imagine wishing for a terrorist attack in order so you can dunk on the sitting president and blame them for it.
Imagine thinking the shit-4-brain Presidents handling of the border has nothing to do why the border is a complete utter mess and concern for the tax paying element of society. But hey, we got Kamala on the job Yo…
the gop could have fixed the border issue last time they had control of the house, senate, and white house, but they didn't. rubio did not even support his own bill that he wrote, because ending the border issue would give the gop one less issue to run on. it is much more politically expedient for the gop to make it an issue and do nothing to fix it. case in point, all the trumpers on here howling about the border every other day. even the ones complaining that fentenyl is being seized at the border, because i guess we are supposed to just let it in, right?
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.- Hemingway
imagine wishing for a terrorist attack in order so you can dunk on the sitting president and blame them for it.
Imagine thinking the shit-4-brain Presidents handling of the border has nothing to do why the border is a complete utter mess and concern for the tax paying element of society. But hey, we got Kamala on the job Yo…
also, do not pretend that trump had a better idea. he built a few miles of fence and wall that is either a: falling down now, or b: easily passable.
but let's talk about kamala, who is by far a better presidential candidate than anything your side has to offer. she was senator and da of california, that is more than anybody on your side has done.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.- Hemingway
I wonder how many of our maga friends were convinced the car explosion in NY today was a terrorist attack due to the right wing ecosphere they get their info from?
Just read an article from CBC the Canadian government hasn't ruled out terrorism. I wish the news and government apparatus on our side was not always in a rush for a snap answer. For all we know this could have been a planned attack. I would wait for forensic evidence, background on the driver etc. before I made a conclusion. I'm not convinced one way or the other yet.
The driver was a 56 year old nearby resident of New York who was driving a $300,000 Bentley on his way home from a casino after the Kiss concert he originally wanted to see was cancelled. Fox spent all day scaring their viewers that it was an act of terrorism by someone who snuck into our country.
Not that article, the dateline on the one I read was a few hours before this one and didn't have any details about the driver or the car. And also stated that senior Canadian government officials hadn't yet ruled out terrorism. It was the first non us news article I could find once I read about this incident on this thread. Had I not been reading AMT I would have been blissfully unaware of any cars being engulfed in flames today.
So then you can certainly see the stark difference between how the CBC and mainstream media in the U.S handled it verses the right wing ecosphere. A few hours before this article was when Fox and their maga cohorts were in the middle of their fever dreams of an open border terrorist incident. That's the point.
Yes of course that is crystal clear. It's why I prefer the way that cbc or bbc presents the news in a fairly even handed manner and doesn't jump to conclusions right away one way or another. I agree that the Fox and right wing eco system is too extreme, I just question that US left leaning sources sometimes jump to be the opposite of that no matter what the cost.
But... they didn't didn't, though? They spent much of the day saying they don't know if it was terrorism or not until they had more information....just like the CBC did.
You said yourself you didn't know it even happened until seeing it posted here so it's odd that you complaining about coverage you did not even consume.
Your first post was that you wondered how many MAGAs or whatever thought this was terrorism due to the right wing ecosystem. I looked at an unbiased source at the time I read your comment where one of the western governments that police the border hadn't ruled out terrorism. To me it is not unreasonable that someone could think an explosion at a border crossing was terrorism or some type of coordinated attack. Once more facts were known obviously that was an unreasonable conclusion, but at the time that I read your post it was not yet ruled out.
Not being ruled out is not the same thing as blatantly telling people this was an act of terrorism and blaming Joe Biden's open border policy right?
Responsible media outlets in the United States spent the day telling viewers they did not know exactly what happened yet, while the right wing ecosphere, as demonstrated if you scroll up a few posts, was breathlessly telling their viewers and followers we were basically at war.
So, yeah, it seems very reasonable to wonder how many magas thought it was an act of terrorism based on the shady outlets of which they get their "news."
There’s probably a caravan of rifle toting patriots headed to the border as we speak 🤣🤣
I wonder how many of our maga friends were convinced the car explosion in NY today was a terrorist attack due to the right wing ecosphere they get their info from?
Just read an article from CBC the Canadian government hasn't ruled out terrorism. I wish the news and government apparatus on our side was not always in a rush for a snap answer. For all we know this could have been a planned attack. I would wait for forensic evidence, background on the driver etc. before I made a conclusion. I'm not convinced one way or the other yet.
The driver was a 56 year old nearby resident of New York who was driving a $300,000 Bentley on his way home from a casino after the Kiss concert he originally wanted to see was cancelled. Fox spent all day scaring their viewers that it was an act of terrorism by someone who snuck into our country.
Not that article, the dateline on the one I read was a few hours before this one and didn't have any details about the driver or the car. And also stated that senior Canadian government officials hadn't yet ruled out terrorism. It was the first non us news article I could find once I read about this incident on this thread. Had I not been reading AMT I would have been blissfully unaware of any cars being engulfed in flames today.
So then you can certainly see the stark difference between how the CBC and mainstream media in the U.S handled it verses the right wing ecosphere. A few hours before this article was when Fox and their maga cohorts were in the middle of their fever dreams of an open border terrorist incident. That's the point.
Yes of course that is crystal clear. It's why I prefer the way that cbc or bbc presents the news in a fairly even handed manner and doesn't jump to conclusions right away one way or another. I agree that the Fox and right wing eco system is too extreme, I just question that US left leaning sources sometimes jump to be the opposite of that no matter what the cost.
But... they didn't didn't, though? They spent much of the day saying they don't know if it was terrorism or not until they had more information....just like the CBC did.
You said yourself you didn't know it even happened until seeing it posted here so it's odd that you complaining about coverage you did not even consume.
Your first post was that you wondered how many MAGAs or whatever thought this was terrorism due to the right wing ecosystem. I looked at an unbiased source at the time I read your comment where one of the western governments that police the border hadn't ruled out terrorism. To me it is not unreasonable that someone could think an explosion at a border crossing was terrorism or some type of coordinated attack. Once more facts were known obviously that was an unreasonable conclusion, but at the time that I read your post it was not yet ruled out.
Not being ruled out is not the same thing as blatantly telling people this was an act of terrorism and blaming Joe Biden's open border policy right?
Responsible media outlets in the United States spent the day telling viewers they did not know exactly what happened yet, while the right wing ecosphere, as demonstrated if you scroll up a few posts, was breathlessly telling their viewers and followers we were basically at war.
So, yeah, it seems very reasonable to wonder how many magas thought it was an act of terrorism based on the shady outlets of which they get their "news."
There’s probably a caravan of rifle toting patriots headed to the border as we speak 🤣🤣
probably an illegal razor wire floating blockade in the river too. oh yeah wait...
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.- Hemingway
imagine wishing for a terrorist attack in order so you can dunk on the sitting president and blame them for it.
Imagine thinking the shit-4-brain Presidents handling of the border has nothing to do why the border is a complete utter mess and concern for the tax paying element of society. But hey, we got Kamala on the job Yo…
Imagine thinking that mush brains orange man can successfully run a country oh wait he did try and just about ruined it! Remember that tax break did it trickle down to you Linda or wait 763 thousand Americans died on his watch from all the misinformation he spoon fed folks like you about COVID being just an ordinary flu it was going away by Easter 😂😂 go ahead keep lapping up the orange juice it’s good for you bad bad for me
imagine wishing for a terrorist attack in order so you can dunk on the sitting president and blame them for it.
Imagine thinking the shit-4-brain Presidents handling of the border has nothing to do why the border is a complete utter mess and concern for the tax paying element of society. But hey, we got Kamala on the job Yo…
Imagine thinking that mush brains orange man can successfully run a country oh wait he did try and just about ruined it! Remember that tax break did it trickle down to you Linda or wait 763 thousand Americans died on his watch from all the misinformation he spoon fed folks like you about COVID being just an ordinary flu it was going away by Easter 😂😂 go ahead keep lapping up the orange juice it’s good for you bad bad for me
"we have 15 cases and these will be going down very quickly."
lmao dumbass
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.- Hemingway
imagine wishing for a terrorist attack in order so you can dunk on the sitting president and blame them for it.
Imagine thinking the shit-4-brain Presidents handling of the border has nothing to do why the border is a complete utter mess and concern for the tax paying element of society. But hey, we got Kamala on the job Yo…
also, do not pretend that trump had a better idea. he built a few miles of fence and wall that is either a: falling down now, or b: easily passable.
but let's talk about kamala, who is by far a better presidential candidate than anything your side has to offer. she was senator and da of california, that is more than anybody on your side has done.
You know better than to attempt to make sense to a QtRUmplican troll who has nothing to add except more parroting of conspiracy theories, dogwhistles,and lies created by the writers at murdoch inc.
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
Greetings from prison. Send macadamia nuts. And avocados, if you got ‘em.
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
Well go ahead defend the TFG with valid points about how great he was/is for the American people! Instead all you ever do is come here and talk about mush brains? Covid crap? You mean like it didn’t happen or it was just a regular flu season? I’ll be here waiting
imagine wishing for a terrorist attack in order so you can dunk on the sitting president and blame them for it.
Imagine thinking the shit-4-brain Presidents handling of the border has nothing to do why the border is a complete utter mess and concern for the tax paying element of society. But hey, we got Kamala on the job Yo…
the gop could have fixed the border issue last time they had control of the house, senate, and white house, but they didn't. rubio did not even support his own bill that he wrote, because ending the border issue would give the gop one less issue to run on. it is much more politically expedient for the gop to make it an issue and do nothing to fix it. case in point, all the trumpers on here howling about the border every other day. even the ones complaining that fentenyl is being seized at the border, because i guess we are supposed to just let it in, right?
