Propaganda
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.
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Sky deletes its video of Falter claiming he was only trying to cross the road
Page now gives 404 result after overwhelming evidence challenging claims emerged
As Skwawkbox reported earlier today, ‘Campaign against Antisemitism’ (CAA) chief executive Gideon Falter’s claim that he had been prevented by police from crossing a road after just happening to ‘come across’ a pro-Palestine march looks to have fallen apart after a huge volume of eyewitness, photographic and video evidence emerged challenging the veracity of the claim.
Falter, whose CAA group has been shown to have taken large amounts of funding from a ‘quasi-governmental’ Israeli organisation and featured prominently in the campaign to take down then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, has also been shown to have made false claims of antisemitic speech – leading to the prosecution, conviction and unanimous acquittal on appeal of a Foreign Office official. His claim about Saturday’s events fuelled calls for the banning of pro-Palestinian marches and the removal of Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley – who just happens to have previously refused the demands of right-wing, pro-Israel campaigners and politicians for the marches to be banned.
And now Sky News, which had run hard with the false claims and the ensuing narrative, has deleted its video of Falter’s staged stunt. Footage and photographs shot by bystanders strongly suggest that Falter was at the site of the march for some time before the incident – and that he was there with bodyguards and had already tried to disrupt it, a stark contrast with his narrative that he had just bumped into the march on his way home from synagogue.
While emails containing the link will still show a preview of the original content, clicking through to the link leads to a ‘404’ ‘page not found result, as the combined screenshots below show:
It will be interesting to see whether the rest of the so-called ‘mainstream’ media follow suit, or leave up the misleading video and claims despite the flood of contrary evidence.
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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.
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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.
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Don’t Let Them Numb You To What’s Happening In Gaza
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/9f2c456296ad09397b3599660d866b53/href
One of the reasons I often pivot to poetry and emotion-laden prose in my commentary on Gaza is because it’s so very easy to let ourselves become numb to the horrors of what’s being done there day after day and month after month — but it’s so very, very important not to.
It would be so very easy to get overwhelmed and start letting one day of lies and atrocities blend into the next until it becomes this amorphous gray blob on the periphery of our attention. Reports like IDF sniper drones playing the sounds of distressed women and children to lure civilians out into the open and then shooting them, or Israeli officials ridiculously claiming they had no idea that blowing up a consulate building full of Iranian military officers would be seen as an escalation, have been coming out on a daily basis now, and it’s tempting to let yourself become overwhelmed and stop caring as much.
And it isn’t an accident that we are confronted with that temptation every day. Since day one the Israelis have been yanking public consciousness this way and that with astonishing atrocities, ridiculous denialism and high octane narrative spin, backed by the full might of the western empire and its peerlessly powerful propaganda machine. Every day we’re smacked in the face with new horrors, coupled with new statements from the Israeli regime taunting our sense of reality like “Heeheehee, did we do it? Who knows? No, we didn’t! But if we did it was good!” while western officials make vague obfuscatory statements that they need more information about each incident before taking a position and suggesting that the IDF needs to investigate itself to find out what happened. You’ll see them pour tons of energy into indignantly denying the very idea that Israel would ever attack a hospital, only to have them arguing that it’s fine and good for Israel to destroy every hospital in Gaza just weeks later.
This can break you, if you let it. It’s hard for the mind and heart to take such systematic pummeling, especially if you don’t understand that it is being done deliberately with a very specific goal in mind. The more westerners can be psychologically shoved into throwing up their hands and filing Gaza away in our mental “bad things in the world I try not to think about” drawer, the easier it is for Israel and its imperial backers to do the monstrous things they want to do there.
So I do what I can to help keep the reality of what’s happening in Gaza on the surface, not just in terms of the factual truth but the emotional truth of it as well. The horror. The suffering. That empathetic connection to the plight of our fellow human beings that can drive us to act, and to push for real change.
Don’t let these pricks numb you to what’s happening in Gaza. You can see plainly that that’s what they want, and you can see plainly what they’d stand to gain by pushing people into that state of numbness. So don’t give it to them. Ensure that, by the measure of at least one person, they fail toward that endeavor. And do what you can to ensure that they fail with others as well.
We’re not supposed to be unaffected by this sort of thing. We’re not supposed to be able to find a state of psychological comfort with genocide. It’s not natural, and it’s not right. Man-made nightmares unleashed upon the waking earth are supposed to disturb us.
