What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

I recently watched the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, originally intended for airing by the BBC, but suspended and then finally cancelled (allowing for its showing on Channel 4 instead), due to "impartiality concerns."

Impartiality concerns? Of course it's impartial! The story related is that of the systematic and deliberate destruction of the Gazan healthcare system. It's the story of the perpetration of a war crime, the deliberate murder of doctors, surgeons and their families with the specific purpose of decapitation of the system upon which the beleaguered inhabitants of Gaza depend for their only defence against the horrendous injury being heaped daily upon them.

Would the BBC cancel a documentary on say dog fighting because it is deemed to have impartiality concerns? The people being interviewed for the film, doctors and paramedics, are being murdered as the programme is being made for God's sake! They dissapear into the Israeli detention system, are killed in drone and missile attacks targeted on their houses, are followed down the damn streets as they flee! Impartiality concerns? Where in God's name do the BBC get their ideas from?

And as for the documentary. Every politician in this country should see what they are involved in when they vote in the Commons on issues pertaining to Gaza. The evidence of what is happening is mounting day by day, week by week, into an undeniable mountain of facts. The deliberate hospitals destruction policy is now all but undeniable (remember how the first bombing of Al-Shifa was explained as an accident, then as a result of its being underrun with Hamas used tunnels - since then virtually all of the 36 Gazan hospitals have been attacked, to the point where it is now barely deemed worthy of report). It follows hard on the heels of the mounting evidence of deliberate shoot to kill policies being operated at the four mega-distribution hubs being operated by GHF, together with a deliberate starvation policy of the Gazan population. Again this mounting evidence is airbrushed, whitewashed and presented in language designed to deliberately introduce a misrepresentation of the true horror of what is being committed in real time before our eyes.

For clarity here I repeat. This is not a war, it's a genocide. What is being done to the Palestinians of Gaza, is akin to what the Germans did to the Jews in Europe, the systematic and brutal destruction of a people, but in that case without the constant leakage of real-time footage from mobile phones and cameras directly linked to satellites beyond the reach of being shut down.

Documentaries such as this should not have to fight for the opportunity to be shown. The reality of the footage captured is beyond question. It isn't the production of some nutcase in a backroom with an AI tool. It's documentary footage of the killing of a people and it should be essential viewing for anyone in any way connected to this situation. This is not a documentary, it is evidence. It is testimony.

I watched a brave fellow on YouTube this morning, coming out and saying things for which he can expect a knock on his door, such is the state of things in Stamer's Britain. He's a braver fellow than me and I salute him. We have got ourselves into a pretty pass in our support for Israel since October 7th. We none of us forget the horror of that day and only the hardest of hearts could wish for anything but the speediest release of those poor hostages remaining alive in the hell-hole which is Gaza. But October 7th, no matter how bad, could never serve as justification for what has followed. If it could then we are truly doomed, every man jack of us.

It's time for Israel to stop. It's time for our governments to stop. It's time for them to listen to their people - the people to whom they answer and not the other way around as they would have us believe. The man on YouTube implored that each of us, every one, to step up now, in the moment of Gazan greatest need, and in some way, whatever manner, however small, cast a pebble into the pool of resistance against what is being done in our names. Together, cumulatively, he said, the ripples caused thereby will gather into a great wave that even our smug and complacent leadership will not be able to ignore.

(Gaza:Doctors Under Attack is available to watch both on the Channel 4 online app and on YouTube itself (in its entirety). Go watch.)

[peter]

Only those who have been living under a rock can have been suprised at the Financial Times revelation that the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) was balls deep in the notorious Donald Trump plan to relocate all the Palestinian population from Gaza and turn the place into a "riviera" and technology center in which both Trump and Elon Musk would have a large stake.

It's a bit complicated but it seems that the plan, put together by Israeli business people and US consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG), was certainly formulated in the presence of staff members of the TBI, even if they were not actively involved in its development. Two Institute members have been acknowledged as being present, "in an observational capacity," and while the TBI originally denied any involvement, when confronted with proof that their staff had been involved in WhatsApp group discussions on the subject, they admitted to this limited presence.

