Hidden History -- In The Making

DO ANY OF YOU HAVE WAR POWERS?

It Is Long Past The Time For Congress To Exercise Its Constitutional Role To Rein In The Runaway War Machine. America Is Embroiled In Foreign Wars That Consume, With Growing Unease, Our Attention And Resources.

When America’s Founders were creating the Constitution, they had just won a war against King George III of England. They deliberately and unambiguously invested the power to wage war in the Congress, judging it to be more reticent about entering war than a head of state, who would see a war as an opportunity to increase his power.

Fast forward to today. America is embroiled in foreign wars that consume, with growing unease, your attention and resources. Yet the Senate on Thursday sunk legislation that would have required the White House to get congressional approval before attacking Venezuela. We should rely on the carefully designed constitutional structure our Founding Fathers provided to avoid further disasters and use those tools to extricate us from existing ones.

During the 2024 election campaign, you were all told the wars were a waste and would be ended swiftly if Donald Trump won. It looks like you were fooled again.

Ukraine was supposed to be settled quickly. However, after the 10 months since President Trump’s inauguration, the current debate is whether to provide nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles to reach deep into Russia, which has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Doesn’t your governing elite think shooting nuclear-capable missiles into Russia could be risky?

Recently, and with fanfare, the Palestinians released their hostages to the Israelis, but Israel’s military, using American supplied and funded weapons, has repeatedly and dramatically violated the ceasefire. It looks like all the lofty rhetoric about peace deals was just hot air.

In less than a year in office, the Trump administration has directly engaged in the bombings or has supported the bombings of Gaza, Yemen, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, and possibly Qatar. It has also been financing political turbulence in countries across Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and who knows how many in Africa. Alarmingly, Trump recently has started arguing for military intervention in Nigeria.

Over the past two months, the Trump administration has been illegally assassinating, without any due process, “suspected narco-terrorists” off the coasts of Latin America. The Washington elites are circulating stories sotto voce among themselves that there are Hezbollah terrorists in the Venezuelan jungles. Now, you are supposed to be really threatened. It won’t be long before they will be whispering about Hamas fighters training in Cuba to attack Key West, or even Miami!

These fairy tales are the latest additions to the long list of old discredited war propaganda gems such as: the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, the German soldiers bayoneting and decapitating babies during World War I in France, the domino theory, the faked attack in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam, Iraqi soldiers ripping babies out of incubators in Kuwait, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, poison gas attacks in Syria, the fake Libyan mass rape claims, or of course the completely debunked claim of the many beheaded babies in Israel.

The American regime is operating an empire spanning the globe with 800 military bases and overseeing numerous military actions in many countries. All these hostilities are acts of war without a constitutionally required declaration of war. The national debt stood at about 6 trillion dollars before the start of the Global War on Terror. It is now 38 trillion and counting while there seem to be more terrorists and wars than before. Much of this would stop if the money was stopped.

What’s worse, none of these wars have even remotely turned out as promised. Often the results are the opposite of the propaganda.

There was a ceasefire in the Korean War in 1953, yet we still have troops stationed in Korea seven decades later. We were told we had to protect Vietnam from Communism. We even destroyed villages to save South Vietnam from the Vietcong. In the end, we fled Vietnam, the North Vietnamese won, and Hanoi normalized relations with Washington a couple decades later. Afghanistan, after 20 years of war, crumbled to the Taliban in 11 days. Don’t forget the Carter administration supported Sunni fighters in Afghanistan before the 1979 Soviet invasion. Under President Ronald Reagan they became the vaunted American regime-supported Mujahideen, whose post-Soviet civil war helped lead to the rise of the Taliban. The American regime still has troops in Iraq and Syria. Libya is a continuing wreck and embroiled in a devastating civil war. It is a safe bet that this new regime change adventure in Venezuela will end badly. As will Yemen, Ukraine, and Gaza.

During the Vietnam tragedy, Congress became increasingly alarmed about the excesses of presidential power amid the war’s horrifying human and economic costs, so they formulated and finally passed the 1973 War Powers Resolution. This Resolution was designed to limit the president’s power to wage war without the constitutionally required congressional approval.

It is time for Congress to exercise its constitutional duties and stop shirking its responsibility to restrain these destructive actions. Some courageous members of Congress have taken the initiative to introduce a bill entitled: “H.Con.Res.51 – To direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities that have not been authorized by Congress.”

Members of Congress who are concerned about America’s future should support this effort to constrain its illegal runaway militarism before the regime runs out of borrowing power and credibility. It may be difficult for many members of Congress to resist the influence of the military industrial complex and various foreign interests, but those who can, must, before America becomes embroiled in more failed military fiascoes.

