Interview by Alberto Mora with compañeros Fabrizio Casari and Stephen Sefton
Revista En Vivo, Channel 4
October 19th 2023
Alberto Mora
We welcome our guests this morning, good morning Fabrizio, good morning Stephen.
Thanks for joining us this morning. We want to talk a bit and follow up on this genocide that Israel is applying to the Palestinians, and all the lies that have been told. I would like to start with Fabrizio, who recently spoke about what is happening in the Middle East. It as also said that, despite everything that has been said about not touching civilians and giving them the “opportunity” to withdraw to the south of Gaza, that civilians should go to a safer region. What Fabrizio found is that civilians are the real target of Jewish artillery and aviation, always with the same eagerness to get hold of their lands and everything else.
I would like to ask both of you, first of all, for a brief reflection on where we are at the moment after all the days since the beginning of this conflict, in which, of course, it is always about framing Israel as if it were the good guy and the Palestinians as the bad guys. Welcome to you both, I would like to hear Fabrizio first and then Stephen.
Fabrizio Casari
A very good morning, these times are bad and bad is an understatement. Here are some aspects, symbolic in a way that is interesting. What you were referring to just now is that I was writing: The civilian population is being told, leave this way, so that they leave Gaza City free and we can go in to finish off Hamas, and the part of the civilian population that believed them has been bombed exactly when they were setting out to leave.
I seem to remember, that since 1992 and NATO's entry into the war against Yugoslavia, with the story that Serbian planes were bombing the civilians of Kosovo who were leaving. Now it seems that bombing civilians has become more acceptable.
But the paradox is symbolic of all that; it is to say to the Palestinians: Get out of here, get out of there, and get out of here too, but it is not the Palestinians who have to leave Palestine, it is the Jews who have to leave Palestine. That land is Palestine.
The idea is that the world may be wasting time arguing over the one who has the right to be there because that is his land but they still have to leave, this whole paradox of the conflict is very telling now. At the same time the paradox has become a crime of an appalling size. If we are going to look at the last incident, that of the Baptist Hospital that was destroyed, with more than 500 dead.
Now, I don't know if you'll see it there in Nicaragua, but the whole Western media keeps saying that the missile that destroyed the hospital is probably from Islamic Jihad.
It must be remembered that the Islamic Jihad only have Qassam missiles, maybe Hamas has better ones, but the Qassam does the kind of damage that if I launch it at you inside a condominium maybe they end up with a couple of rooms destroyed; they have very limited power.
What completely collapses a Hospital is a weapon loaded with at least has 1,200, 1,300 kilos of TNT; we are talking about missiles, and so while not saying that Israel is the one that destroyed that Hospital, they forget to say that it was only the 4,000th missile that it has launched these days, so when there is one that enters the Hospital. Ah!, then it has been a malfunction by the Palestinians.
That reminds me of the Nord Stream, sorry to laugh but it does make me laugh because it is such that they have the nerve to say it. Do you remember the Nord Stream in Ukraine that was Russian, was sabotaged, exploded. Who could it have been? Why, the Russians who usually get up in the morning and start beating themselves up. And Bucha, where the missile was of Ukrainian production but was said to be Russian; that is, what is clear is that the imperial offensive is very crude and always continues to have the problem of consensus, they need to make international opinion believe who are the good guys who are the bad guys.
Normally, by completely inverting the two poles of matter, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good. I wrote in that article that I also don't think they will enter by land, there is no land assault, because one by land will very expensive for the Israel Army.
The Israeli Army lives on myths that are not confirmed by history, because it depends on such a strong military superiority, by air, navy and troops and weapons, that you’s think it would be easy for everyone to be so strong.
In fact, when they have engaged in ground warfare with their infantry, twice they did so in Lebanon, and they had to flee with their tails between their legs, with Hezbollah after them. So they are thinking very carefully before entering Gaza, because they know that behind every stone, every ruin there may be a Palestinian guerrilla. Of course they are going to come in and massacre everyone, but they are not going to get out of it immune, and already the price they are paying is beginning to be high.
International public opinion that has stopped believing the story, and indeed the reason why they are inventing stories so as to completely reverse the reality and their responsibility for what has been done, is precisely because they realize that the European Union itself, which is Israel's best friend, says Enough Is Enough!
That is to say, that there is a fine line and here ends a very sensitive distinction between what is defense and what is retaliation against civilians; so that's how it is in the Gaza Strip where Israel risks a lot.
