This is Us

 

The U.S. recently commemorated the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon of September 11, 2001.

The three-minute video linked below shows how U.S. – sponsored destruction of Gaza makes the 9/11 attacks against the U.S. seem tiny by comparison.

You don’t even have to watch it for three minutes to get a feeling for the immensity of this crime.

Both of our major parties continue to support this. This is the country we are supposed to be proud of. This is us.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DCQmayWbeY0

 The Insane Clown Plan for Gaza

Actual Surreal image from the insane Gaza plan re-posted by The Guardian

The Trump crime syndicate has leaked a plan for postwar Gaza that is so absurd it ought to be published in “The Onion” or “The Borowitz Report.”

But apparently it is serious.

Here are a few of the plan’s more surrealistic proposals:

 

1. --- It proposes a “temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s more than 2 million population.” 

 That might sound harsh, but Gazans would be given “generous voluntary relocation packages.”

(Oh, and they would only be displaced temporarily? I mean, that is just so nice!)

 

2.   --- It proposes an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone.”

(A fitting tribute to a great grifter.)

 

3.    ---   It includes a “Gaza Trump Riviera and Islands.” : “World-class resorts along the coastline and on small artificial islands (similar to the Palm Islands in Dubai).”

(An even greater tribute to an even greater grifter.)

 

4. ---  It includes “6-8 dynamic, modern and AI-powered, smart planned cities on the inner side of the Gaza Ring.” And all services provided  will be done “through ID-based digital system.”

(Wow!  Smart planned cities! And an ID based digital system! Those alone make it worth the ethnic cleansing of two million people!)

 

And a Tribute to Mister Bone Saw!

As if paying tribute to Trump and Musk was not cynical enough, the plan proposes a highway named after the psychopathic prime minister of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salmon. He is most famous for ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. As you may recall, Khashoggi went into the Saudi consulate in Turkey to get a marriage license and was never seen again. He seems to have been murdered inside the building and smuggled out in parts, thus earning Bin Salmon the “Mr. Bone Saw” monicker (M.B.S., get it?)

 

No Donations Necessary!

The project will be expensive but don’t worry.  The plan contemplates “$70B-$100B in public investment.” Notice the word “public” there, as in government subsidized.                                                             

Which is to say it will be financed by the same people who spent tens of billions to destroy Gaza and wipe out its indigenous people: the U.S. Israeli, and other European taxpayers.

With this boost from the public sector, corporations and multibillionaires such as those already mentioned will be able to profit hugely. How hugely? Well, the plan estimates a ten-year “total [of] $385B return on a $100B investment.” Nice.

 

Oh, and Strategic Benefits for the U.S.!

Also tucked away in the plan is a statement that maybe explains what it’s really all about, besides, of course, the pure greed of the thing. The project would, “strengthen [the U.S.’s] hold in the east Mediterranean, and secure US-industry access to $1.3T of rare-earth minerals from the Gulf.”

In other words, it’s for the good of The Empire, so let’s get those inconvenient Palestinians out of there and get to work!

The bizarre plan has, naturally, been roundly criticized for the obvious cynical fraud that it is. One paragraph, from a group called the Edinburgh Action for Palestine, sums it up well:

“Behind the glossy language of “economic acceleration” lies the same imperial arrogance: stripping Palestinians of sovereignty, relocating the population, and offering “digital tokens” in place of their confiscated land. This is not reconstruction-it is dispossession wrapped in Silicon Valley jargon.”

End

 

A Rumination on Concentration Camps

 

U.S Government Creeps Tour Alligator Alcatraz

 

Concentration Camps are back in fashion!

Well, to be precise, they never went out of fashion. They just kind of went underground. More on that in a minute.

The U.S. Congress has appropriated 45 billion dollars for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement – ICE – to build new “detention centers” such as, presumably, the already infamous Alligator Alcatraz in the Florida Everglades.

The funding, according to one report, “represents a 265 percent annual budget increase to ICE’s current detention budget.” It will about double the agency’s detention capacity, which is currently around 56,000 and includes some 200-plus facilities.