How many Americans would die or be maimed in a war in South America? What if we wreck Venezuela—how many people would flee and exacerbate the worldwide refugee crisis? How would this adversely affect America’s relations with other countries in the hemisphere? How would war against a country with one of the largest proven oil reserves in the world affect the price of oil for consumers?

The looming war against Venezuela is, like the others, clearly unlawful on many levels and should be stopped before things spin out of control with deadly and ruinous unanticipated consequences.

It is time for Congress to ignore the propaganda, vote the interests of the American people, and follow the Constitution to end this reckless destruction.

MR. PRESIDENT – DON’T DO IT!

An American Regime Led Regime Change In Venezuela Would Worsen The Problems Trump Promised To Fix. The Administration’s Public Case For Its Venezuela Policy Is Insultingly Ridiculous.

Donald Trump did not campaign on a program of an American regime-led regime change in Venezuela. Somehow, though, he is on the verge of doing just that. His administration has sent a Marine Expeditionary Unit to the region, and now has ordered the USS Gerald Ford and its carrier strike group to the Caribbean as well. The Trump administration appears to have a round chambered with the Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro’s name inscribed on it.

These moves follow a campaign of standoff strikes against alleged drug boats allegedly headed to the United States. The administration’s case for this precursor action is that they are protecting Americans from dangerous drugs like fentanyl. This argument is flawed; fentanyl doesn’t come to the United States from Venezuela, and the boats in question do not appear to have enough range to reach the United States in any case.

So what is America doing there?

The administration’s public case for its Venezuela policy is insultingly ridiculous. At an October 15^th press conference, the president declared that “every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives.” Considering that there were only around 84,000 overdoses in the United States last year, and that they have so far blown up 10 boats, they should have declared victory and come home seven boats ago.

A cynic would observe that the administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act has run into legal trouble. Among the issues raised by the American courts is the fact that the United States is not at war. It is hardly a leap of logic to wonder whether administration officials are thinking, “The courts are saying we don’t have the power because we’re not at war—but that could change.” Taking the United States to war would be a likely remedy for that legal shortcoming.

Supporters of regime change in Venezuela have invoked the Monroe Doctrine, arguing that the United States has long intervened in the Caribbean. The historical referent is wrong here—the Monroe Doctrine was about keeping European empires out of the Western Hemisphere. The Roosevelt Corollary was about policing Latin Americans ourselves.

In any case, the history of American intervention in Latin America ought to counsel restraint and not emulation. Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in Mexico to capture Pancho Villa ended with the outlaw leader still on the lam. Two interventions in Nicaragua bedeviled four American presidents over 20 years. Uncle Sam cut its occupation of the Dominican Republic short after an immediate case of buyer’s remorse, but nevertheless slogged through its occupation of neighboring Haiti for nearly two decades.

By the end of the 1920s, Washington wanted out of the business of regime change in Latin America. Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt wisely retrenched from the region. They eschewed the paternalism of their predecessors, judging that the costs of intervention and occupation outweighed the supposed benefits. The White House is drawing the wrong lessons from this ignominious period of American diplomatic history.

Furthermore, proposals for a forcible regime change in Venezuela, presumably through airpower and covert operations, have few direct precedents in the region. Operation Urgent Fury, the 1983 American invasion of Grenada, seized an island of only 133 square miles. The 1989 ouster of Manuel Noriega in Panama was assisted by the already large American military presence in the small nation. The heyday of American Banana Wars in the Caribbean was similarly facilitated by collaboration on the ground and incremental intervention.

Such conditions do not exist in Venezuela, as the country is more than twice the size of Iraq and is led by a regime that, at least for now, enjoys the loyalty of the military. If it changes Venezuela’s regime, the White House risks recreating the endless wars and quagmires of the Middle East, but this time in its own neighborhood. The size of the strike package suggests a campaign on the scale of President Barack Obama’s Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya. The outcome there was chaos, civil war, and open-air slave markets.

The administration has made the strange decision to admit to a finding authorizing the CIA to take covert action inside Venezuela. Venezuelans will now attribute anything that goes wrong in their country to American meddling. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, had already blamed one earthquake on the United States. Now that an American president has explicitly authorized CIA operations in Venezuela, an otherwise outlandish claim has gained credibility.

In his second inaugural address, President Trump announced that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.” In his telling, “we will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

This promise is a far cry from a call for creating a Libya in the Western Hemisphere. Trump should stop listening to the hawks in his administration and recall the promises of his second inaugural.