What makes me laugh is that Biden comes along saying to them, don't make the same mistake that we made after September 11th. It would be interesting to know what it is that Biden thinks have been the mistakes after September 11th, invading Afghanistan, attacking Yemen, hitting Iraq. What was the mistake? Getting into Syria?
Why was that a mistake? It's a pity none of the journalists there didn’t ask him, it would have been the best question that could have been asked. And the truth is that he is going ion with two aircraft carriers, thinking about if the war breaks out, since all the other Arab countries are demonstrating, and there are very strong popular mobilizations in support of Palestine.
If the war opens, it will not simply be on the territory of Gaza, it will involve Lebanon, it will involve a piece of Syria, it will involve a piece of Egypt; that is to say that the conflict can happen very strongly, and the greatest threat they have is that of Iran. So that's what Biden is there for, to show Iran and to show the Israelis, who are effectively damaging the start of his electoral campaign.
Alberto Mora
Thanks Fabrizio. It was an extraordinary cynicism too, that Mr. Biden began to take a kind of inventory: there is damage here, there is damage there, I do not know how many die, poor babies, the baby's smile. I don't know if Reagan, George Bush, ever set out to make that count of all the criminal acts they have done around the world. But well, this man came to make a fool of himself there, with an extraordinary cynicism, which leaves one appalled. Go ahead, Stephen, what's your take on the balance sheet?
Stephen Sefton
Good morning, Alberto, and thank you very much for the invitation and for allowing me to contribute to this discussion with Fabrizio and you, for our viewers.
It was interesting that Fabrizio mentioned the subject of September 11th in relation to this, because many people in the United States are saying that this is the moment, a similar moment for the Zionist state of Israel to what happened in 2001 in the United States.
But there is a fundamental difference now, in my opinion, which is that while in 2001 the sympathy of the world supported the United States and expressed solidarity with the United States, at this moment the opinion of the Majority World condemns Israel and that is a fundamental difference.
So, while the United States had the possibility of taking advantage of the disaster that happened to it in New York and Washington to attack countries that had nothing to do with the attack, such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Here Israel is not going to be able to exploit that pretext of the Palestinian offensive on Saturday, October 7, to justify its genocide, and that’s what we are seeing.
However, I think it is worth analyzing some of the tricks of the psychological war that the West has used to justify the slow motion genocide that has been happening over the last 75 years, in effect. One of the arguments that has been used in relation to the Palestinian offensive is that it is only about Hamas, and Hamas is a terrorist organization, and that is why Israel had the right to bomb the population of Gaza.
But that is a lie, everything is a lie, and we have to remember our own experience here in Nicaragua, that in the psychological war against us all kinds of lies were mobilized and that same thing that happened in 2018 is the same thing that is happening now.
So the reality of the offensive of last October 7th is that it was coordinated between about eight or nine Palestinian groups, not only Hamas and they included the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is a Communist organization, and other organizations that do not share the same ideology or the religious opinions of Hamas; so, this attempt to identify the problem as the problem of a terrorist group called Hamas is completely false. This has been a Palestinian offensive occupying its right of self-defense against 70 years of aggression by the Zionist State of Israel.
In relation to the immediate propaganda, the false lies that have been used to present Israel as a victim, again; it must be remembered that the only sources we have for the figures of casualties and deaths on the part of Israel, are the Israeli sources themselves, they have never been corroborated.
On the other hand, we have videos of survivors of the events of last October 7th, who testify that dozens of Israeli citizens had been taken prisoner by Palestinian forces, that the Israeli forces themselves killed dozens of their own people; but that does not appear in the Western media.
Hamas has always denied that they attacked civilians that day, that their target was the Northern Division of the Israeli Army in Gaza, which at that time allegedly had a number of troops between 3,500 and 4,000, and the Palestinian Forces were about 2,000. So, all that is very confusing, and we can be sure that what appears in terms of descriptions of Palestinian atrocities is probably a complete lie.
What's the idea of that? The idea is this, the idea is to equate Hamas with terrorists and the idea goes further by comparing or making people believe that all Muslims and Arabs are the same as Hamas, and so then everyone is a terrorist. We have seen that in the terrible events in the United States, in the attack on a young Palestinian boy who was stabbed by a fanatic and murdered.
