TheKarenCorn

[Jessica Valenti @JessicaValenti]

I know a lot of us have already clocked the victim blaming—but it’s about to get much worse #cornell

[United Farm Workers @UFWupdates]

This ruling upholds the laws protecting the basic rights of every person in this country.

This admin can’t keep snatching up hardworking people without cause, just for being brown and working class. We’ll keep fighting for the rights of farm workers & every immigrant community.

[United Farm Workers @UFWupdates]

A federal district court has barred Border Patrol’s unlawful practices in UFW v Noem-filed after chaotic raids targeted farmworkers including our union members.
The preliminary injunction applies to future Border Patrol operations in CA’s Eastern District.
https://t.co/IsReH0bO1q

[New York Times Tech Guild @NYTGuildTech]

We are on ULP strike. We gave @nytimes management months of notice of our strike deadline, we made ourselves available around the clock, but the company has decided that our members aren’t worth enough to agree to a fair contract and stop committing unfair labor practices.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The Most American Thing That Has Ever Happened

A man set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington today. He said he did it in protest of the genocide in Gaza.

Independent journalist Talia Jane reports that she was able to obtain footage of the incident, which the unnamed man apparently recorded himself. Jane reports that the man said he is “an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force” and that he “will no longer be complicit in genocide.” After igniting he repeatedly yelled “Free Palestine.”

According to Jane, a police officer showed up pointing a gun at the man’s burning body; I guess that’s just what American cops do when they aren’t sure what to do. Someone who was actually trying to save the man reportedly yelled “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!”

This just might be the most American thing I have ever heard of. It’s more American than the fake bald eagle cries they put in Hollywood movies. It’s more American than monster trucks and mass shootings. You simply cannot fit more America into a single incident than a man dying a horrifying death in protest of war crimes while a first responder screams at cops to stop pointing their guns at him and go get fire extinguishers. If you were to pick a single moment in history to sum up the essence and expression of the US empire, that would be it.

The New York Times reports that the man “was taken to a nearby hospital with life-threatening injuries and remains in critical condition.” A spokesman for the US Air Force has reportedly confirmed that the man is an active duty member.

“I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” the man reportedly recorded himself saying before the incident. “But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

The nameless protestor is correct. People in Gaza are being burned alive, are suffocating to death under collapsed buildings, are having operations and amputations without anesthesia, are starving to death, are watching their loved ones die in front of them, are experiencing suffering of a degree that very few of us here in the west can even imagine. And our ruling class is absolutely attempting to normalize this for us.

This isn’t even the first self-immolation we’ve seen in protest of Israel’s US-backed atrocities after October 7; back in December an unnamed protester with a Palestinian flag self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate building in Atlanta.

And as I reflect on this I can’t help thinking, how many Israel supporters have self-immolated in protest of October 7? How many Israel supporters have self-immolated in protest of the super serious antisemitism crisis they claim is making Jews feel unsafe in their communities? Surely their claims are just as serious and sincere as those of Palestine supporters, no?

Of course not. This has not happened and the very idea is laughable. Israel apologists insist that it is they and their favorite ethnostate who are the real victims in all this, rather than the population of Gaza who has seen tens of thousands of Palestinians annihilated while Israeli soldiers openly celebrate their mass displacement and death. But you don’t see them self-immolating; you see them cheerleading for ethnic cleansing and genocide. They wouldn’t do anything to cause themselves pain or inconvenience to promote their pet agenda. They wouldn’t even miss brunch for it.

It’s a horrific thing, burning alive. I suspect that pretty much everyone who’s ever self-immolated has had serious regrets about it within the first few seconds. There’s simply nothing one can do to prepare oneself for the experience of that kind of pain, or for how long it can take them to lose consciousness after it’s started. At that point the only comfort they could possibly offer themselves is that it can’t go on forever.

But the fact that anyone would ever take such a measure at all shows how profoundly urgent they recognize this issue to be, and how much more sincere they are about it than those on the other side.

[Tiberius @tiberiusfiles]

Since Saturday…

We’ve discovered Hind Rajat was murdered by Israel, alone, amidst the bodies of her family, after crying for help as she was terrified.

We’ve witnessed Sidra Hassouna’s broken and dismembered corpse hung from a wall after another IOF attack.

We’ve watched yet another young Palestinian girl taking her last breaths, lying on a hospital floor, as an Israeli missile blew her stomach out.

We’ve seen medics desperately attempting to resuscitate a baby whose home had been destroyed by the IOF.

We’ve seen another infant whose legs had been blown off, lying in hospital without anaesthetic.