YOU KNOW HOW THE MEDIA NORMALLY REPORTS ON A MASS ATROCITY

If The Press Had Not Been Aggressively Protecting Israel And Its Interests, All Of Their Reporting On Gaza Would Have Looked Like The Reporting You Are Seeing On The Genocide In Sudan.

The Washington Post has published an article titled “Families shot down, held at ransom as they flee Darfur’s killing fields,” subtitled “Sudan’s RSF paramilitary and its allies have carried out mass ethnic killings and hostage taking in the captured city of El Fashir, survivors told The Post.”

The article opens with a paragraph humanizing the victims of the El Fashir massacres: “Families gunned down as they huddled for safety. Young children weeping over their mother’s body in the desert. Doctors seized for ransom and executed.”

It names the perpetrators, “the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces,” in the second paragraph.

It names the backers of the perpetrators in the third paragraph, saying that “The RSF is backed by the United Arab Emirates.”

It mentions the word “genocide” three separate times. “Ethnic killings” appears twice. The UAE is named repeatedly; even the fact that it is “a key U.S. ally” is explicitly highlighted.

Do you notice anything strange about this reporting?

You shouldn’t. What stands out, reading this article here in the year 2025, is how completely and utterly normal it is.

It’s not fantastic or extraordinary journalism, it’s just normal for a mainstream western publication. The reporters talk to the victims, describe the massacres they were told about, explain the various power dynamics at play from a mainstream western perspective, name some American officials who are pushing for a halt to the RSF’s atrocities, and use appropriately strong language to describe the horrors they are documenting — including in the headline.

They do all the normal mainstream news reporter things. They cover a depraved mass atrocity the same way they’ve typically covered such things for generations.

None of this would stand out on its own, if we hadn’t spent two years watching the mainstream western press do absolutely none of these normal journalistic things in Gaza.

The passive-language “Gazans perish in explosion” headlines. The contortions to avoid naming the perpetrator and the governments that are backing its atrocities. The adamant refusal to use the word “genocide” except to frame it as a dubious claim being made by another party which Israel forcefully denies. The wildly biased discrepancy between the strength of language used to describe violence inflicted by Israelis versus violence inflicted by Palestinians.

If the western press had not been aggressively protecting Israel and its interests this whole time, all their reporting on Gaza over the last two years would have looked very much like the reporting we’re seeing on the genocide in Sudan. There’s a discrepancy in the reporting because there’s a discrepancy in the propaganda needs of the western empire.

It is good that the western press are doing actual journalism in Sudan and covering that genocide with the normal level of urgency and emphasis. If they had been reporting on Gaza in the same way these last two years, the west’s support for Israel would have completely collapsed by now.

Which is exactly why they haven’t been doing it.

AS ISRAELI FORCES RAZE HOMES THE GAZA RESIDENTS REPORT THE BLASTS

Journalists On The Ground Say Blasts Have Echoed Through Gaza Since The Early Hours, Even Though The Ceasefire Is Supposedly In Effect. This Should Tell You How The World Treats Israel.

Most of the strikes hit zones on the far side of the yellow demarcation line, territory Israel’s military occupies and has largely sealed off from the rest of the enclave.

Residents living near the line said that the noise has barely stopped. Families say they are hearing repeated blasts and drones overhead, long after the ceasefire came into force.

People in the area also report seeing Israeli tanks and bulldozers levelling homes inside these zones, wiping out what remains of residential streets and making any Palestinian return even harder.

This demonstrates how the West treats Israel with exception to all laws, agreements and even basic morality and since it is ruled by their master race.

MOST AMERICANS HAVE NO IDEA WHO THEIR GOVERNMENT IS BOMBING

What Percentage Of Americans Even Realize That Trump Has Bombed Somalia Nearly A Hundred Times This Year? It Is Doubtful That It’s Even One Percent.

An article by Dave DeCamp has highlighted the widely-ignored fact that according to AFRICOM the American regime waged a three-day bombing campaign in Somalia from October 26 — October 28, bringing the total number of American airstrikes in that nation this year to 89.

What percentage of Americans even realize that Trump has bombed Somalia nearly a hundred times this year? I doubt it’s even one percent. The mainstream press barely mention it. Americans have hardly any idea who their own country is bombing.

In theory the press are there to create an informed electorate who can then use their votes to move their government in a healthy direction. In practice the press are there to keep the public too ignorant, propagandized and distracted to meddle in the workings of the imperial machine.

