No Mass Rapes By Hamas On October 7th/Open Thread

I wonder where the custom of wrapping fish in newspaper originated because the ink would bleed into the fish and you would be eating toxic material rather just reading it.

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You were brought up to think that authority figures were trustworthy (even though they’re the ones who do almost all the harm in the world)
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The remarkable aspect about the appeal to authority religion is that the “authority” consists of experts with massive conflicts of interests.

Opioids were non-addicting and safe because opioid manufactures and doctors selling them said so.
Vioxx didn’t cause heart attacks because a study done and funded by Merck said it was safe.
Psychiatric drugs are safe and effective because psychiatrists who sell them say so.
Vaccines are safe and effective because the CDC who has dozens of vaccine patents and makes tens of billions yearly from them says so.
Medicines are safe and effective because the FDA which gets half its budget from pharma and is staffed by pharma employees approved them.
The government adding Fluoride to water doesn’t cause cognitive impairment the government says so.

In the book 1984 a classic quote is “The Party (experts) told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

The effect of the dramatized and extreme Hollywood and literature dystopias is that people don’t recognize we live in a dystopia.

You’d think that humans would learn – the more lurid the allegations, the more you should ask whom these allegations benefit and the more you should beware a rush to judgment.

Moreover, if Hamas really were so evil, why do Israel and its goons have to present so many fake atrocity tales?

Among the bigger reasons the Mass Rape theory made no sense is that Hamas was completely shocked at how quickly & easy the IDF collapsed. They had no expectation of having hours of free time in Kibbutzim to conduct such a thing. Nor did they even realize the music festival was happening.

I am pretty sure they expected 90% losses within hours and expected to net 10 or 20 hostages tops.

Once I saw what the DNC did to Bernie Sanders, that was it for me. For years I had been a fool to trust corporate news. Global warming will put an end to it all, except for the filthy rich who can run from it, for a while.

@Carborundum

The fuck are you talking about? There was ZERO evidence of rape. NONE.

When someone says, “I personally watched rape occur” that’s evidence.

Ok.
I’ll leave a reply
A haiku kind of response
Do not trust anyone

You know, “we” can do no evil, and “they” can do no right. Our grievances are warranted, our motives are pure, and theirs are fabricated/dishonest and a guise for self-aggrandizement.

There have been some cracks in the media bubble lately though. At least now Gaza is being called a humanitarian disaster, though even here you’d think that Russia is starving more Ukrainians then Israel is starving Palestinians by the selected outrage.

For the first “IA” in the above substitute “EI”. The second IA is actually correct – for the non-military versed the full term is “Immediate Actions and Stoppages” (what you do when the magic bang-stick fails to bang).

Pro-tip: when you bork a two letter acronym, it might be time for that second cup of coffee.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

As to Bruce W’s sharing of the Intercept report, please note that 3 brave sources revealed this months ago: the Grayzone (Blumenthal & Mate), the Electronic Intifada (Ali Abunimah & associates) & Mondoweiss were all debunking the blatant lies & insane claims very thoroughly & very soon after the Hasbara article appeared. 99% of the Ryan Grim & Intercept reporting is simply cut-&-paste from these 3 sources, months later, & with only one minimal credit to the Grayzone & EI & Mondoweiss as nearly the entirety of their sources– they are considered by Grim as disreputable because they are actually “Lefty.”

How Left is Ryan Grim.? He recently published a book glorifying “the Squad” who sell out & follow the Establishment Dems 99% of the time, wouldn’t do the “Force the Vote” for Medicare for All to force their betters in the Dem. (as well as R) party to come out against affordable health care for Americans!! (But the R’s did it to the patsy Kevin McCarthy later, proving it could be done IF any of these people had a spine or wanted to do something for their constituents).

