Yes, 10/7 Was Israel’s 9/11
In both cases, they let it happen to justify wars already planned
After the brutal attack against southern Israel on October 7, 2023, Major Nir Dinar, a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said, “This is our 9/11. They got us.”
Other IDF representatives made the same comparison, which I and some critics found chilling. After all, the United States response to 9/11 was a 20-year ‘War on Terror,’ which destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq, killed over a million people, displaced tens of millions, set off a massive refugee crisis in Europe and West Asia, and cost several trillion dollars. Is the Oct. 7 response going to be the same thing?
So far, the answer seems to be yes. Israel has launched a hyper-violent response against Gaza, worse than the Bush administration did against Iraq. 10/7/23 is eerily reminiscent of 9/11/01 in several other ways.
Massive intelligence failures?
The 10/7 attack seemed to catch Israel by surprise, and media everywhere reported on this “massive intelligence failure.” But were they really surprised? An Egyptian government representative testified he had warned Israel on several occasions that Hamas was ‘up to something big,’ and had been ignored.
That was one man’s report, but it has since come out that Hamas had built a model Israeli village in the Gaza desert, on which its soldiers were practicing assault tactics. This training ground was easily visible to aerial drones and planes, which Israel flies over the Strip all the time. They saw, but Israeli officials now say they “misinterpreted what they were seeing,” according to Business Insider.
Let’s be honest. The words “intelligence failure” and “Israel” do not go together. Israel is the West’s leading surveillance state. Selling surveillance equipment and training is a major earnings source for them. The monitoring systems in Gaza were so pervasive that a cat walking on the wall would trigger an alarm, authorities boasted.
Yet they somehow missed all the training going on. They missed dozens of fighters sailing in on motorized gliders and even failed to respond to bulldozers knocking down sections of the wall so fighters could cross the border. It took IDF seven hours to respond while people were being killed. Are they that incompetent? Or were they told to stand down? The Times of Israel reported that the IDF hadn’t expected Hamas’ ability to knock out the monitors, so they didn’t keep watch on them. Was that an innocent mistake?
9/11 was also called a surprise attack. Then National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice told the 9/11 Commission , “No one could have expected this.” In reality, the military not only anticipated the use of hijacked airplanes as weapons, they held drills on how to stop them. But their defensive plans weren’t put into action on 9/11.
Terror porn
On 9/11 and again on 10/7, the media responded with endless hours of terror coverage. How many times a day did they show the trade center towers collapsing? In the case of 10/7, it has been more like terror pornography, lurid images of wounded and dead Israelis, some real and some faked,
Alan MacLeod on Mint Press News wrote about the sensational and now discredited stories of militants chopping heads off Jewish babies. “The extraordinary assertion was originally reported by the Israeli channel I24 News, which based it on anonymous Israeli military sources. Despite offering no proof whatsoever, this highly inflammatory claim was picked up and repeated across the world by a host of media (e.g., in the United States by Fox News, CNN, MSN, Business Insider, and The New York Post.)”
“Meanwhile, the front pages of the United Kingdom’s largest newspapers were festooned with the story, the press outraged at the atrocity and inviting their readers to feel the same way.” The story has now been dropped, as no decapitated babies have been found, but it lives on in social media and in the minds of millions of Israelis and their supporters in the US and UK.
Mass rapes were widely reported on 10/7, reports mostly dropped quietly days later for lack of evidence. By then, MacLeod writes, the reports “incited global anger and calls for an overwhelming Israeli military response.” Doesn’t the outrage over 10/7 remind you of the feelings stirred up in Americans after 9/11/01?
Media now has people cheering actual genocide in Palestine. The Wall Street Journal wrote,- “Israel is entitled to do whatever it takes to uproot this evil, depraved culture that resides next to it.” And US State Department officials deleted tweets calling on both sides to follow the rules of war, because they ‘weren’t going to tell Israel how to fight evil.’
