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US talks the talk, but the IDF won't listen and actually says the US stands behind whatever they want to do
Israel’s national security adviser Tzachi Hangebi said the US has not told Israel any deadline to complete military operations against Hamas in Gaza.
“They understand that they are not in a position to tell the IDF how long it needs in order to achieve the goals. The good thing is that they share the same goals. … It is correct to assume that we cannot measure this in weeks, and I’m not certain that it could be measured in months,” Hangebi said.
CNN has previously reported that US officials expect Israel's operation targeting the southern end of the strip to last several weeks before it transitions, possibly by January, to a lower-intensity, hyper-localized strategy that narrowly targets specific Hamas militants and leaders, according to multiple senior administration officials. The White House is deeply concerned about how Israel’s operations will unfold over the next several weeks, a senior US administration official said. The US has warned Israel firmly in “hard” and “direct” conversations, the official said, that the Israeli Defense Forces cannot replicate the kind of devastating tactics it used in the north and must do more to limit civilian casualties.
Hard and direct conversations have done and will do nothing. The devastating tactics in the South are the same.
University of Pennsylvania president resigns after congressional testimony
The resignation comes amid backlash after Elizabeth Magill was one of three university presidents to testify at a congressional hearing over protests at US campuses related to the war in Gaza.
Critics have said Magill evaded questions on whether students who call for the genocide of Jews should be disciplined. Magill’s defenders, and Magill herself, have said her response sought to carefully unpack a complex legal and policy question that pits students’ freedom from discrimination against their freedom of speech.
Following the testimony, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression warned that changing the university’s free speech policies would lead to future weaponisation and censorship.
Calls for universities to silence pro-Palestinian protesters have highlighted outside pressure at top US universities that critics say have stifled freedom of expression.
The US is more interested in a war on words than on the conflict itself
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/us/university-of-pennsylvania-president-resigns.html
During her testimony before Congress on Tuesday, Ms. Magill gave lawyerly responses to a complicated question involving speech. Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, said that students had chanted support for intifada, an Arabic word that means uprising and that many Jews hear as a call for violence against them.
After parrying back and forth, Ms. Stefanik asked, “Calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?”
Ms. Magill replied, “If it is directed and severe, pervasive, it is harassment.”
Ms. Stefanik responded, “So the answer is yes.”
Ms. Magill said, “It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman.”
Ms. Stefanik exclaimed: “That’s your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context?”
Two other university presidents — Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T. — testified with Ms. Magill and made similar statements. Free-speech scholars said that they were legally correct.
But Ms. Magill’s remarks failed to meet a moment of moral clarity for many of the university’s Jewish students, faculty and alumni, and set off a wave of criticism that included the state’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, and its two Democratic U.S. senators, John Fetterman and Bob Casey. Even the White House weighed in.
Ms. Magill apologized Wednesday evening for her testimony.
“In that moment, I was focused on our university’s longstanding policies aligned with the U.S. Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable,” she said in a video. “I was not focused on, but I should have been, the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate. It’s evil — plain and simple.”
She added, “In my view, it would be harassment or intimidation.”
In a response to her apology, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a campus free speech group, said in a statement that it would be a mistake for Penn to revise its speech policies in response to the congressional hearing.’
Ms. Magill had already been embattled for months, before the Oct. 7 attacks.
In the summer, donors asked her to cancel a planned Palestinian literary conference on campus. Ms. Magill, citing free speech, said that it would go on as planned in September.
First casualty of the recently passed resolution
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/12/05/house-passes-resolution-declaring-anti-zionism-a-form-of-antisemitism-some-democrats-are-critical/?sh=3123027f1e74
Note the jump from using the word Intifada (Intifada is an Arabic word that literally means “shaking off”, and in the Palestinian context, it is understood to mean a civil uprising) to turning that world into a call for the genocide of Jews.
Same as the meaning of "from the river to the sea" has been twisted.
'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free'—the translation of min an-nahr 'ilā l-baḥr / Filasṭīn satatḥarrar—is the version that has circulated among English speakers expressing solidarity with Palestine since at least the 1990s.
