At this point, Washington’s defense of Israel becomes as baldly obscene as the apartheid state’s long record of lawless aggression toward the Palestinian population.
Man with body bags in Jabalia, Gaza Strip, Oct. 9. (Bashar Taleb, Palestinian News & Information Agency, or Wafa, in contract with APAimages, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
There have been many, very many singular moments among America’s purported leaders and assorted officials and commentators since Hamas staged its daring assault on southern Israel on the morning of Oct. 7. Let us consider a few of these moments and draw some conclusions.
Let us look closely at what is being said and what the American public is now urged to think and accept as Israeli forces prosecute a campaign against Gaza’s 2.1 million people so extreme as to suggest ethnic cleansing is, as many have long argued, the ultimate Israeli project.
“Well, there have been some members of Congress who have called for a ceasefire, and they have not gone as far as backing the administration’s call for support for Israel.” This was a reporter’s observation at a press conference last week that featured President Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean–Pierre, and Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser.
Jean–Pierre’s response merits careful parsing for the large implications we find in it. In my read it reflects Washington’s increasing desperation as Israel’s conduct toward Palestinians tips into a savagery no rational human being can defend.
“So, look, I’ve seen some of those statements this weekend. And we’re going to continue to be very clear,” Jean–Pierre replied. “We believe they are wrong, we believe they’re repugnant, and we believe they’re disgraceful.”
Let’s not miss what transpired in those few seconds. To call for a ceasefire as the Israeli Defense Forces level an entire city and turn a million human beings into refugees — murdering many children and noncombatants in the process — is humane by any serious definition. To describe such a call as wrong, repugnant, and disgraceful is to assert that what is ordinarily decent must now be cast aside as indecent.
At this point, Washington’s defense of Israel becomes as baldly obscene as the apartheid state’s long record of lawless aggression toward the Palestinian population.
‘Not Two Sides’
Jean-Pierre in February. (White House, Hannah Foslien)
Pressing on in a tone that is combative and unmistakably defensive all at once, Jean–Pierre added, “Our — our condemnation belongs squarely with terrorists who have brutally murdered, raped, kidnapped hundreds — hundreds of Israelis. There can be no equivocation about that. There are not two sides here. There are not two sides.”
Not two sides, asserted twice. This, too, has implications we must consider.
Later at the same presser, another White House correspondent asked Jake Sullivan, “Is the goal the destruction of Hamas? … What is — where do you draw the line? Is there a red line of where do you draw that line of what you need to accomplish?”
Good questions, if inarticulately posed. To which Sullivan replied, “I’m not here to — to draw red lines or issue warnings or give lectures to anybody.”
Sullivan during a White House discussion of the conflict in Israel and Gaza, Oct. 9. (White House, Adam Schultz)
Translation: No, we, the one nation with the power and influence to stop the most nakedly racist case of violence in the IDF’s long history of such aggression, will do nothing to prevent it.
Let us continue.
Last Friday Akbar Shahid Ahmed, the foreign affairs correspondent at HuffPost, reported on an internal State Department memorandum advising diplomats and other officials to refrain from any suggestion that Israel moderate its bombing campaign or its planned ground invasion into Gaza.
“In messages circulated on Friday, State Department staff wrote that high-level officials do not want press materials to include three specific phrases: ‘de-escalation/ceasefire,’ ‘end to violence/bloodshed’ and ‘restoring calm,’” Ahmed wrote. “The revelation provides a stunning signal about the Biden administration’s reluctance to push for Israeli restraint…”
I would have liked an extended quotation of the memo’s text, but I am not the least bit doubtful that State circulated the instructions Ahmed described. By last Friday Antony Blinken, the Biden regime’s spineless secretary of state, had deleted messages calling for restraint that he had earlier posted on his X account.
Biden followed by Blinken, about to address the attacks in Israel, Oct. 7. (White House, Oliver Contreras)
A headline atop an editorial in Saturday’s New York Times — signed, significantly, by the Editorial Board: “Israel Can Defend Itself and Uphold Its Values.” Under it, this assertion: “What Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law.”
