Tipping the Scale Blog

“Humanitarianism” from Hell

7/17/2025

How Israel and its Western co-Perpetrators are weaponizing humanitarian aid for genocide and ethnic cleansing

Tarik Cyril Amar
July 16, 2025

The Gaza Genocide is special. And in not one but two regards: As has often been observed, this is the first genocide in history that is, in essence, live-streamed. No genocide before has been committed under the eyes of the world like this one. And second, the Gaza Genocide is undermining and, in effect, devastating whole moral and legal orders – or, at least, long-standing claims to them – in an equally unprecedented way.

These two peculiarities are, of course, related: The only way the world as a whole could have tolerated the Gaza Genocide for now almost three years is by stubbornly disregarding fundamental norms, both written and unwritten. For instance, almost no state – with the exception of Yemen (under de facto control of the Ansar Allah movement or “Houthis”) – has even tried to comply with its binding and clear obligations under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, namely to “prevent and punish” the crime of genocide. No one with the power – alone or with others – to do so, not in the Middle East, not beyond it, has come to save the Palestinian victims of the Gaza genocide in the only manner that would work: by stopping their Israeli murderers by massive force.

Yet the small but still disproportionately influential part of the world that calls itself the West has gone beyond “merely” failing to act. That’s because, whether the West is a civilization once shaped by Christianity or not, for a long time already its true, most inner core has been hypocrisy. And during the Gaza Genocide, the West’s compulsive need to rationalize even its most vicious actions into acts of virtue covered by “values,” has led to a new peak of absolute moral and intellectual perversion: Precisely because the West has not “only” abandoned the Palestinian victims but is actively co-perpetrating this genocide together with Israel, its elites – in politics, culture, the media, the police and judiciary – have made a sustained, obstinate effort to radically alter our sense of right and wrong, from specific legal norms down to our intuitive and widely shared understanding of limits never to be crossed.

Waging, for example, a so-called “war” by killing or injuring – often maiming for life – over 50,000 children (as of May 2025)? A “war” in which we receive one reliable testimony after another that many of these children are targeted deliberately, including by sadistic drone operators and snipers? A “war” in which starvation, medical deprivation, and the promotion of epidemics have all been deployed equally deliberately? In the West, we are told to call this “self-defense.”

Read Tarik Cyril Amar on Substack.

The New York Times Finally Stops Avoiding The G-Word

7/16/2025

Caitlin Johnstone
Jul 15, 2025

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The New York Times has published an op-ed by a genocide scholar who says that he resisted acknowledging the truth of what Israel is doing in Gaza for as long as he could, but can no longer deny the obvious.

It’s an admission that may as well have come from The New York Times itself.

In an article titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”, a Brown University professor of Holocaust and genocide studies named Omer Bartov argues that “Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza,” and denounces his fellow Holocaust scholars for failing to acknowledge reality.

“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” Bartov writes. “Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/1877181727447142846

And resist he did. In November 2023, Bartov wrote another op-ed for The New York Times saying “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening.”

Apparently he is seeing the proof now and has stopped resisting what’s been clear from the very beginning. And it would seem the editors of the Gray Lady have ceased resisting as well.

Read complete article and follow Caitlin on Substack.

Joe Biden the Second

7/15/2025

John J. Mearsheimer
July 15, 2025

On 14 July 2025, I was on the “Deep Dive” with Lt. Col. (ret.) Danny Davis talking about President Trump’s announcement (just before we went on the air) that he is providing Ukraine with additional arms and giving Putin 50 days to come to the negotiating table and settle the war. We both agreed that this policy is not only going to fail, but Trump now owns the war for sure and is effectively employing the same policy toward Ukraine that his predecessor, Joe Biden, pursued. Moreover, it is clear that Trump, who promised to end the war before he moved into the White House, but certainly just after he took office, has consistently fooled himself in his dealings with Russia.