Dehumanizing Language
People promoting war first take over the language. Just as in 2001, Muslim enemies are described as less than human. Hamas operatives are never militants or fighters or members; they are always terrorists, always evil. Israeli officials call them savages and animals. Israeli leaders and citizens, and Israel’s supporters call for Palestinians to be ‘finished’ and ‘eradicated.’
Media almost universally calls what is going on in Gaza an “Israel-Hamas war.” But as Chris Hedges wrote, “This is not a war. It is the obliteration of civilians trapped for 16 years in the world’s largest concentration camp. Gaza is being leveled, flattened, destroyed, reduced to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of its impoverished residents will be killed, wounded or left homeless without food, fuel, water and medical help.”
Israel supporters always say, ‘Israel has a right to defend itself.’ But how is bombing apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals self-defense? Whereas in previous Gaza invasions, Israel often warned civilians before destroying their homes, prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh wrote that this time, “Apartment buildings, hospitals, and mosques were torn apart, with no prior warning and no effort to minimize civilian casualties.”
Dodgy relationship with Hamas
After 10/7, Israeli President Isaac Herzog promised civilians would be massacred. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” he said. “There are no civilians in Gaza,” — apparently the million children living there are armed — because they should have overthrown Hamas before this.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government itself actively supports and funds Hamas. Mehdi Hassan wrote on The Intercept, “Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance Hamas as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)
According to the Times of Israel, Israeli PM Netanyahu told his party in 2019, “Those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza (meaning to Hamas,) because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.” Yet President Herzog will blithely condemn a million Gazans to death for not overthrowing the party his own government supports.
Since then, Israel has been able to count on Hamas to give them provocations any time they want to attack Gaza. In the last 12 years, the provocations have been largely ineffective rocket barrages that might kill two or three Israelis. But the October 7 attack was orders of magnitude bigger, and the response has been orders of magnitude worse, the obliteration of Gaza. Israel wants that land for themselves, and they are taking it.
The US had a similar frenemy relationship with al-Qaeda in 2001, and still does. As Robert Dreyfus documents in his book Devil’s Game, the U.S. first supported Osama bin Laden’s jihadists against the USSR in Afghanistan. Then they became the villains in the 9/11 attacks, although they always denied their involvement. In the last decade they have become allies again, against the secular government of Syria.
Racializing the conflict
Have you noticed how the 10/7 narrative quickly grew from blaming a group of terrorists called Hamas to blaming the whole Palestinian population? Now, the circle of blame has grown to include other Muslim countries, chiefly Iran, for supporting Hamas. U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham talks about bombing Iran in retaliation. Some are calling for war against Iran.
Similarly, the enemy on 9/11 grew from a terrorist group called al-Qaeda to any country that might have any connection with al-Qaeda. Soon, all Muslims were at fault in the public discourse, creating support for endless wars against them.
Burying the context
Why would governments allow horrific attacks on their own people like 9/11 and 10/7? With the help of their compliant media, they use the terror to bury the context of oppression that prompted the attacks. Instead, we demonize the people whose resources we want to take. Hamas attacks because they “hate Jews.” President Bush repeatedly claimed that Al-Qaeda “hates us for our freedoms.”
The terror attacks also generate anger and hatred that bring people to support wars they would never ordinarily support. That is the danger here. Israel is genociding Gaza now — ordering a million civilians to leave, then bombing their convoys when they try to flee, cutting off water, food, and electricity so the world cannot see the suffering. If people in the West continue to support this crime, the suffering will spread.
The terror attack playbooks of the US and Israel are so similar they might have been written by the same intelligence agencies. Both countries’ goals are to take more land and power. The world was grossly fooled by 9/11 and the results were truly horrifying. We’re falling for it again, and we have to wise up.
Contact your reps and demand the US stop supporting the destruction of Gaza now. Tell them to cosponsor Rep. Bush and Tlaib’s resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and opening of a humanitarian corridor, so Gaza’s children can have water and food. Reach out to your friends and family and spread truth. Find an action near you and participate.
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