Bahaha.
Ok Nancy P
"Those are YOUR facts, not THE facts" - Nancy P while in border meeting 2017
A simple search on the #s proves you so wrong. But I expect nothing less from the special 10 and their echo chamber AMT oops...I mean The View. What a cult your in you can't even know the truth. Or what was dementia joe saying, we beleive in the truth, not the facts.
Such entertainment the lib dims. Filthy mush brains
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The Juggler
Behind that bush over there. Posts: 47,535
edited November 2023
More about how the right wing ecosphere spreads disinformation to the brains of our maga friends, who do not seem to possess the ability to think rationally about things any longer.
From Niagara Falls to Texas to Gaza, a horrifying look into the abyss of a post-truth future
A N.Y. car crash falsely propagandized as "a terror attack" symbolized our increasingly Orwellian post-truth world.
In this photo taken from video provided by WKBW-TV, smoke billows from a checkpoint at the Rainbow Bridge, Wednesday in Niagara Falls, N.Y. A vehicle exploded at a checkpoint on the American side of a U.S.-Canada bridge in Niagara Falls Wednesday, leaving two people dead and prompting the closing of four border crossings in the area, authorities said.Read moreUncredited / AP
by Will Bunch | ColumnistPublished Nov. 26, 2023, 8:26 a.m. ET
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” — George Orwell, 1984
In the ever-shrinking world of a free and fair media, the recent weeks have brought an explosion of untruth and a stepped-up war on reality. With democracy increasingly staring into the abyss both at home and abroad, propaganda and censorship are the double-edged sword of rising dictatorship. And now with violent hacking coming from both sides of the blade, it is indeed an increasing struggle to cling to the dream of truth-flavored sanity.
Americans got a scary peek into what the rising confluence of right-wing authoritarianism and its quasi-state media could accomplish on the day before Thanksgiving. That’s when what turned out to be a tragic, fatal car crash at the wrong time in the wrong way at the wrong place — a bridge border crossing between the U.S. and Canada in Niagara Falls — became a launching pad for a Big Lie about immigration and terror that circled the globe several times before the mundane truth put its pants on.
Here’s what really happened on Wednesday: A 53-year-old couple from Erie County, N.Y. — Monica and Kurt Villani — were driving to a casino in Canada in a Bentley luxury car because of a canceled rock concert when something went terribly wrong. Approaching the Rainbow Bridge border post, the car was traveling 80 to 100 mph — perhaps due to a medical emergency, or a stuck accelerator — and struck a curb, sending the Bentley into the air before a fiery crash and explosion that killed both occupants.
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No one can fault the FBI or other agencies for investigating whether this was some type of terror attack, given the location of the accident at a key border crossing, the timing — perhaps the busiest travel day of the year — and the spectacular nature of the explosion. What’s inexcusable, however, was the rapid reporting of the most extreme speculation as fact, and the large number of supposedly responsible politicians willing to run with those untruths.
“What I’ve been told is that this was an attempted terrorist attack,” said Alexis McAdams, a correspondent for Fox News, the right-slanted network that despite a series of scandals and mishaps is still the most-watched cable news channel. Reporting just two and a half hours after the crash, McAdams added that her law enforcement sources believed that the motorists — in reality, remember, two middle-aged KISS fans — “have packed that car full of explosives.”
Thus, the “reputable” Fox News was adding the meat of confirmation to what a frothing right-wing echo chamber on social media was already proclaiming: The “blast” mean a network of terrorists is poised to enter America not only from the south but from the north, thus proving — in their minds — the inherent weakness of President Joe Biden’s border policies. And there was an army of political demagogues eager to run with a false meme.
“We need to lock down the borders immediately,” GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida posed on X/Twitter Wednesday. “Full deportation efforts need to begin. The U.S. does not need to be the world’s hospitality suite any longer.” Added another Florida Republican, Rep. Byron Donalds, in a now deleted tweet: “Open borders, soft-on-crime policies and bending a knee to the woke P.C. mob is an inevitable threat to our nation and its people. Today’s apparent terrorist attack must be a wake-up call to all Americans.”
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The website Meidas Touch published a list of more than 30 Republican officials or right-wing luminaries who tweeted similar sentiments and occasionally embellished their posts with new made-up details, like the discovery of an Iranian passport at the crash site. Some of these posts are still up, days after it became clear that the Niagara Falls crash was just a horrific tragedy and not the far-right’s fever dream of Islamic jihad to justify a repressive response. Others, including Fox News, have ripped yet another page from George Orwell’s 1984 — tossing their initial reporting down a memory hole.
Unfortunately, their mission had already been accomplished. For millions of U.S. web surfers and couch potatoes, the mental connection of Biden, the border and fiery chaos had already been implanted, and it will remain even as some of the erroneous tweets are deleted. And that sense that things are out of control in America is already being used to sell them on a rule-breaking strongman in the White House. That will be used in a Trump 47 presidency to actually carry out Luna’s howling at the moon, to deport so many migrants that America will need a gulag archipelago of camps to hold them.
The Niagara Falls panic didn’t happen in a vacuum, after all. It happened in the same week that Argentina elected a right-wing extremist president in Javier Milei, that the anti-immigration party of radical Geert Wilders won the most seats in the Netherlands parliament, that a fake rumor about the immigration status of a stabbing attacker sparked a destructive riot in Dublin — and that polls show Trump edging into the lead over Biden ahead of 2024′s election.
Elon Musk, owner of social media platform X, gestures during an event with Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London on Nov. 2, 2023.Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP
For these rising, right-wing authoritarians, a free press and its threat of factual public information rate high on their enemies list — as it’s been for strongmen and dictators for the last century. The alliance between Fox News, Elon’s Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) and right-wing blowhards shows how a strong propaganda regime has already been established — but what about the censorship side of the sword?
It’s coming.
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Also this past week, we saw a stunning partnership between an increasingly unhinged Musk, the world’s richest man, and a far-right attorney general, the disgraced-but-somehow-still-in-office Ken Paxton of Texas, in taking legal action aimed at undermining and perhaps destroying the left-wing media watchdog group, Media Matters for America. (Full disclosure: Over a decade ago, I had a brief fellowship with MMFA to support a book I was writing.)
Media Matters had run an explosive report about pro-Nazi hate speech published on X and ads for major corporations getting placed next to such content. Other X users confirmed the problem even as X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino claimed any instances were rare and unintentional. That didn’t stop Musk from threatening “a thermonuclear lawsuit” against MMFA or Paxton from announcing a state investigation of the group — chilling moves against a free press that could cost Media Matters hundreds of thousands of dollars just to defend its very existence.
The legally challenged Paxton won’t be a Trump 47 attorney general, but someone like him — like frothing right-wing lawyer Mike Davis, who recently told a podcast that “we’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo” — will get the job, which will surely include the task of siccing the Justice Department on journalists Trump has declared “enemies of the people.”
Civil Defense workers remove the body of Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah, who was killed by Israeli shelling, at Alma al-Shaab border village with Israel, in southern Lebanon, on Oct. 13. Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, a watchdog group advocating for press freedom, said that the strikes were targeted rather than accidental and that the journalists were clearly identified as press.Read moreHassan Ammar / AP
It’s teeing up a dystopian world in which journalists who do not obey the party’s propaganda line could face increasingly severe consequences — perhaps far worse than the ordeal currently facing Media Matters. Verbal abuse, lawsuits, and harassment is only where it starts. If you want to see where treating a free press as the enemy ends, look to Gaza. And not only because the communications minister in the right-wing government of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening sanctions against that nation’s most critical newspaper, Haaretz — although there is that.
They say that truth is often the first casualty of war but in southern Israel and Gaza the heartbreaking casualties have been the truth-tellers themselves, the journalists. After four Israeli journalists were brutally and unconscionably killed in the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack, Israel’s violent war of retaliations has not only caused the deaths of Palestinian men, women and children by the thousands, but has also killed journalists at a pace not seen in any conflict in decades.
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A stunning 53 Palestinian or Lebanese journalists have been killed since the war broke out, and the circumstances of at least several journalists and their family members obliterated by precision Israeli drone strikes on their homes or offices has done little to quiet suspicions that some media members are deliberately targeted. Indeed, last week the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders claimed the Reuters visuals journalist Issam Abdallah was deliberately attacked when he was killed in southern Lebanon on Oct. 13 by shells fired from Israeli territory. Wrote the group also known by its French initials RSF: “Two strikes in the same place in such a short space of time (just over 30 seconds), from the same direction, clearly indicate precise targeting.” Israel denies targeting journalists.
Major U.S. newsrooms have been mostly tepid in condemning these outrageous, violent, and attacks of little precedent on press freedom, to the extent that it’s mentioned at all. Ditto the Biden administration, which has made protecting democracy its core argument for a second term and yet seems to view the real-world implications of the First Amendment as an afterthought, if not a hindrance.
Indeed, one report suggested that Team Biden agrees with its odd-couple ally the Netanyahu government in wanting the public to know as little as possible about the extent of the destruction and killing in Gaza, Politico reported last week that a Biden administration fear, in negotiating a temporary cease-fire, was that it “would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.”
This kind of malarkey is what I find so alarming about our increasingly Orwellian present, and even dimmer future. It’s not just that the newest generation of chest-thumping strongmen are harnessing the electrons of the 21st century to hypercharge their modern Ministries of Untruth, but that the guardians of the actual truth — the newsroom grand poobahs, an American president who claims he ran to save democracy — are passively watching it slip from our hands.
