ACCORDING TO LIZ - Anyone who speaks out against the genocide in Gaza and for the rights of ordinary Palestinians is not anti-Semitic but for free speech, for democracy, and for human dignity.
Israel’s prime minister has falsely accused Mayor Zohran Mamdani of supporting Hamas after CNN interview clips showed Mamdani again calling Netanyahu a war criminal.
One is a fact. In the eyes of much of the world as well as the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netanyahu is a war criminal.
The purported Hamas link, just an addled, twisting of the truth to manipulate public opinion in favor of the criminal Israeli provocateur of regional wars, genocide and condoning racist violence on the West Bank.
Another far more disturbing fact is NAZA, the Israeli military’s shameful system for assessing collateral damage which maps out every building in the Gaza Strip in real time predicting the number of civilians that could be killed in an airstrike. And still proceeding.
NAZA is also the title of the just-released documentary with extensive, extremely detailed confessions of military participants in the mass targeting and murder of hundreds of Palestinian civilians. Call just one a terrorist and Netanyahu’s government plays yet another of its get-out-of-jail free cards to continue its favorable façade for the eyes of its American supporters.
On one hand the Israeli government is claiming the documentary contains classified IDF information that must be suppressed and, on the other, that the whole thing is a hoax.
Somewhat doubtful given the information, if not the interviews, has been widely available online for several years.
These are dispassionate interviews with educated Israelis in tech, recorded against the Tel Aviv skyline, about the mechanics of total surveillance in Gaza using the IDF’s A.I. targeting systems including Gospel, Lavender, and Where’s Daddy* and then analyzing the footage to identify human targets, correctly or not, and calculate the number of civilians it’s permissible to murder in return for one possible terrorist.
Collaterals, much like too many of the men murdered by ICE since Trump took office.
Voiced on video, one of the Israelis shared about how the experience could be fun, staying up late with your buddies, working toward a common goal.
Frat brothers discussing genocide as if it were just another videogame. Or headboard coups for raping intoxicated co-eds.
The state of Israel and its army want to revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship. Unlikely, as that concept was long ago rejected by the Israeli Supreme Court for the murderer of Itzak Rabin, but they still want to raise the fine for “defamation” aka an unpalatable truth or, as Netanyahu’s stateside comrade-in-arms would say, fake news, by almost 200,000%.
In July, Ro Khanna introduced an amendment in the House Armed Services Committee to kill a provision hidden in the ginormous 2027 National Defense Authorization Act that would irredeemably intertwine the American and Israeli militaries.
Far more egregiously than the inflation-adjusted $200 billion in military assistance bestowed on Israel by the United States since 1948, the 2027 NDAA would essentially fuse the interests of Israel and the United States by bestowing unprecedented access to U.S. military technology, data-sharing systems and defense production capabilities on a foreign country and, more critically, prevent accountability for future funding and Congressional oversight, even when used for Israeli territorial expansion and genocide.
Potentially granting the likes of Netanyahu command and control of American military operations, personnel, and equipment.
Despite support from both sides of the aisle, even by Marjory Taylor Greene, the amendment failed on a voice vote.
Khanna’s revelation of Israeli influence during the mark-up generated challenges from committee members. But it was the truth.
On June 1 Netanyahu had written a letter to Marlin Stutzman, Republican representative from Indiana, a state high on the list of weapons manufacturing, personally thanking Stutzman for endorsing “my plan” for a “new framework of joint defense cooperation, co-development, coproduction and mutual investment in areas including advanced missile defense, artificial intelligence unmanned systems, cybersecurity and next generation military platforms” – clearly indicating his claws were tightly hooked into this supposedly all-American legislation.
Shocking many, even those in the know of how quid pro quo government operates. Republican Senator Thomas Massie of Kentucky protested: “We are a sovereign country.”
Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, pointed out that allowing the passage of the NDAA with this provision intact “would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including A.I., quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more.
“It also proposes ‘network integration’ and ‘data fusion.’ In other words, the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data. If fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the U.S. has with any other country in the world.
“The result could well be a U.S. political system even more susceptible to the whims of an Israeli government that seemingly has no qualms about drawing the U.S. into military conflicts in the Middle East.”
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the peace group CodePink, and other anti-war groups pushing lawmakers to cut off military assistance to Israel over the genocide in Gaza and escalating violence against Palestinians were completely ignored by Trump ass-lickers groveling to avoid being primaried.
Unprecedented AIPAC funding of candidates beating the anti-Semitism drum is further perverting American politics away from true democracy.
Letting Israeli A.I. tech loose on the issue whether physically in the Middle East or in the social media morass of American politics poses tremendous danger for civilians here and overseas in Trump’s losing wars.
Experts at the Center for American Progress called on Congress to refuse the president’s outrageous 2027 $1.5 trillion military budget request.
“Instead, lawmakers should insist on a disciplined defense budget that makes sense, ensuring that funds are spent on programs critical for the well-being of American service members and modern defense needs—not vanity projects with limited military utility.”
The NDAA is currently stuck in the Senate where the Republican leadership have been unable to garner the necessary 60 votes. Time is tight with the upcoming fiscal year technically having started on October 1.
Even to have a signed bill by the start of 2027, the Senate must come up with a version with enough concessions to pass, which then must be reconciled with the more militant House bill before it can be sent to the Oval Office for signature.
Amid rising antiwar sentiments, American voters are likely to severely impinge on the president’s power.
Republican candidates supporting Trump’s bellicosity are at risk. The flip-flop on A.I. and data centers across the country, given the specific and implied A.I. expansion written into a number of aspects of the NDAA, won’t help its passage.
Dr. Adam Hamawy, progressive Democratic nominee for New Jersey's 12th congressional district, puts his opposition this way:
“We’re paying for bombs, we’re paying for war, we’re paying for aircraft carriers and bombers. We should be spending it here for healthcare, childcare, what the American people need.”
In a belligerent speech at the United Nations on September 24, the Israeli prime minister doggedly defended his country’s military actions across the Middle East and again attacked Mayor Mamdani.
Showing their disgust with the man and his internecine policies, dozens of delegates walked out of the hall when he took the podium.
Meanwhile the United States and its military continue to provide the Netanyahu regime with weapons of destruction, bulldozers to destroy housing, and boosted military intelligence able to target one purported terrorist surrounded by a sea of civilians resulting in further massacres, all the while granting Israeli leaders diplomatic cover for their doctrines of murder.
Bypassing traditional channels, Trump recently approved sending $2.8 billion in bombs to Israel including 40,000 2,000-pound bombs, bombs that even the Netanyahu-apologist Biden put a stop to in fear of their use to further the annihilation of Gazans.
Primarily funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars transferred in a sleight of hand to the Israeli military to buy American manufactured matérial.
Exercising their right to free speech in opposition to the intrigues of Israeli military ambition – whether those voices are American, British, Israeli, Palestinian or New Yawker – is not terrorism.
Calling criminals criminals and criminal actions criminal actions… and terrorists embedded in Netanyahu’s armed forces what they truly are: terrible, is in no way anti-Semitic.
Is this really how Americans want their country and themselves to be perceived?
*read further details in From Nine-Eleven to Lavender)
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
