This is beyond awful, beyond inhumane, beyond any regard for human rights and dignity. How is it that no one like the U.N. is monitoring the situation to ensure Israel complies with the cease-fire and withdraws its military? This is an indictment of the civilized world that such a genocide is allowed with no consequences in the 21st century.
Beyond awful and inhumane? No, this is as human as it gets. It is tragic, but there is nothing more in line with human history than this. Our entire existence has been shaped by conflicts just like this—wars, territorial struggles, and violent power shifts. Expecting a toothless international system to change human nature is naive at best.
The U.N. or any other international body ensuring compliance? Let’s be honest—history has shown time and time again that these institutions hold little real power when it comes to stopping conflicts. They can issue statements, draft resolutions, and condemn actions, but at the end of the day, enforcement only happens when the right geopolitical interests align. Otherwise, it’s just theater.
And if you think Gaza is some unique, unprecedented horror, take a step back. Right now, in Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are committing genocide, massacring entire ethnic groups. In China, over a million Uyghur Muslims have been forced into internment camps since 2014 in what is effectively ethnic cleansing. Russia has deported up to 1.6 million Ukrainians, including 260,000 children—wiping out communities by force. Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims are still being murdered and displaced, and Ethiopian forces in Tigray have used famine and mass killings to target ethnic Tigrayans. Azerbaijan just ethnically cleansed over 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. And let’s not forget Western Sahara, where Morocco has systematically displaced and oppressed the native Sahrawi people for decades.
What’s happening in Gaza is brutal, but it’s not some aberration of humanity—it is humanity. Expecting it to suddenly stop because we’ve declared ourselves “civilized” ignores the very nature of our species. If anything, Gaza gets the most attention, while other ongoing genocides barely make the news. That’s not to say one is more justifiable than another—it’s just to point out that this isn’t unique, and outrage tends to be selective.
At the end of the day, we’re just slightly overclocked primates—hairless apes with two times the neurons, the ability to sweat, and a tendency for violence. Don’t expect too much.
To set the record straight, Russia has annexed the Donbas, a longtime pro-Russia-part of Ukraine whose citizens have been relentlessly punished by the pro-West regime put in place in 2014 by our own Victoria Nuland, a proud neocon. Russia did this for its own survival, knowing that the Nuland plan was to provoke Russia and weaken it (see Rand Corporation report from 2019 for full details) through war and sanctions, then carve it into Western-controlled fiefdoms. The point was to seize Russian natural wealth, which is vast. Our country is run by corporations; our politicians are bought and paid for. Our media serves the interests of their corporate sponsors and spins the facts in precisely the way you have illustrated in your comment.
I remember reading an article recently where private prison owners—just that combination of words sounds bizarre from a European perspective—were petitioning the government to lock up more people because they were losing money. That sounds like slavery with extra steps, but whatever, that’s just business as usual over there.
The truth is, none of this is new. If we dig into the oldest written records, they’re about the exact same things we’re dealing with today—power struggles, exploitation, people being treated as disposable. Different time periods, different methods, but the core mechanics never change. People act like we’ve evolved beyond all this, but in reality, it’s just a more polished version of the same old game.
Same shit, different era. Expecting it to magically change because we slapped some new labels on it is just wishful thinking.
And your point is what? It's always been like this so why bother to try and change things for the better? If you are right, then we die trying to make a better world. If you are wrong, then we die not having tried. It's a point, but not one I consider worth considering.
When people call what’s happening in Gaza "unbelievably inhumane," it shows a lack of historical and global perspective. Don’t get me wrong—it is genocide by definition, and the suffering is tragic. But in terms of scale, it’s far from the worst atrocities humanity has inflicted on itself.
Take Dresden in 1945. Over the course of three days, around 25,000 civilians were killed in Allied bombings. In one night, the firebombing of Tokyo killed somewhere between 100,000 to 150,000 people, leaving a million homeless. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wiped out around 200,000 people in an instant and through subsequent radiation exposure.
Even when it comes to population displacement, Gaza is not an exception. The Nakba of 1948 resulted in over 700,000 Palestinians being forced to flee their homes, with around 15,000 killed. Around the same time, the expulsion of Germans after WWII displaced 12 to 14 million people, leading to up to 2 million deaths from forced marches, starvation, and disease.