 And yes, these centers do qualify as concentration camps. The American Heritage Dictionary defines one as follows:

 

 A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable

Well, yep, that fits. Maxwell Frost, who represents central Florida in the U.S. Congress, recently visited Alligator Alcatraz and vouched for the harsh conditions there. He said:

 

“we saw abhorrent conditions, a lot of crowding, 32 male individuals per cage — these people are being caged — three toilets per area. And the drinking water, it comes from the toilet apparatus in the cell. Not only that, but there is not enough resources and not really an ability for them to be able to speak with their legal counsel or lawyers.”

Other investigations confirm what Frost saw. An AP story by two Miami reporters says this:

“…people held there say worms turn up in the food. Toilets don’t flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, and mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere.”

And this:

“Inside the compound’s large white tents, rows of bunkbeds are surrounded by chain-link cages. Detainees are said to go days without showering or getting prescription medicine, and they are only able to speak by phone to lawyers and loved ones. At times the air conditioners abruptly shut off in the sweltering heat.”

 

And it’s not just Alligator Alcatraz.  Barbaric treatment of detainees at three other immigrant detention centers in Florida was very recently reported by Human Rights Watch. For example:

n  Immigrants “were detained shackled for prolonged periods on buses without food, water, or functioning toilets; there was extreme overcrowding in freezing holding cells where detainees were forced to sleep on cold concrete floors under constant fluorescent lighting; and many were denied access to basic hygiene and medical care.”

n  “Officers denied detainees critical medication and detained some incommunicado in solitary confinement as an apparent punishment for seeking mental health care.”

n  On at least on occasion, “officers made men eat while shackled with their hands behind their backs after forcing the group to wait hours for lunch: ‘We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs,’” one man said.

n  “Lockdowns—during which staff denied detained people access to medical staff and basic recreation—were sometimes imposed only because the facility was short-staffed.”

 

A Quick Recent History

You or I might have thought that concentration camps would be a thing of the past. They would have been banned after the revelations of the Nazi camps of World War Two.

Alas, that’s never been the case. The Soviet Union’s system of Gulags expanded after WW II, with an estimated  2.5 million people detained  at the time of Stalin’s death in 1953.

 But even in the enlightened global west, empires were secretly mass-detaining troublesome groups post WW2.  England is a great case in point.

 The rubble had barely been cleared in London and other industrial centers before the British Empire itself went right back to the dark side. By 1953 it was mass-detaining Africans in inhumane centers to try and maintain its colonial rule over Kenya.

 

 

One of over 100 British Camps in Kenya 1953-59.

This was Britain’s reaction to the so-called “Mau Mau Rebellion,” a violent uprising in the early 1950s by the indigenous Kikuyu people who finally had enough of British settlers stealing their land. An “Emergency” was declared, and, as historian Juiffe Duffy wrote:

From 1953 to 1960, between 70,000 and 150,000 Mau Mau suspects were detained without trial in an archipelago of camps. Conditions in the camps were dire and British colonials and loyalist warders meted out violence with impunity.

The Kenyan colonialists often interred entire Kikuyu villages. All were then

… interrogated about their political allegiances. …

To progress through the camp complex to eventual release, detainees (none of whom had been charged with or convicted of any crime) had to confess to their Mau Mau activities.

Camp staff achieved this by using systematic brutality that had been sanctioned by the colonial administration.

And meanwhile, in the U.S.

Here in the U.S., concentration camps have been disguised as “correctional facilities” and other nice terms. For a full century -- from post-Civil War and well into the cold war era -- places like the notorious Parchman Farm in Mississippi and Angola Prison in Louisiana used legalized slave labor to make profits for collaborating industries. They used brutal beatings and psychological torture to maintain order, packed inmates into crowded and unsanitary cells, and fed them as meagerly as possible to keep them alive and working.

Parchman, incidentally, was the model for the prisons  depicted in the films “Cool Hand Luke” and “Oh Brother, Where Art Though.”

Post-Slavery Slave Labor at Parchman, Mississippi

 

In the above cases, the inmates were wildly disproportionately black and often incarcerated for very minor breaches of the laws. Slavery, of course, had been technically abolished by then. But the Constitutional Amendment that ended slavery contained a huge loophole. The exact words are these:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” (Emphasis added)

Cruel internment camps pop up in many other places in the history of U.S. empire. In the action known as the Phillipine – American War (1899-1902), the U.S. military, in an effort to resist rebellion against its occupation:

 “forcibly relocated many civilians to concentration camps, where thousands died.”