Israel keeps violating the “ceasefire” and bombing Gaza whenever it wants to, then saying the ceasefire is back in effect. It’s like saying you’ve quit smoking whenever you’re not currently having a cigarette.

NPR reports that after a mid-“ceasefire” bombing campaign that killed 104 people including 46 children, Benjamin Netanyahu “ordered the strikes after accusing Hamas of violating the ceasefire for handing over body parts this week that Israel said were partial remains of a hostage recovered earlier in the war.”

Saying you massacred children because you weren’t given the correct pieces of a corpse just might be the craziest justification for a war crime that anyone has ever offered.

Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon accused UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese of witchcraft for her report on Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza. That’s right. Witchcraft.

“Miss Albanese, you are a witch and this report is another page in your spell book,” Danon said in response to Albanese’s remarks to the UN’s Third Committee on Gaza.

Says a lot about the strength of their arguments, really.

Pro-Palestine arguments are like, “Here’s raw video footage of atrocities, IDF admissions of war crimes, IDF soldiers documenting their own sadism, eyewitness testimony from western doctors, and analysis from every major human rights group,” while pro-Israel arguments are like, “You’re a witch doing witchcraft!”

Israeli media report that their government is preparing to wage a “propaganda war” for when foreign journalists are able to gain access to Gaza in advance of the expected PR fallout as the world learns “the human stories from Gaza in the voices and faces of the residents themselves.”

It’s such a trip how as a state the Israelis understand the importance of perception management more acutely than any nation on earth, but as individuals they still can’t resist the urge to club an old woman on camera or post pictures of themselves wearing stolen panties in Gaza. Really drives home how the entire state is premised on the understanding that its existence depends on actively cultivating the support of powerful western military forces using aggressive lobbying and propaganda campaigns, but the state is also premised on extreme hatred and racism, and these two essential ingredients are clashing with more and more regularity when it comes to Gaza.

It’s not okay to still support a two-state solution in 2025. Israel has spent two years showing the world that it should not exist as a state. It needs to be disarmed, dismantled, and denazified.

It was still excusable to naively believe a two-state solution was workable prior to 2023, but after two years of Israeli officials openly saying with the overwhelming support of their citizenry that there will never be a Palestinian state while committing a genocide in full view of the entire world, this is no longer a tenable position to have. There is no longer any excuse for still believing the state of Israel will allow the Palestinians to have a fully sovereign state and leave them in peace, especially not after watching it wage war on all its neighbors with the blatantly obvious goal of domination and territorial expansion.

The Israel experiment has been run. The results of that experiment show that it is not workable. Everything you have seen these last two years is the result of Zionists getting everything they want. This is what that looks like. The world needs to terminate the experiment by any means necessary and end the Zionist state forever.

THE AMERICAN REGIME SKIPS THE UN REVIEW OF ITS HUMAN RIGHTS RECORD

The American Regime Joins Israel As The Only Other Country To Not Show For The Mandatory Process Scrutinising The Human Rights Record Of UN Member States. Is That Surprising To You?

The American regime did not send a representative to attend a United Nations review of its human rights record, becoming the second country in history to snub the mandatory procedure.

The meeting, part of the Universal Periodic Review, which takes place every four to five years, was held on Friday without the United States in attendance.

“We were supposed to meet today in order to proceed with the review of the United States,” said Jurg Lauber, president of the UN Human Rights Council. “Nevertheless, I note that the delegation of the United States is not present in this room.”

The Trump regime said in August it would not attend the meeting, joining ally Israel as the only other country to skip the process in which all 193 UN member states undergo scrutiny of their human rights records. Topics such as LGBTQ, immigrant rights, and the death penalty had been on the agenda for discussion at the meeting.

China’s representative at the meeting said that Washington was showing a “lack of respect for the UPR mechanism”, while Cuba accused the American regime of being afraid of what greater oversight of its human rights record might bring.

“As a founding member of the United Nations and primary champion of individual liberties, we will not be lectured about our human rights record by the likes of HRC (Human Rights Council) members such as Venezuela, China or Sudan,” the American Department of State said in a statement.

While the United States has a long record of chafing at oversight by international institutions over its human rights practices, the nationalist administration of President Donald Trump has been notably hostile to international frameworks that could place restraints on the use of American power at home and abroad.

The Ameican regime has also sought to pressure international institutions critical of allies such as Israel, sanctioning UN officials and the International Criminal Court (ICC) for their scrutiny of severe abuses by Israeli forces in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territory.

The Trump administration has depicted forms of international cooperation on many issues as a waste of time, stating that such efforts bring requirements and constraints that place the American regime at a disadvantage with rivals while offering few benefits in return.