So what is the point of characterizing Hamas and Arabs and Muslims in general in this way? The idea is to project the falsehood that this conflict is a conflict between Arabs who, in an irrational way, only want to kill Jews, and they are trying to present a situation of a conflict with very ancient roots, as basically a religious conflict which is completely false; but that is one of the objectives of the psychological war of the West against its own populations, and the world population.
That is another way of supporting the old Zionist trick, of identifying Judaism with Zionism which is an extremist, fanatical ideology that wants to exterminate the Palestinians, as Fabrizio said, it wants to eliminate them from what they believe is their territory based on their religious beliefs, but the vast majority of Jews in the world, do not share that ideology.
The religion of the Jews in the same way as the Christian and Islamic religions, basically proposes Principles of Justice, Principles of Solidarity and in the same way that certain Islamic groups distort the religion of Islam, the Zionists have done exactly the same with the noble religion of the Jews.
That is why it is important to highlight that we are facing a massive psychological warfare operation, and part of that is also the lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.
Even some Western Human Rights Organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which always support the imperialist positions in relation to countries that the United States and its allies want to attack, in this case even they have admitted and characterized the State of Israel as an Apartheid State, just as the Apartheid system used to be in South Africa, and it is not an accident that the Government of South Africa has refused to condemn, as the United States has requested, the Palestinian Offensive of last October 7th.
Alberto Mora
Thanks Stephen. Well, I want to get back to Fabrizio, then your opinion. Fabrizio explained that there were other reasons why Israel would not be able to launch this attack that it had announced on the ground attack on Gaza. Biden was quick to say that those in Hamas must be killed, but that it would be a mistake to get into Gaza.
RT today has gathered statements from an American journalist, Seymour Hersh, and puts his words in quotes: "Gaza is becoming a Hiroshima without the use of nuclear weapons”" and it quotes him in this information where it reports that a well-informed official told this journalist that Gaza is in the process of becoming a Hiroshima without the use of nuclear weapons.
He indicated that in Israel's plans there will be no need for a massive ground invasion, and that Netanyahu's Plan calls on the Israeli Army to kill every member of Hamas and that the tunnel system can be destroyed, perhaps using US produced bombs that can penetrate tens of meters underground before detonating at the end of the tunnel in what was once Gaza City.
I heard you say a few days ago, Fabrizio, that the Hamas members were in the tunnels, and you might get in there but have to see how many would come out. But the thing is that with the justification of destroying the tunnels they are destroying the whole city, and they are going to leave all that in ruins, there are already antecedents but I would like your opinion.
You have argued that these may not the real reasons, that the Israelis are not what they claim, that they have generated a whole vision that supposedly they are impregnable, but that they are not.
Fabrizio Casari
Look, Alberto, there is not only the question of the tunnels, it is that if Gaza is not empty, then every Palestinian is a weapon against Israel. Secondly, the tunnels, okey, there are special bombs, small US missiles, US made, that Israel has and are able to enter, search for the the tunnel and get inside; a small particular fact to note is that some tunnels end in Egypt, and if you blow up a tunnel and hit Egypt maybe that's not the best idea.
But regardless of that, they do not enter because also to enter they need to clear Gaza, that is, leaving it without Palestinians, and a Gaza without Palestinians they are not going to get. So, the choice is, do they go in and massacre another 30,000, 40,000 people, or do they go in and have 1,000, 2,000 of their soldiers get killed, so there they are thinking about it, they have been saying so for two weeks.
I thought that they were not going to enter Gaza two days after they announced it, because it seemed to me that from the point of view of military tactics it is not very smart, because what they are now fighting with is not the Intifada, it is no longer children throwing stones.
Now they are fighting armed formations, it is not only with Hamas as you have just said, the FLP, the FD, PLP, I think there is Al-Fatah, I think there are the Muslim Brotherhood; there are several factions
Well, they say that they are all terrorists, that Hamas is a terrorist; they said the same thing with Arafat's PLO that they were terrorists, I don't know if you have listened to them, but those who oppose the Empire are usually of three kinds. In the first case they are crazy; in the second case they are terrorists, in the third case they are dictatorships. Because of course, if they are the crazy ones then you are the wise one; if they are terrorists then you are the humanist and if there is a dictatorship then you are the democrat.
