Israel
Quashing University Protests And Banning TikTok To Make The Kids Love Israel
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/4435e36db734d23de7b565f669651057/href
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It’s just a tough situation, with victims on both sides. On one side you’ve got people being slaughtered in droves by genocidal massacres and siege warfare, while on the other you’ve got people whose feelings get hurt when these atrocities are opposed. Hard to say which is worse.
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I have dedicated every day of my life to the project of spreading awareness of the depravity and deceitfulness of the western empire, but I will never write anything more effective toward this end than what the empire is doing itself on university campuses right now.
I mean, you kind of have to wonder what they’re thinking. “Yeah, that’s it. Violently quash pro-Palestine protests at universities, ban TikTok to ensure the suppression of pro-Palestine content, and saturate the boomer media with obvious propaganda. That’ll make the kids love Israel.”
https://medium.com/media/9dc4da954a62b39d06fae11ac1cdab9a/href
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Meanwhile the US empire is still playing games with each and every one of our lives by continually taking insane risks in its world-threatening brinkmanship with a nuclear superpower. It turns out last month the Biden administration secretly sent Ukraine long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), which Ukraine has reportedly already used to attack a Russian base in Crimea.
In 2022 when Ukraine first started urging the United States to send it the ATACMS— which has nearly four times the range of the HIMARS weapons the US has been supplying — Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova immediately responded with a warning that their use on Russian territory would make the US a direct participant in the conflict, and Russia would respond accordingly. Crimea is considered Russian territory by the Russian Federation.
In an article published in Antiwar last year titled “ATACMS: Be Very Afraid of This Acronym,” West Suburban Peace Coalition president Walt Zlotow wrote that this missile system “has potential to draw the US and NATO into all out war with Russia”:
ATACMS are long range US missiles that can strike up to 190 miles. Top US officials, likely including President Biden, are seriously considering giving ATACMS to Ukraine in their battle to take back all Russian gains in Ukraine, including Crimea. They can reach both Crimea and the Russian mainland.
If so used by Ukraine to attack Russia, it may be a missile too far that could ignite Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Further escalation into nuclear confrontation between Russia and the US/NATO alliance seeking Russia’s defeat becomes more likely.
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Biden proclaimed it “a good day for world peace” when he signed the World War 3 bill which will pour weapons of death and destruction into Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. This is the inverted reality the US-centralized empire premises its narratives about itself upon. They’ve got the mainstream public espousing a completely backwards and upside-down worldview, which is why we live in a completely backwards and upside-down civilization.
Michael Tracey on Twitter: "Biden just signed the mammoth war funding bill. "It's a good day for world peace," he says, without a hint of irony. New arms shipments will flow to Ukraine within hours. It's a shame Trump couldn't be there for the signing ceremony, they could've bonded over their shared support pic.twitter.com/wWLCcR0Crc / Twitter"
Biden just signed the mammoth war funding bill. "It's a good day for world peace," he says, without a hint of irony. New arms shipments will flow to Ukraine within hours. It's a shame Trump couldn't be there for the signing ceremony, they could've bonded over their shared support pic.twitter.com/wWLCcR0Crc
The Ukraine war funding part of the bill was actually reportedly pushed through with behind-the-scenes collaboration between Trump and Republican lawmakers. Anyone who still buys Trump’s “ending the wars, fighting the deep state” schtick is a fucking moron.
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When Israel’s genocide funding made it through the House, Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted, “The US Congress just overwhelmingly passed a much appreciated aid bill that demonstrates strong bipartisan support for Israel and defends Western civilization. Thank you friends, thank you America!”
And he’s not wrong. The US congress does have massive bipartisan support for Israel, and pouring war machinery into that genocidal apartheid state does in fact bolster the blood-fueled machine of nonstop murder and tyranny that is “western civilization”.
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Human thriving arises from curiosity. Curiosity about the way our material universe operates leads to advances in science, and all the benefits that come with it. Curiosity about how our civilization’s power structures operate leads to an understanding of how the world really works, which will lead to the emergence of a truth-based society if realized on a collective level. Curiosity about our own consciousness and inner processes leads to self-realization, and the harmonious way of moving in the world which flows from it.
If a healthy humanity exists in the future, it will be above all a deeply curious species. The values of competition, greed and domination which currently drive the way our civilization operates will have given way to curiosity, humility and discovery. We will have cultivated a humble but intense curiosity about ourselves, about each other, about our collective societal dynamics, and about our natural world.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured images via Rawpixel, Wannapic, Freepic, and Wikimedia Commons.