 

 The U.S also used internment camps in its long war against the so-called Indians. One of the most notorious was the Bosque Redondo Reservation near present-day Fort Sumner in east central New Mexico. The inmates there included Navaho (Dine) people whose forced 300-mile journey to get there was a hellish experience in itself. The official website of New Mexico Historic Sites reports:

“The Diné call this the Long Walk, when over 50 different groups made the 300+ mile journey over a period of nearly three years. Several hundred Diné captives either died during the walk or were abducted by slave traders. Gross acts of brutality included stragglers being shot and pregnant women killed if they could not keep up with the group.” 

American Soldiers Supervise The Long Walk

 

Eventually, some 9,000 Navaho were contained at Bosque Redondo, along with several hundred Mescalero Apaches (Nde) brought in from the opposite direction. How both were treated there is well summarized by one paragraph from the above-mentioned website:

“During their internment, the Diné and Ndé were prevented from practicing ceremonies, singing songs, or praying in their own language. Daily depredations at the reservation were palpable on every level. Food rationing was both meager and completely foreign (coffee beans, white flour and rank beef), while the lack of wood for heating and cooking during the bitterly cold winters led to illness, and high infant mortality. When a small disease was contracted from the military, it ravaged the captives. The suffering from exposure, starvation, and sickness took an estimated 1500 lives.”

No surprise, then

 We shouldn’t be surprised, then, at the resurgence of these gulags. They are nothing new. The only innovation the Trump mob has offered is to express how proud they are of the cruelty of their system.

Empires have never been able to resist concentration camps. But their people sure should.

 

 

 

 

 

Depravity Now!

 

No matter how sadistic you think the state of Israel is, it’s worse. It’s impossible to get to the bottom of its depravity.

Take, for example, the very recent assassination of four Palestinian journalists via an air strike on a tent they were sleeping under. It seems that one of them, named Anas Al-Sharif, had become rather renowned for his reporting on the Gazan genocide. So Israel did what any gangster organization would do. They rubbed him out, along with three of his colleagues.

Not only did they kill the messengers, but they proudly showed off their criminality by announcing the killing in advance. They declared, with no evidence or even logic, that Al-Sharif was working for Hamas. And that, by Israeli military logic, was all the excuse required to eliminate him (and, again, anyone hanging out with him).

Al-Sharif knew he would very likely be killed. His friends knew it. The Committee to Protect Journalists knew it: two weeks before his murder, they called for him to be given some kind of protection, noting he was “being targeted by an Israeli military smear campaign he believed was "a precursor for his assassination".

 

Al-Sharif and his three colleagues are only four among some 270 journalists killed by Israel since October 2023. They are virtually all Palestinian, as Israel has banned any outside reporters from entering. This form of censorship is “unprecedented in any other conflict in modern history,” according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

The recent murders were made even more obscene by the Israeli mafia kingpin Benjamin  Neten-Yahoo, who, just hours before the killings said Israel would start allowing journalists into Gaza. Here is what he said, with a straight face:

In fact, we have decided, and I’ve ordered and directed the military to bring in foreign journalists, more foreign journalists, a lot. There’s a problem of assuring security, but I think it can be done in a way that is responsible and careful to preserve your own safety.

No Fish For You

Maybe even more revealing – though much less reported on -- is a ban on Gazans entering the sea waters off its western coast. That’s right: No fishing, no swimming, no bathing, no wading, under threat of being murdered by gunboats or drones.

The most recent edict was issued by the Israeli Defense Forces on July 12 of this year – during an intense heat wave. Posted on X (Twitter), it said this:

Strict security restrictions have been imposed in the maritime area adjacent to Gaza—entry to the sea is prohibited. This is a call to fishermen, swimmers, and divers—refrain from entering the sea. Entering the beach and waters along the entire Gaza Strip endangers your lives.

The ban on swimming – so far – is not being enforced.  But it could be at any time, which ramps up the anxiety for Gazans even further. As one Gazan mother told a reporter,

“The sea was the only outlet left. If they kill us for going there, maybe that would be easier than this slow death[.]… Still, I fear for my children. My oldest is 9. How can I convince him that swimming in the sea could get him killed?"

 

 Another Gazan emphasized the cruel intention of the ban. “This is not about security,” he said. “It’s economic, social and psychological warfare, a weapon of slow, deliberate suffocation.

