tv SPOTLIGHT PRESSTV August 18, 2024 2:02am-2:31am IRST
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hello and welcome to press tv spotlight, i'm marsia hashimi, thanks so much for being with us. there must be an end to hostilities is what we have been hearing for over 10 months now from the so-called international community regarding gaza, as those words without any punch continue to be said, design is genocide. continues and more palestinians
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are being killed, from newborns to their great-grandparents, no one is spared, as at least 40,000 people have been slaughtered, if someone had told you this year ago that 40,000 people could be killed in real time, and most of the world not do a thing, would you have believed that? well, that is the world that we are living in this august of 2024. i like to welcome my guest. to the program. paul rudi, co-founder free palestine movement out of berkeley. anthony haw, professor of globalization, leth bridge university, out of leth bridge. thank you both for being with us. i started off with paul, your thoughts, paul, i, i started with that question and beginning, i mean, could
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you have imagine what we're going through right now, watching a daily basis in real time, and though we have pockets of resistance and pockets of awareness, still it's continuing 10 months on, what would you have believed that this would be our reality? well, i expected for decades that we would eventually come to something like a genocide that there would there would be terrible event, but i thought that this terrible event in would cause people to wake up and not only see what's going on, and it's had some effect in that direction, but i expected the reaction to be revulsion at at what israel is doing and what it is, and discovering the reality of israel and that the... world would
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react to shut it down to do something to to stop the carnage and the the the theft of land and the ethnic cleansing, but that hasn't been the case, everything that's happened has been interpreted as doing something, but in fact it's only been about words, about about the international court of justice and the proclamations and uh the halting of commerce with israel from part of the world, not the entire world. all of these things have uh, it seems like israel doesn't care, as long as it has the united states to back it, and it doesn't care for all the condemnations and the legal statements and and condemnations. it's, i thought we'd be beyond this now. yes, indeed. anthony, your
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thoughts, what is it? um, uh, paul just talked about that he thought it would be a greater reaction than we're seeing, and of course, as i said, there are pockets of awareness that's happening throughout the world, but again, it's still continuing 10 months later, what is the main issue here that can cause uh, this lack of action and stopping this genocide in your perspective? well, think at the moment we see the united states stop trying to step forward as if it is some kind of negotiator or moderator in a process and at the same time this process that the us government seeks to moderate, they are allies, supporters, partners with one of the with the main protagonist which is israel, so all along this process we see the... united states saying, well, maybe if
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you do smaller bombs, or few less bombs, but nevertheless sending billions and billions of dollars of armaments and and saying, maybe if you do this, and maybe if you do that, but to take into account the reality that this is thoroughly a us operation and any efforts to put a sheen on it, an ornamentation on it, that it's trying to be the moderate party, no, it is belligerant here, it is a genocidal partner in this terrible situation, so we don't have viable system, of course the international the us and israel have snubbed that system, that system uh, now we see finally the judiciary getting involved, the international court of justice and the icc, although the icc gets keeps getting intimidated and pushed away, but we see the
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implications that there is no enforcement mechanisms, that these judicial bodies have no resort to an enforcement mechanism, and causes you to think twice, would we really want the un to have access to its own army? what kind of power would that be? so we're seeing you know demonstration of not only a failure of humanity of those in power essentially to really confront what they're involved with, the human, it's not a tragedy, it's a sacrilege, it's a degradation, it's a assault on all of humanity, it's a true crime against humanity, and we're also seeing the reality that structurally the rule of law is kind of a farse, and exists for certain people under certain levels of power and wealth, but it doesn't exist at the upper
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echilons, it's been a fiction and now it's exposed for the ruthless, genus, literally genocidal fiction is... as it is, and this f, and this genocide, i, i don't, i can't think of any comparison, when i think of the predominant story about world war ii, and jews dying in gas chambers, as the predominant story, that's a pretty gentle death compared to what we're seeing with force starvation, with now, sores and epidemics and plagues going through the population uh... the uh mental stress, the hospitals being destroyed, and this this first time we've really seen a real demonstration of scientific mechanistic starvation created, you know, and and water,