After Niagara Falls, and Texas, and Gaza, it’s way past time for anyone to think that “it can’t happen here,” because it’s happening now. And the next 12 months may be our last chance to show that we are not going mad, that the people want the truth, and that we will stop fact-based journalism from sliding down Orwell’s memory hole for good.
imagine wishing for a terrorist attack in order so you can dunk on the sitting president and blame them for it.
Imagine thinking the shit-4-brain Presidents handling of the border has nothing to do why the border is a complete utter mess and concern for the tax paying element of society. But hey, we got Kamala on the job Yo…
the gop could have fixed the border issue last time they had control of the house, senate, and white house, but they didn't. rubio did not even support his own bill that he wrote, because ending the border issue would give the gop one less issue to run on. it is much more politically expedient for the gop to make it an issue and do nothing to fix it. case in point, all the trumpers on here howling about the border every other day. even the ones complaining that fentenyl is being seized at the border, because i guess we are supposed to just let it in, right?
Bahaha.
Ok Nancy P
"Those are YOUR facts, not THE facts" - Nancy P while in border meeting 2017
A simple search on the #s proves you so wrong. But I expect nothing less from the special 10 and their echo chamber AMT oops...I mean The View. What a cult your in you can't even know the truth. Or what was dementia joe saying, we beleive in the truth, not the facts.
Such entertainment the lib dims. Filthy mush brains
Ha you came back! How was your thanksgiving did you see how great of a welcome trumpollini received at the Clemson game it was glorious 😂😂
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
Greetings from prison. Send macadamia nuts. And avocados, if you got ‘em.
More about how the right wing ecosphere spreads disinformation to the brains of our maga friends, who do not seem to possess the ability to think rationally about things any longer.
From Niagara Falls to Texas to Gaza, a horrifying look into the abyss of a post-truth future
A N.Y. car crash falsely propagandized as "a terror attack" symbolized our increasingly Orwellian post-truth world.
In this photo taken from video provided by WKBW-TV, smoke billows from a checkpoint at the Rainbow Bridge, Wednesday in Niagara Falls, N.Y. A vehicle exploded at a checkpoint on the American side of a U.S.-Canada bridge in Niagara Falls Wednesday, leaving two people dead and prompting the closing of four border crossings in the area, authorities said.Read moreUncredited / AP
by Will Bunch | ColumnistPublished Nov. 26, 2023, 8:26 a.m. ET
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” — George Orwell, 1984
In the ever-shrinking world of a free and fair media, the recent weeks have brought an explosion of untruth and a stepped-up war on reality. With democracy increasingly staring into the abyss both at home and abroad, propaganda and censorship are the double-edged sword of rising dictatorship. And now with violent hacking coming from both sides of the blade, it is indeed an increasing struggle to cling to the dream of truth-flavored sanity.
Americans got a scary peek into what the rising confluence of right-wing authoritarianism and its quasi-state media could accomplish on the day before Thanksgiving. That’s when what turned out to be a tragic, fatal car crash at the wrong time in the wrong way at the wrong place — a bridge border crossing between the U.S. and Canada in Niagara Falls — became a launching pad for a Big Lie about immigration and terror that circled the globe several times before the mundane truth put its pants on.
Here’s what really happened on Wednesday: A 53-year-old couple from Erie County, N.Y. — Monica and Kurt Villani — were driving to a casino in Canada in a Bentley luxury car because of a canceled rock concert when something went terribly wrong. Approaching the Rainbow Bridge border post, the car was traveling 80 to 100 mph — perhaps due to a medical emergency, or a stuck accelerator — and struck a curb, sending the Bentley into the air before a fiery crash and explosion that killed both occupants.
ADVERTISEMENT
No one can fault the FBI or other agencies for investigating whether this was some type of terror attack, given the location of the accident at a key border crossing, the timing — perhaps the busiest travel day of the year — and the spectacular nature of the explosion. What’s inexcusable, however, was the rapid reporting of the most extreme speculation as fact, and the large number of supposedly responsible politicians willing to run with those untruths.
“What I’ve been told is that this was an attempted terrorist attack,” said Alexis McAdams, a correspondent for Fox News, the right-slanted network that despite a series of scandals and mishaps is still the most-watched cable news channel. Reporting just two and a half hours after the crash, McAdams added that her law enforcement sources believed that the motorists — in reality, remember, two middle-aged KISS fans — “have packed that car full of explosives.”
Thus, the “reputable” Fox News was adding the meat of confirmation to what a frothing right-wing echo chamber on social media was already proclaiming: The “blast” mean a network of terrorists is poised to enter America not only from the south but from the north, thus proving — in their minds — the inherent weakness of President Joe Biden’s border policies. And there was an army of political demagogues eager to run with a false meme.
“We need to lock down the borders immediately,” GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida posed on X/Twitter Wednesday. “Full deportation efforts need to begin. The U.S. does not need to be the world’s hospitality suite any longer.” Added another Florida Republican, Rep. Byron Donalds, in a now deleted tweet: “Open borders, soft-on-crime policies and bending a knee to the woke P.C. mob is an inevitable threat to our nation and its people. Today’s apparent terrorist attack must be a wake-up call to all Americans.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The website Meidas Touch published a list of more than 30 Republican officials or right-wing luminaries who tweeted similar sentiments and occasionally embellished their posts with new made-up details, like the discovery of an Iranian passport at the crash site. Some of these posts are still up, days after it became clear that the Niagara Falls crash was just a horrific tragedy and not the far-right’s fever dream of Islamic jihad to justify a repressive response. Others, including Fox News, have ripped yet another page from George Orwell’s 1984 — tossing their initial reporting down a memory hole.
Unfortunately, their mission had already been accomplished. For millions of U.S. web surfers and couch potatoes, the mental connection of Biden, the border and fiery chaos had already been implanted, and it will remain even as some of the erroneous tweets are deleted. And that sense that things are out of control in America is already being used to sell them on a rule-breaking strongman in the White House. That will be used in a Trump 47 presidency to actually carry out Luna’s howling at the moon, to deport so many migrants that America will need a gulag archipelago of camps to hold them.
The Niagara Falls panic didn’t happen in a vacuum, after all. It happened in the same week that Argentina elected a right-wing extremist president in Javier Milei, that the anti-immigration party of radical Geert Wilders won the most seats in the Netherlands parliament, that a fake rumor about the immigration status of a stabbing attacker sparked a destructive riot in Dublin — and that polls show Trump edging into the lead over Biden ahead of 2024′s election.
Elon Musk, owner of social media platform X, gestures during an event with Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London on Nov. 2, 2023.Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP
For these rising, right-wing authoritarians, a free press and its threat of factual public information rate high on their enemies list — as it’s been for strongmen and dictators for the last century. The alliance between Fox News, Elon’s Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) and right-wing blowhards shows how a strong propaganda regime has already been established — but what about the censorship side of the sword?
It’s coming.
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Also this past week, we saw a stunning partnership between an increasingly unhinged Musk, the world’s richest man, and a far-right attorney general, the disgraced-but-somehow-still-in-office Ken Paxton of Texas, in taking legal action aimed at undermining and perhaps destroying the left-wing media watchdog group, Media Matters for America. (Full disclosure: Over a decade ago, I had a brief fellowship with MMFA to support a book I was writing.)
Media Matters had run an explosive report about pro-Nazi hate speech published on X and ads for major corporations getting placed next to such content. Other X users confirmed the problem even as X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino claimed any instances were rare and unintentional. That didn’t stop Musk from threatening “a thermonuclear lawsuit” against MMFA or Paxton from announcing a state investigation of the group — chilling moves against a free press that could cost Media Matters hundreds of thousands of dollars just to defend its very existence.
The legally challenged Paxton won’t be a Trump 47 attorney general, but someone like him — like frothing right-wing lawyer Mike Davis, who recently told a podcast that “we’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo” — will get the job, which will surely include the task of siccing the Justice Department on journalists Trump has declared “enemies of the people.”
Civil Defense workers remove the body of Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah, who was killed by Israeli shelling, at Alma al-Shaab border village with Israel, in southern Lebanon, on Oct. 13. Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, a watchdog group advocating for press freedom, said that the strikes were targeted rather than accidental and that the journalists were clearly identified as press.Read moreHassan Ammar / AP
It’s teeing up a dystopian world in which journalists who do not obey the party’s propaganda line could face increasingly severe consequences — perhaps far worse than the ordeal currently facing Media Matters. Verbal abuse, lawsuits, and harassment is only where it starts. If you want to see where treating a free press as the enemy ends, look to Gaza. And not only because the communications minister in the right-wing government of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening sanctions against that nation’s most critical newspaper, Haaretz — although there is that.
They say that truth is often the first casualty of war but in southern Israel and Gaza the heartbreaking casualties have been the truth-tellers themselves, the journalists. After four Israeli journalists were brutally and unconscionably killed in the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack, Israel’s violent war of retaliations has not only caused the deaths of Palestinian men, women and children by the thousands, but has also killed journalists at a pace not seen in any conflict in decades.
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A stunning 53 Palestinian or Lebanese journalists have been killed since the war broke out, and the circumstances of at least several journalists and their family members obliterated by precision Israeli drone strikes on their homes or offices has done little to quiet suspicions that some media members are deliberately targeted. Indeed, last week the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders claimed the Reuters visuals journalist Issam Abdallah was deliberately attacked when he was killed in southern Lebanon on Oct. 13 by shells fired from Israeli territory. Wrote the group also known by its French initials RSF: “Two strikes in the same place in such a short space of time (just over 30 seconds), from the same direction, clearly indicate precise targeting.” Israel denies targeting journalists.
Major U.S. newsrooms have been mostly tepid in condemning these outrageous, violent, and attacks of little precedent on press freedom, to the extent that it’s mentioned at all. Ditto the Biden administration, which has made protecting democracy its core argument for a second term and yet seems to view the real-world implications of the First Amendment as an afterthought, if not a hindrance.
