World Socialist Web Site – March 1, 2024

Israel massacres Palestinians seeking flour:
A war crime made in Washington

By Andre Damon

On Thursday morning, Israeli infantrymen, snipers, tanks and drones opened fire on a crowd of starving Palestinians in Gaza City as they lined up to receive flour from aid trucks, killing at least 112 and injuring more than 700.

Doctors reported that many victims arrived at hospitals with gunshots to their torsos and heads, indicating that they were deliberately targeted by Israeli troops, who were shooting to kill.

Images from the scene showed bags of flour drenched in blood, leading many to refer to the killings as the “flour massacre.” The hundreds of victims overwhelmed local hospitals, which were already without medical supplies and power and were only able to provide first aid.

This was a deliberate and conscious massacre by the fascistic Netanyahu regime, as part of a systematic campaign to kill as many Gazans as possible and drive the rest from their land.

Thursday’s massacre is just a foretaste of what Israel has in store as it prepares its full-scale assault on Rafah, where over 1 million people are seeking shelter after being displaced from northern Gaza.

While Israeli troops pulled the trigger, they were using bullets and tank rounds paid for and supplied by the United States. Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate Joseph Kishore stated in response to the massacre, “It is not only Netanyahu and his fascistic ministers who are responsible but the Biden administration, which has fully backed Israel as part of the militaristic and imperialist agenda of the American ruling class.”

The guilt does not stop at the White House. The entire US media establishment is complicit in covering up this atrocity. Every mainstream US media outlet rushed to promote and propagate Israel’s absurd cover story: that Palestinian aid drivers caused the massacre by plowing into the crowd, despite widespread footage of Israeli troops shooting at the unarmed civilians.

Every US media account equated the plain and obvious truth, that Israeli troops massacred a crowd of hungry people, with an equally plain and obvious lie, that the troops had nothing to do with the death toll, claiming that these represented “conflicting accounts.”

“Chaotic aid delivery turns deadly,” read a headline in the Washington Post. “112 killed in Gaza food line. Israel blames Palestinian aid drivers.”

Biden, responding to the murders, offered the usual banalities about a “tragic and alarming incident” and called for “expanding the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza.”

These platitudes are meant to cover up the actual US policy of unconditional support for the Netanyahu regime no matter what it does. There are, as US officials have repeatedly made clear, no “red lines” for how many people Israel is allowed to kill. The Israeli regime can starve, massacre and displace the entire population of Gaza, as far as Biden, Blinken and their fellow enablers of genocide are concerned.

Thursday’s act of mass murder is only the latest and deadliest in a series of massacres by Israeli troops during the distribution of food. These targeted operations are part of a deliberate policy to starve the civilian population of Gaza to death.

In a statement, the Euro-Med Monitor warned, “Israeli shooting towards starving people receiving aid has become a regular practice. In recent weeks, Israeli forces have directly attacked and killed dozens of people in Gaza City, including on Salah al-Din Street and in the vicinity of Kuwait Roundabout.”

Israel’s genocidal policy is having its intended effect. In a statement to CNN, Melanie Ward, CEO of Medical Aid to Palestine, said that as a result of Israel’s systematic blockade of food supplies, “This is the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded. That means children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.”

On Thursday, the official death toll of the Gaza genocide reached 30,000, according to the region’s health ministry. With a further 7,000 missing, the real death toll is likely closer to 37,000.

The combined number of dead, missing and wounded exceeds 100,000, making up 4 percent of the population of Gaza, effectively marking one of the most rapid depopulation events in modern history.

“Life is draining out of Gaza at a terrifying speed,” wrote Martin Griffiths, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.

Millions of people all over the world are shocked and horrified by Thursday’s massacre, which is the culmination of nearly five months of bombings, mass executions, starvation and mass displacement by Israel.

For months, workers and young people have participated in demonstrations all over the world calling for an end to the genocide. But in the face of these protests, the US and other imperialist governments have only doubled down on their support for Israel.

