So, to be absolutely clear, Israel's top government official has announced that charges against himself and other Israeli leaders for obvious war crimes like intentionally bombing and starving civilians would be both "antisemitic" and a "hate crime".

Reading by Tim Foley.

The 'Antisemitism' Moral Panic Has Officially Jumped The Shark

Don’t let anyone tell you your protests don’t make a difference or your dissident speech poses no threat to the powerful. If what you’re doing wasn’t working, empire managers wouldn’t be losing their minds right now.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Empire Managers Explain Why This New Protest Movement Scares Them

"It's like responding to warnings of another holocaust by babbling about Sauron."

Reading by Tim Foley.

Using A Fictional Antisemitism Crisis To Support A Real Genocide

It's actually a brilliant self-reinforcing scam. It works like this:

Step 1: Murder people in the middle east in the name of fighting "terrorism".

Step 2: This causes people to hate you and your allies and to want to retaliate with violence.

Step 3: Designate these people "terrorists".

Step 4: Send more war machinery to the region to go fight "terrorism".

Step 5: Murder more people in the middle east in the name of fighting "terrorism".

Do you see how this cycle would repeat over and over again, leading to more and more US military expansionism in the middle east? That's exactly what we've been seeing, and it's exactly what the US empire wants.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The US Empire Deliberately Stokes Hatred And Violence In The Middle East

Our problem is not that more and more people are opposing Israel's empire-backed atrocities in Gaza with more and more aggression, our problem is that people are not opposing it aggressively enough. Our problem is that too many people still have their minds jacked into the mainstream worldview and ignore the most urgent matter of our time, letting their thoughts be preoccupied with frivolous garbage and trusting that our leaders are doing what's best for us.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The Problem Isn't Civil Disobedience, It's Civil Obedience

It's important to understand that there's nothing unusual about the western empire's depravity in Gaza or the mass media's constant lies and distortions about it - they do these things constantly, year after year. What's unusual is that people are waking up to it.

Reading by Tim Foley.

It's Not Unusual That We're Being Lied To, It's Unusual That People Are Noticing

Anyone who's been following the Gaza genocide on social media today will be seeing this phrase "legally killed child" alongside footage of children ripped apart by Israeli military explosives in a civilian displacement camp.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel Massacres Children, Which The Western Press Says Is Fine

It's hard to believe there was a time when I didn't know what a child's insides look like.
That I didn't know how limp babies' limbs go when they are dead,
when they are missing parts of their body,
missing their head,
limbs dangling lifeless as parents hold them in front of the camera,
screaming, crying, pleading, desperate.
There was a time when I didn't know how it feels to watch a man scream "Free Palestine" while burning alive,
until there was nothing left to scream with and he lost his voice forever,
but still by some power remained standing long after his voice was gone.
I didn't used to know just how sadistic people can be,
how hateful they can be,
how apathetic they can be toward the suffering of human beings,
or how heroic others can be in times of great need.
I didn't used to know. Now I do.
And now I sit here, head heavy like lead, tongue limp like a baby's corpse,
hands feeling older than the stars,
and I don't know what to do.
There is nothing I can say to make this okay.
There is nothing I can say to make any of this make sense.
This is the civilization we were born into.
This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal,
as the airman said before he burned.
I lift my ancient hands to my sore heart
and say a prayer to the great Whatever
in a desperate plea
for a better world.

Reading by Tim Foley.

There Was A Time

Cynthia Vigil was never charged with any crime because anyone could see that violent force was an entirely understandable and legitimate response to having been kidnapped and subjected to horrific treatment. It never at any time occurred to anyone to say that she should have acted differently, and it most certainly never occurred to anyone to make her single act of desperate violence the major story instead of the fact that there was a serial killer who'd been abducting women and torturing them in his murder dungeon.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Why I Don't Condemn Hamas For October 7

The moonlight caresses the missile silos in Russia and the blown out hospitals in Gaza.

The garbage plays in the wind like children. The exhaust fumes and the sounds of traffic feel like sex in your senses.

You can meet the divine here. Here in the city. Here in dystopia. Here amid the smell of piss and the sleeping bags on the sidewalk. Here in the heart of a dying empire, whose cancerous tendrils sprawl like ivy across the dying face of a dying world.

You can let the LED lights dance with the light at the core of your being.

You can drink from the Great Mother’s breasts beneath a billboard for the latest iThingy.

You can raise up your heart to the pigeons, and to all the other animal species whose lives we have not yet succeeded in extinguishing.

For us, this is Eden.For us, this is the only place in which Buddha can be born.

In the future, if there is a future, maybe the humans figure things out and create a healthy world. But that world is not our world. That world is not where we clocked in to do our daily work.

We clocked in to this strange civilization, where headless robot dogs keep showing up in police forces and sniper drones play the sounds of crying babies to lure out Palestinian civilians.

Where we have amputated our sacred connection with nature and land and affixed a prosthesis made of viral videos and sitcoms to the aching, festering stump.

Where everyone’s eyes are darkened by unnatural mindings, and everybody’s always hungry no matter how much they eat.

This is where we will make our stand.

This tanglewire nest full of fast food wrappers and broken toys, this mess where everything smells like motor oil and despair.

This is the manger in which Christ consciousness will be lain.

This is the armageddon town that will become our paradise.

This is the landfill empire where we will finally let sprout those mysterious seeds planted in us long ago.

In this strange civilization, in their own secret language, even the buzzing drones over Gaza sing the holy name of Allah.

_______________

Reading by Tim Foley.

Landfill Empire

Our perception of the world is dominated by the movements of our attention, which means that our perception of the world can be changed by manipulating those movements. Propagandists understand this, so they spend their time doing things like telling us over and over again what a bad bad baddie Vladimir Putin is while just occasionally giving a single highly mitigated mention to an individual instance of Israeli criminality, or talking about October 7 over and over again while greatly deemphasizing the massacres Israel has been perpetrating on the Palestinians in Gaza every day since.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The Media Skew Public Perception By Manipulating People's Attention

Readings of all Caitlin Johnstone's articles, usually by her co-writer Tim Foley.

The US Empire Deliberately Stokes Hatred And Violence In The Middle East

Caitlin Johnstone

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