Palestinian children and young adults released by Israel reported rapes, starvation, and had evidence of broken bones.
Well if biden is complicit in war crimes going on right now in Gaza, then he needs to be arrested.
You think I'm praying when I confront your denial of Israel's war crimes?
No, as I never denied the commission of war crimes, I just think you're lying.
Good luck with that.
Has anyone seen proof of ‘Hamas’ atrocities’?
The United Nations has heard accounts of sexual violence during the 7 October attacks by Hamas, in a meeting where speakers also attacked women’s rights activists and UN officials for not doing more to investigate or condemn these crimes.
Israeli officials and frontline workers, senior US politicians and activists from both countries spoke at the meeting on Monday, organised in part by former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg. She told those gathered that “silence is complicity”.Hamas denies that its fighters carried out sexual violence; Sandberg asked if the world should believe them, or “the women whose bodies tell us how they spent the last minutes of their lives” and called for a “full and fair investigation” from the UN.
Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, in a recorded message, said: “It is outrageous that some who claim to stand for justice are closing their minds and their hearts to the victims of Hamas.”
US president Joe Biden denounced the alleged sexual violence, calling on the world to condemn such conduct “without equivocation” and “without exception”.
“Reports of women raped – repeatedly raped – and their bodies being mutilated while still alive – of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them,” Biden said at a campaign fundraiser in Boston. “It is appalling.”
In a statement on its Telegram channel, Hamas denounced Biden’s statements as false accusations and said he was joining Israel’s effort to cover up war crimes in Gaza committed with US support.
The UN meeting, attended by about 800 people including diplomats from dozens of countries, watched videos from police interviews with first responders who described genital mutilation and shooting at breasts. A survivor of the attack on the Supernova rave described witnessing a gang-rape.
Two first responders from Israel addressed the UN in person. Simcha Greinman, who collected victims’ remains from the sites of attacks, described finding a woman’s body, naked from the waist down, leaning over a bed.
The corpse had been booby trapped with a live grenade, hidden in the woman’s hand, he added. Among the bodies he recovered were two people who had suffered genital mutilation, one a woman who had “nails and different objects” in her genitals, the other so badly damaged “we couldn’t even identify if it’s a man or a woman”.
Shari Mendes, an architect who prepares bodies for burial, said her team leader “saw several female soldiers who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in the breast. This seemed to be systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims.”
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand described video of a fresh bloodstain on the crotch of a teenage hostage, visible when she was dragged out of a Jeep in Gaza soon after her abduction, as evidence of sexual assault, and joined other speakers calling for activists to condemn Hamas.
“When I saw the list of women’s rights organisations who have said nothing, I nearly choked. Where is the solidarity?” she told the meeting.
A UN commission of inquiry investigating war crimes on both sides of the Israel-Hamas conflict has said it would focus on sexual violence by Hamas in the 7 October attacks on Israel and was about to launch an appeal for evidence, Reuters reported last week.
However its work is likely to be hampered by the fact that Israel has not cooperated with the commission, which it accuses of having an anti-Israel bias.
Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, said that “dozens” of women and some men were raped by Hamas militants.
“We are investigating sexual crimes against both women and men perpetrated by Hamas terrorists,” Binyamin said in an interview with The New York Times. “There were violent rape incidents, the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen, of both women and men. I am talking about dozens.”
He cited autopsies, forensic evidence and confessions from captured Hamas fighters, as well as testimony, videos and still images of the attack. He said he could not comment further on an ongoing investigation.
Evidence of sexual violence that has been made public by Israeli authorities includes accounts from surviving witnesses and first responders who handled the damaged bodies.
Women’s rights groups in Israel warned last month of significant failings in preserving forensic evidence that could have shone a light on the scale of sexual violence committed against women and girls in last month’s Hamas attacks.
Several incidents of sexual assault and rape from 7 October have been documented by Hamas body camera footage, CCTV, material uploaded to social media, and photographs and videos taken by civilians and first responders, according to several people involved in analysing the footage. Survivor and witness testimonies, many from the Supernova rave, describe seeing women being raped before they were shot.
The Observer view on Joe Biden: he struck a blow against Donald Trump, but the fight is only just beginning
Biden has come out punching, but the polls aren’t on his side, and he’s up against a man who always plays dirty
Joe Biden, as US president, likes to stand above the fray, conscious of the dignity of his office and the awesome power he wields. Joe Biden, as Democratic party presidential candidate, running for a second term and determined to prove the doubters wrong, is happy to wade right in. It was this second, combative incarnation that was on display at George Washington’s war of independence base in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on Friday. Biden came out punching.
