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It can make you feel like you’re going mad. How phony and superficial it all is. How we’re a year and a half into history’s first live-streamed genocide and our whole society is acting like everything’s peachy. We’re murdering kids. We’re starving them. We’re dropping high tech military explosives on them. Blowing their limbs off. Ripping their guts out. Shooting them in the head. This isn’t just being done by “Israel”. It’s being done by the entire western empire which backs these atrocities. And yet if you turn on a TV you’ll see famous people laughing and joking about nonsense, expressing political opinions of no more depth and significance than whether or not there should have been a female Ghostbusters movie. Go read the news and it’s dominated by empty fluff about celebrities and politicians and the latest brain fart to come out of Donald Trump’s mouth. Go to a party and everyone’s nattering about vapid gibberish, yelling “No politics!” if you try to say anything about the holocaust-shaped elephant in the room. Newer readers might not know this, but I used to have a lot more fun on my platform. Lots of humor. Psychedelic poetry. Spirituality and philosophy. But ever since the Gaza holocaust began, that kind of writing has often felt like it would be irreverent and frivolous. Almost sacrilegious. I would feel like I’m joining in with the madness of mainstream culture by turning my back on all those emaciated bodies and mutilated children. So for the last year and a half I’ve mostly just been doing what I feel everyone on earth ought to be doing: pointing to the genocide and saying it needs to stop. I used to be a lot more poetical and creative in my ways of pointing to the criminality of the empire, because its depravity was often difficult for people to really grasp, so I was always seeking out new ways to help people see its monstrosity with fresh eyes. Now that they’re just butchering children right in front of us, that’s not really what’s called for anymore. What’s called for is to keep drawing everyone’s attention to the terrible thing that’s staring us all right in the face. This task shouldn’t be falling to university activists and obscure antiwar bloggers. Every news outlet in the world should be making this their entire focus. If we had a sane and ethical news media, this is what they would be doing. All the leading stories every single day would be about the latest evil thing Israel and its western backers have done in Gaza, clearly stating in every headline our own government’s role in making this possible. Every press conference would be completely dominated with questions asking every western official why we are participating in an active genocide and demanding answers about when it is going to stop. Instead we get “Palestinians perish in explosion” passive-language headlines, usually coupled with “…says Hamas-run health ministry” in order to let readers disbelieve the entire story. And that’s on those rare occasions that Israel’s atrocities get reported on at all; normally Gaza is seen as a third or fourth-tier issue of far less importance than some infinitely less egregious grievance in our own country. Palestinian lives are given vastly less weight than western lives, with our own feelings and comforts emphasized far more heavily than the issue of the Palestinian people living or dying. And it can just make you feel like you’re going crazy. It’s like if we were all going around physically drenched in human blood, with blood flooding our living rooms and severed limbs strewn about our bedrooms and kitchens — but nobody was talking about it. You try to say “What’s up with all this blood and gore?” and they shush you and tell you it’s impolite to talk about politics. A dark red deluge pours out of your minivan door when you open it to pick up your kid from soccer practice, and everyone looks away. This is happening. We know it’s happening. It’s happening right in front of us and we’re acting like it’s not. It’s so maddening and frustrating, and it can make you feel so powerless. But we keep pointing at Gaza, because what the hell else are we going to do? The alternative is to join the lunatics acting like it isn’t happening. At the very least, it’s a way of preserving our sanity. Preserving our humanity. Even if they do succeed in purging Gaza of all Palestinian life, at the very least we will have prevented the bastards from warping and twisting us into psychopathic freaks like them. Even if we can’t stop them from destroying Gaza, we can at least stop them from destroying our hearts.