Campus Protests about Israel and the Palestinians (several updates)
This post is for discussion of the ongoing campus protests against Israel’s response to the October 7th, 2023 attack on it by Hamas, and in support of the Palestinians.
More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in its attack on Gaza, with two-thirds of the dead being women and children, according to the local health ministry, reports the Associated Press.
[original photo by Jay Janner/USA Today Network, via Reuters]
A round-up of recent news about protests at various college campuses can be found here.
Of particular interest are questions about how universities should (or should not) respond to these kinds of protests, and the principles, ideals, and practical considerations that underpin answers to those questions.
Details about what’s happening at your campus are welcome, as are links to news and commentary elsewhere, including links to particularly valuable social media feeds.
By way of background on the matter of free speech and campus protests, I recommend this piece by Jacob Levy (McGill). Some excerpts:
[U]niversities offer very robust protection for political and protest speech, but as an incidental byproduct, not in the same deliberate way that a liberal democratic society does. A university’s core commitment is to the discovery, transmission and preservation of knowledge – paradigmatically, what is done in research, in teaching, and in publication and library collection. The principle that defends that commitment is not freedom of speech as such, but rather academic freedom.
Academic freedom has a few moving parts:
First, the freedom to follow arguments and evidence where they lead, according to scholarly methods…
Second, the freedom to teach, within the confines of the scholarly mission of the class, and limited by the freedom of students to be secure that they will be assessed fairly…
And finally, freedom from evaluation on non-academic grounds, of which the traditionally most important are political and religious grounds. Members of the academic community are only to be academically evaluated, for purposes ranging from student grades to professors’ tenure, on the grounds of the success of their academic work. They may not lose academic standing (student enrolment, faculty employment and so on) for their views and speech on other questions. In the early 20th-century cases that helped shape this rule, universities came to the understanding that, say, an economist couldn’t be fired for being an atheist, a mathematician for being a socialist; what they had to say on those political and religious questions was irrelevant to their work. The technical phrase here is freedom of extramural speech – outside the walls of the laboratory, the classroom and the library. Protections of extramural speech are very strong, not primarily in order to protect that speech, but in order to protect the academic integrity of what goes on inside the laboratory, classroom and library.
A rule that has traditionally accompanied and strengthened academic freedom is institutional neutrality. If academic freedom is the ability of scholars and scholarly communities or disciplines to work without having an orthodoxy imposed on them, institutional neutrality is the commitment not to declare an orthodoxy in the first place. Just like a professor at the front of a classroom shouldn’t use it as a pulpit to announce their own political and religious views, so too should the university as a whole not adopt substantive political or religious opinions that would chill the freedom of its members to pursue their own ideas and arguments. A great deal of important political inquiry and debate happens at a university, but it’s undertaken by students and professors with differing views pursuing differing arguments, not by the institution as a whole declaring official conclusions…
These principles generate some surprising and strange outcomes. For example, the odd thing about the centrality of student protests to important moments in university life is that they are so irrelevant to the university’s mission. There is very strong protection for the freedom of protest, not because protest is important to a university the way it is to a democratic society, but because it’s academically irrelevant. It’s wrong to question a student’s (or professor’s) standing in the academic community because of what they say at a protest – or on social media, or in any other non-academic setting. The only appropriate limits are not about the content of what’s said, but about the conduct of the protest action; the university has to protect not only the safety of its other members but also the security of its academic functions. It can’t rule against the language on a sign, but it must intervene to prevent violence between students, or occupations and blockades that would prevent a class from meeting, or an invited speaker from speaking.
This is easier said than done…
I recommend reading the whole piece.
One thing to note is that the institutional neutrality Levy discusses is especially tricky, particularly in this context: one declared aim of some of the student groups is to get their universities to stop investing in companies involved in or profiting from Israel’s military efforts in Gaza. Should such investments themselves be considered a deviation from institutional neutrality, such that the student calls for divestment could be seen as a call for institutional neutrality? Or are such investments in principle relevantly different from what we might think of as paradigmatic departures from institutional neutrality, such as an official statement supporting a side in a political dispute? The details probably matter here, both on the extent to which investment in certain companies is intentional, and the extent to which such companies are “involved” with Israel’s war efforts.
And that’s just one issue.
OK, let’s see how this goes. (Comments are moderated. Please remind yourselves of the comments policy. Thanks.)