Don’t let them take that away from you. Feelings are meant to be felt. Feel the grief. Feel the outrage. Feel the anger. Feel the pain. Let it come to you and say everything it wants to say to you, like you would with a small child telling you about their fears or their hurts. Write it down, sing it out, paint it, dance it, roar it into a pillow, throw rocks at it into a stream, whatever you can do to bring it into the world in a more tangible form. Let it wash through you, feel it completely until it has had its say, then get up, and keep fighting.
As we work our way into the monumental endeavor of creating a healthy world together, it’s not enough for us to be informed about what’s going on in the world — we’ve also got to have a mature emotional relationship with it. We don’t just need to have conscious minds, we need to have conscious hearts as well. If we don’t have a conscious relationship with our emotions, and if our emotions don’t have a conscious relationship with what’s going on in the world, then how can we hope to steer the world toward health? Caring and compassion are the only useful compass we have to navigate us there.
So shelter your caring from the efforts of the bastards to snuff it out, like a precious candle flame on a windy day. Even if we lose the battle in the short term, and even if we lose the war in the long term, at the very least you can deprive these freaks of that one little victory by continuing to care.
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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.
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Facebook designates Grayzone journalist Kit Klarenberg a ‘dangerous individual’
The notoriously intelligence-friendly social media network appears to have imposed a ban on posting a recent report by Kit Klarenberg, and is automatically restricting users who re-publish his work. Multiple Facebook users have reported being banned, or having their posts censored, after sharing an investigation by The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg into CIA and MI6 involvement in the creation of ISIS. Readers who post links to the piece on the social network find themselves frozen out of their accounts, on the […]
The post Facebook designates Grayzone journalist Kit Klarenberg a ‘dangerous individual’ first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Facebook designates Grayzone journalist Kit Klarenberg a ‘dangerous individual’ appeared first on The Grayzone.
If The Mainstream Worldview Was Accurate, Gaza Wouldn’t Be Burning
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/b9a7947ecce09c5f77c6785bf536a25f/href
The destruction of Gaza proves the entire mainstream western worldview is bullshit, because if the mainstream western worldview was accurate, the destruction of Gaza would not be happening.
By the mainstream western worldview I mean the general consensus about what’s going on in the world which is prevalent among mainstream western politicians and pundits and the creators of mainstream culture in New York and Hollywood. The worldview which takes it as a given that western democracy is real, that the US and its allies are basically good actors on the world stage even if they make mistakes from time to time, that the western news media pretty much tell us the truth about things (or at least the media which align with the mainstream political faction we support), and that the world works pretty much the way we were taught in school.
If the mainstream western worldview was accurate, the US and its western allies would not be helping Israel rain military explosives upon a walled-in civilian population that’s half comprised of children — because the mainstream western worldview maintains that the US and its western allies behave in an ethical way with high regard for human rights and wellbeing.
If the mainstream western worldview was accurate, the US and its western allies would not be assisting Israel while it deliberately starves civilians — because according to the mainstream western worldview that kind of collective punishment is a violation of the international law which the US and its western allies uphold and defend.
If the mainstream western worldview was accurate, we would not be continually reading stories about how large media outlets like CNN and The New York Times force their staff to slant their coverage in a way that benefits Israeli information interests — because per the mainstream western worldview the western press are reliable sources of information, and propaganda is something that is only used by bad guys like Putin and Kim Jong Un.
If the mainstream western worldview was accurate, Hollywood and the western news media would have spent six months united in passionate and consistent condemnation of Israel for its nonstop mass atrocities in Gaza — because the mainstream western worldview says we live in a truth-based society guided by ethical institutions.
If the mainstream western worldview was accurate, we wouldn’t see western officials standing behind podiums justifying the mass slaughter of civilians and denying obvious Israeli war crimes day after day and month after month — because in the mainstream western worldview murdering civilians and facilitating war crimes is something that is only done by illiberal, undemocratic countries to the east and the south.
If the mainstream western worldview was accurate, the US and its allies wouldn’t have spent this time bombing people in Yemen, Iraq and Syria who try to fight back in opposition to Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza — because the mainstream western worldview asserts that the US power alliance is an upholder of peace and stability throughout the world.
We simply are not seeing what we’d expect to be seeing with regard to Gaza if the mainstream western worldview was accurate. This is because the mainstream western worldview is not accurate — it’s a false narrative construct that has been carefully assembled inside each of our skulls by the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed.
In reality we do not live in a truth-based society that is guided by morality and governed by basically decent people — we live in a lie-based society that is guided by greed and the pursuit of power, and is governed by unelected sociopaths. We do not live in the kind of world we were taught about in school. We live in a corrupt, mind-controlled dystopia, under the thumb of an undeclared globe-spanning empire which requires more and more violence and tyranny to sustain.
