere between their homes and the fence. There's a fair chance that a number of them were killed by Apache helicopters. Within the kibbutzes, we've identified 18 people who were pretty much certainly killed by the police and the army as they arrived. 12 of them, a specific incident in Kibbutz Bedi where you have a large number of gunmen, around 40 gunmen holed up in a house with 13 hostages.
A tank is brought in and opens fire on the house. There are two survivors from this incident which is why we know about. There may be other incidents we don't know about because everyone was killed, but there are two survivors from this who spoke to Israeli media. There's a common sense thing. You just have to look at the scale of the destruction and it's clear that 1,200 men armed with rocket propelled grenades and machine guns did not do all of this.
The Hannibal Directive was was something that was developed in the nineteen eighties by the Israelis, and it was basically to avoid situations where their enemies would capture one or two or three Israeli soldiers and then effectively hold them to ransom. There was one occasion where the Israelis released over a thousand Palestinian prisoners in return for a single Israeli soldier. So an order was issued whereby they said, it's better that we kill everyone than allow people to be captured. Now this was supposedly rescinded several years ago, but at midday on October 7, the army revived the Hannibal directive, put it into effect. 70 vehicles were hit.
At least in some of the cases, everyone in the vehicle was killed.
Speaker 1: The Israeli military does not deny the report.
Speaker 0: The peculiarity of the days after October 7 is that the Israeli media and subsequently the international media choose to focus not on the very real and extensive crimes that Hamas and others did commit, but on crimes they did not commit. And this had two focuses. In the days immediately after it's to do with babies. The most dramatic one is we see an allegation that there were 40 babies killed, many of them beheaded. This is very simple to deal with because we have a comprehensive list of the dead.
We know that two babies are killed on October 7. One is an 10 old child. Who is hit by a bullet fired through a safe room door. The other is a child who dies after an emergency cesarean, a Bedouin child in fact. Now any story about babies that does not relate to those two and there are a lot of stories about babies is not true.
We know it's not true. This has enormous implications for the other wave of atrocity stories that began very quickly which is to do with sexual violence and particularly the Israeli assertion that it was widespread and systematic. To be clear in the film, we are not saying that there were no rapes on October 7. We simply don't know. What we are saying is that there simply is not the evidence.
There's not the forensic evidence. There's not the visual evidence. There's not the photographic evidence. And there is not the witness evidence to support the allegation of widespread and systematic rape. The Israelis have this strange system where they farm out the collection of bodies after disasters and terrorist attacks and so on to an organization called Zaka, who are ultra orthodox religious volunteers.
They collect the bodies, prepare them for religious burial, and so on. A character that many people would have seen in the days afterwards is Josie Landau, who was the southern commander of Zaka, who was on television a great deal. He said The two
Speaker 2: piles of 10 children each were tied to the back, burned to death.
Speaker 0: You then see a phone call which Netanyahu makes to president Biden, where he repeats this story. In fact, he embellishes it.
Speaker 2: They took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them, and executed them.
Speaker 0: Terribly important, this, because it was entirely untrue. We know the house he's talking about. He's talking about the house in Kibbutz Bedi, which was the house that was stormed by Israeli police and military, and where it is almost certain that all of the hostages were killed by the Israeli police and military. There were two children there, two twins, but no other children. So we know the story is untrue.
Mister Landau told a number of other stories. There's one particularly notorious one about the fetus being cut out of a pregnant woman.
Speaker 2: The baby that was connected to the court was stabbed, and she was shot in the back.
Speaker 0: We simply know this is untrue. The list of the dead show there's no such victim. Mister Landau said, you know, I have a picture of this atrocity.
Speaker 2: If you wanna see the picture, I have the picture of it. This is the baby. I'm sorry to be graphic here, but I I can't see a baby here. You can't see the baby because but this is the picture of the of the mother.
Speaker 0: It was a piece of charred flesh. It wasn't a baby. It certainly wasn't a baby. So it was interesting. Psychologically, I'm not quite sure why he offered to show me a photo that he didn't have.
I'd point out as well that Zaka was an organization that was in trouble. There had been a major Its founder had been accused of child sexual abuse. There was a financial scandal that had been found to be cooking the books. It's raised an awful lot of money since October 7. These stories were clearly useful, and they were useful to the Israeli government.
In the film, we see Benjamin Netanyahu visiting Zaha volunteers and thanking them for talking to the world's media and stressing that this is another front in the war. Why does this matter? Why does it matter whether this type of atrocity was committed but not that type? People were killed in this way, not that way. It matters because the murder of babies and widespread rape has a particular resonance.
It's particularly triggering. The Israeli government and its supporters when they justify the brutality of the subsequent bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip Again and again and again, what they always reference is babies and rape.
Speaker 3: Young girls who were raped and then murdered.
Speaker 2: Women brutally raped and murdered.
Speaker 3: Little kids who are beheaded. Pictures of terrorists beheading children.
Speaker 4: These bastards put these babies in
Speaker 3: a oven and put on their oven. We found the kid a few hours later.
Speaker 0: This is something you see in previous conflicts as well. If you want to dehumanize an enemy, if you want to desensitize people to the suffering that is inflicted on that enemy, then you portray them as barbarians, basically as savages, as people who are not deserving of humane treatment. And that's why it's relevant. That's why it's important to pick apart. A lot of the world's leading media outlets have done in-depth investigations where they have concluded there was widespread systematic, instrumentalized, weaponized rape.
The New York Times makes a particular feature of the story of a young woman. She was killed early in the morning, nine miles north of the music festival site as she and her husband were fleeing. The New York Times, in its big December investigation into sexual violence, leads with this, and about a third of the article consists of her story. It's immediately undermined because the woman's sister then posts on Instagram immediately afterwards that this isn't true. We know she wasn't raped.
She was texting us until minutes before her death. It's also the case that her husband had a lengthy phone conversation immediately after her death with his brother and again made no mention of rape. So it's very important that because it's the central most compelling piece of information in one of the biggest investigations done by one of the world's most prestigious media outlets, The New York Times, and it turns out not to be true. It's done by three journalists. One of them turns out to be somebody who had worked in some capacity for Israeli intelligence previously, who has virtually no journalistic experience, and then who had liked genocidal media posts.
It's very interesting with Anna Schwartz. She gives an interview in Hebrew to an Israeli channel. She actually lays out how difficult they were finding it to find evidence that they they were talking to all the hospitals and all the psychiatric clinics and so on, and that there was simply no evidence at all. There were no witnesses that come forward. No no victims had come forward at all.
I think she's telling this as if to to show what digging they had to do, but it's actually very revealing. In the end, it's quite clear. They fall back on the same sources as everyone else, Israeli government officials, IDF officers, and first responders. All sources which were discredited by the baby stories. So no babies were beheaded, no babies were were thrown into ovens, and there is no real evidence for widespread and systematic rape.
Now it's very clear why the Israelis might want these stories to to circulate. What's less clear is why very reputable western news and media outlets should swallow them so uncritically, particularly given the track record of the Israeli government and the IDF, which has been shown again and again and again in the past to have been less than truthful in the accounts it gives.
Speaker 1: Because our war is against Hamas, not against the people of Gaza. While this mission is urgent, we will continue to fulfill it with care and with a commitment to the sanctity of life, both Israeli and Palestinian.
Speaker 0: The response to our film October 7 has been interesting. The response is not to criticize and to pick apart and say we've got it wrong. They don't do that at all. What they do is they simply ignore you, which on one level I take as a compliment because I think there are all sorts of people out there who would very much like to pick apart what we're doing and to destroy it and discredit it. And I think they take one look at it and decide they can't really do it.
So what they do do, which in a way is even more damaging, is just to entirely ignore us. This is significant because so often what we are doing is critiquing the way the mainstream media has covered the story, which may well be of course precisely why the media doesn't want to look at what we've done. So in a way the treatment of this in many ways echoes the treatment of our earlier series, The Labor Files, which offered a critique of the dominant media narrative about Corbyn and the Corbyn years on the antisemitism crisis. The allegation of antisemitism clearly is a very powerful weapon that can be wielded in defense of the Israeli state. I think sometimes particularly by the Israeli state, it is wielded very cynically and very deliberately.
Speaker 2: When the ICC investigates Israel for fake war crimes, this is pure antisemitism.