UPDATE 1 (4/25/24): The Department of Philosophy at Columbia University has issued the following statement:
The Philosophy Department is concerned for the safety, academic progress, and rights of our students. We condemn all forms of hate speech, harassment, and incitements to violence. We also regard it as quite implausible that erecting a tent on a lawn constitutes a clear and present danger, and we urge the lifting of suspensions of students whose charges stem from that act. Thus we support the joint statement by the Columbia and Barnard Chapters of the American Association of University Professors and the letter from the Columbia College Student Council. We want President Shafik to succeed, and for mutual trust between all parties on campus to be regained. Such success and trust requires visible engagement by the President and Trustees with the procedures of faculty governance.
UPDATE 2 (4/25/24): Noelle McAfee, professor and chair of philosophy at Emory University, was among those arrested for protesting at Emory.
WATCH: Among those arrested today were Noelle McAfee, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University.
I’ve asked for a comment from Emory on this arrest, no word yet.
This video provided to us by an #Emory PHD student. You can hear him in this video. @ATLNewsFirst pic.twitter.com/86aJgb7NUX
— Patrick Quinn (@PatrickQuinnTV) April 25, 2024
Thanks to several readers for bringing this to my attention. Original Tweet here.
UPDATE 3 (4/26/24): Sukaina Hirji, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, gave a speech to protestors there. Watch it here.
UPDATE 4 (4/26/24): Caroline Fohlin, professor of economics at Emory University, asks three law enforcement officers who appear to be on top of a student protestor on the ground, “what are you doing?” A fourth officer grabs her, pulls her away, twists her arm behind her back, and pushes her to the ground. A second officer joins in pushing her down, heedless of the fact her head is being pushed into the sidewalk.
FULL VIDEO OF ELDERLY AMERICAN ECONOMICS PROFESSOR CAROLINE FOHLIN BEING ASSAULTED BY POLICE
She is an over 65 year old American woman.
Americans attacked for Israel.
What if this was your mother/grandmother? pic.twitter.com/ne7uDsPGIX
— Sulaiman Ahmed (@ShaykhSulaiman) April 26, 2024
According to news reports, she was charged with disorderly conduct and battery of a police officer. This guy:
The post Campus Protests about Israel and the Palestinians (several updates) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Israeli captive in Gaza says IDF has killed 70 captives and shames Netanyahu
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a US-born Israeli, wishes his parents a good Passover – and says Netanyahu and his far-right government should be ‘ashamed’
A US-born Israeli held captive in Gaza has said on video that Israel’s military has killed seventy of his fellow captives and that Israeli PM Netanyahu and his far-right government ‘should be ashamed of yourselves’.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 24-year-old Californian-born Israeli taken captive on 7 October, went on to tell his parents that he loves them and hopes they somehow manage to have a happy Passover:
Goldberg-Polin, who at 24 years old will have served in the Israeli military, has lost part of his left arm, presumably under fire on 7 October last year, although it is unclear from what he says whether he was wounded by Palestinian fighters or by Israeli forces. It is now well known – admitted by the IDF and freely discussed by Israeli newspapers, though still ignored by UK media and politicians – that Israeli helicopters and tanks killed ‘immense’ numbers of Israeli citizens under the IDF’s ‘Hannibal doctrine’ of killing potential hostages. His performance is passionate, but it is, of course, unknown whether he was speaking under duress.
Relatives of Israeli captives killed in Gaza have also accused the Israeli military of killing them; the IDF is known for sure to have killed three hostages who had escaped, stripped to show they were no threat, and were calling out in Hebrew, while waving a white flag, for soldiers not to shoot. Israel is holding around nine thousand Palestinian hostages, who have been arbitrarily detained and imprisoned without trial. The EU is calling for an independent investigation of the hundreds of executed Palestinian captives currently being unearthed behind Al Shifa hospital after Israel’s raid there. Israel has murdered more than 40,000 civilians, mostly women and children.
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In This Dystopia, Opposing A Genocide Is Considered Worse Than Committing One
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/f1f7ca17c1b03eaf52ab5a7d596e97a2/href
All the frenzied shrieking about pro-Palestine protests at universities these last few days makes it clear that our civilization is so twisted and insane that it sees protesting a genocide as far worse than committing one. Which is about as backwards as any society could possibly be.
Seriously, try to imagine a crazier, more upside-down civilization than one which gets more angry at people protesting genocidal atrocities than it does at people committing them. A civilization where people wear their pants on their head and walk backwards all day? That would be less crazy. A civilization where the dogs own the people and the children go to work while the parents go to school? That would be less crazy.