Indeed, one report suggested that Team Biden agrees with its odd-couple ally the Netanyahu government in wanting the public to know as little as possible about the extent of the destruction and killing in Gaza, Politico reported last week that a Biden administration fear, in negotiating a temporary cease-fire, was that it “would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.”
This kind of malarkey is what I find so alarming about our increasingly Orwellian present, and even dimmer future. It’s not just that the newest generation of chest-thumping strongmen are harnessing the electrons of the 21st century to hypercharge their modern Ministries of Untruth, but that the guardians of the actual truth — the newsroom grand poobahs, an American president who claims he ran to save democracy — are passively watching it slip from our hands.
After Niagara Falls, and Texas, and Gaza, it’s way past time for anyone to think that “it can’t happen here,” because it’s happening now. And the next 12 months may be our last chance to show that we are not going mad, that the people want the truth, and that we will stop fact-based journalism from sliding down Orwell’s memory hole for good.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 41,012
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
You're not going to tell us MTG, who is pushing herself via her brilliant memoir to be 45's running mate next year, would make a better vice president than Kamala Harris, are you Linda? That wouldn't even be humorous.
And please, be honest, you know you love the kind of attention your get here.
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
Greetings from prison. Send macadamia nuts. And avocados, if you got ‘em.
Who’s this and what’s it all about?
That's Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd. He was recently stabbed in prison.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
Cmon Linda you don’t drop bombs in AMT and leave? It’s not like you’re willing to have an honest discussion about the hate and fascism that trump spreads thru America? He didn’t begin his political career by spreading hatred with false accusations ? If you are serious, please let’s discuss.
but you may have a point. The extreme left is similar in some ways. It’s eerily quiet in the mid east topic these days, as there’s been a pause in that horrible war the last few days. But that shows it’s not beyond the left extreme to support fascism either.
And there it is, like clockwork….as Evil Elon laughs his ass off at y’all still using his platform making $ off you…the hypocrisy of this place keeps me coming back for more…
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
Cmon Linda you don’t drop bombs in AMT and leave? It’s not like you’re willing to have an honest discussion about the hate and fascism that trump spreads thru America? He didn’t begin his political career by spreading hatred with false accusations ? If you are serious, please let’s discuss.
but you may have a point. The extreme left is similar in some ways. It’s eerily quiet in the mid east topic these days, as there’s been a pause in that horrible war the last few days. But that shows it’s not beyond the left extreme to support fascism either.
Who here is supporting fascism? Why can’t we all agree that no matter what nationality or race or Religion you follow civilians should be off limits? No
jesus greets me looks just like me ....
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brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 41,012
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
Cmon Linda you don’t drop bombs in AMT and leave? It’s not like you’re willing to have an honest discussion about the hate and fascism that trump spreads thru America? He didn’t begin his political career by spreading hatred with false accusations ? If you are serious, please let’s discuss.
but you may have a point. The extreme left is similar in some ways. It’s eerily quiet in the mid east topic these days, as there’s been a pause in that horrible war the last few days. But that shows it’s not beyond the left extreme to support fascism either.
And there it is, like clockwork….as Evil Elon laughs his ass off at y’all still using his platform making $ off you…the hypocrisy of this place keeps me coming back for more…
Bombs away...
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
Cmon Linda you don’t drop bombs in AMT and leave? It’s not like you’re willing to have an honest discussion about the hate and fascism that trump spreads thru America? He didn’t begin his political career by spreading hatred with false accusations ? If you are serious, please let’s discuss.
but you may have a point. The extreme left is similar in some ways. It’s eerily quiet in the mid east topic these days, as there’s been a pause in that horrible war the last few days. But that shows it’s not beyond the left extreme to support fascism either.
Who here is supporting fascism? Why can’t we all agree that no matter what nationality or race or Religion you follow civilians should be off limits? No
It’s an unfortunate part of war to say the least, especially by a wealthy govt who hides underneath civilians. The anti Israel sentiments on here were very strong the day of the original attack, when the targeting of civilians were initiated by Hamas, and there were zero Palestinian civilian victims.
That country has a fascist govt, its leaders are worth billions and billions while the people starve and blaming Israel is a convenient excuse to perpetuate their wealth. And supporting their cause right now leads to what? More of the same? Shouldn’t the goal for ending this war be for providing for a pro democracy anti Iran govt there?
imagine wishing for a terrorist attack in order so you can dunk on the sitting president and blame them for it.
Imagine thinking the shit-4-brain Presidents handling of the border has nothing to do why the border is a complete utter mess and concern for the tax paying element of society. But hey, we got Kamala on the job Yo…
the gop could have fixed the border issue last time they had control of the house, senate, and white house, but they didn't. rubio did not even support his own bill that he wrote, because ending the border issue would give the gop one less issue to run on. it is much more politically expedient for the gop to make it an issue and do nothing to fix it. case in point, all the trumpers on here howling about the border every other day. even the ones complaining that fentenyl is being seized at the border, because i guess we are supposed to just let it in, right?
Bahaha.
Ok Nancy P
"Those are YOUR facts, not THE facts" - Nancy P while in border meeting 2017
A simple search on the #s proves you so wrong. But I expect nothing less from the special 10 and their echo chamber AMT oops...I mean The View. What a cult your in you can't even know the truth. Or what was dementia joe saying, we beleive in the truth, not the facts.
Such entertainment the lib dims. Filthy mush brains
did rubio end up voting for his own immigration bill? yes or no. get back to me on that. but i know you won't so ok...
also serious question. if you don't like it here, why do you come back? i'm sure you can find more pleasant ways to spend your day if you do not like it on the view.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.- Hemingway
There is a lot of fear, hate, and ignorance in the world. And way too much in the United States. As is proven by the QtRUmplicans parroting the talking points from the likes of fuQer Qarlson and aleQs jonezing.
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
Cmon Linda you don’t drop bombs in AMT and leave? It’s not like you’re willing to have an honest discussion about the hate and fascism that trump spreads thru America? He didn’t begin his political career by spreading hatred with false accusations ? If you are serious, please let’s discuss.
but you may have a point. The extreme left is similar in some ways. It’s eerily quiet in the mid east topic these days, as there’s been a pause in that horrible war the last few days. But that shows it’s not beyond the left extreme to support fascism either.
Who here is supporting fascism? Why can’t we all agree that no matter what nationality or race or Religion you follow civilians should be off limits? No
It’s an unfortunate part of war to say the least, especially by a wealthy govt who hides underneath civilians. The anti Israel sentiments on here were very strong the day of the original attack, when the targeting of civilians were initiated by Hamas, and there were zero Palestinian civilian victims.
That country has a fascist govt, its leaders are worth billions and billions while the people starve and blaming Israel is a convenient excuse to perpetuate their wealth. And supporting their cause right now leads to what? More of the same? Shouldn’t the goal for ending this war be for providing for a pro democracy anti Iran govt there?
Or a democratically elected government using Hamas as a means to an end. But I'm sure you don't want to admit that, nor any of the other Israeli transgressions over the past 5 or 6 decades, right? Bibi and those that voted for him in that "democracy" bear no responsibility, right? All kittens and puppies that Israel.
But they say that as soon as he regained power, Netanyahu — who as a candidate had pledged to “knock out the rule of Hamas in Gaza” — instead largely pursued a strategy that didn’t disrupt the status quo of a divided Palestinian population, leaving Hamas to rule in Gaza and the rival Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
That schism served the purposes of Netanyahu and opponents of a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict by hobbling the Palestinians’ ability to oppose Israel’s occupation, analysts said.
“With no unified leadership, Bibi was able to say he couldn’t move forward with peace negotiations,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and political analyst, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname. “It allowed him to say, ‘There is no one to talk to.’”
The situation allowed Netanyahu to largely sideline the “Palestinian question,” an issue that had shaped the tenures of Israeli leaders over the previous four decades. Instead, Netanyahu focused on Iran and other threats and on Israel’s development into an economic powerhouse, according to Netanyahu biographer Anshel Pfeffer.
“Netanyahu always felt that the Palestinian conflict was distraction being used as a wedge issue in Israel,” Pfeffer said. “He called it a ‘rabbit hole.’”
Year after year, successive Netanyahu cabinets approved moves that had the effect of easing pressure on Hamas: Israel agreed to periodic prisoner releases, the transfer of money from Qatar to pay public salaries in Gaza, improve infrastructure and, critics say, fund Hamas military operations.
The prime minister hoped to prevent any reconciliation between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, even when the two sides came close to rapprochement in 2018.
“In the last 10 years, Netanyahu worked to block any attempt at demolishing Hamas in Gaza,” Raz said.
Netanyahu’s office declined to provide anyone to respond on the record. But a senior government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity denied that the prime minister ever pursued a policy of keeping Hamas in power.
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
Cmon Linda you don’t drop bombs in AMT and leave? It’s not like you’re willing to have an honest discussion about the hate and fascism that trump spreads thru America? He didn’t begin his political career by spreading hatred with false accusations ? If you are serious, please let’s discuss.
but you may have a point. The extreme left is similar in some ways. It’s eerily quiet in the mid east topic these days, as there’s been a pause in that horrible war the last few days. But that shows it’s not beyond the left extreme to support fascism either.
What fascism is the left supporting in your opinion Lerxst?
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
Cmon Linda you don’t drop bombs in AMT and leave? It’s not like you’re willing to have an honest discussion about the hate and fascism that trump spreads thru America? He didn’t begin his political career by spreading hatred with false accusations ? If you are serious, please let’s discuss.
but you may have a point. The extreme left is similar in some ways. It’s eerily quiet in the mid east topic these days, as there’s been a pause in that horrible war the last few days. But that shows it’s not beyond the left extreme to support fascism either.