Speaker 0: It's not the case in Western media and Western societies that you cannot criticize Israel. You can. Now you have to be a bit careful about how you do it. But certainly at the moment, during the assault on Gaza, you certainly can. What you cannot do is to question the fundamental philosophy of Zionism.
What you are not allowed to do is to say what all Palestinians would say. Israel is a state whose defining feature is and has always been that it is structured to ensure the domination of one ethnicity over another. That it is in effect an apartheid state, which is what all of the world's human rights organizations now describe it as. The enormous peculiarity and dysfunction of Western media with Israel is not only does it not say that, you're actually not allowed to say that. And this renders criticism of Israel perilous terrain.
People are very on edge. They're very aware that they're straying into dangerous territory. They're very aware they have to choose their words terribly carefully, otherwise they will be misconstrued. You can see this happening at its worst within the Labour Party where particularly Jewish people are far far more likely to be suspended and expelled for antisemitism from the Labour Party than non Jewish people. There is something more fundamental that goes on which regards the Palestinian people as a whole.
Once you have tainted them with the stain of antisemitism, you have opened the door to, you have facilitated the dehumanization of Palestinians, which is the psychological prerequisite of Israeli brutality towards the Palestinians and of Western complicity in that brutality. Palestinians will often make the point that they did not choose who their occupier was, who their colonizer was. So in fighting back, yes, they are inevitably fighting back against Zionists and Jews. It doesn't mean they're anti Semitic. One has to ask oneself the question, are we really saying that if they had been colonized by Greeks or Italians, they wouldn't be resisting their occupation?
Of course they would. 36 Israeli children were killed on October 7 and this understandably got widespread international media coverage. At this stage, I
Speaker 2: think over
Speaker 0: 14,000 Palestinian children have been killed. And you would expect the outrage and the coverage to be proportionately greater, and it's not. In future, people will look back at what is being done, is essentially the flattening of a whole series of towns and the mass murder of thousands and thousands of unarmed civilians, almost half of whom are children. And they will be absolutely bewildered by how the West allowed this to happen under its very noses with weapons that were being supplied by the West. There is a rupture in the relationship of large numbers of people with the political media class.
There is a fundamental alienation that is going on right now as a result of what is happening in the Gaza Strip. I think that's very dangerous for the future. The events of October 7 are a case study in how traditional media can let us down and how we desperately need alternative voices that will genuinely probe these things and not simply accept the narratives that are fed to them. For this reason, think it's enormously important to have outlets like Doubledown News, and I would urge you to support Doubledown News in any way you can.
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An Israeli sniper shot a Palestinian child in the back for no reason, in the West Bank The child is reportedly in hospital in critical condition. No words of condemnation from cowardly Western politicians & deafening silence from the world’s media https://t.co/QVGUfsKKkm
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‘Traumatised’ Maccabi Tel Aviv fans arriving at Ben Gurion airport from Amsterdam singing: Ole ole, ole ole ole Let the IDF win & fuck the Arabs Ole ole, ole ole ole Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!” https://t.co/wPGeKhCekF
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Israeli Soldiers War Crimes EXPOSED @pularjs https://t.co/6OVspLMIsH
Video Transcript AI Summary
Over the past year, a meticulously documented crime has unfolded, focusing on the town of Hebuk Khazah, which the Israeli army allegedly emptied and destroyed, recording and posting the destruction. Soldiers allegedly filmed themselves destroying homes and going through women's underwear. One individual stated they would "erase Gaza" if given the chance, a sentiment allegedly shared by many Israelis.
Israelis allegedly mocked Palestinians who no longer have homes in song. AI is allegedly used for targeting in Gaza, using phones and social media to track individuals and assign points, with enough points leading to being killed, often at home using software called "Where's Daddy." Despite numerous videos, there is allegedly a lack of footage showing dead Hamas fighters.
All 36 hospitals in Gaza have allegedly been assaulted. A man was allegedly used as a human shield and killed in front of his mother. Soldiers allegedly display impunity, posting videos of unarmed individuals being shot by snipers, including a child. Detainees are allegedly abused, with reports of beatings and a star of David carved into one man's back, and a dog being used to rape someone. 53 individuals have allegedly been killed in Israeli detention. Western media's double standards are criticized, with claims that the lives of one group of people are worth more than the lives of another group of people.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Over the last year, we have witnessed what is the greatest crime of the 21st century. Perversely, it's a crime that has been meticulously documented and presented to us by the people who are carrying it out. We at Elder 0 have collated all that evidence, packaged it. What it reveals is truly shocking. We focus on the town of Hebuk Khazah, which is a small town of about 13,000 people.
The Israeli army enters this town just after Christmas. It's emptied of people, and they simply destroy it. And they record to themselves doing it. They post before and after videos, and the town is entirely flattened. There is no precedent for this in the whole history of the Israeli army.
We have become addicted to explosions. The willful destruction of civilian property for punitive reasons or even perhaps to create a buffer strip is illegal. You can't do that. It's against international law. And they're doing it, and they're recording it, and they're putting it on Facebook.
And we know the names of soldiers and the commanders who did it. They go into the homes of Palestinians, and they're often clearly staying there. And they just smash them up. And they film themselves smashing them up. They also delight in going through women's underwear drawers.
And this is a sort of recurring obsession. You have to see Israeli soldier videos in the context of the broader output of Israeli society.
Speaker 1: If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second. I would press it right now. Give me that button and press it right now.
Speaker 0: There you go.
Speaker 1: And I think most Israelis would.
Speaker 0: There's an Israeli song called This Was My Home, and what they would do is dress up as caricatures of, obviously, what they perceive Palestinians to be, being sung mockingly to people who no longer have homes. We're not looking at some sort of obscure subculture within Israeli society. This is mainstream Israeli society. When people tell you who they are, believe them. It's an entire nation out there that is responsible, and we will fight until we break their backbone.
972 magazine carried a story about how the Israelis were using AI, artificial intelligence, for targeting. Essentially, they had a problem. They wanted a rate of strikes in the Gaza Strip, which human computation couldn't keep up with. They needed to use AI to identify these targets. They're using people's phones and their social media.
Any information at all, they can scrape about them. And then they track them through their phones. So who are they talking to on their phone? Who are they simply near as they're carrying their phones around? And they have a little league table.
And if you accumulate enough points, you can be killed. The terrifying thing is how do you kill them? Where do you kill them? And they reach the calculation that it's much easier to kill people when they're at home, which is where the second bit of software kicks in, which is called Where's Daddy? The naming is indicative of a fairly dark sense of humor.
They track you. Once daddy is home, they can kill you. And of course, along with anyone else who is in the house as well. It's astonishing what Israeli soldiers do put on film, but that raises the question of what they don't put on film. You very rarely see them actually fighting.
Every now and then, you'll see them all firing their guns, but usually pretty clear there's no incoming. On the other hand, what you see a great deal of is them dressing up in women's underwear. Has Israel managed to destroy Hamas? I would point to a really simple common sense thing. Israeli soldiers have posted thousands of videos online.
The IDF, the Israeli army, repeatedly posts videos online. Scour those videos for the bodies of dead fighters, and there's remarkably few. I remember 20 years ago in Afghanistan when the Taliban fell before the age of social media. And I remember making films about that footage with piles of corpses. It's extraordinary how few dead Hamas fighters we are seeing.
Another extraordinary facet of this conflict is the repeated attacks on hospitals. They have assaulted every single one of the 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip. We have the films of Mohammed Alhalo, a remarkable young journalist who really chronicled the whole story of the Nasr hospital. The Israelis are very keen to drive people taking refuge in the hospital out to force them further south. They send a messenger into the hospital to order the people there to leave, and they use a detainee.
And they've made it quite clear to him. They know who his mother is, where she is, and that she will be killed if he does not return. So he does return. They send him back because the people still aren't leaving. People aren't leaving because they don't trust the Israelis.
1 of the few people who does leave is his mother. She follows him out with a small group of other people, and he's killed in front of her eyes. Having used him as a messenger, as a human shield, effectively, they simply shoot him. They shoot him 3 times in front of her eyes and kill him. What is extraordinary about so many of the soldiers' videos is the sense of impunity they have.
One particular video is the 202 paratroopers. When they left Gaza, individuals within that unit put together a video. It's like a commemorative video, and it's edited, and it's set to music, and so on. It's been up on YouTube now for 6 months. It includes 3 men, separate incidents, men who are shot by snipers.