It’s as wrong as you can possibly get anything in this world. It’s actually hard to imagine how anyone could get anything more wrong. If you’ve accepted daily massacres of innocent civilians as the baseline normal and appropriate thing, and regard any opposition to this as a freakish and evil abomination, then you’re as screwed up and confused about reality as any other stark raving lunatic in town. Maybe worse.
To view nonstop mass military slaughter as moral and opposition thereto as immoral is to live in a mental moral universe that has been flipped on its head. It’s to inhabit a reality tunnel that has become completely divorced from reality. But that’s the kind of mainstream worldview that the political-media class in this society are working to indoctrinate us into day in and day out throughout our entire lives.
Briahna Joy Gray on Twitter: "I had to scroll past *four* college campus stories, including two protest-critical opeds (John McWhorter & Bret Stephens) before I got to the much delayed coverage of hundreds of Palestinians found in mass graves. https://t.co/b57txq0M3o / Twitter"
I had to scroll past *four* college campus stories, including two protest-critical opeds (John McWhorter & Bret Stephens) before I got to the much delayed coverage of hundreds of Palestinians found in mass graves. https://t.co/b57txq0M3o
I just saw a tweet from the commentator Briahna Joy Gray saying that in order to find any mention in The New York Times of the hundreds of Palestinians in mass graves that are being discovered in Gaza, she had to scroll past no fewer than four stories about pro-Palestine protests on college campuses — including two op-eds which criticized the protesters.
What kind of warped, fucked up dystopia is this where that’s the kind of mainstream news outlet people are getting their information and ideas from? Our entire civilization is saturated with reality-distorting propaganda like this, and it’s making people insane. It’s got our moral compasses flipped 180 degrees from our true north, and our inner sensemaker tuning in to frequencies of nothing but garbled static.
That’s how crazy they need us to be to keep us supporting a globe-spanning empire that literally cannot exist without nonstop violence and tyranny. They need us thinking up is down and black is white. They need us not just unable to tell the difference between right and wrong, but actually believing that wrong is right and right is wrong. So they pound our collective consciousness day in and day out with extremely aggressive psyops in the form of mass media propaganda to ensure that our insides are scrambled around enough to consent to the amount of depravity necessary for our rulers to continue dominating this planet.
This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal, as Aaron Bushnell said moments before lighting himself on fire in protest of the genocide in Gaza. A society where mass graves get less media attention than university protesters. A society where more political firepower is going into stopping pro-Palestine demonstrations on college campuses than ending Israel’s murderous assault on an enclosed enclave packed full of children. A society where trying to stop a genocide is considered evil, and committing one is considered good.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Adobe Stock.
Stopping The Slaughter In Gaza Is More Important Than Your Feelings
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/97dca92d08491c88a4c9173764b60bac/href
Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than your feelings. Your feelings don’t matter.
Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than playing along with the persecution-LARPing of Zionist university students.
Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than some privileged Ivy Leaguers pretending to feel “unsafe” or “unwelcome” on campus.
Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than whatever you’re pretending to believe “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means.
Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than making sure everyone says all the right words and condemns Hamas with sufficient fervor.
Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than making sure Joe Biden maintains enough support to win re-election.
Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than performing all kinds of mental contortions and prostrations while talking about Israel’s criminality to avoid offending people who make everything about themselves.
Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than helping you avoid the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance incurred by the contradictions between your stated value system and the genocidal murderousness and cruelty of apartheid Israel.
Your feelings are not more important than Palestinian lives.
Your feelings are not more important than Palestinian displacement.
Your feelings are not even more important than Palestinian feelings.
Your feelings are not important. Stopping the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the people of Gaza is important.
It is a symptom of the cancerousness of western civilization that there are people living their whole lives under the entirely unquestioned assumption that their feelings are so important that it is fine and normal to expect that a limitless number of impoverished foreigners may be killed without any opposition whatsoever in order to promote the interests of their favorite ethnostate, and that anyone who does oppose it is persecuting them.
It is a symptom of how diseased our entire society has become that people are so narcissistic that they now perceive anti-genocide demonstrations on university campuses as a direct attack against them and their identity, and will use any amount of spin and mental contortion to make this seem true.
It is a symptom of the dire need to dismantle the entire western empire that a mainstream narrative structure exists in our society which says opposing a genocide is a far more egregious offense than committing one.
It is a symptom of the dire need for radical revolutionary changes in this civilization that western political systems are urgently discussing the need to stomp out protests against a genocide at university campuses under the pretense of protecting people’s feelings.