As to “Carborundum’s” lunacy, let’s briefly cover some specifics: somebody who is not & never has been a journalist is given a prestigious shot to write a hyped-up, unsourced piece for the Gray Lady. Why? Because she’s an Israeli Military official– they’re always truthful & fair, right? Then she brings in her even less qualified nephew to write the piece fronted by Jeffrey Gettleman, an ardent Zionist. (As Ian said, this is top-down Hasbara.)

So bullet points for the following:

Schwartz liked a post calling to turn Gaza into “a slaughterhouse”. Well, no anti-Palestinian prejudice or hate their, eh?

Raz Cohen spoke 3 times about what he claimed to witness, varying & contradictory stories which can’t be substantiated– 1st, the day of Oct. 7 he shared a post of himself hiding with friends in a ditch near the Novara music festival and giving a “V for victory” sign with his fingers. Then when interviewed soon after he shared how scary it was to wait & be rescued and said NOT ONE WORD about rapes he witnessed, or the “cutting off of breasts” with box-cutters, & the “terrorists” passing around & “playing with” the severed breasts? (WTF? Is this even possible? I’m not a surgeon so I have no idea, but this would not be sensual in any way, it’s just trying to smear Palestinians as necrophiliacs, apparently.) Oh, & per his story this was happening while Israeli planes were overflying the festival and firing on the attackers! The stabbing & cutting off & playing with severed breasts story by Cohen was about 2 weeks later. Then he does a morbid “fashion show” with members Kos-playing brave Israeli soldiers & subhuman Arab monsters for money. Then when his lies start to be questioned he says he’s “too traumatized to talk about it” (since no more money will come in and the attention will only be negative. )

Another major “source” went into hiding, only a first name is shared & it’s not even known if the person is male or female, age, no other data shared. People searched across Israel for anyone sharing that name, nobody with that name took credit. (I’m too busy to look up this evidently imaginary party’s name at the moment.)

The 3rd major source was the Zaka serial rape & corpse cult. They were founded by a serial rapist (think Jimmy Saville) & when he won a national Israeli prize, multiple men & women came forth to share his rapes of them (some when they were children). He then tried to commit suicide , botched it and was in a coma for years before dying. Zaka has no training in forensics & disposes of bodies according to Mosaic practices, thus if any rapes had occurred no evidence would have been gathered, nor was it. They are fanatical cultists, you just have to take their word for it.

And these Hasbara fanatics didn’t just smear Palestinians, either, they went after their own!! Gal Abdush’s badly burned body was evidently from the Israelis resorting to the “Hannibal option” & killing everyone fleeing the musical festival including Israelis so no hostages are taken to give “Hamas” more leverage in negotiations. Thus (as everyone now knows) the # of Israelis killed had to be lowered from the 1400 original estimates on Oct. 8 to 1200 some weeks later, as evidently the Israelis hit 200 Israelis fleeing on foot or in (destroyed) cars, Abdush being in the latter category. Her body was simply chosen because (badly burnt as it was) it was in a posture that could suggest rape. Her family was never told Gettleman et al would claim she was raped, they don’t believe she was raped (she spoke to her sister on the phone & died moments later) & they were hurt and disgusted by the addition of false charges she was raped before her tragic death by the NYT purely for Hasbara purposes.

Carbo’s “When someone says, “I personally watched rape occur” that’s evidence.” Uhm, no, it’s not!! Do you still believe the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador who claimed to witness “babies removed from incubators” when she wasn’t even in Kuwait when the invasion happened? Do you still believe in WMD’s in Iraq because Rumsfeld said definitively they were “in the area of Baghdad & north,” etc.? I suggest you grow up. Also please be advised I will take anything you say on this site in the future with many pinches of salt!!

Mark Twain usually gets the credit for saying, “A lie goes round the world before the truth can even get its pants on.” This is an example. Netanyahu still screeches about “beheaded babies” in nearly every interview with the US press. As racist and evil as Israeli society is, their newspapers show the maturity to have disproved and admitted this lie months ago. Don’t be a sucker. Don’t believe genocidal murderers who want to justify exterminating thousands with insane lies. This story was no more coherent or believable than Marjorie Taylor Green’s claim that Rothschild space lasers were setting California wildfires from space because climate change isn’t real.

