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One under-discussed ticking time bomb is the way Israel keeps saying it’s going to resume incinerating Gaza if Hamas doesn’t disarm while Hamas keeps saying it won’t disarm. Netanyahu’s office is saying that Hamas will soon be given a 60-day deadline to give up its arms, after which the full-scale bombing of the enclave will resume if these demands aren’t met.
A lot of people don’t understand that Hamas has never at any point agreed to give up its weapons. To give up its weapons would be to surrender, which is a very different thing from agreeing to a ceasefire. Israel’s demands and Hamas’ refusal are two diametrically opposed positions which put things on a collision course toward reigniting the Gaza holocaust at full scale.
Israel and its allies have no legitimate basis upon which to demand that Hamas surrender. All they can legitimately do is stop murdering and abusing the Palestinians. If Israel does resume the full-scale incineration of Gaza it will try to justify its actions, but those actions will be completely unjustifiable.
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After a year of dishonest concern trolling about imaginary nuclear weapons in Iran, the so-called “President of Peace” Donald Trump has let the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the US and Russia go the way of the dinosaur. The New START treaty has been allowed to fully collapse by the Trump administration, and has been replaced by nothing. This is infinitely more dangerous for our world than anything Iran has ever been accused of doing.
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Someone on Twitter tried to cite Cuba’s floundering economy as evidence that socialism doesn’t work. I told him, “Believing capitalism is better than communism because the US was able to strangle the Cuban economy is like believing you’re a better person than your neighbor because you beat the shit out of him in his driveway.”
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There’s an infuriating video going around showing an AI program whose entire function is to monitor baristas using facial recognition software and make sure they’re maintaining maximum efficiency at the coffee shop.
We could have a utopia where robots do most of the labor. Instead we’ve got a dystopia where AI programs push human employees to work like robots.
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If an Epstein document had revealed that Trump advanced Israeli interests as a political favor to the world’s richest Israeli in exchange for campaign funding, it would’ve been the biggest story in the world. But because he came right out and said it, it barely caused a blip.
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Every news outlet, pundit and analyst who tries to tell you that Jeffrey Epstein was a Russian intelligence operative instead of an Israeli one is just telling you they’re a propagandist. View it as a big flashing sign that says “Never trust anything from this source ever again.”
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Israel supporters were overjoyed when the Bondi shooting happened, because they knew it would cause authoritarian laws to be passed. They were happier than the worst Nazis in Australia. They were flooding my replies excitedly telling me I’m going to prison for criticizing Israel.
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Every time those in power move to silence Israel’s critics, we must triple our criticism of Israel.
Every time they try to shut down pro-Palestine protests, we must triple our participation in the protests.
We need to make sure their efforts to silence us guarantees them MORE of the thing they’re trying to get rid of, not less.
Impose direct costs on their tyrannical behavior and show them with our actions that every effort to silence us only makes things worse for them.
And that’s as it should be. They’re coming after our rights now. If you attack the civil rights of the citizenry, the citizenry are going to fight you right back.
You don’t get to push without getting pushback. You don’t get to try to take away my rights and then just coast along like it’s no big deal. You get back what you give, thrice over.
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The only governments who’ve been able to resist US imperial domination are the ones like China and Iran who forcefully control what goes on in their country, because that’s the only way to shut down US infiltration and subversion effectively. So now the US spends its time going “All our enemies are authoritarian dictatorships! We must be the Good Guys!”
Really they’re the ones who set the conditions which made it so that the only states which maintain their sovereignty are the ones who tightly restrict things like western media propaganda, National Endowment for Democracy influence operations, and other regime change ops. If the US wasn’t constantly trying to topple governments which don’t kiss the imperial boot, those nations could be a lot less restrictive in their laws and policies.
The US empire makes the whole world more tyrannical.
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Caitlin Johnstone 