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and and i can't think of a situation like it, what a poverty of institutions and compassion within our ruling class we see. yeah, indeed, well, paul, i mean, by april of this year uh, israel had dropped over 70,000 tons of bombs on this densely populated small area of the gaza strip, now since then no statistics have been um released, but let's talk about exactly what what do we mean by that, we're talking about 70,00 tons on area, the side of gaza strip, break it down to for people to understand when we're talking. talking about that this was more than all of world war ii, more bombs than all of world war ii dropped in this 10 months on that strip, that's correct, essentially it has destroyed more than half of all the structures in there it
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is, it's comparable in world war ii what to what happened in dres, dresden germany where the entire city was in gul not only by bombs, but by fire storm, and but this has happened not just just to one city, this has happened to all of gaza, there are less than half of the structures are still standing and many of them are damaged, but it's not just the structures, it's the infrastructure, it's the sewage and the water and the the the health services, even it's it's food and water and... all of these things, they've bombed the farms so that whatever food is available there is no longer available. this is absolute, i would go beyond genocide. genocide means the elimination of people, but
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elimination by various means. i would call this the eradication of people, they're trying to eradicate the entire population of of gaza. it's much strong than genocide, and yet uh, we do nothing, we, nothing that has been done until now, all the things that... people will claim have been done in order to stop israel, have not stopped israel in the least, it is continu, it has had no effect on the ground in gaza, this is this is the dilemma that we're we're in, the only way it's going to be stopped is if we have enough governments, people, movements, that are willing to put the their lives and their resources at risk in order to go and stop it physically, the only country that i know that
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is doing that is yemen, it's just yemen, and they're doing a fantastic job, imagine if we had few more countries uh, even bigger than yemen, doing the same thing, just go there, get in the way of the israelis, stop them, dare the united states to intervene and kill in some case. maybe some allies that they have, it requires physical intervention. yes, indeed. well, um, anthony, a gaza grave digger says he can't sleep as he's burying 200 to 300 marters every day. hundreds of families have been totally wiped out, meaning generational murder has been taken place. i mean, let's talk about this, this level of barbar. and once again we say, it it still continues, it still continues as we speak.
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what does this do, you, you mentioned something earlier about this basically affecting all of humanity, what does it do to all of us really? um, what, of course, first and foremost is the palestinians and what they're going through, but also this major stain on humanity. well, that that is major, major point. that all people, decent people throughout the world, we have to wake up every morning and wake up to realization that terrible assault on humanity, the likes of which we've never seen, goes on day after day, week after week, month after month, and and and here we are, it's sort of obvious, but i think it needs to be emphasized that there's no situation in the world quite... like it where you have 2.3 million prisoners caged in a in a jail and so you can't run
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away, so these people inside this jail are subjected to anything forced on them, and it seems the predators, the united states and israel, have lots of help from lots of allies and are supplies in lots of ways that this is extreme. elaborate ways that they're thinking to kill people, not just kill them, but torture them, make it, is this what they call deterrance? is this it will be so afrighten of this superpower that they can do anything now? mean, are we looking a vision of the future for many other peoples? as genocide becomes normalized, and people are persuaded that we have to learn to just take this in our stride and learn to accommodate. "now things that no human uh world community has ever had to accommodate facing this uh, i
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mean, hasn't it become, sorry to jump in here, but hasn't it become normalized to a certain point, um, anthony, because i can recall myself when the first hospital was bombed uh, just how devastated all of us were. um and now it's almost on a regular basis that hospitals are bombs, that people are picking up pieces of their children or their parents and weighing the amount of uh what a human being should weigh because they can't even identify the remains. mean we have cross, it's almost you want to say paul almost like point of no return, mean i don't even know how humanity uh... is going to recover from this and the palestinians themselves, i mean when you look at the kids
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that they're witnessing this day in, day out, day in and day out, i mean, what does it do to them, your thoughts on this? i mean, really, i, i'm just because we've talked about this now for 10 months, um, and the words really don't even come anymore, because it's so horrific, it's so horrific even be alive during this time and not being able to do. anything about it? well, i have to say that in in the us, in november we have an election, and the one certainty we have in the election is: that we are uh those of us, the vast majority of people who vote, whether they vote republican or democrat, whether they they vote for camela harris or donald trump, they're going to vote for genocide, they're going to support genocide, they're going to say in effect, i know you're going
