“Mystery Strikes” and Deaths

There’s a perverse insistence in Western news that the deaths of innocent children, women, disabled, and the elderly in Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gazan residential areas are casualties of ‘war’. Again and again, they acquit Israel of any wrongdoing by claiming that these killings are due to ‘war’ rather than a genocide, despite UN claims. The civilian death toll in Gaza is higher than any other conflict in the 21st century.

As I demonstrated with a 1937 newspaper headline in Part 1, the use of pro-Zionist Media to create a pro-Israel narrative is nothing new. Here’s an example from 2018, where BBC changed its headline to make sure that Israel is once again the victim.

Let’s get back to the present Israeli genocide now:

NYT protects Israel's role in enforcing illegal famine in Gaza. A NYT piece blames Gazans for not displaying orderly queue at an aid convoy. Absolves Israel of creating famine conditions by not mentioning Israel’s role, and how IDF soldiers shot Gazans looking for food. Credit: NYT

A mysterious strike has killed people in Gaza. Makes you think who attacked, could it have been Israel? Credit: Sky News

Takeaway

Headlines are viewed in a vacuum. They have the responsibility to convey the entire story. With the rise of pay-walls and subscriptions, most readers aren’t allowed to look at anything except the headlines, especially in Western news websites. These headlines thus serve to reinforce a view that Israel is fighting a ‘defensive’ war in Gaza, and not all ‘strikes’ are committed by Israel.

Google announced on Wednesday that its AI note-taking and research app, NotebookLM, is adding an “Audio Overview” feature. Audio Overview will give users another way to digest and comprehend the information in the documents they have uploaded to the app, such as course readings or legal briefs.

Since its launch, NotebookLM has used text to summarize and explain source materials, but now, it can do so out loud using audio. The feature is geared toward people who grasp materials better by listening to explanations as opposed to reading them.

Jordan’s Islamist opposition party has topped the country’s parliamentary elections but fell short of securing a majority, according to official election results.

The Islamic Action Front (IAF), the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, won 31 out of 138 seats in the Parliament of Jordan, tripling its representation in the House of Representatives, the country’s election commission announced on Wednesday.

Al-Adailah told Reuters their win was a “popular referendum” that backs their platform of support for the Palestinian group Hamas, their ideological allies, and their demand to scrap the country’s peace treaty with Israel.

Israel is lobbying members of Congress to press South Africa to drop its legal proceedings in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the war in Gaza, according to an Israeli foreign ministry cable obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: South Africa has until Oct. 28 to give the top UN court its arguments for continuing the case against Israel over alleged violations of the Genocide Convention during the war in Gaza.

• Israeli officials say they want members of Congress to make clear to South Africa that there will be consequences for continuing to pursue the case.

Behind the scenes: Israeli officials said the Israeli foreign ministry started a diplomatic campaign in recent weeks to press South Africa not to push forward with the case at the ICJ. The U.S. congress is a main tool in the effort.

• On Monday, the Israeli foreign ministry sent a classified cable to the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC and to all Israeli consulates in the U.S. about South Africa's ICJ case.

• "We are asking you to immediately work with lawmakers on the federal and state level, with governors and Jewish organizations to put pressure on South Africa to change its policy towards Israel and to make clear that continuing their current actions like supporting Hamas and pushing anti-Israeli moves in international courts will come with a heavy price," the cable read.

In a Q&A session that Tom's Hardware attended at IFA 2024, AMD revealed that the next generation of its Ryzen handheld gaming processor, AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme, will arrive early next year. The Z2 Extreme is the successor to AMD’s current Z1 Extreme, which powers devices like the ROG Ally X and Legion Go.

One AMD representative said, “So, we’ve our Z1 Extreme and Z1 in market today, right? Z2 is in the works. We’re working with a number of partners across the OEM ecosystem on that, and it will be coming to market probably in the early part of 2025.”

After the news of Israel's killing of US-Turkish citizen Aysenur Ezgi Eygi spread throughout the US and international media landscape, the Biden administration said the news was "tragic", offering condolences to the family while refraining from laying the blame on Israel or condemning the incident.

Instead, the US State Department said it would gather the information about her death and then make further comment at a later point..

"Hey how'd they die, Matt? Was it magic? Who or what killed Aysenur?" Palestinian American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said on X, in response to a comment on the killing from State Department spokesperson Matt Miller.

Palestinian American political analyst Omar Baddar said that it was likely Israel's killing would be met with few consequences by the US.

"We're about to get another demonstration of who can kill Americans with impunity," Baddar sad.

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) says world leaders pressured him not to apply for arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister and defense minister on allegations of war crimes in Gaza, the BBC reported on 5 September.

Karim Khan told the BBC, “Several leaders and others told me and advised me and cautioned me,” he said.

Khan explained the ICC needed to request warrants for leaders on both sides of the conflict so that the court is viewed as applying “the law equally based upon some common standards.” “If one had applied for warrants in relation to Israeli officials and not for Gaza, [some would] say: 'Well, this is an obscenity' and, ‘How on earth is that possible?’” he said.

Though several months have passed since Khan's application, ICC judges have not issued any arrest warrants.

Germany finds itself at a historic turning point that could redefine what it stands for and what it wants to project to the world. As the far right makes significant electoral inroads, the country is in a deep identity crisis, facing serious structural economic and societal challenges.

While in the Weimar Republic a century ago, demagogues and populists thrived on “othering” German Jews, today this “other” is the migrant - more specifically, those with Muslim backgrounds.

As in other European countries, this broad-brush approach to political Islam has become widely accepted in the German mainstream, where any form of Islamic activism is regarded as a potential “gateway drug” to the world of jihadism.

The Islamist bogeyman is a beautifully simplistic narrative in populist fear-mongering. Mirroring the story told in the video posted by Bavaria’s interior ministry, any contact with Islamic discourse is portrayed as automatically putting the participant on a conveyer belt from moderate Islamism to al-Qaeda-style terrorism.

The oft-debunked “conveyer belt theory” has been pushed by Israeli and Emirati networks in the counter-extremism space in an effort to securitise political Islam in all its diverse shapes and forms.

The Israeli prison authorities in Raman and Nafha Prisons have told lawyers that scheduled visits to prisoners have been cancelled on the pretext that a quarantine has been imposed due to the spread of scabies among inmates, according to the Palestinian Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club.

No details were provided about how long the visits will be cancelled.

When Israel and Iran started rattling the saber at each other last month, foreign airlines took no chances. Many companies suspended service to Israel as well as neighboring Lebanon, which has been in a low-intensity border war with Israel, and Jordan, which was in the path of a previous Iranian air raid on Israel.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D–N.Y.) believes that this risk calculation is really an act of "discrimination against the Jewish State." In a letter first reported by Jewish Insider, he demanded that American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines "restore air travel to Israel" unless the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says otherwise.

Torres did not mention the flight cancellations to Jordan or Lebanon, both of which also host large numbers of American citizens.

Israeli forces have shot a 16-year-old Palestinian girl in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin and denied medical access to her for over half an hour, leaving her to bleed to death, says the Palestinian Red Crescent.

The teenage girl, identified as Lujain Osama Musleh, was killed in the town of Kafr Dan in Jenin on Tuesday.

The agency said the regime’s forces prevented its medical team and its ambulance from reaching the area of the shooting for some 30 minutes and left the Palestinian girl to bleed to death.