US imperialism is unshakably committed to its support of the Gaza genocide because it is a critical component of the broader war the imperialist powers are waging in the Middle East. Seeking to dominate and subjugate Iran as part of an effort to control the oil-rich region, the United States has carried out waves of attacks in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria, while Israel has carried out strikes inside Lebanon and Syria.

The imperialist onslaught against the Middle East is one component of the global eruption of imperialist war, which is taking ever bloodier forms. This week, French President Emmanuel Macron raised the prospect of deploying NATO troops to fight Russia in Ukraine—in effect proposing a direct shooting war between nuclear-armed opponents—a conflict which could trigger a nuclear exchange whose death toll would be in the millions or even billions.

The fight against the Gaza genocide must be waged as a struggle against the imperialist governments that are enabling it and dragging the world into the inferno of world war. This requires the fusion of the growing movement against the Gaza genocide with the movement of the working class in the struggle for socialism.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/01/fppq-m01.html

Chris Hedges Report– March 1, 2024

Aaron Bushnell’s Divine Violence

By Chris Hedges

Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation was ultimately a religious act, one that radically delineates good and evil and calls us to resist.

Aaron Bushnell, when he placed his cell phone on the ground to set up a livestream and lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C., resulting in his death, pitted divine violence against radical evil. As an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force, he was part of the vast machinery that sustains the ongoing genocide in Gaza, no less morally culpable than the German soldiers, technocrats, engineers, scientists and bureaucrats who oiled the apparatus of the Nazi Holocaust. This was a role he could no longer accept. He died for our sins. 

“I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he said calmly in his video as he walked to the gate of the embassy. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

Young men and women sign up for the military for many reasons, but starving, bombing and killing women and children is usually not amongst them. Shouldn’t, in a just world, the U.S. fleet break the Israeli blockade of Gaza to provide food, shelter and medicine? Shouldn’t U.S. warplanes impose a no fly zone over Gaza to halt the saturation bombing? Shouldn’t Israel be issued an ultimatum to withdraw its forces from Gaza? Shouldn’t the weapons shipments, billions in military aid and intelligence provided to Israel, be halted? Shouldn’t those who commit genocide, as well as those who support genocide, be held accountable?

These simple questions are the ones Bushnell’s death forces us to confront.

“Many of us like to ask ourselves,” he posted shortly before his suicide, “‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

The coalition forces intervened in northern Iraq in 1991 to protect the Kurds following the first Gulf War. The suffering of the Kurds was extensive, but dwarfed by the genocide in Gaza. A no-fly zone for the Iraqi air force was imposed. The Iraqi military was pushed out of the northern Kurdish areas. Humanitarian aid saved Kurds from starvation, infectious diseases and death from exposure. 

But that was another time, another war. Genocide is evil when it is carried out by our enemies. It is defended and sustained when carried out by our allies. 

Walter Benjamin — whose friends Fritz Heinle and Rika Seligson committed suicide in 1914 to protest German militarism and the First World War — in his essay “Critique of Violence,” examines acts of violence undertaken by individuals who confront radical evil. Any act that defies radical evil breaks the law in the name of justice. It affirms the sovereignty and dignity of the individual. It condemns the coercive violence of the state. It entails a willingness to die. Benjamin called these extreme acts of resistance “divine violence.”  

“Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope,” Benjamin writes.

Bushnell’s self-immolation — one most social media posts and news organizations have heavily censored — is the point. It is meant to be seen. Bushnell extinguished his life in the same way thousands of Palestinians, including children, have been extinguished. We could watch him burn to death. This is what it looks like. This is what happens to Palestinians because of us.

The image of Bushnell’s self-immolation, like that of the Buddhist monk ảứTh￭ch Qung ￐c in Vietnam in 1963 or Mohamed Bouazizi, a young fruit seller in Tunisia, in 2010, is a potent political message. It jolts the viewer out of somnolence. It forces the viewer to question assumptions. It begs the viewer to act. It is political theater, or perhaps religious ritual, in its most potent form. Buddhist monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh said of self-immolation: “To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, that is, to suffer and to die for the sake of one’s people.”