They are putting up the killing of people who are clearly unarmed. And for soldiers to post this in their own names shows a sense that they simply don't have to account for their actions at all. Deaths by snipers are very common in the Gaza Strip, and it's not just adult men. There's a particular shot of a child, a young boy, who was shot at the gates of the NASA hospital. It's then too dangerous to collect the body.
If you're a sniper, you know who you're shooting. You've got very good sights, and you know perfectly well what you're looking at. Mohammed al Hallou. He is almost killed numerous times. One of the occasions is he's shot.
He's wearing a flak jacket. They've actually managed to hit the thing that says press. One of the dreadful things about working as a journalist and as a human rights worker during this conflict, not only do you not have sort of immunity as it were, you are positively a target. Detainees are clearly abused when they are first taken prisoner. We've all seen the images of them stripped to their underwear.
It's clearly designed to humiliate. We gathered accounts in the Gaza Strip of people being beaten. We have a picture of 1 man who had a star of David carved into his back. In a way, for many, this is just a prelude to when they're taken into Israel to these detention centers. In our film, we have one grotesque eyewitness account of a dog being used to rape someone.
UN report at the end of June identified 53 individuals who have been killed in Israeli detention. There's a report on Israel's channel 13 broadcasting to the world, advertising the fact, celebrating the fact that these men spend 24 hours in complete darkness with a single hole for a toilet in handcuffs chained together with leg cuffs. The whole focus of the report is clearly the Israeli public. And what they're trying to stress is how badly these people are being treated because clearly the political issue within Israel is whether they're not being treated badly enough. No one can hide here.
No one can pretend they didn't know what was happening because the Israelis were were shouting in our faces. The double standards of Western media, of western politicians are just breathtaking. I mean, you just have to look at David Lamy and Keir Starmer's response to the Iranian attack on Israel, which didn't actually kill anyone. I utterly condemn this attempt by the Iranian regime to harm innocent Israelis. And they were straight to the election condemning it in a way that they have not condemned the Israelis who have killed over 40,000 people.
It's quite clear that the lives of one group of people are worth more than the lives of another group of people. No one can say they didn't know. The Israelis could not have made it clearer to us what they were doing in their rhetoric, social media they were posting, and what their own media was saying, that this was an exercise in ethnic cleansing, quite possibly an exercise in genocide. They were making it abundantly clear to us. And if we are ignorant, we are willfully ignorant.
When people tell you who they are, believe them. And the Israelis have certainly told us who they are over the last year. The experience of the last year is testimony to the inadequacy of traditional media in the west, which seems simply to be a unable to tell this story as it really is. And it highlights more than ever the need for independent media outlets like Double Down News. And I would urge you to support Double Down News on Patreon.
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Israeli Soldiers SICKENING War Crimes EXPOSED @pularjs https://t.co/hd4LMApwyx
Video Transcript AI Summary
Al Jahzira has collated evidence revealing shocking actions by the Israeli army, including the destruction of Hebok Khazah. Soldiers filmed themselves destroying Palestinian homes and rifling through women's underwear. Some Israelis express support for erasing Gaza. An Israeli song mocking Palestinians who have lost their homes is mainstream.
Israel uses AI for targeting in Gaza, tracking people via phones and social media to create kill lists, prioritizing those at home using software called "Where's Daddy?". Despite extensive online videos, there's a lack of footage showing dead Hamas fighters. All 36 hospitals in Gaza have been attacked. A messenger sent by Israelis into Nassar hospital was killed after delivering their message.
The 202 paratroopers posted a video showing the killing of unarmed individuals. Deaths by snipers, including children, are common. Journalists are targeted. Over 10% of journalists in Gaza have been killed. Detainees are abused, with reports of beatings and sexual assault.
Western media is criticized for double standards and biased coverage, particularly regarding human shields. There is no evidence Hamas uses human shields, while Israelis have been documented doing so. The West enables Israeli behavior. RAF Akrotiri is suspected of providing targeting information to Israel. Western politicians condemn Iranian attacks on Israel while excusing Israeli actions. The speaker urges support for independent media.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: This is the film you will not see on the BBC or CNN or any other Western media. Over the last year, we have witnessed what is the greatest crime of the 21st century. Perversely, it's a crime that has been meticulously documented and presented to us by the people who are carrying it out. We at El Jahzira have collated all that evidence, packaged it. What it reveals is truly shocking.
We focus on the town of Hebok Khazah, which is a small town of about 13,000 people. The Israeli army enters this town just after Christmas. It's emptied of people, and they simply destroy it. And they record to themselves doing it. They post before and after videos, and the town is entirely flattened.
There is no precedent for this in the whole history of the Israeli army. We have become addicted to explosions. The willful destruction of civilian property for punitive reasons or even perhaps to create a buffer strip is illegal. You can't do that. It's against international law, And they're doing it, and they're recording it, and they're putting it on Facebook.
And we know the names of the soldiers and the commanders who did it. They go into the homes of Palestinians, and they're often clearly staying there. And they just smash them up, and they film themselves smashing them up. They also delight in going through women's underwear drawers, and this is a sort of recurring obsession. You have to see Israeli soldier videos in the context of the broader output of Israeli society.
Speaker 1: If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second. I would press it right now. Give me that button and press it right now.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 1: And I think most Israelis would.
Speaker 0: There's an Israeli song called This Was My Home. And what they would do is dress up as caricatures of, obviously, what they perceive Palestinians to be, being sung mockingly to people who no longer have homes. We're not looking at some sort of obscure subculture within Israeli society. This is mainstream Israeli society. When people tell you who they are, believe them.
Speaker 2: It's an entire nation out there that is responsible, and we will fight until we break their backbone.
Speaker 0: 972 magazine carried a story about how the Israelis were using AI, artificial intelligence, for targeting. Essentially, they had a problem. They wanted a rate of strikes in the Gaza Strip, which human computation couldn't keep up with. They needed to use AI to identify these targets. They're using people's phones and their social media.
Any information at all, they can scrape about them. And then they track them through their phones. So who are they talking to on their phone? Who are they simply near as they're carrying their phones around? And they have a little league table.
And if you accumulate enough points, you can be killed. The terrifying thing is how do you kill them? Where do you kill them? And they reach the calculation that it's much easier to kill people when they're at home, which is where the second bit of software kicks in, which is called Where's Daddy? The naming is indicative of a fairly dark sense of humor.
They track you. Once daddy is home, they can kill you. And, of course, along with anyone else who is in the house as well. It's astonishing what Israeli soldiers do put on film, but that raises the question of what they don't put on film. You very rarely see them actually fighting.
Every now and then, you'll see them all firing their guns, but usually pretty clear there's no incoming. On the other hand, what you see a great deal of is them dressing up in women's underwear. Has Israel managed to destroy Hamas? I would point to a really simple common sense thing. Israeli soldiers have posted thousands of videos online.
The IDF, the Israeli army, repeatedly posts videos online. Scour those videos for the bodies of dead fighters. And there's remarkably few. I remember 20 years ago in Afghanistan when the Taliban fell before the age of social media, and I remember making films about that footage with piles of corpses. It's extraordinary how few dead Hamas fighters we are seeing.
Another extraordinary facet of this conflict is the repeated attacks on hospitals. They have assaulted every single one of the 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip. We have the films of Mohammed Alhalo, a remarkable young journalist who really chronicled the whole story of the Nassar hospital. The Israelis are very keen to drive people taking refuge in the hospital out to force them further south. They send a messenger into the hospital to order the people there to leave, and they use a detainee.
And they've made it quite clear to him. They know who his mother is, where she is, and that she will be killed if he does not return. So he does return. They send him back because the people still aren't leaving. The people aren't leaving because they don't trust the Israelis.
1 of the few people who does leave is his mother. She follows him out with a small group of other people, and he's killed in front of our eyes. Having used him as a messenger, as a human shield, effectively, they simply shoot him. They shoot him 3 times in front of our eyes and kill him. What is extraordinary about so many of the soldiers' videos is the sense of impunity they have.
One particular video is the 202 paratroopers. When they left Gaza, individuals within that unit put together a video. It's like a commemorative video when it's edited and it's set to music and so on. It's been up on YouTube now for 6 months. It includes 3 men, separate incidents, men who are shot by snipers.
They are putting up the killing of people who are clearly unarmed. And for soldiers to post this in their own names shows a sense that they simply don't have to account for their actions at all. Deaths by snipers are very common in the Gaza Strip, and it's not just adult men. There's a particular shot of a child, a young boy, who was shot at the gates of the NASA hospital. It's then too dangerous to collect the body.
