Manufacture Dissent

PBS had planned to air One Day in Gaza across its national network, a film that digs into what happened on May 14, 2018, when Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians during the Great March of Return. The BBC had already aired it in the UK. The U.S. broadcast was scheduled, promoted, and locked in. Then, without warning, PBS yanked it from the lineup and replaced it with a recycled Frontline episode about Robert Mueller — something already aired, already streamed, already old news.

The film shows the chaos of that day: the smoke, the snipers, the bodies, the panic, the political theater around the U.S. Embassy opening in Jerusalem that same day. It includes footage and testimony that make it impossible to pretend the violence was abstract or distant. It forces viewers to confront what happened, not as a debate, but as a lived event.

PBS never gave a real explanation. No press release. No public statement. No acknowledgment that the switch even happened. The documentary simply vanished from the schedule. Independent reporting at the time pointed to the obvious: the film was politically sensitive, and PBS didn’t want the blowback. A graphic, uncomfortable look at Israeli military actions — airing on the anniversary of the events — was apparently too much for a network that depends on donors, corporate sponsors, and political goodwill.

The BBC kept the film available. PBS did not. It never reappeared on the schedule, never got a rescheduled date, never received the kind of transparency you’d expect from a public broadcaster. It was quietly buried, replaced with something safer, something that wouldn’t spark phone calls or angry emails.

The documentary shows a pattern — a pattern of framing, of narrative control, of pre‑assigned blame. A pattern that became even more obvious after 10/7, when Israeli officials immediately blamed Hamas for everything before investigations even began.

The irony is that One Day in Gaza was exactly the kind of journalism PBS claims to champion: eyewitness accounts, verified footage, multiple perspectives, and a clear record of what happened. Instead, the network chose silence. And that silence said more than the documentary ever could.

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Sources:

BBC Programme Index (official BBC listing for the documentary)

Plex listing for “One Day in Gaza”

Internet Archive upload noting PBS pulled the film

TheTVDB listing for “One Day in Gaza”

📽️ Credit: Unknown

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Cornell likes to present itself as one of the safest, most prestigious campuses in the country. It’s the kind of place parents brag about, the kind of place brochures show with smiling students on green lawns, the kind of place that insists it has everything under control. But the numbers sitting inside its own reports tell a completely different story. They show a campus where harm isn’t rare. It’s routine.

The university doesn’t advertise that part. It doesn’t put it in the glossy mailers or the campus tours. It doesn't talk about the students being harmed. It doesn’t talk about how many people stay quiet because they don’t trust the system to protect them. It doesn’t talk about how many cases disappear into categories so broad you can barely tell what happened. It just hopes no one looks too closely.

But the numbers are right there. Cornell logged 1216 cases (includes sexual assaults, dating violence , domestic violence, stalking, harassment related misconduct) in six years. One school. One campus. No national average, no multi‑campus compilation, no giant system. Just Cornell. Do the math. That’s two hundred a year. And students aren’t even on campus for a full twelve months, so it’s really two hundred incidents squeezed into eight months. Twenty‑five a month. An incident almost every single day. And that’s just what people were willing to report. Everyone knows the real number is higher.

If one campus can produce numbers like that, then the culture around it isn’t broken — it’s functioning exactly the way it was built. Harm isn’t the exception. It’s the environment. And in the United States, that environment isn’t shrinking. It’s thriving.

📽️ credit: Jennifermarksthespot

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📽️: yaakov_shapiro/x

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Masculinity is a performance for other men, and the Cornell 7 are a textbook example of what happens when that performance becomes the only reality men trust. None of this is about impressing women. It’s about proving to other men that you’re willing to cross lines, enforce dominance, and protect the group’s image at any cost. Masculinity becomes a stage where the audience is always male, and the applause comes from violence, silence, and loyalty.

This is why toxic masculinity is an epistemic problem. It warps how men understand truth. It tells them that aggression is evidence, that domination is logic, that empathy is weakness, and that accountability is betrayal. Once you internalize that, you stop seeing the world as it is. You see it as a constant test of whether other men will approve of you.