This idea of caricaturing and demonizing the enemy is simple and now is simply the most important part of political communication, which is the creating the background of the Fourth and Fifth Generation War, the so-called Hybrid War. That's how it's done, with communication, it's not completely new, the gringos invented it in the Second World War, that's where many of their foundations were born, among them the NED and several that have been dedicated to that, but in recent years they have been particularly cruel with over Ukraine; this is a most important issue.
What I mean is that Palestine still has a city like Gaza with two million people, faced with two million people, there is no alternative, you are not going to be able to end it all in one go. You need something, and that may be a Hiroshima as Seymour Hersh says, who is the greatest living war correspondent, unfortunately elderly.
He is 83 years old now, but he is a man who has done spectacular research, and above all completely dismantling and demonstrating the falsity of some great Western stories, among others Seymour Hersh is the author of the research that led to the admission by Ukraine that the sabotage of the Nord Stream was not Ukrainian it was done by NATO personnel and Norwegian sailors.
Seymour Hersh is the same one who dismantled the lie, according to which, the Syrian Army used chemical weapons in Syria, and the cruel lie of the children who were taken out of the incubators by Saddam's troops, remember the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, like the chemical weapons in Syria and now the Palestinian Hospital.
The truth is that, when they fail to win on the battlefield, they try to win in the field of media manipulation in order to continue having that international consensus, which is the necessary gasoline for the whole machinery of oppression to move.
It strikes me that for example yesterday, in Beijing where the 10th Anniversary of the Silk Road was being celebrated, President Putin who according to them would be a war criminal, but if Putin were a war criminal, I don't even want to think that you could call the entire Israeli General Staff or President Netanyahu or Biden.
And Putin reminded them that those two aircraft carriers that are very close to the territory in question that they should not even get close because it begins to be of international relevance for other countries, to be very careful, that they are within reach. So, what does that mean, it means that what is being fought in Palestine is the third act of a war that after Syria and Ukraine, the United States is trying to fight in all corners of the world by raising to international destabilization to the highest point, .
That has possibly delayed the initiative that they were going to take in Taiwan, they will have it beyond, they are not in the military or storage conditions to ensure their dominance this time. That they are historically a little weaker than in the past, unfortunately, that is being played out in the land of the Palestinians.
I don't think there is a people in the world anywhere, as humiliated, despised, killed off and kept in conditions of human immiseration as the Palestinian People, and I have already noted on another occasion what Italian Prime Minister Andreotti, a Christian Democrat, said, “if I had been born in a Palestinian refugee camp, today I would be a terrorist”.
Because in the condition the Palestinians live in, no human being would accept it. An open-air prison in which to have water, to have food, to have electricity, to have a job, to buy anything, from the smallest thing to the biggest, they need the authorization of the Israeli troops. And we must never forget about this issue, Palestine is occupied by an Israeli occupation force occupying Palestine illegitimately, illegally and unjustly.
As Stephen rightly said, Zionism is a religious ideology that encompasses a minority of Israel, which has been very useful politically since the founding of the State of Israel until today. The thing is that one always has to ask oneself, what are the ideologies that they have established on the basis of a people different from the rest? One has been Nazism, the superiority of the Aryan race; another is Zionism that says that Israel is the race preferred by God, and the other the exceptionalism which is the legal and political culture of the United States.
Perhaps we shoudl aspire to a world where one people does not arrogate to itself the right to say that it is superior to others, and that therefore, it has all the rights and privileges while the others have only duties.
I think that the apartheid taking place in Palestine is worse than what was taking place in South Africa; I think that the lack of humanity shown by the Israeli Army is beyond that of any other war that has been unleashed. And cowardice, because when you have planes with military technology, soldiers, warships and missiles against a small paramilitary organization, and you use cities with civilians as targets, this has no name in the history of mankind. That has no name!
So, they are not very different from the bombings that were staged during the Second World War in the cities where they had no reason to bomb, and any place where instead of measuring yourself with your enemy you choose innocent people, that is not justified by moral and, frankly, historical politics.
The interesting thing, and I close with this, is that President Biden, President by default, at this point has said that the United States would agree to a division of the Gaza Strip, you can imagine what quota for Palestine and what quota for Israel, but where United Nations troops could guard the border. A thing like in Kosovo, or up to a certain part in Korea.
What makes me laugh is this is a proposal that Israel has never accepted, Israel has never accepted the utmost possibility, to be able to permit the presence of international troops. Several times the Palestinians have asked for it and immediately Israel rejected it.
