Caitlin Johnstone

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Israel has generously and compassionately reopened the Erez crossing to allow aid into Gaza, as it is the only way to ensure that the US will keep sending them weapons to kill the people in Gaza. 

Biden sent Netanyahu one warning about a failure to protect civilians possibly costing Israel its US support and the crossing opened immediately, which proves (A) that Israel has been intentionally starving Gazans by closing entrances off from aid and (B) that Biden could have ordered this to stop at any time.

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The Biden administration approved another weapons package for Israel on the same day Israel killed a bunch of international aid workers in Gaza and bombed the Iranian consulate in Syria. But please, tell me more about how frustrated and angry and outraged and upset Biden’s feelings are feeling toward Israel.

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The huge amount of western outrage and sympathy we’re seeing over the IDF assassination of an international aid convoy compared to the systematic extermination of Palestinians we’ve seen over the last six months confirms the west only regards white people as full human beings, which is a point we’d already seen driven home by the disproportionate amount of outrage and sympathy we saw over Ukraine.

But you know what? We’ll take it. Things are that desperate that if you can only support an end to the Gaza genocide if you see six westerners get killed, I say welcome aboard anyway. Hopefully this is the beginning of the formation of an actual conscience that’s worth a damn.

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The mass media are reporting that the preliminary IDF debrief into the killing of several World Central Kitchen employees in Gaza has found that the multiple strikes were not carried out with the intention of killing those workers, a report which if you ask me has big “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade” energy.

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Pretty ballsy to say "there's no way in hell Israel would do something bad" six months into a genocide. https://t.co/DbIEPnwYrH

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 3, 2024

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Haaretz has a new article out titled “At Singapore Airshow, the Gaza War Was a Selling Point for Israeli Weapon Manufacturers,” which is exactly what it sounds like. One of the ugliest things about this dystopia is that acts of mass military slaughter are always immensely profitable for a specific industry. They’re profitable in and of themselves, even before you add in things like land and resource grabs, just by helping to market and sell more weapons.

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Stop calling this a “war”. A war doesn’t involve conversations about whether or not a walled-in population should be allowed to have food, medicine and electricity. If you have that much control over a population, you can’t be at war with it. You’re just killing a bunch of prisoners.

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Biden and his cohorts aren’t mad at Netanyahu for committing a genocide, they’re mad at Netanyahu for not hiding a genocide.

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I’ve fucking had it with people who blindly regurgitate empire propaganda about Gaza. Fuck right off with your weaponized gullibility.

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The thing that’s so pathetic about the push to blame this whole mass atrocity on Netanyahu is that the people doing this aren’t even really going after Netanyahu. They’re not pushing to send him to The Hague and have him imprisoned for war crimes or bring about any meaningful consequences at all — they’re just saying we should feel negative feelings toward him for a bit like we did with Bush. 

It’s always about feelings with the imperial spin campaign over Gaza. Biden’s feelings toward Netanyahu, Israeli feelings about October 7, the feelings of western Jews about pro-Palestine protests. The whole thing’s been one nonstop appeal to emotion fallacy.

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MAGA Republicans claim to be a bold anti-war, anti-establishment faction, which is squarely refuted by their support for the Gaza genocide.

Democrats claim to support human rights and to oppose tyranny and racism, which is squarely refuted by their support for the Gaza genocide.

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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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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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.)

A targeting system called '"Where's Daddy?"' is among the strongest prima facie evidence of genocidal intent the world has ever seen. https://t.co/fFty6ClaVU

— Tom Studans (@maximumwelfare) April 4, 2024

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.”

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.

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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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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The imperial media cannot stop babbling about how angry President Biden’s feelings are feeling toward Israel like it’s some kind of actual news story, even as this administration cheerfully pours mountains of weaponry into backing Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza. 

If you haven’t been following the mass media’s coverage of Biden and Gaza for the last six months, the entire thing can be summed up by the headline of a new Politico article, “‘Angry’ Biden not changing Israel policy after deadly strike on aid workers”.

This is in reference to the Israeli military’s deliberate assassination of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers, which conveniently resulted in multiple humanitarian aid organizations ceasing their operations in Gaza out of fear of being attacked themselves. The attack has been drawing widespread condemnation throughout the western world, because six of the workers killed came from western nations and are therefore considered real human beings by the western empire. Biden released a statement saying how “outraged and heartbroken” he is about the incident, drawing a fresh deluge of frenzied reporting about how the president’s feelings are feeling about Israel.

"I'm so angry I can barely sign off on this 2,000 pound bomb shipment" https://t.co/43YpqqlVuI

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) April 3, 2024

But as the aforementioned Politico article illustrates, none of this actually matters because this administration’s Israel policy has not changed. Biden is reportedly set to greenlight a sale of fighter jets to Israel in a deal worth $18 billion, and this is just a few days after we learned that this administration has quietly signed off on the delivery of more of the 2,000-pound bombs with which the IDF has been obliterating so many civilians in Gaza. The Biden White House still adamantly refuses to acknowledge that Israel has even once violated humanitarian law these past six months.

So why are we being told by the news media over and over and over again that Biden is super duper upset with the government of Israel? It doesn’t matter. At all. It’s not a news story. It’s not interesting. Nobody with functioning gray matter between their ears gives the tiniest sliver of a fuck. But they’ve been hammering and hammering and hammering on this idiotic narrative for months.

The answer of course is because the western news media are propaganda services for the western empire of which Washington is the central hub, and their job is therefore to make the US government look good. By emphasizing the point over and over and over again that the US president strongly disapproves of the Israeli regime’s behavior in Gaza, the imperial spinmeisters are distancing the White House from one of the darker chapters in the history of the United States even as Biden signs off on this mass atrocity day after day despite being fully capable of ending it at any time. 

Israel used an automated system called "Where's Daddy?" to ensure it killed AI-designated targets while the targets were at home with their spouses and children:https://t.co/E18lbV8Dif

— Eli Valley (@elivalley) April 3, 2024

This fuzzbrained nonsense is happening at the same time a major report from +972 reveals that Israel has been using an AI system 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.

This is the kind of murderous depravity that the Biden administration has been giving the thumbs up to day after day for half a year now while the imperial media prattle on like preschoolers about the president’s feelings. 

Stop telling us about the president’s feelings. Stop telling us he’s “angry” and “frustrated” with Israel. No one cares. Nobody gives a shit how Biden’s feelings feel about the government he’s helping carry out a genocide. All that matters is that he’s helping them commit genocide.

This six-month mass atrocity has been one nonstop insult to our intelligence.

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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

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Six months of this now. Half a year.

Half a year of genocide apologia.

Half a year of the most outrageous lies you can possibly imagine.

Half a year of seeing children’s bodies ripped to pieces and starved to skeletons on our social media feeds.

Half a year of atrocities justified by something that happened way back in October, and didn’t even happen the way the news media tell us it happened.

Half a year of western government officials pretending obvious evidence of war crimes is just some ineffable mystery that we’ll hopefully have answers to someday.

Half a year of Israeli officials openly stating their genocidal intentions in Hebrew for their Israeli audience and paying lip service to human rights and compassion in English for their western liberal audience.

