"Viet Cong Use Children as Human Shields," the Associated Press alleged in 1967. "'Civilian casualty?" That's a gray area," Alan Dershowitz argued in The Los Angeles Times in 2006. "We can’t ignore the truth that Hamas uses human shields,”"Jason Willick wrote in The Washington Post in 2023.

For more than five decades, military forces with overwhelming firepower, including the U.S., Israel, and others have accused enemy combatants of using “human shields.” According to these allegations, militant resistance throughout the world, from the Vietnamese National Liberation Front to Palestinian militants, herd civilians in front of them, or hide in hospitals, religious institutions, and other public places, in order to evade attacks. In turn, they force the enemy to “risk” killing civilians, and they themselves bear responsibility for those who are killed.

But rarely, if ever, have these accusations been true. Indeed, the term “human shields,” despite having a clear legal definition, has become a catch-all for militias or insurgency groups that merely operate among a civilian population, functioning as a convenient pretext for invading, occupying and colonial forces to kill civilians, and reinforcing racist conceptions about besieged populations. So why, and how, do media provide cover for governments that lie about and instrumentalize supposed “human shielding”?

On this episode, we dissect the decades-old “human shields” accusation, examining how it dehumanizes and militarizes people living under occupation and invasions, demonizes resistance movements, and sanitizes civilian-killing aggressors as reluctant actors who "simply had no choice."

Our guests are Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini.

Episode 197: The "Human Shields" Canard as Catch-All Colonial Absolution

Google's gone to shit, Huma Abedin is dating George Soros' son, Brandon is going Dark and Epstein is out on steam. We take a jaunt through our really cool world with guest Ed Zitron, tech reporter and host of the Better Offline podcast.

Subscribe for $5 a month to get access to all our premium QAA episodes + mini-series like Manclan, Trickle Down, Perverts and The Spectral Voyager: https://www.patreon.com/QAA

Ed Zitron: https://twitter.com/edzitron / https://www.wheresyoured.at / https://www.betteroffline.com

Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.

http://qaapodcast.com

Episode 268: Why Google Sucks Now feat Ed Zitron

One of the worst dino movies we've ever seen. A stain on the genre. It's Theodore Rex (1995)!

Support us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/nosuchthingasabadmovie
Email us at nosuchthingasabadmovie@gmail.com
Follow us on Instagram! @nosuchthingpod
Tweet at us!
@NoSuchThingPod
@apriletmanski
@Sgtzima
@DeclouxJ

Episode #149 - Theodore Rex

We are jumping on the bandwagon by using The Criterion Channel's recent program, AND THE RAZZIE GOES TO, as a starting point to discuss what it means to be perceived as a 'bad' movie and why COCKTAIL, UNDER THE CHERRY MOON and QUERELLE we're given those honours.

Join the Patreon now for an exclusive episode every week, access to our entire Patreon Episode back catalog, your name read out on the next episode, and the friendly Discord chat: patreon.com/theimportantcinemaclub

Subscribe, Review and Rate Us on Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-…ub/id1067435576
Follow the Podcast: twitter.com/ImprtCinemaClub
Follow Will: twitter.com/WillSloanESQ
Follow Justin: twitter.com/DeclouxJ

Check out Justin's other podcasts, THE BAY STREET VIDEO PODCAST (@thebaystreetvideopodcast), THE VERY FINE COMIC BOOK PODCAST (www.theveryfinecomicbookpodcast.com) and NO SUCH THING AS A BAD MOVIE (@nosuchthingasabadmovie), as well as Will's MICHAEL AND US (@michael-and-us).

#374 - Why Are These Considered Bad Movies?

What if there was a videogame so indistinguishable from the real world that anyone who played it began to wonder if their entire life was nothing more than a game?  What if there was a movie that, in depicting this, stumbled upon the unnerving truth of our present relationship to the internet?  What if that movie came out one month after The Matrix and totally bombed while the Matrix would go on to release three sequels and establish the language of conspiracy theory culture?  Get your bio-port fitted, lube up your game-hole and jack into this week’s QAA movie night, “eXistenZ.” 

Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to our archive of premium episodes and ongoing series like PERVERTS, Manclan, Trickle Down and The Spectral Voyager: https://www.patreon.com/QAA

Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.

https://qanonanonymous.com

Premium Episode 237: eXistenZ Movie Night (Sample)

Lucy, Theo, Andrew, and Ben bring you: The toilet purchaser's dilemma, fumbling a skill check to impress women, the end of the good times at Barefoot Lake, one man's war on Perth airport, and staying safe by not helping old ladies.
***
Get your live show tickets at boontavista.com/live
***
Support our show and get exclusive bonus episodes by subscribing on Patreon: www.patreon.com/BoontaVista
***
Email the show at mailbag@boontavista.com! Call in and leave us a question or a message on 1800-317-515 to be answered on the show!
***
Twitter: twitter.com/boontavista
Website: boontavista.com
Merchandise: shop.boontavista.com/
Twitch: twitch.tv/boontavista

EPISODE 345: Drift Stance JDM Toilet (No Bidet)

Bonus Episodes

After inhabiting the White House but before examining the Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin created a show that sought nothing less than to fix the most important American institution of them all: Saturday Night Live. We launch what will eventually become a multi-episode discussion of STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP (2006-7).

