UN reports on Gaza genocide perpetrators
Names US corporations with blood on their hands
These days the genocide in Gaza seeps into my mind like an unwanted song that you can’t shake. Just now I got to the top of the stairs and thanked god I wasn’t a Palestinian being shot at, bombed, starved and deprived of water and shelter. They whither away as caged animals hunted to extinction. Israeli soldiers have admitted they have been ordered to shoot into the crowds who were bunched together at food distribution sites around Gaza. Ordered to randomly murder civilizations knowing they have nothing to do with Hamas except having tolerated them as a radical political party.
This is not about politics. That dog won’t run. This is about territory, expansionism and about money, good old capitalism. Al Jazeera English reports, “Dozens of companies — including some of the world's biggest — are profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza and its expanding illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.” This wasn’t Al Jazeera’s findings; like me they are passing this information along. Exercising their editorial judgment saying, ‘This is important.. You should see it.’
The source for this startling but not surprising conclusion is a new United Nations Special Report. I learned my search engine of choice, Google, is earning money from this heartless genocide. As is my favorite way to click and shop, Amazon. Microsoft is also named as are IBM, Palantir, Alphabet, Lockheed-Martin and Chevron, just to mention a few of our fellow US citizens united.
On the settlement side CAT, RADA, booking.com and Airbnb are paving the way for the razing of villages and raiding of homes going on in the West Bank even as you read this. That’s an awful lot to boycott. Not sure we have enough mental barbed wire to go round it. Am I going to stop using Google? Will I close my Amazon account? Those are the only two on the list that I deal with, at least that I know of. How should they be punished? That they should be punished is of course.
I hope there is some NGO somewhere who is following up on this. Compiling information on how much and how often. It would be reporting from the bloody maw of the global military-industrial complex, and I’ll bet its breath stinks.
The report says IBM “has been responsible for training military and intelligence personnel, as well as managing the central database of Israel’s Population, Immigration and Borders Authority that stores the biometric data of Palestinians.” In other words, IBM is providing the means for Bibi's boys to automatically recognize individual Palestinians for tracking purposes. Kinda reminds of the fishermen who use radar to locate schools of fish. Makes it easier to catch ‘em or in the case of Gazans, to target them.
While IBM has legitimate grounds to say what they are providing is militarily neutral, now they know we know its application is anything but that, what will they do about it? That depends on what we make them do. If we do nothing, they will continue at status quo. But if we do nothing, though it is not-doing, it is still an act and we will have committed it making us complicit in the genocide in Gaza, not in a big way, but enough to make it uncomfortable for the more sensitive among us. And that’s what we get for doing nothing, that and our loss of innocence. By doing nothing we are not innocent!
Along with IBM’s biometric trickery, Palantir Technologies “expanded its support to the Israeli military since the start of the war on Gaza in October 2023" the UN report said. It found “‘reasonable grounds’ to believe the company provided automatic predictive policing technology used for automated decision-making in the battlefield, to process data and generate lists of targets including through artificial intelligence systems like ‘Lavender’, ‘Gospel', and ‘Where’s Daddy?’”
Automated decision-making to generate lists of targets? So Palantir and IBM are helping to automate the genocide and by doing so kindly take some of the burden off human hands.
According to Anadolu Ajansi, the US Mission to the UN called the report “economic warfare” because it sent letters to these firms it had named “accusing them of being complicit in ‘gross human rights violations, apartheid, and genocide.’” Yes, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese used the ‘G’ word, and that’s what wrankles the US Mission.
Their statement said, “These letters also constitute an unacceptable campaign of political and economic warfare against the American and worldwide economy.” (Read ‘the hyperhierarchy’.) Regarding the accusations of apartheid and genocide the UN Mission predictably called them “false and offensive.”
By using such truculent language, calling it ‘war’, allows our administration the ability to respond in kind. How far do they dare to go? How far have they gone so far?
Automated weapons? Perhaps in the not too distant future a small armed drone will visit my second story office window and zap me like a bug; all done from a computer screen in northwest nowhere.