That’s five images that should never exist—five scenarios that can never be justified—in five days.

Yet these precious souls are merely five out of tens of thousands of dead or injured children—children the west sees as expendable to protect a fascist regime built on bloodshed.

There is no returning from this for the western order. The systems in place that facilitated this—and many genocides before it—must be entirely dismantled if the world is to know peace.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

We know Israel knew where Hind was because the Red Crescent coordinated with the IDF. It is discoverable who specifically they coordinated with and who that officer spoke with in the chain of command. There is a digital trail that exposes everyone involved and they should rot in prison

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Israelis Keep Hurting Their Own PR Interests By Talking

One problem Israel keeps running into is how the institutionalized dehumanization of Palestinians which keeps the apartheid state operational also causes Israelis to say things that non-Israelis will find extremely shocking, which hurts Israel’s PR interests.

We saw this illustrated in a recent New Yorker interview with Daniella Weiss, a leader of the push to build illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. Weiss stated frankly and unapologetically that she supports apartheid, that she doesn’t believe Palestinians should have any sovereignty anywhere, that she doesn’t believe Palestinians should have voting rights, that she wants the population of Gaza to be replaced by Israeli settlements, and that she is untroubled by the killing of children in Gaza because she feels it’s being done in the interests of Israeli children.

Asked where the Palestinians in Gaza should go, Weiss replied, “To Sinai, to Egypt, to Turkey.” When the interviewer said the Palestinians are not Egyptian or Turkish, she contended that “The Ukrainians are not French, but when the war started they went to many countries.”

To the question “When you see Palestinian children dying, what’s your emotional reaction as a human being?”, Weiss answered, “I go by a very basic human law of nature. My children are prior to the children of the enemy, period. They are first. My children are first.”

Asked if she believes human rights are not universal and should not apply equally to everyone, Weiss replied “That’s right.”

But perhaps the most revealing statement Weiss made was her entirely truthful explanation of what drives the Israeli push to colonize Palestinian land:

“In Israel, there’s a lot of support for settlements, and this is why there have been right-wing governments for so many years. The world, especially the United States, thinks there is an option for a Palestinian state, and, if we continue to build communities, then we block the option for a Palestinian state. We want to close the option for a Palestinian state, and the world wants to leave the option open. It’s a very simple thing to understand.”

That one paragraph right there will teach you more about the present-day realities of the Israel-Palestine conflict than an entire year of watching CNN. It’s horrid, and it’s jarring to hear it spoken out loud in a favorable way… but it’s true.

This sort of thing has been happening for years. Israelis who’ve been marinating in a self-validating echo chamber of Zionist ideology which dehumanizes Palestinians and normalizes oppression and abuse don’t think twice about saying things that make Israel look bad on the world stage, because to them it’s just the standard status quo way of looking at things.

In 2021 a settler from New York named Yaakov Fauci made headlines around the world with his candid statements to a Palestinian family whose Sheikh Jarrah home he was squatting in.

Fauci, apparently fully aware that he was being filmed, famously replied to the family’s complaints that he was stealing their home by shamelessly telling them, “If I don’t steal it, someone else will steal it.”

And the thing is, he wasn’t lying. He was truthfully describing an abusive dynamic in apartheid Israel where Palestinians are being forced out of their homes in order to control ethnic demographics and advance the agenda outlined above by Daniella Weiss. If he’d been a trained propagandist for the Israeli state he never would have made such comments on camera, but because he was just a Zionism-indocrinated member of the Israeli public he saw no reason to hold his tongue.

Some years ago The Empire Files’ Abby Martin put together a devastating critique of the Zionist ideology just by going around the streets of Jerusalem with a camera and a microphone and talking to Jewish Israelis about their views on Palestinians. Over and over and over again they shared their support for tyranny, murder, genocide and ethnic cleansing in their own words and without hesitation, never thinking that their words could be used to harm Israel’s image, because to them these were just normal things that they said all the time in their day to day life.

You see the same sort of thing when Israelis are filmed sitting in lawn chairs to watch and cheer IDF bombing operations on Palestinian neighborhoods, during which a woman once told the press “I’m just a little bit fascist” after advocating the total destruction of Gaza City.

Every time this happens it sends viral video footage around the internet and does real damage to the world’s perception of Israel. That’s a big part of why Israel is struggling to control the narrative about the Gaza massacre today, which is in turn being exacerbated by more incendiary statements by Israelis, not just from the general public but from within the Israeli government itself.

On Saturday Israeli security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter casually referred to the violent forced expulsion of Palestinians from the northern half of the Gaza Strip as “Nakba 2023”, a reference to the violent forced expulsion which was inflicted on Palestinians at the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948.