Who here is supporting fascism? Why can’t we all agree that no matter what nationality or race or Religion you follow civilians should be off limits? No
It’s an unfortunate part of war to say the least, especially by a wealthy govt who hides underneath civilians. The anti Israel sentiments on here were very strong the day of the original attack, when the targeting of civilians were initiated by Hamas, and there were zero Palestinian civilian victims.
That country has a fascist govt, its leaders are worth billions and billions while the people starve and blaming Israel is a convenient excuse to perpetuate their wealth. And supporting their cause right now leads to what? More of the same? Shouldn’t the goal for ending this war be for providing for a pro democracy anti Iran govt there?
Or a democratically elected government using Hamas as a means to an end. But I'm sure you don't want to admit that, nor any of the other Israeli transgressions over the past 5 or 6 decades, right? Bibi and those that voted for him in that "democracy" bear no responsibility, right? All kittens and puppies that Israel.
But they say that as soon as he regained power, Netanyahu — who as a candidate had pledged to “knock out the rule of Hamas in Gaza” — instead largely pursued a strategy that didn’t disrupt the status quo of a divided Palestinian population, leaving Hamas to rule in Gaza and the rival Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
That schism served the purposes of Netanyahu and opponents of a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict by hobbling the Palestinians’ ability to oppose Israel’s occupation, analysts said.
“With no unified leadership, Bibi was able to say he couldn’t move forward with peace negotiations,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and political analyst, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname. “It allowed him to say, ‘There is no one to talk to.’”
The situation allowed Netanyahu to largely sideline the “Palestinian question,” an issue that had shaped the tenures of Israeli leaders over the previous four decades. Instead, Netanyahu focused on Iran and other threats and on Israel’s development into an economic powerhouse, according to Netanyahu biographer Anshel Pfeffer.
“Netanyahu always felt that the Palestinian conflict was distraction being used as a wedge issue in Israel,” Pfeffer said. “He called it a ‘rabbit hole.’”
Year after year, successive Netanyahu cabinets approved moves that had the effect of easing pressure on Hamas: Israel agreed to periodic prisoner releases, the transfer of money from Qatar to pay public salaries in Gaza, improve infrastructure and, critics say, fund Hamas military operations.
The prime minister hoped to prevent any reconciliation between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, even when the two sides came close to rapprochement in 2018.
“In the last 10 years, Netanyahu worked to block any attempt at demolishing Hamas in Gaza,” Raz said.
Netanyahu’s office declined to provide anyone to respond on the record. But a senior government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity denied that the prime minister ever pursued a policy of keeping Hamas in power.
With more granular detail because facts are important. Now, please, tell us how Israel is innocent. And convince us that Israel is a true partner for peace. Seems Bibi has some blood on his hands, eh?
For 14 years, Netanyahu's policy was to keep Hamas in power; the pogrom of October 7, 2023, helps the Israeli prime minister preserve his own rule
Much ink has been spilled describing the longtime relationship – rather, alliance – between Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. And still, the very fact that there has been close cooperation between the Israeli prime minister (with the support of many on the right) and the fundamentalist organization seemingly evaporated from most of the current analyses – everyone’s talking about “failures,” “mistakes” and “contzeptziot” (fixed conceptions). Given this, there is a need not only to review the history of cooperation but also to conclude unequivocally: The pogrom of October 7, 2023, helps Netanyahu, and not for the first time, to preserve his rule, certainly in the short term.
The MO of Netanyahu’s policy since his return to the Prime Minister’s Office in 2009 has and continues to be, on the one hand, bolstering the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and, on the other, weakening the Palestinian Authority.
His return to power was accompanied by a complete turnaround from the policy of his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, who sought to end the conflict through a peace treaty with the most moderate Palestinian leader – PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
For the last 14 years, while implementing a divide-and-conquer policy vis-a-vis the West Bank and Gaza, “Abu Yair” (“Yair’s father,” in Arabic, as Netanyahu called himself while campaigning in the Arab community before one recent election) has resisted any attempt, military or diplomatic, that might bring an end to the Hamas regime.
In practice, since the Cast Lead operation in late 2008 and early 2009, during the Olmert era, Hamas’ rule has not faced any genuine military threat. On the contrary: The group has been supported by the Israeli prime minister, and funded with his assistance.
When Netanyahu declared in April 2019, as he has after every other round of fighting, that “we have restored deterrence with Hamas” and that “we have blocked the main supply routes,” he was lying through his teeth.
For over a decade, Netanyahu has lent a hand, in various ways, to the growing military and political power of Hamas. Netanyahu is the one who turned Hamas from a terror organization with few resources into a semi-state body.
Releasing Palestinian prisoners, allowing cash transfers, as the Qatari envoy comes and goes to Gaza as he pleases, agreeing to the import of a broad array of goods, construction materials in particular, with the knowledge that much of the material will be designated for terrorism and not for building civilian infrastructure, increasing the number of work permits in Israel for Palestinian workers from Gaza, and more. All these developments created symbiosis between the flowering of fundamentalist terrorism and preservation of Netanyahu’s rule.
Take note: It would be a mistake to assume that Netanyahu thought about the well-being of the poor and oppressed Gazans – who are also victims of Hamas – when allowing the transfer of funds (some of which, as noted, didn’t go to building infrastructure but rather military armament). His goal was to hurt Abbas and prevent division of the Land of Israel into two states.
It’s important to remember that without those funds from Qatar (and Iran), Hamas would not have had the money to maintain its reign of terror, and its regime would have been dependent on restraint.
In practice, the injection of cash (as opposed to bank deposits, which are far more accountable) from Qatar, a practice that Netanyahu supported and approved, has served to strengthen the military arm of Hamas since 2012.
Thus, Netanyahu indirectly funded Hamas after Abbas decided to stop providing it with funds that he knew would end up being used for terrorism against him, his policies and his people. It’s important not to ignore that Hamas used this money to buy the means through which Israelis have been murdered for years.
In parallel, from a security standpoint, since Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Netanyahu has been guided by a policy that almost completely ignored the terrorism of the rockets and the incendiary kites and balloons. Occasionally, the media has been exposed to a dog-and-pony show, when such weapons were captured, but not more than that.
It’s worth reminding that last year, the “government of change” (the short-lived coalition led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid) exercised a different policy, one of whose expressions was the halting of funding for Hamas arriving via suitcases full of cash. When Netanyahu tweeted, on May 30, 2022, that “Hamas is interested in the existence of the weak Bennett government,” he was lying to the public. The government of change was a disaster for Hamas.
Netanyahu’s nightmare was the collapse of the Hamas regime – something that Israel could have expedited, albeit for a difficult price. One of the proofs for this claim was given during Operation Protective Edge.
At the time, Netanyahu leaked to the media the contents of a presentation that the military had made to the security cabinet laying out the potential repercussions of conquering Gaza. The premier knew that the secret document, which noted that occupying Gaza would cost the lives of hundreds of soldiers, would create an atmosphere of opposition to a widespread ground invasion.
In March 2019, Naftali Bennett told the Channel 13 program Hamakor: “Someone took care to leak that to the media to create an excuse for not taking action… it’s one of the gravest leaks in Israeli history.” Of course, the leak was not investigated, despite many demands from members of the Knesset. In closed-door conversations, Benny Gantz said then, when he was the IDF’s chief of staff, “Bibi leaked this.”
Let this sink in. Netanyahu leaked a “top secret” document in order to thwart the military and diplomatic position of the cabinet, which sought to defeat Hamas with various means. We should heed what Avigdor Lieberman told Yedioth Ahronoth, in an interview published just before the October 7 assault, that Netanyahu “continuously thwarted all the targeted assassinations.”
It should be stressed that Netanyahu’s policy of keeping Hamas in charge in Gaza didn’t find expression only through opposition to physical occupation of Gaza and to assassinations of key Hamas players, but also in his determination to thwart any political reconciliation between the PA – Fatah in particular – and Hamas. A prominent example is Netanyahu’s behavior in late 2017, when talks between Fatah and Hamas were actually taking place.
A fundamental disagreement between Abbas and Hamas concerned the question of the Islamist group’s military being subordinate to to the PA. Hamas agreed that the PA would return to running all civilian matters in Gaza but refused to yield its arms.
Egypt and the United States supported reconciliation and worked to achieve it. Netanyahu totally opposed the idea, asserting repeatedly that “reconciliation between Hamas and the PLO makes achieving peace harder.” Of course, Netanyahu didn’t pursue peace, which wasn’t on the agenda in any way back then. His position only served Hamas.
Over the years, from time to time, various figures on both sides of the political spectrum repeatedly pointed to the axis of cooperation between Netanyahu and Hamas. On the one hand, for example, Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet security service from 2005 to 2011, told Yedioth Ahronoth in January 2013, “If we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas’s strengthening has been Bibi Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister.”
In August 2019, former prime minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio that people who believed that Netanyahu had no strategy were mistaken. “His strategy is to keep Hamas alive and kicking… even at the price of abandoning the citizens [of the south] … in order to weaken the PA in Ramallah.”
And former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot told Maariv in January 2022 that Netanyahu acted “in total opposition to the national assessment of the National Security Council, which determined that there was a need to disconnect from the Palestinians and establish two states.” Israel moved in the exact opposition direction, weakening the PA and strengthening Hamas.
Shin Bet head Nadav Argaman spoke about this when he finished his term in 2021. He warned explicitly that the lack of dialogue between Israel and the PA had the effect of weakening the latter while bolstering Hamas.