The phrase was popularised in the 1960s as part of a wider call for Palestinian liberation creating a democratic state freeing Palestinians from oppression from Israeli as well as from other Arab regimes such as Jordan and Egypt.
However look at the AJC (American Jewish Committee) interpretation
https://www.ajc.org/translatehate/From-the-River-to-the-Sea
“From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” is a rallying cry for terrorist groups and their sympathizers, from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to Hamas, which called for Israel’s destruction in its original governing charter in 1988 and was responsible for the October 7, 2023 terror attack on Israeli civilians, murdering over 1,200 people in the single deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. It is also a common call-to-arms for pro-Palestinian activists, especially student activists on college campuses. It calls for the establishment of a State of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, erasing the State of Israel and its people. Another phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” which uses the Arabic word for “uprising” or “shaking off,” also calls for widespread violence against both Israelis and Jews across the globe.
Thought control in progress, hijacking langue. Which goes on all the time in mainstream media, for example Palestinians die in the war while Israelis get killed.
During a conversation, John Collins, professor of global studies at St Lawrence University and director of the independent news outlet Weave News, reminded me, “Words construct reality for us. In wartime, the words used by journalists are supposed to help us clarify what is happening and why. But too often, those words serve to distract us, mislead us, or shield the powerful from accountability”.
This misleading happens at a very elemental level in the way Palestinian deaths are described in news stories. While Palestinians are said to have “died”, Israelis are “killed”. The latter formulation acknowledges an active act of killing by someone, but the former is passive. As if to say that no one is to blame for Palestinian deaths or suggest – as did Israeli military spokesperson Lt Col Richard Hecht following the attack on Jabalia refugee camp – that Palestinian deaths are simply an unavoidable “tragedy of war”.
Of course, the minimisation of the Palestinian death toll also happened when President Biden questioned the accuracy of numbers seeing as the Ministry of Health in Gaza is run by Hamas. He said, “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s a price of waging a war…But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” Such an allegation effectively planted a seed of doubt about the actual severity of Palestinian suffering, with several news outlets assessing and reporting on the way the Ministry of Health calculated casualties – this while international humanitarian agencies insisting the ministry’s numbers are indeed reliable.
How media outlets frame the “why”, “how” and “what’s next” of this ongoing war also shapes public opinion. As a scholar of disinformation and propaganda, Nicholas Rabb found that “misleading rhetoric and incessantly one-sided coverage” by the US and Israeli media has allowed for the “uncritical demonisation of Palestinians”.
This includes right-wing media outlets in the US fearmongering about a forthcoming “Global Day of Jihad” called by Hamas. A Homeland Security official said that there was no credible evidence of an imminent threat on US soil. Nonetheless, after listening to conservative talk radio and worried about the impending “Day of Jihad”, a 71-year-old man attacked his tenant, a Palestinian American woman, before stabbing her six-year-old son to death.
The war of journalism is a deadly one as well
Since the Gaza war broke out, at least 63 journalists have been killed, including 56 Palestinians, four Israelis, and three Lebanese nationals, according to the group. The war has also led to “the deadliest month for journalists” since CPJ began tracking data in 1992.
https://www.protect-journalists.com/
We are renewing the call for journalists to tell the full truth without fear or favor. To use precise terms that are well-defined by international human rights organizations, including “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” To recognize that contorting our words to hide evidence of war crimes or Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is journalistic malpractice and an abdication of moral clarity.
The urgency of this moment cannot be overstated. It is imperative that we change course.
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Writers of the letter are a group of U.S.-based reporters at both local and national newsrooms. Some members of the group were also involved in a 2021 open letter outlining concerns with U.S. media coverage of Palestine.
All signatures have been verified. About 600 current and former journalists signed the letter as of its publication on Nov. 9, 2023. About 600 more have signed since, bringing the total to about 1200. All numbers have been updated as of Nov. 13, 2023.
More than 30 journalists have since asked to have their signatures removed, fearing reprisal from their employers. Those employers include the Associated Press, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, McClatchy, the Chicago Tribune, LAist, the Modesto Bee, KCRW, and KQED.
