I host this meritless screed partly for entertainment value, funny if you’re in a good mood, but mainly as one of a myriad ways in which Israeli hasbara, whether from inside the settler state or without, becomes its own caricature. As such it serves as a dark but comic scene in the Gaslit Opera which last week saw Bibi likening an Israeli newspaper’s citing of testimony, by IDF soldiers ordered to shoot children, to the antisemitic “blood libel” of mediaeval Christendom.
Blot on the landscape? Palestinian flags at Glastonbury ’25 with (inset) the man who cries “antisemitism”
In a June 27 post on Palestine Action, a peaceful direct action group which the UK (its complicity in war crimes a flagrant breach of international law) means to list as a terrorist organisation, so making membership or support a crime punishable by up to fourteen years in jail, I wrote:
[existing] maximum sentences for criminal damage may not suffice to instil fear in those whose antisemitism – what other motive could they possibly have? – might otherwise extend to actively opposing ‘our’ helping a rogue regime rip open babies skulls with livestreamed bullets.
It’s the sarcasm (an instrument I’ve learned the hard way to use sparingly in my posts) I want to draw attention to. Four months ago Owen Jones responded thus to a bemused – I have charity enough to believe genuinely – Israel apologist, Hen Mazzig:
Mazzig: I do understand why this conflict raises a lot of emotions but I think we need to focus on reality and I understand especially when you are Jewish or Palestinian or Arab why you feel so connected to this conflict and really hurt and upset. I’m upset for my family and friends I lost on October 7. I don’t understand why you are upset …
Jones: Because I object to genocide. I’m a human being.
London, May 17, 2025 – more pictures here
And now we have journalists like an Adam Chapman I’ve charity enough – though my supply of the stuff is running low – to deem stupid, ignorant and pompous rather than a mendaciously gaslighting apologist for mass murder and ethnic cleansing. Deploring the thing – a sea of red, green, black and white at Glastonbury – that so lifted my spirits, 1 he writes today at GB News:
The Jew hatred at Glastonbury has been 50 years in the making. We simply chose to ignore it
The hatred shown at the Glastonbury festival this past weekend is unprecedented. The notion that calls are made for the death of anyone, let alone the soldiers who have just played a major role in saving Western civilisation from the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, demonstrates a form of intellectual depravity that has not been seen before.
Short video inserted by me.
At the root of this issue is the seemingly unending hate fest of Jew hatred, just as it is with the “pro-Palestinian” hate marches. In the latter case, the only reason they are taking place is because they provide an excellent opportunity to attack Israel and, by extension, Jews.
If they were truly pro-Palestine, they would have marched when former Syrian leader Bashar Assad was massacring them in the hundreds of thousands.
They would also be marching in support of the persecuted Sudanese people, who are victims of a real genocide. It is widely accepted that when there are no Jews involved in a dispute, there is no interest. That explains why those marches are antisemitic.
Yet Glastonbury takes this argument a step further. The mindless left-wing and Islamist thugs have shown that they will support any entity that fights against Jews, even if that entity is against all forms of British values …
Those with a stomach for spiritual cyanide may read the rest at leisure. It’s often my practice, when engaging corporate journalists – an empire cheerleading Simon Tisdall say, or an Israel apologist of Howard Jacobson stripe – to go through their articles line by line, paragraph by offending paragraph, issuing evidence based correctives as I go. Here, that video insert aside, I see no need. Anyone persuaded by so much as a word of what Adam Chapman has to say has strayed onto the wrong site. Go in peace: the exits are clearly signposted.
I give his meritless screed time of day partly for entertainment value, as a piece funny if you’re in a good mood, but mainly as one of a myriad examples of how Israeli hasbara, whether from inside the colonial settler state or without, has become its own caricature. As such it serves as a dark but comic scene in the Gaslit Opera which, just last week, featured Bibi likening an Israeli newspaper’s citing of against-interest testimony by IDF soldiers – of orders to kill starving men, women and children at food distribution points 2 – to the antisemitic “blood libel” of mediaeval Christendom.
* * *
- I didn’t go to Glastonbury – somebody had to look after dog and blog – but my partner and stepdaughters did. My lifted spirits came courtesy of YouTube clips not so much of Bob Vylan and Kneecap but of the extent of support, and sea of Palestinian flags.
- A post is due on these food distribution points, implemented after aid agency UNRWA was expelled by Israel, which claims, as ever without evidence, that its officials include Hamas operatives. Here I note only that they are open an hour each day. Arrive too late and you’ll still be in line, your children unfed, when the point closes. Arrive too early and you’re shot. Dead, like the IDF whistle blowers said.
“Those with a stomach for spiritual cyanide may read the rest at leisure.”
And on cue, an antidote:
https://sonar21.com/the-empire-of-lies-must-fall/
“Before the bombs fall, before the sanctions choke, before the drone strike turns a wedding into a crater—there is a story.
The story that says: We are the good guys.
This is the first crime of the Empire: the lie that cloaks its violence in virtue. Not just the violence itself—but the ease with which it is made invisible, the speed with which it is turned into entertainment. The American Empire is not merely a machine of war. It is a factory of myths. Myths so seductive, so immersive, that they turn complicity with murder into identity.
This is not just domination—it is sorcery. A kind of psychic conquest that replaces reality with ritual, conscience with costume. An empire whose power does not rest only on military supremacy, but on narrative supremacy: the ability to make injustice feel like order, exploitation feel like generosity, and war feel like safety.
It is not just that this Empire kills.
It teaches its people to cheer for the killing.
To wave flags while children in Gaza suffocate under rubble.
To post patriotic memes while Yemeni families bury their dead in desperate silence.
To recite slogans about liberty while applauding the starvation of whole nations through economic warfare.
This is not simply propaganda—it is the construction of a moral architecture in which an atrocity becomes acceptable, and then—inevitably—unnoticeable…….
……..“Exceptionalism” is the sacred myth at the heart of the Empire—the belief that one nation, one people, one way of life is inherently superior to all others. It is a story told not as aspiration, but as destiny. This belief is not benign; it is the ideological engine that justifies domination and subjugation. For if a people are exceptional, then what they do is not subject to the same moral standards as others. Their wars are not wars of aggression, but of liberation. Their wealth is not exploitation, but reward. Their control is not tyranny, but stewardship.
But the logic of exceptionalism always leads to murder.
It creates a moral hierarchy in which the lives of others—those who do not belong to the “exceptional” group—are worth less, or nothing at all. The Other becomes expendable. Bombed villages become “collateral damage.” Sanction-starved children become “strategic costs.” Every crime becomes an act of righteousness when committed by the “exceptional.”
That’s my next masthead quote sorted. Thanks man!
The latest atrocity from the “most moral army in the world”:
https://skwawkbox.org/2025/07/01/israel-digs-trap-for-starving-gaza-aid-seekers-buries-victims-alive/
“What happened today is one of the worst crimes ever committed…as soon as the first wave of American aid arrives, people rush to get sugar first. Today, [the occupation] deliberately placed the sugar in a separate area.
Then, they dug a deep pit just before the sugar zone, covered it with nylon, and lightly sprinkled it with dirt so that no one would see it or notice. The starving reached the sugar first, and seven people fell into the pit.
Then a bulldozer came and buried them alive.
Meanwhile, a man in his fifties was returning from the aid area, nearly collapsing. I held him, and he said to me: “I’d rather die of hunger than go back to that aid – it’s aid of death.”
– Palestinian writer Omar Hamad
If I can get corroboration, without which it’s too easily dismissed, I’ll post on this.