technocrit

Every accusation is a confession.

Why Israel Fears the Faces of Dead Palestinian Children on Its Streets (David Issacharoff | Haaretz, 2025-04-21)

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2025-04-21/ty-article/.highlight/why-israel-fears-the-faces-of-dead-palestinian-children-on-its-streets/00000196-5985-d99b-a5ff-d9d7fa560000

archived:
https://archive.is/2025.04.21-202552/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2025-04-21/ty-article/.highlight/why-israel-fears-the-faces-of-dead-palestinian-children-on-its-streets/00000196-5985-d99b-a5ff-d9d7fa560000
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“Ahead of an anti-war demonstration scheduled for Thursday in Tel Aviv – organized by the Jewish-Arab movement Standing Together – the Israeli police said they would not allow the protest to take place unless organizers agreed to a ban on signs displaying images of ‘kids or babies from Gaza’ or bearing references to ‘genocide and ethnic cleansing.’

“The document outlining these conditions was riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, perfectly reflecting the heavy-handed police, who are acting without any clear guidelines or legal basis.

“Even in death, Palestinian children killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza are treated as a threat in Israel…”

#StandingTogether #IsraeliOpposition
@palestine@lemmy.ml @palestine@a.gup.pe @israel

Why Israel Fears the Faces of Dead Palestinian Children on Its Streets (David Issacharoff | Haaretz, 2025-04-21)

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2025-04-21/ty-article/.highlight/why-israel-fears-the-faces-of-dead-palestinian-children-on-its-streets/00000196-5985-d99b-a5ff-d9d7fa560000

archived:
https://archive.is/2025.04.21-202552/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2025-04-21/ty-article/.highlight/why-israel-fears-the-faces-of-dead-palestinian-children-on-its-streets/00000196-5985-d99b-a5ff-d9d7fa560000
———

“Ahead of an anti-war demonstration scheduled for Thursday in Tel Aviv – organized by the Jewish-Arab movement Standing Together – the Israeli police said they would not allow the protest to take place unless organizers agreed to a ban on signs displaying images of ‘kids or babies from Gaza’ or bearing references to ‘genocide and ethnic cleansing.’

“The document outlining these conditions was riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, perfectly reflecting the heavy-handed police, who are acting without any clear guidelines or legal basis.

“Even in death, Palestinian children killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza are treated as a threat in Israel…”

#StandingTogether #IsraeliOpposition
@palestine@lemmy.ml @palestine@a.gup.pe @israel

By all criteria, this a concentration camp. Not “concentration camp” as rhetorical inflation, or emotionally manipulative shorthand, or edgy metaphor—but as in: literally.

As in: detention without trial, state control, inhumane living conditions, forced labor, dehumanization, brutal violence, isolation from accountability, psychological torture, and—by every available logical extension—murder.

That last one we can’t yet verify in the strict evidentiary sense, but the circumstances suggest it like smoke suggests fire, and they are already trying to hide their actions and deny what is occurring.

Significantly absent in the long obituaries for Pope Francis in both the New York Times and the Washington Post were mentions of his deep concern for the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza. In Francis’s last public message on Easter Sunday, just hours before he died, he had called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and condemned the “deplorable humanitarian situation” there.

The obits also failed to note that Pope Francis had personally telephoned the Holy Family Church in Gaza just about every evening since Israel invaded the territory in October 2023 — including the Saturday night before Easter. The church’s pastor, Rev. Gabriel Romanelli, remembered: “He said he was praying for us, he blessed us, and he thanked us for our prayers.” Other church members said that the Pope “would make sure to speak not only to the priest but to everyone else in the room.”

Pope Francis’s concern for Gaza and Palestine did not start in October 2023. Rev. Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Christian theologian and Lutheran pastor, told Democracy Now:

I think no Palestinian will ever forget when Pope Francis, in 2014, stopped his car, went down, stepped down and prayed at the separation wall separating Jerusalem from Bethlehem — a moment that touched all of us and continued to speak to us for years.

Full Article

Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a 32-year-old Venezuelan immigrant legally residing in the United States, has apparently been disappeared to El Salvador’s notorious Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) after mistakenly turning onto the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, Michigan.

The bridge, one of North America’s busiest international crossings, links Detroit with Windsor, Ontario. Due to the complexity of nearby highways, even local residents occasionally take the wrong ramp. For Prada, this innocent mistake led to arrest, imprisonment, and deportation—culminating in his disappearance into a foreign prison.

This week on CounterSpin: CBS News on April 14 said:

We’re following new violence in the Middle East. Israeli strikes hit a major hospital in northern Gaza. At least 21 people were reportedly killed. The emergency room is badly damaged. Israel accused Hamas of using the hospital to hide its fighters.

Meanwhile, Houthi militants in Yemen said they fired two ballistic missiles at Israel. The Israeli military initially said two missiles were launched and one was intercepted, but later said only one missile had been fired.

There’s information in there, if you can parse it; but the takeaway for most will be that framing: “violence in the Middle East,” which suggests that whatever happened today is just the latest round in a perennial battle between warring parties, where you and I have no role except that of sad bystander.

When it comes to Yemen, elite media’s repeated reference to “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” not only obscures the current fighting’s political origins and recent timeline, it erases the Yemeni people, who are paying the price both for the fighting and for the distortions around it, from political elites and their media amplifiers.

We get some grounding from Khury Petersen-Smith; he’s the Michael Ratner Middle East fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began 82 years ago today, is now universally hailed as a bold act of Jewish resistance against the Nazis. But at the time, many Poles watched — or cheered — as the ghetto burned. The parallels with Gaza are hard to ignore.

A number of the North African country’s most senior opposition politicians were among 40 people sentenced on Saturday, including a former justice minister and diplomats. Critics insist the charges are trumped up and say they are symbolic of President Kais Saied’s authoritarian rule.

For a while it seemed like the dubious hypothesis that the virus that causes Covid did not jump from animals to humans, but was released from a Chinese lab, might be fading away. But the US government and the media are breathing new life into this zombie idea, contributing to the vilification of China and undermining actual scientific research.

Before dawn on Thursday, 17 April, Israeli airstrikes across Gaza targeted displaced families living in tents in three separate places – in al-Mawasi Khan Younis in southern Gaza, Deir al-Balah in the center and in Jabaliya in the north.

Journalists and eyewitnesses reported that the tents were engulfed in flames and the victims, including many children, were burned alive, with bystanders desperately trying to put the fires out.

A physician in northern Gaza, Dr. Ezzideen Shehab, who has been narrating this genocide on social media while caring for his patients, stated earlier this week that “after 556 days, Gaza is no longer a place. It is an experiment, a question posed to humanity: How long can a population be bombed, starved and displaced before it ceases to exist? And how quietly can this be done before the world looks away for good?”

I write this letter as the sun rises, hoping that the suspension of my rights will raise alarm bells that yours are already in jeopardy. I hope it will inspire your outrage that the most basic human instinct, to protest shameless massacre, is being repressed by obscure laws, racist propaganda and a state terrified of an awakened public. I hope this writing will startle you into understanding that a democracy for some—a democracy of convenience—is no democracy at all. I hope it will shake you into acting before it is too late.