War in Gaza Won’t End in 2024 – Israel
Israel will continue to wage war in Gaza throughout 2024, Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a statement on Sunday. Describing a strategic shift to what he called the “smart” management of IDF troops, Hagari revealed that five reservist brigades were being taken out of combat, supposedly to reinvigorate the Israeli economy as the country settles in for a prolonged conflict.
“The goals of the war require lengthy fighting, and we are prepared accordingly,” he said, explaining that sending the reservists back home “will result in considerable relief for the economy, and will allow them to gain strength for operations next year, and the fighting will continue and we will need them.”
The IDF spokesman’s prediction followed similar comments from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned during a press conference on Saturday that “many more months” of fighting still lay ahead.
The government has categorically rejected international pleas for a ceasefire amid the mounting death toll in Gaza, where its AI-enhanced bombing campaign has resulted in over 21,800 Palestinian deaths since Hamas’ October 7 surprise attack, according to the enclave’s health ministry. Another 56,000 have been seriously wounded, and 85% of the enclave’s approximately 2.3 million residents have been displaced.
The US has consistently stood by Israel throughout the current stage of the conflict, including by vetoing UN Security Council resolutions demanding a ceasefire. However, even Washington has clashed with its Middle Eastern ally over Gaza’s future. Netanyahu has said the territory will remain under Israeli control after the war, while the US has called for it to be run by the Palestinian Authority as a step towards a two-state solution; the organization governs the West Bank and previously oversaw Gaza before Hamas took power following elections in 2007.
The Israeli government vehemently opposes Palestinian statehood, to the point that Netanyahu has openly boasted of his role in preventing it during several rounds of peace talks over the years.
On Sunday, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich suggested that the government “encourage migration” of Palestinians out of Gaza and reestablish the Jewish settlements that were dismantled there in 2005. In an interview with Army Radio, he observed that “the entire discussion about ‘the day after’ would be completely different” if 90% of the enclave’s Arab inhabitants would just ethnically cleanse themselves.
While an official with Netanyahu’s office subsequently told the Associated Press that “contrary to false allegations, Israel does not seek to displace the population in Gaza,” but merely looks to “enable those individuals who wish to leave to do so,” a government document leaked last month called for the mass relocation of all of the territory’s residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula – a plan that alarmed Palestinians and Egyptians alike.
Over One-Third of Americans Say Biden’s Election Was Not Legitimate – Poll
A growing number of Americans, or more than one-third of US adults believe that US President Joe Biden’s 2020 election was not legitimate, a new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll revealed on Tuesday.
While the majority of US adults (62%) still consider Biden’s 2020 win legitimate, 36% have an opposite view on the matter. This represents a 7% increase compared with poll results for the same question in December 2021, when only 29% said Biden’s election victory was not legitimate.
The share of Republicans who consider Biden’s election victory legitimate has shrunk from 39% three years ago to only 31% now. Meanwhile, the number of Democrats who think Biden was legitimately elected decreased from 94% to 91%, according to the poll.
At the same time, almost two-thirds of US adults, or 63%, expressed confidence that there was no solid evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, according to the survey.
The poll also found that 50% of Americans believe that protesters who entered the US Capitol during the January 6, 2021 riot were “mostly violent.”
Moreover, 53% believe that former President Donald Trump bears either “great deal” (37%) or a “good amount” (16%) of responsibility for the attack on the Capitol.
The nationwide poll was conducted online and by phone on December 14-18, 2023, among 1,024 adults.
On January 6, 2021, after Trump’s election defeat, a mob of his protesters breached the US Capitol in an attempt to halt Congress’s Electoral College vote count. Since the riot, charges have been filed against more than 1,200 individuals for crimes related to the breach of the Capitol.
Electronic Fog of War
COUNTERREVOLUTION IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
Alongside the complexity of the geopolitical questions and the intensity of the passions that Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip continues to provoke, the conflict also has exacerbated and exemplified, and perhaps clarified, the global metaphysical reality which extends beyond it: the post-truth reality that animates the Western mind.