His target was Donald Trump, the almost certain Republican choice to challenge him in November’s election. His theme was the threat that the former president, who continues to falsely claim that he won the 2020 contest, poses to the post-independence democratic tradition. “Today we’re here to answer the most important of questions: is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” Biden said. “America, as we begin this election year, we must be clear: democracy is on the ballot.”
Rhetoric aside, Biden and the Democrats do not lack facts to fortify their arguments. Trump applauded as “patriots” the rioters who attacked Capitol Hill and tried to overthrow the election in January 2021. He has spoken of abolishing the US constitution, assuming dictatorial powers and vengefully pursuing retribution against those who call him to account. They include federal judges who will oversee the nearly 100 criminal felony charges he faces this year.
The first votes in the Republican and Democrat 2024 election primaries and caucuses are due to be cast in Iowa (or, in the Democrats’ case, mailed) in the coming days.
Biden and Democrats running for Congress are highlighting issues such as abortion rights wrecked in 2022 by Trump-appointed supreme court justices, minority rights, the climate crisis and the post-pandemic recovery that has brought a return to growth and new jobs – for which the White House claims credit.
Yet Biden’s Valley Forge insistence that Trump is a “loser”, while accurate in retrospect, looks highly questionable going forward. American voters, on the whole, do not give their current president much credit for his domestic achievements, including the Inflation Reduction Act that boosted clean energy and cut healthcare costs. Biden’s national approval rating hovers around 40%.
Polls suggest that many voters think he is too old, at 81, to run again.
Biden’s feisty performance at Valley Forge, kicking off a busy schedule of campaign events, was partly designed to dispel such misgivings. Yet there are 10 months to go. Many wonder openly whether he will stand the pace. It is almost certainly too late to replace him as Democratic nominee – although vice-president Kamala Harris and California governor Gavin Newsom are often mentioned. And all the time Trump and the Republicans will be pounding him hard.
In some ways, Biden has been remarkably unlucky. He inherited huge damage caused by the Covid pandemic, a losing hand in Afghanistan and an extremely hostile China. Then came the biggest war in Europe since 1945, the cost of living crisis and raging inflation. Now there is the Israel-Palestine conflict, which has split Democratic voters.
Meanwhile, Trump, 77, unabashed by all the scandals, lies and pending court cases, is intent, as in 2016, on dividing Americans into warring camps for his own advantage. Obsessively pursuing the post-2020 vindication he craves, he is weaponising race, gender, class and issues such as taxes, migration and gun ownership. He is more than 50 points ahead of his nearest Republican rival. Nationally, he and Biden are neck and neck. A recent survey found Trump leading in five of the six most important “swing” states.
Only one thing is certain. It’s going to be a helluva fight.
THIS ELECTION YEAR IS UNLIKE ANY OTHER
At the outset of this election year, with Donald Trump leading the race to be the Republican presidential nominee, Americans should pause to consider what a second Trump term would mean for our country and the world and to weigh the serious responsibility this election places on their shoulders.
By now, most American voters should have no illusions about who Mr. Trump is. During his many years as a real estate developer and a television personality, then as president and as a dominant figure in the Republican Party, Mr. Trump demonstrated a character and temperament that render him utterly unfit for high office.
As president, he wielded power carelessly and often cruelly and put his ego and his personal needs above the interests of his country. Now, as he campaigns again, his worst impulses remain as strong as ever — encouraging violence and lawlessness, exploiting fear and hate for political gain, undermining the rule of law and the Constitution, applauding dictators — and are escalating as he tries to regain power. He plots retribution, intent on eluding the institutional, legal and bureaucratic restraints that put limits on him in his first term.
Our purpose at the start of the new year, therefore, is to sound a warning.
Mr. Trump does not offer voters anything resembling a normal option of Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, big government or small. He confronts America with a far more fateful choice: between the continuance of the United States as a nation dedicated to “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” and a man who has proudly shown open disdain for the law and the protections and ideals of the Constitution.
If in 2016 various factions of the electorate were prepared to look beyond Mr. Trump’s bombast in the hope that he might deliver whatever it was they wanted without too much damage to the nation, today there is no mystery about what he will do should he win, about the sorts of people he will surround himself with and the personal and political goals he will pursue. There is no mystery, either, about the consequences for the world if America re-elects a leader who openly displays his contempt for its allies.