Later, we had horrors like Pol Pot’s Cambodia, where between 1.7 to 2 million people were executed, starved, or worked to death between 1975 and 1979. And in Rwanda in 1994, around 800,000 people were slaughtered in just 100 days, with neighbors turning on each other with machetes over ethnic identity.
Now let’s talk about more recent atrocities. In Ukraine, over 2,000 people die every day because a midget in heels with a Napoleon complex can’t handle losing power. The civil war in South Sudan has caused over 400,000 deaths since 2013 and continues to destabilize the region. Meanwhile, North Korea has been systematically starving its population, and in Tigray, thousands have been killed amidst widespread reports of mass killings and sexual violence.
This isn’t meant to downplay the tragedy in Gaza. It’s about perspective. Humanity has repeatedly committed atrocities, often on far larger scales. And ironically, despite these events, we are still living in the most peaceful period in recorded history. Maybe that’s something worth considering before declaring any single event the worst we've ever seen.
My point is that this kind of reaction—"Oh my God, this is so unbelievably inhumane, I can’t comprehend it"—is honestly kind of retarded. If you’re over 30, you lived through the Rwandan genocide, where some lunatics imported boatloads of machetes, handed them out to everyday people, and those same people hunted down and hacked their neighbors, friends, and even family members to death. This wasn’t just a random event—it was systematic and horrifying. People were massacred not because of any personal conflict but simply due to their ethnic identity—often based on something as trivial as a surname. Imagine being told to butcher your friend or neighbor with a blunt machete simply because they were categorized as Tutsi.
And it didn’t stop there. Once the Tutsi forces returned, they launched their own retaliatory killings—what you might call a genocidal uno reverse card. It’s the kind of raw brutality that shakes people, but if you know anything about history and geopolitics, this isn’t an anomaly. These kinds of horrific events are built into the patterns of human conflict.
Look at army ants. They don’t fight all the time—most of their activity is peaceful and cooperative. They build, forage, and take care of their colony. But when war comes, they fight hard enough and often enough to be called "army ants." Humans are no different. We have peaceful moments, cooperation, and progress, but violence, territorial disputes, and power struggles are always just beneath the surface. It’s predictable, even if we don’t like to admit it.
So, no, this isn’t surprising or "unbelievable." It’s part of our nature. We might as well be called "army hominids."
Yes, but even more, it is the US et al oligarchic machine that delusionally thinks it is above both the law, even international law, and above the lowly human race. White supremacists who make, break and bend the laws governing our Planet at will. There has so far been no end to their hubris and arrogance and insatiable greed (but we also know that this angers the gods of whatever ilk who will always have the last word on that). Israel is the Empire's Colonial proxy who would not be capable of this level of relentless death, cruelty and vicious destruction without US/Western weapons/$$$ of Empire.
I would suggest that it is a mistake to overlook the current holy trinity that are converging at this time and these policies: Power, Profits, and Prophets. Overlooking any will lead to an incomplete analysis, and away from a solution.
This is great reporting, the result of which infuriates me that Joe Biden's Democrat party has no balls. I think if we do not see some real leadership soon, there should be a new party that represents the humanity for which the U.S. was founded. And of course now with Trump and TecBro
Fascist running the country things will only get worse, around the glob! Thank you for keeping your eye on the Palestinian genocide, your work is invaluable.
Watching the SNL special celebrating their 50yrs of musical appearances - of course they included Sinéad O'Connor tearing up a picture of the Pope. It made more sense this time around though, when I noticed she was wearing a necklace with a Star of David. And I thought, "Oh..."
Israeli Zionists have ruined Judaism's icon forever. Judaism should choose a new one. ;(
Thank you, Abubaker, for this heartrending report. Seeing you, over the many weeks and months, on The Electric Intifada live, has been a beacon of hope for all of us who have watched your reporting. Stay safe. You are precious.
Ceasefire or no ceasefire; scam or no, we cannot allow Israel to escape the legal consequences of their war crimes. The Hind Rajab Foundation has, among other things, filed a case with the ICC against 1,000 Israeli soldiers for war crimes in Gaza.
They have taken further steps in recent days, and vacations are becoming a lot more difficult for IDF soldiers, worldwide. The Hind Rajab Foundation can use our help. Please join me in making a contribution.
You might find meaningful to watch the recent interviews that Glenn Greenwald did on his Rumble platform, and Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada, did with the head of this organisation, Dyad Abou Jahjah,. It was very informative.
And if you didn't hear, Ali Abunimah was recently arrested by the Swiss authorities when he went there to give a talk. Just think about that, a talk. Here's a petition calling for accountability for the arrest of Ali Abunimah in Switzerland:
This is golden opportunity for the BRICS nations to come to your aid, to help you rebuild. I hope serious discussion are underway about how they (Russia and China in particular, with their growing affluence) can thwart Israel's attempt to remove you from Gaza. Don't give up hope! The whole world is watching and sees how your tragedy is our tragedy and why it's time to bring down the Western empire if any of us is to survive the many existential and very real threats to humanity's future.
Even a cursory review of human history should make us realize, in the collective, the human species is incapable of behavior that one would think of as humane. We simply cannot pull it off. And now, just as icing on the cake we have engineered our own demise. Welcome to the Anthropocene; climate change is coming for us all.
It is indeed coming, but only if we figure out how to last that long. In the short term, we have some other, pressing annihilation-inducing problems to contend with, including wars of western choice with nuclear disaster as one of the quite possible outcomes. AI, or what passes for it, has the potential to be extremely destabilizing, and destructive, regardless of whether the search for Eldorado (AGI) is even remotely possible. The Sixth Extinction, species, habitat, and diversity loss, of which we are already well on our way towards.
This is beyond awful, beyond inhumane, beyond any regard for human rights and dignity. How is it that no one like the U.N. is monitoring the situation to ensure Israel complies with the cease-fire and withdraws its military? This is an indictment of the civilized world that such a genocide is allowed with no consequences in the 21st century.
Beyond awful and inhumane? No, this is as human as it gets. It is tragic, but there is nothing more in line with human history than this. Our entire existence has been shaped by conflicts just like this—wars, territorial struggles, and violent power shifts. Expecting a toothless international system to change human nature is naive at best.
The U.N. or any other international body ensuring compliance? Let’s be honest—history has shown time and time again that these institutions hold little real power when it comes to stopping conflicts. They can issue statements, draft resolutions, and condemn actions, but at the end of the day, enforcement only happens when the right geopolitical interests align. Otherwise, it’s just theater.
And if you think Gaza is some unique, unprecedented horror, take a step back. Right now, in Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are committing genocide, massacring entire ethnic groups. In China, over a million Uyghur Muslims have been forced into internment camps since 2014 in what is effectively ethnic cleansing. Russia has deported up to 1.6 million Ukrainians, including 260,000 children—wiping out communities by force. Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims are still being murdered and displaced, and Ethiopian forces in Tigray have used famine and mass killings to target ethnic Tigrayans. Azerbaijan just ethnically cleansed over 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. And let’s not forget Western Sahara, where Morocco has systematically displaced and oppressed the native Sahrawi people for decades.
What’s happening in Gaza is brutal, but it’s not some aberration of humanity—it is humanity. Expecting it to suddenly stop because we’ve declared ourselves “civilized” ignores the very nature of our species. If anything, Gaza gets the most attention, while other ongoing genocides barely make the news. That’s not to say one is more justifiable than another—it’s just to point out that this isn’t unique, and outrage tends to be selective.
At the end of the day, we’re just slightly overclocked primates—hairless apes with two times the neurons, the ability to sweat, and a tendency for violence. Don’t expect too much.
To set the record straight, Russia has annexed the Donbas, a longtime pro-Russia-part of Ukraine whose citizens have been relentlessly punished by the pro-West regime put in place in 2014 by our own Victoria Nuland, a proud neocon. Russia did this for its own survival, knowing that the Nuland plan was to provoke Russia and weaken it (see Rand Corporation report from 2019 for full details) through war and sanctions, then carve it into Western-controlled fiefdoms. The point was to seize Russian natural wealth, which is vast. Our country is run by corporations; our politicians are bought and paid for. Our media serves the interests of their corporate sponsors and spins the facts in precisely the way you have illustrated in your comment.
And the US is now sending "different" people to detention camps....again, and making slaves...again
I remember reading an article recently where private prison owners—just that combination of words sounds bizarre from a European perspective—were petitioning the government to lock up more people because they were losing money. That sounds like slavery with extra steps, but whatever, that’s just business as usual over there.
The truth is, none of this is new. If we dig into the oldest written records, they’re about the exact same things we’re dealing with today—power struggles, exploitation, people being treated as disposable. Different time periods, different methods, but the core mechanics never change. People act like we’ve evolved beyond all this, but in reality, it’s just a more polished version of the same old game.
Same shit, different era. Expecting it to magically change because we slapped some new labels on it is just wishful thinking.
And your point is what? It's always been like this so why bother to try and change things for the better? If you are right, then we die trying to make a better world. If you are wrong, then we die not having tried. It's a point, but not one I consider worth considering.
When people call what’s happening in Gaza "unbelievably inhumane," it shows a lack of historical and global perspective. Don’t get me wrong—it is genocide by definition, and the suffering is tragic. But in terms of scale, it’s far from the worst atrocities humanity has inflicted on itself.
Take Dresden in 1945. Over the course of three days, around 25,000 civilians were killed in Allied bombings. In one night, the firebombing of Tokyo killed somewhere between 100,000 to 150,000 people, leaving a million homeless. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wiped out around 200,000 people in an instant and through subsequent radiation exposure.
Even when it comes to population displacement, Gaza is not an exception. The Nakba of 1948 resulted in over 700,000 Palestinians being forced to flee their homes, with around 15,000 killed. Around the same time, the expulsion of Germans after WWII displaced 12 to 14 million people, leading to up to 2 million deaths from forced marches, starvation, and disease.
Later, we had horrors like Pol Pot’s Cambodia, where between 1.7 to 2 million people were executed, starved, or worked to death between 1975 and 1979. And in Rwanda in 1994, around 800,000 people were slaughtered in just 100 days, with neighbors turning on each other with machetes over ethnic identity.
Now let’s talk about more recent atrocities. In Ukraine, over 2,000 people die every day because a midget in heels with a Napoleon complex can’t handle losing power. The civil war in South Sudan has caused over 400,000 deaths since 2013 and continues to destabilize the region. Meanwhile, North Korea has been systematically starving its population, and in Tigray, thousands have been killed amidst widespread reports of mass killings and sexual violence.
This isn’t meant to downplay the tragedy in Gaza. It’s about perspective. Humanity has repeatedly committed atrocities, often on far larger scales. And ironically, despite these events, we are still living in the most peaceful period in recorded history. Maybe that’s something worth considering before declaring any single event the worst we've ever seen.
My point is that this kind of reaction—"Oh my God, this is so unbelievably inhumane, I can’t comprehend it"—is honestly kind of retarded. If you’re over 30, you lived through the Rwandan genocide, where some lunatics imported boatloads of machetes, handed them out to everyday people, and those same people hunted down and hacked their neighbors, friends, and even family members to death. This wasn’t just a random event—it was systematic and horrifying. People were massacred not because of any personal conflict but simply due to their ethnic identity—often based on something as trivial as a surname. Imagine being told to butcher your friend or neighbor with a blunt machete simply because they were categorized as Tutsi.
And it didn’t stop there. Once the Tutsi forces returned, they launched their own retaliatory killings—what you might call a genocidal uno reverse card. It’s the kind of raw brutality that shakes people, but if you know anything about history and geopolitics, this isn’t an anomaly. These kinds of horrific events are built into the patterns of human conflict.
Look at army ants. They don’t fight all the time—most of their activity is peaceful and cooperative. They build, forage, and take care of their colony. But when war comes, they fight hard enough and often enough to be called "army ants." Humans are no different. We have peaceful moments, cooperation, and progress, but violence, territorial disputes, and power struggles are always just beneath the surface. It’s predictable, even if we don’t like to admit it.