If Bushnell was willing to die, repeatedly shouting out “Free Palestine!” as he burned, then something must be terribly, terribly wrong. 

These individual self-sacrifices often become rallying points for mass opposition. They can ignite, as they did in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, revolutionary upheavals. Bouazizi, who was incensed that local authorities had confiscated his scales and produce, did not intend to start a revolution. But the petty and humiliating injustices he endured under the corrupt Ben Ali regime resonated with an abused public. If he could die, they could take to the streets.

These acts are sacrificial births. They presage something new. They are the complete rejection, in its most dramatic form, of conventions and reigning systems of power. They are designed to be horrific. They are meant to shock. Burning to death is one of the most dreaded ways to die.

Self-immolation comes from the Latin stemﾠimmol￢re, to sprinkle with salted flour when offering up a consecrated victim for sacrifice. Self-immolations, like Bushnell’s, link the sacred and the profane through the medium of sacrificial death.

But to go to this extreme requires what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr calls “a sublime madness in the soul.” He notes that “nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power and spiritual wickedness in high places.” This madness is dangerous, but it is necessary when confronting radical evil because without it “truth is obscured.” Liberalism, Niebuhr warns, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”

This extreme protest, this “sublime madness,” has been a potent weapon in the hands of the oppressed throughout history.

The some 160 self-immolations in Tibet since 2009 to protest Chinese occupation are perceived as religious rites, acts that declare the independence of the victims from the control of the state. Self-immolation calls us to a different way of being. These sacrificial victims become martyrs.

Communities of resistance, even if they are secular, are bound together by the sacrifices of martyrs. Only apostates betray their memory. The martyr, through his or her example of self-sacrifice, weakens and severs the bonds and the coercive power of the state. The martyr represents a total rejection of the status quo. This is why all states seek to discredit the martyr or turn the martyr into a nonperson. They know and fear the power of the martyr, even in death.

Daniel Ellsberg in 1965 witnessed a 22-year-old anti-war activist, Norman Morrison, douse himself with kerosene and light himself on fire — the flames shot 10 feet into the air — outside the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at The Pentagon, to protest the Vietnam War. Ellsberg cited the self-immolation, along with the nationwide anti-war protests, as one of the factors that led him to release the Pentagon Papers.

The radical Catholic priest, Daniel Berrigan, after traveling to North Vietnam with a peace delegation during the war, visited the hospital room of Ronald Brazee. Brazee was a high school student who had drenched himself with kerosene and immolated himself outside the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Syracuse, New York to protest the war.

“He was still living a month later,” Berrigan writes. “I was able to gain access to him. I smelled the odor of burning flesh and I understood anew what I had seen in North Vietnam. The boy was dying in torment, his body like a great piece of meat cast upon a grill. He died shortly thereafter. I felt that my senses had been invaded in a new way. I had understood the power of death in the modern world. I knew I must speak and act against death because this boy’s death was being multiplied a thousandfold in the Land of Burning Children. So I went to Catonsville because I had gone to Hanoi.”

In Catonsville, Maryland Berrigan and eight other activists, known as theﾠCatonsville Nine, broke into a draft board on May 17, 1968. They took 378 draft files and burned them with homemade napalm in the parking lot. Berrigan was sentenced to three years in a federal prison.

I was in Prague in 1989 for the Velvet Revolution. I attended the commemoration of the self-immolation of a 20-year-old university student named Jan Palach. Palach had stood on the steps outside the National Theater in Wenceslas Square in 1969, poured petrol over himself and lit himself on fire. He died of his wounds three days later. He left behind a note saying that this act was the only way to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which had taken place five months earlier. His funeral procession was broken up by police. When frequent candlelit vigils were held at his grave at Olsany cemetery, the communist authorities, determined to stamp out his memory, disinterred his body, cremated it and handed the ashes to his mother. 