In an interview with The New York Post Sunday, Chuck Schumer, the U.S. Senate majority leader, denounced U.S. demonstrators calling for Israel to stop its indiscriminate military campaign against Gazans and said Israelis must get “everything they need” — the objective being “to totally eliminate Hamas.”
“Totally eliminate.” Does the phrase summon any echoes in history?
On the halfway-humorous side, Lydia Polgreen, a Times columnist, published a piece last Friday under the headline, “Now Is the Moment for Biden’s Age to Be an Asset.”
And in the same line, Douglas Emhoff addressed Jewish leaders at the White House last Wednesday. With the incoherent president by his side, Emhoff reassured them, “I know you’re all hurting…. But thank God we have the steady leadership of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris during this unthinkable time in our history. Their moral compass, their calm and empathy are what we need in this time of crisis.”
Emhoff, just a brief aside, is the vice-president’s spouse.
U.S. Vice President Harris and Second Gentleman Emhoff disembarking at Denver International Airport in March. (White House, Lawrence Jackson)
On Monday evening the White House announced that Biden will travel to Israel Wednesday — not at his initiative but in response to a telephone call from Bibi Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Biden’s purpose, as the Times described it in Tuesday’s editions, is “to bolster the country’s resolve to eradicate Hamas.”
In other words, to endorse a military campaign against Gaza that grows more obscene by the day.
A bottomless inventory of this stuff, these preposterous declamations, this bloviating, this full-frontal approval of criminal aggression, has accumulated since the Hamas incursion into Israel on Oct. 7. Let’s be clear about the intent of this extraordinary onslaught.
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This is the most powerful campaign to manufacture consent in behalf of apartheid Israel in my lifetime, and that almost certainly includes yours. We need to ask why this is so.
[Related: Atrocity Propaganda]
True, the perception-management blitz that assaults us daily is easily mistaken as nothing more than what we have had — routinely over many decades — from official Washington and the hack reporters and columnists regurgitating the orthodoxies. A criminal regime is dressed up as the democracy of the Middle East, Palestinians act violently without cause or provocation, the Israeli state is rightfully defending itself and its citizens — innocent citizens, of course.
History Is Erased
Jaramana Refugee Camp in Damascus, Syria, established after the Palestinian Catastrophe, or Nakba, 1948. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
Above all, far above all, events are completely stripped of history. Never is there any mention, when events such as the Hamas assault occur, of all the savagery to which Palestinians have been subjected since al–Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948.
[Related: Israel’s Official Ethnic Cleansing Program]
All the land-thefts, village bulldozings, olive-grove burnings, the arrests and tortures, the murders of children, and on and on: All this is airbrushed out of the picture. It is the most powerful of erasures, for what remains, as Karine Jean–Pierre so well put it, is only one side. All context is made invisible. History is erased.
[Related: Human Rights Watch: Israel Guilty of Apartheid]
In the present case, we must recognize that the Hamas militias’ murders of noncombatant Israelis in the 20 towns and villages it assaulted on Oct. 7 cannot be excused or condoned. Those killings, by officials counts at least 1,300, were wrong no matter which way one turns the case.
But neither can we accept official assertions that Hamas acted without provocation. Washington officials and the corporate media, which we must count official but for the ownership structure, remain silent in unison about the events that preceded the Oct. 7 assault.
We read nothing of the scores of right-wing settlers, a freak-show of racist fanatics, who stormed al–Aqsa just prior to the Hamas intervention — an obvious and by the evidence intentional provocation. In its own way this news blackout, too, is wrong.
Dozens of Israeli settlers forced their way into the flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in occupied East Jerusalem to mark the fifth day of Sukkot https://t.co/1Zw2GTgTMt pic.twitter.com/UhfYUxgRYt
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 4, 2023
Is what we get from the propaganda mills this time routine, more of the same? I do not think so. My reasoning begins with events that occurred two years ago. In May 2021, readers will surely recall, Israeli police attempted to restrict Palestinians’ access to al–Aqsa and the associated Dome of the Rock — this during Ramadan no less.