Don’t protect people’s feelings. Stop the genocide in Gaza.
People’s feelings should be uncomfortable when a genocide is happening.
People should be experiencing uncomfortable cognitive dissonance and shame when their innately unjust worldview is being completely discredited in front of everyone.
None of us should be feeling comfortable with any of this. We should be feeling very, very uncomfortable, and letting that discomfort drive us to end this nightmare forever.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Feature image via Ted Eytan (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
US unis even arresting TEACHERS as Israel lobby group demands anti-Palestine crackdown
Students and teachers targeted by police as ADL demands government breaks student anti-genocide protest movement
At least one US university has called in police to arrest faculty members as well as students, as the so-called ‘Anti-defamation League’ (ADL) demanded a crackdown on the spreading anti-genocide protest movement among US students.
NYPD officers took NYU teachers as well as students away from a demo against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as demonstrations spread to universities around the country. Columbia University, also in New York, has seen further student arrests as a sit-in demo by students against Israel’s slaughter of innocents continues undeterred.
In a tactic reminiscent of the recent rigged stunt in the UK by the Israel-linked, so-called ‘Campaign against Antisemitism’ (CAA), the ADL has claimed Jewish students are unsafe and demanded the immediate suspension of anyone who dares protest against mass murder:
Innocent women and children in Gaza are being slaughtered by the tens of thousands by Israel – and Palestinian students have been attacked, leaving at least one paralysed, by morons whipped up by the Islamophobic speech of politicians and pro-Israel lobbyists – but it seems we are meant to treat the feelings of the friends of genocide and apartheid as more important, on both sides of the Atlantic.
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‘Gideon Falter Came to a Pro-Palestine Demo Looking to Provoke – And the Media Gave him What He Wanted’
An antisemitism campaigner's clash with the Metropolitan Police yards from a pro-Palestinian march on 13 April was about a lot more than him looking "openly Jewish". I know, I was there when it happened.
Gideon Falter, chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), was blocked by a police officer and threatened with arrest in Aldwych, London – with the exchange caught on camera.
Footage published by Sky News showed Falter telling police officers that he wanted to make his way to the other side of where pro-Palestinian protestors were marching. The police did not less him pass and offered to escort him via another route, avoiding the protestors to ensure that he would be "completely safe".
During the exchange, one of the officers said Falter was being "disingenuous" and trying to "antagonise" others as he "took it upon himself" to walk "right into the middle" of the march and was "openly Jewish".
The incident sparked calls for the Met Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, to resign, and Scotland Yard has apologised twice.
Falter is the vice chairman member of the Jewish National Fund UK, which reportedly raised more than £1 million to fund ‘Israel’s largest militia’.
During the incident, he appeared to be flanked by a number of security guards in dark glasses and a videographer who later provided footage by the CAA to the press.
I happened to witness a small portion of Falter’s interaction with the police as I moved along the protest route.
As I had come towards Aldwych, I noticed the pro-Israeli protest with a number of Israeli flags, as well as a few Pahlavi Iranian flags featuring the face of the son of the last Shah of Iran. I saw one man being led away from the pro-Israel counter-protest by police, his wife following him. As I got nearer, I saw that some people from both sides were hurling insults and trying to antagonise each other.
Stewards on the march were encouraging pro-Palestine demonstrators not to engage with the counter-protestors.
The clash at the Pro-Palestine march has led to calls for the Commissioner of the Met Police to resign. Photo: John Lubbock
It is clear that some Israel supporters are unhappy with the level of support for Palestine being demonstrated by the weekly marches, and are openly advocating that the police should ban demonstrations which former Home Secretary Suella Braverman has called "hate marches".
Following the incident, Falter told TalkTV that the Met Police should "ban the marches". Such calls have been going on since last November when Rowley refused to bow to calls to ban a demonstration held on Armistice Day.
This week’s headlines announcing that Falter had been prevented from crossing the demonstration route because he was "openly Jewish" have allowed all those people who previously called for the Met to ban marches to now call for Rowley’s resignation.
But there is more to the story than Falter’s categorisation of it as him being "simply Jewish in the vicinity of these marches". Falter's presence at the march had a number of contextual factors, of which looking "openly Jewish" was by no means the most important. It is, however, the only one which he chose to draw attention to
Falter claims he was not there to counter-protest, but why was he then trying to cross the march right next to the counter-protest, where antagonists on both sides were shouting at, and insulting, each other?