Mr. Trump’s four years in the White House did lasting damage to the presidency and to the nation. He deepened existing divisions among Americans, leaving the country dangerously polarized; he so demeaned public discourse that many Americans have become inured to lies, insults and personal attacks at the highest levels of leadership. His contempt for the rule of law raised concerns about the long-term stability of American democracy, and his absence of a moral compass threatened to corrode the ideals of national service.
The Republic weathered Mr. Trump’s presidency for a variety of reasons: his lack of prepared agenda, the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efforts of appointees who tried to temper his most dangerous or unreasonable demands. Most important, it survived because of the people and institutions in his administration and in the Republican Party who proved strong enough to stand up to his efforts to undermine the peaceful transfer of power.
It is instructive in the aftermath of that administration to listen to the judgments of some of these officials on the president they served. John Kelly, a chief of staff to Mr. Trump, called him the “most flawed person I’ve ever met,” someone who could not understand why Americans admired those who sacrificed their lives in combat. Bill Barr, who served as attorney general, and Mark Esper, a former defense secretary, both said Mr. Trump repeatedly put his own interests over those of the country. Even the most loyal and conservative of them all, Vice President Mike Pence, who made the stand that helped provoke Mr. Trump and his followers to insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, saw through the man: “On that day, President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution,” he said.
There will not be people like these in the White House should Mr. Trump be re-elected. The former president has no interest in being restrained, and he has surrounded himself with people who want to institutionalize the MAGA doctrine. According to reporting by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan, Mr. Trump and his ideological allies have been planning for a second Trump term for many months already. Under the name Project 2025, one coalition of right-wing organizations has produced a thick handbook and recruited thousands of potential appointees in preparation for an all-out assault on the structures of American government and the democratic institutions that acted as checks on Mr. Trump’s power.
The project ties in with plans from Mr. Trump and his supporters to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers so they can be fired if they do not buy fully into the Trump agenda. He also plans to strip the Justice Department of its independence in order to use it to wreak vengeance on those who, in his view, failed to concoct a victory for him in the 2020 election or otherwise didn’t support his unconstitutional demands. There is more, including threats by Mr. Trump to find ways to use federal troops against those who might protest his policies and practices. These ambitions demonstrate that the years out of office and the mounting legal challenges he faces have only sharpened his worst instincts.
Mr. Trump was impeached twice as president and since leaving office has been charged in four criminal cases — two related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, one over hush money paid to a porn star and another for hoarding classified documents after he left office and impeding the government’s efforts to retrieve them. No other sitting or former president has ever been indicted on criminal charges. Not only has Mr. Trump shown no remorse for these actions, he has given no sign that he understands these indictments to be anything but a political crusade meant to undermine him. He continues to claim that the Jan. 6 insurrection has been misrepresented. “There was love and unity,” he said in an interview last August. And he has suggested that, if re-elected, he could use his presidential powers to pardon himself.
Mr. Trump’s forays into foreign affairs remain dangerously misguided and incoherent. During his presidency, he displayed consistent admiration for autocratic leaders — including Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un — and contempt for our democratic allies. While in the White House, he repeatedly threatened to leave NATO, an alliance critical to the stability of Europe that he sees only as a drain on American resources; now his campaign website says, without elaborating, that he plans to “finish” the process of “fundamentally re-evaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.”
He has announced his intention to abandon Ukraine, leaving it and its neighbors vulnerable to further Russian aggression. Encouraged by an American president, leaders who rule with an iron fist in Hungary, Israel, India and elsewhere would face far less moral or democratic pressure.
Mr. Trump has made clear his conviction that only “losers” accept legal, institutional or even constitutional constraints. He has promised vengeance against his political opponents, whom he has called “vermin” and threatened with execution. This is particularly disturbing at a time of heightened concern about political violence, with threats increasing against elected officials of both parties.
He has repeatedly demonstrated a deep disdain for the First Amendment and the basic principles of democracy, chief among them the right to freely express peaceful dissent from those in power without fear of retaliation, and he has made no secret of his readiness to expand the powers of the presidency, including the deployment of the military and the Justice Department, to have his way.
