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.

They don't have truth on their side, and they don't have morality on their side, so all they can ever do is attack the sources of the ideas and information that are opening people's eyes to the criminality of Israel and its western allies.

Reading by Tim Foley.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told the press on Tuesday that the continued killing of civilians in Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza "is going to happen".

Reading by Tim Foley.

How high does the pile of mutilated and dismembered children need to be before it's high enough? Give me a specific height please, in meters or in yards.

Reading by Tim Foley.

You see kids, Israel needs to keep dropping bombs on buildings full of children and targeting civilians with siege warfare and murdering Palestinians in the West Bank and censoring the media and arresting dissidents and killing journalists, because if it doesn't, the bad guys will win.

No no you don't understand: if Israel stops killing children by the thousands in its relentless bombing campaign, the nation could be taken over by murderous terrorists.

Reading by Tim Foley.

It's a little bit bomby in Gaza today,

at least that's what the news men say.

Israel's victims were "murdered" and "killed"

and all mourn the innocent blood that was spilled,

but in Gaza explosives just fall from the air

and nobody mentions who launched them, from where.

They talk about "blasts" and how buildings were "hit".

Who blasted and hit them? Eh, who gives a shit.

It's a little bit bomby outside, that's the weather.

Put up your umbrellas, dudes. Get it together.

Reading by Tim Foley.

I used to be pro-Palestinian, you know. I thought Israel was wrong for carpet bombing Gaza and using siege warfare on civilians.

But then I ran into a very wise Israel apologist who changed my way of looking at things forever.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The US-centralized empire is a giant network of allies, partners and assets spanning the entire globe. Many of the nations in this network, such as Israel, have strong ideologies and values systems that the empire must cooperate with to obtain their loyalty. But the empire itself has no ideology or values - it values nothing but planetary domination. The empire's motives are no more ideological than the motives of a mugger are ideological.

So the empire has no ideology, but it is held together by cooperation with individual governments who do. The problem this creates is that sometimes the ideologies of those states cause them to do things that go against the interests of the empire as a whole. Israel can just up and decide to commit a genocidal massacre in front of everyone. Saudi Arabia can decide it's going to dismember a Washington Post reporter with a bone saw. Proxies in Ukraine can keep saying Nazi things and sporting Nazi insignia in public. They do these things because unlike the top brass in the imperial power structure they are guided by ideology, with no regard for the need to preserve the empire's image as a "rules-based international order".

Reading by Tim Foley.

The western press have been finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to do reporting alongside the middle easterners they've been lying about for generations, and discovering that a lot of those middle easterners speak English and have a few things to say.

Reading by Tim Foley.