He claims he did not have a film crew, yet footage published of the incident by the BBC and others is credited to his organisation. Other videos show Falter at the centre of a group of people attempting to wade into the demonstration.
Protest movements seeking social and political change, which employ large street demonstrations to show their support, are used to agents provocateurs who aim to show the movement in a bad light by getting close to protestors and antagonising them. A man wearing a three-piece suit, with a number of security guards in tow, would look out of place almost everywhere except possibly entering a celebrity nightclub.
The attempts by Falter and some elements of the media to reduce his behaviour to a simple matter of him being Jewish appears to have an obvious political aim – to paint opposition to the Israeli state as motivated by racism.
I believe this is a political tactic employed by those who support the actions of the Israeli Government, which does a huge disservice to the fight against the real problem of antisemitism which exists globally.
The Jewish diaspora in the UK contains political factions which are highly critical of the Israeli Government and its actions in Gaza, and many hundreds of British Jews are regularly seen on these demonstrations.
The 13 April protest had a large contingent from the Jewish bloc, who gathered at a separate starting point before joining in with the head of the demonstration as it left Russell Square. Taking photos at the head of the march, I heard a loud cheer go up as the Jewish bloc joined the main march.
Attempting to paint pro-Palestine demonstrators as antisemitic, then, is an attempt to divide a large and diverse group of people calling for an end to the bombing of Gaza.
I didn’t stay to see the end of Falter’s confrontation with the police, because stewards advised us to move on and not engage with counter-protestors looking to antagonise people.
But Falter seems to have got exactly what he came for: a filmed confrontation which made a police officer look bad, and which is now being used to call for the sacking of the Met Commissioner.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism was contacted for comment.
Israel Is Turning Hospitals Into Mass Graves While The West Fixates On ‘Antisemitism’
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/b318a60a0d409ca00256593c53a7e713/href
A mass grave created by the IDF has been uncovered at a Gaza hospital, where Palestinian civilians appear to have been the victims of a gruesome massacre.
“Bah, that’s old news Caitlin,” you may be saying. “We already know about the massacre and mass graves which were discovered a few weeks ago at the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza.”
No no, that’s a different mass grave from a different IDF massacre at a completely different Gaza hospital. The now completely destroyed al-Shifa Hospital was in Gaza City; I’m talking about the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, where some 210 bodies have reportedly been discovered in a mass grave after Israeli forces withdrew from the city earlier this month. Two different massacres, two different hospitals, two different mass graves full of Palestinian civilians.
The IDF are just attacking hospitals and mowing down civilians and trying to bury the evidence of their crimes, so naturally we’re seeing the western political-media class focus very hard on the problem of antisemitism allegations on college campuses.
Motasem A Dalloul on Twitter: "MoH: Number of bodies retrieved from Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis rises to 210.Hundreds are still missing!First picture from Nasser and the second from Al Shifa Hospital! pic.twitter.com/bI8KsSv2XV / Twitter"
MoH: Number of bodies retrieved from Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis rises to 210.Hundreds are still missing!First picture from Nasser and the second from Al Shifa Hospital! pic.twitter.com/bI8KsSv2XV
“Biden denounces antisemitism on college campuses amid Columbia protests,” reads a new headline from The Washington Post.
“As Protests Continue at Columbia, Some Jewish Students Feel Targeted,” The New York Times urgently warns us.
“White House condemns ‘blatantly antisemitic’ protests as agitators engulf Columbia University,” blares Fox News.
“Columbia University faces full-blown crisis as rabbi calls for Jewish students to ‘return home’,” says CNN.
“Columbia University: White House condemns antisemitism at college protests,” the BBC reports.
https://medium.com/media/7187525e6e2fa3c5d8126327859afd31/href
Getting far less attention than the fact that some Zionist university students are feeling uncomfortable feelings because other students say Palestinians are human beings is the fact that Israel is establishing a pattern of massacring civilians and burying them in mass graves outside hospitals in Gaza, or the fact that the IDF has been butchering children in Rafah, or the fact that the International Criminal Court is reportedly considering charging Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials for war crimes.
Those matters are important, just not nearly as important as how some western Jews feel emotionally upset about pro-Palestine protests. For that, the world must stop spinning on its axis until this extremely egregious problem has been addressed.
All the western spin and distortion around Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza these last six months have revolved around centering feelings over human lives. How western Jewish Zionists are feeling about pro-Palestine sentiments. How Joe Biden’s feelings secretly feel about Netanyahu. How Israelis feel about October 7.