“Then came Hamas’ retaliatory rockets fired into Jerusalem from Gaza after an ultimatum it issued to retreat from al–Aqsa was ignored,” I wrote in this space at the time. “And now we watch Israel’s fourth attack on Gaza in the past dozen years. And now we read in our corporate press of Israeli–Arab ‘clashes’ and of Israel’s ‘right to self-defense.’”
Hamas rocket attack from Gaza into Israel, Oct. 7. (Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Something happened amid those events, it seemed to me then and seems to me now. The deranged, at this point psychotic violence of the Israeli state — and many of its citizens — was too obvious to deny. The apologetics would return like an incoming tide, but neither official Washington nor corporate media was able to avoid some bold admissions of responsibility. The mainstream press even made occasional mention of history.
There was a crack in the wall whose bricks were made long ago of denial and lies and erasures, this is to say. It suggested very strongly a turn in world opinion.
I recall these thoughts as I listen to Karine Jean–Pierre, Jake Sullivan, and the editorial writers at The New York Times. Their defenses of Israel and denials of the past have grown so ridiculously hollow that we are effectively invited not to believe what is right before our eyes.
We are urged to think the decent is indecent, this is to say — and by the same token that the indecent is decent.
Refusing to face reality, the propagandists and liars are left with but one alternative: to insist ever more loudly and aggressively and in ever shriller tones that the obviously false is true. And a certain desperation, to me pronounced, necessarily creeps into the official narrative when it seeks to pervert our perceptions so fundamentally.
It cannot hold and is not. From all I hear and read in various comment threads, some attached to the work of apologists at The New York Times and elsewhere, the façade of Israeli righteousness, the “self-defense” dodge, the subtraction of history — all this is weakening. Unmistakably, I would say.
To turn this matter another way, Washington’s neoconservative cliques cannot indefinitely defend and prolong a foreign policy that is failing this spectacularly.
In all the short, faux-confident sentences — “There are not two sides here,” etc . — I urge you, readers, to hear anxiety and apprehension. You can claim the sky is not blue and it does not get dark at night only so long before no one listens and opinion turns decisively against you.
I had an interesting conversation over the weekend with Christian Müller, a prominent Swiss journalist for many years and now the publisher and editor of GlobalBridge.ch, a German-language current-affairs publication. Is this the moment, we wondered together, when the international defense of Israel crumbles and the apartheid state stands effectively alone, the U.S. its only defender?
It is our question, and there are signs of it. I mentioned comment threads here and there. There are also the Europeans, whose enthusiasm for the Israeli project shows serious signs of weakening. Over the weekend Gideon Rachman, a Financial Times columnist and long a reliable friend of Israel, quoted European diplomats saying ruefully — and of necessity anonymously — “We may be about to see a massive ethnic cleansing.”
Such remarks are not those of sanguine allies of a regime that is obviously out of control.
I answer my friend Christian with a qualified negative. No, public opinion and the support Israel has long enjoyed among the Western powers is not on the brink of tipping over. The Hamas incursion into Israel and the Israeli response will not prove decisive in this way.
But if we think in terms of a gradual evolution toward justice, the winds blow unmistakably in the right direction. They have gathered force gradually for some years now. The horrific events of 2021 were pivotal, we can see, but they were not the decisive turning point some of us thought we saw at the time.
It is the same now. The offensive pretense of Israeli innocence has never been more thoroughly exposed as fraudulent, never more obviously a matter of moral irresponsibility. It will nonetheless require more time before the lights go on and the great, grotesque game of charades we call “democratic Israel’s self-defense” is over.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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This is not a war; it is an ongoing genocide.
I’m the first person to criticize the Biden Administration for the lack f a moral compass, which presumably reflects the heat of the American people today. But if Biden has any pragmatists, he knows this could be the demise of Israel. It has never survived a s country more than 75 years in the past and it may be that its time is up for it to self-destruct again. I sense that Biden is trying to clam down the Israelis with his actions and these edicts from State are meant to show that the US is fully committed to its friend. In this case, hopefully, friends don’t allow friends to drive drunk (on hate). That said, this has got to be a setback to any plan to contain China. The Administration is failing on all fronts and didn’t need this mess at this time. But 75 years of looking the other way while atrocities are committed with US dollars and protection have a way of creating blowback.