Half a year of seeing reports that the IDF did something unbelievably evil, thinking “That can’t be right, let me check it out,” and then going “Oh, nope, it’s actually even more evil than I thought.”

Half a year of the western political-media class trying to frame the direct sponsorship of an active genocide as something other than what it is.

Half a year of passive-language “Palestinian child walks into bullet” headlines from the mainstream press.

Half a year of insulting our intelligence.

Half a year of insulting our humanity.

Half a year of unfathomable suffering.

Half a year of irreparable trauma.

Half a year of irreplaceable loss.

This fucking sucks, man. It sucks so bad. I’ve always enjoyed doing commentary on the crimes of the empire, but these last six months have been truly harrowing. It’s awful having to stare directly at hell on earth from day to day with compassion in your heart. The only thing keeping this project going is the fact that it needs to be done, and the knowledge that my own suffering isn’t the faintest shadow of what the Palestinians are going through right now.

This needs to end. It needs to end with desperate urgency. But we’re seeing no signs that it’s about to.

I don’t have anything wise or insightful to add to any of this right now. Some days all you can do is point to the nightmare and call it what it is, and we can all just be real about reality and feel our feelings about that.

I guess all I can really say is that at least we’re not alone in seeing what we’re seeing. The whole world is watching Israel commit a horrifying mass atrocity backed by the full might of the empire, and more and more eyes are opening to the reality of what this means for their society and everything they’ve been told to believe about it.

Every positive change in human behavior is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness, and Gaza is expanding western consciousness like nothing ever before.

So at least there’s that. At least there’s the possibility that something good might one day grow out of this steaming pile of shit.

And that’s all I’ve got for you. That’s the best I can do right now.

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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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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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In the span of just a few hours we learned that Israel committed a horrific massacre at al-Shifa hospital, struck an Iranian consulate in Syria killing multiple Iranian military officers, and killed a vehicle full of international aid workers in an airstrike. This murderous regime is out of control.

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Israel is so dedicated to protecting civilian life that it’s deliberately gunning down unarmed Palestinians whenever they walk within firing range and then adding them to its “Hamas terrorists killed” tally. Haaretz reports that the IDF has set up “kill zones” in Gaza where they just shoot anything that moves, with an IDF reserve officer saying the number of Hamas members Israel claims to have killed is massively inflated because “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.” Haaretz notes that the three escaped Israeli hostages the IDF gunned down in December had wandered into one of these kill zones.

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A Doctors Without Borders physician went on Sky News to talk about Israel’s deliberate destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system, and the Murdoch shill anchor who was interviewing her asked her if Hamas was active in al-Shifa hospital fighting Israelis. The doctor, Tanya Haj-Hassan, told him “I am just shocked that we’re still having this conversation” and went on to describe how Israel’s assault on Gazan healthcare workers is so methodical that Gazan hospital staff have been changing out of their scrubs before leaving work because Israeli troops are picking off anyone in scrubs.

"Do you know if Hamas were there [in Al Shifa hospital]?"@Tanyaalih: "I am just shocked that we're still having this conversation. [The Israelis] executed tens of people point blank, including one of our colleagues, Dr Ahmed Almaqadma, & his mother, who's also a physician" pic.twitter.com/zqImcL5MH2

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) April 1, 2024

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At the beginning of the year I tweeted, “Gaza is a live laboratory for the military industrial complex. Data is with absolute certainty being collected on all the newer weapons being field-tested on human bodies in Gaza (just like has been happening in Ukraine) to be used to benefit the war machine and arms industry.” Since then we’ve learned that the IDF has been experimenting with new military robots in its Gaza assault, and that Israeli startups are now looking to start exporting new AI-powered war machinery marketed as having been “battle-tested” in Gaza.

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Israel is a synthetic, artificially created state. It did not arise organically from the naturally existing conditions of the land and its people; it was unnaturally forced into existence by outside powers. It is more synthetic than meth. It is more synthetic than Pete Buttigieg.

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Normal person: Stop doing genocide 

Crazy person: But the TV told me rape happened six months ago

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Netanyahu: [livestreams himself kicking a Palestinian baby off a cliff]

Netanyahu: [staring into camera] I kicked a Palestinian baby off a cliff because I hate Palestinians and I want to genocide them.

State Department press corps: Any comment on the video of Netanyahu kicking a Palestinian baby off a cliff and saying he wants to commit genocide?

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller: [smirking] Uh, I have seen that video, and I can say that we’re looking into it and we’re in touch with our counterparts in Israel on this issue. Beyond that I would only reiterate our position that claims that Israel is committing genocide are unfounded and anti-semitic in nature, and I have nothing further to add at this time.

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I’ve been mentally referring to Matthew Miller as “Smirkula”.

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Another one of the extremely stupid things Israel apologists ask us to believe is that Israel was right on the cusp of agreeing to give Palestinians a state before October 7, but because of October 7 that generous prospect is now off the table.

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Rightists who see through the empire propaganda on the Ukraine proxy war but unquestioningly swallow all empire propaganda about Gaza are even dumber than people who’ve swallowed both, because they’re just letting their favorite political faction do their thinking for them. 

They’re also dumber because they saw and understood that the mass media churn out propaganda constantly, but still assumed we’re being told the truth about Gaza. They broke out of the propaganda matrix, then jacked their minds right back into it. They’re like someone who pulled his head out of his ass, looked around, and then shoved it right back in.

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If only the Democrats who rallied so aggressively against a fictional conspiracy between Trump and Russia could harness that same energy to oppose a real genocide by Biden and Israel.

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Just ignore anyone who condemns Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza but still supports Biden. Their Israel-Palestine rhetoric is just for show.

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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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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Israel has ended its assault on the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, because there is nothing left to assault. The facility — the largest medical complex in Gaza where hundreds of civilians had been sheltering — is now an empty, unusable, burnt-out husk. Witnesses report hundreds of corpses in and around the complex, with video footage showing human body parts protruding from the earth and bodies with zip ties on their wrists.

Israel is currently doing its usual song and dance where it claims the hospital was a Hamas headquarters and everyone it killed there was a “terrorist”, but at this point the only people buying that schtick are the ones who desperately need to. This was a massacre of profound savagery. It’s as plain as day to anyone who isn’t deeply invested in pretending otherwise.

Israel, which at the beginning of the Gaza onslaught had adamantly denied that it would ever attack a hospital, has since launched hundreds of documented attacks on Gaza’s healthcare services and has destroyed most of its healthcare system. Just today the director-general of the World Health Organization announced that an Israeli airstrike on Gaza’s al-Aqsa Hospital compound killed four people and injured seventeen.

A @WHO team was on a humanitarian mission at Al-Aqsa Hospital in #Gaza, when a tent camp inside the hospital compound was hit by an Israeli airstrike today. Four people were killed and 17 injured. WHO staff are all accounted for.

The team was at the hospital assessing the needs…

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) March 31, 2024

Oxford University professor Nick Maynard, who spent time working at al-Aqsa Hospital earlier this year, recently accused the IDF of “systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system” in Gaza.