@Danfmto

My understanding is that the October 7th assault was meant to be a hostage taking operation. Hamas has had success with prisoner exchanges in the past. The targets were meant to be IDF bases and illegal settlements. The goal was taking prisoners, and killing what were viewed as valid targets if needed.

They didn’t expect the IDF to be so totally inept and absent, the concert wasn’t supposed to be there, and they didn’t expect the IDF to panic and massacre hundreds of its own citizens.

They also almost certainly didn’t expect Israel to respond by escalating to open genocide.

Actually, that is evidence. You may choose to disbelieve that evidence. (Or spew verbiage trying to obfuscate or discredit it.) But it is absolutely evidence.

Our of curiosity (probably morbid curiosity), what would the possible relevance be of US Civil Code to a criminal matter in a foreign country / foreign occupied territory?

To be clear, I am using evidence in a sense used to construct intelligence estimates (I hesitate to say “the sense” in that it’s likely the issues are broader than what I’m emphasizing here). My sense is that it is quite different in that (I assume, based on what I see covered in media) legal procedures screen evidence to determine what can and cannot be included in arriving at a verdict (if true, generally appropriate I would say given the power asymmetries at work) while estimates are much more inclusive. I would say it’s rarer to throw something out completely when constructing estimates and the analyst has a comparatively huge degree of latitude in determining *how* to interpret a given piece of evidence (or more commonly multiple articulated pieces of evidence). The goal strikes me as pretty different in that it usually aims at particularistic synthesis rather than reduction to a limited, conclusion well-supported by precedent (I don’t think there’s any sort of parallel construct to precedent in Int). On reflection, comparatively few people with legal backgrounds end up as analysts compared to what I would have expected (if I had previously thought about it) given significant overlap in the basic tasks – I suspect because of this key difference.

As to your demand that I defend “my” evidence, I guess my question would be what do you think is going to happen? If people mouth the incantations of the Internet factoids of the day well enough, the scales are going to fall from my eyes and I’ll realize that I have been *WRONG*? [the horror!] That I’ve been duped by Israeli IO and that the noble inhabitants of the Strip would never, ever do such a thing? If I don’t exhaustively source everything to your satisfaction you’re going to take it as vindication for EA? Count coup? Nail my hide (metaphorically, I hope) to the door? If that’s the case, brother have at it. At the end of the day, I’m too experienced and too tired to deeply care what a bunch of predominantly White, male, older Americans who have mostly never been out of CONUS think about pretty much anything. (What they believe is definitely interesting to me, but I really don’t care to influence it [more about seeking to innoculate ourselves from foreign influence increasingly surging over the border].)

I’m afraid I have a pretty different view of the political acumen of the readership. Informed in the sense of understanding the nuances of a small subset of online discourse, certainly. Informed in the sense of understanding the countries, people and phenomena that discourse purports to be about? Oh, no. Very, very much no. Capital N. Capital O. So many confident statements, so much certainty expressed by people who haven’t been within 10,000 klicks of the countries they speak of, based purely on the statements of unaccountable interlocutors selected based on whether what they say fits their cherished preconception. That may constitute political acumen in the context of enabling one to thrive in the cesspool that is the modern American body politic, but the rest of us outside of that shitshow find it lacking.

Re: Germans discussing bridge targeting

I read everything the Russians do with regard to Ukraine as expressing a feeling of desperation.

Their goal is to get the Europeans to the negotiating table and into a mindset that acknowledges Russia’s interests as a Great Power. The German conversation is so far detached from that it must make the Russians despair of ever being in the same reality let alone the same room.

Bruce:
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

— Kipling

Ian, thank you for continuing to be one of the few place on the web that allows the sort of discussion I’m about to engage in…even if you yourself don’t agree.