Wherever there’s an opportunity to focus the narrative on what feelings are being felt by a politically convenient population, the western press fall all over themselves to do so with tumescent enthusiasm. Wherever there’s an opportunity to focus on Israeli atrocities, the western press are nowhere to be found.
If you belong to a group that isn’t supported by the western empire, you can see your entire family murdered right in front of you and the western political-media class still won’t consider you a victim. If you belong to a group that the empire regards as human, then even someone offending your feelings will be viewed as an unforgivable hate crime.
________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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In Gaza The Sniper Drones Are Crying Like Babies
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/6253d993dc77cb18808a5e43dd03c8b6/href
They’re hunting civilians with armed quadcopters in Gaza.
The drones play recordings of crying babies and women screaming in distress in order to lure people out into the open, and then shoot them.
This is reportedly happening at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, where people live in total darkness at night and have no connection to the outside world.
Other times the drones play the sounds of explosions and gunshots and rolling tanks, and sometimes songs in Hebrew or Arabic, all to terrorize these refugees hiding in the darkness afraid for their lives.
This is the sort of report that a critical thinker would normally dismiss as absurd atrocity propaganda if it was being made about any other military power, but this is the IDF we’re talking about, and this specific allegation is pretty well-supported now.
Ryan Grim on Twitter: "Also @Hind_Gaza confirmed this is happening: the IDF has quadcopters luring people to them with recordings of the sound of women and children screaming, then firing on them https://t.co/1ANe4myWLx / Twitter"
Also @Hind_Gaza confirmed this is happening: the IDF has quadcopters luring people to them with recordings of the sound of women and children screaming, then firing on them https://t.co/1ANe4myWLx
When the destruction of Gaza first began I used to read the jarring claims about the horrific things the IDF were doing and often think, “No, no way. That can’t be the whole story. It’s too cartoonishly evil. There must be some information missing.” Then a few days or weeks later confirmation would come out, showing it’s even worse than I thought before.
I don’t experience that kind of dubiousness when reading such stories anymore. There are only so many atrocities you can see documented, so many videos of IDF troops recording themselves gleefully behaving like monsters, so many hospitals you can see attacked, so many journalists you can see assassinated, before you read a new report about new unfathomable acts of depravity and find yourself saying “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
This baby-crying-sniper-drone story is something else, though. It’s like something out of a weird post-apocalyptic horror movie or something. It’s the kind of information that makes you sort of re-evaluate your previous assumptions about humanity, the world, and the kind of reality we’re experiencing here.
It is really astonishing, how cruel people can be. How cruel a whole nation of people can be made to be, if they’re indoctrinated just right. You spend your whole childhood being indoctrinated into the belief that one group of people are inferior to your own and don’t deserve the same rights and treatment your group receives, and before you know it you’re blockading aid trucks from bringing that group food, and playing recordings of crying babies on an assassination drone in order to murder civilians at a refugee camp.
That’s how Nazi Germany happened, it’s how the genocidal apartheid state of Israel has happened, and it’s how the murderous US-centralized empire has happened. It turns out it’s not all that hard to manipulate a population into supporting shocking abuses at mass scale with modern propaganda and indoctrination from early childhood. It turns out the human mind is a lot more hackable than we’d like to believe it is, and that this can be used to unleash living nightmares upon our world a lot more easily than we’re comfortable acknowledging.
This is how the entire western world has been manipulated into accepting nonstop war, militarism, nuclear brinkmanship, imperialism and exploitation as fine and normal, and into assuming that a better world isn’t possible. As long as the powerful are able to manipulate the way a sufficiently large percentage of the population thinks, speaks, acts and votes, we’re going to be stuck in this horrifying dystopia where the sky rains fire upon the innocent, where war profiteers reap vast fortunes from machines which rip apart human bodies, and where sniper drones cry like babies.
We can help weaken the empire’s propaganda machine by spreading awareness of what it’s doing and how it operates, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. Help people to see the ways in which the mass media are deceiving them, point out all the signs that we live under an empire of lies, and help spread awareness of what’s really true and what’s really possible.
All positive changes in human behavior of any scale are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Spreading awareness is the first step toward a healthy world, and we can each do that in our own small way every single day.
______________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Adobe Stock.
Victorious smear victim takes aim at ‘antisemitism’ lawyer who misled court
Zionist Mark Lewis panned by James Wilson in series of Twitter posts
Earlier this month, university lecturer James Wilson won substantial damages from two so-called ‘antisemitism campaigners’ who had foully smeared and endangered him and his family in their efforts to discredit him as an opponent of the ‘left antisemitism’ narrative that supporters of Israel have weaponised for almost a decade now against supporters of Palestinian human and political rights.