“It’s not just about targeting the buildings, it’s about systematically destroying the infrastructure of the hospitals,” says Maynard. “Destroying the oxygen tanks at the al-Shifa hospital, deliberately destroying the CT scanners and making it much more difficult to rebuild that infrastructure. If it was just targeting Hamas militants, why are they deliberately destroying the infrastructure of these institutions?”

Why indeed? If the objective is to target Hamas, why trash the hospital’s medical equipment? If the objective is to target Hamas, why destroy the whole complex and make it unusable as a healthcare facility?

Logically we can only conclude that it isn’t about targeting Hamas at all. It’s about destroying Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure.

Today, we witness the total ISraeli destruction of the most important, 700 beds specialty hospital in Gaza, Al Shifa Medical Complex. It was established 78 years ago during the British Mandate, the name Shifa meaning 'The House of Healing'; now turned into a 'House of Death' by… pic.twitter.com/l53luccMtz

— Dr. Mads Gilbert (@DrMadsGilbert) April 1, 2024

Why would Israel want to destroy Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure? The answer to that question has been clear for months: to make the land uninhabitable for the Palestinians. The same reason they’re deliberately starving Gazans, destroying their homes, continually moving them from place to place and bombing every “safe zone” they create. 

This is naturally giving rise to a situation in which the inhabitants of Gaza will either die or flee to some other country — which just so happens to be exactly what Israel wants them to do. 

It’s so obvious what’s happening here. Painfully obvious. Poke-you-in-the-eyeballs obvious. But we’re still subjected to a western political-media class who keeps forcefully telling us that this blatant ethnic cleansing campaign is not what it looks like. Telling us that all this starvation and destruction and elimination of healthcare services and the way it directly places pressure on the Palestinians to leave their homeland is just a series of coincidences arising from Israel’s “war” of “defense”. That only by pure happenstance does it look exactly the same as the advancement of an agenda that Israelis have sought to advance for generations.

Well I personally am through with having my intelligence insulted, and I hope you are too. The sky is blue, a spade’s a spade, the emperor has no clothes, and Israel is conducting a very obvious ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.

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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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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The Zionist plan for the Palestinians is to kill them and drive them off their land by whatever cruelty is necessary, with the understanding that one day people will look back on it in the same way they look back on the genocides of other indigenous populations, saying “Yeah it was bad, but that was in the past so there’s nothing we can do about it.”

The Zionists take a long view of history, understanding that all the outrage and backlash they’re facing over Gaza right now will one day be irrelevant if they can carry out their plan for the territory today. They know that future generations of Israeli settlers will be able to say “Sure there was an ethnic cleansing in Gaza and a bunch of mass atrocities were committed, but that all happened before I was born; I had nothing to do with it. What do you want me to do, give up the home I’ve lived in all my life? That’s nuts.”

And they’re absolutely right: if Israel succeeds in driving the Palestinians out of Gaza (and assuming humanity doesn’t destroy itself via nuclear armageddon or environmental collapse), that is exactly the future they can expect to have. The genocidal atrocities against the Palestinians will be something kids learn about in history class. Israel itself might even be able to be a lot more honest about what happened, once the Palestinian problem has been fully resolved and the threat of a Palestinian state no longer exists.

So they do what they need to do in the meantime, with the understanding that this will one day all be rubbed away by the sands of time. They commit what atrocities they need to commit, they lie in whatever ways they need to lie, and they exert influence wherever they need to exert influence until they can get this thing locked down. Once they have, they can sit back and let old father time do the rest of the work for them.

That’s why it’s so important to oppose this thing now: because once Palestine is erased, it’s highly unlikely that it can ever be restored. We see what an uphill battle it is to obtain any rights at all for indigenous populations in other nations founded on genocidal settler-colonialism, and they haven’t even been driven out of their national borders into foreign countries.

The sins of the present and the recent past are much, much easier to correct than the sins of the distant past. That’s why the Zionists are so keen to move these atrocities into the “sins of the distant past” category.

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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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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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The Washington Post reports that in recent days the Biden administration has quietly signed off on sending Israel billions of dollars worth of fighter jets and the 2,000-pound bombs that have been causing so much death and destruction in Gaza, even as Israel prepares to launch a bloody assault on the strip’s densely-populated southernmost point. 

Literally just completely ignore every single thing US officials say about the need to protect civilians and how Biden’s feelings are privately “frustrated” with Netanyahu. Just ignore their entire narrative about what their goals are in Gaza. Their actions make it clear.

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Protesters from Palestine Action have forced Israel-based arms dealer Elbit Systems to permanently close one of its factories in the UK as demonstrators have made it too difficult for the factory to operate. We’ll never vote the empire away, but we might someday be able to direct action it away.

Israel's largest arms company, Elbit Systems, has permanently vacated its weapons factory in Tamworth, Staffordshire, following a relentless campaign by Palestine Action.

This is the third Elbit Systems site in the UK to be shut down permanently by Palestine Action.

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) March 28, 2024

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Video footage has surfaced of IDF troops murdering two unarmed Palestinians in cold blood and then burying their bodies with bulldozers to conceal their crime. This is surely not anywhere close to the first time such a thing has happened in Gaza, and is yet another sign that the death toll from this onslaught is probably a massive undercount.

Israel’s assault on Gaza features heavy earth-moving equipment more extensively than any other military operation anyone’s ever seen. One reason is because it’s a great way to destroy Palestinian homes. Another reason is because it’s a great way to hide dead Palestinian bodies.

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An IDF commander has told Israeli media that on October 7 he made the decision to fire on vehicles he knew could have Israelis in them because “it’s better to stop the abduction and that they not be taken,” adding more weight to the mountain of evidence that Israeli troops fired on Israelis on October 7 to prevent them from being taken hostage. Israeli bombs and blockades have been picking off the remaining hostages ever since, with Israel now estimating that only 60 to 70 of the 134 hostages are still alive.

Whenever you run into an Israel apologist who is defending against criticisms of Israel’s actions in Gaza by saying “Hamas just needs to release the hostages and this all ends,” maybe go ahead and remind them of this.

❖

"This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal."
~ Aaron Bushnell https://t.co/OHnIH4OPRn

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 28, 2024

❖

ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt just went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and compared wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh to wearing a Nazi armband. The mass media keep having this lunatic on as an expert analyst and he keeps saying the most bat shit insane things imaginable. Any screaming schizophrenic off the street would be just as qualified as Greenblatt.

❖

A former ranking IDF officer has told Haaretz that Israel is conducting “a war of cruel rich people” which is causing many times more destruction than necessary to accomplish its stated objectives against Hamas.

“In principle, it would be possible to arrive at similar achievements with 10 percent of the destruction we have caused,” the unnamed source told Haaretz.

Ten percent. Israel is causing ten times more damage than it needs to to achieve its stated objectives because its stated objectives are false — Israel’s real goal is not to defeat Hamas, it’s to grab a bunch of land from a Palestinian territory. 