Now, why is Biden making that proposal? That remains to be seen, I have some speculations in my head, but I don't want to keep talking so as not to take up too much time, maybe another time I'll elaborate. But it is interesting because it is the first time that a US President recognizes that there is no capacity for self-regulation on the part of Israel, and that this can only be regulated by international troops, that later if it is true, or he says it only for propaganda, we will see this.
Alberto Mora
Thank you, Fabrizio. Stephen, please.
Stephen Sefton
Well, in relation to what Fabrizio was commenting, I think it is important that we return to the perception, to the attitude of the Zionists towards the Palestinians. There is a Major General named Gior Elan, who commented to the Israeli media recently, and I quote his words: "The State of Israel has no choice but to make it reach a place where it is impossible to live. We have to create a severe, humanitarian crisis as a necessary means to achieve our goal. Gaza is going to return or become a place where no human being can exist”" End quote.
So you have the top Zionist military commanders openly saying that they are going to commit crimes against humanity committed against the Palestinian civilian population, and we have seen right now at the United Nations, that the United States has openly become complicit and supports this policy of committing crimes against humanity openly, admitting it in public to the world.
What care we to think about this? Under international law genocide can result not only from killing large parts of a population, but also from creating living conditions that are so unbearable, that it leads to the destruction of large groups of people.
So, here we are in a situation where the United Nations is ratifying crimes against humanity. We return to what our beloved Foreign Minister, Comrade Denis Moncada, told us recently, that what is required is not a reform of the United Nations, it is a complete refounding, as our Eternal Commander Hugo Chavez said and as our Foreign Minister of Dignity Father Miguel de Escoto said.
So, another thing to keep in mind about these crimes that are being committed by the Zionist regime is that they are not only taking place in Gaza, because although the most horrible images and the biggest slaughter is happening in Gaza, the other part is in the West Bank where a large part of the Palestinian population lives, under Zionist military occupation... Today I was reading in the morning a report where it was stated that more than 850 Palestinian civilians have been kidnapped and disappeared; it is not known what has happened to these 850 people.
There are also reports that are coming out of the prisons in the Zionist entity of Israel, where it holds more than 5,300 prisoners, that prison officials are torturing, breaking the bones of Palestinian prisoners, in revenge for the Palestinian Offensive of last October 7th.
We have to take into account this situation, which is an exact reflection of what Fabrizio was commenting on in relation to the nature of the Zionist regime in Israel. I think that in our last conversation Fabrizio commented this: One of the things that the Zionist authorities have done is, to give a notice to the administrations of the different Hospitals in Gaza, to empty their hospitals and take the patients we do not know where, they are supposed to be able to move thousands and thousands of patients.
So, in relation to the Baptist Hospital in Gaza, we must also remember that that hospital had recently been attacked with bombs that destroyed an operating room and I understand that the X-ray part; so it is not the first Israeli attack on the Hospital.
These threats to hospitals have been constant, I think for a week or so now, that Israel has said that hospitals have to close, they have to remove the patients, when the World Health Organization itself has explained publicly that it is impossible to transfer so many patients without killing hundreds of people.
So you have a situation now that the United States is not allowing in enough aid to help the food situation in Gaza, making itself complicit in the Zionist genocide that is happening. And they have a dozen hospitals where they don't have water, they only have water from a well and it will be contaminated after so many bombings.
A hospital in Lebanon has had to close and also a Children's Hospital has had to close; now. Imagine if our Hospital La Mascota in Managua had to evacuate the children from the hospital. The Durra Children's Hospital in Gaza was evacuated because Israel bombed it with white phosphorus, which is prohibited under international law.
We have to reiterate that almost all these hospitals are running only with their generators, and when the diesel or fuel to run them runs out, the hospitals will be completely without electricity.
This humanitarian situation is extremely urgent, but the United States and its allies themselves are preventing the entry of humanitarian aid, although they have supposedly said that they will make a humanitarian pause so that maybe 20 trucks can enter, and that is absurd face with the needs of 2 million people.
Alberto Mora
Of course. Thank you Stephen, thank you Fabrizio, and I hope that somehow these International Organizations can stop this genocide on the part of Israel and do justice to the Palestinian people. To enforce the territorial division, and to respect the rights of the Palestinian People.
Again, thank you Fabrizio and Stephen, I thank you for having been with us.