Escaping from the matrix of the mainstream western worldview is like escaping from a cult: it starts with one tiny heresy. One small, secret thought that goes against all your indoctrination. Maybe it’s the realization that you’ve been lied to your whole life about Israel and Palestine. Maybe it had something to do with watching the mass media manufacture consent for the invasion of Iraq. Whatever it is, it starts out as a tiny little mental suspicion that the information sources you’ve been trusting to help form your understanding of the world might not be nearly as trustworthy as you’d been led to believe. If you talk to anyone who’s ever left a cult, they’ll generally tell you that it started out the same way for them. They see a sign that the cult leader claiming he’s Jesus might actually be kind of petty and egotistical. They find themselves questioning whether Sri Baba Shiva really needs that many Rolls-Royces. They wonder if maybe Pastor Jeremiah is saying God wants him to have so many wives for reasons that have more to do with what Pastor Jeremiah wants than what God wants. These little heresies eventually add up and snowball into an avalanche which collapses the indoctrination that was keeping them in the cult that whole time. It actually tends to play out this way when it comes to leaving any psychologically abusive relationship. A little spark forms in the back of the victim’s mind questioning whether the thoughts their partner put in their head are really true — and noticing who would benefit if they weren’t. Enough little sparks like that, and you eventually get a fire that burns the whole relationship down. Those are the kinds of sparks we’re trying to get flying when working to wake people up from the indoctrination of the empire. We’re trying to get those first tiny heresies to form in people’s minds, using whatever’s happening in the news at the moment or whatever relevant ideas are trending. We don’t need to get anyone to wake all the way up in one go — we just need to get the snowball rolling. One little heretical thought can be all it takes to get someone seriously questioning whether everything they’ve been taught about the world is a lie. So we point out the lies wherever we find them. Any glaring plot hole in the official narrative anywhere it pops up. Right now Gaza is a constant deluge of information and raw video footage that can spark some major heresy if it is truly seen and ingested. The way we were just told to cheer for Syria being taken over by Al Qaeda is another. The lies we were told about Ukraine and the events that led up to the war is another. Every day there’s something coming up that you can show anyone who will listen to you, saying, “See? Look at that! They lied! They’re lying right now! I wonder what else they’re lying about?” And it just takes one. One well-placed spotlight on one obvious plot hole is all it takes to get someone pulling on a thread that will eventually unravel the whole matrix of delusion for them. And once they’re awake, they can join us in helping to wake up the others. So make a vocation of being a serial blasphemer. Get people asking the inconvenient questions, and spark as many small acts of heresy as you can. People are only going to awaken from the imperial narrative matrix one pair of eyelids at a time, and we each have the opportunity to spend some time every day trying to help open them.

South Africa’s legal team has submitted hundreds of documents containing what it calls “undeniable evidence” as part of its ongoing genocide case against the state of Israel, with its representative to The Hague saying “The problem we have is that we have too much evidence.” The Israeli outlet Haaretz reports that IDF soldiers are actively blocking the return of Palestinians they have driven out of northern Gaza as part of the so-called “General’s Plan” — a land grab of Palestinian territory using ethnic cleansing by violent force. Haaretz has been far more critical of Israel’s actions than western media outlets have been. It recently published an editorial titled “If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is”. Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken is now publicly advocating international sanctions on the Israeli government for its apartheid abuses and opposition to a Palestinian state, drawing an outraged response from the Netanyahu regime. Last week there was a two-day rally attended by multiple Israeli government officials called the “Preparing to Resettle Gaza Conference,” which was exactly what it sounds like: high-profile Israelis gathering to discuss the agenda to drive Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and replace their territory with Jewish settlements. Humanitarian aid in Gaza has reportedly fallen to its lowest level since Israel’s genocidal onslaught began, with just a few hundred truckloads entering the enclave from October 1 to October 22 and nothing getting through to the north. The UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs recently warned that “The entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying,” a warning that was issued shortly before the Israeli Knesset voted to cut off UNRWA aid throughout all the territories it controls. According to a new report from The Washington Post, the US State Department has been inundated with hundreds of reports of US-supplied weapons being used to needlessly kill and harm civilians in Gaza, but in violation of its own rules it has failed to take any action on a single one of them. According to one WaPo source, investigations of these reports have tended to stall out at the “verification” stage, which consists of asking the Israeli government for its side of the story. Israeli forces reportedly killed 109 Palestinians in a single massacre on Tuesday — including dozens of children — when Israel blew up an apartment building where hundreds of civilians were sleeping. The IDF killed five journalists in a single day last Sunday, bringing the total number of journalists murdered in Israel’s genocidal assault to at least 180. This occurred shortly after Israel published a kill list of six Al Jazeera journalists who it claims are secret Hamas fighters, although no Al Jazeera reporters were among the five killed. And this is just in Gaza. Israel has already killed some 164 healthcare workers in its ongoing assault on Lebanon, where the Netanyahu government is sabotaging ceasefire negotiations by inserting ridiculous non-starter demands like Israeli planes being allowed to enter Lebanese airspace and Israeli forces being allowed to police the ceasefire deal with military operations in southern Lebanon as they see fit. Every day there’s more and more ugly news in the middle east, perpetrated by Israel and its powerful western backers who make its abuses possible. It’s getting harder and harder to stay on top of. There really is “too much evidence” to keep up with.

What happened when I criticised the BBC’s editorial policy when I was doing my Master’s in London in 2012: 🗣️My professor, who was a BBC journalist, got angry with me. 🗣️He sent me an e mail saying: “Don’t do this again.” 🗣️He asked me to change the title of my thesis.. Go to the first reply to this post to get a surprise!