The ban on fishing, meanwhile, has been in place since October 2023 and is enforced rather brutally. An estimated 200 fishers were killed, mostly by Israeli Naval Forces, between October 2024 and December 2025. 

That’s a relatively small number out of some 60,000-plus documented Gazans murdered since October ’23.  But that’s exactly why the sea water ban is so telling.  It illustrates how no cruelty – no matter how trivial -- has been left unapplied.

Here’s a good example of how the seawater ban is used to perpetrate cruelty for its own sake. It is from a United Nations report of May 2025:

On 8 November 2024, a 16-year-old fisher boy, Mohammed Attif Al Bardaweel, and three other boys were retrieving their fishing net from a paddling fishing boat off the coast of Rafah. According to Mohammed’s father, INF started shelling the boys, so “they got out of the water and fled.” Once the boys reached the shore, they split into two groups while running home. However, a drone pursued them and struck the two boys running in the rear group, where Mohammed was killed and another boy was seriously injured, losing one of his eyes. The drone then followed and struck the two other boys, injuring both.

 

Prior to the recent “war,” according to the same UN report, the fishing industry was “a main source of livelihoods and food for Gaza’s population.” Traditional, small-scale fishing had produced 4,460 tons of fish annually and aquaculture had added 750 tons more. The World Bank had estimated “around 18,000 people in Gaza directly depended on fishing for their livelihoods, with an extended impact on over 110,000 family members.” 

 

But that was then. Today, the industry is down to seven percent of pre- 2023 production. Viewed that way, the seawater ban is not cruelty of its own sake. It is a practical part of a larger cruelty, the deliberate starvation of some two million people for the crime of being Arabic.

If you’re keeping score at home, the number of Gazans starved to death reached 227  today, August 12. It is likely to increase rapidly in the near future.  

End

 

  

 

The ICE Men Smasheth

Hitler’s Brownshirts Proudly Marching

 

 Immigration and Customs Enforcement – better known as I.C.E, -- has become Donald Trump’s version of Hitler’s Brownshirts.

True, they’ve upgraded the costume from the sewage-brown Boy Scout garb of Hitler’s yobboes. The modern ICE gorilla sports a variety of ensembles, from fashion-forward flak jackets to form-fitting tee-shirts made to spec by such profiteers as VF Imagewear or FEDS Apparel.

 Otherwise their main function is the same: to terrorize a certain population. In the case of the Brownshirts, as everyone knows, it was Jews. In the case of ICE, it’s immigrants  or anyone who looks like they might be an immigrant (ie. brown-skinned and unable to afford a very nice car).

 ICE has even adopted a fave technique of the Brownshirts: smashing glass. You might recall Nazi Germany’s infamous Kristallnacht – the “Night of the Broken Glass,” in which the Brownshirts led a frenzy of window-smashing against Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and synagogues across the country.

 

Latter-Day Brownshirts

 

ICE may never match the Brownshirts in total square-footage of windows destroyed. (Reliable data is hard to find.)

But they may already have surpassed their Nazi heroes in car windows pulverized. ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news group, has identified “nearly 50” separate cases of ICE car-window-bashing since Trump last took office. By comparison, using the same investigation methods, the ProPublicans were able to find just eight such incidents in the previous ten years.

One videoed case involved a Guatemalan couple in Massachusets, whose lawyer advised them NOT to open the car door or window until he, the lawyer, arrived. But the agents could not wait. In the video, the ICE goon who wields the adze seems to enjoy the work, his dedication even translating to excellent technique: The weight shifts from back foot to front, the head stays back, the hips rotate, and the adze-head accelerates through the window pane.

All the better to terrorize the cars’ inhabitants, who have included pregnant women, sobbing toddlers, and, in one case, “a 12-year-old with severe disabilities.”

 

Photo by ProPublica

 

There is one thing ICE could improve on, however. The adzes in the videos appear to have wooden handles. Look for future ICE adzes to sport high-grade aluminum or graphite handles, which are lighter in weight. They can afford it.

Speaking of affording it, ICE needs more staff and they will pay. They recently announced a “major Recruitment Drive offering $50K Signing Bonuses and Student Loan Forgiveness.”