Gaza should devastate any part of the mainstream worldview which still exists in your mind, because all the facts we are seeing right in front of our faces squarely contradict that worldview.
Changing your worldview is not easy. It takes work. It takes sincerity. It takes a willingness to sit in the discomfort of cognitive dissonance while staring at facts which prove our perspective is misinformed, and coming to terms with them. But it’s the only way for an individual to come to a truth-based understanding of the world, and one day it’s how we as a collective will move into the creation of a real truth-based society.
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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
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Israeli media: Israel ‘totally defeated’ – and terrified of Iran
Source close to discussions about Iran says millions would be fleeing Israel if they knew what was being said
Israeli media are often far more honest about what their country is doing – and what is going on in it – than western ‘mainstream’ media are about the same issues. While UK ‘msm’ still maintain the lie that Hamas ‘beheaded babies’ and raped women on 7 October, Israeli media sometimes freely discuss the truth – and frequently and openly write about the ‘immense’ numbers of Israelis killed that day by the Israeli military.
And now, Israeli media are discussing two further truths that will not be aired by UK broadcasters or printed by UK papers.
First, Haaretz – one of Israel’s major dailies – has splashed a headline concluding that Israel has lost – totally lost – the ‘war’, the genocide, it has been raining down on the innocent civilians of Gaza. Lost so badly that Israel cannot be secure – and will not either regain by force the captives taken by Hamas, or end its pariah status:
And second, journalists with sources close to the Israeli regime’s discussions about Iran – which yesterday achieved a measured but compelling attack on Israel in retaliation for Israel’s bombing of Iran’s consulate in Damascus – are saying openly that those discussions are so terrifying that if the Israeli populace knew what was being said, millions of them would be flooding Israel’s main international airport to try to get out of the country:
The UK government, opposition and media are incorrigibly dishonest about Israel’s genocide and its terrible consequences for the millions of innocents in Gaza and the West Bank – and the ruination of both Israel’s and the West’s always-thin pretence as democratic, humane and law-abiding. But the truth is out there – and will percolate through.
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CNN Finally Tells The Truth About The Flour Massacre After Previously Shilling For Israel
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/0fe0fedb2287670f15f4a396da977730/href
CNN has a new report out showing that (surprise!) Israel lied about the Flour Massacre in which IDF troops fired machine guns into a crowd of starving Gazans waiting for food this past February, killing over a hundred people. CNN found that Israel’s timeline and version of events doesn’t line up with video footage, witness testimony, and forensic evidence.
Which of course was obvious from the beginning to anyone who isn’t deeply invested in pretending Israel ever tells the truth about these things. Within hours of the massacre Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor had a preliminary report up saying that video, audio and material evidence shows that the IDF had been firing into the crowd in contradiction of Israel’s claims that the injuries and deaths sustained on the scene were mostly due to Gazans trampling on each other in a mad rush upon the convoy of aid trucks. Now here’s CNN, a month and a half later, telling us essentially the same thing.
This is the same CNN who at the time reported on the Flour Massacre in ways that advanced Israel’s information interests with headlines completely exonerating Israel of any wrongdoing like “At least 100 killed and 700 injured in chaotic incident” and “Carnage at Gaza food aid site amid Israeli gunfire”. CNN also repeatedly refers to the killings as “food aid deaths”, as though it’s the food aid that killed them and not the military of a very specific state power.
Mehdi Hasan on Twitter: "The Flour Massacre was indeed a flour massacre.As I told @abbydphillip on CNN that night, we shouldn't trust the Israeli military's initial and kneejerk denials. They lie. They're good at lying.And, now, CNN's own latest and important investigation proves me right: https://t.co/dsuzoAgOM2 / Twitter"
The Flour Massacre was indeed a flour massacre.As I told @abbydphillip on CNN that night, we shouldn't trust the Israeli military's initial and kneejerk denials. They lie. They're good at lying.And, now, CNN's own latest and important investigation proves me right: https://t.co/dsuzoAgOM2
I don’t know if there’s a word for when a government does something evil and then churns out a bunch of easily disprovable lies with the understanding that by the time those lies are debunked public attention will have moved on from the controversy, but there should be. Over and over again we’ve seen the Israeli regime do just enough lying to dampen the initial burst of attention and outrage and get people doubting themselves, only to discover far too late that it was all a bunch of crap after the initial crime has been forgotten.