ISRAELI ATTACKS ON PALESTINIANS AT GAZA WEDDING VIOLATES THE CEASEFIRE AGAIN

In Gaza, Israel Has Continued To Routinely Kill And Injure Palestinians In Spite Of The October 10th Ceasefire, While Desperately Needed Humanitarian Aid Remains Blocked.

Crossings into Gaza remain closed, blocking aid including shelter materials, medicine, basic food items and supplies for infrastructure repair.

On November 5^th, Israel killed two Palestinians in separate incidents, claiming that they had crossed the so-called yellow line where the Israeli army maintains control. Al Jazeera reported that little information has been given about the location of this line, and it is still being physically marked on the ground, presenting another deadly hazard for Palestinians.

Reporter Ebrahim Saeed documented the invisible partition in northern Gaza, where Palestinians explain that they cannot reach their homes and belongings, and are constantly threatened by Israeli snipers and tanks.

On November 4^th, one Palestinian was killed and another was wounded when an Israeli quadcopter drone opened fire in eastern Gaza City, and another was killed in Jabaliya in northern Gaza, again with the Israeli army claiming that it fired on the individual for crossing the so-called yellow line.

Palestinians were shot and wounded by Israeli forces on Monday, November 3^rd, in southern Gaza.

Civil defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said that Israeli forces opened fire on a wedding that same day. The attack wounded several children including a 6-year-old girl, Sundus Hillis, in the Daraj quarter of Gaza City.

Basal said that the attack took place inside the so-called “safe yellow line” zone in that part of Gaza City, “an area designated under the American-brokered ceasefire as a first-phase boundary where Israeli occupation forces were meant to withdraw and halt all aggression.”

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor stated on October 31^st that since the beginning of the ceasefire, 219 Palestinians had been killed, including 85 children.

Across the eastern, northern and southern parts of the Gaza Strip, beyond where the Israeli army has designated the vague yellow line boundary, Israel has continued to use bombs and airstrikes to evaporate entire blocks and destroy any trace of Palestinian homes, agricultural land and infrastructure.

Euro-Med said that these actions “suggest Israel is consolidating a new reality, allowing itself to conduct continuous military operations in areas it controls, covering roughly 50 percent of Gaza, while removing these areas from the ceasefire framework, without engaging in combat operations aimed solely at destruction or eliminating future livelihoods.”

Five Palestinian fishers were arrested on Tuesday after Israeli gunboats opened fire on their fishing boats just off the Gaza Port, “forcing fishermen to jump into the water … before being bound and arrested,” according to a statement by the Union of Agricultural Work Committees.

Israel continues to ban Palestinians from fishing despite the ceasefire agreement.

PALESTINIAN BODIES RETURNED

Palestinian bodies that were returned to Gaza by Israel this week were so badly decomposed that they were difficult to identify, according to a Gaza health ministry official who spoke on Wednesday.

The official said that one of the returned bodies was missing a head.

Bodies have been routinely returned to Gaza with visible signs of field executions and torture. Health officials say efforts to identify the remains have also been hindered because Israel is not allowing DNA testing equipment into Gaza, it has been noted.

The Ministry of Health said that 285 Palestinian bodies have been received since October 10^th, but only 84 of those have been identified.

ONLY A FRACTION OF EXPECTED HUMANITARIAN AID ENTERS GAZA

Israel continues to use food and healthcare as weapons, 25 months into the genocide and nearly four weeks into a so-called ceasefire.

The Gaza government media office stated that since October 10^th, only 145 trucks are entering Gaza daily on average, which is fewer than one-quarter of the agreed-upon minimum of 600 trucks that should be entering in order to meet the basic needs of Palestinians.

The media office added that only 10 percent of the anticipated 1,100 fuel trucks have entered as well, “reflecting the continued policy of deliberately restricting and obstructing the vital energy supplies needed to operate hospitals, bakeries and essential facilities.”

The Norwegian Refugee Council says that it is one of nine international humanitarian aid agencies that have faced repeated rejections by Israel, blocking them from bringing in lifesaving shelter materials as winter and the rainy season approach.

“Since the ceasefire took effect on October 10^th, Israeli authorities have rejected 23 requests from nine aid agencies to bring in urgently needed shelter supplies such as tents, sealing and framing kits, bedding, kitchen sets and blankets, amounting to nearly 4,000 pallets. Humanitarian organizations warn that the window to scale up winterization assistance is closing rapidly,” the group said on Wednesday.