There has been suggestions that they were involved in the preparation of a 'slide-deck' presentation of the idea, an accusation they deny, as indeed do BCG, who embarrassingly also have some connection to the now notorious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, about which we have been hearing so much.

"Richer than Croesus," as George Galloway so nicely put it, Tony Blair has long had his bloody hands immersed in the history of the Middle East. His Institute is only the means via which he has retained power and influence in the region since his disastrous intervention in Iraq with 'Dubbya'. That one left over a million people dead and led to the formation of Isis, the notorious killing machine whose second head poncho the British government of today is so inclined to favour as a man they can do business with. As an aside, diplomatic relations with Syria under the said Isis man's premiership have just now been announced.

Needless to say the TBI is horrified by any suggestion that it was involved in any way with a plan that would have seen Gazans by the truckload shipped out, who knows where, so that the Trump dream could be realised. "Nothing to see here," they say, whistling away in innocent fashion while surreptitiously pointing there finger at BCG from under their jacket. BCG for its part, suddenly seems to know very little of what its own staff are up to. Some clowns have taken the fall, accused of being rogue operators as it were, and naturally we believe the Group's assertion that this was the case.

Why is it, I ask myself, that things in this Gazan situation just get worse and worse all of the time. While slaughter proceeds on a daily basis with such boring regularity that it is no longer even being reported (there is not one mention of Gaza on the BBC News website 'front page' this morning and I have little doubt that the printed media will prove the same), the disgusting perfidy of the power players at the top of our polities, our establishments, just gets ever deeper by the day. While a genocide in in progress, the very man who was in at the start of the Middle East's modern problems is found grubbing around in the planning stages of developments as to how to deploy the assets of the murdered people into churning out wealth for the grabbing. It's as predictable as it is sickening. Instead of a prison cell in the Hague, as Galloway put it, he's in offices pouring over spreadsheets outlining yet more despicable plans.

What on earth can have possessed him, I asked myself on reading the story; surely he must have known how toxic this plan was. With all of the history already attached to his actions in Iraq and elsewhere, what in God's good name would have stopped him from running a mile when he heard the words "Trump Riviera in Gaza" first spoken? Surely he must have been aware of what his staff at the TBI were up to?

But then I realised. He's already so tarnished, so mired in responsibility in the eyes of the world, that he no longer cares. He's got nothing to loose. All that matters is being there, involved in how the cake is sliced up. They'll still hold open the doors on the limousine when he turns up to bank the mullah. What's a little more opprobrium heaped on top of that already associated with his name. And if he's already rationalised all the responsibility he already carries for the million deaths in Iraq (and all the evidence is that he has - those deaths trouble him not one jot) then it'll be small problem to turn a blind eye to what has happened to the people of Gaza once they're gone. After all, they are doomed, irrespective of what he does. And someone's going to reap the rewards so he might as well be in on the action as anyone else.

Because only a person with the nievity of a four year old could believe that the Israeli businessmen/BCG plan for the Trump Riviera, the Elon Musk Technology Park, has any place in those plans for the current inhabitants of Gaza in them. And Blair is certainly not nieve. No-one could ever accuse him of being that!

And so, as evey day passes, I'm left with an ever deeper pit of disgust for what our world, our Western world with its touted high moral compass, its ingrained superiority over every other culture and system on this planet, considers to be the example it should set to the rest of the world. That people who should rightly be in the Hague are instead plotting the means of securing their next few million, while the corpses of those upon whose backs those millions will be made are still warm in the mass graves in which they have been buried. This is our world. We made it, and now we think that it should be exported to those of the world who follow different pathways, whether they like it or not. Dear God let them see with absolute clarity and understanding, the moral vacuum that exists at the heart of our system and resist the imposition of it upon themselves with all their might.