This is exactly what happened with Israel’s initial assault on al-Shifa Hospital back in November, when Israel was cranking out propaganda claiming the hospital was being used as a command center for Hamas. Not until the end of December did The Washington Post show up to acknowledge the abundantly obvious fact that there was no evidence for Israel’s claims, which independent outlets like Consortium News had been reporting since mid-November. Now al-Shifa Hospital — the largest hospital in Gaza — has been completely destroyed.
Back in October Israel and its apologists were shrieking with outrage that anyone would dare suggest that Israel would ever attack a hospital at all, saturating the media with bogus evidence that it falsely claimed proved its innocence. Since that time Israel has launched hundreds of attacks on Gaza’s healthcare services and has destroyed most of its healthcare system.
https://medium.com/media/1ee20ae306d9731abf067aa3357d093e/href
It’s a weaponization of the adage “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth even puts its boots on.” They know all they have to do is lie really hard for a week or two, and then when the truth inevitably surfaces it won’t matter, because the truth will never be able to have the impact their lies had when it mattered.
It’s so obnoxious how even after all this time Israel is still given the benefit of the doubt on such claims by the western political-media class until they’re debunked weeks or months later, long after the outcry over the incident has been muted and neutered by Israeli lies. If a state power is preventing journalists and human rights groups from investigating the facts on the ground in a given area, then it is not legitimate to give their claims about what happens in that area weighted consideration when their track record and all the facts in evidence say they’re probably lying.
The fact that the western press keep giving Israel the benefit of the doubt whenever reports like this emerge after they’ve been caught in so very many lies means the western press are just as culpable for the circulation of Israeli lies as Israel itself. In journalism you’re taught that if someone says it’s raining and someone else says it’s dry, your job isn’t to quote them both and treat both claims as equal, your job is to go look out the window and see which is true. The fact that the imperial media take so long to drag their asses to the window serves nobody but Israel and the globe-spanning empire of which it is a part.
________________
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
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As Support For Gaza Goes Mainstream, Don’t Let The Empire Co-Opt The Movement
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/cf84586c4696989987f7277f02df4bcc/href
Opposition to the slaughter in Gaza appears to be getting more mainstream, which is obviously great, but when political impulses go mainstream it means there’s going to be a massive and concerted effort to funnel public sentiment in a direction that doesn’t damage the interests of the empire.
They’re going to try to blame this all on Netanyahu.
They’re going to insist that Israel itself is fine and the only thing that went wrong was a fluke incident in which an aberrational right wing faction briefly got into power.
Mohammad Alsaafin on Twitter: "It's absolutely a good thing these stories are getting mainstream coverage in the US now. It's also...weird...seeing stories that have been all over social media for months suddenly break into that ecosystem all of a sudden. https://t.co/AZWl2kduY1 / Twitter"
It's absolutely a good thing these stories are getting mainstream coverage in the US now. It's also...weird...seeing stories that have been all over social media for months suddenly break into that ecosystem all of a sudden. https://t.co/AZWl2kduY1
They’re going to try to wash the western empire’s hands of the mass atrocities it directly facilitated in Gaza.
They’re going to try to frame Biden as a basically decent politician who found himself trapped in an impossible situation.
They’re going to keep pretending a two-state solution is right around the corner and doing everything they can to stall out meaningful change on Palestinian rights, while blaming any obstacles to peace on the Palestinian resistance.
They’re going to pollute the information ecosystem with a deluge of messaging which is all designed to counter the notion that Gaza means the entire status quo needs to be overhauled — with regard to Israel-Palestine, with regard to US foreign policy, with regard to the US government itself, and with regard to the western power structure in general.
https://medium.com/media/966ad9d08496a41d53ffb1abfec46220/href
They’re going to say everything they need to say to ensure that everyone understands that the basic status quo in Israel, the United States and the western world is working perfectly fine, and this was all just an innocent little oopsie poopsie caused by a few bad apples.
They’ll justify, they’ll excuse, they’ll exonerate, and then they’ll distract, moving public attention on to the next big thing and allowing the amnesia of the daily news churn to wash Gaza from our attention — all while pretending to be on our side.
This messaging will need to be fought tooth and claw. We cannot allow them to neuter this political moment with spin and propaganda. We need to make sure their criminality remains front and center of public awareness, and we need to push for the real revolutionary changes that Gaza plainly proves are needed.