❖

"This is all Benjamin Netanyahu's fault" has swiftly become the mantra of the western liberal political-media class. The idea is to pretend one guy was singularly responsible for the multinational effort to commit genocide in Gaza so that no big systemic changes need to be made. https://t.co/7JllUMun1Q

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 28, 2024

❖

Of all the pants-on-head idiotic things Israel and its apologists ask us to believe, “The UN just hates Israel for no good reason so all its claims should be dismissed” is definitely among the dumbest.

Israel apologists constantly claiming the UN is antisemitic and treats Israel unfairly remind you of a boy who never does any homework and keeps saying his bad grades are because his teacher hates him. The UN talks about Israel a lot because Israel is a murderous criminal regime.

❖

If you still have any doubt that we live in a profoundly sick dystopia as deranged as anything that’s ever been imagined in fiction, take note of the fact that the most powerful empire in history is currently trying to propagandize you into thinking an obvious genocide is fine.

❖

They lied about decapitated babies so that they could kill babies.

They lied about rape so that they could rape.

They lied about Hamas using civilians as human shields so that they could use civilians as human targets.

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.

I made a new painting titled “The Self-Immolation Of Aaron Bushnell”, with an accompanying video and a reading of some words on the subject. Watch with sound on:

Photos:

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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

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was bombing and starving a walled-in population of two million, half of them children. Seriously, imagine it. Imagine the rage and vitriol. Imagine the nonstop media coverage.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, US media coverage of that war exceeded the media coverage of all US wars in the previous three decades. If Russia were deliberately and systematically exterminating civilians in Ukraine or anywhere else, the western media coverage of those war crimes would be many times more.

It’s almost cliché at this point to say “imagine if Russia or China did this”, but such comparisons are important for retaining a sense of perspective on just how evil the western political-media class is being about Gaza right now. We’re seeing articles come out in the mass media about starvation in Gaza which never once even mention the word “Israel”. Do you think that would be happening if this were being perpetrated by a government which defies the western empire? Of course not.

An entire Economist article on famine in Gaza doesn’t say the word “Israel” once. Not even when describing damage to farmland and water facilities or severely restricted aid deliveries.

Saying *who* is destroying the farmland and restricting aid seems like basic info to include. pic.twitter.com/Z6fBtmc0Bp

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) March 27, 2024

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately blockading food from an imprisoned population of millions of people.

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was relentlessly raining military explosives on densely packed urban areas known to be full of children.

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately and methodically ethnically cleansing an oppressed population for entirely racist reasons.

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if evidence that Russia or China are committing horrific war crimes was surfacing on a daily basis.

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China were getting caught in lie after lie after lie while carrying out such a mass atrocity.

Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China tried to present them with blatantly fabricated evidence of crimes committed by the targeted population in justification of their atrocities.

We’d be living in a different political and media landscape. If Russia or China was doing what Israel is doing, entire presidential campaigns would have been built around who would oppose it most aggressively. Every sanction and embargo in the book would have been slammed upon the perpetrating government. The western press would be falling all over themselves to expose every atrocity and every lie and blaring those expositions as feature stories on every platform for months, and showering one another with awards for doing so.

StateSpox was asked about UN Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs’s report on Gaza which said there’s reasonable ground that the threshold for genocide has been met.

Miller said they oppose mandate of this rapporteur, accused her of antisemitism and rejected allegations of genocide. pic.twitter.com/R7s79FjYCQ

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) March 27, 2024

Instead we get this. Government officials babbling nonstop about Israel’s “right” to “defend itself” and how this would all be over if Hamas didn’t keep fighting, while showering Israel with weapons to help it continue its atrocities. The mass media churning out a constant deluge of passive-language “Gazans are having trouble finding food for some reason” headlines and continuous reminders that this is all happening because of October 7, while repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda like it’s gospel truth. All viable US presidential candidates vowing their unconditional support for Israel while occasionally impotently finger-wagging at this or that aspect of Israel’s atrocities to avoid looking like complete psychopaths.

That contrast between how the western political-media class is acting toward the Gaza genocide and how we all know they’d be acting if an unaligned government was doing something similar is exactly why the US-centralized empire cannot be permitted to rule our world anymore. It pretends to stand for peace, justice, freedom and democracy, but in reality it just inflicts nonstop death and suffering upon human beings around the world and covers it up with propaganda spin from its servile mainstream press. It purports to uphold the “rules-based international order”, but all that means in practice is that it upholds an international order in which the US empire makes up the rules as it goes along and changes them as it pleases.

Humanity cannot allow itself to be abused and tyrannized by this murderous, hypocritical globe-spanning power structure any longer. A better world is possible, but we’re going to have to find a way to pry the talons of these monsters off the steering wheel first.

______________

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 Wikimedia Commons/Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation (CC BY 4.0 DEED)

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The British High Court has ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may potentially get a final appeal against extradition to the United States, but only within a very limited scope and only if specific conditions are met.

The court ruled that Assange may appeal only on the grounds that his freedom of speech might be restricted in the US, and that there is a possibility he could receive the death penalty. If the US provides “assurances” that neither of these things will happen, then the trial moves to another phase where Assange’s legal team may debate the merits of those assurances. If the US does not provide those assurances, then the limited appeal will move forward.

Absurdly, the court determined that Assange’s lawyers may not argue against extradition on matters as self-evidently critical as the fact that the CIA plotted to assassinate him, or on the basis that he is being politically persecuted for the crime of inconvenient journalism.

Assange’s Fate Awaits US ‘Assurances’ https://t.co/tpbQZHgw1L

The High Court on Tuesday rejected five Assange grounds for a new appeal, agreeing he had only three legitimate arguments but that the U.S. could nullify them with new “assurances,” reports Joe Lauria. pic.twitter.com/IHkQZWZLEL

— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) March 26, 2024

The mass media are calling this a “reprieve”, even “wonderful news”, but as Jonathan Cook explains in his latest article “Assange’s ‘reprieve’ is another lie, hiding the real goal of keeping him endlessly locked up,” that’s all a bunch of crap.

“The word ‘reprieve’ is there — just as the judges’ headline ruling that some of the grounds of his appeal have been ‘granted’ — to conceal the fact that he is prisoner to an endless legal charade every bit as much as he is a prisoner in a Belmarsh cell,” writes Cook. “In fact, today’s ruling is yet further evidence that Assange is being denied due process and his most basic legal rights — as he has been for a decade or more.”

Cook writes the following:

“The case has always been about buying time. To disappear Assange from public view. To vilify him. To smash the revolutionary publishing platform he founded to help whistleblowers expose state crimes. To send a message to other journalists that the US can reach them wherever they live should they try to hold Washington to account for its criminality.

“And worst of all, to provide a final solution for the nuisance Assange had become for the global superpower by trapping him in an endless process of incarceration and trial that, if it is allowed to drag on long enough, will most likely kill him.”

Assange’s ‘reprieve’ is another lie, hiding the real goal of keeping him endlessly locked up@Jonathan_K_Cook

https://t.co/wknQDCEaci

— Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW (@Stella_Assange) March 26, 2024

This kind of slow motion strangulation is how the empire operates all the time these days, across all spheres. Helping Israel starve Gaza while slowly pretending to work toward solutions. Drawing out a proxy war in Ukraine for as long as possible to bleed Russia. Slowly killing Assange in prison without trial under the pretense of judicial proceedings.