If you're a sniper, you know who you're shooting. You've got very good sights, and you know perfectly well what you're looking at. Mohammed Al Hallelu. He is almost killed numerous times. One of the occasions is he's shot.
He's wearing a flak jacket. They've actually managed to hit the thing that says press. One of the dreadful things about working as a journalist and as a human rights worker during this conflict, not only do you not have sort of immunity, as it were, you are positively a target. As Western journalists, you know, we sometimes work in very hairy situations, and we we face danger and so on. What we don't generally wrestle with is the perpetual fear that they're going to murder our children.
And in fact, on a number of occasions, they have murdered the families of Al Jazeera journalists. It's shameful that the international journalistic community has not stood up more, not just for Al Jazeera, but for all those other journalists who have been killed in the Gaza Strip.
Speaker 3: Well over 10% of all journalists in Gaza have lost their lives since this conflict began. The usual mortality rates expected of infantry soldiers is less than 5%. So we're talking about absolutely shocking levels of loss of life.
Speaker 0: Detainees are clearly abused when they are first taken prisoner. We've all seen the images of them stripped to their underwear. It's clearly designed to humiliate. We gathered accounts in the Gaza Strip of people being beaten. We have a picture of 1 man who had a star of David carved into his back.
In a way, for many, this is just a prelude to when they're taken into Israel to these detention centers. In our film, we have one grotesque eyewitness account of a dog being used to rape someone. UN report at the end of June identified 53 individuals who have been killed in Israeli detention. There's a report on Israel's channel 13 broadcasting to the world, advertising the fact, celebrating the fact that these men spend 24 hours in complete darkness with a single hole for a toilet in handcuffs chained together with leg cuffs. The whole focus of the report is clearly the Israeli public.
And what they're trying to stress is how badly these people are being treated because clearly the political issue within Israel is whether they're not being treated badly enough. No one can hide here. No one can pretend they didn't know what was happening because the Israelis were were shouting it in our faces. Human shields are an enormously important topic, and it's an absolute indictment of Western media the way this is covered. The idea that Hamas, the Kasambra guys, and so on, use the civilian population as human shields.
There is no evidence that they are positively using them as human shields in the sense that they're hiding behind them, not allowing them to leave or not telling them that they're there. A second point about that as well. What is there about Israeli behavior over the last year that would lead anyone for a moment to think that the presence of civilians would lead them to hold their fire? There's absolutely nothing to suggest that they would respect the fact that there are civilians in the way and therefore, not shoot. Which means that it would be utterly pointless for Hamas.
I've looked at the Cassam Brigade's own combat videos, which are a stark contrast to the videos that the Israeli soldiers put online. There's over 300 of them. And they very often show successful attacks on tanks and other armored vehicles. These attacks all take place in desolate, abandoned landscapes. I have not seen a single civilian.
Now then there is the secondary point. The UN International and Israeli Human Rights Organizations have found the Israelis to be guilty of using human shields. In the film, we have footage of this. You can see there they are hiding behind people, resting their guns on their shoulder. They've got a man, and he's being forced to go and inspect empty buildings, open the doors, and so on.
So that if they're booby trapped or if there's an ambush, he will get it. It's clearly absolutely systematic. Now the fact that the entirety of western media and the western political class continues to trot out this mantra about it being that hides behind human shields, when all of the abundant evidence suggests precisely the opposite.
Speaker 2: The Israelis today saying that Hamas use Palestinians as human shields. Do they?
Speaker 0: Killing the victims, then blaming the victims for killing themselves. I mean, what is this logic? Palestinian groups take their own people hostages. This is this is racism. This is sickness.
The appalling caliber of the journalism is just absolutely shocking. Israeli behavior is dependent on the indulgence of the west. We use some of Matt Kennard's reporting in Declassified UK. Matt has done an awful lot of work exposing the role of RAF at Kratiri, a place most British people probably haven't heard of, but we still own a chunk of Cyprus. And on it, we have a bloody great air force base.
And it is clearly playing a vital role in this conflict. Right from the beginning of the conflict, you had huge military transport planes flying to Israel, numerous surveillance flights in the air for 6 hours at a time sent from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus over the Gaza Strip. And the suspicion would be that they are providing targeting information to the Israelis. Already by March, they'd accumulated a 1000 hours of surveillance footage over the Gaza Strip. The government is not providing a satisfactory explanation of what all this footage is being used for.
Speaker 2: Will he also explain what role, legally or otherwise, Britain has played in overflying Gaza with surveillance aircraft and the use of RAFA criteria as a staging point for aircraft going to Israel, which many people believe are carrying weapons that are used to bomb gas.
Speaker 0: I am very comfortable with the support that we give, to Israel, and I won't comment on operational issues. The double standards of Western media, of Western politicians are just breathtaking. I mean, you just have to look at David Lammy and Keir Starmer's response to the Iranian attack on Israel, which didn't actually kill anyone.
Speaker 4: I utterly condemn this attempt by the Iranian regime to harm innocent Israelis.
Speaker 0: And they were straight to the election condemning it in a way that they have not condemned the Israelis, who have killed over 40,000 people. It's quite clear that the lives of one group of people are worth more than the lives of another group of people. If Israel is attacked, the Western media and Western politicians are full of rhetoric about Israel has a right to defend themselves.
Speaker 2: Israel has a right to defend itself.
Speaker 0: Israel has a right to defend itself. Israel has a right to self defense.
Speaker 4: We stand with Israel, and we recognize her right to self defense.
Speaker 0: If Israel attacks people, then the whole media narrative is about fears of escalation. In other words, the great danger that the other side might fight back. The double standards are just breathtaking. One way in which we're sort of liberated at Al Jazeera is we don't have to buy into this bogus two side system, this bogus sort of equivalence. There is no equivalence between, on the one hand, an all powerful occupying power, building illegal settlements on Palestinian land.
And on the other side, a prostrate, helpless, powerless people. There's no moral, political, or military equivalence there. But also, on October 7th, 2 babies are killed. Okay. Which is dreadful.
It's appalling. At the end of August, when the Gazan Health Ministry published detailed figures, the first 14 pages, 701 names were taken out with children under the age of 1. And that doesn't include 7,000 people for whom there's no documentation. It doesn't include the large numbers of people who are still under the rubble or who have died of because of lack of access to health care. It's very, very likely that in the end, the total number of dead and injured in the Gaza Strip will be more than a quarter of a 1000000 people.
There is just no comparison between the 2. Now if, as for example, the BBC often does, you achieve balance by having 2 stories in your evening news report. On the one hand, reporting that, you know, the very real anguish and trauma of a family who still have a son or a daughter in captivity in Gaza. And on the other hand, an airstrike which has killed 40 people, you know, 15 of them, whatever, who are perhaps children. If you are treating that as equivalent, you are buying into a fundamentally racist arithmetic.
Speaker 5: There was no balance in what was going on. Israeli spokespeople who we did have on were given a lot of free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback.
Speaker 2: Babies were set on fire. Babies were shot in the head.
Speaker 5: Whereas any Palestinian guest was asked to condemn Hamas. But I want to ask you specifically about Hamas's actions today. Do you support them? Israel has a right to defend itself. That was the editorial line that was drilled into us, into all of our coverage.
To a guest talking about, you know, Israeli airstrikes killing Palestinians in Gaza, that would be the response from our presenters.
Speaker 2: Denying access to food is collective punishment, and and that we should all be clear in saying that.
Speaker 4: Israel will argue, obviously, that it has a right to defend itself.
Speaker 5: People were terrified of using the word genocide in coverage. They still are. You will very rarely see it in any BBC coverage. And if an interviewee says the word genocide
Speaker 2: This is a genocide happening in front of our eyes. Yeah. We have yeah.
Speaker 4: We that that word is, as you know, incredibly emotive, and the Israelis, as you know, will be saying that they are targeting Hamas
Speaker 0: only. No one can say they didn't know. The Israelis could not have made it clearer to us what they were doing in their rhetoric, social media they were posting, and what their own media was saying, that this was an exercise in ethnic cleansing, quite possibly an exercise in genocide. They were making it abundantly clear to us. And if we are ignorant, we are willfully ignorant.
When people tell you who they are, believe them. And the Israelis have certainly told us who they are over the last year. The experience of the last year is testimony to the inadequacy of traditional media in the West, which seems simply to be unable to tell this story as it really is. And it highlights more than ever the need for independent media outlets like Double Down News. And I would urge you to support Double Down News on Patreon.