Beginning with the murder of civilians in Southern Israel on October 7, the truth of every incident has been aggressively contested, regardless of the strength of evidence behind them. Across a no man’s land of information warfare, divided by the friend/enemy distinction, every fact presented by one side as decisive is rejected by the other as propaganda.
This situation itself presents a kind of fact that needs to be considered alongside other axes of analysis. We are enveloped by an electronic fog of war, chaotically combining symbols, interests, and emotions into an immersive, semi-conscious simulation. This fog today refracts the battlefield of Israel’s war in Gaza, but it precedes it, and extends beyond it, into an hallucinated future.
We are inside an interzone of ethical and intellectual ambivalence, punctuated by intermittent bursts of random violence. The long-forgotten spectacle of Kony 2012 supplies the template. For three weeks an ecstatic public shuddered at a tale of horror from the heart of darkness, and forgot about it one week later.
Unconscious motives, massaged by cybernetic media, are the key to the spectacular reality of global conflicts. In the ghost parade of former current things, every urgent flashpoint becomes a temporary silhouette of psychic drama. The conditioned reflex of social media consumers mechanically asserting ideological or geopolitical allegiances should be submitted to the “school of suspicion” for examination. What are the psychic and commercial angles to the shadow war of Left and Right? What is the cybernetic logic of projection and apophenic paranoia? Why are certain metaphors and words and symbols chosen, and not others? What is the strategic function of conformism, and the function of transgression in the attention economy? What is the unity of the unconscious, shattered, across a billion mirrored screens?
It’s necessary to drop the liberal pantomime that still imagines politics through the prism of competing parties advocating for material interests. What exists today is a consumer simulation of that logic. With the extension of cybernetic media and its destruction of the older liberal media politics is content in a global matrix of pathology triangulated like a sex show or a multiplayer game. The current thing at any given moment is never the most salient, but the most emotionally magnetic, according to the passing mood, which changes like the weather in response to broken butterflies and solar breeze.
So-called climate change in fact refers obliquely “through a scanner darkly” to this changing cultural and social climate. What Bernard Steigler described as an “uncontrollable society of disaffected individuals” has been brought into being through the destruction of meaningful human communities and the liquidation of their concomitant intellectual and moral structures.
Commodified dreams replace private experience. Character flattens into synthetic identity. Man no longer thinks and becomes unsure that he exists. Productions of selfies and autofictions circulate attempt to mask existential anxiety. Pseudo-communities and protest cults emerge as exhibitionist puppet shows in extended ideological universes. The ritual in which social media users photograph meals with their phones has replaced the ritual blessing characteristic of religious communities. Big data eats first. The choice of Hamas fighters on October 7 to film themselves murdering Israeli civilians is paralleled by the media strategies of internet prostitute-artists and criminal hooligan TikTok influencers to obliterate privacy for a cheapened celebrity.
Stiegler emphasizes the “immense rupture” created in the logic of the “calendrical and the cardinal” with the surgical birth of mass media and its development into computerized media. A stellar cosmology organized around natural cycles was replaced by a mass synchronization connected to ideological spectacles. The prototype was the French Revolutionary calendar, which defined a 10-day week to eliminate the sacrament of Christian Sunday. The plethora of new globalist holidays, above all for the deity Pride, is the contemporary update. Meanwhile, revolutionary iconoclasm channeled against national monuments and historical memory imposes a new cardinal landscape where heroes once stood.
The aim is to program the social environment to structure perception within a restricted psychological spectrum. The ideological schematization of politics serves the same purpose. If, over the last decade, the Left has enthusiastically supported every assault on human dignity and freedom, this consistency is not a fluke, but the attraction of the brand. Violence is the point. Ideology is secondary, if not irrelevant, except to the degree it offers targets. What calls itself the Left is a political expression of the desire to destroy, or scream, or profit from destruction. Similarly, if over the past three years, the most cynical actors across the ideological spectrum have been the ones who most consistently invoke the rhetoric of “We” and claim to represent its spokesmen the motives for this tactic aren’t hard to place.
Ideology is second-order rationality embraced to channel drives. Sloterdijk’s formula ira quaerens intellectum defines the general dynamic. Rage, resentment, or ambition locates a story which transmutes it into something else and something more. This is now exemplified by the war against Hamas in Gaza as it plays out as a festival of protest on the streets of European cities, on the campuses of zombie universities, and in the psychic sewer of online. Across all these zones the protests are identity parades seeking to express and ultimately impose a personal and social sense of self inside a non-stop city of deracination, dislocation, derealisation, and disgust.
Any effort to establish the objective truth of incidents or claims or the relevance of historical context is misguided because the war is nothing but the shadow of the protestors themselves. No wonder the description of the conflict is disputed. Is Hamas at war with Israel or is Israel engaged in genocide against the peaceful Palestinian people? Does Hamas, or Antifa, or cancel culture, or accelerating demographic change, or crime, or race or sex or the difference between truth and lies exist, or are all these things “far-right” disinformation? The international phenomenon of individuals destroying posters of Israeli hostages demonstrates the basic logic. The truth must be suppressed in order to protect the fantasy, which also is a weapon and a shield.
No one wants to be reminded that the enemy is also human. No doubt, denial of the suffering of civilians in Gaza arrives to the same point. But suffering is universal and irrelevant. Beyond the stories and hysteria the truth of this reality is war. Truth, of course, is the first casualty of war. But it is also war’s objective. In the heat of battle paper tigers fold, and myths evaporate. The true strength of the combatants is examined, and the real order of power appears.
What is decisive? This question is settled through a war. If no position of neutrality today exists between the warring parties, even to the point of the description of the war, in Israel or elsewhere, this is because the imposition of the neutral is the goal. A ceasefire is pointless. One side must surrender or be beaten, or else perpetuate a pseudo-peace of self-delusion in lieu of true belief.
Why, against the protests of the state of Israel, has the BBC refused to label Hamas terrorists, and calls them militants instead? To tell this lie: “The BBC’s job is to place the facts before its audience and let them decide what they think.” Six months earlier, the broadcaster refused to grant that Elon Musk’s new Twitter could describe it as state-funded media, despite the fact the BBC is funded through taxation, and the Director General is appointed by the government. The BBC insisted it was “funded by the British public through the license fee.” This distinction with no difference defines a project to confuse.
The real dividing line is here. There is no escape from truth, or from the fact that it means almost nothing. It is no longer possible, or never was, to establish truth as authoritative because truth does not exist in space, but in the midst of an occupied world in which the deciding factor isn’t truth but the power to impose a culture that respects it.
The world is not a search for truth, but the reverse. The record cannot be corrected because no power is committed to the truth as such. Power possesses only expertise in using power. When the systems concentrating power are corrupted, so is the expertise they shelter. The knowledge of the powerful becomes the expertise of the seraglio, sophistic knowledge of maneuvers, masquerades, and games. At the same time, knowledge of the outside is suppressed, because it is increasingly unable to survive. Forced outside the cities, it takes to desert highways, to find refuge where it can, and waits. Welcome to 2024.
Daniel Miller is a writer, critic, and IM—1776’s literary editor.
Smashing The A.I. Threat Matrix: How Humanity Defeats Skynet
NY Firefighers Respond to Series of Explosions in Manhattan Area
The Fire Department of New York (FDNY) has responded to reports of explosions on Roosevelt Island in the Manhattan area of New York, according to local officials.
Alarmed residents claimed to have heard small explosions coming from the area of 580 Main Street, south of the Roosevelt Island Bridge and Tram.
“Buildings shook and tremors were felt,” said eyewitnesses.
Power cuts have also been reported in buildings at 2 and 4 River Road, south of the aerial tramway that connects Roosevelt Island to the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
?#UPDATE: Police investigating reports of small explosions from multiple manholes causing power outages across Roosevelt Island in New York City so far no reports of injuries at this time. Con Edison officials have just arrived on scene pic.twitter.com/hNKPd3V1oP
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) January 2, 2024
According to local media outlets, there is a large firefighting effort underway at the scene. There are also currently many helicopters in the area.
No injuries have been reported.
The NWO’s 2024 Black Swan Tell – Exclusive Report
Black Swan. It is the favorite New World Order term. The NWO would have us believe that a Black Swan event is an unfortunate event created by the Russians, MAGA terrorists, or anonymous hackers, not a looming premeditated, war-gamed, genocidal, treasonous act by an establishment fueled by the insanity of a totalitarian eugenicist movement careening off the tracks.
Like Event 201, the Globalists have already clearly telegraphed that they are behind an inevitable Black Swan event. And the rabbit hole is deep.
Following the death of NWO Godfather Henry Kissinger, Kissinger’s loyal Nazi student Klaus Schwab fumbles with the house of cards of the New World Order. As his diabolical leadership becomes clearer to the populous. Schwab struggles to keep the mad dream alive. Unfortunately for this legion of doom addicted would be murderous tyrants, 2024 reveals that humanity is wide awake and Pandora’s box has been opened. And we know exactly who opened it.
“No Stomach” In US to Keep Funding Ukraine as “War Is Over” – Ex-Pentagon Official
Former Pentagon official Michael Maloof is predicting that Congress and the Pentagon are in for a “tumultuous” start of 2024, as the ongoing standoff over Biden’s billions more in Ukraine defense aid highlights the reality that there’s “no stomach” any longer to fund Ukraine.
The ex-senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense issued the words in a fresh interview with Russian media, wherein he also emphasized that the only way out for Kiev is through negotiations based on the current dire realities of the battlefield, which has seen setback after setback for Ukraine forces.
This dire state of things has also been seen in the increasingly gloomy and negative coverage of Ukraine on the part of major mainstream media. For example the NY Times ran this surprising headline over the weekend: ‘People Snatchers’: Ukraine’s Recruiters Use Harsh Tactics to Fill Ranks. Weeks prior, in early December, the same publication issued this headline: U.S. and Ukraine Search for a New Strategy After Failed Counteroffensive.
Maloof issued his own even more pessimistic assessment, painting a picture of a domino effect spilling over into the halls of a tense and divided Congress which must belatedly acknowledge “the war is over.”
According to Maloof’s assessment in the interview:
“The United States has their appropriations hung up. The US government could shut down by January 17 if the administration and Congress can’t negotiate and work out an arrangement for funding Ukraine and Israel, but at the same time to enforce the border. I think the Republicans to date have held firm, and we’ll see if they’ll hold on. But there’s no stomach right now any longer to fund the Ukrainians.
Frankly, the people see that the war is over. Basically, the [Ukrainian] counteroffensive failed, and there’s no way that they can pick it back up and turn things around, because they’ve gone into total defensive mode. The so-called counteroffensive just does not exist,” said Maloof.
This is a moment long past due where the American people and their leadership are being forced to put America first given the NATO’ization of Ukraine project has failed.
“We have got to worry about our whether our government is even going to be open for business,” he continued, and added: “there is a second tranche in February that would shut down as well if they have not reached a resolution on funding the government agencies the way the House has dictated.”
American public support for funding Ukraine amid the Russian invasion was already slipping as early as last summer…
And looming heavily in the background is the unpredictability of other global flashpoints which threaten to stretch US forces and resources thin. Speaking of Israel’s escalatory policies in Gaza, Maloof said, “I guess he [Benjamin Netanyahu] thinks he can go ahead and start raising all kinds of havoc not only with Iran, but also with Hezbollah up north. So are we going to help fund all of that?“
“I mean, that’s the big question. And I don’t think there’s any stomach for that, considering that, you know, we are entering an election year,” emphasized Maloof again.