United States | News & Politics

The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) has initiated an armed crackdown against its own people in the occupied West Bank, a campaign reportedly backed and orchestrated by the United States. While corporate media narratives attempt to distance Washington from the operation, its roots trace back years.

On Saturday, PA President Mahmoud Abbas directed the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF) to execute a large-scale operation targeting resistance groups in the embattled Jenin refugee camp. PA spokesperson Brigadier General Anwar Rajab justified the crackdown by accusing these groups of sowing “sedition and chaos,” portraying them as foreign-backed Islamist criminals.

The operation swiftly escalated, resulting in the killing of two Palestinians, including an unarmed teenager and a fighter aligned with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), who was a leader within the Jenin Brigades group. Accusations against the Palestinian Authority forces quickly mounted. UN officials condemned their actions, reporting that security forces had opened fire on unarmed minors.

PA forces were also documented using a hospital as a military base during the crackdown. From within the medical facility, they reportedly opened fire and detained eight individuals.

The Palestinian Authority has sought military support from the United States, specifically requesting armored vehicles and ammunition to bolster its forces. In response, Washington has reportedly urged Israel to approve the transfer of such equipment.

Ahead of the operation, U.S. Security Coordinator Michael Fenzel is said to have held meetings with the PA security forces’ leadership. These discussions reportedly centered on the planned crackdown.

Trained by U.S. and Canadian armed forces, the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF) 2,000-strong 101st Unit has now been assigned the task of dismantling resistance groups based in Jenin. These groups span a broad political spectrum, from secular factions to religious ones.

Plutocrats like Thiel are constantly thinking about the fact that ordinary people vastly outnumber them and can kill them at any time. They think about it way more often than ordinary people do. It’s a point that they are acutely aware of at all times. It consumes their attention. They are always working on manipulating public consciousness to ensure that we don’t think as much as they do about how many more of us there are of them, and how we don’t have to put up with their domination of our society if we don’t want to.

As Michael Parenti once put it:

“I tell students when they say, ‘Oh they don’t care what we think. They ignore us’, and all that, and I say, ‘Oh no, no. That’s the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly, they don’t care how your living conditions are, they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air, they don’t care about anything. The only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking. In the morning, they start, ‘What’s going to be the story today? How do we manipulate, how do we control, how do we contain, how do we influence, how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds?’”

Manipulating public consciousness is of existential importance to the ruling class, because no matter how many billions of dollars you amass, at the end of the day you’re still a soft skin sack of blood and bones like anybody else, and you share a society with huge numbers of people who can very easily hurt you if they want to. That’s why our minds are constantly being hammered with propaganda into accepting the status quo politics upon which our rulers have built their kingdoms.

The man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare's CEO has been charged with murder as an act of terrorism, prosecutors said Tuesday as they worked to bring him to a New York court from a Pennsylvania jail.

Luigi Mangione already was charged with murder in the Dec. 4 killing of Brian Thompson, but the terror allegation is new.

Under New York law, such a charge can be brought when an alleged crime is “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion and affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping.”

A key source named by The New York Times as an expert helping to verify the authenticity of internal Hamas documents in a major report in October told Drop Site News he had raised concerns about the veracity of the documents in his interviews with the Times. Israel provided the paper with alleged Hamas meeting minutes as part of its campaign to directly link Iran to the planning of the October 7 attacks.

Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, whom the paper described as “a Hamas member and a former fighter in its military wing who is now an analyst based in Istanbul,” said a Times reporter only permitted him to review one page of the 30 pages of documents the Times asked him to verify. Al-Awawdeh, according to WhatsApp messages seen by Drop Site News, told a Times reporter that without seeing more of the document “it is hard to judge” its authenticity.

“I asked for the other pages and he said he couldn’t send them to me but he said he could read them to me at a later time and I told him that wouldn’t work, if I could see the pages, it would be preferable,” al-Awawdeh told Drop Site. The Times never provided al-Awawdeh with additional pages and subsequently cited him in an October 12 story as the only named source for its verification of what it described as “Minutes of Hamas’s secret meetings” that “provide a detailed record of the planning for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/23689894

from #972Magazine [published in Israel]
By Ahmed Moor
December 17, 2024

Dec 16 (Reuters) - Lockheed Martin (LMT.N) said on Monday it had formed a subsidiary that will help U.S. defense companies incorporate artificial intelligence into their operations.

Companies across sectors have leaned more on AI over the past few years to help optimize their workflow. However, defense companies have remained cautious given the sensitive data required to train models in the sector.

Earlier this month, privately held defense tech company Anduril Industries partnered with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to develop and deploy advanced artificial intelligence solutions for national security missions.