In 2018 Palestinians in Gaza peacefully demonstrated and walked to the barrier. All were unarmed. Many were simply shot down by the Zionists. Perhaps they should do that again and again until they are all dead. Then our very safe western analysts will approve them, when they are all dead as a result of a peaceful protest, since they very vocally do not approve of a violent protest. Were the slaves of the Haitian revolt vilified as are the people of Hamas? Most analysts of the west begin their comments on the present catastrophe with a strong vilification of Hamas.
I completely agree with Norman Finkelstein about the present horror. He said he ‘neither approves nor disapproves’ what Hamas has done. He added that he does not know what he would have done were he one of the prisoners of Gaza. Neither do I. But these western analysts who insist on prefacing every report or commentary with a strong condemnation of Hamas apparently do.
The Gleiwitz incident was a false flag attack on the radio station Sender Gleiwitz in Gleiwitz staged by Nazi Germany on the night of 31 August 1939. Along with some two dozen similar incidents, the attack was manufactured by Germany as a casus belli to justify the invasion of Poland
I’m not disregarding or neglecting the political and sociological arguments about why the US favors Israel over Palestine. But there is a huge military component here. Israel is a stockpile for US military weapons (including nukes) and a launch pad for military incursions, should control of the fiat dollar (oil exchange) be threatened. This represents the trappings of “empire.” It is not a good foreign, economic, or military policy. Way long ago in US history, coupled with post-WW2 British fanaticism, the “elites” and economists promised the virtues of fiat currency, which I won’t recount here. But we have come to find that these empty promises carry a huge burden: non-ending wars, support for apartheid regimes, huge expenditures on the military-industrial complex, and problems at home in America as the lust for empire turns us outward while neglecting our own issues. It is a bad way to exit the stage, but the elites who are connected to internationalism and globalism (not trade, but global control) are selling the American republic down the river. This will not end well.
‘Neglecting our own issues’ here in the US I consider a gross understatement. There is absolutely no thought, no attention not even a brief glance given to the myriad problems that we who pay for this ‘glorious empire’ suffer. Ah, but our lackeys in Congress are now addressing what to them is a grave domestic problem: social security, medicare, medicaid. These ‘gifts’, say our heroes, are the cause of the terrific unsustainable debt that empire is suffering. They must go, or be cut drastically.
In 1983 social security was cut 13%. What will they do this time?
Netanyahu has repeatedly, emphatically asserted that all of Palestine belongs exclusively to Israel. His basis for this claim is that God allegedly gave that land to the Jews approximately 3000 years ago. In the same ancient story God instructed the Jews to slaughter the inhabitants (Deut. 20:16), which Israel has been doing since being established since 1948.
This justification for Israel’s blatant ethnic “cleansing” of Palestinians is insane. It should carry no weight whatsoever. Jews have sued to recover property stolen from their families in WWII. By that standard, Palestinians should recover all property stolen from their families even later than WWII.
It seems to me the blanket support by US politicians for Zionist insanity is most easily explained by bottomless corruption, cowardice, and a complete absence of integrity. I would condemn this more strongly if I could think of a way.
Don’t forget all that oil in that area that empire lusts to continue controlling.
It’s a stretch to imagine that this project was decent from the beginning. Some have supported it for humane reasons, but that is a different matter.
This is not because of anything wrong with the Jewish people who moved into stolen Palestinian land after WWII. They were in no position to “look a gift horse in the mouth.” But the levels of hypocrisy in “solving ” the “Jewish question” by tearing land away from Palestine are many and tragic. Roosevelt had turned Jewish refugees away from the States earlier, when accepting them might have really saved them from Hitler’s Reich. Had the States been willing to grant a similar amount of land to the fleeing Jews, they would have been willing to come here. It would have been stolen land as well, but at least it need not have been invitation to commit a fresh genocide. Granting them land already resided on by a third party a bit like putting slaves to fight for barrels of salt pork.
No, these are more fruits of racism, gone sour because they have been sour. Now there are generations of Jewish children who have known no other home than what had been owned by Palestine, and an Israeli government anxious to press its particular version of a “final solution.”