The following is a response to the recently posted Naked Capitalism article entitled ‘IM Doc Reports on Covid Not Waning, Long Covid Effects as Lambert Lambastes Latest CDC Guidance as “Crime Against Humanity”’ which can be accessed here:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/03/im-doc-reports-on-covid-not-waning-long-covid-effects-as-lambert-lambastes-latest-cdc-guidance-as-crime-against-humanity.html

Let me begin by saying right off the bat that it is both absolutely amazing and quite frightening to me that ‘IM Doc’ – who often quite correctly has spoken of ‘signals’ in both scientific testing procedures / clinical drug trials as well as ‘on-the-ground’ medicine as practiced by doctors in various settings – it is absolutely astounding, not to mention horrifically irresponsible medically according to the good doctor’s own often-invoked standards, that he (and ‘Yves’ and ‘Lambert’ and the majority of the commentariat) misses the glaringly obvious signals of ‘vaccine’ issues based on his own freaking data.

Frankly, I couldn’t contain my anger the more I read and the more it became obvious this glaring signal was, once again, never seriously going to be addressed by NC editors nor anyone in their minimal brain trust…not to mention anyone in their allegedly quite intelligent and enlightened commentariat.

As is so often the case, a person’s blind spots are enormous, and the more intelligent and authoritative the person takes themselves for, the larger the blind spots they inevitably seem to have.

Returning to the larger point, Naked Capitalism’s naked gatekeeping has gone beyond simply bad and irresponsible journalism to the point of borderline socio/psychopathy. Crazy and over the top you say? Allow me to explain.

There is currently no way to accurately discern ‘vaccine’ injury/death from covid injury/death.

There has and continues to be a coordinated campaign from the top to suppress any information that sheds a negative light on the DOD/HHS’ at once both laughably and crudely named ‘Operation Warp Speed, the pieces of which were put together well before the covid event itself was officially declared a pandemic in March of 2020 (the public in the US began being primed by the media beginning in January 2020).

the vax side effects are on average way less bad than getting Covid

This is extraordinarily irresponsible, and that’s being kind. The ‘vax’ side effects are underreported, what is reported is downplayed, and many people have been fired and personally denigrated via public name-calling – a shameful practice that of course says much more about the character, or rather lack thereof, of the denigrator than of the person being denigrated.

This is even more true when the people being denigrated are risking their own character and professional reputations in public in order to help people, while the ones doing the denigrating hide to varying degrees – sometimes entirely – behind online pseudonyms. This defines both ‘keyboard warriors’ and ‘wimps’ though I am not here directing those terms at anyone per se. Rather, pointing out that, definitionally, anyone engaging in this sort of behavior fits the bill, so to speak.

Now, the only thing perhaps even more pathetic than the aforementioned personalities are their acolytes, many of whom seem unable to personally navigate the world to any serious degree unless they constantly read the advice of their online sages – who have crafed these carefully-curated personas as truth-tellers and, as such, trusted authorities on the main subjects they opine on.

They in turn ‘gatekeep’ and disallow any information that might seriously call into question their trusted status as sages and truth-tellers…and that’s not to mention the double duty many of them do as the great moral voice for the poor unwashed masses.

In short, the failure to even admit the fact that the ‘vax’ injuries and deaths are grossly underreported and their severity grossly downplayed is journalistically irresponsible at a minimum.

The larger underlying principle is the total lack of concern for human beings’ lives, particularly given a seeming concern for the demise of the public health system. I say ‘seeming’ because the underreporting and downplaying of vax injuries and deaths ought to be at the proverbial front and center right now of any competent public health service.

There is overwhelming evidence that the ‘vax’ is in fact causing more harm than the illness itself. Anyone reporting on this has a moral responsibility to allow open discussion of this obviously quite relevant evidence without invoking the logical and simple-minded fallacy of name-calling and denigration.