Now the victorious Wilson has taken aim in his social media feed at Zionist lawyer Mark Lewis, who at one time represented at least two of the defendants. Lewis, a pro-Israel activist who spoke about ‘unapologetic Zionism’ at the launch of a UK pro-Israel group considered by many to be far-right and boasted of wanting to make people whom he considered ‘antisemites’ homeless, has been lionised by the Zionist right for his pursuit of their opponents.
He has also been sanctioned by the Solicitors Regulation Authority for abusive conduct on social media – and wished a young Jewish supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour dead – and was heavily criticised by a judge in a different case for his conduct of the case and his lack of proper research on behalf of his clients:
a matter of very real concern that the Claimants put evidence before the Court, on an ex parte application, that was not true…
…he had simply failed to carry out sufficient (or any) research or to take adequate instructions from his clients.
And, as James Wilson has pointed out – alongside much more – Lewis was forced to apologise to the court for providing misleading information in Wilson’s suit about the financial health of one (by the time of the hearing, apparently former) client, Edward Cantor who, he had claimed, did not own property that could be sold to pay any penalty levied by the court:
As Luke Turner, who responded to Wilson’s posts, pointed out, Lewis’s distaste for ‘antisemites’ did not prevent him representing two extreme right-wingers – described by the judge in the case as bullying and ‘whiffing’ of antisemitism – when they wanted to sue Turner for posts about them:
The irony of that particular quote is really quite something, given who he was representing in my case, and the "whiff of threat and antisemitism" described by the judge in their "aggressive" course of "bullying" towards me. https://t.co/Dly6C3Aqwb
— Luke Turner (@Luke_Turner) April 20, 2024
And in a pair of posts showing screenshots of communications from Lewis, Wilson – himself a now non-practising solicitor – showed that Lewis demanded thousands of pounds, from the victim of the smear, to settle Lewis’s case against them, while expressing his and his clients’ expectation of victory in the case and repeating that Cantor owned nothing that could be used to pay any penalty. The tactic and the refusal to accept Wilson’s settlement proposal racked up enormous legal costs for the failed defendants:
I am worried about recovering my costs. I do not want to bankrupt Mr Mendelsohn or make Mr Cantor and his family homeless.
But if Mark Lewis @MLewisLawyer), Daniel Berke (@DanielBerke1) and Beth Grossman (@DoughtyStreet) refuse to pay my costs, then I may have no choice.— James Wilson (@per_incuriam2) April 21, 2024
And Wilson concluded his posts – for now at least – by taking aim at Simon Myerson, a supporter of Israel and part-time judge recently sanctioned for abusive comments on social media. Myerson had shared a post calling Wilson the ‘scum of the earth’, which the judge in Wilson’s case described as:
abuse of the same dehumanising kind as was used of Jewish people by the Nazis in the 1930s.
The judge also rejected the defence’s claim that Wilson’s correspondence with Myerson about his sharing of the abusive post demonstrated any kind of aggression or unreasonableness on Wilson’s part.
As Jewish author Michael Rosen, who was also targeted by some of the same people, pointed out, perhaps with his tongue firmly lodged in his cheek, it is noteworthy that the UK ‘mainstream’ press – which will run for weeks with any allegation against a left-winger or supporter of Palestinians – has shown no interest in covering the outcome of the Wilson case or the abusive conduct of those on the losing, pro-Israel, side:
However, Skwawkbox has covered the case in full and a timeline of it can be found here.
The case is not the first conducted by Lewis against supporters of Palestinian rights that ended poorly for his clients. In 2020 Jane Heybroek, a human rights barrister, won a stunning victory when actress Tracy-Ann Oberman and TV presenter Rachel Riley dropped their libel claim against her over an article retweeted by Heybroek criticising their behaviour and contributed toward her legal costs defending the action.
Mark Lewis was asked for comment about Wilson’s comments and analysis but had not responded at the time of writing. He was also ‘tagged’ by Wilson at the start of his Twitter analysis about Lewis’s involvement in the case:
Since one of the Defendants’ solicitors, Mark Lewis (@MLewisLawyer) of Patron Law (@LawPatron), is mentioned in the statement, I am tagging him here. If he wishes to reply, I’ll post his reply below my statement.
— James Wilson (@per_incuriam2) April 13, 2024
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