The US-centralized empire hunts not like a tiger, killing its prey with one fatal bite to the jugular, but more like a python: slowly suffocating the life out of its prey until it perishes. It favors the long, drawn-out, confusing strangulation of inconvenient populations and individuals, carried out under the cover of bureaucracy and propaganda spin. In today’s world it prefers sanctions, blockades and long proxy conflicts over the big Hulk-smash ground invasions we saw it carry out in places like Iraq and Vietnam.

These slow suffocations can take more time, but what they lack in efficiency they make up for in the quality of perception management. It’s bad PR to just openly invade countries and murder people, which is why the leaders of the western empire have been able to wag their fingers at Putin despite their being quantifiably far more murderous than Russia. People start snapping out of the propaganda matrix you spent so much time building for them and begin organizing against the political status quo your power is premised on.

So they opt for slow strangulation strategies where they can confuse the public about what’s happening and who’s responsible, outsourcing the blame to other parties while posing as the good guy who’s trying to bring peace and stability. It takes time, but the empire has time to burn. That’s what happens when you’re the most powerful empire in the history of civilization; you have the luxury of biding your time while orchestrating large-scale, long-term operations to advance your power agendas.

Meanwhile Gaza starves, Ukraine bleeds, and Assange languishes in prison, each needing this to end with more urgency every 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 Landjager (CC BY-NC 3.0 DEED)

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

List of things that have been discredited during the destruction of Gaza:

• Israel

• the “rules-based international order”

• liberals

• the label “antisemitism”

• the mainstream media

• Joe Biden

• the “two-state solution” myth

• Bernie Sanders

• Robert F Kennedy Jr

• the label “terrorist”

• the “human shields” lie

• the ADL

• AIPAC

• the US war machine

• right wing “free speech” supporters

• the Democratic Party

• the Republican Party

• Zionism

• all western governments

• all of western civilization

• everything westerners believe about their society

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The US vetoed multiple UN ceasefire resolutions, then put forward a fake “ceasefire” resolution that didn’t actually demand a ceasefire and accused Russia and China of “sabotaging” peace when they vetoed it, then an actual ceasefire resolution was passed which the US abstained from voting on rather than vetoing in order to save face over its Russia/China moralizing, and then the US declared (100% falsely) that the UN ceasefire resolution which passed is “non-binding”.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continues to support and defend Biden and just endorsed virulent Israel supporter Hakeem Jeffries for House Speaker, even after accusing Israel of genocide in a House floor speech. 

If you say this is a genocide and then you support the people who are backing this genocide, it means either (A) you’re fine with genocide or (B) you only called it a genocide to score progressive political points and don’t actually believe what you said.

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Israel's obsession with destroying hospitals makes no sense from a military strategic viewpoint but it makes tons of sense from a genocidal viewpoint. https://t.co/U5SKdzITuN

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 25, 2024

❖

Biden supporters keep trying to spin his genocidal actions as some kind of aberration in his otherwise lovely behavior due to highly unusual circumstances, as though he hasn’t been a bloodthirsty warmonger AND an extreme pro-Israel hawk his entire fucking political career.

❖

Don’t babble at me about how bad and wrong it is for Palestinians to use violence unless you can offer me a coherent plan for what they should do instead.

Civil disobedience won’t work because Zionists have no conscience and don’t care about Palestinian death and suffering.

The doors to a two-state solution with a real Palestinian state are slammed shut by Israel’s political landscape and are being further bolted down by continually expanding settlements deliberately designed to prevent such a solution from ever emerging.

A one-state solution where everyone has equal rights and no ethnicity gets preferential treatment is an even more remote pipe dream which not even Israel’s western allies support.

So what can the Palestinians do? It doesn’t look like anyone who opposes armed resistance has any good answers. Really what they want is for Palestinians to just lie down and submit to whatever abuses Israel wants to inflict upon them and just slowly fade into obscurity and become a forgotten people, but they can’t say that aloud without sounding like psychopaths so they just finger-wag at Hamas without ever offering any legitimate solutions.

Palestinians have been forced against their will into an impossibly horrible situation, and they sometimes use violence out of desperation because all the other doors are closed to them. If you want me to “condemn” them for this you can kiss my ass, especially since you can’t even tell me what they should do instead.

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The overwhelming majority of westerners spend roughly zero percent of their day thinking about Jews and Judaism, but because Israel stands accused of genocide people are being gaslighted into believing our society is overflowing with a widespread seething hatred of Jewish people.

❖

All popular online posts about Israeli atrocities will have numerous comments underneath claiming that it didn’t happen, or that it was justified, or that it was good actually, or that it should be blamed on Hamas. Every single one, without a single solitary exception. No matter how strong the evidence is. No matter how horrific the atrocity. 

This shows you that Israel apologists don’t care about truth or morality, and it shows you that they never have. All throughout Israel’s history they’ve been lying and manipulating the public narrative about what the Israeli state has been doing this entire time. That’s why they push so hard to get people de-platformed and censored and to get TikTok shut down: all they care about is controlling the public narrative, so they want to silence anyone who makes that harder for them.

_______________

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 Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED)

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Walking the streets of this ghost town, watching ghost people laugh and play and indulge like Gaza isn’t burning, like children aren’t starving, like people aren’t dying slowly trapped under rubble next to the corpses of their loved ones, like IDF troops aren’t merrily picking off civilians with drones and snipers while children get their limbs amputated without anaesthetic, with the full support of this ghost civilization and its ghost leaders.

This ghost town full of ghost cars, ghost buses, ghost trains, ghost pubs, ghost concerts, ghost theme parks, ghost cinemas, ghost festivals, ghost laughter, ghost feasting, ghost shopping, all going on just the same as it was before all this started. Little children running around with flesh on their bones and their organs inside their bodies like they’re supposed to be, supervised by ghost parents with heads full of social clout and gossip.

Last month a man set himself on fire before the Israeli embassy and screamed “FREE PALESTINE” as he burned. He was not a ghost. He was flesh-and-blood real. He saw it. He responded to it. He treated this nightmare like the thing that it is.

We don’t do that in this ghost town. We stare at screens and shovel snacks and booze into the gaping void within ourselves and flail our attention around looking for anything that will keep us from an even momentary encounter with the real. We do not look at Gaza. We look at everything except Gaza.

So we keep the charade going. Frantically keeping the gears of this ghost town turning like hamsters on a running wheel, running faster and faster because we can feel the wet mouth of authenticity nipping at our heels. It’s like a giant theater improv game we’re all playing together, where the whole instruction is to keep the scene in a constant state of frenetic motion.

Because we all know what will happen if we are still, on some level. We all know that stillness allows the smoke to clear and the mud to settle in the water, and from there it’s only a matter of time before we find ourselves in the tyrannical grip of clarity. And then it will all bubble up. The lies. The phoniness. The discontentment. The feelings. Shame. Guilt. Truth. Gaza.