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10 year old boy chased and apparently arrested for waving Palestine flag in Germany https://t.co/5xM8wRLm88
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The most moral army in the world, in the West Bank https://t.co/UQTPXZcJbu
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EXPOSED: Israel’s Secret Torture Camps @OborneTweets https://t.co/qsMddrShrX
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Israeli soldiers gang raping Palestinian detainee captured on camera. And the majority of the world’s ‘journalists’ and politicians will just continue to look away and pretend it never happened https://t.co/knwpOKhRZ6
reSee.it AI Summary
The author, a Holocaust survivor, draws parallels between the cruelty of the Holocaust and the situation in Gaza. They emphasize the importance of preventing such atrocities from happening again and urge people not to turn a blind eye, but to be brave and stand on the right side of history.
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As a Holocaust Survivor Israel’s genocide in Gaza is not done in my name. I see echoes of the Holocaust in Gaza today: Dehumanisation, humiliation, large-scale killings, destruction of families and the determination in which they are destroying the whole of Gaza is very similar to the cruelty of the fascist regimes and it should not be controversial to say so. What happened to the Jewish people, the industrial scale of extermination and invisible emotional pain, is so horrendous that it should never be repeated anywhere in the world. That is why we say not in our name and Never Again. Fascism thrives on indifference and the general public being intimidated or looking the other way due to self-preservation. Don’t look the other way. Be brave and on the right side of history. Stephen Kapos
Video Transcript AI Summary
As a Holocaust survivor, I condemn the genocide in Gaza and criticize the Israeli government for using Holocaust memory to justify their actions. The dehumanization of Palestinians, reminiscent of Nazi tactics, is unacceptable. The brutality in Gaza must be condemned, and standing against injustice is crucial. The global protests against these atrocities give hope for change. It is vital to separate Jewishness from Zionism and speak out against oppression. History will judge those who remain indifferent. Platforms like Doubledown News are essential for balanced journalism. Join us on Patreon for the future of journalism.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: I say this as a holocaust survivor, that the genocide in Gaza is not happening in my name and in our name. The way that the Israeli government is using the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they are doing to the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the holocaust. It's an outrage. When I saw the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations putting on a yellow star or stomach turning, somebody who had to wear a yellow star like myself and my entire family, I'm insulted by that. What distinguishes the the Jewish Holocaust is its industrial scale and industrial methods being applied.
And what has been happening to Gaza is similar in that the scale of the bombing and the indiscriminate nature of the bombing, the complete lack of care about children and women being the majority of the victims, victims amounts to industrial scale of genocide. The painting of the Palestinian people as worthless, almost animal like by the description of some of the leaders. That dehumanization enables the population of Israel to tolerate what what's going on. The way that Palestinian people who were arrested were treated, having to take their clothes off and parading them, it's part of the humiliation. In the West Bank, the way the checkpoints are organized, the way that you are forced to wait for hours for no reason in order to go to school or go to work, etcetera.
All this amounted to humiliation similar to to what we experienced. The sort of determination and consistency with which they are setting about to destroy the whole of Gaza is very similar to the kind of cruelty and determination of the fascist regimes, some of the actions of the Nazi state in dehumanizing and completely cruel large scale killings, etcetera. If it is repeated, I don't see why you couldn't make the parallel. It can only be helpful in understanding what's going on to make the parallel. I don't think there should be any taboo against that.
I think I particularly find painful to see the children. I remember after the war, you know, we played in the ruins like they do now, but particularly their losses to suddenly lose parents and siblings and so on. There was a boy in the same rescue homes where I was. He was traveling on a tram with his parents. This boy moved to the front to stand behind the tram driver because he was interested in how he was working the levers and so on.
At the next stop, an Arrow Cross raiding party came on and asked for papers, and the parents were identified as Jews and arrested straight away. The son was separated at the front, and they had to make an immediate decision whether to say something to him and involve him or let him perhaps escape the net, and that's what they decided. So they were taken down from the tram and sent to Auschwitz. They never said goodbye to their son and they perished in in Auschwitz. So that was the end of the family.
Now can you imagine the psychological state of that boy who suddenly found himself on his own in this way, not saying goodbye to his parents. And I think this kind of thing, this separation and and the sense of complete inability to intervene or in any way exert any kind of positive influence on events. This kind of separation and and and destruction of families in this manner is again something that repeats in Gaza now, I think. I heard that some families divide the children and leave some with one branch and and some Jewish people? The gas chambers and the What happened to the Jewish people?
The gas chambers and the industrial scale of extermination and also the sort of invisible aspects, the incredible emotional pain caused, is so horrendous, taken together that it seems to me inconceivable that it should be repeated anywhere in the world. That is why we say not in our name and never again. And this is why I was so totally shocked, particularly by those who I know have gone through the same themselves, repeating it on on on another people. I take as as a extreme example, one of my cousins, late cousin, she died some years ago, who was a young girl taken to Auschwitz from Transylvania. Because she was young and strong, she was put to work and she worked in a warehouse sorting clothes.
And one day, she was sorting her parents' clothes, meaning that they had already been taken to the gas chamber. I think it's difficult to understand the emotional experience of doing or being in that situation. Yet she came back to Israel, at first, Romania and then Israel, and she was as racist as the rest of them against the Palestinians. Now how it's beyond understanding how you can do that and and with the background that she had. I think this is to do with the extreme propaganda and the dehumanization.
Zionism was a very unfortunate and sad development for the Jewish people. It broke a much longer tradition of always being on the side of the oppressed, not the oppressor. And and the charitable nature of Judaism and the humanity that they advocate into a kind of exceptionalism and nationalism. Everything is a Jew. Not a single piece for other people.
Only for us. And in practical terms, impossible project of taking over another people's country, which led to all the troubles that followed. Also, I agree with my cousin, late cousin, very bright guy, who said, well, if we claim that there is a people who tend to be the, victims of other people's, discrimination, etcetera, then the last thing you want to do is to collect them up into one place as a target. And I think he was right, and I think, current events prove it. Zionism started to proclaim that the only safe place for Jews is in Israel, and what we are seeing today is the worst, the most dangerous place for Jews is Israel.
Quite a number of my family from Romania ended up in Israel. So when I visited them, that was my first brush with Zionism. I was completely shocked how despite their experiences during the Holocaust, they were racist basically against the Palestinians and couldn't understand it, and I can't understand it to this day fully. How that could happen, But they were, and there's no denying it. And I found that atmosphere of racism was prevailing generally in Israel, and and I turned, strongly against that.
Later on, I saw the repeated brutality of action against Palestinians, and it became more and more horrifying. And the very cruel attack on Gaza was the ultimate. And the use of the holocaust background as a cover for all this was just unbearable. I mean, it was criminal, I I felt. And this is when I became more active in trying to protest.
Today's marches are having a very hopeful aspect. It is so large, so persistent, so global that eventually the western leadership, which are trying to deny what is actually going on, will be forced to face up to it. And I think we are not far from that. There was no parallel to that in the Jewish holocaust experience. In fact, there was great abandonment.
There were some very few very brave people who risked everything were too afraid and looked the other way. I find it completely incomprehensible, really, how you can do anything but totally condemn quite clear genocide. And anybody who doesn't do that, it will be revisited on him or her to to look back on, to be on the wrong side of history and and seriously guilty. And that goes for the UK government to Kirsh Tama and the shadow cabinet. And some of the church leaders, the chief rabbi, completely identifies with Israel and Zionism.
I think it's important to stand up against this conflation that is propagated between Jewishness and Zionism. If you do not stand up and criticize it and divorce yourself from it, then it sort of besmirches all Jews, basically. And and I think it's essential to show that, from a point of view of the morale of the people that is being victimized in the name of the Jewish people that this is not supported supported universally by Jewish people at all. But it's simply the Zionist and Israeli establishment which does it, which are not too far from fascistic attitudes. I think fascism thrives on indifference and and the general public being intimidated or looking the other way out of self preservation and comfort, and it's essential that is not practiced, that a certain degree of risk even taken, and always making a stand against injustice.
The time will come, and history will judge these events. If you are just indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire degree of guilt without any doubt. And it's important that when that judge judgement comes, you are found to be on the right side of history that you had not been, for sake of comfort and advancement or whatever, you had not been inactive. You have to assert yourself against the evils around you. Knowing how the mass media ignores the most important events, it makes it incredibly important to have forums like Doubledown News to bring a much more balanced picture to the public.