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to help continue this genocide in gaza, you're going to give israel whatever it needs in order to continue to genocide in gaza, but i'm going to vote for you anyway, i'm going to help you commit genocide in gaza. millions and millions of americans are going to vote for genocide. i just published an article it in dissident voice, but that's what they're going to do. this is how normalized it is. why, why, paul, why? i mean, because anyone with a conscience, i would imagine anywhere in the world, and seeing baby. being crushed to death or cut up into pieces, it would awaken them and they would not want to support it, so what is happened? what has happened? let's talk about the us, what has happened then that the majority of americans, as you said, whether voting republican or democrat voting for genocide, why? because
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they think it's their duty to vote, because they think they have a choice, because they think that... voting for the lesser evil, but when the lesser evil is so evil, how can you even vote? that it doesn't make any sense, we need voter strike here, we need to find another way to to create create our government, nobody, i don't know anybody who who was involved in the selection of the candidates that we have in the united states, it's uh, we we don't really have. choices um who was it goldman - once said hundre years ago she said um if if voting made a difference it would be made illegal and that's basically the case where this is a
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game we're playing it's it's a deception on the american people that voting actually does something. when all of the control of the candidates and the voting procedure is in the hands of a relatively small group of people who also control the information fed to the electorate, so the electorate is kept as ignorant as possible, believing only what they're told. right, unfortunately. well, anthony, looking at the subject at hand, i mean, there's another round, there was another round of so-called cease fire talk, uh in doha, qatar, egypt, us and israel, it ended without any result. now, the white house says, they're optimistic. let's start from here. i mean, how can a cease fire happen one without a hamas representative, and how can the zianist even talk about, uh, being serious about a cease fire, when they have just assassinated, they main negotiator
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for the palestinian side? well, zionist. are doing the mediation in the process and zionists are parties to the process and the fact that we have the democratic party against the republican party and both are under zionist control and there's a prominent third party candidate robert f kennedy also under zionis control and let's not fool ourselves that the media has vested interest in zainaus narrative so this idea that we're sort of jammed in this situation, and it's not like the united states is the only place where this is happening, same thing in canada, same thing in britain, you design control the opposition parties as well as the governing parties, and let's not shy away from realizing that the people perpetrating this genocide are the main victims of
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genocide, their suffering is the reason that we have a genocide conviction ' genocide convention which is now being applied to the people of israel, so what did all of this holocaust education and the perspective of people inside israel, where we know that the general population is disagrees with netanyahu and lot of things, but there is quite a high level of support for the idea of eliminating palestinians, that this isn't just few crazies on a high, this is a... reflection of a deep conviction that somehow has become rooted in many, many people, jewish people in israel, and and then we have of course the christian zyonis and such. so you taking into account what this all means in the light of our larger historical inheritance where this event called the holocaust has become one of them maybe the
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core legends legend of our western civilization or the core well narrative we really have to take account what have we done in all of this way we've handled genocide up until now to to mess with people's minds in very atrocious manners, and on that note, i'm so sorry we're out of time, but i appreciate both of you, being with me, paul larudi, co-founder free palestine movement out of berkeley, anthony hall, professor of globalization, leth bridge university, out of leth bridge, and thank you viewers for being with us on another spotlight, i'm marza hashimi, hope to see you right here next time, goodbye.
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to be anti-immigrant, traditionally in front was to be rightwing. to be anti-muslim, you don't need to be right-wing. you can say, "i'm anti-muslim, but i'm not racist. l'islamophobie n'est qu'un masque du racisme, il fonctionne exactement de la même manière. moi je connais pas aucun parti en france qui n'a pas de position à un moment donné contre l'islam, il a aucun parti en france qui va accepter que vous portiez un foulard dans un lieu publique. l'islamophobie en france provient pour la l'écrasante majorité d'un discours médiatique et politique qui alimente une peur en fait du musulman et de l'islam mais qui ne correspond absolument pas à la réalité. time or go, that's all, it's not a problem of being racist.
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the headlines on press tv, no and inside to the israely genocide in gaza, at least 15. members of family including nine children are killed in an israeli strike on central gaza. a letter to the us state secretary, nearly 130 journalists and press organizations call for an arms embargo on israel for killing media crews in gaza, and the hamas resistance movement dismisses, the us claims that sease fire deal for gaza is near as quote,
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