But there’s only so long you can run from yourself. There’s only so far you can flee before you get exhausted and fall down and find yourself staring up at the sky you’ve been living under your whole life. This fraudulent ghost town can’t keep up this charade forever. None of this is sustainable. At some point and in some way, truth inevitably comes crashing in.

_______________

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 Jonathan Cutrer (CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

I just read a New York Times piece about the bodies that are trapped beneath the rubble in Gaza which said the Gaza Health Ministry estimates that there are 7,000 people listed as missing, but adds that that figure “has not been updated since November.” 

November. There is no chance that any of the numbers we’re getting out of Gaza are up to date, including the death counts. Their infrastructure is shot and the scene there is just too chaotic. Nobody can keep track of anything anymore.

❖

ISIS keeps attacking the enemies of the US and Israel for some strange and mysterious reason while funding for the main humanitarian group in Gaza gets cut due to completely unevidenced claims of Hamas affiliation. Re-fund UNRWA; de-fund ISIS.

❖

It’s funny to see the US proposing a fake UN “ceasefire” resolution which doesn’t actually demand a ceasefire when it’s public knowledge that the US could single-handedly create a ceasefire by telling Israel it will stop receiving US weapons if it doesn’t negotiate one right now.

❖

Ben Shapiro just cancel cultured Candace Owens out of a job for saying Palestinians are human beings and Alex Jones has condemned Israel’s genocidal atrocities before most Democrats on Capitol Hill have. American right wing punditry is a trip, man.

❖

It sure is a crazy coincidence how all this stuff about difficulty with food distribution, collateral damage, human shields, the need to eliminate Hamas etc just happens to combine to create a situation that looks exactly the same as committing a genocide against an undesirable population.

They’re just doing a horrible thing they’ve wanted to do for ages and then using narrative to cover it up. Oh noes, it turns out it’s really hard to get food and medical supplies to this undesirable population! Oh noes, it turns out the bad guys are hiding in the hospitals and the civilian infrastructure! Oh noes, it turns out the bad guys are hiding behind large numbers of women and children! Oh noes, it turns out we’re going to need you all to move off of the land we’ve been coveting for generations!

It’s a sick joke that not even a child would fall for, but you see western government officials and major news outlets treating it seriously every goddamn day. It’s a barely-disguised genocide happening right out in the open, and the people responsible for telling the public what’s going on in the world are pretending it’s actually a very unfortunate series of highly convenient coincidences. There’s an elephant in the room wearing a cardboard crown as a disguise, and they’re all calling it Your Highness and telling everyone the king has come to visit.

❖

Israel routinely massacres civilians who are waiting for food, attacks hospitals, picks off civilians with drones and snipers, and is deliberately starving the frailest and most defenseless people in Gaza to death, but the western political-media class keep calling this a “war”.

❖

People who wish to conflate Zionism with Jewishness often argue that most Jews are Zionists, but so what if they are? Most westerners are propaganda-addled imperialists, but if I didn’t believe westerners can and do snap out of that worldview I wouldn’t be doing what I do here.

In any system where people are being indoctrinated at mass scale by the powerful you’re going to see the majority of that population buying into the indoctrination, but conflating the people with the political ideology they’re indoctrinated with serves only to confuse and distort. If people had conflated “Nazism” with “Germany” that logic could have been used to justify exterminating every German after WWII, but because that distortion wasn’t made it opened up the possibility of de-indoctrinating the nation from that pernicious worldview.

Betting on the possibility of a better future means drawing a distinction between the people and the unhealthy worldviews they’ve been indoctrinated with, whether that’s Zionism, western imperialism, or anything else. We can only have a healthy world when the people snap out of their propaganda-induced coma and shake off the power-serving worldviews of this diseased civilization.

_________________

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 Alisdare Hickson (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 DEED)

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The worst actions of your government happen not in secrecy, but right out in the open under the narrative cover of mass media propaganda. The western empire doesn’t hide its worst deeds, it just manipulates the way people think about them.

Tomorrow we could unearth rock-solid proof that the US government knowingly orchestrated 9/11, and that crime in and of itself still wouldn’t be as bad as what the US government is facilitating in Gaza right now, in plain view of the entire world. And even if such a revelation did occur, the imperial media would probably either ignore it or spin it so that its impact is dulled into impotence.

The empire’s worst atrocities happen in the open because the empire’s worst atrocities involve butchering and starving huge numbers of people, which is impossible to do in secret. They can assassinate a government official here and sign a malignant secret agreement there without needing to do it openly, but murder at mass scale isn’t something you can conceal in the information age.

The US-centralized globe-spanning power structure therefore relies heavily on its historically unprecedented ability to psychologically manipulate global populations when carrying out such atrocities. The empire has invested more heavily in soft power than any empire or government in human history, and the science of modern propaganda has been advancing under this investment at least as rapidly as military technology has been.

That’s why you can have the most damning information imaginable about the people who rule over us sitting right out in the open, and you won’t see anywhere remotely close to the public outrage and backlash you ought to see. The US government can literally back a genocide without hiding any part of it, and the political-media class will simply manipulate public psychology into getting lost in a bunch of hogwash about self-defense and human shields and difficulties delivering food and medical supplies and hey Biden is working hard to do the right thing here and it’s all very complicated and everything bad that happens in Gaza can be blamed on Hamas anyway.

It’s a truly astonishing power that would inspire awe if it wasn’t so evil. Power is controlling what happens, but real power is controlling what people think about what happens.

Whistleblowers and investigative journalists provide an invaluable service to humanity for which we should all be grateful, but what this civilization needs more than anything right now is not so much new information about what the powerful are doing, but rather the ability to lucidly perceive the information that’s already been made public. We need people clearly seeing what’s already right in front of them, without the lens of distortion and obfuscation that the powerful have placed over their eyes.

Until we find a way to snap a critical mass of people out of the propaganda-induced coma the empire has placed them in, they’ll be able to get away with any evil they need to commit in order to secure their interests and advance their agendas. We can work on this front by doing everything we can to get people looking at the reality of what our rulers are doing at every opportunity, in as creative and interesting a way as we can come up with. The more eyes open to the truth, the more lucid perceivers there will be to help open the eyes of others.

________________

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

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Humanity doesn’t just need to escape from the mental prison of imperial indoctrination. It needs to escape from the heart prison as well.

I’m always talking here about the need to fight empire propaganda to help the public awaken to the fact that everything we’ve been trained to believe about the world is a lie, because that insight taking root in sufficient numbers would be the first step toward the revolutionary changes our world so desperately needs.

But large numbers of people opening their eyes to the reality of mass-scale psychological manipulation by the powerful would by itself be insufficient, because people need not only to see the truth — they also need to care. 

Realizing the depravity and immense human suffering the US-centralized empire is responsible for creates an opportunity to respond to this insight with horror and begin resisting it — but it is only an opportunity. At that juncture it’s still possible for someone to realize that we’re not being told the truth about what’s happening in the world, but decide to play along with the lies anyway, either because the existing world order has made them wealthy, or because they are too indoctrinated with support for western power structures, or because they ideologically support Israel, or because they’re afraid of the changes and upheaval that would come with an overturning of the status quo, or because they are intellectually and morally lazy, or some other selfish reason.

