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From: AbsurdTimes from AbsurdTimes's Newsletter <absurdtimes1c2@substack.com>
THE ABSURD TIMES
Illustration: Needs no explaination. First, welcome to all the new subscribers! Now, let's get to some of the latest issues. LIES – ISRAEL BUILT THE TUNNELS - OVERWHELMING PERFIDY BY Absurd Times These revelations have been suppressed by decades and some are just now available. We will definitely start very slow and seem a bit like a textbook but understand that we are just trying for timing. Believe me, things pick up quite a bit before the article's journalistic attachment. Negation I once met and then knew a Professor, from the West Side of Chicago (neighborhoods change rapidly there), a Ph,D. In Political Science, full professor, who still lived his background. He was the most profound philosopher of our age. He would shout out in the middle of a longish and tedious discussion the type where everyone seemed to be arguing about the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin-type discussion "WHO CARES???!!!!" I immediately woke up. He had summarized everything of the last unknown number of hours into two words: WHO CARES??!! As the group began things about manners, erudition, and even throwing in a bit of cosmology, I finally mustered the energy to care and said SHUT THE FUCK UP. I'M OUTTA HERE! He started to laugh and then we left together. That was the last MENSA meeting either of us ever went back to. He once asked me why I had bothered so long with them, and I told him that it had been building, that I was usually careful not to get angry as I tended to be violent for extended periods, but the night before they had been chanting or garbling that Ravel's Bolero was sexual intercourse and I began to wonder how they could ever have been drawing on personal experience. Then, I said, "You came in and said WHO CARES??!! and I saw my exit. Lose a mob and gain a friend." He started to laugh and then shook his head wondering "Who are these beings?". And I said "Some of my best friends were beings, but things change." It also marked the first time I smirked at the same time as someone else did. The case if the superflous comma Are any fans of Sherlock Holmes around? We need to go to the first attempted overthrow of our government of this century. We also have to remember Dan Quayle. At the time George Herbert Walker Bush, left-handed first baseman of the Yale team and at least a 201 batter, head of the CIA, Vice President under Ronald Regan, star of BEDTIME FOR BONZO, and spokesman for 20 Mule Team Borax, Governor of California who said "We should be careful about who we allow to go to college" when he found out that students caused him trouble, and finally President of the United States who was told about the Iran-Contra deal but forgot about it anyway as his Alzheimers started to kick in, had Dan Quayle as his Vice President. We have to hold on to that fact because it was the foundation for this century. So, who was Dan Quayle? He was widely regarded as a joke. On the Web you can find many misquotes or foul-ups he was the author of. He was from Indiana. My favorite jab at him was the quote arising from a visit he made to "Latin America". He saw all the CIA-prompted people cheering him and waving him on, and blowing him kisses. When he got back, he said "It was a great trip and made me wish I had studied Latin harder in high school." Just do a search on hiM and you will be rewarded. Mike Pence, also from Indiana, called him when Mike was told he could overthrow the election by messing with the Electoral College votes. Quayle told him he didn't have a chance. So, Dan Quayle knew more about what was going on than anyone else and saved our government, at least for a while. What about the comma? Well, it seems that Pence told Trump, straight out, "You know you lost the election." However, in the transcript, it read "You know, you lost the election.' These are two different sentences. The first is an assertion that Trump actually knew that he had lost the election The second makes it seem that Pence is informing Trump that in his (Pence's) opinion, Trump lost the election. The first is the correctly punctuated sentence. Eventually, that led to chants of HANG MIKE PENCE and the informative video of Josh Hawley of Missouri running away from danger like a long-legged chicken escaping an ax. So who needs anything more? Some facts that have been too succinct to mention: I was once asked about INHERIT THE WIND when I mentioned it in connection with the guy who was now the Speaker of the House figured the world was only 6,000 years old. Someone wrote back and said he couldn't find it. I told him I found it on ROKU – all 3 versions. Little did I know that subscription services snapped up the latest two minutes after my announcement. The day after Israel finished the pause, 700 more Palestinians were killed. On the West Bank: it is now carved up into 224 Islands, an Archipelago if you will, and no longer belongs to the Palestinians. Israel claims to have won it and legally owns the Israeli Supreme Court decided it was time to start Nit Wit Yahoo's trial. A recent poll determined that in the West Bank, 80% of Palestinians support Hamas. (Way up). The same poll in Gaza yielded 60%. All of this becomes even more to the point that more than half the Palestinian population was born just before or when Hamas was elected. Why are they telling us that all these people choose Hamas? Trump, and thus most Republicans are attacking MSNBC now. MSNBC had first decided out of fear to just fire the journalist who made the