Why the next world order will be armed with nukes

7/12/2025

How the West’s recklessness is testing Moscow’s nuclear patience

Dmitry Trenin
July 11, 2025

© Getty Images / vadimrysev

A multipolar world is, by its nature, a nuclear one. Its conflicts are increasingly shaped by the presence of nuclear weapons. Some of these wars, such as the conflict in Ukraine, are fought indirectly. Others, as in South Asia, unfold in more direct forms. In the Middle East, one nuclear power has attempted to preempt another state’s potential development of nuclear weapons, backed by an even more powerful nuclear-armed ally. Meanwhile, rising tensions in East Asia and the Western Pacific bring the risk of a direct clash between nuclear states ever closer.

Having avoided a nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War, some European countries have since lost the sense of caution once associated with possessing such weapons. There are several reasons for this. During the ‘mature’ Cold War years, especially after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, nuclear weapons played their intended role: they deterred and intimidated. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact operated on the assumption that any large-scale confrontation would escalate into a nuclear conflict. Recognizing this danger, the political leaderships in Washington and Moscow worked to avoid the unthinkable.

Notably, while the Americans entertained the idea of a limited nuclear war confined to Europe, Soviet strategists remained deeply skeptical. During decades of Soviet-American confrontation, all military conflicts occurred far from Europe and outside the core security interests of the two powers.

Now, 35 years after the Cold War ended, the physical potential for global annihilation remains, but the fear that once restrained leaders has diminished. The ideological rigidity of that era has vanished, replaced by a less defined conflict between globalist ambitions and national interests. The world remains interconnected, but divisions increasingly run within societies rather than strictly between states.

Complete article on rt.com.

Evading Genocidal Accountability

7/11/2025

Robina Qureshi
@robinaqureshi

The ICJ is lying.
The UN is lying.
OXFAM is lying.
UNICEF is lying.
The ICC is lying.
UNRWA is lying.
B’Tselem is lying.
The WHO is lying.
The Pope Is lying.
Raz Segal islying.
Ilan Pappe is lying.
Amira Hass is lying.
Gideon Levy is lying.
Al Jazeera is lying.
Journalists are lying.
Palestinians are lying.
The Red Cross is lying.
Anti-Zionists are lying.
Gaza Doctors are lying.
The West Bank is lying.
History books are lying.
The Red Crescent is lying.
College students are lying
Anti-Zionist Jews are lying.
Middle Eastern Eye is lying.
Our grandparents are lying.
Hospitals in Gaza are lying.
Human Right Watch is lying.
World Central Kitchen is lying.
Norman Finkelstein is lying.
FIfteen paramedics were lying.
Amnesty International is lying.
Palestinian hostages are lying.
Palestinian Christians are lying.
Doctors Without Borders is lying.
The Gaza Health Ministry is lying.
The UN Special Rapporteur is lying.
The World Surgical Foundation is lying.
The IDF soldiers admitting crimes are lying.
146 countries supporting Palestine are lying.

BUT ISRAEL IS TELLING THE TRUTH?

Follow Robina Qureshi on Substack.

Israeli soldiers admit that killing civilians with drones is like a video game to them

7/11/2025

This is sick...

Ricky Hale
and
Council Estate Media
July 11, 2025

Israeli soldiers have been attaching grenade launchers to Chinese-made EVO drones and using them in Gaza, as confirmed by @972mag. This violates Chinese export rules which forbid the use of these drones for military purposes.

Israel has modified drones that are primarily designed for photography because it is cheaper and easier than using military-grade drones and no permission is needed from a strike command centre.

Soldiers have been dropping grenades on civilians to teach others "not to return" to areas of Gaza they want to depopulate. They operate the drones through a portable control system with a screen which they liken to playing a videogame.

Imagine a Nintendo Switch, only instead of blowing up pixels on a screen, you're blowing up women and children. It's truly dystopian shit.

Making killing feel like a videogame is a technique that has been employed by the US for years to condition soldiers to kill without hesitation. If you see what you are doing as a game, your conscience is much less likely to make you hesitate.