The Cornell 7 operated inside that closed male reality. Their choices weren’t random. They were shaped by a system that rewards men for shutting down doubt, shutting down compassion, and shutting down any version of truth that threatens the group’s performance. Toxic masculinity doesn’t just teach men how to act. It teaches them what to believe.

📽️: Remaking Manhood Now

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The Green Party has voted to adopt a motion declaring Zionism to be a form of racism, triggering immediate backlash from the mainstream media and pro-Israeli groups. The motion was brought forward by members who felt that the party had not taken a firm enough stance on the political ideology fueling the oppression of the Palestinians.

It was passed by delegates who argued that the ideology was a racist philosophy that has resulted in the subjugation of an ethnic group, based on their views and decades of ethnic cleansing, segregation and genocide.

Mainstream media outlets immediately jumped to the defense of Israel, painting the motion as divisive and inflammatory, while several pro-Israeli groups accused the Greens of being prejudiced and prejudging the dispute between Israel and Palestine.

Many in the Green Party believe that the motion is a necessary step in confronting Zionism, which they see as an obstacle to the party’s foreign policy goals. They argue that Israeli’s discriminatory laws and policies towards the Palestinians, which have been documented by international human rights watchdogs, including reports by reputable rights groups that have accused Israel of committing crimes against humanity and of maintaining an apartheid regime, must be confronted.

Backlash mounted against the decision as mainstream media personalities accused the Greens of fueling divisive rhetoric. Pro-Israeli groups accused the Greens of crossing a red line in choosing to stoke tensions between Jews and Arabs, with some arguing that criticism of Zionism was tantamount to bigotry against Jews.

They said Zionism and Judaism were not the same thing, but many Green Party delegates disagreed.

Defenders of the motion say the rebuke of Zionism follows a consistent pattern of mainstream media attempts to delegitimize criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic

They argue that the vote marks a shift in how politicians are beginning to discuss the Israeli government, and its discriminatory and genocidal policies towards the Palestinians. With increased scrutiny of the Gaza war and growing pressure on European lawmakers and legislators to take stronger stances, it has become harder to ignore Zionism’s role in fueling the persecution of the Palestinians.

While it remains to be seen if other parties will follow the Greens in explicitly naming Zionism as racist, the motion has marked an important shift in political discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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Sources:

📽️ DoubleDown News

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/04/green-party-members-pass-zionism-is-racism-motion

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-green-party-members-pass-motion-zionism-racism

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/4/uk-green-party-members-pass-zionism-is-racism-motion

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/green-party-zionism-racism-motion-b2623451.html

https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/green-party-members-pass-zionism-is-racism-motion

📽️: Uncivilized Media

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📽️: DropSite News

On February 28th, Minab began its morning just as it always did. The children put on their schoolbags, the teachers prepared their lessons and the parents sent their children out the door, expecting to see them again for lunch. By noon, the school had been reduced to a crater. A sequence of U.S. Tomahawk missiles struck the building, leaving almost nothing standing. At least 156 people were killed – 120 of them children. Washington referred to it as a "precision strike" while Minab describes it as a slaughter.

For two months Jeremy Scahill, Murtaza Hussain and Sayah sat with the people who had lived through the incident. They toured the ruins, which were still covered with notebooks and had burned desks. They heard parents who searched through the wreckage using their hands. They spoke to teachers who had lost all their classrooms in a matter of seconds. The message in each of their accounts was that there had been no fighters at that school: no weapons and no military presence, just children studying maths and reading.

The strike took place at the morning assembly when the courtyard was full. The first missile brought down the main hall, the second went through the playground and the third struck the exit route on which the children were running. The survivors said that the sound was one continuous scream — metal, concrete and human voices merging into a single sound.

The parents ran towards the school through clouds of dust. A few of them found their children still alive but with injuries. Many others found only bits of clothing, backpacks or shoes. One father knew it was his daughter because she always wore a bracelet. A teacher was able to recognize her students by the colours of their notebooks since their faces had disappeared.

