Israel’s crimes: too depraved to be true?

I’m on Spain’s Costa del Sol for a week, so writing less. This is Caitlin Johnstone today:

Anti-Genocide Activism Is Terrorism In The Empire Of Lies

British police have been arresting anti-genocide protesters for holding signs expressing support for activist group Palestine Action, which London has now officially designated a terrorist group for putting red paint on war planes that were being used in the Gaza holocaust.

That’s right, welcome to the empire, where peace activists are called terrorists, where hospitals are called military bases, where facts are called blood libel, where people opposing genocide are called hateful Nazis, where genocidal soldiers are a protected group and chanting for their death is a hate crime.

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Israeli outlet Haaretz has published an article titled “Now I Understand Why Israel Is Denying Journalists Access to the Appalling Scene in Gaza” by a French historian named Jean-Pierre Filiu, who spent a month in the killing fields of the ruined Palestinian territory after entering with a busload of French physicians.

Israel has banned journalists from Gaza in order to hide its war crimes, making doctors and other specialists the de facto western reporters on the ground. And they’re all reporting the same thing about what they are seeing.

Part of the problem is how normies who don’t follow this stuff closely cannot believe Israel could be as evil as we’re saying it is. They’re often like “Oh yeah right, they’re just killing civilians because they’re evil and want Palestinians to die”. Which would make sense as an objection if you hadn’t been following Israel’s pattern of behavior from day to day and weren’t familiar with the way Israelis talk about Palestinians whenever they’re speaking to each other in Hebrew instead of addressing the western press.

Israel’s public image is somewhat protected by the fact that its behavior is so profoundly evil that simply talking about it strains credulity among the uninformed, in the same way you sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist if you talk about some of the things the CIA has openly admitted to doing in the past. Many people literally cannot believe anyone could be as evil as Israel is, so the true extent of their crimes go unseen.

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I’ve decided I’m never going to click on another Piers Morgan Uncensored video. He’s just a shitty western empire stooge playing Jerry Springer with people’s outrage over the worst things in the world and pretending to be impartial while generating viral online video clips fueled by rage and partisan echo chamber amplification.

It occasionally looks edifying, but it’s really a symptom of some of the most diseased aspects of this civilization, like Mr Beast. The man is a parasite feasting on the vitriolic energy of these dark and troubling times, directly profiting from the immense suffering caused by the empire he serves.

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The western public has stopped viewing Palestine as an intimidating issue to speak out about, and it’s causing a major problem for the Israel PR machine.

One of the biggest obstacles for the pro-Palestine movement used to be the way Israel-Palestine was incorrectly regarded as a super complex issue that the average busy member of the public can’t hope to understand. That’s changing now because a live-streamed genocide is straightforward enough to override the “No you don’t understand what’s happening because words, words, words” schtick that Israel apologists always use to shut people down, but for a long time the hasbarists were able to intimidate people into silence just by knowing a bunch of clever talking points that the average casual observer would struggle to come up with answers for.

One of my favorite clips from the Glastonbury Festival came from Australian band Amyl and the Sniffers, whose vocalist Amy Taylor gave an off-the-cuff speech about Palestine and colonialism and the parallels between what white colonizers did to Indigenous Australians and what’s happening to the Palestinians today.

It wasn’t a perfect or super eloquent speech by Taylor’s own admission, but it was passionate and it got the point across. At the end she said, “That’s the truth and I thought I’d share that today. It was gonna be something way more poetic but that’s just what I said; it’s not perfect but I think it’s better to say anything than to say nothing at all right now.”

More and more people are seeing this when it comes to Gaza — that it’s better to say anything than to say nothing at all right now. You don’t have to be an expert. You don’t have to know everything there is to know about about the apartheid state of Israel and the history of the Zionist project. You know what you’re seeing and you know it’s wrong, and that’s enough. Don’t let anyone intimidate you into being silent on the defining issue of our times.

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