He warned that the relative quiet in the West Bank at the time was deceptive, and that “Israel must find a way to cooperate with the PA and to strengthen it.” Eisenkot commented, in that same 2022 interview, that Argaman was right. “This is what’s happening, and it’s dangerous,” he added.
People on the right said similar things. One of the mantras being repeated was that of newly elected MK Bezalel Smotrich, who in 2015 told the Knesset Channel that “Hamas is an asset and Abu Mazen is a burden,” referring to Abbas by his nom de guerre.
In April 2019, Jonatan Urich, one of Netanyahu’s media advisers and a Likud spokesman, told Makor Rishon that one of Netanyahu’s achievements was separating Gaza (both politically and conceptually) from the West Bank. Netanyahu “basically smashed the vision of the Palestinian state in these two places,” he boasted. “Some of the achievement is related to the Qatari money reaching Hamas each month.”
Around the same time in 2019, Likud MK Galit Distel Atbaryan wrote in an effusively complimentary Facebook post: “We must say this honestly – Netanyahu wants Hamas on its feet, and he is ready to pay almost any incomprehensible price for this. Half the country is paralyzed, children and parents are suffering from post-trauma, homes are blown up, people are killed, a street cat holds a nuclear tiger by the balls.” Read it but don’t believe it? It’s worth believing, because this is exactly the policy by which Netanyahu comported himself.
The prime minister himself spoke briefly at times about his position regarding Hamas. In March 2019, he said during a meeting of Likud MKs, at which the subject of transfer of funds to Hamas was under discussion, that, “Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must support delivery of funds to Gaza because maintaining separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
In a tweet two months later, Channel 13 quoted former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as telling a Kuwaiti newspaper: “Netanyahu isn’t interested in a two-state solution. Rather, he wants to separate Gaza from the West Bank, as he told me at the end of 2010.”
Gen. (Res.) Gershon Hacohen, a prominent right winger, made things crystal clear in an interview with the online magazine Mida in May 2019. “When Netanyahu didn’t go to war in Gaza to defeat the Hamas regime, he basically prevented Abu Mazen from establishing a united Palestinian state,” he recalled at the time. “We need to exploit the situation of separation created between Gaza and Ramallah. It’s an Israeli interest of the highest level, and you can’t understand the situation in Gaza without understanding this context.”
Netanyahu’s entire policy since 2009 has sought to destroy any possibility of a diplomatic agreement with the Palestinians. It’s the theme of his rule, which depends on the continuation of the conflict. Destroying democracy is an additional aspect of his continuing rule, something that has brought many of us out to the streets during the past year.
In that same 2019 interview with Army Radio, Barak said that Netanyahu was keeping the south “on a constant low flame.” One should pay particular attention to his assertion that the security establishment laid on the cabinet table several times plans “to drain the swamp” of Hamas in Gaza, but the cabinet never discussed them.
Netanyahu knew, Barak added, “that it’s easier with Hamas to explain to Israelis that there is no one to sit with and no one to talk to. If the PA strengthens… then there will be someone to talk to.”
Back to Distel Atbaryan: “Mark my words – Benjamin Netanyahu keeps Hamas on its feet so that the entire State of Israel won’t become the ‘Gaza envelope.’” She warned of disaster “if Hamas collapses,” in which case, “Abu Mazen is liable to control Gaza. If he will control it, voices from the left will arise advocating negotiations and a diplomatic settlement and a Palestinian state, including in Judea and Samaria.” Netanyahu’s mouthpieces are incessantly pumping out such messages.
Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas have an unspoken political alliance against their common enemy – the Palestinian Authority. In other words, Netanyahu has cooperation and agreement with a group whose goal is the destruction of the State of Israel and the murder of Jews.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was on the mark when he wrote in May 2021, at the time of the establishment of the government of change, that Netanyahu and Hamas were scared of the possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough. He wrote that the premier and Hamas both “wanted to destroy the possibility of political change before it could destroy them politically.”
He then explained that they didn’t need to talk or have an agreement between them. “They each understand what the other needs to stay in power and consciously or unconsciously behave in ways to ensure that they deliver it.”
I could go on and on expanding on the subject of this cooperation, but the preceding examples speak for themselves. The 2023 pogrom is a result of Netanyahu’s policy. It is not “a failure of the concept” – rather, this is the concept: Netanyahu and Hamas are political partners, and both sides have fulfilled their side of the bargain.
In the future, more details will emerge that will shed additional light on that mutual understanding. Don’t make the mistake of thinking – even now – that as long as Netanyahu and his present government are responsible for making decisions, the Hamas regime will collapse. There will be a lot of talk and pyrotechnics about the current “war against terror,” but sustaining Hamas is more important to Netanyahu than a few dead kibbutzniks.
You guys are the best!!…I got an Orange man reference, some Covid crap, a little Q-man , a Troll insult (those are my fave), and to top it off someone even defended Kamala….now that my friends is a new low, even for this place…please keep it up, you guys never disappoint…someone please repost something stupid from Evil Elon’s X next to really make my day. Mahalo
Cmon Linda you don’t drop bombs in AMT and leave? It’s not like you’re willing to have an honest discussion about the hate and fascism that trump spreads thru America? He didn’t begin his political career by spreading hatred with false accusations ? If you are serious, please let’s discuss.
but you may have a point. The extreme left is similar in some ways. It’s eerily quiet in the mid east topic these days, as there’s been a pause in that horrible war the last few days. But that shows it’s not beyond the left extreme to support fascism either.
Who here is supporting fascism? Why can’t we all agree that no matter what nationality or race or Religion you follow civilians should be off limits? No
It’s an unfortunate part of war to say the least, especially by a wealthy govt who hides underneath civilians. The anti Israel sentiments on here were very strong the day of the original attack, when the targeting of civilians were initiated by Hamas, and there were zero Palestinian civilian victims.
That country has a fascist govt, its leaders are worth billions and billions while the people starve and blaming Israel is a convenient excuse to perpetuate their wealth. And supporting their cause right now leads to what? More of the same? Shouldn’t the goal for ending this war be for providing for a pro democracy anti Iran govt there?
Comments
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
but let's talk about kamala, who is by far a better presidential candidate than anything your side has to offer. she was senator and da of california, that is more than anybody on your side has done.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
lmao dumbass
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
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Ok Nancy P
"Those are YOUR facts, not THE facts" - Nancy P while in border meeting 2017
A simple search on the #s proves you so wrong. But I expect nothing less from the special 10 and their echo chamber AMT oops...I mean The View. What a cult your in you can't even know the truth. Or what was dementia joe saying, we beleive in the truth, not the facts.
Such entertainment the lib dims. Filthy mush brains
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/free-press-right-wing-authoritarianism-20231126.html
From Niagara Falls to Texas to Gaza, a horrifying look into the abyss of a post-truth future
A N.Y. car crash falsely propagandized as "a terror attack" symbolized our increasingly Orwellian post-truth world.
by Will Bunch | ColumnistPublished Nov. 26, 2023, 8:26 a.m. ET
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” — George Orwell, 1984
In the ever-shrinking world of a free and fair media, the recent weeks have brought an explosion of untruth and a stepped-up war on reality. With democracy increasingly staring into the abyss both at home and abroad, propaganda and censorship are the double-edged sword of rising dictatorship. And now with violent hacking coming from both sides of the blade, it is indeed an increasing struggle to cling to the dream of truth-flavored sanity.
Americans got a scary peek into what the rising confluence of right-wing authoritarianism and its quasi-state media could accomplish on the day before Thanksgiving. That’s when what turned out to be a tragic, fatal car crash at the wrong time in the wrong way at the wrong place — a bridge border crossing between the U.S. and Canada in Niagara Falls — became a launching pad for a Big Lie about immigration and terror that circled the globe several times before the mundane truth put its pants on.
Here’s what really happened on Wednesday: A 53-year-old couple from Erie County, N.Y. — Monica and Kurt Villani — were driving to a casino in Canada in a Bentley luxury car because of a canceled rock concert when something went terribly wrong. Approaching the Rainbow Bridge border post, the car was traveling 80 to 100 mph — perhaps due to a medical emergency, or a stuck accelerator — and struck a curb, sending the Bentley into the air before a fiery crash and explosion that killed both occupants.
No one can fault the FBI or other agencies for investigating whether this was some type of terror attack, given the location of the accident at a key border crossing, the timing — perhaps the busiest travel day of the year — and the spectacular nature of the explosion. What’s inexcusable, however, was the rapid reporting of the most extreme speculation as fact, and the large number of supposedly responsible politicians willing to run with those untruths.
“What I’ve been told is that this was an attempted terrorist attack,” said Alexis McAdams, a correspondent for Fox News, the right-slanted network that despite a series of scandals and mishaps is still the most-watched cable news channel. Reporting just two and a half hours after the crash, McAdams added that her law enforcement sources believed that the motorists — in reality, remember, two middle-aged KISS fans — “have packed that car full of explosives.”
Thus, the “reputable” Fox News was adding the meat of confirmation to what a frothing right-wing echo chamber on social media was already proclaiming: The “blast” mean a network of terrorists is poised to enter America not only from the south but from the north, thus proving — in their minds — the inherent weakness of President Joe Biden’s border policies. And there was an army of political demagogues eager to run with a false meme.
“We need to lock down the borders immediately,” GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida posed on X/Twitter Wednesday. “Full deportation efforts need to begin. The U.S. does not need to be the world’s hospitality suite any longer.” Added another Florida Republican, Rep. Byron Donalds, in a now deleted tweet: “Open borders, soft-on-crime policies and bending a knee to the woke P.C. mob is an inevitable threat to our nation and its people. Today’s apparent terrorist attack must be a wake-up call to all Americans.”