Haaretz reports:

Israeli security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter (Likud) was asked in a news interview on Saturday whether the images of northern Gaza Strip residents evacuating south on the IDF’s orders are comparable to images of the Nakba. He replied: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba. From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war — as the IDF seeks to do in Gaza — with masses between the tanks and the soldiers.”

When asked again whether this was the “Gaza Nakba”, Dichter — a member of the security cabinet and former Shin Bet director — said “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”

When later asked if this means Gaza City residents won’t be allowed to return, he replied: “I don’t know how it’ll end up happening since Gaza City is one-third of the Strip — half the land’s population but a third of the territory.”

Dichter’s comments are surprising not only because Israel has been publicly framing the mass displacement in Gaza as a measure taken solely to protect civilians, but also because the Israeli government has long officially denied that the Nakba ever happened, even passing laws forbidding its history to be taught in schools.

Even as western officials hasten to frame Israel’s actions as a defensive and measured response to the Hamas attack on October 7, Israeli officials have been falling all over themselves in a mad rush to make those western officials look like liars.

When talking about the Gaza assault Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made headlines by invoking the biblical nation of Amalek, whose people God instructed the Israelites to commit total genocide against. The first book of Samuel contains the instructions, “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

President Isaac Herzog insinuated last month that all civilians in Gaza are legitimate military targets because they failed to overthrow Hamas, saying, “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”

When announcing the total siege on Gaza which would see the enclave cut off from electricity, food, water and fuel, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant stated that “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”

IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said Israel would turn Gaza into a “city of tents” and that Israel’s “emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy” in its bombing campaign.

Dan Gillerman, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, said last month that “I am very puzzled by the constant concern which the world is showing for the Palestinian people and is actually showing for these horrible, inhuman animals who have done the worst atrocities that this century has seen.”

“Hamas became ISIS and the citizens of Gaza are celebrating instead of being horrified,” The Economist cites an Israeli general saying last month. “Human beasts are dealt with accordingly.”

“Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal,” a major general named Giora Eiland wrote in an Israeli newspaper, adding, “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”

Israel’s allies keep trying to portray it as a rational actor and a positive force in the world, but if you listen to Israelis themselves you get a very different understanding of what this murderous apartheid state is actually about.

As Maya Angelou said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

[CAIR National @CAIRNational]

We are shocked and disturbed to learn that a landlord in Chicago expressing anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian views broke into a Muslim family's apartment and attacked them with a knife, injuring the mother and killing her 6-year-old son, Wadea Al-Fayoume. @cairchicago will hold a press conference this afternoon to share more details, God willing. The Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-Palestinian racism being spread by politicians, media outlets, and social media platforms must stop. Now. #Palestine #Israel #Islamophobia #Wadea

[Jim Gray (The former Chief) @JimGraytweetz]

I was fortunate enough to get a private screening of the film, Killers of the Flower Moon earlier this month. Having been marginally released from my NDA with the premiere of the film today at Cannes, I have a few thoughts.

[Jorts (and Jean) @JortsTheCat]

Erasmo is out of work while the orchards are too flooded to prune. Many farm workers in CA lost income due to storms and flooding. Growers are insured for losses, but their workers aren’t.

PLEASE donate to support @UFWupdates emergency aid efforts here: https://t.co/9GEFRD21Ti

[TheKarenCorn @TheKarenCorn]

@hankgreen Putrefaction

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

If you live in #CO03 and voted against Lauren Boebert, you can check the status of your ballot here:

https://t.co/txzUuXvxmc

[TheKarenCorn @TheKarenCorn]

@BobLeBlancEsq @JLLederman I have served on the Democratic State Committee with Jesse for years! He made a great carpool buddy when we met in person.

[Jorts (and Jean) @JortsTheCat]

Why is the NYT writing about workers standing up for themselves but describing it like ringworm

[The White House 46 Archived @WhiteHouse46]

.@PressSec on today’s Build Back Better news:

[TheKarenCorn @TheKarenCorn]

@TheShanique I am drinking my calories

[TheKarenCorn @TheKarenCorn]

@SoniaChangDiaz Dose for Dunks

[Gravel Institute @GravelInstitute]

Pat Tillman called the Iraq War "fucking illegal," got shot to death by his own men, and then had his death covered up by the U.S. military.

[☆ ‧dreamboy·˟͙‧̩̥l @LilNasX]

omg if you roll down your window at chic fil a playing call me by your name they give u a free sandwich and a lemonade