What Hamas did to Israel was immoral and unproductive. However, what options did they have to stop the constant brutality and murders by Israeli police and military? Appeal to the UN? As for the intercession of the USA? Plead for EU help, or Saudi, or… At some point, you realize that there will be no guys in white hats coming to the rescue, and you just react.
This extreme Pro Israel support by the USA will cause more anti-semitism. Is this the result Hamas wanted? Will we soon be at war with Iran? …another war for our military to lose.
An interesting historical parallel can be read here:
hxxps:/www.resilience.org/stories/2012-11-21/in-the-twilight-of-empires/
It jars seeing POC in the service of empire, shilling for white supremacist regimes, forgetting that they were once and often still are victims of the same. The likesof this repulsive spokesperson and the former civil rights hero
turned tame Dem politician Jim Clyburn who was the dupe to swing Bidens primary campaign, demonstrate the seduction of power of over history and principle.
I would like to remind the reader that Israel created Hamas in the first place as a counterbalance to the secular Fatah that was not cooperating with Israel. I am put in mind of a quotation from the old testament, Hosea if memory serves, sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
Everybody says that Israel has the right of self defense. Indeed it does. But not from a captive population that it has trapped and that it is mistreating in clear violation of the laws of war and international law.
I also think we need to have a discussion about when provocation becomes excessive. The Israelis have done exactly what the Palestinians did in times past and the world yawned and said, next.
And, of course, the US vetoed the Brazilian proposal for a cease fire. It would be a remarkably good idea to listen to Roger Waters.
Patrick Lawrence you are the first to bravely call
resistance to Israeli barbarism by Hamas a
“daring assault.” Neither is it a war or a
conflict as the two sides are far from equal in power.
It is a genocidal assault and maybe truth in journalism
will set us free. Apologies to (John:8:32).
Thank you for this. Most ‘progressive’ western analysts never tire of vilifying Hamas. As though there is not a tremendous power differential.
In all the earlier attacks this century on Gaza, Israel , as now, pretends it is just against Hamas. The figures for killed Israelis in this unexpected attack by Hamas are given as 1300 or 1400, but no mention of how many are soldiers, and surely “settlers” cannot be considered innocent civilians. 1500 Hamas fighters are admitted killed by Israel. I cannot really accept that this is not “punishment of Hamas” enough instead of promising, and getting started, on killing 2.2 million Palestinians of all ages and both sexes living in inescapable conditions in Gaza.
A great article as usual by this author. I like the hopeful tone as well, despite the acknowledged current disgusting reality. As is said, things that can’t go on forever, don’t. And despite Biden’s ludicrous announcements of permanence of both the US and its special regard for the apartheid state, change comes for us all. Who knows, at some point the US may revert back to following the advice of its original president GW:
“Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all.” …
“In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation, which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”
I read the NYT daily via the Montgomery County VA libraries. I also make many comments about that paper’s constant excuse making for Israel. I do think that is the case due to the demographics reading it. Losing them would decrease readership and then their advertising revenues.
Wars are always about money in the end, despite all the noble pieties.
Meryl Nass republished an excellent post about the MONIED INTERESTS involved in Israel’s current situation.
OK, yes the lies are obviously Orwellian and uncomfortable even for the militarized media. But I don’t see how the wind is blowing in the right direction, unless you mean far right. There is no evidence that popular opinion matters to those with the bombs, and the media is at best resigned to more of the same, not opposed to it. The militarism, the police state crackdown, the censorship, the deep state media and the use of fossil fuels are all growing.
I wish I was seeing a larger scale of resistance. Maybe I am misreading the evidence. As to the Hamas actions being wrong, yes if you believe there is some non-violent moral way to achieve a release from the genocidal path which defines the Zionist project. But where has that path been demonstrated? And what nation or people on this planet practice or believe in nonviolence? Even the majority of theoretically nonviolent Quakers I know vote for war-loving democrats. I do not see the moral difference between the Hamas attack and the Warsaw ghetto uprising against the fascists. An uprising not about succeeding but the dignity of refusing to go down without a fight. Was it worth it? No, it was one aspect of human nature, fight or flight produced by 70 years of genocide by a people traumatized by their own genocidal victimization.