The Norwegian Refugee Council’s regional director Angelita Caredda said, “We have a very short chance to protect families from the winter rains and cold. More than three weeks into the ceasefire, Gaza should be receiving a surge of shelter materials, but only a fraction of what is needed has entered. The international community must act now to secure swift and unimpeded access.”

At least 259,000 Palestinian families, more than 1.45 million people, need emergency shelter assistance, the group added.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces abducted a worker with UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency, on October 30^th, while he was working at one of the only two crossings that are partially open for humanitarian aid deliveries.

Raed al-Afifi was detained and taken by Israeli forces, and Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor says that “no information has been provided by Israeli authorities regarding his location or the charges against him.”

Euro-Med says that in a related development, the Israeli army “had requested the agency [UNICEF] to withdraw its trucks and supplies from Kerem Shalom [crossing] a day before the arrest and subsequently prevented the entry of aid trucks carrying medical equipment for hospitals in northern Gaza, as well as vaccinations for newborns and nutritional supplements.”

The targeting of UNICEF, the group says, “is part of a broader campaign to restrict United Nations agencies and international humanitarian organizations, aiming to end their presence and operations after they witnessed widespread violations affecting Palestinian civilians during the war, and to further deprive the population of livelihoods and essential services in Gaza.”

ESCALATION OF ATTACKS, SIEGE IN WEST BANK

Turning to the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces have escalated their attacks and destruction in the northern city of Tulkarm, with extensive bulldozing operations in the Tulkarm refugee camp which has been under siege for more than 280 days.

The Wafa news agency reported that Israeli soldiers have tightened military measures and closed all entrances to the camp, preventing residents from reaching their homes. Barriers, including iron gates and concrete blocks, have been installed in the camp and in the city’s neighborhoods adjacent to the camp, and have seized nearby homes and turned them into military bases.

Wafa reports, “This escalation comes as the aggression and siege on the nearby Nur Shams camp enter the 270th consecutive day.”

Local journalist Wafeya Ulhadi recorded a protest on Wednesday, as residents demanded the right to return to their homes and rejected forced displacement.

Wafa news agency said that the Israeli soldiers blocked the residents’ advance and forced them to disperse at gunpoint.

More than 5,000 families have been displaced from Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps in the past 10 months, and more than 600 homes have been destroyed, leaving the camps uninhabitable.

2,400 ATTACKS BY ARMY AND SETTLERS IN OCTOBER

Israeli soldiers and settlers carried out nearly 2,400 attacks across the occupied West Bank during the month of October alone, according to statistics from the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission in Palestine. The army was responsible for nearly 1,600 of the assaults, and settlers carried out nearly 800.

“The attacks ranged from direct physical assaults, uprooting of trees, burning of fields, preventing olive pickers from reaching their lands, seizing property, and demolishing homes and agricultural facilities. On the other hand, the occupation forces are closing large areas of land under the pretext of enforcing ‘security,’ while the colonizers are granted expansion within said lands,” the commission stated.

A news agency reported that Jewish Israeli settlers attacked and injured three Palestinians west of Yatta, south of Hebron on November 5^th.

The settlers released their livestock into the fields, damaged crops and fruit trees, and then physically assaulted the residents, leaving three with injuries.

Settlers also destroyed olive groves in the village of Turmus Aya on Wednesday, setting fires that damaged fruit-bearing trees, causing losses for farmers and threatening this year’s olive harvest.

The Turmus Aya lands and surrounding areas are subjected to frequent and repeated attacks by settlers, especially in recent weeks.

And settlers carried out a gruesome attack on sheep owned by Palestinian farmers this past week in the southern West Bank.

Footage from a surveillance camera shows nine masked Israeli settlers, armed with clubs, raiding the property of the Dramin family, on the outskirts of the village of Samu in the South Hebron Hills.

The video shows the settlers “shattering windshields and torching harvests, as three of the men enter the sheep pen and beat lambs in front of the ewes. The security camera filmed one of the settlers throwing lambs onto the floor, throwing concrete blocks at them and beating them, as another settler hit the others. Six lambs were killed and four others were severely injured,” the Tel Aviv newspaper reported.

Other sources indicated that some of the lambs had their eyes gouged out by the settlers.

HIGHLIGHTING RESILIENCE

And finally, we wanted to highlight people expressing joy, determination and resilience across Gaza and around the world.

Students at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City are registering for classes, after two years of trying to complete their education – while also trying to survive a genocide.

In a short video, one student says that she hopes to finally obtain her right to education, including by taking in-person classes. Muhammad Shabbir, a university administrator, says that in the third year of this war, the college was happily surprised that the number of student registrants was higher than any year before.