Israeli soldiers who manually operate these drones on the ground have admitted to journalists they are being used to kill civilians. Almost all of those killed were unarmed and at a safe distance from the soldiers, meaning they were posing no threat. They were simply returning to their homes and were killed without any warning shots. Their corpses were left to be eaten by stray dogs.

Israel has been up to its old trick of killing civilians who enter no-go areas that are not declared as no-go areas. The boundaries of these no-go areas change regularly, meaning nowhere in Gaza is safe. If Palestinians unwittingly cross an imaginary line to return home or search for food, they are simply murdered. One of those who was murdered was a child riding a bike.

Israel plans to force the remaining Palestinians in Gaza into a concentration camp and assume anyone outside the concentration camp is Hamas and kill them. This means the whole of Gaza is about to become a no-go zone where IDF soldiers can kill civilians at will. You can imagine what these bastards will be like when they're unleashed.

Follow Council Estate Media on Substack.

Francesca Albanese Sanctioned By Evil Empire

7/10/2025

Banned from entering Palestine, she turned to researching genocide profiteers

Lisa Savage
July 10, 2025

What triggered the U.S. decision to sanction UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine Francesca Albanese? Was it her report on U.S.-Israel’s deliberate starvation tactics? No. Was it her report on U.S.-Israel targeting of health care providers, hospitals, and ambulances? No. Was it her report on U.S.-Israel’s attacks on UNRWA schools where internally displaced Gazans were sheltering? No. Was it her speaking out to call an ongoing livestreamed genocide by that entirely accurate term? No, not even that.

Her unforgivable act: publishing a report on June 30 detailing 48 corporations profiting from the U.S.-Israel genocide in Gaza. U.S. tech firms Microsoft, Amazon, and Google were among those named as part of a “joint criminal enterprise” making money by assisting in killing tens of thousands of Palestinians. How exactly?

From Axios quoting the report:

Microsoft, Amazon and Google have established research and development (R&D) hubs and local data centres in Israel, while they enjoy what the report describes as “unprecedented government-granted access to data and a captive population”. According to Albanese’s report, this has helped unleash “the first AI-driven and livestreamed genocide, while providing the data sovereignty to shield impunity”..

The report states: “[Israel’s] forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and big tech – providing significant supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability – while investors and private and public institutions profit freely.”

Profits reportedly rose at least 18% and as much as 30% for the three tech giants in recent months. Who cares about blood on their hands when there are billions in profits to be made? And that’s just in the tech sector. Building bombs and the warplanes that drop them has also proven highly profitable. As is investing pension funds in genocide profiteers like Elbit Systems.

Unprecedented? Hardly. Corporations known to have profited from the Nazi genocide of Jewish people include Krups (built the concentration camp ovens for mass slaughter), Ford (built vehicles for the Nazi army), and IBM (created the punch card system for tracking those identified by the Nazis as undesirable).

Palestinians, living under British occupation at the time, did not profit from the Holocaust — but since 1948 they are still being driven out of their homes and now into 21st century concentration camps on the pretext that they are “Jew haters.” Never mind that they lived peacefully for centuries with their Jewish (and Christian) neighbors. The divide and conquer approach of colonial occupiers made sure to obliterate that ethos.

Francesca Albanese’s moment exemplifies a few current downward trends. The gutting of the United Nations as a bulwark against genocide. The demonizing of anyone who gains the public ear to object to genocide. The false assertion that those who oppose genocide are “terrorists” though they use nonviolent methods like research or splashing red paint on warplanes. The wielding of sanctions as a blunt instrument to punish and to attempt to control a legion of international entities.

Genocide team photo from the White House July 7, 2025. Some have commented that the U.S. fake tan team is much browner than the Israeli European colonizer team who are the deathly pale shade of vampires.

The Nobel “Peace” Prize’s downward trend as 47 was nominated by Netanyahu at the White House earlier this week. (Past recipients include Henry Kissinger and drone bomber in chief Obama, so don’t be surprised if the U.S. sycophants on the Nobel Committee give it to genocidaire in chief 47.)

