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Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna falsely reported that antiwar activist Medea Benjamin “smacked” her during a confrontation on Thursday, subsequently calling the police in an effort to get the Code Pink leader charged with assault.
If you watch the video of the so-called “assault”, it’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen in your life. The 73 year-old activist barely grazes the clothing on Luna’s arm with her hand while speaking, after which the US Air Force veteran Luna collapses into a pile of blubbering victimhood.
Benjamin reports that she was briefly detained by Capitol Police after the incident, but was released without charges after officers reviewed the video footage.
Luna had already been on a crusade against Code Pink that same day, falsely suggesting the organization is funded by the Chinese government while questioning Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. She then took to social media to reiterate her false claim that “Code Pink is a CCP-funded op” and insisting the activist “hit my arm”.
Everyone in the US government is a manipulative warmongering psychopath. Capitol Hill is swamp full of lying mass murderers.
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Asked by the press to define the word “ceasefire” on Wednesday, President Trump came up with an answer you just know was fed to him by his handlers.
“It’s a different part of the world, you know; I’d say in that part a ceasefire is when you’re shooting in a more moderate manner,” the president said.
That might be the Hebrew definition of the word, but everywhere besides Israel the word “ceasefire” is understood to mean that both sides cease firing. The IDF has continued hammering Lebanon and Gaza amid so-called ceasefire agreements on a daily basis, and the president has plainly been groomed to regurgitate the correct lines in defense of this policy.
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More people have been burned to death by Israeli strikes in Gaza.
People show you examples of discrimination against Jews and it’s somebody wearing a watermelon pin or saying “from the river to the sea”. People show you examples of discrimination against Arabs and it’s families being burned alive in Palestine and Lebanon with the full backing of the western world.
The abuses and atrocities people defend using “antisemitism” accusations are orders of magnitude more dangerous than antisemitism.
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The Smotrich parade scandal really highlighted how many mental contortions liberal Zionists are performing in order to separate Israel and its government; they spent the whole next day in narrative management mode bloviating about how Israel’s finance minister does not represent Israel and had no business being in the Israel Day parade.
They like to pretend there are fairy fantasyland versions of Israel in other dimensions ruled by magic Jewish elf queens who ride candy unicorns and treat Palestinians as equals, and it is only by some freakish and unforeseeable twist of fate that our dimension’s version of Israel wound up being governed by genocidal racists.
That’s how they maintain their view that it’s legitimate to criticize specific actions of this one specific government sometimes, but it’s antisemitic to oppose Zionism or say Israel shouldn’t exist. They pretend that the genocidal apartheid state we see before us today is some sort of fluke that is only one of the many possible iterations of what Israel could look like, and that any minute now it could agree to a two-state solution and become a virtuous beacon of truth and justice for the entire world.
This is of course ridiculous. Everything that Israel is today is the result of everything it has always been. All this war, genocide, apartheid and abuse is what it looks like when you give Zionists everything they want. This is all the inevitable fruit of the decision to plant a brand new ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization whose inhabitants do not belong to the privileged group.
There is no alternate reality version of Israel. Its government is inseparable from everything it is as a state. Smotrich, Ben Gvir and Netanyahu are the product of everything Israel has been from its very inception, and when they leave power they will be replaced by psychopathic fascists with different names and faces.
Genocidal apartheid states should not exist. To oppose genocide and apartheid is to oppose Zionism, because there is no material manifestation of Zionism put into practice which does not include those things. Saying “anti-Zionism is anti-semitism” is just saying you support genocide and apartheid and want those things to continue.
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It’s easy to point at Australia’s “antisemitism envoy” Jillian Segal and make fun of how crazy and stupid she is, but the Albanese government is the only reason her craziness and stupidity is a problem.
The thing about Segal and all these “antisemitism advisors” they’re setting up in western governments is that they’re just random people with strong political opinions who are being elevated to ridiculous levels of influence. They’re not experts, they’re just people who happen to hold the political opinion that it should be illegal to criticize the state of Israel.
Which wouldn’t normally be an issue; our society is full of individuals with terrible political opinions. The problem is that our government has selected these cartoonishly absurd Zionists to help shape policy in immensely consequential ways that erode the civil liberties of our nation. Our leaders are the ones to blame for these inept lunatics wielding obscene levels of influence; left to their own devices they’d just be harmless idiots. They’re only harmful because they’re being given the power to do harm.
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Caitlin Johnstone 