During the winter of 1989, posters with Palach’s face covered the walls of Prague. His death, two decades earlier, was lionized as the supreme act of resistance against the Soviets and pro-Soviet regime installed after the overthrow of Alexander Dubček. Thousands of people marched to the Square of Red Army Soldiers and renamed it Jan Palach Square. He won.

One day, if the corporate state and apartheid state of Israel are dismantled, the street where Bushnell lit himself on fire will bear his name. He will, like Palach, be honored for his moral courage. Palestinians, betrayed by most of the world, already look to him as a hero. Because of him, it will be impossible to demonize all of us. 

Divine violence terrifies a corrupt and discredited ruling class. It exposes their depravity. It illustrates that not everyone is paralyzed by fear. It is a siren call to battle radical evil. That is what Bushnell intended. His sacrifice speaks to our better selves.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. His most recent book is “America: The Farewell Tour” (2019).

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/aaron-bushnells-divine-violence 

World Socialist Web Site – March 1, 2024

Christchurch terrorist foreshadowed mosque attacks online over a year before

By John Braddock

According to a report from the Conversation, republished in the Guardian on February 20, Christchurch fascist gunman Brenton Tarrant posted about his intentions on the website 4chan at least a year before his 2019 deadly attacks on two mosques in the city.

New research by a group of academics working at the University of Auckland—Chris Wilson, Ethan Renner, Jack Smylie and Michal Dziwulski—raises serious questions about why authorities did not detect the posts before the horrific shootings. The researchers uncovered racist and violent online postings by Tarrant as far back as 2015—that is, four years earlier.

On March 15, 2019 Tarrant carried out well-planned mass shootings at the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 51 people were killed and 40 injured. The victims included men, women and children; the youngest killed was a three-year-old boy. Tarrant made clear in his manifesto that the atrocity was motivated by white supremacist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim beliefs.

To this day there remain many unanswered questions about how Tarrant, an Australian citizen, was able to plan and carry out his attacks without being stopped by police or the intelligence agencies on both sides of the Tasman Sea. Tarrant had links with the Australian neo-Nazi groups, the Lads Society and United Patriots Front (UPF), whose leading members had at one point tried to recruit him.

New Zealand’s then Labour Party-led government took steps to suppress public discussion about the terror attack. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared that she would not refer to Tarrant by name and instructed the media to avoid reporting on his beliefs.

The state censor outlawed possession of Tarrant’s manifesto—an anti-democratic decision taken in order to hide the similarity between his politics and those of US President Donald Trump, as well as far-right forces in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. These included the Labour government’s coalition partner NZ First, a viciously anti-immigrant party.

The research points to systemic failings by the state agencies, given the human and technical resources at their disposal, to seriously track and investigate on-line activities of the extreme right, both before and after the attack. The authorities consistently turned a blind eye to the danger of far-right violence while the focus of their intelligence activity was directed towards the Muslim community and left-wing groups.

A royal commission of inquiry was held in 2020, but its hearings took place in secret and the vast majority of the evidence that it examined has been sealed. A separate coronial inquiry, which is limited in scope and focused on the day of the attack, began two years ago and is yet to conclude.

The royal commission’s report, published in 2020, covered up the role of the state agencies, declaring that nothing could have been done to prevent the attack. This is despite the fact that Tarrant was active in far-right online forums and had been reported to police in Australia for sending death threats via Facebook to an opponent of the fascist UPF.

The Conversation article is a damning indictment of the royal commission’s report, which accepted Tarrant’s claims that he was not a frequent commenter on extreme right-wing sites. The commissioners flatly declared: “Although [Tarrant] did frequent extreme right-wing discussion boards such as those on 4chan and 8chan, the evidence we have seen is indicative of more substantial use of YouTube and is therefore consistent with what he told us.”

The Auckland University researchers questioned this assertion and went on to investigate whether right-wing websites were significant in Tarrant’s radicalisation. They declared their findings overturned “a great deal of what we thought we knew about him.” They also raised disturbing questions “not only about why this posting was not detected before the attack, but also why it has not been discovered in the five years since the 15 March attacks.”

