2024-06-21

Give Them an Inch and They Blog for Miles

Here's the pattern. The IDF commits some ludicrously atrocious war crime - there is near universal outrage, but apparently not enough to shift Biden in his support of the ongoing genocide. Israel pretends to have some sort of regret over the "mistake" - and then the IDF repeats the war crime over and over and over again.

The latest thing that follows the pattern is the Tent Massacre. A "mistake" where dozens of people were horrifically burned to death in their refugee tents - burned by a US-made and Biden supplied GBU-39. In the four days following the Tent Massacre, at least 66 more people were killed by Israel in "safe zones" in Gaza. The IDF is still bombing refugee tents in Rafah. The Tent Massacre was really just the first of a series.

And it is a pattern.  Remember the Flour Massacre on February 29? Well, it too was the start of a series. This is a list of incidents in March at the same roundabout.

The general progress of the genocidal rampage is yet another example. The incursion into Rafah was opposed by basically every country other than Israel. Even Biden said that Israel should not go into Rafah - although his racist asshole psychopaths noted that this was with the caveat of "without a credible plan to evacuate and protect civilians". Incidentally - this is just basic international humanitarian law - no military actions without a credible plan to protect civilians. And what happened? The IDF moved into Rafah without an evacuation plan - the US put their goalposts onto a moving truck and had to repack them multiple times after trying to set them up again. That moving truck is likely set on fire now - Rafah is essentially evacuated with who knows how many casualties that entailed - and the US still does not believe their red line was crossed.

Or - consider the Al-Ahli Hospital massacre way back on October 17. This was before the world picked up on the massive degree of dishonesty that Israel and the IDF is capable of. Israel pitched a story of a "misfiring PIJ rocket". Literally the exact same lie they used just over a year prior when they slaughtered five children. The Tent Massacre should have brought some more attention to Al Ahli - basically the same incident - a firestorm that killed many people sheltering in tents. The same sized explosion, the same primary cause of death, the same degree of physical damage to the surroundings. Al Ahli was almost certainly caused by an Israeli fired, US made, and Biden supplied GBU-39. But even if it wasn't - the fact that Israel was allowed to continue their military operation, not merely unabated but in ever escalating intensity - ensured that the Al-Ahli Hospital Explosion merely the first of a series. We all saw what happened afterwards - the IDF was gripped in a hospital destroying mania. Delusions of a "Hamas Pentagon" underneath Al Shifa turned up tons of planted evidence (live ammo and grenades stored behind an MRI machine), closed off tunnels they had to dig eight feet down to find, and a box of dates. And that was not the only hospital that the IDF sieged relentlessly. In fact, the IDF sieged all of Gaza's hospitals relentlessly.

It's not always thus. There have been things that have forced the IDF to actually change their behaviour. The WCK attack which killed seven aid workers in a humanitarian aid convoy - where Israel used drones to hunt these people down over the span of a mile and a half before murdering them. Not to say that the IDF has not engaged in a campaign targeting aid workers - they absolutely have. But six of the WCK victims were foreign nationals - and Israel seems not to have slaughtered many more foreign aid workers since then.

But otherwise - it is just a matter of doing the most outrageous thing possible and daring people to oppose them. And when that opposition is shown to be insufficient to slow down the slaughter, because people like Joe Biden do not believe Palestinian life has any value at all, that specific war crime becomes normal operating procedure.

Which brings us to the scary part. The last outrage was disguising IDF special forces as civilians in order to massacre 274 Palestinians and wound some 700 more in order to rescue 4 hostages. Is this the next standard operation for Israel? To be clear - they've committed this specific war crime before - there's video evidence of Israeli special forces raiding a hospital disguised as doctors and patients. But this latest incident was close to a thousand casualties. Also, the previous examples of the pattern all had historical precedents. Israel has long been obsessed with Gaza hospitals, they've bombed refugee camps many times before October 7 - even shooting aid seekers is not that much different than their actions throughout the Great March of Return. The pattern is having one extreme example of atrociously bad behaviour - and when that doesn't lead to actual repercussions, incorporating that bad behaviour into the military operations in a much bigger way.

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