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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Middle Easterners Have Words For The Western Press Who've Been Lying About Them by Caitlin Johnstone Caitlin Johnstone |
Hundreds of US congressional staffers are passing around a letter urging their bosses to call for a ceasefire, there’s a silent mutiny brewing in the State Department over the Biden administration’s Gaza actions, mainstream reporters have been refusing to parrot Israel narratives, and the streets are full of pro-Palestine demonstrators.
This is different. What we are seeing right now is a deviation from the usual script.
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The western press have been finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to do reporting alongside the middle easterners they’ve been lying about for generations, and discovering that a lot of those middle easterners speak English and have a few things to say.
Check out this clip of Egyptian podcaster Rahma Zein laying into CNN’s Clarissa Ward at a protest at the Rafah Crossing border gates:
And this clip of a Palestinian man telling off CNN’s Sara Sidner — who helped circulate the infamous “40 decapitated babies” psyop — saying “You are genocide supporters! You are not welcome here! Genocide supporters! Fuck CNN! Fuck CNN!”:
An urgently needed message and a long overdue confrontation.
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If Israel didn’t bomb that hospital then why did it doctor up a fraudulent audio clip pretending to show Hamas fighters saying Israel didn’t bomb the hospital?
The only way to reconcile this fact with a belief in Israel’s innocence is rigorous psychological compartmentalization.
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A lot of the distortion around this current crisis arises from confusion between peace and the baseline status quo. Because Israel had been trucking along at the same status quo for so long, people assume there was a state of peace when Hamas attacked it, which was why the western political/media class were able to frame it as an “unprovoked” attack. But in reality the status quo in Israel has been one of continually escalating violence, tyranny and abuse for generations, not one of peace.
The trouble with abusive dynamics that have been going on for a long time is that after a while those who aren’t directly affected by the abuse tend to get used to that way of being and start thinking of it as normal. So when there’s pushback against that abusive status quo, it looks to them like it came completely out of nowhere at the hands of an unprovoked aggressor.
Stand on someone’s face for long enough and one day it will surprise you if he eventually bites your foot. You might even feel like you were the victim, because that’s just what you’d gotten used to.
And the imperial media of course do everything they can to exacerbate public confusion about this crucial distinction. The Hamas attack is being constantly framed as an unprovoked act of aggression by evil men who wanted to do evil things to Jews, solely because they are evil and hate Jews. History began on October 7, and all the events from 1948 onward never happened.
Empire propagandists do this constantly by the way, wherever it suits the information interests of the empire. After 9/11 it was “they hate us for our freedom” and all the US aggressions in the middle east which provoked Al Qaeda were swept under the carpet. When Russia invaded Ukraine the well-documented NATO provocations and violence in the Donbass which gave rise to it were written out of the history books, and history began on February 24, 2022. If China ever reacts to the US military surrounding it with war machinery and its aggressive provocations in Taiwan, that will be framed as a completely unprovoked attack which came completely out of nowhere as well.
Circumstances aren’t peaceful just because we are used to them. Just because you are able to go about your daily routine without major disruption doesn’t mean someone isn’t being horrifically abused by the status quo which makes your way of life possible. Peace doesn’t look like everyone complying with the status quo regardless of its abusiveness, it looks like the absence of abuse.
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