He says “this demonstrates that there is living, undying Palestinian will in the hearts of all of our students.”

HOLLYWOOD FIGURES CRITICAL OF GAZA GENOCIDE ARE SUBJECT TO “BLACKLISTING” BY PARAMOUNT

The Move Follows A Broader Campaign By The Studio To Distance Itself From Growing Industry Criticism Of Israel’s Genocide In Gaza.

Paramount Studios, led by new CEO David Ellison, has created an internal blacklist targeting Hollywood figures it considers “anti-Semitic,” Variety reported on November 4^th.

The move follows a broader campaign by the studio to distance itself from growing industry criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, assumed control of the Hollywood studio in October following an $8bn merger with Skydance.

Larry Ellison, a close ally of wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and the largest individual donor to the Israeli army, has long aligned his company’s operations with American and Israeli security priorities, pledging Oracle’s cloud and cybersecurity infrastructure to support Israel after the start of its genocide in Gaza.

Oracle has also moved to take control of the American TikTok algorithm under a Trump-backed deal transferring the app’s operations from China’s ByteDance to American oligarchs.

The company will retrain the algorithm “from the ground up” and manage all American user data through its cloud network, a role praised by Jewish advocacy groups as a safeguard against what they describe as online antisemitism.

David Ellison is also pursuing the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which, if successful, would place some of the largest entertainment and news networks in America under a single, openly pro-zionist leadership.

Variety reports that Paramount’s new leadership under the younger Ellison has taken a hardline stance in defense of Israel, with sources claiming the studio now refuses to work with artists it deems hostile to Israeli interests.

The company has also dismissed several senior staff members seen as critical of Israel, including CBS foreign correspondent Debora Patta, who covered Israel’s genocide in Gaza extensively.

Bari Weiss, founder of the far-right outlet The Free Press and an ardent zionist, was appointed editor-in-chief of CBS News shortly after Ellison’s takeover.

In a statement released on Friday, Paramount said it “disagreed with recent efforts to boycott Israeli filmmakers,” claiming that “silencing individual creative artists based on their nationality does not promote better understanding or advance the cause of peace.”

The statement came in response to a pledge by Film Workers for Palestine, endorsed by over 4,000 actors and directors—including Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem, and Olivia Colman—to boycott Israeli film institutions accused of complicity in genocide and apartheid.

The group rejected Paramount’s portrayal of the initiative, saying the pledge targets institutions, not individual artists.

“We hope the studio is not intentionally misrepresenting the pledge in an attempt to silence our colleagues in the film industry,” the collective said.

Film Workers for Palestine also highlighted the Ellison family’s close ties to Netanyahu and the Israeli military, noting that federal filings show Larry Ellison will retain control of Paramount.

Last month, the International Association of Genocide Scholars concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide, a determination rejected by the Israeli Foreign Ministry as “Hamas’s campaign of lies.”

LEARN WHY INVADING VENEZUELA WON’T END UP BEING EASY

As American Warships Patrol Caribbean Waters And F-35 Fighters Prowl Venezuelan Airspace, Hawkish Voices In Washington Paint An Enticing Picture: A Swift Military Operation To Topple Nicolás Maduro.

It would not be similar to the easy interventions in Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989). It’s a dangerous fantasy that ignores three decades of failed Venezuelan policy and fundamentally misunderstands the catastrophic difference between those brief police actions and what a Venezuela invasion would entail.

The comparison is essentially that of a neighborhood skirmish to a regional war. Venezuela is roughly 2,650 times larger than Grenada and 12 times larger than Panama, with 243 times more people than Grenada and 12 times more than Panama. The appropriate historical parallels aren’t Grenada or Panama—they’re Iraq and Afghanistan, multi-trillion-dollar quagmires that killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of civilians while advancing no genuine American interests.

What regime change boosters consistently ignore is what happens the day after Maduro falls. They focus obsessively on knocking out Venezuela’s conventional military—no walk in the park, but an attainable feat—while studiously avoiding the nightmare that follows: A multi-factional civil war among heavily armed irregular forces, refugee flows dwarfing the current crisis, and a protracted insurgency that could justify further intervention by the American regime and spiral into a broader conflict that could attract irregular leftist forces from the region.

As far as historical analogues are concerned, Grenada was a tiny 344-square-kilometer volcanic island—smaller than many American cities. Despite hilly terrain, the entire country could be secured quickly because of its minuscule size. Panama at 75,420 square kilometers was larger but still a narrow isthmus focused around the Canal Zone, where American forces already had an extensive military presence and insider knowledge based on decades of American influence in Panama.

