Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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Israel supporters are like, “No no you don’t understand, the side that’s killing babies and incinerating families and assassinating journalists and starving civilians and bombing cultural heritage sites and carpet bombing entire neighborhoods and driving an indigenous people off their land are the GOOD guys.”
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There is literally nothing Israel could do that its supporters wouldn’t defend. Try to fill in the blank in “Israel could _______ and people would defend it” with something that wouldn’t be true. Most of the insanely evil things you could put in that space are already actually being done. Genocide? They’re already doing that. Murdering babies? They’re already doing that. Killing thousands of children? Already doing that. Deliberately targeting and assassinating journalists, artists and scholars? Already doing that.
Israel supporters will defend any evil — literally any evil — as long as it is being perpetrated by their favorite regime. There are zero constraints of any kind, because Israel supporters are completely uninterested in morality. If they were, they wouldn’t be supporting one of the most immoral governments on this planet even after all it has done in the last two months.
Part of the problem is the widespread consensus that October 7 means Israel is justified in doing literally anything in response, no matter how heinous. Israel could exterminate the entire population of Gaza and its supporters would still be saying “WHAT ABOUT OCTOBER 7??”
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A new Israelis study found that Israel is killing civilians in Gaza at a significantly higher rate than civilians were killed in the world wars of the 20th century. Military analysts have said that the destruction in northern Gaza is comparable to the most aggressive World War II bombing campaigns in places like Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne.
US officials were reportedly shocked when Israeli officials indicated they were preparing to inflict civilian casualties in Gaza that would be reminiscent of world war horrors, and then, in typical Israeli fashion, they went and did even worse.
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Biden killing Ukraine peace negotiations and backing a genocide in Gaza are both worse than anything Donald Trump has ever done.
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Israel apologists often cite the fact that the majority of Jews support Israel to substantiate their ridiculous position that opposition to Israel is anti-semitic, but that statistic is not actually morally relevant or logically interesting. Any population that’s sufficiently saturated with propaganda and indoctrination will wind up mostly supporting the thing they’re being propagandized and indoctrinated into supporting; that’s the purpose of propaganda and indoctrination.
The majority of westerners subscribe to the mainstream worldview which supports western imperialism for exactly the same reason — because they were propagandized and indoctrinated into that worldview. This doesn’t mean western imperialism shouldn’t be ferociously opposed; it absolutely must be. Even if that puts you standing against the indoctrinated majority.
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The funny thing about the claim that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism is that most Zionists aren’t even Jewish. The majority of them are Christians who hope all Jewish people go to Israel so that Jesus will return, then Jewish people get to either repent and convert to Christianity or go to hell.
What that means is, in a very real and quantifiable way, most Zionists are actual anti-semites.
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It’s so surreal to get called the worst thing in the world for opposing the worst thing in the world. You oppose children being murdered by the thousands in Gaza and you’ll get accused of harboring the same prejudices that led to the Holocaust. It makes you feel you’re going mad.
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The US is sponsoring a relentless genocidal massacre that’s killing, crippling and tormenting innocents in the most horrific ways imaginable, and Americans are being persuaded to focus instead on a completely fictional epidemic of genocidal rhetoric against Jews at universities.
And I do mean completely fictional — nothing of the sort is happening. It’s like pointing to a clip of Darth Vader destroying a planet in Star Wars to distract from the actual real life atrocities in Gaza.
The fake epidemic of genocidal chants on campus reminds me of the fake epidemic of Russian propaganda, when “Russian propaganda” was defined as “any criticism of US foreign policy”. Falsely define common pro-Palestine chants as calls to genocide Jews and you can then declare an epidemic of genocidal rhetoric.
It goes like this:
Step 1: Arbitrarily declare that common innocuous pro-Palestine chants are actually calls for genocide.
Step 2: Pretend there’s an emergency epidemic of university students calling for genocide on campus because they use those chants.
Step 3: Kill pro-Palestine speech on campus.
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Just spitballing here but maybe the most efficient way to prevent western youth from becoming radicalized against Israel is not to censor the internet and kill free speech at universities but to make Israel stop murdering thousands of innocent people.
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Caitlin Johnstone 