Israel bans UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese from entering Israel Here is her no-nonsense response to the gaslighting attempt of a MSM dude who looks like Big Bird from Sesame Street. ‘Can you really keep a straight face when you ask that question?’ They have nowhere to go...

Don't talk to me about October 7. Don't talk to me about hostages. I don't care. I haven't cared for months. Many, many times more Gazans are dying and suffering than the number of Israelis who died and are suffering. That means the death and suffering of Palestinians is much more urgent and matters much more than the death and suffering of Israelis. The only way to disagree with this is to believe Israeli lives are worth much, much more than Palestinian lives. The longer the mass atrocity in Gaza goes on for the less tragic and worthy of sympathy October 7 becomes. It's already been diminished to a fraction of the significance it once had, and it's getting smaller and smaller as this nightmare stretches on. This is not the fault of people like me, it is the fault of the people conducting this genocide. You don't get to murder tens of thousands of people and then demand everyone weep over you losing a thousand. That's not a thing. It's SO fucking obnoxious how Israel supporters keep acting like actions a tiny fraction as impactful as what's been happening in Gaza are where all our sympathy and attention should still be going, nearly four months after the fact. Fuck all the way off with that idiotic bullshit. All of Israel's actions since October 7 have revealed why Hamas did what it did on October 7. This is the kind of murderousness and depravity Palestinians have been living under from the Nakba on. Israel is so murderous and depraved that one of the most common talking points of its apologists when responding to opposition to the atrocities in Gaza has been "Yeah, what did Hamas expect would happen? Fuck around and find out!" That's not a sane or acceptable way for human beings to talk about acts of genocide and the butchery of thousands of children, but Israel apologists think it's normal. Because that's what Israel is. In the eyes of the world, Israel has retroactively legitimized the acts of violence the Palestinian resistance has been inflicting upon it. It has legitimized those acts by showing the world its true face.

Israel Accuses The ICJ Of (You Guessed It) Antisemitism The International Court of Justice rejected Israel’s request to dismiss the genocide case brought against it by South Africa on Friday, ruling by a massive majority that the case shall proceed and instructing Israel to refrain from killing and harming Palestinians in the interim. Many Palestine supporters have expressed dismay that the ICJ did not explicitly order a ceasefire, while many others (including South African officials) argue that the ruling is very positive and tantamount to a ceasefire order because it demands the end of harm to members of the protected group. Imperial media are aggressively emphasising the absence of a ceasefire order in their headlines and many Israel apologists are framing that absence as a victory for their favorite ethnostate, but such performative chest-thumping is severely undercut by the way high-level Israeli officials are currently accusing the ICJ of antisemitism and saying Israel should ignore its rulings. “The international court of justice went above and beyond when it granted South Africa’s antisemitic request to discuss the claim of genocide in Gaza, and now refuses to reject the petition outright,” complained Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant in response to the ruling. “The decision of the antisemitic court in The Hague proves what was already known: This court does not seek justice, but rather the persecution of Jewish people,” said Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir. Ben Gvir also tweeted “Hague Schmague” immediately after the ruling was issued, which will probably go down in history as the most Israeli tweet of all time. Everyone’s arguing about whether or not the ICJ’s ruling is helpful, and I don’t know enough one way or the other to be sure either way, but from where things stand right now it does seem unlikely to me that managers of the Israeli war machine would be getting this freaked out and whipping out their tired old “antisemitism” song and dance if there wasn’t something of substance to it. International lawyer Francis Boyle, who won provisional measures against Yugoslavia at the ICJ in 1993, said the following of the ruling: “This is a massive, overwhelming legal victory for the Republic of South Africa against Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. The U.N. General Assembly now can suspend Israel from participation in its activities as it did for South Africa and Yugoslavia. It can admit Palestine as a full member. And — especially since the International Criminal Court has been a farce — it can establish a tribunal to prosecute the highest level officials of the Israeli government, both civilian and military.” So take that for whatever that’s worth to you. In any case the butchery in Gaza still urgently needs to be ended, and only time will tell whether Friday’s development had any major effect on the outcome of this horror. But man what I wouldn’t have given to be a fly on the wall at the meetings they were having at the US State Department on Friday. It’s days like this that remind you why empire managers switched from talking about “international law” to using the meaningless phrase “rules-based international order”.

◾The deputy Prime Minister of Britain downplays the devastating toll of around 7,000 Palestinian killed, listen to him against the background footage of the war crimes committed in the Gaza strip: -You can't conduct a military operation without there being some "civilian impact". ◾He was asked by the interviewer: Have you seen the pictures? Fcking disgusting