It should be added here that both ignoring the glaring ‘vax’ injuries/deaths and/or maintaing an aura of cool indifference to them are also telltake signs of socio/psychopathy on the part of the individual or group engaging in these behaviors.

Those who won’t or can’t adhere to this most basic logical and moral threshold should rightly be considered ‘gatekeepers’ and their integrity should immediately be called into question. It is ultimately their own character that should be put on trial. They have blood on their hands.

Here is a recent, elegantly simple illustration from the UK which speaks volumes, and is representative of what is going on in most of the vaccinated world:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azR1HN-4iMo

I don’t care for the host of this discussion, but the voices of the nurses themselves should absolutley be heard. They were forced to employ protocols that killed people, period. These are peoples’ lives we are talking about:

https://rumble.com/v47o0uo-vsrf-live-110-covid-whistleblowers-what-the-nurses-saw.html

This video on ‘vax’ side effects also mentions the killing protocols that were used in nursing and elder/disabled care homes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwdRfbPrGIY&list=UULFF9IOB2TExg3QIBupFtBDxg&index=22

Please also see the work of retired Air Force Major Tom Haviland, who created a wonderfully simple and unbiased questionnaire that he has compiled data from for two years now. His work is referred to as the ‘Worldwide Embalmer Blood Clot Survey” and it ought to be ‘front page news’ everywhere. That it isn’t is another huge red flag. A glaring signal, if you will.

Thank you again Ian for your commitment to honest and unbiased inquiry and investigation.

On Cruelty:

So, Yves banned ya, eh?
Happens to the best of us. And it’s not like Ian won’t do the same if you get too far afield. Hugh and Reality Checker come to mind.

Bottom line though is that it’s her website and she’ll run it however she wants. On balance, I think they do a lot more good than harm. I mean, it’s not like you’re complaining about Zero Hedge of Drudge. Why is that?
It’s because something Yves is doing well drew you in I suspect.

Personally, I’m not entirely convinced by your arguments. And personally, I remain cynical of overzealous claims made by both sides of the debate. And personally, the choice that flows from said cynicism has found me vaxing with Novavaxx — which I learned the benefits of through Lambert’s exhaustive reporting at Naked Capitalism.

Naked Capitalism is clear and explicit regarding their editorial line on COVID-19, mitigation, vaxx.

I have doubts about the value of journalistic commitments of this kind, even when backed by non-expert critical thinking of the high standard set by Yves, Lambert, and importantly in this case IM Doc.

We are all sucked into the vacuum created by the collapse of Public Health authority at the CDC and to a lesser extent, the FDA. NC, like the rest of us, is forced to search out random “voices” in the chaos of X-twitter and beyond. There is ultimately no adequate substitute for collaborative expert inquiry and we do not have institutional support for that — or at least it is hard to pinpoint where it survives. Individual “voices” that in our ignorance we judge on their charisma are never adequately constrained enough in their brief judgments by deep ethical consideration or extensively elaborate evidentiary logical interpretations.

I have made myself “expert” in a community of experts in matters unrelated to medicine and I deal daily in my job with “expert” medical care dictums (“pearls”) used to train and test medical practitioners.

The topics of COVID-19, long COVID and vaccine risks and effectiveness in popular discourse, including public policy guidance, are simply an unfathomable mess as far as I can tell. I would not feel confident taking any line, including the line(s) taken by NC. I personally have never contracted COVID-19 or its variants (and neither has Yves) nor have I experienced vaccine side-effects as far as I know. My sample of 1 isn’t knowledge, but it undermines my confidence in the value of any self-certainty in a way. I am going on “reports” that I cannot verify easily or sort or order. I do not have deep knowledge to use to filter “scientific” reports (but know enough to recognize there is a great deal of methodologically poor “scientific” stuff flooding into the journalistic space, polluting the popular discourse.

I despair and I do not see what else can be done by someone who simply seeks to be a well-informed citizen.