So, no, this isn’t surprising or "unbelievable." It’s part of our nature. We might as well be called "army hominids."
Different animals, same patterns.
agreed - I wonder what world Pinker was looking at
This is what the US and Israel do.
Its obvious that the Israelies think that they are above the human race.
Any country dealing with Israel has to know now that the Israelies look down on them.
Yes, but even more, it is the US et al oligarchic machine that delusionally thinks it is above both the law, even international law, and above the lowly human race. White supremacists who make, break and bend the laws governing our Planet at will. There has so far been no end to their hubris and arrogance and insatiable greed (but we also know that this angers the gods of whatever ilk who will always have the last word on that). Israel is the Empire's Colonial proxy who would not be capable of this level of relentless death, cruelty and vicious destruction without US/Western weapons/$$$ of Empire.
I would suggest that it is a mistake to overlook the current holy trinity that are converging at this time and these policies: Power, Profits, and Prophets. Overlooking any will lead to an incomplete analysis, and away from a solution.
If the Israelies can't see that the war must stop it is up to us to cease funding them.
This is great reporting, the result of which infuriates me that Joe Biden's Democrat party has no balls. I think if we do not see some real leadership soon, there should be a new party that represents the humanity for which the U.S. was founded. And of course now with Trump and TecBro
Fascist running the country things will only get worse, around the glob! Thank you for keeping your eye on the Palestinian genocide, your work is invaluable.
Watching the SNL special celebrating their 50yrs of musical appearances - of course they included Sinéad O'Connor tearing up a picture of the Pope. It made more sense this time around though, when I noticed she was wearing a necklace with a Star of David. And I thought, "Oh..."
Israeli Zionists have ruined Judaism's icon forever. Judaism should choose a new one. ;(
Thank you, Abubaker, for this heartrending report. Seeing you, over the many weeks and months, on The Electric Intifada live, has been a beacon of hope for all of us who have watched your reporting. Stay safe. You are precious.
Ceasefire or no ceasefire; scam or no, we cannot allow Israel to escape the legal consequences of their war crimes. The Hind Rajab Foundation has, among other things, filed a case with the ICC against 1,000 Israeli soldiers for war crimes in Gaza.
https://www.hindrajabfoundation.org/perpetrators/hind-rajab-foundation-files-historic-icc-complaint-against-1000-israeli-soldiers-for-war-crimes-in-gaza
They have taken further steps in recent days, and vacations are becoming a lot more difficult for IDF soldiers, worldwide. The Hind Rajab Foundation can use our help. Please join me in making a contribution.
https://buy.stripe.com/cN228hbY5g7jaM84gg
You might find meaningful to watch the recent interviews that Glenn Greenwald did on his Rumble platform, and Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada, did with the head of this organisation, Dyad Abou Jahjah,. It was very informative.
And if you didn't hear, Ali Abunimah was recently arrested by the Swiss authorities when he went there to give a talk. Just think about that, a talk. Here's a petition calling for accountability for the arrest of Ali Abunimah in Switzerland:
https://chng.it/8D4pkxPhWS
This is golden opportunity for the BRICS nations to come to your aid, to help you rebuild. I hope serious discussion are underway about how they (Russia and China in particular, with their growing affluence) can thwart Israel's attempt to remove you from Gaza. Don't give up hope! The whole world is watching and sees how your tragedy is our tragedy and why it's time to bring down the Western empire if any of us is to survive the many existential and very real threats to humanity's future.
Even a cursory review of human history should make us realize, in the collective, the human species is incapable of behavior that one would think of as humane. We simply cannot pull it off. And now, just as icing on the cake we have engineered our own demise. Welcome to the Anthropocene; climate change is coming for us all.
It is indeed coming, but only if we figure out how to last that long. In the short term, we have some other, pressing annihilation-inducing problems to contend with, including wars of western choice with nuclear disaster as one of the quite possible outcomes. AI, or what passes for it, has the potential to be extremely destabilizing, and destructive, regardless of whether the search for Eldorado (AGI) is even remotely possible. The Sixth Extinction, species, habitat, and diversity loss, of which we are already well on our way towards.