 This partially answers a question I have often asked myself. How does ICE find people sadistic enough to carry out their terrorism? Financial incentive is probably a good place to start. But I wonder if they also screen for latent racism and sociopathy.

End

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why I Can’t Stop Bitching About Gaza

 

Israel sunk to a new level of depravity yesterday. Its agents killed some 91 Palestinians who were trying to get some food at an aid station.

I am not totally sure why this particular topic keeps grabbing my attention. Certainly, there are plenty of other outrages worthy of bitching about. I think my own preoccupation with this particular topic comes down to two major reasons:

1)   The U.S.-sponsored starvation-genocide against children, elderly, women, and other innocent Palestinians is one of the most indefensible crimes against humanity since World War II. It is getting more cruel and more obscene every day. It is still not being given anywhere near the attention it deserves.

2)   My own tax dollars (and yours) are being used to finance this action. Thoreau, in “Civil Disobedience,” makes a very relevant observation:

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

As a taxpayer, I am being forced against my will to give this genocide my support in a very practical way. I deeply resent this.

Very recently another of my favorite writers, Caitlin Johnstone, offered an essay titled “Gaza Isn’t Starving, it’s Being Starved.” I think it’s worth quoting at some length:

“So what’s the plan here? Do we just sit and watch Israel starve Gaza to death with the support of our own governments?

And then what? We just go along with our lives, knowing that that happened? That this is what we are as a society? That our civilization is comfortable allowing something like that to happen? And that our rulers could do the same thing to another inconvenient population at any time?

We’re just meant to be cool with that? And go on living like it’s normal?

I’m genuinely curious. How exactly is everyone planning to go about living their lives after that point? How does that work, exactly?

I’m asking because I don’t know. I mean, I know what my own government and its allies should do, but I don’t know what we as ordinary members of the public are supposed to do.”

One thing we can do is at least go on the record in opposition. I guess that’s what I am trying to do, even if I have a tiny audience. And I am grateful for Caitlin Johnstone and many others who have offered me an example.

End

 

 

If you can’t bomb ‘em, Sanction ‘em

 

In one of his lamer songs, Merl Haggard once crooned, “When yer puttin’ down my country hoss, yer walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me.”

It seems that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has similar issues, with one minor variation. A U.N. human rights official recently put down Rubio’s country’s corporations. And in doing this, she by God walked on the fightin’ side of him.

 So Rubio  sanctioned that lady!

Let the world be warned: You don’t walk on the fightin’ side of Mark Rubio, Hoss.

The UN official in question is one Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.  In a recent report for the UN, Albanese had the gall to point out that numerous U.S. (among other) corporations were profiting bigly from the U.S./Israel mass murdering and starving of fellow human beings in Gaza.

In her report, Albanese names 48 specific corporations who are cashing in on the

Genocide. They include such American icons as these:

 

Airbnb

Amazon

Blackrock

Booking.com

Caterpillar

Chevron

Christian Friends of Israeli Communities

Google (Alphabet)

Hewlet Packard

IBM

Keller Williams Realty

Lockheed Martin

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Microsoft

Pacific Investment Mgt. Co.

Palantir Technologies

Vanguard (investment management)

 

The Gaza genocide is in fact so profitable that, as Albanese said, “ending it will not happen without holding the private sector accountable, including its executives.

Of course, it’s hard to hold anyone accountable when simply reporting objective facts makes you a criminal.  

The sanctioning won’t affect Albanese much. The penalties include not being allowed to visit the U.S. and having her assets in the U.S. frozen. She lives in Italy and presumably doesn’t have a large amount of money in U.S. banks.

But it’s rather sobering that some unelected rando – Rubio, in this case -- can arbitrarily decide that anyone he doesn’t like is a terrorist and enemy of the state. Chris Hedges summarized the implications of this rather cogently:

 

The attack against Albanese presages a world without rules, one where rogue states, such as the U.S. and Israel, are permitted to carry out war crimes and genocide without any accountability or restraint. It exposes the subterfuges we use to fool ourselves and attempt to fool others. It reveals our hypocrisy, cruelty and racism. No one, from now on, will take seriously our stated commitments to democracy, freedom of expression, the rule of law or human rights. And who can blame them? We speak exclusively in the language of force, the language of brutes, the language of mass slaughter, the language of genocide.

 

 End.