Realizing that you’ve been indoctrinated into accepting a pernicious status quo unlocks an important door within yourself, but just because that door is opened doesn’t mean you have to walk through it. Walking through it requires another kind of awakening — an awakening of the heart.

Really no amount of knowledge or intellectual insight will ever set us free as a species in and of itself. You could upload the sum total of human knowledge into the brain of everyone on earth — including even government secrets that aren’t public knowledge — but unless this is accompanied by a collective opening of the heart, it wouldn’t make any difference. Unless people can find it within themselves to care deeply about the horrific things our rulers have been doing to our fellow human beings, no amount of knowledge about those things will catalyze real change.

And there are plenty of people who know but don’t care. The most powerful government agencies in the world are run by people who know terrible secrets about our ruling power structures that we ordinary members of the public are not allowed to know, but because their loyalty is to the empire and not to humanity, they don’t care about the moral implications of what they know or the human suffering the empire is responsible for.

So the demand of this moment in history is not just to understand, but to care. Not just to know what’s wrong with the world, but to feel it. Not just to awaken on the level of the head, but to awaken on the level of the heart as well. Not just to value our own personal understanding, but to value humanity as a whole.

Knowledge of the truth can lead to a profound compassion for the victims of the globe-spanning power structure which rules over us and a determination to oppose its cruelty — that’s why said power structure pours so much energy into keeping everyone propagandized. But it doesn’t necessarily need to lead to such compassion. The light of truth can stop its expansion at the gates of the heart, unless there’s some willingness from somewhere deep inside us to throw those gates open.

Ultimately humanity just needs to wake up, on every level. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles of propaganda. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles on our hearts. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the ego. We need to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the dualistic perspective which obfuscates the oneness of all of reality from our vision. 

That’s what’s being asked of us at this juncture. To wake all the way up and become a conscious species. That’s the only way we’ll ever be able to move about on this planet in a healthy and harmonious way. 

And we’ll either rise to the occasion or we won’t. We’ll either wake up, or we’ll destroy ourselves. I believe we have the freedom as a species to go either way.

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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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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

A new poll by the Pew Research Center has found that half of Americans have no idea whether more Israelis or Palestinians have died in the so-called “Israel-Hamas war”. 

“Most Americans report having strong emotional reactions to the Israel-Hamas war,” the Pew Research Center writes. “Yet, for the most part, Americans are not paying very close attention to news about the conflict. One sign of this limited attention is that only about half of U.S. adults can correctly answer a question that tests their factual knowledge by asking whether the number of deaths in the war, so far, is higher among Palestinians or among Israelis.”

The answer of course is that many, many times more Palestinians have died since October 7 than Israelis. There were reportedly 1,163 Israeli deaths on October 7 with the IDF claiming to have lost 246 troops in the ground offensive thereafter, while the Gaza Health Ministry says Palestinian deaths in Gaza are nearing 32,000 (arguably a massive underestimate).

But the Pew Research Center is wrong to blame widespread American ignorance of these numbers solely on a lack of attention. The real culprit is the journalistic malpractice of the mass media.

An indictment of our media coverage. https://t.co/QROsSYRkcl pic.twitter.com/TWoHO2hbbE

— Abdallah Fayyad (@abdallah_fayyad) March 21, 2024

The fact that half of Americans don’t know whether Israelis or Palestinians are suffering more deaths in Gaza is the result of the appalling “Palestinian child walks into bullet”-style headlines the mainstream American press have been churning out since this conflict began. 

Plenty of Americans are unfamiliar with the specific details of foreign conflicts their country is involved with, but because most of them encounter headlines and bits of information in their day to day lives there is a general awareness about things like the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine, or that 9/11 happened, or that the US went to war with Iraq amid claims of weapons of mass destruction. 

But because the Israeli assault on Gaza is backed by the western empire, the headlines in the western press are a lot less clear about exactly what’s happening there. In a new article for Declassified UK titled “How the Western Media Helped Build the Case for Genocide in Gaza”, Jonathan Cook lays out numerous instances in which the mainstream press have brazenly misrepresented reality about facts on the ground in Gaza in their headlines, like saying “food aid-related deaths” to describe an IDF massacre of Palestinian civilians waiting for food, or describing civilians being deliberately starved by Israel in ways that suggest they’re just suffering from a natural famine.

In a society where only 20 percent of news consumers ever read past the headline, mass media propagandists know they can get away with a tremendous amount of manipulation of public consciousness by simply phrasing headlines in a way that advances the information interests of the US-centralized empire. If the mainstream press had been correctly informing the public that Israel is killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and intentionally starving hundreds of thousands more, there would be no confusion among the American public about whether Israelis or Palestinians have been suffering more deaths since October.

American movies and TV shows like to make fun of nations like North Korea for having state propaganda, but Americans are easily the most propagandized population on earth. The propaganda of the mainstream press is so effective because Americans don’t know it’s propaganda, so they consume it without any distrust or skepticism.

That’s just what’s necessary to manufacture consent for the actions of the globe-spanning empire which revolves around the United States. There is too much power riding on the behavior of the US government for the American people to be permitted any real say in it, so their opinions and understanding are manipulated throughout their entire lives by state propaganda services disguised as news.

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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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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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The Israeli hostages deserve far, far less interest and attention than the hundreds of thousands of Gazans who are being starved and murdered as we speak. The only way to believe otherwise is to believe Israeli lives are worth thousands of times more than Palestinian lives.

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The PR campaign for Israel’s destruction of Gaza revolves around encouraging everyone to focus on the feelings of people on the pro-Israel side instead of focusing on facts and evidence. The way Israelis are feeling about October 7. The way Israelis are feeling about the hostages. The way pro-Palestine demonstrations make western Jews feel inside. What feelings Biden is privately feeling toward Netanyahu. The whole thing’s one big fat appeal to emotion fallacy. 

Meanwhile the feelings of the two million Palestinians being starved, displaced, dismembered, traumatized, terrorized and having to watch their loved ones die horrific deaths right in front of them never features. We’re discouraged from thinking about their emotions at all. Only the feelings of people who support these atrocities shall draw our attention and sympathy, thereby generating support for the continuation of those atrocities.

Palestinians in Gaza have been experiencing unfathomable suffering for nearly six months now but the entire western political-media class has been insisting since October 7 that we center the feelings of Israelis and western Jews at all times. Palestinian anguish doesn't count. https://t.co/F9BBH0F47d

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 20, 2024

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In December a former legal advisor to the State Department named Brian Finucane warned The Washington Post that the first Israeli attack on Al-Shifa Hospital back in November could be used as a precedent to “pre-excuse future operations against hospitals”. Which is exactly what’s ended up happening: Israel has since been obliterating hospitals throughout the enclave, and has attacked Al-Shifa three more times since then.

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The propagandists who’ve been manufacturing public consent for this mass atrocity are just as guilty as the ones dropping the bombs.