The attack on Albanese also exemplifies a positive trend: the desperation of Hasbara forces as public respect for the Zionist entity sinks lower by the day.

https://x.com/swilkinsonbc/status/1943298112656936970

Who are the real humans here? Proud to stand with Palestine supporters Albanese, Lowkey, Kneecap, Bob Vylan, Roger Waters, Palestine Action, Reverend Sue Parfitt, and some of my favorite culture workers Caitlin Johnston and Laura of Normal Island News. Proud to stand with Gaza, the West Bank, and the Palestinian diaspora.

I’ll be on trial next month for disrupting a General Dynamics celebration of a warship it built to help enforce the blockade now starving Gaza. Several other friends will be on trial too, including possibly my husband despite being told that the district attorney had dropped his charges for splashing red paint on the sidewalk in front of GD’s executive offices.

It isn’t the first time we’ve been in the docket for opposing the war machine, nor is it likely to be the last. Personally, I have zero fear of being designated a terrorist for nonviolent actions on behalf of humanity. Bring it on.

Read Lisa's posts on Substack.

What Do You Do After Watching a Child Die on Your Feed?

7/10/2025

I’m Alive. They’re Not. That Should Mean Something.

Ahmad Ibsais
July 10, 2025

I am ashamed that every day I live a leisurely life is devoid of justice.

This morning I listened to “On Being,” the episode where Krista Tippett interviews a grief therapist who says our bodies are not built to carry the full weight of the world. She speaks softly, in the way people do when they are trying to soothe without sounding patronizing, and tells her audience that it is okay to look away. I’m standing in my kitchen with my thumb on the nespresso (one I bought before they joined the boycott list), nodding along, even though I know I will resent her words by noon.

After breakfast, I open TikTok. The first video on my feed begins with a clip from a comedy page, someone lip-syncing to audio from “Love Island.” A few seconds in, it cuts to a boy in Gaza whose face is streaked with ash and blood. His voice shakes. He is asking for help, explaining that his mother and sister are trapped beneath a collapsed building in Deir al-Balah. Behind him, there is a cloud of dust still rising, and someone offscreen is screaming. I watch for six seconds before my thumb moves to the next video. I tell myself I will come back to it, but I don’t.

Sometimes the videos open with cat memes or astrology jokes. Sometimes they use sped-up Kendrick Lamar tracks or old Vine audios, anything to make the algorithm keep them visible for just a few moments longer. There are children who livestream while hiding under mattresses. Parents who preface their pleas with jokes, because if they do not hook the viewer, the world will scroll past their deaths before they finish a sentence. There are no journalists left in northern Gaza, no food, no fuel, no safe zone. There is only the front-facing camera and the chance that someone, somewhere, might send twenty dollars.

I don’t scroll past because I don’t care. I care so much it feels like my organs are melting some days. I write. I protest. I donate. I fast in solidarity. I boycott. I lose sleep. I say Palestine with my chest. I do everything I know how to do, and still I go on living. I still put on music while I fold my laundry. I still take walks in the evenings. I still write sentences like these and wonder who will read them. I am not sure if that makes me a hypocrite or simply human. But I know something in me has changed. Or maybe it has been stripped away.

There is something corrosive about witnessing this much death and continuing to eat three meals a day. I drink my coffee while soccer players in Gaza, teenagers who had posters of Messi above their beds, are having their legs amputated in makeshift field hospitals. I watch DIY house reno tutorials after watching a man unzip a body bag and collapse when he sees the face of his daughter. I go for a run while hospitals in Rafah perform surgeries without anesthesia on newborns. There is no punchline to this comparison, only shame.

Read complete post on State of Siege in Substack.