Join us on Patreon for an extra episode every week - https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus

Michael and Us

#524 - Studio Sucky, Part 1

In the late 19th century a Frenchman pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes of all time and inspired countless conspiracy theories about Freemasonry that still circulate today.  The man, who went by the pseudonym Leo Taxil, started his career by publishing several texts smearing the Pope and the Catholic Church. But then he switched sides and claimed he converted to Catholicism. To prove his devotion he started publishing anti-Masonic texts. These new works included wild stories about a secret satanic sect with freemasonry called Palladism. Despite the fact that these stories are far beyond the limits of believability, they were taken seriously by the Catholic Church. Taxil finally admitted that his multiple books about satanism in Freemasonry were all part of an elaborate, 12-year-long-hoax.

In part 1 of this series, we explore the childhood of “Leo Taxil,” his hoaxes in France and Switzerland, and the anti-Church writings that forced him to fend off lawsuits and criminal charges.

In part 2, we’ll get into the thousands of pages he wrote about secret satanism in Freemasonry, how the public swallowed these stories up, and his dramatic confession that it was all a lie.

REFERENCES

Dickie, John. The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World. Public Affairs, 2020

Ziegler, Robert. Satanism, magic and mysticism in fin-de-siècle France. Springer, 2012.

Van Luijk, Ruben. Children of Lucifer: The origins of modern religious Satanism. Oxford University Press, 2016

Mellor, Alec. A Hoaxer of Genius
https://skirret.com/papers/ahoaxerofgenius-leotaxil.html

Wikisource: The Works of Leo Taxil
https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Auteur:L%C3%A9o_Taxil

Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)

https://qaapodcast.com

QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

The Taxil Hoax and Satanic Freemasonry Part 1 (Premium E245) Sample

In the late 19th century a Frenchman pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes of all time and inspired countless conspiracy theories about Freemasonry that still circulate today.  The man, who went by the pseudonym Leo Taxil, started his career by publishing several texts smearing the Pope and the Catholic Church. But then he switched sides. He claimed he converted to Catholicism and to prove his devotion he started publishing anti-Masonic texts.These new works included wild stories about a secret satanic sect with freemasonry called Palladism. Despite the fact that these stories are far beyond the limits of believability, they were taken seriously by the Catholic Church. Taxil finally admitted that his multiple books about satanism in Freemasonry were all part of an elaborate, 12-year-long-hoax.
In the second part of the two-part series, we discuss Leo Taxil’s multiple books which supposedly exposed Satanism in Freemasonry, why he called Charleston, South Carolina the “Luciferian Rome,” and the dramatic public confession that sent shockwaves among Catholics and Freemason alike.
REFERENCES
Dickie, John. The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World. Public Affairs, 2020

Ziegler, Robert. Satanism, magic and mysticism in fin-de-siècle France. Springer, 2012.

Van Luijk, Ruben. Children of Lucifer: The origins of modern religious Satanism. Oxford University Press, 2016

Introvigne, Massimo. "Satanism: a social history.". Brill, 2016.

The Confession of Leo Taxil
https://freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/taxil_confessed.html

Mellor, Alec. A Hoaxer of Genius
https://skirret.com/papers/ahoaxerofgenius-leotaxil.html

Wikisource: The Works of Leo Taxil
https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Auteur:L%C3%A9o_Taxil

Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)

https://qaapodcast.com

QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

The Taxil Hoax and Satanic Freemasonry Part 2 (Premium E246) Sample

Wets here! Get your wets. Fresh wets. Only the finest wets. Just came in this morning. Low low prices. Affordable wets for the family. You sir, want wets? Well you can't have one. No wets for you. Don't even look at my wets.

In this episodes, Log meets a yummy mummy. Joe meets a juice fanatic. And Steve overhears the pope dropping some f-bombs near an archdeacon.

say a lil prayer

567: Yummy Mummy Pope Juice

Naomi Karavani sits in with us while Jake draws from Mike Davis' City of Quartz to explain the strange material history of the Home Owner's Association and how it relates to the whole NIMBY/YIMBY thing as well as toxic sludge.

NAOMI KARAVANI
@NaomiKaravani
FIRECRACKER on YOUTUBE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p18FIxZCW9U

MERCH
poddamnamerica.bigcartel.com

PATREON + DISCORD + KEEP US ALIVE
PATREON.COM/PODDAMNAMERICA

The Home Owner's Soviet w/ Naomi Karavani

A podcast about culture, politics, and our crumbling world. Hosted by Luke Savage and Will Sloan.

Exclusive subscriber-only episodes: https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus/overview