The research team asserts that there were numerous opportunities for New Zealand and Australian security services to observe Tarrant making extremely threatening online statements. Tarrant had been calling for attacks against civilians at least as early as 2015. “The violent racism and Islamophobia in his posting sets him apart, even in the darkest corners of 4chan,” they noted.

The team reviewed thousands of anonymous posts and hundreds of threads. Because 4chan posts are anonymous, they used a combination of indicators to identify Tarrant. 4chan’s “politically incorrect” board—referred to as /pol/—provides the time, date and location of each post, allowing them to match this against Tarrant’s travel to numerous countries over five years.

Tarrant provided personal information in his posts, openly stating his Australian identity and always using the same distinctive language, and in some cases repeating specific points. Tarrant often made certain grammatical errors which made his posting stand out. These features can be seen in online writing samples as early as 2011, in his 2019 manifesto and in a great deal of online posting. The researchers concluded that, taken together, these indicators identify Tarrant at a “very high evidence threshold.”

Posts showed that by 2015, Tarrant was calling for mass violence against people of colour. Inspired by US gunman Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine black worshippers in a South Carolina church, Tarrant declared: “violence is the last resort of a cornered animal” and “it was always going to come to this.” He said white nationalist extremists should target innocent victims in locations of “significance,” such as places of worship.

For at least four years Tarrant planned on killing people in such locations. He glorified public shootings and advocated the sadistic killing of innocent civilians, hoping white violence might trigger a race war. Travelling internationally between 2014 and 2018, Tarrant became increasingly focused on Muslims. In one thread, he claimed he would form and fund an armed band of 4chan users to conduct ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.

Map showing countries visited by Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant in Europe [Photo: Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terrorist attack on Christchurch mosques on 15 March 2019)]

The intelligence agencies appear to have consistently ignored warning signs that would have enabled them to identify and track Tarrant and intervene. He posted regularly on 4chan and 8chan, which are freely and publicly accessible. His postings were visible to numerous others whose identities he could not know.

Two threads in March and August of 2018 showed plans to attack the Muslim community in New Zealand. Revealing he was in Dunedin, Tarrant expressed his anger at the mosques in that city, and in neighbouring Christchurch and Ashburton. When other users called on him to act, he wrote: “I have a plan to stop it. Just hold on.”

The researchers note: “Far from maintaining tight operational security as he planned his attack, Tarrant openly (albeit anonymously) discussed violence against mosques in the South Island while in New Zealand.” They note that the royal commission’s report stated that Tarrant made only “limited lapses” in operational security during his time in New Zealand between late 2017 and March 2019. “This is not the case,” the researchers say.

The research team will be posting more information about their study in due course. However, what has been presented so far is sufficient to challenge the key finding of the royal commission: that the police and security services could not possibly have known about Tarrant’s plans in advance or taken action to prevent the atrocity.

The study completely vindicates the position taken by the World Socialist Web Site at the time of the 2019 massacre and since. The commission’s predetermined purpose was to whitewash the New Zealand and Australian intelligence agencies and police, and to cover up the role of governments in both countries in whipping up racism and Islamophobia, including through participation in US imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The commission’s final report was vetted and approved by the intelligence agencies themselves prior to being released.

In a perspective published three days after the attack, the WSWS opposed the attempts that were already being made to portray Tarrant as a “lone wolf,” unconnected to any political tendencies, whose actions and beliefs were completely alien to New Zealand politics and society. The massacre was, we insisted, “the product of the deliberate cultivation, at the highest levels of the capitalist state in country after country, of the most extreme right-wing nationalism.”

With the fifth anniversary of the country’s worst terror attack approaching, the ongoing silence from the political establishment is aimed at obscuring the roots of the Christchurch shootings and downplaying the danger posed by fascism and the extreme right, internationally and in New Zealand.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/02/29/opcw-f29.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
 

 

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