Democracy in the United States is stronger with a formidable conservative political movement to keep diversity of thought alive on important questions, such as the nation’s approaches to immigration, education, national security and fiscal responsibility. There should be room for real disagreement on any of these topics and many more — and there is a long tradition of it across the American experiment. But that is not what the former president is seeking.
Re-electing Mr. Trump would present serious dangers to our Republic and to the world. This is a time not to sit out but instead to re-engage. We appeal to Americans to set aside their political differences, grievances and party affiliations and to contemplate — as families, as parishes, as councils and clubs and as individuals — the real magnitude of the choice they will make in November.
Seems more like the United States of Israel.
Quote:Seems more like the United States of Israel.
That would certainly explain biden siding with a regime involved in war crimes. What else could explain his numbness to the suffering of innocent people?
This is from The Guardian which does NOT clear its dispatches with the IDF before publication.
But CNN seems to be unique in maintaining this policy, unlike other major outlets, The Intercept wrote.
The Jerusalem CNN staff who review the reporting do so under the watchful eye of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which, as The Intercept has previously reported, is maintaining strict media bans around the genocide in Gaza, including censorship of topics and stories that may be embarrassing to the IDF. All reporters in Israel must sign an agreement to abide by such rules set by the IDF, and Israel has reportedly censored thousands of news stories since the beginning of the current massacre in Gaza.
CNN’s practice of routing coverage through the Jerusalem bureau does not mean that the military censor directly reviews every story. Still, the policy stands in contrast to other major news outlets, which in the past have run sensitive stories through desks outside of Israel to avoid the pressure of the censor.
“The policy of running stories about Israel or the Palestinians past the Jerusalem bureau has been in place for years,” a CNN spokesperson told The Intercept in an email. “It is simply down to the fact that there are many unique and complex local nuances that warrant extra scrutiny to make sure our reporting is as precise and accurate as possible.”
The spokesperson added that the protocol “has no impact on our (minimal) interactions with the Israeli Military Censor — and we do not share copy with them (or any government body) in advance. We will seek comment from Israeli and other relevant officials before publishing stories, but this is just good journalistic practice.”
In a separate directive dated November 2, Senior Director of News Standards and Practices David Lindsey cautioned reporters from relaying statements from Hamas. “As the Israel-Gaza war continues, Hamas representatives are engaging in inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda. Most of it has been said many times before and is not newsworthy. We should be careful not to give it a platform.” He added, though, that “if a senior Hamas official makes a claim or threat that is editorially relevant, such as changing their messaging or trying to rewrite events, we can use it if it’s accompanied by greater context.”
This is from The Guardian which does NOT clear its dispatches with the IDF before publication.
Quote:The United Nations has heard accounts of sexual violence during the 7 October attacks by Hamas, in a meeting where speakers also attacked women’s rights activists and UN officials for not doing more to investigate or condemn these crimes.
Quote:
Somebody made claims. They threw 'women's rights activists' in to create umbrage and legitimacy and ended with a phrase to make people feel guilty. Devoid of legitimate evidence.
Israeli officials and frontline workers, senior US politicians and activists from both countries spoke at the meeting on Monday, organised in part by former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg. She told those gathered that “silence is complicity”.Hamas denies that its fighters carried out sexual violence; Sandberg asked if the world should believe them, or “the women whose bodies tell us how they spent the last minutes of their lives” and called for a “full and fair investigation” from the UN.
Quote:The first bolded phrase lists the groups conducting the genocide against Palestine who are heavily invested in making Hamas seem like monsters as a casus belli for their on-going extermination of the residents of Gaza. Why in the F is Meta exec Sheryl Sandberg of any importance? Billionaire establishment shill Mark Zuckerberg's number 2 at his empire, heavily funded and supported by the US security state... Was she on hand in the last few minutes of those women's lives? Hearsay. Pathos.
Fact free.
Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, in a recorded message, said: “It is outrageous that some who claim to stand for justice are closing their minds and their hearts to the victims of Hamas.”
Quote:Nothing more than name dropping of the Blue Wave Queen to assemble the devotees and distract the on-going genocide.
US president Joe Biden denounced the alleged sexual violence, calling on the world to condemn such conduct “without equivocation” and “without exception”.
Quote:Bringing in Biden's name for gravitas among the Blue devotees where alleged is minimized by condemn, without equivocation and without exception.
“Reports of women raped – repeatedly raped – and their bodies being mutilated while still alive – of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them,” Biden said at a campaign fundraiser in Boston. “It is appalling.”
