JOHNSTONE

In what is arguably the most liberal thing ever to have happened in all of human history, the Biden administration has announced its plans to develop a US National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia even as it helps Israel massacre Muslims by the thousands in Gaza.

Reading by Tim Foley.

In America they killed all the buffalo just to take away food from the natives,

made mountains of their skulls and posed proudly in photos

like they posed proudly in front of burnt bodies after lynchings in the south.

In Australia they stole the brown children and gave them to pale families

and watched their ancient civilization disappear into the toxic fumes of industry

like a sailboat into the mist.

In Israel teenagers play with buttons that cause explosions on screens

and look forward to the end of the Gaza operation

so they can leave and go play better video games.

In Gaza mothers clutch tattered pieces of flesh and clothing to their chests

and scream names that will never again be answered

and call out questions to the heavens that will also go unanswered.

And the ghosts of the buffalo roam through the ruins 

looking for their heads

while the people of Gaza comb through the rubble 

looking for their dead,

and the rest of us stare at screens and cry like babies

and ask our own unanswered questions 

of heavens clouded by the fumes of industry,

vanishing stars above a dying world

as the lights go out in Gaza

one by one.

_____________

Reading by Caitlin Johnstone.

The response to the Gaza crisis from western leaders and media outlets and celebrities shows very clearly that we really are led by the least among us. The least wise. The least intelligent. The least compassionate. The least insightful. We are ruled by sociopaths and morons.

Reading by Tim Foley.

You see this kind of thing over and over again from Israel apologists. They tell you things you absolutely know to be false in your own direct perception, over and over and over again, in the hope that they can overwhelm your mind. That's what's happening when they tell you Israel is "defending itself" and "targeting Hamas" when they're mostly killing women and children and bombing entire city blocks into powder, and that's what's happening when they tell you over and over again that you hate Jews and love terrorists even when you know for a fact that you don't.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Before they launch missiles, they launch propaganda campaigns. Before they roll out tanks, they roll out narratives. Everyone who helps manufacture consent for the killing in Gaza is just as culpable for the murder of those thousands of children as the people dropping the bombs.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The thing is there's only so much propaganda spin you can put on the murder of thousands of children.

With other imperial military actions the propagandists had an easier time spinning things. Oh no those evil communists are taking over Vietnam, we need to stop them! Oh no Saddam's got WMDs, we need to get him! Oh no Gaddafi's gonna kill and rape all those Libyans, we have a responsibility to protect them!

In Gaza, Israel and its western backers are massacring children by the thousands with a shockingly vicious bombing campaign that is turning entire neighborhoods into gravel. They're raining down military explosives on a giant concentration camp that is densely populated by children. There's only so much a propagandist can do with that.

Reading by Tim Foley.

It’s okay to admit you were wrong about this. It’s okay to change your mind.

It’s okay to admit you reacted inappropriately to the news of what happened on October 7 and advocated some Israeli responses that you should not have advocated.

It’s okay to admit that you were wrong to cheer when the bombs started landing on Gaza.

It’s okay to admit you were wrong about the longstanding debate over Palestinian rights.

It’s okay to admit that you shared some things online that you now regret sharing.

I say this because there are probably a lot of pro-Israel people looking at what’s happening in Gaza and starting to feel a bit dissonant about it. Like maybe they’re on the wrong side of this thing after all.

And I just want to reassure you that you can change your position on this. It’s perfectly fine and normal to do so.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Israeli ground forces have ramped up activities in Gaza in what anonymous US officials are reportedly telling the press is a "rolling start" to the long-anticipated ground invasion.

Israel has also crippled Gaza's largest telecommunications service, which had been the enclave's last remaining contact with the outside world after Israel knocked out all the others. Humanitarian organizations and mainstream press outlets now say they have lost communication with their contacts in Gaza in a level of information blackout we're unaccustomed to seeing in modern times.

"This information blackout risks providing cover for mass atrocities and contributing to impunity for human rights violations," Human Rights Watch correctly notes.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel has lost the argument. Permanently. There's no coming back from this.

Reading by Tim Foley.

It gets harder and harder for the imperial propagandists to frame empire-targeted powers like Hamas as evil villains who are simply evil because they are evil. As our society gains a better and better collective understanding of psychology and trauma and why individuals do what they do, fewer and fewer people are swallowing such infantile propagandistic frameworks. When something scary and traumatizing happens, more and more people are beginning to ask, "Why? Why did that happen? What were the antecedents which led those people to do what they did?"

When people start asking such questions, answers are revealed which are very inconvenient for the information interests of the western empire. Oh it turns out Israel is an abusive apartheid state and Gaza is a giant concentration camp where Palestinians are deprived of basic human needs. Oh it turns out NATO was amassing war machinery near Russia's border in ways the United States would never in a million years permit near its own borders. Oh it turns out western powers were funneling weapons to murderous extremist groups in Syria with the goal of ousting Assad and installing a puppet regime in Damascus.

More and more people understand that nobody is just plain evil because they are evil; if they're doing something violent and scary, it's a safe bet that something violent and scary was done to them, either immediately before or in their formative years. You see this expanding awareness manifest today in popular movies and shows with the rise of the anti-hero and complex villains with traumatic pasts that you can understand and sympathize with. Modern storytelling has largely abandoned the Virtuous Protagonist vs Villainous Antagonist model, simply because audiences are too conscious to buy it anymore.

Reading by Tim Foley.