Container Gardening (book review), Idiot of the Week, and Kylie Minogue performed at the Brit Awards
Book review time. I wasn't finding anything to read and then my daughter and I were watching TV, flipping channels, ended up on a show about gardening. My mom has a flower garden and she grows some vegetables during the spring, summer and fall and we've got a walnut tree. I grew up with that. Love to tell you I helped out. Didn't. We're staying with C.I. in California and she grows flowers, plants, fruits and vegetables. Betty's daughter learned about gardening from C.I. and they used to grow things together all the time. Now she's in college and she's got a container garden.
A what?
She is in an apartment and doesn't have a yard so she grows things in pots on the balcony.
I'd like for my daughter to know how to do that. So I went looking for a book on container gardening.
At KINDLE, I found Tammy Wylie's CONTAINER GARDENING FOR BEGINNERS: A GUIDE TO GROWING YOUR OWN VEGETABLES, FRUITS, HERBS AND EDIBLE FLOWERS.
Tammy's a longterm gardener who started gardening at the age of two. In addition to container gardening being good for people without access to yards, she notes it's also good for many other people including kids and you can get some containers that are easy to garden in while in a wheel chair.
The book consists of two parts. The first focuses on selecting containers and seeds or seedlings to grow and the basics of that. The second half focuses on the various fruits, vegetables, herbs and edible flowers you can grow and their nutrients.
My daughter and I decided on containers that we would put on C.I.'s deck. So they'll be outside. If you're growing indoors, you can use a window or buy grow lights. What did we want to grow was next? Using the book for what would be easy, we decided on green onions, bell peppers, radishes (my daughter's favorite vegetable), cilantro, parsley and nasturtium.
We took longer deciding on containers. Ceramic containers absorb water, we learned. You could make your own containers or recycle. You need to think about how deep the pot was -- especially if you wanted to grow regular size carrots and not baby sized. And we had to decide on soil.
Now we were ready to plant -- which we did Friday. Reading the book, we had the choice of seeds or seedlings and we went with seedlings.
Important point, "Every time you water your container, you wash away valuable nutrients." So we got some compost tea (one of the recommendations in the book). Since this is our first time, my daughter and I also took Tammy's suggestion of keeping a garden journal so we'd know when we planted, when to expect harvest, etc.
Idiot of the Week? Little Bobby Junior.
Oh, Little Junior, he's such a joke. In a world of men, he's a junior. At 70, he's a little junior. Read Ruth's "Oh, Little Junior, you were always someone's fool" for all the reasons Little Junior won Idiot of the Week.
Lastly, my daughter's favorite singer is Kylie Minogue and she performed at Saturday's Brit Awards.
Friday, March 1, 2024. Marianne Williamson delivers a major speech in
San Francisco, THE NEW YORK TIMES mythical rape 'report' continues to
fall apart, instead of answering questions about that report the paper
is trying to figure out who is speaking to the press, and much more.
Marianne
Williamson announced Wednesday that she was unsuspending her campaign
for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination and was back in the
race.. She spoke at an event in San Francisco last night.
Excerpt.
Marianne
Williamson: The Battle of Gettysburg was the battle at which it was
decisive. Once the North won that battle, it was decisive that the
Union would in fact survive. So Abraham Lincoln himself went to the
battlefield. And his words, of course, in The Gettysburg Address is
that the men who died there -- for the North -- he said that they had
given their last full measure of devotion so that a government of the
people and by the people and for the people would not perish from the
earth. My message to you is, once again, although we don't already know
this, is it's perishing now. It's perishing on our watch because we
are for all intents and purposes a government of the corporations and by
the corporations and for the corporations. And ever since particularly
CITIZENS UNITED and the unlimited permission given to corporate forces
to flood our political system with the undue influence of their money,
at this point, they hold Washington hostage. Washington is a system of
legalized bribery. I can tell you from being in the belly of that
beast, this is how the system operates. If you don't have, I mean huge
money -- I don't mean money, I mean huge money -- Remember the President
has a billion dollars for this campaign. If you don't have either huge
amounts of money or access to people with huge amounts of money, you
don't have a chance of being anywhere near the pinnacles of power in
this country. And that's why you might ask yourself, 'Well given all
the things we've been talking about tonight, why don't they pass
policies in Washington that make it better? Why don't they pass
policies that help the average American?" That's because there are so
few average Americans in that place. And how much power is exerted to
make sure the average American either doesn't get in or once they do get
in they're manipulated to the point where there's just more suckers for
the same establishment? There's only one way to override this at this
point. And that is for a peaceful revolution -- a peaceful revolution at
the ballot box. John F. Kennedy said that those who keep us from
peaceful revolution make violent revolution inevitable. So I believe
that we are at a crossroad. I think we all know that we're at a
crossroad. But like I said before, this is a moment for data analysis. I
didn't say anything tonight that everybody here doesn't already know. I
mean maybe I gave a statistic or two that you might not have
considered. But in general it's like the dots are scrambled. It's not
like the dots aren't there. And it's not that we're stupid people.
It's that we've been trained -- we've been trained to expect too
little. We've been trained to farm out our best critical thinking. And
we've been -- even those of us who are Democrats -- we've been trained
to give up the democratic process. We've returned to Tammany Hall
politics -- to men around a table a hundred years ago who got together
with cigars and decided who the candidates would be and would come up
with these ridiculous policies like, "Oh, no, no, we don't primary an
incumbent president." Tell that to those of us who remember Lyndon B.
Johnson because Eugene McCarthy primaried him, Bobby Kennedy Sr.
primaried him. We didn't think that was weird. We thought it was
democracy. People primary sitting senators all the time. People
primary sitting Congress people all the time. But we've just been 'oh!
oh! oh!' This is codependency now. Because the DNC said "Oh, no, we
have to go with Joe. The DNC says we're going with Joe." Who the hell
is the DNC? I'll tell you something, political parties are not
mentioned in the Consitution. And George Washington, in his farewell
address, warned us about them. He said, he predicted -- and, man, this
one rings true -- he said they could form factions of men who were more
loyal to their party than to their country. John Adams would then say
he saw political parties as the greatest threat to our democracy. And I
-- many of us in this room -- grew up in a time when political parties
sat in the background. We still honored that democratic principal that
political power lies in the hands of the people. The people would make a
decision in a primary who to nominate. The party would have nothing to
do with it until the people had chosen and then they would step in.
But, of course, they decided once Bernie Sanders came along, "Oh, we're
not going to have any of that." And then they got away with that. And
then they did it the next time and they got away with that. And now
they don't even pretend. Now they don't even pretend. And we're just
going along. So I ran for president because I feel that we need an
economic u-turn -- an economic u-turn in this country. Because I feel
we're like a ship headed for the iceberg here and that one major party
just heads right towards it and another major political party heading
more slowly and will hit it at a different angle. We have one major
political party representing a total nose-dive for our democracy because
you can't have a thriving democracy where you don't have a thriving
middle class. And the other major political party is moving in the
direction of a managed decline. These political parties do not just chop
wood and carry water for these corporate forces, they are huge
corporate forces. So seems to me we need to turn the ship around. Now I
was very enthralled by Franklin Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights
which would include universal healthcare, Medicare For All, tuition free
college and tech school, a complete elimination of the college loan
debt by using The Higher Education Act. It would include all of the
things we've mentioned. It would include things like ramping down
fossil fuel extraction rather than ramping it up which all of those
presidents of the modern era -- Democrats and Republicans -- end up
falling in line with Big Oil. Now one of them pretends not to. See,
one of them has learned what we want to hear so will say things like
"I'm the Climate President" and will even make sure that there are
healthy investments in green energy in The Inflation Reduction Act and
we say, "Oh, that's so good! There are these wonderful, wonderful, very
beneficial in the Inflation Reduction Act. Oh, yes. Oh, yes." Guess
what? It's a classic purse thief distraction technique. That same
president has given more oil drilling permits than even Trump did. That
same president okayed The Willow Project. That same president must
know that all of the investment in dirty energy completely nullifies the
investments in healthy, green energy. We are suckers if we're okay
with that. And all of the presidents in the modern era -- Republican or
Democrat -- are willing to fall in line -- obviously -- with the defense
industries. And so what we need is a guaranteed living wage. What we
need is guaranteed sick pay. All of those things. And we need to
repudiate the permanent war machine. Americans are figuring this out.
We need to play peace games, not just war games. We need a peace
academy, not just military academy. We need armies of peace builders
just like we have armies of military personnel. We need a peace academy,
not just a military academy, because we need to learn to wage peace.
Even Donald Rumsfeld said we need to learn to wage peace.
The
speech was broadcast live on YOUTUBE (2,844 views -- those may not
include live views) and TWITTER (9448 views). (TWITTER -- I don't work
for Elon Musk and I don't have to indulge him.)
It
was a major speech covering many important topics and explaining why
she was back in the race -- a candidate unsuspending their campaign is
news -- it's always news in the rare times that it happens. Most
infamously, it happened in 1992 when H Ross Perot came back into the
race.
So news outlets can hire reporters to
cover just Taylor Swift or just Beyonce, but there's no one who could
cover a speech in a major US city -- one also broadcast live over the
internet?
That's rather sad and one more sign of a democracy in peril.
And
I'd rather money be spent covering the arts than covering sports so
let's add in all the reporting that took place after the Superbowl
ended. I think everyone who wanted to see it, watched it. The coverage
in the days after the game was not needed.
Gaza.
ELETRONIC
INTIFADA continues to cover the mythical rapes of October 7th that have
still not been documented. And the revelations that THE INTERCEPT and
others have turned up in the last days.
New doubts are emerging about the New York Times’s coverage
of sexual violence during the October 7 Hamas-led attack — and the paper
owes its readers an open and transparent explanation.
What’s more, its reporting on this issue has become so questionable
that it should assign new reporters to go over the entire story again.
Independent researchers scrutinized the online record,
and raised serious questions about Schwartz. First, she has apparently
never been a reporter but is actually a filmmaker, who the Times
suddenly hired in October. You would expect the paper to look for
someone with actual journalistic experience, especially for a story as
sensitive as this one, written during the fog of war. Surely the paper
had enough of its own correspondents on staff who could have been
assigned to it.
Next, the researchers found that Schwartz had not hidden her strong
feelings online. There are screenshots of her “liking” certain posts
that repeated the “40 beheaded baby” hoax, and that endorsed another
hysterical post that urged the Israeli army to “turn Gaza into a
slaughterhouse,” and called Palestinians “human animals.”
(Just this morning, more evidence emerged online; Schwartz apparently also served in Israeli Military Intelligence.)
Finally, one of her co-authors on two of the reports was Adam Sella, who is her nephew. ********* [see note added below]*****
Let’s pause here. What would happen if the Times suddenly
hired a Palestinian filmmaker with no journalistic background, who had
recently publicly “liked” posts that called for “pushing Israeli Jews
into the sea,” to co-write several of its most sensitive and contested
reports?
After Anat Schwartz’s online history became public, she locked down
her accounts and then deleted much of the incriminating content.
The New York Times imposes strict rules on its reporters to
maintain the appearance of objectivity. Reporters are not supposed to
attend demonstrations of any kind, wear campaign buttons, or post
opinions on social media. By hiring Anat Schwartz, the paper clearly
violated its own guidelines, and it should publicly explain and
apologize.
And her partner in this, Adam Sella, is the nephew of Anat Schwartz’s partner, and they’re not married. In fact, Amy, The New York Times,
they requested a correction from us, because we had initially said that
it was her nephew, which I think in the context of America and other
countries you would say. If you’re somebody’s longtime life partner, you
would say, “Oh, yeah, this is my nephew.” OK, they’re not blood
relatives, and they emphasize that she’s not married. Fine, we corrected
that.
My question is: Where are the corrections in The New York Times piece? The New York Times
has grave, grave mischaracterizations, sins of omission, reliance on
people who have no forensic or criminology credentials to be asserting
that there was a systematic rape campaign put in place here. And to
publish this article at a moment when Israel was intensifying, after
that brief pause where captives were exchanged — intensifying its
genocidal attack against the people of Gaza, this played a very, very
significant role. And the more we learn about this, the more we discover
that the reporting tactics that The New York Times used are
certainly not up to the standards that the newspaper claims to be
promoting. They will not issue any corrections on what has already been
documented to be very problematic sins of commission and omission in
this piece.
Inside the newsroom, the article was met with praise from editorial
leaders but skepticism from other Times journalists. The paper’s
flagship podcast “The Daily” attempted to turn the article into an
episode, but it didn’t manage to get through a fact check, as The
Intercept previously reported.
(In a statement received after publication, a Times spokesperson said,
“No Daily episode was killed due to fact checking failures.”)
The fear among Times staffers who have been critical of the paper’s
Gaza coverage is that Schwartz will become a scapegoat for what is a
much deeper failure. She may harbor animosity toward Palestinians, lack
the experience with investigative journalism, and feel conflicting
pressures between being a supporter of Israel’s war effort and a Times
reporter, but Schwartz did not commission herself and Sella to report
one of the most consequential stories of the war. Senior leadership at
the New York Times did.
Schwartz said as much in an interview
with Israeli Army Radio on December 31. “The New York Times said,
‘Let’s do an investigation into sexual violence’ — it was more a case of
them having to convince me,” she said. Her host cut her off: “It was a
proposal of The New York Times, the entire thing?”
“Unequivocally. Unequivocally. Obviously. Of course,” she said. “The
paper stood behind us 200 percent and gave us the time, the investment,
the resources to go in-depth with this investigation as much as needed.”
Shortly after the war broke out, some editors and reporters
complained that Times standards barred them from referring to Hamas as
“terrorists.” The rationale from the standards department, run for 14
years by Philip Corbett, had long been that Hamas was the de facto
administrator of a specific territory, rather than a stateless terror
group. Deliberately killing civilians, went the argument, was not enough
to label a group terrorists, as that label could apply quite broadly.
Corbett, after October 7, defended the policy in the face of
pressure, newsroom sources said, but he lost. On October 19, an email
went out on behalf of Executive Editor Joe Kahn saying that Corbett had
asked to step back from his position.
“After 14 years as the embodiment of Times standards, Phil Corbett has
told us he’d like to step back a bit and let someone else take the
leading role in this crucial effort,” Times leadership explained. Three newsroom sources said the move was tied to the pressure he was under to soften coverage in Israel’s favor. One of the social media posts
that Schwartz liked, triggering the Times review, made the case that,
for Israeli propaganda purposes, Hamas should be likened at all times to
the Islamic State. A Times spokesperson told The Intercept, “Your
understanding about Phil Corbett is flatly untrue.” In a statement
received after publication, “Phil had asked to change roles before Joe
Kahn even became executive editor in June 2022. And it had absolutely
nothing to do with a dispute over coverage.”
Since the revelations regarding Schwartz’s recent social media
activity, her byline has not appeared in the paper and she has not
attended editorial meetings. The paper said that a review into her
social media “likes” is ongoing. “Those ‘likes’’ are unacceptable
violations of our company policy,” said a Times spokesperson.
The bigger scandal may be the reporting itself, the process that
allowed it into print, and the life-altering impact the reporting had
for thousands of Palestinians whose deaths were justified by the alleged
systematic sexual violence orchestrated by Hamas the paper claimed to
have exposed.
Another frustrated Times reporter who has also worked as an editor
there said, “A lot of focus will understandably, rightfully, be directed
at Schwartz but this is most clearly poor editorial decision making
that undermines all the other great work being tirelessly done across
the paper — both related and completely unrelated to the war — that
manages to challenge our readers and meet our standards.”
The
story never should have run. There were no facts. There was no
evidence. We have stated over and over here that it is mythical rapes
until they have survivors or victims (victims if the females died).
I'm sorry I'm not in the mood for crap. I'm going try to be nicer
than I was to the actress who called me last night and begged me to help
with the effort on those mythical rape victims. But I can't make any
promises.
That was last night. This morning"
One
e-mail changed a little bit in the 43 times it was sent. You got the
wrong one. You can't shame me. Not on the topic of the assault. I get
it, you want us to all grab the Israeli government's hymnal and sing
the chorus to "Rapes Took Place October 7th And My Heart Knows It
Happened." You got the wrong one.
(A)
I was assaulted years ago as a child. So I really don't need to hear
from you sentences like, "Imagine if you were assaulted . . ." _____, I
was. I don't have to imagine. And what kind of sicko (a) wants me to relive that trauma? (B) "You have said over and over,
'Believe all women.''' One more time: You got the wrong one. I never
said that and I never would say that. Check the archives and you'll see
that I have long rejected that nonsense. I do not believe in that
blanket nonsense. Some men lie, some women lie. More to the point, I
am a thinking person and I would be an idiot to turn off my brain and
march along blindly. There are women who came forward with charges
against Donald Trump. I don't like Donald and never have. I believed
some of the women, I didn't believe them all. If you were serving on a
jury, you'd listen to the information and process it using your best
skills. That's not "believe all women." I've never argued that and I
never would. Some women I believe, some I don't. Some I can't
determine. (C) "It is your duty to call out these rapists." What
rapists? As with the women who allegedly were raped, we don't know
anything about who raped anyone.
I hear your claims. I've heard them repeatedly in the media. Where's your proof?
Some of you liars on this are bringing back in the beheaded babies lie.
That is a lie. There is no proof to that. But it could have happened.
A sword swipe, a head comes off. Yeah, that can happen. But you're
telling me that in the hours an assault took place on October 7th, as
Israelis scrambled to get to safety and hopefully Israeli forces scrambled to fight the attack, Hamas took
time to rape. And to gang rape. Wow.
Doesn't
play. Doesn't mean it didn't happen. But it doesn't play. If you
pitched me that, I'd say that was a huge plot point error and that the
audience will never believe it. This was
an attack lasting hours not days. That the audience -- aware of all the
money that's gone into the Israeli military alone would never believe
that attackers would gang rape on site of the attack because they would
be in fear of being caught. They might drag someone away to rape them
after the attack but to stop everything and conduct a gang-rape? Again,
it doesn't play. Doesn't mean it didn't happen. But it doesn't play.
It didn't play. It was never believable.
Recently,
the United Nations raised the issue of Palestinian girls and women
being abused and raped in Israeli custody. That likely has happened. A
woman being held somewhere is much more likely to be assaulted than a
woman out in the open in the midst of a raid, attack, charge whatever.
If evidence emerges that it did happen, we'll note that evidence. We did note the UN announcement because it is news.
But,
please note, I didn't use it to slam feminists or the women who pretend
they're feminists even though they're just Me-ists. Feminism is only
to be acknowledged and practiced by Me-ists when they can personally
benefit from it. Like the joke about certain African-American male
celebrities who reach out to the Black community only when they're in
the midst of a scandal and therefore, the joke goes, suddenly remember
they're Black.
Part
of the propaganda on the rape myth (it's a myth until they find females
who were raped) was to try to turn woman against woman. And, in the
US, various ugly spirited women -- and balding women if you think about
it -- used their celebrity to sneer at other women for not embracing
and standing up for these non-existent rape victims.
And
that was bad enough. I don't need some egotistical bitch who made
everyone miserable on her so-so TV show and was such a bitch that they
weren't willing to meet her quote so she'd pop up on the spin-off
lecturing me about feminism. A queen bee who persecutes other women
telling me what feminism is?
That was bad enough. But then we had others coming forward and damning feminists for promoting the mythical rapes.
Excuse
me. I'm a feminist. I'm not the feminist. Ava and I, at THIRD,
present a feminist view on the media, we don't write "the" feminist
view.
Because there's not one universal voice or opinion.
It
was amazing to watch as a narrative emerged that bashed feminists for
(a) not speaking out for the mythical rape victims and (b) bashed
feminists for speaking out on the mythical rape victims.
That's what it finally came down to.
A lot of writers who never do a thing for feminism or feminists kept attacking us -- regardless of what we did or did not do.
I
think it's highly more likely that women in custody were raped -- it's
true of women in custody in any country including the US. So I won't be
surprised if the investigation the UN is calling for -- on what has
happened to Palestinian women in Israeli custody -- finds actual
evidence and proof. But as a feminist and as a rape victim, this
feminist does not use rape for propaganda.
We
should wait for proof. Listen to women, absolutely. But there were no
women to listen to with regards to October 7th and what I'm left with
is the impression that women were used to sell war (how it has looked
the entire time) and that's not about feminism. THE NEW YORK TIMES has a
lot to answer for as do various American celebrities -- Julianna, Mayim
and other balding actresses.
Instead of answers from THE TIMES, they're circling the wagon and trying to figure out who's talking to the press. Charlotte Klein (VANITY FAIR) reports:
TheNew York Times is conducting a leak investigation following a report in The Intercept about a yet-to-be-aired episode of The Daily
addressing explosive claims of sexual violence committed by Hamas on
October 7. Management in recent weeks has pulled at least two dozen
staffers, including Daily producers, into meetings in an
attempt to understand how internal details about the podcast’s editorial
process got out, according to multiple sources familiar with the
matter. The investigation, I’m told, is being led by Charlotte Behrendt,
the paper’s director of policy and internal investigations.
In late January, The Intercept reported that the Times had planned to air an episode of The Daily weeks earlier that was based on a December Timesinvestigation, led by Pulitzer Prize–winner Jeffrey Gettleman and coauthored by freelancers Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella,
about how Hamas “weaponized sexual violence” in the October attack on
Israel. But the paper shelved that episode “amid a furious internal
debate about the strength of the paper’s original reporting on the
subject,” according to The Intercept, which noted that a new script was
drafted that “offered major caveats, allowed for uncertainty, and asked
open-ended questions that were absent from the original article, which
presented its findings as definitive evidence of the systematic use of
sexual violence as a weapon of war.” The Intercept’s Daniel Boguslaw and Ryan Grim
suggested that producers and the paper faced a conundrum: “run a
version that hews closely to the previously published story and risk
republishing serious mistakes, or publish a heavily toned-down version,
raising questions about whether the paper still stands by the original
report.” (Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander
told The Intercept that the paper does not comment on ongoing reporting
and that “there is only one ‘version’ of any piece of audio journalism:
the one that publishes.”)
It’s highly unusual for the Times to conduct a leak
investigation, with multiple staffers saying this is the first such
internal probe they can recall taking place. “It’s not something we do,”
said one. “That kind of witch hunt is really concerning.” Though
information has leaked out in the past—it’s par for the course for a
newsroom as sprawling and influential as the Times—this
disclosure presumably cuts deeper because it described internal
decision-making around a story that had yet to be published.
That's
not a good look for any outlet. It's an especially poor look for THE
TIMES. It was four years ago, remember, that they were dismissing the
Hunter Biden laptop. But more to the point, it was October 18, 2020 that they published an article everyone wants to forget
-- a fairy tale about how THE NEW YORK POST -- a threadbare publication
that has nowhere near the newsroom THE TIMES does -- had massive
pushback on their own Hunter Biden laptop article. [Added 3/1/24 at
10:23 PM actual date of NYT 'report' on the NY POST article and also
provided link And, by the way, 'tabloid' is not an insult or broadside.
It's what THE POST is and has been going back to the days of Dorothy
Schiff -- there are tabloids and there are broadsheets.] That
anonymice 'report' was questionable for the lack of facts and
on-the-record sources -- and the pretense that NY POST has an actual
newsroom of any significance -- they're run on the cheap. But it's even
more appalling when you grasp that THE TIMES believes it can
investigate and report on other outlets but that no one should do the
same on them.
[Added 3/1/24 at 2:53 pm -- I think we need Jeremy and Ryan's discussion with Amy on today's DEMOCRACY NOW!
We'll note it in Monday's snapshot -- and it will go up here in about
two hours in its own post but since the snapshot is reposted I want to
be sure the video of their discussion is in this snapshot.]
Gaza remains under assault. Day 147 of the assault in the wave that began in October. Binoy Kampmark (DISSIDENT VOICE) points out, "Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza
by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction.
But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge
for the propaganda outlets: How to justify it? Fortunately for Israel,
the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover
for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence." CNN has explained, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund." ABC NEWS quotes UNICEF's December 9th statement, ""The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.
Scores of children are reportedly being killed and injured on a daily
basis. Entire neighborhoods, where children used to play and go to
school have been turned into stacks of rubble, with no life in them." NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe
Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll.
The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom
believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza." The
slaughter continues. It has displaced over 1 million people per the US
Congressional Research Service. Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) points out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned
the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide." The death toll of
Palestinians in Gaza is grows higher and higher. United Nations Women noted,
"More than
1.9 million people -- 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza --
have
been displaced, including what UN Women estimates to be nearly 1 million
women and girls. The entire population of Gaza -- roughly 2.2 million
people -- are in crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse." AP
noted yesterday that the death toll stood at 30,035 with
over 70,000 injured and thousands missing. Months ago, AP noted, "About 4,000 people are reported missing." February 7th, Jeremy Scahill explained
on DEMOCRACY NOW! that "there’s an estimated 7,000 or 8,000
Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of
their former home." February 5th, the United Nations' Phillipe
Lazzarini Tweeted:
And the area itself? Isabele Debre (AP) reveals, "Israel’s military offensive
has turned much of northern Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape. Whole
neighborhoods have been erased. Homes, schools and hospitals have been
blasted by airstrikes and scorched by tank fire. Some buildings are
still standing, but most are battered shells." Kieron Monks (I NEWS) reports, "More than 40 per cent of the buildings in northern Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, according to a new study of satellite imagery
by US researchers Jamon Van Den Hoek from Oregon State University and
Corey Scher at the City University of New York. The UN gave a figure of 45 per cent of housing
destroyed or damaged across the strip in less than six weeks. The rate
of destruction is among the highest of any conflict since the Second
World War."
At least 13 children are dead in Gaza because of malnutrition and hunger, Hamas said, citing data from the Gaza Health Ministry.
The
deaths are "a declaration of failure of the international community and
the United Nations in carrying out their tasks in protecting children
from starvation," it said in a statement today.
"We
renew our call on the United Nations and international relief
institutions to take urgent action to save children and civilians in the
Gaza Strip, especially in the Gaza and North governorates, and not to
submit to the dictates of the criminal Zionist occupation," Hamas said,
referring to Israel.
The organization also urged the
international community to help deliver food aid and medical assistance
to the enclave urgently "to avoid the increasing catastrophe of famine."