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Mohammed El-Kurd DESTROYS Zionist Victimhood, From The River To The Sea @m7mdkurd https://t.co/pNASRYD6g8
Video Transcript AI Summary
The speaker expresses frustration over debates on chants and slogans distracting from the ongoing genocide in Palestine. They criticize the conflation of Zionism with Judaism and call for accountability for Israeli actions. The speaker urges people to speak out against the atrocities and support independent journalism. They emphasize the importance of standing up against oppression and not being complicit in silence.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: When I turn on the television and I hear that from the river to the sea is genocidal and that Intifada is a call to kill all Jews, I feel like as though I'm a victim of a stupid joke. Especially as I'm watching my people get slaughtered in the streets, I am asked to have the patience for these kinds of debates that tell me that words are genocidal. The Israeli regime is engaging in a war of attrition against the Palestinian people and yet we are asked to talk about chants and slogans. And in my opinion, I don't even think this is about free speech or the right to express yourself, or the right to analogy, or the right to say whatever you wanna say. It's not even about this.
This is about our moral obligation as human beings to reject genocide, the real genocide that is happening in real time. Zionism has been so successful. It has exploited the legacy and the memory of the Holocaust to serve its political game.
Speaker 1: When the world witnessed the tragedies of the Holocaust, we said never again. Now is our chance to mean it. My resolution condemns the slogan, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Speaker 0: To be clear, from the river to the sea, as someone who's Jewish, means to exterminate my people. Never again. And the fear of a possible second holocaust, which by the way is logistically impossible on the part of Palestinians, is given a lot more urgency than the current genocide taking place in real time. Language comparing Zionism to Nazism is more penalized, is more scrutinized than the actual military actions and governmental policies that beg for the analogy to be made. All of this is happening against the backdrop of bombs dropping on people, of white phosphorus burning people's flesh, and we are told to talk about language.
Recently in the United States, this debate about antisemitism has gone to the Senate. You have, Jewish students who are afraid of chants being chanted on campus. In one world, there are people digging with their bare hands in the rubble to retrieve their family members. And in another world, you have privileged students crying about their lives from the safety of their high rise apartments. There's an ecosystem that has allowed this fear, this paranoia to fester so much so it became so visceral that they think the gestapo is gonna show up in the halls of the Ivy Leagues.
Meanwhile, you have the only nuclear power in the Middle East bombing the shit out of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. And we are told that we must give equal weight to both things if not more weight to the latter. That is absurd. And when you invite the presidents of the Ivy Leagues to testify before the senate or before congress, and they are asked if intifada means the genocide of the Jews.
Speaker 2: Are mobs shouting from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, or long live the infantata? Are those anti Semitic comments? When I hear those terms, I find them very upsetting. That is anti Semitic behavior. And you should be there should be some consequences to that anti Semitic behavior.
We're in agreement. Yes? Yes. Thank you.
Speaker 3: You are president of Harvard, so I assume you're familiar with the term intifada. Correct? I've heard that term. Yes. And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews.
Are you aware of that? That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
Speaker 0: And they are unable to say, no, actually, if you pick up a fucking dictionary, and tifada means uprising, they have brought it onto themselves that they are getting kicked out or being forced to resign. Because when you are being accused of appalling things and you refuse to call these things appalling, you have no spine. I'm sorry. If people are being killed in front of you and yet you are unable to denounce that very killing, and you wanna give cover to these discursive mental gymnastics, I have no sympathy for you. If these presidents were able to stand up straight and look that question in the eye and say, how dare you ask me such a disgusting question, Of course, intifada does not mean the genocide of the Jewish people.
My students are protesting what is going on in the Gaza Strip which is within the right of expression.
Speaker 4: I strongly believe that the movements like BDS and SJP should be outlawed from every college and university in America. We're not gonna allow KKK to roam free on campus. Right? From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free is a call for Jewish slaughter. That's what it is and it needs to be outlawed.
Enough with that.
Speaker 0: There's a lot that can be said about the river to the sea chant. Right? Like, I can go on a monologue about how it's a call for the liberation of Palestinians that exist across geographies, how it's a call for dignity for everyone, blah blah blah. Right? But that's not the point.
The people asking us whether from the river to the sea is genocidal are not interested in an answer. It's such a ridiculous question. They are interested in distracting us from the focal point, the focal point being that there is an actual literal genocide being committed today in real time that is televised, and television anchors are instead asking their guests about the hidden insidiousness of that chant.
Speaker 5: From the river to the sea, shouted by the people who are shouting it, echoed by the mindless morons who are the majority of the marches don't even know what they're talking about, haven't even got a clue as to what happened around the, I'm quite old, around the founding, if you like, of Israel and how all of that happened. It is saying we wanna get rid of Israel. We want our country back, and, that's what we're gonna do. So it's really promoting genocide.
Speaker 0: That is by design. This is not that these journalists are stupid or inept. It's not that people are genuinely curious to know what this chant means. It is to distract from the real life events perpetuated by the Israeli state in real time. What the debate about the river to the sea also reveals is the projection of Zionism.
They have to look within our intentions. They have to speculate whether we want to commit genocide. Meanwhile, they are the ones who have committed genocide in 1948, who continue to commit incremental genocide and are committing a fully fledged genocide today in the Gaza Strip. It's crazy, you are being told by the people that are killing you that you want to kill them. They're killing us and then they're pretending to mourn civilian life.
For the idea, the death of a civilian is a tragedy. And they're pretending they're doing so in self defense, and they're pretending that they are the martyrs, and they are the subjects of hatred, and they are the subjects of genocide. It's absolutely mad. And if it weren't for the flagrant, insidious nature of it, it would be hilarious. But the reason why it's not funny is because there is tens of thousands of people murdered by Israeli bombs.
It's not a joke. It's not a joke that an Israeli spokesperson, after being accused of genocide by South Africa, can get on a podium and accuse South Africa of aiding and abetting genocide. South Africa has made itself criminally complicit with Hamas' campaign of genocide against our people. It's not a joke. It's not funny.
But they are doing it because they know they have the backing of the world's leaders and superpowers that are interested in maintaining a status quo of subjugation of the Palestinian because that is what is lucrative. There's a hut being said about antisemitism and anti Zionism, and I'm constantly reminded of my childhood. When I was young, my house was taken by settlers and they happened to be Jewish and it wasn't my fault that they were Jewish, they just happened to be Jewish. They decided to come and take our house and say our house was theirs by divine decree because God said that the Jews owned the land. That is not my problem.
That is not my fault. And I think this is a microcosm for the entirety of the settler state. Yaakov, you know this is not your house. Yes. But if I go, you don't go back.
So what's the problem? Why are you yelling at me? I didn't do this. You are stealing my house. And if I don't steal it, someone else is gonna steal it.
This is a colonial enterprise that has decided willingly to desecrate and exploit Jewish symbols in favor of its settler project, and we are supposed to distance ourselves from that. If you are using the Star of David as a military symbol, as an icon of conquest, how is that my fault? If you are leveling neighborhoods to the grounds, then planting the Star of David in the middle of the neighborhood, if you are literally carving the Star of David in the faces of young Palestinian men, how are we supposed to distance ourselves from this conflation when this government is intentionally, explicitly, and institutionally conflating Judaism, the religion, with Zionism, a racist ideology. The burden and the responsibility of making the distinction does not fall on the oppressed, it does not fall on the colonized. When they are exploiting that conflation in their favor, this falls on them.
Frankly, I am tired of watching bombs drop on people, watching people draw their last breaths, and having these images and scenery disrupted by request that I condemn this, and I denounce that, and I rebuke this, and I rebuke that. It's absolutely incredible. It's crazy. The material systemic reality is that of physical, tangible subjugation. And yet we are talking about what is antisemitic and what is not antisemitic when Palestinians are being slaughtered.
But this is so revealing about the west. It's revealing about the kind of, psyche that holds so many people hostage. We are willing to look evil in the eye. We are willing to look violence in the eye and treat it as an everyday banality, right? Palestinians are robbed of their rights.
Our homes are demolished, we do not have the freedom of movement to move from city to city, we are bombed into oblivion. All of that is tolerated, even celebrated, certainly financed by the world's superpowers, by the United States, by Britain. What does that say to us? I talk to a lot of people who tell me that they're afraid to speak out. Lots of liberals who tell me they're afraid to speak out against the genocide of the Palestinian people tell me they're afraid of being accused of bigotry.