“Israel Can Defend Itself and Uphold Its Values.”
“What Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law.”
Right! They are slaughtering Palestinians because they value human life.
Typical NYT bullshit.
But, as the Nazis said about JEWS and SLAVS, the Palestinians are not humans, they are subhumans.
Bullshit has been called, by Mr. Knight! Appropriately so!
Pure, unadulterated B.S.! Zionist have poisoned minds.
“No, public opinion and the support Israel has long enjoyed among the Western powers is not on the brink of tipping over. The Hamas incursion into Israel and the Israeli response will not prove decisive in this way. ”
Absolutely correct.
But if people learn anything it is a small sign that we MIGHT NOT believe the lies.
Thanks Patrick, let’s hope the charade is nearing its end. The Biden administration is more ossified and detached than any administration of my lifetime (and I was around when “We Like Ike” buttons were a thing). Let’s hope their incompetence leads to an awakening of the public that has so far eluded us.
I hope so, too. This goes beyond anything. I’ve been around as long as you have and it is excruciating to hear what the Biden government (and let’s face it, the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, the Obama administration, the Trump administration are included here) is doing and trying to cover up.
The Democrats have disappointed me ever since Clinton. He came in and fanatically accelerated Ronald Reagan’s horrible policies and set the stage for the bipartisan forever wars by using NATO to bomb Yugoslavia. It has been downhill ever since. The Democrats have truly become the more effective evil and there is nowhere to turn to since the Republicans are just plain nuts.
Here Here! Here’s to fundamental decency!!!!And me too – My parents took me downtown outside the New Brunswick courthouse to see presidential candidate Ike speak to the citizenry.
Collective punishment in warfare is an international war crime for a reason; it borders on and often crosses the line into genocide.
We have seen the US under Obama, continuing ever since, pushing the genocide in Yemen , so as to sell more weapons to the Saudis. We have seen VP, Ukraine Viceroy, and now President Biden pushing the UkroNAZI eradication of Russian language, Russian culture and genocide of ethnic Russian Ukrainians, over the objections of the Ukrainian people who voted over 70% for a “Peace with Russia” campaign platform. After 8 years of bombing the Donbas and killing over 14,000 Ukrainians in the civil war, the West declared Putin’s SMO response “unprovoked”. Now after 70 years of horrific mistreatment of Israel’s occupied Palestinians, including many atrocities similar to what we saw in the reprehensible “unproved” Hamas attack, possibly expected and used for Public Relations by the US and their NATO poodles as well as the Israeli Zionists, we see more indiscriminate genocide of Palestinians. (Look up the UN reports on the one-sided casualties in the conflict over the years, particularly in numbers of children).
As an American, I don’t appreciate MY Secretary of State arriving in Israel and proudly proclaiming his actions as a Jew. If anything, such “dual citizen” Americans (who can always skip out of the US, welcome in Israel) should recuse themselves from the matter entirely. Of course Nuland is also Jewish, and not sure how far down the State chain of command goes before we would ever get any unbiased America-first diplomats. From the selective outrage of OUR UniParty politicians, it’s unlikely to find many in DC who would put US interests above Israel’s.
Maybe Assange should convert to Judaism?
The ongoing Al-Aqsa lunatic settler incursions began in April, 2021, not May.
“In the present case, we must recognize that the Hamas militias’ murders of noncombatant Israelis in the 20 towns and villages it assaulted on Oct. 7 cannot be excused or condoned.”
Hamas, et al, also attacked military installations, legitimate targets. Why is the author failing to mention this?
Serving IDF, because they were asleep and in their pajamas turn out to be “innocent civilians”? Reservists as well?
Somebody would have to make a fairly convincing argument for that.
Everybody ought to read this. You will not see it in the NYT or WAPO, etc:
hXXps://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-forces-shot-their-own-civilians-kibbutz-survivor-says/38861
How much does Jake Sullivan get paid to wear a Columbia Sportswear jacket?
Is this the new look? Dress shirt and tie plus corporate logo?
He looks like a cartoonish whore.