Quote:100% fabulist hearsay spoken by a president in public. As said regarding Trump--a president should be careful about what they say when investigations are in progress. He intentionally said it as if it were fact to cloud the horror of the war crimes he's sponsoring in Gaza.
In a statement on its Telegram channel, Hamas denounced Biden’s statements as false accusations and said he was joining Israel’s effort to cover up war crimes in Gaza committed with US support.
The UN meeting, attended by about 800 people including diplomats from dozens of countries, watched videos from police interviews with first responders who described genital mutilation and shooting at breasts. A survivor of the attack on the Supernova rave described witnessing a gang-rape.
Quote:I also saw an IDF-aligned first responder who waved her arms about, gave a story about genital mutilation, beheaded babies, breasts cut off etc who I found completely unbelievable--later this narrative was abandoned when evidence for these accusations could not be cited / found.I am open, however to the investigation of the 'survivor of the attack.'
Two first responders from Israel addressed the UN in person. Simcha Greinman, who collected victims’ remains from the sites of attacks, described finding a woman’s body, naked from the waist down, leaning over a bed.
The corpse had been booby trapped with a live grenade, hidden in the woman’s hand, he added. Among the bodies he recovered were two people who had suffered genital mutilation, one a woman who had “nails and different objects” in her genitals, the other so badly damaged “we couldn’t even identify if it’s a man or a woman”.
Shari Mendes, an architect who prepares bodies for burial, said her team leader “saw several female soldiers who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in the breast. This seemed to be systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims.”
Quote:Hearsay. Let's see evidence--BUT they were soldiers.
I've seen footage and evidence of civilians including children shot in cold blood on the street, beaten, and hit with white phospherous and bombs. Thousands.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand described video of a fresh bloodstain on the crotch of a teenage hostage, visible when she was dragged out of a Jeep in Gaza soon after her abduction, as evidence of sexual assault, and joined other speakers calling for activists to condemn Hamas.
Quote:I saw her too. I was scared to death for her. I noticed a lot of blood in the seat of her pants when they pulled out of the back of the car and walked her around to the back seat. I also noticed she walked with normal strides and strength, and I immediately understood that rapes which could produce that much blood would render it impossible for her to walk that normally. It was obvious that so much blood was from her cycle.
“When I saw the list of women’s rights organisations who have said nothing, I nearly choked. Where is the solidarity?” she told the meeting.
A UN commission of inquiry investigating war crimes on both sides of the Israel-Hamas conflict has said it would focus on sexual violence by Hamas in the 7 October attacks on Israel and was about to launch an appeal for evidence, Reuters reported last week.
Quote:After all those accusations, now admitting they have no evidence.
However its work is likely to be hampered by the fact that Israel has not cooperated with the commission, which it accuses of having an anti-Israel bias.
Quote:Why wouldn't Israel give evidence to prove these accusations? Why would anyone withhold evidence to prove their claims???
Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, said that “dozens” of women and some men were raped by Hamas militants.
Quote:Hearsay.
“We are investigating sexual crimes against both women and men perpetrated by Hamas terrorists,” Binyamin said in an interview with The New York Times. “There were violent rape incidents, the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen, of both women and men. I am talking about dozens.”
Quote:Hearsay.
He cited autopsies, forensic evidence and confessions from captured Hamas fighters, as well as testimony, videos and still images of the attack. He said he could not comment further on an ongoing investigation.
Quote:He said he has these things--but none shown. He cited... Hearsay.
Evidence of sexual violence that has been made public by Israeli authorities includes accounts from surviving witnesses and first responders who handled the damaged bodies.
Quote:Where is that evidence?
Women’s rights groups in Israel warned last month of significant failings in preserving forensic evidence that could have shone a light on the scale of sexual violence committed against women and girls in last month’s Hamas attacks.
Quote:So, wait. Didn't they JUST SAY they had the evidence? And now they're laying the ground work to explain why they don't have evidence?
Several incidents of sexual assault and rape from 7 October have been documented by Hamas body camera footage, CCTV, material uploaded to social media, and photographs and videos taken by civilians and first responders, according to several people involved in analysing the footage. Survivor and witness testimonies, many from the Supernova rave, describe seeing women being raped before they were shot.
Quote:Have you seen this evidence? They say what it is and where it is, so why don't they use it instead of not complying with requests for evidence?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/05/un-hears-accounts-of-sexual-violence-during-7-october-attacks-by-hamas