The website Meidas Touch published a list of more than 30 Republican officials or right-wing luminaries who tweeted similar sentiments and occasionally embellished their posts with new made-up details, like the discovery of an Iranian passport at the crash site. Some of these posts are still up, days after it became clear that the Niagara Falls crash was just a horrific tragedy and not the far-right’s fever dream of Islamic jihad to justify a repressive response. Others, including Fox News, have ripped yet another page from George Orwell’s 1984 — tossing their initial reporting down a memory hole.
Unfortunately, their mission had already been accomplished. For millions of U.S. web surfers and couch potatoes, the mental connection of Biden, the border and fiery chaos had already been implanted, and it will remain even as some of the erroneous tweets are deleted. And that sense that things are out of control in America is already being used to sell them on a rule-breaking strongman in the White House. That will be used in a Trump 47 presidency to actually carry out Luna’s howling at the moon, to deport so many migrants that America will need a gulag archipelago of camps to hold them.
The Niagara Falls panic didn’t happen in a vacuum, after all. It happened in the same week that Argentina elected a right-wing extremist president in Javier Milei, that the anti-immigration party of radical Geert Wilders won the most seats in the Netherlands parliament, that a fake rumor about the immigration status of a stabbing attacker sparked a destructive riot in Dublin — and that polls show Trump edging into the lead over Biden ahead of 2024′s election.
For these rising, right-wing authoritarians, a free press and its threat of factual public information rate high on their enemies list — as it’s been for strongmen and dictators for the last century. The alliance between Fox News, Elon’s Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) and right-wing blowhards shows how a strong propaganda regime has already been established — but what about the censorship side of the sword?
It’s coming.
Also this past week, we saw a stunning partnership between an increasingly unhinged Musk, the world’s richest man, and a far-right attorney general, the disgraced-but-somehow-still-in-office Ken Paxton of Texas, in taking legal action aimed at undermining and perhaps destroying the left-wing media watchdog group, Media Matters for America. (Full disclosure: Over a decade ago, I had a brief fellowship with MMFA to support a book I was writing.)
» READ MORE: With the world on fire, a cowardly, timid news media is a threat to U.S. democracy
Media Matters had run an explosive report about pro-Nazi hate speech published on X and ads for major corporations getting placed next to such content. Other X users confirmed the problem even as X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino claimed any instances were rare and unintentional. That didn’t stop Musk from threatening “a thermonuclear lawsuit” against MMFA or Paxton from announcing a state investigation of the group — chilling moves against a free press that could cost Media Matters hundreds of thousands of dollars just to defend its very existence.
The legally challenged Paxton won’t be a Trump 47 attorney general, but someone like him — like frothing right-wing lawyer Mike Davis, who recently told a podcast that “we’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo” — will get the job, which will surely include the task of siccing the Justice Department on journalists Trump has declared “enemies of the people.”
It’s teeing up a dystopian world in which journalists who do not obey the party’s propaganda line could face increasingly severe consequences — perhaps far worse than the ordeal currently facing Media Matters. Verbal abuse, lawsuits, and harassment is only where it starts. If you want to see where treating a free press as the enemy ends, look to Gaza. And not only because the communications minister in the right-wing government of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening sanctions against that nation’s most critical newspaper, Haaretz — although there is that.
They say that truth is often the first casualty of war but in southern Israel and Gaza the heartbreaking casualties have been the truth-tellers themselves, the journalists. After four Israeli journalists were brutally and unconscionably killed in the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack, Israel’s violent war of retaliations has not only caused the deaths of Palestinian men, women and children by the thousands, but has also killed journalists at a pace not seen in any conflict in decades.
A stunning 53 Palestinian or Lebanese journalists have been killed since the war broke out, and the circumstances of at least several journalists and their family members obliterated by precision Israeli drone strikes on their homes or offices has done little to quiet suspicions that some media members are deliberately targeted. Indeed, last week the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders claimed the Reuters visuals journalist Issam Abdallah was deliberately attacked when he was killed in southern Lebanon on Oct. 13 by shells fired from Israeli territory. Wrote the group also known by its French initials RSF: “Two strikes in the same place in such a short space of time (just over 30 seconds), from the same direction, clearly indicate precise targeting.” Israel denies targeting journalists.
Major U.S. newsrooms have been mostly tepid in condemning these outrageous, violent, and attacks of little precedent on press freedom, to the extent that it’s mentioned at all. Ditto the Biden administration, which has made protecting democracy its core argument for a second term and yet seems to view the real-world implications of the First Amendment as an afterthought, if not a hindrance.
Indeed, one report suggested that Team Biden agrees with its odd-couple ally the Netanyahu government in wanting the public to know as little as possible about the extent of the destruction and killing in Gaza, Politico reported last week that a Biden administration fear, in negotiating a temporary cease-fire, was that it “would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.”
This kind of malarkey is what I find so alarming about our increasingly Orwellian present, and even dimmer future. It’s not just that the newest generation of chest-thumping strongmen are harnessing the electrons of the 21st century to hypercharge their modern Ministries of Untruth, but that the guardians of the actual truth — the newsroom grand poobahs, an American president who claims he ran to save democracy — are passively watching it slip from our hands.
After Niagara Falls, and Texas, and Gaza, it’s way past time for anyone to think that “it can’t happen here,” because it’s happening now. And the next 12 months may be our last chance to show that we are not going mad, that the people want the truth, and that we will stop fact-based journalism from sliding down Orwell’s memory hole for good.
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
That's Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd. He was recently stabbed in prison.
but you may have a point. The extreme left is similar in some ways. It’s eerily quiet in the mid east topic these days, as there’s been a pause in that horrible war the last few days. But that shows it’s not beyond the left extreme to support fascism either.
Bombs away...
That country has a fascist govt, its leaders are worth billions and billions while the people starve and blaming Israel is a convenient excuse to perpetuate their wealth. And supporting their cause right now leads to what? More of the same? Shouldn’t the goal for ending this war be for providing for a pro democracy anti Iran govt there?
also serious question. if you don't like it here, why do you come back? i'm sure you can find more pleasant ways to spend your day if you do not like it on the view.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
And way too much in the United States.
As is proven by the QtRUmplicans parroting the talking points from the likes of fuQer Qarlson and aleQs jonezing.
But they say that as soon as he regained power, Netanyahu — who as a candidate had pledged to “knock out the rule of Hamas in Gaza” — instead largely pursued a strategy that didn’t disrupt the status quo of a divided Palestinian population, leaving Hamas to rule in Gaza and the rival Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
That schism served the purposes of Netanyahu and opponents of a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict by hobbling the Palestinians’ ability to oppose Israel’s occupation, analysts said.
“With no unified leadership, Bibi was able to say he couldn’t move forward with peace negotiations,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and political analyst, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname. “It allowed him to say, ‘There is no one to talk to.’”
The situation allowed Netanyahu to largely sideline the “Palestinian question,” an issue that had shaped the tenures of Israeli leaders over the previous four decades. Instead, Netanyahu focused on Iran and other threats and on Israel’s development into an economic powerhouse, according to Netanyahu biographer Anshel Pfeffer.
“Netanyahu always felt that the Palestinian conflict was distraction being used as a wedge issue in Israel,” Pfeffer said. “He called it a ‘rabbit hole.’”
Year after year, successive Netanyahu cabinets approved moves that had the effect of easing pressure on Hamas: Israel agreed to periodic prisoner releases, the transfer of money from Qatar to pay public salaries in Gaza, improve infrastructure and, critics say, fund Hamas military operations.
The prime minister hoped to prevent any reconciliation between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, even when the two sides came close to rapprochement in 2018.
“In the last 10 years, Netanyahu worked to block any attempt at demolishing Hamas in Gaza,” Raz said.
Netanyahu’s office declined to provide anyone to respond on the record. But a senior government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity denied that the prime minister ever pursued a policy of keeping Hamas in power.
Netanyahu and Hamas depended on each other. Both may be on the way out. - The Washington Post
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There are no kings inside the gates of eden
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
Much ink has been spilled describing the longtime relationship – rather, alliance – between Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. And still, the very fact that there has been close cooperation between the Israeli prime minister (with the support of many on the right) and the fundamentalist organization seemingly evaporated from most of the current analyses – everyone’s talking about “failures,” “mistakes” and “contzeptziot” (fixed conceptions). Given this, there is a need not only to review the history of cooperation but also to conclude unequivocally: The pogrom of October 7, 2023, helps Netanyahu, and not for the first time, to preserve his rule, certainly in the short term.
The MO of Netanyahu’s policy since his return to the Prime Minister’s Office in 2009 has and continues to be, on the one hand, bolstering the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and, on the other, weakening the Palestinian Authority.
His return to power was accompanied by a complete turnaround from the policy of his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, who sought to end the conflict through a peace treaty with the most moderate Palestinian leader – PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
For the last 14 years, while implementing a divide-and-conquer policy vis-a-vis the West Bank and Gaza, “Abu Yair” (“Yair’s father,” in Arabic, as Netanyahu called himself while campaigning in the Arab community before one recent election) has resisted any attempt, military or diplomatic, that might bring an end to the Hamas regime.
In practice, since the Cast Lead operation in late 2008 and early 2009, during the Olmert era, Hamas’ rule has not faced any genuine military threat. On the contrary: The group has been supported by the Israeli prime minister, and funded with his assistance.
When Netanyahu declared in April 2019, as he has after every other round of fighting, that “we have restored deterrence with Hamas” and that “we have blocked the main supply routes,” he was lying through his teeth.
For over a decade, Netanyahu has lent a hand, in various ways, to the growing military and political power of Hamas. Netanyahu is the one who turned Hamas from a terror organization with few resources into a semi-state body.