mistake of being more accurate than Israel wanted, but because of the plan to extinguish MSNBC, it, changed its mind, removed his regular show (3 weeks left), and made him sort of an executive. Maga wanted to have Hunter Biden testify to one of their committees. At first, he resisted, then agreed insisting THAT THE SESSION BE ON LIVE TELEVISION. No, they wanted it behind closed doors where they could "leak" whatever, He volunteered just so long as it was open and what actually happened was seen and heard. They hid. OK – some information from what remains of journalism in our fine country: The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill deconstructs Israel's narrative around Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital, including unsubstantiated allegations Hamas uses tunnels under the hospital as its command center — tunnels that Israel itself built. "We were told that this was like a Hamas Pentagon," says Scahill, who describes how the Israeli military's own evidence disproves its allegations that the hospital was dangerous enough to justify its siege and bombardment. The World Health Organization says Al-Shifa, Gaza's largest hospital, "is no longer functioning." The Israeli disinformation campaign against it was a "lethal lie," says Scahill. We also discuss the status of Palestinian prisoners who are now candidates for release in Israel and Hamas's ongoing hostage exchange. Transcript This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Israel is continuing to detain the head of Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza. Last week, the Israeli military detained Muhammad Abu Salmiya as he was evacuating patients south from Gaza City. Israel raided Al-Shifa, claiming Hamas ran a command and control center under the hospital, but Israel has yet to provide any hard evidence to back that up. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak recently spoke with CNN's Christiane Amanpour. He admitted Israel built the bunkers decades ago underneath Al-Shifa. EHUD BARAK: It's already known for many years that they have in the bunkers, that originally was built by Israeli constructors underneath Shifa, were used as a command post of the Hamas in a kind of a junction of several — several tunnels, part of this system. I don't know to say to what extent it is a major. It's probably not the only kind of command post. Several others are under other hospitals or in other sensitive places. But it's for sure had been used by Hamas even during this conflict. CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Well, when you say it was built by Israeli engineers, did you misspeak? EHUD BARAK: No, no. Someday, you know, decades ago, we were wanting the place, so we held them. It was decades, many decades, ago, probably five, four decades ago, that we helped them to build these bunkers in order to enable more — more space for the operation of the hospital within the very limited size of this compound. AMY GOODMAN: Again, that was the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. We're joined now by Jeremy Scahill, senior reporter and correspondent at The Intercept, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army and Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. One of his most recent pieces for The Intercept is headlined "Al-Shifa Hospital, Hamas's Tunnels, and Israeli Propaganda." Jeremy is joining us from Germany. Jeremy, can you talk about what he just said? JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. Well, first of all, Amy, the Al-Shifa Hospital, originally, going back to the years of the British Mandate in the 1940s, it was a British military barracks, and then it was converted into a hospital, under both the Israeli and the Egyptian occupations of that area. And then, in the 1980s, the Israelis began to do extensive construction on it. In fact, I was looking at the Israeli Architecture Archives that were set up, and you can go back and look at [inaudible] from that era, and two Tel Aviv architects oversaw the expansion of the Al-Shifa Hospital. And by 1983, they had finished the construction of underground facilities at the hospital. Now, we should also say, it's not uncommon for hospitals the world over to have underground facilities for a variety of reasons. But when you're in an active war zone, it's very common. In fact, Israel has many underground facilities at its hospitals throughout Israel and has been using them since October 7th, certainly. They're considered more secure places to hold vulnerable patients. And so, what we know about Israel's construction is that they at least built an underground operating room. They built a network of tunnels. And, in fact, during some of the construction, the son of one of the Israeli architects who designed the underground facility said that when Israel was building these in the 1980s, they hired people from Hamas as security to guard the construction project to ensure that it wouldn't get attacked. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jeremy, could you talk also about the thousands of prisoners that Israel has been holding, many of them without any trial for extended years, and yet the Netanyahu government refers to all of them as "terrorists"? JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. I mean, Juan, I went through — and this connects also to the narrative around Al-Shifa. But just to directly answer your question, Israel released a list of 300 names that it said were fair game for a hostage-prisoner handover because of the truce with Hamas. And I went through all 15 pages of those names. I read each of the individual dates of birth, the dates of arrest, what the nature of the charges were — if there were any charges. Some of them don't even list any actual charges against them. And what I discovered is that of the 300 names, 233 of these prisoners — most of them are teenage boys, some are — there's a teenage girl who's 15 years old — the 233 of 300 have not been convicted of anything. They haven't been sentenced for anything. And Israel is the only country in the so-called developed world that tries children in military courts. And so, you know, the Israeli narrative is that these are all hardened terrorists, because Palestinians are not allowed to have any context. Palestinians are not treated as full human beings. So, when a child — maybe his brother was killed by the Israeli forces, maybe his mother was killed by the Israeli forces — throws a rock at a soldier, their houses are often then raided at night. They're snatched. They're taken to interrogation without the presence of a parent or a lawyer. And then they're pressured into pleading guilty under threat of spending years in a military judicial process. Now, I say this relates to Al-Shifa because the colonial narrative always — and you can look at the British with the IRA, you can look at the position against Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress — is that those who are victims of the occupation have no rights to legitimate struggle. And so, the prisoners that Israel are holding, overwhelmingly, are people that are accused of committing political acts of violence. And that context also bleeds into Israel's narrative about Al-Shifa: Al-Shifa is not really a hospital. Al-Shifa — look, I don't know if you guys have the video, but if you do, you should play it. Israel puts out a video to justify the siege of Al-Shifa Hospital, the most important hospital in Gaza, where you had dozens of children that needed incubators. Israel had knocked out the power supply. You had the most vulnerable patients there. They put out a video, the Israeli Defense Forces, that is this high-tech three-dimensional rendering, they said, of an underground, what I just call a Hamas Pentagon, and they imply that this is where — this is the central facility where Hamas is planning its terror operations. When Israel finally then lays full siege to it, with the backing of the Biden administration and Biden himself — they co-signed all of that. They said that hostages had been held under the hospital. They said that it was used as a command and control center. When Israel finally starts to access the hospital, they take embedded journalists on these propaganda tours. And what they found was essentially nothing of any major significance. They go in, and they say, "Oh, look, we found these rifles behind an MRI machine," which is ridiculous for anyone who knows the technology of an MRI machine and the magnetism of it. They're all conveniently placed, neatly arranged. There's one Hamas vest with a Hamas logo on it. So that gets ridiculed, and skepticism is expressed even by corporate media outlets that historically print Israel's propaganda as just established fact. So, then they finally gain access to a tunnel in the area. They go down there, and they say, "Oh, this tunnel is X number of meters long, and there's a blast-proof door that has a hole so that the Hamas terrorists can fire at us. So we need to take some time before we blow it open. And then on the other side is going to be this command and control center." So, finally, then, last week, they blow the thing open. They go in there. And what do they find? They find three rooms, basically. One looks like a kind of very old-school, 1980s-style exam room from a hospital. There's a sink somewhere in there. There's two toilets. And then you have this utter clown from the IDF who has been made a fool of himself by doing these tours. It's like Geraldo Rivera looking for Al Capone's vault. He's running around, saying, "Aha! There's electricity in here. This is a Hamas command center. Aha! They had an air conditioner in here." You know, the pipes are rusty. Many of the electrical wires aren't even connected. Now, I don't know for a fact that Hamas guys weren't under there. It wouldn't shock me if at some point Hamas did have people under there. But we were told this was like a Hamas Pentagon and that it was so dangerous that it justified laying siege to a hospital filled with the most vulnerable people. This is akin to sort of the George H.W. Bush administration lies about the Iraqis pulling babies from incubators. It's an utter lie that was co-signed and promoted by President Joe Biden and his administration, and they should be made to answer for this, because it wasn't just Al-Shifa. They did it at the Indonesia Hospital. They did it at other hospitals. Of course Hamas has networks of tunnels underneath Gaza, 150 to 300 kilometers, by some estimates. Israel is waging a targeted assassination campaign against them, and they live in a confined area waging a guerrilla war. That's not news. But Israel tried to rebrand something that anyone who's followed this already knows, and tried to make it seem like it's a smoking gun. And, in fact, it was a lethal lie. AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, we want to thank you for being with us, senior reporter, correspondent at The Intercept. We'll link to your pieces on Al-Shifa and Palestinian prisoners at democracynow.org. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy AbsurdTimes's Newsletter, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.
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