The U.S. government has not provided anything that is even like an admission of responsibility. It has given no evidence, no apology, and no explanation with what actually took place on the ground. The officials keep repeating the same statement: "We are assessing." People who survived the attack in Minab say that they have heard this phrase before and that it always ends nowhere.

What Scahill, Hussain, and Sayah have documented is not a tragic error or confusion; it is one of the most serious U.S. war crimes since Vietnam – a deliberate attack on a civilian school during broad daylight. The survivors are aware of this, the journalists are aware of this, the world understands this and the only people who are pretending that this is not the case are those who carried out the missile strikes.

The families who talked to the reporters did so since they won't allow their children's deaths to be included in another Pentagon press release and they want the world to fully understand what took place and who was responsible.

It is their story, and they no longer need to wait for America to spin it.

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John Pilger’s 2002 documentary revisits the West Bank and Gaza a quarter‑century after his first film on the same subject, arguing that the core injustice facing Palestinians has remained fundamentally unchanged. Pilger documents how Palestinians continue to live under Israeli military occupation, facing restrictions on movement, home demolitions, refugee‑camp limbo, and a permit system he compares to apartheid‑era pass laws.

Through interviews with Palestinians and Israelis — including doctors, historians, settlers, peace activists, and families of both suicide bombers and their victims — Pilger explores how decades of displacement, unimplemented UN resolutions on the right of return, and the expansion of settlements have shaped daily life and fueled cycles of resistance.

The film states that the occupation’s human toll, combined with Israel’s military dominance, has created a reality in which Palestinians fight back with limited means while living under what Pilger describes as “open‑prison” conditions. It also highlights Israeli voices critical of government policy, emphasizing that the conflict’s human consequences are felt on both sides.

Upon release, the documentary drew controversy, with some critics alleging bias, though broadcasting regulators upheld its accuracy. Despite the debate, the film remains a stark examination of why peace has been so elusive and why the Palestinian question is still unresolved.

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Ansar Allah, often called the Houthis, is a political and military movement that emerged from Yemen’s northern Saada region in the early 2000s. They didn’t appear out of nowhere. They grew out of years of political exclusion, economic neglect, and foreign interference in Yemen’s internal affairs.

Before the war, Ansar Allah was part of Yemen’s political landscape. They ran social programs, religious schools, and local governance structures. They were one of several Yemeni groups pushing back against corruption and foreign influence. They weren’t designated as terrorists inside Yemen. They were a domestic political and social movement.

The turning point came when the United States (Obama) and Saudi Arabia began shaping Yemen’s internal politics. Washington backed Riyadh as the regional enforcer, and Saudi Arabia acted as the proxy power. The goal was simple: keep Yemen’s government aligned with U.S. and Saudi interests, especially when it came to security cooperation and control over strategic waterways.

When Yemenis pushed back, including Ansar Allah, they were labeled “Iran-backed rebels” and later “terrorists.” This label didn’t come from Yemen. It came from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, who routinely classify local resistance movements as terrorists whenever those movements refuse to hand over their land, resources, or political autonomy.

In 2015, Saudi Arabia launched a full-scale military intervention in Yemen with U.S. support. The airstrikes, blockade, and economic strangulation led to one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. Millions were pushed into famine conditions. Food, fuel, and medicine were blocked or restricted. Civilian infrastructure was bombed repeatedly.

Throughout this, Ansar Allah became the de facto governing authority in northern Yemen. They ran ministries, collected taxes, maintained security, and kept basic services functioning under bombardment. Whether people support them or not, the reality is simple: they are a governing entity controlling territory where the majority of Yemen’s population lives.

The U.S. narrative frames them as terrorists. The Yemeni reality frames them as a political and military authority that rose in response to corruption, foreign interference, and a devastating war. Understanding who Ansar Allah is requires stepping outside the labels imposed by outside powers and looking at the conditions that created them in the first place.

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Sources:

Al Jazeera – Yemen War & Blockade Coverage

Middle East Eye – Ansar Allah & Yemen Politics

Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies – Yemeni-led Analysis

UN OCHA Yemen – Humanitarian Situation Reports

Human Rights Watch – Saudi-led Coalition Airstrikes & Blockade