Tell me that they're afraid of losing a job. And frankly, that fear is hard to swallow because it will never compare to the fear of having your house bombed, of not knowing whether your mother is alive or dead, of being shot by a sniper in the middle of a crowded street. We are at a moment for transformation. I believe the world has changed forever since October 7th. And if we are unable to make sacrifices, if we are unable to call a spade a spade, if we are unable to speak up, then we have failed.
And not only have we failed, but we become accomplices in this genocide. I am sorry about your job. I am sorry about you souring the mood of your boss or having an unpleasant dinner with your family should you speak up about Palestine. But compare that to the anguish of being in the Gaza Strip right now. It does not compare.
If you think your silence is going to protect you from being fired, if you think you staying quiet about the subjugation of a faraway people is going to keep you safe, you are dead wrong. The more you ignore the censorship of Palestinians, the more you ignore this repression and crackdown on speech, on Palestinian rights, on saying no to the empire, the more the empire is going to grow, the more powerful it becomes, and you are going to be its next victim. I am sure of that. In an ecosystem of journalism that obfuscates facts, that rewrites history, that victim blames, that writes in passive voice, It is imperative that we support progressive, independent journalism. So if you can join the future of journalism, join Double Down News on Patreon.
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Lowkey EXPOSES Israel’s Secret Role in Britain @Lowkey0nline https://t.co/dK2rYP5Pld
Video Transcript AI Summary
Britain's ties to Israel are deep, with Israeli companies controlling key UK functions like intelligence and police services. Israeli influence extends to companies like Cellebrite and NICE Systems used by British police and the Foreign Office. The UK Israel Tech Hub, funded by British taxpayers, facilitates Israeli tech companies' takeover of public sector contracts. Larry Ellison's Oracle stores UK data, while Israeli businessman Patrick Drahi's stake in British Telecom raises national security concerns. The trilateral security state of the US, Israel, and Britain compromises British sovereignty. Pushback is needed, with alternative media platforms like Double Down News playing a crucial role. Support for such platforms is essential.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: We know that Britain has a role in Israel, but Israel has a role in Britain. Pro Israel forces currently have control of NHS, foreign office, home office and Ministry of Defense data. Your data. Nigel Farage liked to talk about taking back control, but he wouldn't say anything about Israeli intelligence companies taking control of key functions of our intelligence and police services. He wouldn't say anything about the 12,000 US soldiers in this country.
They don't wanna take back control. They wanna control you. What about Rishi Sunap, our prime minister? Well his family company Infosys which was founded by his father-in-law and that his wife still has £500,000,000 worth of shares in, has many Israeli subsidiaries and hundreds of employees within Israel. Infosys signed a memorandum of understanding with the state of Israel in 2012 to develop relations and deepen cooperation.
Infosys, which works on collecting biometric data, has also had a director until recently who was a veteran of Israeli military intelligence unit a 200, Yuri Levine. Let's not forget forget the 44 whistleblowers from within unit a200 came out and said that this unit is surveilling the Palestinians to build a compromise against them and blackmailing them with that information. Unit 8200, don't forget that name because the very company that the British police used to hack phones in this country is Cellebrite. This is an Israeli intelligence company which is headed by alumni of unit a200 in the Israeli military. The CEO of Celebreit has claimed that they have remote control access to all of the information procured through their products.
The British police not only use this Israeli intelligence company to hack phones of their citizens, they also use something called NICE systems as part of their investigations. Now NICE systems is a subsidiary of Israel's largest arms company Elbit Systems. The level of integration between British and Israeli intelligence is unprecedented. Not only is this program used by British police, it's also used by the British foreign office. So you are talking about the outsourcing of Britain's external intelligence functions to elements of the Israeli intelligence agencies.
When we look even further at this question, we wonder how companies like Celebrett could have got such a foothold in the British public sector. Well, there is an organization by the name of the UK Israel Tech Hub, which has played a very important role in all of this. It's based in the British embassy in Israel but it is staffed by former military and intelligence personnel from the Israeli regime. It's headed by the former director general of the Israeli finance ministry, Chaim Shani. Chaim Shani was also simultaneously the director of Celebrae.
But who funds the UK Israel Tech Hub? The UK Israel tech hub is funded by the British foreign office, by the British embassy in Israel and the British department of trade. The UK Israel tech hub exists for the sole purpose and with the stated objective of procuring public sector contracts in Britain for Israeli cyber and tech companies. British taxpayers fund an organization which is facilitating Israeli tech companies staffed by former Israeli intelligence personnel taking over public sector contracts in Britain, including in the NHS. Currently, the data for the British Home Office, the British Ministry of Defense and the NHS is handled by a company called Oracle.
Oracle was founded by Larry Ellison, the 7th richest man in the world and close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu. Larry Ellison is the largest funder of the friends of the IDF charity in the history of the organization. In addition to that, this company Oracle offered the directorship to Benjamin Netanyahu. Meaning that the Home Office, the Ministry of Defense, the Foreign Office, and the NHS has its data stored in a cloud run by a company that Benjamin Netanyahu was supposed to be the director of. And do you know how that deal was procured by Larry Ellison?
Let me tell you a story. At the same time that Larry Ellison was bidding for this contract, he had a charity in this country. It was called the Larry Ellison foundation. And do you know who was employed for half a £1,000,000 a year at this charity? None other than the father-in-law of prime minister Boris Jones.
And guess what? When Larry Ellison's company Oracle procured the contract to store the data of the Ministry of Defense, the Home Office, the Foreign Office, and the NHS, the Larry Ellison Foundation was closed that very month. In addition to that, British Telecom is a key backbone of this country's infrastructure. It delivers telecommunications to millions of people. But why was it that the British government initiated a national security investigation into the latest shareholder takeover in British Telecom?
Currently, the largest shareholder in British Telecom is Israeli French businessman, Patrick Drahi. Now when he took the largest share in BT, the British government launched an investigation in that purchase on the basis of national security. But what could possibly be their issue with Patrick Droege? Patrick Droege is the founder and owner of Israeli news channel I 24. I 24 was found by Harret's newspaper to work as a proxy of the Netanyahu family.
I 24 employs tens of former Israeli military and intelligence personnel. In addition to that, Patrick Drea purchased the Liberation newspaper in France founded by Jean Paul Sartre and replaced the editor with a former agent of Unit 8 200. Patrick Drahee has also been involved in funding organizations that work on settlement in Jerusalem. Patrick Drahey is currently the largest shareholder in British Telecom. This is a question of sovereignty.
How is it that a state which outsources key functions of its intelligence and police services that allows its data from key institutions to be given to former agents of a foreign power, how is it that a nation or a state that does that can have any claim to sovereignty? The question now is how can those in the British public who feel passionately about issues like patriotism justify their willingness to outsource these key functions of the state to Israeli intelligent cutouts. Palestine action has launched the campaign which has seen two sides in this country for Israel's largest arms company Elbit Systems be shut down. The British Ministry of Defense cancelled £280,000,000 worth of contracts with Elbit Systems because of Palestine action activity and they cited operational sovereignty. It's clear there are those in the British establishment who know what has happened here.
The trilateral security state of the United States, Israel, and Britain renders Britain essentially a colony of the United States and Israel. Time to push back. Mainstream monopoly on information is breaking, and one of the symptoms of that process is the development of platforms like Double Down News. So it's absolutely vital that if we want to build an alternative media which is people not power centered, then we must do what we can to support platforms like Double Down News, so sign up to the Patreon now.
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Israel & the Myth of 'Self Defence' @davidahearst https://t.co/ehfO8Cy7Ld
Video Transcript AI Summary
The speaker blames the international community, particularly Britain, for the bloodshed in Gaza, accusing them of giving Israel the freedom to commit war crimes. They argue that Israel's actions go beyond self-defense and are part of an expansionist agenda, creating an apartheid regime worse than South Africa's. The speaker highlights the desperation and savagery in Gaza, with innocent civilians being targeted and killed. They criticize the international community for allowing Israel to continue its assault on Gaza and call for a change in approach to achieve a peaceful resolution. The speaker emphasizes the futility of trying to eradicate Hamas and the Palestinian cause through violence, as history has shown that armed resistance only grows stronger. They propose negotiations, lifting the siege on Gaza, and sharing the land as a way to end the crisis. The speaker also highlights the importance of alternative media in providing a different perspective on the situation.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: If anyone is guilty for the bloodshed that's going on, it is the international community, particularly Britain. The international community has given the greenest of green lights to the Israeli army to do what it wants, and that means the freedom to commit war crimes. You'll see Western values as they actually operate, raining down the bombs on completely innocent Gazan civilians, whether they're supporters of Hamas, Fatah, whether they're civilians, they're going to die and are dying in their 1,000. Where are Western values there? If there's blood on anyone's hands, it's on those who say Israel has a right to defend itself.
Israel has the perfect Israel has the perfect right to defend itself. Israel has a right to defend itself. Israel must have that does have that right to defend herself. Israel has an absolute Israel has a right to self defense. This is not the whole story, it's not the defense of Israel.
It is the expansion of Israel and it is the creation of an apartheid regime, even more severe than the one that happened in South Africa. Israel says it's fighting an existential war, and it has compared what Hamas did to a Holocaust. Half my family died in the Holocaust. There's no comparison. From a Palestinian perspective, you have to realize that Israel was the lords, the masters of the land.
They controlled all your movements. They controlled how much you ate. They controlled who you married. It's the one that decides when to attack. This is a country used to total control over 1 half of the population and it lost that control and it lost that control wildly.
I'm appalled by some of the things that happened. Desperation turned into savagery and I will use that word about what happened at Kaffar Azar or the music festival that took place, where unarmed festival goers were shot like ducks. These scenes are unknown to the current generation of Israelis and the shock this has produced, the sudden loss of confidence in its star performer, which is its army and its intelligence services, cannot be underestimated. That shock has now turned to anger. That anger has now turned to a unholy desire to kill Gazans.
I think now is the time that we need to erase Gaza.
Speaker 1: We're gonna wipe them Clear up the fucking cliff. I'm talking about every fucking flat foot in like a parking lot. Clear Palestinians. All of them.
Speaker 0: There's a Kaffar Azar happening every night in Gaza, women and children buried under rubble. There is absolutely apocalyptic scenes going on there. The Israeli Air Force deliberately targeting blocks, individual families and wiping them out with precision weapons and this is happening now to 1 family after another. I don't think Israel, and in particular, the Israeli army, can give people lectures on brutality, particularly directed at children. It happens all the time in the so called stable peace.
There were 34 children killed so far this year by soldiers in the West Bank. So there is butchery and there's barbarity on both sides. The problem is What's taking place in Gaza, which is truly apocalyptic, is done on an industrial scale and by the time this comes out, the death toll will mount and mount. Joao Gullant, the Israeli Defense Minister, the man who said that Palestinians are human animals, said Israeli forces will not be held accountable for anything they do, so all the past rules have been torn up and Israel is going for the maximum number of Gazan casualties and that's what the international community is allowing Israel to do. They have given Netanyahu the green light and an unlimited time to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.
Darsons have tried to break out of their open air prison before. It happened on the day in which Donald Trump's son-in-law was signing the a ceremony that transferred the official American embassy to Jerusalem. On that very, very day, you had Palestinians unarmed, who were gunned down, demonstrating right next to the fence. They didn't break out of the fence, they were simply being shot at, rather like ducks with the most sophisticated weapons. When that demonstration happened, Gazan's learned a lesson, that the next break up that they do would have to be armed.
Speaker 1: Hamas is ISIS.
Speaker 0: Hamas is very, very different from ISIS and actually, the 2 were at war with each other, in which there were quite a few dead bodies. There's no analytical comparison between Hamas on ISIS, and the main difference between them is that although Hamas is a Islamist organization, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is a resistance group dedicated to ending to patient and this still is a dispute and a conflict over land and not religion. Having said that, Hamas called its attack on southern Israel, the Al Aqsa flood, for a reason. Al Aqsa is being invaded and attacked all the time.
Al Aqsa isn't just their 3rd holiest site for Islam, it's also a national symbol for Palestine. This Sacred turf is actually being taken away piecemeal and again, the West is letting them do this. This was the reason for Hamas saying, enough is enough. But there were lots of other reasons as well. If you can imagine it, 16 years in an open air prison with the electricity controlled or rationed, food rationed, 60% unemployment, settler attacks on Palestinian villages protected by the army, which Israelis themselves describe as pogroms, a total impossibility of a political solution or even a national unity government, and that suited Israel absolutely fine.
When they were demonstrating about democracy in Israel, no one was talking about the obvious elephant in the room, which was an apartheid regime for half of the population, the Palestinian population. Neither Left nor Right were bothered about it and that too is an ingredient into what actually happened here, because the message that was being given by Israel to the Palestinians. He says, you don't matter. We can do it without you. We can control you, and we've forgotten about the Palestinian state.
No one is interested in it. Just days before this attack happened was the imminence of a normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel. And Netanyahu got up in the United Nations General Assembly, waving a map that eradicated Palestine completely and saying
Speaker 1: We'll build a new corridor of peace and prosperity that connects Asia through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel to Europe. This is an extraordinary change, a monumental change.
Speaker 0: Reversing the logic of the last possibility of an agreement on a two state solution, which is in 2002, which was called Arab Peace Initiative. You've got Israel that's turning the screw all the time and encroaching. There are now 700,000 settlers. It's impossible to put Palestinian and everyone knows it. But a 2 state solution is cynically, is the policy of all European governments and America.
It's a policy that can't now possibly exist, and that is the situation that the Palestinians are facing. Now what the Hamas attack has done is to say, I'm sorry, we're here. You cannot ignore us. Now they've done it in a brutal way. They have definitely committed crimes against humanity, but The Palestinians who would not necessarily support Hamas at all, would say, what the hell else do we do?
And that's what's happening all over the place to a new generation of Palestinians. This is the fundamental problem of Israel thinking that it can wipe Gaza out. It can wipe Gaza out. It can kill 10,000 people, 20,000 people. It cannot kill the Palestinian cause.
Hamas is a complicated organisation to describe. It has various wings. There is a faction of Hamas that controls Gaza and there is Mohammed Al Dif, the head of the Qasem Brigade, named after a Syrian preacher who turned to resistance under the British mandate. He was killed by the British in a forest outside Jenin. What the west and Israel permanently misunderstands about the nature of Palestinian resistance was that his name and example lived on.
If Israel now succeeds in eradicating the military leadership, the Cassam Brigades of Gaza, and kills them all. What do you think is going to happen to the memory that they leave behind? Yes, they can level Gaza. They can reduce the whole thing to a pile of rubble. They can kill 100,000 people, and they can say, Job done, and they can even defeat Hezbollah.
But what do you think is going to happen to the memory of all those dead in a new generation that will break out with even stronger force in 20 or 30 years' time. That's history. That's what's happened before. Resistance, armed resistance has been crushed many times. It was crushed in 1948.
It was crushed in 69. It was crushed in 1973. It's been crushed regularly. And what has happened, Hamas is now much, much stronger than previous iterations of it. So there's always going to be whoever you call them, a very strong element of Palestinians who say the only way of changing the situation is by armed resistance until they are involved in proper negotiations and a peace deal and a calm and an exchange of prisoners.
But if Israel thinks that they can wipe out Hamas and wipe out the Palestinian resistance, history tells us they are completely wrong. And all we are doing now is setting the seas for an even more powerful round of resistance in 1 or 2 decades to come. How do we stop the violence? We stop the violence by reversing course, by realizing that the Palestinians are people, that there's always going to be resistance, whether it's Hamas, whether it's anyone else. Whatever they call themselves, they are not going to be chucked off their land.
There is not going to be another Nakba. For they're going to stay there, whatever and they're going to die on that land. The only way out of this incredible, cool ZEN2, is to stop giving Israel the green light, is to enforce negotiations with a broadly representative Palestinian national unity government that allows Palestinians to elect their own leaders, that lifts the siege on Gaza and lifts the siege on all the other Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank and that you start a process of sharing the land from the river to the sea, between the 2 peoples, and this has got to be done with a realization in Israel that there is no end to this until they fundamentally reverse course. The alternative media in a crisis like this is really important, because it provides a different voice to the voice that you're getting on the BBC, We see on the ITM on Sky, that is showing a one-sided horror at what's going on with Hamas and the blanket support for from without really troubling themselves with what's going on to Palestinian civilians. Read Middle East Eye and join Double Down News on Patreon.