Netanyahu’s war-turned-genocide in Gaza has backfired badly - his strategy has helped resurrect Hamas, the very movement he tried desperately to crush

Aside from being a major military setback, Israel’s war on Gaza has also disoriented the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu like never before. Since the announcement of a ceasefire on 26 August, his statements appear erratic and particularly uncertain, an expected outcome of the Gaza war.

Since his first term as a prime minister (1996-99), Netanyahu has showed particular savviness at fashioning political and military events to neatly suit his declared policies. He fabricated imminent threats that were neither imminent nor threats, for example, Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Later, he took on Iran.

He created too many conditions and laid numerous obstacles for peace settlements to ever be realised. The late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, laboured for years to meet Israel’s conditions, and failed. Abbas has taken the same futile road. But Netanyahu’s conditions are specifically designed to be unattainable.

Judging by the #GamerGate hashtag currently infesting Twitter, you’d think there had been some kind of actual scandal involving the video game industry, the media…something. But what the last week in gaming culture has seen is actually the final extinction cries of sad man-boys who think they’re the only ones who should be catered to in an industry that not only needs but genuinely wants to be inclusive.

It’s barely worth mentioning the non-scandal that started this latest wildfire of unchecked straight-white-male privilege except to highlight just how foolish and overblown the whole thing is. The match that set this one off was a blog post by the angry ex-boyfriend of an outspoken indie game developer, whose posted chat logs revealed that she had cheated on him with someone I will generously call a “games journalist”. Given a chance to both slut-shame AND proclaim that this is why women aren’t welcome in gaming, the grosser parts of the internet (read: Reddit) exploded.

They wandered and they loitered. They appeared to shop. They ate ice cream. They hung around for much of the day by political booths including the Spore Infoshop, an anarchist bookstore and community space, and the Ohio Rights Group, an organization attempting to place a pro-medical marijuana and industrial hemp initiative on the ballot. They were not, however, your average Comfest attendees. They were agents of the Ohio Investigative Unit (OIU) of the Ohio Department of Public Safety (ODPS) who may have been working for or with the Department of Homeland Security.
When a Comfest visitor took a camera phone picture of a badly handmade Harley Davison T-shirt stretched over the central girth of one of the agents, the other agents swarmed and the unfortunate photographer was arrested.
The Comfest visitor was charged with disorderly conduct for taking photos of the agent.

The internet is the lifeblood of what’s left of global democracy.

It’s under attack as never before. We must act.

It’s time for the hactivists to mobilize.

When the British slaughtered eight Americans at Lexington and Concord, farmers grabbed their guns and picked off 250 Redcoats as they marched back to Boston.

With guerrilla tactics learned from the Indians, the farmers shot from behind rocks and trees and then flowed back into the woods to fight again further down the road.

They began a Revolution in both modern warfare and the demands of a people determined to be free.

Today the corporations are marching again---this time to choke off the last gasp of a free media.

The prime culprits are “internet providers” like Comcast, Time-Warner, PacBell, etc.  They did not invent or develop the internet. That was done with public money and communal institutions.

They have simply, as always, used their ill-gotten billions to warp, buy and steal a public trust. Now they want it all. They need to be stopped.