Venezuela covers 912,050 square kilometers—featuring the Andes mountains in the west, vast central plains (llanos), dense Amazon jungle in the south, and 2,800 kilometers of Caribbean coastline. This geographic complexity creates countless opportunities for asymmetric warfare, with mountainous terrain favoring defensive operations, urban centers ideal for guerrilla resistance, and jungle regions providing sanctuary for irregular forces.

Unlike Panama where American forces had extensive familiarity from decades of base presence, or Grenada, where the entire operational theater was one small island, Venezuela’s diverse terrain would require controlling vast territories to prevent insurgent sanctuaries. America’s military planners have no established presence, no intimate geographic knowledge, and would face the same challenges that gave American forces fits in Afghanistan’s mountains, Iraq’s urban centers, and Vietnam’s jungles.

Venezuela hosts one of the most complex networks of armed non-state actors in the Western Hemisphere. Start with the colectivos—far-left paramilitary groups numbering 8,000 individuals operating in 16 states and controlling approximately 10 percent of Venezuelan cities. These aren’t poorly armed street gangs; they possess AK-47s, submachine guns, fragmentation grenades, and tear gas—much of it supplied directly by the Venezuelan government.

Colombian guerrilla organizations have also established a significant presence on Venezuelan territory. The National Liberation Army (ELN) maintains operations in 13 Venezuelan states. According to a report by Colombian media outlet Connectas, the ELN has armed cells in roughly 10 percent of Venezuela’s more than 300 municipalities. The group controls territory in the Venezuelan states of Zulia, Táchira, Apure, and Amazonas—the four states bordering Colombia—and also operates in Barinas, Bolívar, and Delta Amacuro, with a presence of roughly 1,000 fighters in Venezuela and 6,000 members in total.

Segunda Marquetalia, dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) who rejected Colombia’s peace accords, operates with an estimated 1,000 members. Other FARC dissident factions add approximately 2,000 more fighters. These groups maintain Marxist-Leninist, anti-imperialist ideologies and view the United States as the primary threat to revolutionary movements. Combined, these irregular forces are in the tens of thousands with substantial weapons, territorial control, and operational experience.

It should be stressed that Venezuela’s official military doctrine has been explicitly designed around asymmetric warfare against a hypothetical invasion by the American regime since the Chávez era. The strategy assumes initial conventional defeat followed by sustained guerrilla resistance—making occupation costly and politically unsustainable.

Nevertheless, Venezuela won’t just roll over without a conventional fight. Venezuela is the number one purchaser of Russian weaponry in Latin America. It boasts mobile Russian S-300VM and Buk-M2E air defense systems (described as “by far the most formidable in Latin America”) and KH-31 anti-ship missiles. Additionally, Venezuela boasts 24 Su-30MK2V Flanker fighters (approximately 21 operational) capable of carrying anti-ship missiles and critically, components of Russia’s C4ISR system—integrated digital warfare networks previously shared only with Belarus.

Most significantly, Russia signed a comprehensive 10-year strategic partnership with Venezuela in May 2025, ratified in October 2025, covering more than 350 bilateral agreements on security, defense, and technology. Russian cargo aircraft have recently been landing in Caracas with additional military supplies. In October 2025, Maduro requested Russian assistance enhancing air defenses, restoring Su-30 aircraft, and acquiring missiles. The Iranians have also cooperated with Venezuela on the development of drone technology and sanctions evasion assistance.

This great power backing has no parallel in Grenada (where Soviet/Cuban support was minimal during the invasion) or Panama (where Manuel Noriega’s late attempts to seek Cuban/Nicaraguan support proved futile against American forces.

The ultimate challenge for the United States comes the day after when Venezuelan forces, colectivos, militias, and allied guerrilla groups retreat to mountainous regions, jungles, and southern plains. From there, armed groups would be able to conduct asymmetric attacks on American forces and any post-Maduro government, creating multiple overlapping resistance movements.

Neoconservative strategists are engaging in dangerous wishful thinking. They promise swift operation followed by grateful Venezuelans welcoming democracy. Reality would be years of counterinsurgency, multi-factional civil war, massive refugee flows, regional destabilization, and a strategic quagmire.

Invading Venezuela won’t be a walk in the park. It would be a quagmire defining American foreign policy for a generation. After 30 years of failure, perhaps it’s time to try something radically different: Diplomacy, engagement, and respect for sovereignty. The alternative is catastrophe, something Donald Trump’s “America First” movement never voted for.