Releasing Palestinian prisoners, allowing cash transfers, as the Qatari envoy comes and goes to Gaza as he pleases, agreeing to the import of a broad array of goods, construction materials in particular, with the knowledge that much of the material will be designated for terrorism and not for building civilian infrastructure, increasing the number of work permits in Israel for Palestinian workers from Gaza, and more. All these developments created symbiosis between the flowering of fundamentalist terrorism and preservation of Netanyahu’s rule.
Take note: It would be a mistake to assume that Netanyahu thought about the well-being of the poor and oppressed Gazans – who are also victims of Hamas – when allowing the transfer of funds (some of which, as noted, didn’t go to building infrastructure but rather military armament). His goal was to hurt Abbas and prevent division of the Land of Israel into two states.
It’s important to remember that without those funds from Qatar (and Iran), Hamas would not have had the money to maintain its reign of terror, and its regime would have been dependent on restraint.
In practice, the injection of cash (as opposed to bank deposits, which are far more accountable) from Qatar, a practice that Netanyahu supported and approved, has served to strengthen the military arm of Hamas since 2012.
Thus, Netanyahu indirectly funded Hamas after Abbas decided to stop providing it with funds that he knew would end up being used for terrorism against him, his policies and his people. It’s important not to ignore that Hamas used this money to buy the means through which Israelis have been murdered for years.
In parallel, from a security standpoint, since Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Netanyahu has been guided by a policy that almost completely ignored the terrorism of the rockets and the incendiary kites and balloons. Occasionally, the media has been exposed to a dog-and-pony show, when such weapons were captured, but not more than that.
It’s worth reminding that last year, the “government of change” (the short-lived coalition led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid) exercised a different policy, one of whose expressions was the halting of funding for Hamas arriving via suitcases full of cash. When Netanyahu tweeted, on May 30, 2022, that “Hamas is interested in the existence of the weak Bennett government,” he was lying to the public. The government of change was a disaster for Hamas.
Netanyahu’s nightmare was the collapse of the Hamas regime – something that Israel could have expedited, albeit for a difficult price. One of the proofs for this claim was given during Operation Protective Edge.
At the time, Netanyahu leaked to the media the contents of a presentation that the military had made to the security cabinet laying out the potential repercussions of conquering Gaza. The premier knew that the secret document, which noted that occupying Gaza would cost the lives of hundreds of soldiers, would create an atmosphere of opposition to a widespread ground invasion.
In March 2019, Naftali Bennett told the Channel 13 program Hamakor: “Someone took care to leak that to the media to create an excuse for not taking action… it’s one of the gravest leaks in Israeli history.” Of course, the leak was not investigated, despite many demands from members of the Knesset. In closed-door conversations, Benny Gantz said then, when he was the IDF’s chief of staff, “Bibi leaked this.”
Let this sink in. Netanyahu leaked a “top secret” document in order to thwart the military and diplomatic position of the cabinet, which sought to defeat Hamas with various means. We should heed what Avigdor Lieberman told Yedioth Ahronoth, in an interview published just before the October 7 assault, that Netanyahu “continuously thwarted all the targeted assassinations.”
It should be stressed that Netanyahu’s policy of keeping Hamas in charge in Gaza didn’t find expression only through opposition to physical occupation of Gaza and to assassinations of key Hamas players, but also in his determination to thwart any political reconciliation between the PA – Fatah in particular – and Hamas. A prominent example is Netanyahu’s behavior in late 2017, when talks between Fatah and Hamas were actually taking place.
A fundamental disagreement between Abbas and Hamas concerned the question of the Islamist group’s military being subordinate to to the PA. Hamas agreed that the PA would return to running all civilian matters in Gaza but refused to yield its arms.
Egypt and the United States supported reconciliation and worked to achieve it. Netanyahu totally opposed the idea, asserting repeatedly that “reconciliation between Hamas and the PLO makes achieving peace harder.” Of course, Netanyahu didn’t pursue peace, which wasn’t on the agenda in any way back then. His position only served Hamas.
Over the years, from time to time, various figures on both sides of the political spectrum repeatedly pointed to the axis of cooperation between Netanyahu and Hamas. On the one hand, for example, Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet security service from 2005 to 2011, told Yedioth Ahronoth in January 2013, “If we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas’s strengthening has been Bibi Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister.”
In August 2019, former prime minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio that people who believed that Netanyahu had no strategy were mistaken. “His strategy is to keep Hamas alive and kicking… even at the price of abandoning the citizens [of the south] … in order to weaken the PA in Ramallah.”
And former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot told Maariv in January 2022 that Netanyahu acted “in total opposition to the national assessment of the National Security Council, which determined that there was a need to disconnect from the Palestinians and establish two states.” Israel moved in the exact opposition direction, weakening the PA and strengthening Hamas.
Shin Bet head Nadav Argaman spoke about this when he finished his term in 2021. He warned explicitly that the lack of dialogue between Israel and the PA had the effect of weakening the latter while bolstering Hamas.
He warned that the relative quiet in the West Bank at the time was deceptive, and that “Israel must find a way to cooperate with the PA and to strengthen it.” Eisenkot commented, in that same 2022 interview, that Argaman was right. “This is what’s happening, and it’s dangerous,” he added.
People on the right said similar things. One of the mantras being repeated was that of newly elected MK Bezalel Smotrich, who in 2015 told the Knesset Channel that “Hamas is an asset and Abu Mazen is a burden,” referring to Abbas by his nom de guerre.
In April 2019, Jonatan Urich, one of Netanyahu’s media advisers and a Likud spokesman, told Makor Rishon that one of Netanyahu’s achievements was separating Gaza (both politically and conceptually) from the West Bank. Netanyahu “basically smashed the vision of the Palestinian state in these two places,” he boasted. “Some of the achievement is related to the Qatari money reaching Hamas each month.”
Around the same time in 2019, Likud MK Galit Distel Atbaryan wrote in an effusively complimentary Facebook post: “We must say this honestly – Netanyahu wants Hamas on its feet, and he is ready to pay almost any incomprehensible price for this. Half the country is paralyzed, children and parents are suffering from post-trauma, homes are blown up, people are killed, a street cat holds a nuclear tiger by the balls.” Read it but don’t believe it? It’s worth believing, because this is exactly the policy by which Netanyahu comported himself.
The prime minister himself spoke briefly at times about his position regarding Hamas. In March 2019, he said during a meeting of Likud MKs, at which the subject of transfer of funds to Hamas was under discussion, that, “Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must support delivery of funds to Gaza because maintaining separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
In a tweet two months later, Channel 13 quoted former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as telling a Kuwaiti newspaper: “Netanyahu isn’t interested in a two-state solution. Rather, he wants to separate Gaza from the West Bank, as he told me at the end of 2010.”
Gen. (Res.) Gershon Hacohen, a prominent right winger, made things crystal clear in an interview with the online magazine Mida in May 2019. “When Netanyahu didn’t go to war in Gaza to defeat the Hamas regime, he basically prevented Abu Mazen from establishing a united Palestinian state,” he recalled at the time. “We need to exploit the situation of separation created between Gaza and Ramallah. It’s an Israeli interest of the highest level, and you can’t understand the situation in Gaza without understanding this context.”
Netanyahu’s entire policy since 2009 has sought to destroy any possibility of a diplomatic agreement with the Palestinians. It’s the theme of his rule, which depends on the continuation of the conflict. Destroying democracy is an additional aspect of his continuing rule, something that has brought many of us out to the streets during the past year.
In that same 2019 interview with Army Radio, Barak said that Netanyahu was keeping the south “on a constant low flame.” One should pay particular attention to his assertion that the security establishment laid on the cabinet table several times plans “to drain the swamp” of Hamas in Gaza, but the cabinet never discussed them.
Netanyahu knew, Barak added, “that it’s easier with Hamas to explain to Israelis that there is no one to sit with and no one to talk to. If the PA strengthens… then there will be someone to talk to.”
Back to Distel Atbaryan: “Mark my words – Benjamin Netanyahu keeps Hamas on its feet so that the entire State of Israel won’t become the ‘Gaza envelope.’” She warned of disaster “if Hamas collapses,” in which case, “Abu Mazen is liable to control Gaza. If he will control it, voices from the left will arise advocating negotiations and a diplomatic settlement and a Palestinian state, including in Judea and Samaria.” Netanyahu’s mouthpieces are incessantly pumping out such messages.
Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas have an unspoken political alliance against their common enemy – the Palestinian Authority. In other words, Netanyahu has cooperation and agreement with a group whose goal is the destruction of the State of Israel and the murder of Jews.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was on the mark when he wrote in May 2021, at the time of the establishment of the government of change, that Netanyahu and Hamas were scared of the possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough. He wrote that the premier and Hamas both “wanted to destroy the possibility of political change before it could destroy them politically.”
He then explained that they didn’t need to talk or have an agreement between them. “They each understand what the other needs to stay in power and consciously or unconsciously behave in ways to ensure that they deliver it.”
I could go on and on expanding on the subject of this cooperation, but the preceding examples speak for themselves. The 2023 pogrom is a result of Netanyahu’s policy. It is not “a failure of the concept” – rather, this is the concept: Netanyahu and Hamas are political partners, and both sides have fulfilled their side of the bargain.
In the future, more details will emerge that will shed additional light on that mutual understanding. Don’t make the mistake of thinking – even now – that as long as Netanyahu and his present government are responsible for making decisions, the Hamas regime will collapse. There will be a lot of talk and pyrotechnics about the current “war against terror,” but sustaining Hamas is more important to Netanyahu than a few dead kibbutzniks.
A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance (rsn.org)
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