I think taking a journalistic line is a dubious practice because then you, the journalist or the journal, are forever after dedicated to “proving” your thesis in polemics, instead of commenting on the emergent phenomena of the times. Cheerleading can secure an audience for a time but the absence of surprise means you are boring. Of course, doing so, you expect to be vindicated and rewarded for it. You might be right in part at least but the public at large will not reward you for being right.

Maybe you have integrity and reward yourself with self-esteem for being “right” with regard to process, methods and professional standards (not the same thing as being a prophet predicting the future at all). Whether society rewards such virtue of process is not up to the individual acting alone; it depends in part on the virtue of the audience assessing value in method.

A journalist’s methods at best are not enough to make up for a scientist’s failure of method. They are not the same methods.

“Yves” and “Lambert” often do content moderation themselves. If they and their content moderation team can’t tell the difference between “Yves” herself and online crazies, perhaps they ought to consider getting out of the online blog business.

I now no longer support RFK Jr. for Pres of the US at all. Now the only person that I could support for President of the US would be Cynthia McKinney or a clone of hers. I came really close to making a huge mistake.

I would have been massively dissapointed in RFK Jr. And it is pretty haard for me to be dispointed. To me Grim Jim is wildly optomisitic. While others accuse him of being to pessimitic. Yet in one of his latest comments he did not even mention the damage to crops that will be caused in the near future by massive hail storms.

I did not get to where I am by not being a realist.

Remember this??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria#:~:text=Day%2Dcare%20sex%2Dabuse%20hysteria%20was%20a%20moral%20panic%20that,part%20of%20the%20Satanic%20panic.

That was an unplanned case of hysteria.

I saw an article today written by an Italian Proffessor I think his name is Ugo Bardo. I might be wrong. But he posted an article looking back at the beginings of the covid story. At first I disagreed with one of his points. But then on further reflection I decided that I agreed after all. Anyways the article got me thinking about the events again.

I have been trying to resist writing about this subject because some group of people went to extra ordinary lengths to gas light the entire planet. And they were very successful. Therefore for me to say anything that would cast doubt on the narratives that they have managed to make main stream is like an ant trying to stop a shoe from squishing him went the ant gets steped on by a human being.

I do not know who was behind the plandemic. I do not even know what their motives were. But one thing that I am pretty sure of is that motive for the plandemic was not for parma companies to make money. That too is just a cover story to hide the real motive of the plandemic. If that was the real motive the intellegence agencies would have made sure that the plandemic did not happen because it would not have passed a cost risk benifit analysis for the intel agencies.

The really important questions about the plandemic are not the phoney stats that were spread about to gaslight the human spiecies, with the exception of those that were party to program. But HOW they managed to pull this off. An average person would say that there is no way in hell that a psy op can get so many medical personnel to support the same narrative. But people with the right background know that it can be done in principle. But in practice a huge amount of details need to be worked out.
I myself do not have the medical background to work out the details. But I think that here and there people with the correct background are figuring out how humanity was hoodwinked.

The intellegence agencies have long arms. That Russian dissedent Nalvarny or something to that effect sure died of a blood clot at the worst possible time. Who benifited most from his death? Who benifited massively by the timing of his death? The Russians say that he died of a blood clot. Well people who are beaten often suffer from blood clots. The guy was in a prison. The guy once said that Muslims were cockroaches. Not surprising that such a guy would end up getting beaten in a prison anywhere in the world. But the west will not be blamed for his beating because how can the west get to him when he is in a Russian prison, right?

But the difficult aspect of the plandemic is that it appears to have been a joint exercise of the western intell agencies and their worst enemies in China, Russia and Iran, which is so absurd that it discredits the entire psy op angle. To believe that these sides would work together to create this gaslighting event is much more absurd than believing that lots of people did not die from the covid virus.

Yet to dismiss this angle means that one has to accept other absurdities. And I think that my POV is now standing the test of time better than the POV of the masses of people who raised and are still raising hysteria about the dangers of the Covid virus.