Antiwar.com on Twitter: "Blinken: Israel Becoming 'Indistinguishable' From HamasAmerica's top diplomat said Israel would have to allow an increase in aid shipments to Gaza to meet US demandsby Kyle Anzalone@KyleAnzalone_ #Blinken #Gaza #Israel #Hamas #wckitchen https://t.co/5eItAgSmQU pic.twitter.com/a5Y5oRYIRD / Twitter"
Blinken: Israel Becoming 'Indistinguishable' From HamasAmerica's top diplomat said Israel would have to allow an increase in aid shipments to Gaza to meet US demandsby Kyle Anzalone@KyleAnzalone_ #Blinken #Gaza #Israel #Hamas #wckitchen https://t.co/5eItAgSmQU pic.twitter.com/a5Y5oRYIRD
Let mainstream sentiment turn against the current Israeli regime and bring an end to the butchery in Gaza, but don’t let the imperial narrative managers co-opt anything. Don’t let them hijack the zeitgeist that’s been building.
View all words and actions of the western political-media class with aggressive skepticism, and push back forcefully every time they try to push public sentiment in a direction that advantages the empire.
____________
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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Featured image via Mark McGuire (CC BY 3.0 NZ)
The ‘Human Shields’ Lie Has Been Conclusively, Irrefutably Debunked
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/b88eeb83b9e50f900e94d4f88e2992cf/href
One aspect of the recent revelations about the IDF’s Lavender AI system that’s not getting enough consideration is the fact that it is completely devastating to the narrative that Israel has been killing so many civilians in Gaza because Hamas uses “human shields”.
If you missed this story, a major report from +972 revealed that Israel has been using an AI system called Lavender to compile kill lists of suspected members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad which have been carried out with hardly any human verification. One automated system, psychopathically named “Where’s Daddy?”, tracks suspects to their homes so that they can be killed along with their entire families. The IDF has been knowingly killing 15 to 20 civilians at a time to kill one junior Hamas operative, and up to 100 civilians at a time to take out a senior official.
+972’s Yuval Abraham writes the following:
“Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called ‘Where’s Daddy?’ also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.”
(Another +972 report by Abraham back in November revealed that IDF AI systems ensure that the Israeli military is fully aware of every child it’s going to be killing in each airstrike, and that it deliberately targets civilian infrastructure as a matter of policy.)
https://medium.com/media/6fa21d3b2bff65a477b86af76b161392/href
When questioned about these systems by +972, the IDF Spokesperson responded that “Hamas places its operatives and military assets in the heart of the civilian population, systematically uses the civilian population as human shields, and conducts fighting from within civilian structures, including sensitive sites such as hospitals, mosques, schools and UN facilities. The IDF is bound by and acts according to international law, directing its attacks only at military targets and military operatives.”
The “human shields” narrative that’s become so popular in Israel apologia insists that the reason the IDF kills so many civilians in its attacks on Gaza is because Hamas intentionally surrounds itself with noncombatants as a strategy to make the innocent Israelis reluctant to drop bombs on them. But as The Intercept’s Ryan Grim recently observed on Twitter, this is soundly refuted by the revelation that Israel has been intentionally waiting to target suspected Hamas members when it knows they’ll be surrounded by civilians.
“Israel’s argument that they kill so many civilians because Hamas uses ‘human shields’ is torn apart by the revelation that the IDF prefers to attack its ‘targets’ when they are at home with their families,” tweeted Grim. “It is not Hamas using human shields, it is Israel deliberately hunting families.”
“A human shield is only a shield if your enemy values human life and seeks to minimize civilian deaths,” Grim adds. “Israel deliberately maximizes the number of civilians it can kill by waiting until a target is with his entire family. Palestinians are not shields to Israel, they are all targets.”
https://medium.com/media/8ba4585e7602afb35d1cc8fb31515b4c/href
This is such an important point. Advocates for Palestine like Abby Martin have for years been presenting compelling arguments against Israel’s “human shields” claims, and common sense shows that the presence of civilians is clearly not a deterrent to Israeli airstrikes, but because of these +972 revelations the lie has now been thoroughly, irrefutably debunked. Civilians aren’t getting killed because Hamas hides behind them, civilians are getting killed because the IDF waits until suspected Hamas members are around civilians to target them with high-powered military explosives.
A popular quote attributed to former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir says “Someday we may be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we will never forgive them for making us kill their children.” You see this quote pop up all the time in varying iterations, shared approvingly by Israel apologists around the world as though it’s something wise and brilliant instead of a horrific defense of murdering children. But it turns out this morally depraved quote isn’t even true by the most generous of interpretations: Israel isn’t being “forced” to kill Palestinian children, it is knowingly choosing to.
The “human shields” narrative is just one more instance in which Israel pretends to be the victim while actually being the victimizer. They lied about beheaded babies so that they could get away with murdering babies. They lied about mass rapes so that they could get away with committing rape. They lied about Hamas using civilians as human shields so that they could kill civilians. They lie about being victims so that they can victimize.
________________
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.