China Is Not Our Enemy: A Case Against the Next War

7/9/2025

American Nobody
July 7, 2025

The headlines are shifting. Ukraine is slipping from the front page, Gaza is exposing Western hypocrisy, and the American public is weary. Which means it’s time for a new enemy. Enter: China.

https://www.newsweek.com/us-ally-japan-prepares-plans-us-china-pacific-war-taiwan-strait-2090216

Washington is preparing us for another proxy war. Only this time, the stakes aren’t confined to a distant battlefield. This time, it’s the global economy, the semiconductor supply chain, and the very possibility of world war.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-prepares-long-war-with-china-that-might-hit-its-bases-homeland-peter-apps-2025-05-16/

The talking points are already set. They say China is building a navy, that it threatens Taiwan, that it spies, and that it censors. And yes, some of this is true. But none of it justifies what we’re being groomed to accept, that being a direct military confrontation with a nuclear-armed superpower.

Let’s get something clear; you don’t have to love the CCP to reject war with China. You don’t have to support surveillance or censorship to say “holy shit this is not our fight.” The Chinese government is not our model, but it’s not our enemy either. Not in the way it’s being sold to us, at any rate.

What China has done well, we should study, recognize, and replicate. Their Belt and Road initiative is smart, not sinister. Their long-term planning is admirable, not evil. Their preference for economic influence over military conquest is, frankly, something we used to believe in too.

What have we done, by contrast? We’ve bombed our way across the Middle East, burned bridges in Latin America, provoked Russia into a war we can’t win, and now we want to extend our reach to East Asia, acting as though we are the last word on sovereignty and freedom.

And Taiwan? The red line is real. Ask around in DC and you’ll hear it in whispers: some apparently can’t wait for a war over that island. But let’s be honest. If Washington encourages Taipei to poke the bear, it will not be the Taiwanese people who suffer alone. Global markets will crash, trade routes will cease, and millions will die.

Finish in Substack.

Israel’s Targeted Killing of Beloved Dr. Marwan al-Sultan and His Family

7/7/2025

After receiving repeated ominous phone calls, al-Sultan and four members of his family were killed in an Israeli airstrike. Drop Site interviewed his son.

Abdel Qader Sabbah
and
Kavitha Chekuru
July 7, 2025

Friends and relatives mourn the death of Indonesian Hospital director, Dr. Marwan al-Sultan, who was killed along with 7 members of his family following a targeted Israeli attack on an apartment in Gaza City on July 2, 2025 (Photo by Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images).

GAZA CITY—It had only been ten minutes since Ahmed al-Sultan, a young medical student in Gaza, left the apartment where his family was staying when he heard the sounds of an airstrike nearby.

“I did not expect, even for a second, that the strike was targeting my family,” al-Sultan, 20, told Drop Site News. “I rushed back and tried to contact anyone in the family, but there was no response from anyone. I hurried to the place, and I was shocked by the scene—our apartment had been destroyed.”

That airstrike in Gaza City last Wednesday, July 2, killed at least eight people, according to the Ministry of Health, including Ahmed’s sister, brother-in-law, mother, and his father, Dr. Marwan al-Sultan. The director of the Indonesian Hospital in north Gaza, Dr. al-Sultan was also one of two remaining cardiologists in Gaza. According to a statement from Healthcare Workers Watch (HWW) dated July 2, his killing marks the 70th medical worker killed in the past 50 days.

“All the martyrs were women, in addition to my father and my sister's husband, Mohammed Imad al-Sultan. I was in shock at the scene,” said Ahmed, who is studying to be a cardiologist like his late father.

Dr. al-Sultan was not only a well-known doctor in Gaza: he was beloved. His death was a shock to an already stricken medical community. When his body was brought to Al-Shifa hospital following the attack, colleagues wept over his body, including Dr. Munir al-Bursh, the Director General of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. In footage taken in the hospital, he can be seen cradling Dr. al-Sultan’s bloodied face.

“Dr. Marwan was a father, a brother, and a beloved friend,” al-Bursh told Drop Site. “Dr. Marwan had not taken off his white coat since the beginning of the war. He was constantly by the side of patients and the wounded.”

The al-Sultan family had only moved to that apartment a month ago. They rented the unit after they were forced from their home in Jabalia due to displacement orders from the Israeli military. “We took the necessary precautions and moved to the place the occupation labelled as ‘safe.’ But, unfortunately, the place the occupation declared safe was also bombed.”

Finish Drop Site News article on Substack.