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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
The Goal Is Ethnic Cleansing, Not Defeating Hamas by Caitlin Johnstone Caitlin Johnstone |
The funny thing about Henry Kissinger dying at age 100 is that he lived long enough to become one of the least crazy warmongers in the DC swamp — not because he got saner, but because the US empire has gotten so much crazier. Almost everyone running the US government today is a worse warmonger than Kissinger was at the end of his life.
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Sane person: Stop murdering thousands of children.
Crazy person: You hate people because of their religion.
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Israeli officials keep openly saying again and again that the plan for Gaza is ethnic cleansing, yet the western political/media class adamantly insists on continuing to frame Israel’s actions in Gaza solely as a war against Hamas. Hamas isn’t the target, it’s the excuse.
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A damning new report from +972 Magazine published on Thursday exposes how Israel has been deliberately striking civilian targets in Gaza as a matter of policy because they believe it will “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas.” It makes it clear that the IDF is very much aware of where the civilians are, and that when they kill children it’s because they calculated that it would be strategically worthwhile to do so.
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As evidence continues to mount that a significant number of the Israelis killed on October 7 were actually killed by indiscriminate fire from the IDF, Israel has announced its plans to bury the vehicles Israelis died in — in other words to bury forensic evidence. According to the Jerusalem Post, “In order to save space and be as environment-friendly as possible… the cars may be shredded before being buried.”
Are people not tired of having their intelligence insulted?
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Israel’s western allies keep being confronted with the problem that they’ve been framing Israel all these years as a free democracy with liberal values identical to the west’s, yet it keeps acting just like the Evil Dictatorships the west always tries to distinguish itself from.
They keep running into this problem because it’s not something that Israel can actually change about itself, since it’s just the stuff that Israel is made of. The Zionist ideological framework which birthed Israel in the first place is what has been guiding its political course this entire time, and that ideology can only steer the country towards racism, apartheid, fascism, theft, murder and genocide.
This has long caused a dissonance between what Israel is seen doing and what Israel is presented as by its western allies and its own PR, and now that dissonance has soared to unprecedented heights. Westerners are taught (falsely) that their governments embody virtuous values systems prioritizing freedom, peace, justice and truth, and here’s this bizarre ethnostate glommed onto them which very clearly wipes its ass with those values without even really attempting to disguise it.
The western empire has destroyed nation after nation on the premise each of those nations was governed by an Evil Dictator who couldn’t be allowed to remain in power, and yet we’re being asked to look past the actions of an intimate partner of the western empire which make those Evil Dictators look like teddy bears and believe that that partner is actually entirely in alignment with the values of the virtuous west. There’s no way to reconcile these two completely contradictory perspectives, so you get cognitive dissonance.
The more cognitive dissonance there is, the harder it is for people to hold onto these contradictory views simultaneously. Eventually it gets too much to hold on to and they’ve got to let go, which is why more and more westerners are starting to open their eyes to both the depravity of Israel and of their own government.
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Israel apologia is the world’s worst people defending the world’s worst actions. You’re more likely to support Israel if you’re a shitty person, and if you weren’t a shitty person to begin with you’ll eventually have to turn into one to continue supporting Israel’s actions.
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Most Israel supporters are non-Jews, but when you talk about what awful people Israel supporters are they’ll try to claim you’re talking about Jews. Israel apologists who aren’t even Jewish will accuse you of anti-semitism for saying things that are really about them.
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Any time there’s a bombing campaign by the US-aligned power structure you see attempts being made to spin the civilians it kills as imperfect victims, and you’re seeing that with Gaza too.
The problem here is that there’s no way to spin children as imperfect victims; they are inherently blameless. If everyone in Gaza was a Hamas fighter, or even a military-aged male, then the “imperfect victims” strategy would work fine, but Gaza happens to contain an unusually high percentage of children and Israel is killing them at a very unusual rate. You can try to say babies and small children are actually covert Hamas fighters or Hamas supporters, but all you’ll succeed in doing is making your side look worse than it already does. It’s a major obstacle for the western empire.
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