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Israel apologists will always have excuses and justifications for every horrible thing that comes out about what Israel is doing in Gaza. There is no testimony, investigative report, statistic or raw video clip that could come out showing horrific criminality on the part of the IDF or the Israeli state that would cause Israel supporters to go “Oh okay now this one really is bad, Israel needs to hold those responsible to account and make some dramatic systemic changes to make sure it never happens again.”

This is because the function of Israel apologia (also known as hasbara) has never, ever been to promote truth or justice; its purpose has always been to promote and defend the information interests of the state of Israel. This is why no matter what Israel is exposed as having done you will always see prominent Israel apologists in politics and media as well as ordinary Israel apologists on social media providing excuses and justifications for it. They’re not there to tell the truth, or to help the public understand what’s happening, or to help create a more just and ethical world — their sole aim is to advance the information interests of their favorite ethnostate to ensure its continued support.

But the fact that so many thousands of people need to be working at this every single day shows how depraved Israel really is. Every genocidal regime in history has always had reasons and justifications for its behavior, and that’s all Israel apologists are providing today. Don’t take their manipulations seriously.

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When I’m criticizing US aggressions toward Russia I get called a Kremlin agent a lot. When I’m criticizing US aggressions toward China I get called a CCP propagandist. Now I’m criticizing US/Israeli aggressions in Gaza and they say I’m an antisemite. At a certain point you figure out that there are just a lot of bootlickers out there who don’t like it when you criticize the world’s most powerful government, so they call you names. 

That’s all it ever is: vapid name-calling. It’s what people do when they have no argument. When facts and morality are not on their side.

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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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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The World Health Organization has issued a statement saying that it has recorded 410 Israeli attacks on Gazan healthcare services since October 7, resulting in 685 fatalities, 902 injuries, and damage to 99 healthcare facilities.

As of this writing there is a still-ongoing IDF assault on Al-Shifa Hospital, which according to Israel has resulted in scores of Palestinian deaths and the capture of hundreds of prisoners. This is the fourth time Israel has attacked this particular hospital, which happens to be the largest hospital in Gaza. 

Survivors of the assault have told Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor that they repeatedly witnessed groups of prisoners being walked into the hospital morgue by IDF troops, then heard the sound of gunfire, then saw the IDF troops returning without the prisoners. Which is probably exactly what it would look and sound like if the IDF was conducting mass summary executions at Al-Shifa Hospital.

BREAKING: ISRAEL TAKE MORE CIVILIANS HOSTAGE FROM AL-SHIFA

They took 160 palestinians hostage including;

Intensive Unit Team
Dr. Nihad Abed
Dr. Mu'nis Muhaisen
Senior Nurse Rohi Labban
Nurse Kamal Kishko
Orthopaedic Team
Dr. Murad Al-Quqa
Nurse Yosef Abo… pic.twitter.com/hvN2hrUc8m

— Sulaiman Ahmed (@ShaykhSulaiman) March 20, 2024

In an article for The Washington Post titled “How Biden became embroiled in a Gaza conflict with no end in sight” (the western press have an extensive track record of constantly framing US military aggressions as passive entanglements that the global superpower keeps innocently stumbling and bumbling its way into by accident), Yasmeen Abutaleb and John Hudson report that according to their sources the Biden White House misrepresented the intelligence whose claims were used to justify the first Al-Shifa raid back in November.

Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, told The Washington Post that there was a marked discrepancy between what White House officials were saying publicly about Al-Shifa and what the intelligence they’d seen actually said:

“Van Hollen, who had received a classified briefing about the U.S. intelligence on al-Shifa, said there were ‘important and subtle differences’ between what Biden officials were saying publicly and what the intelligence actually showed. ‘I did find there to be some disconnect between the administration’s public statements and the classified findings,’ the senator said.”

In December, when it was all long over, The Washington Post published a report which found that “the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center.” It was obvious that Israel was lying about Al-Shifa at the time back in November, with psyops like a nonexistent Hamas calendar being “discovered” in the hospital and a fake video purporting to show an Al-Shifa nurse saying the hospital was overrun with Hamas fighters being debunked as fast as they could be produced.

Are people not tired of having their intelligence insulted? https://t.co/SVPeXjR4OQ

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 19, 2024

The evidence for the justification of this raid doesn’t appear to be any more robust, with the IDF publishing highly dubious footage of what it claims are “Hamas terrorist funds found inside Shifa Hospital”, complete with notes accompanying the money thanking Hamas by name for their “good work”. 

Yeah okay sure, people have been somehow sending “Dear Hamas” letters to the militant group with wads of cash enclosed, and Hamas has been keeping both the cash and the letters in Al-Shifa Hospital, where they were kind enough to leave it for the incoming IDF raid to discover. Sounds legit. Definitely not the sort of thing Israel has been caught lying about many times before.

Israel’s constant fixation on attacking healthcare facilities makes no sense from a military strategic point of view, but it makes plenty of sense from a genocidal point of view. Hospitals are where people are brought to save their lives after they’ve been badly injured or have become acutely malnourished or sick, and they’re where civilians would normally take shelter when nowhere else is safe.

All the way back in December we were already seeing reports that Gaza’s healthcare system has been effectively destroyed by the nonstop attacks on healthcare facilities and the siege warfare cutting the enclave off from much-needed medical supplies. Now we are seeing Israel repeatedly re-attacking those same facilities, ensuring that they remain non-functioning despite all the most resilient efforts of the people of Gaza to stay alive.

This is exactly what it looks like. The narrative managers of Israel and the west will try to spin and distort the information you’re seeing right in front of your face to try and make you believe you’re seeing something other than what you’re seeing, but the truth really couldn’t be more self-evident. This is a genocide. If it wasn’t, Israel wouldn’t be methodically destroying hospitals while bombing and starving the population they’ve been oppressing for generations.

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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

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that bombing Gaza into rubble is a reasonable response to a single Hamas attack.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and starving hundreds of thousands more is a reasonable response to a thousand Israelis being killed.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that criticizing the actions of the state of Israel is antisemitic.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that saying “from the river to the sea” is a call for genocide.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone to think about this onslaught and the discourse around it in terms of “Jews vs Jew haters”.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that it was fine and normal to keep an unwanted ethnic group in a walled-in area whose resources are tightly controlled by those in power.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that TikTok is a massive problem that needs to be eliminated.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that Israel should be able to inflict violence and abuse upon the Palestinian population for generations without ever receiving any violence in return.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that Israel using the Israeli army to murder civilians in an Israeli military campaign is something that can be blamed on Hamas.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that it is fine and acceptable for the IDF to be targeting healthcare workers, journalists and scholars and destroying hospitals, universities and mosques.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that dozens of Israeli hostages are more important than the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are being starved and murdered.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that the US war machine should be bombing people in Yemen, Iraq and Syria to stop their retaliations for the destruction of Gaza.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that the governments who are backing a genocide are not personally responsible for it.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that the unfathomable suffering that is taking place in Gaza right now should not be at the forefront of our attention.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that the genocide in Gaza should be allowed to continue instead of being brought to an immediate end.

And that’s why we’ve been seeing such extensive narrative manipulation — from our news media, from our government officials, and from Israel apologists on social media.

It’s because without extensive narrative manipulation, none of this would be consented to.

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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 Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED)