The onus is on the party committing genocide to stop committing genocide. The onus is not on the victims of the genocide to sign agreements in the hope of saving themselves from the genocide. This is obvious to anyone who isn’t a psychopath.

Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

 

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The Trumpanyahu administration is pushing a “peace plan” for Gaza which critics are saying would damn Palestinians to permanent subjugation under the thumb of Israel. The proposed plan would see Gaza supervised by Trump and by war criminal Tony Blair, and Netanyahu is already saying that the deal will allow the IDF to remain in the Palestinian territory indefinitely.

The last time the US brokered a “peace plan” between Israel and Hamas, the US and Israel torched it in a few weeks, laid siege to the enclave, and announced a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. So even without all the major problems with the offer, there’s not going to be a whole lot of enthusiasm about it.

I’m seeing a lot of purportedly pro-Palestine voices proclaiming that Hamas needs to accept the deal in order to end the genocide. I personally will never tell Palestinians what they should do to address their abuse at the hands of the empire or what deals they should accept. My job as a westerner is to oppose the western empire that is butchering them, not to finger-wag and moralize at the empire’s victims.

The onus is on the party committing genocide to stop committing genocide. The onus is not on the victims of the genocide to sign agreements in the hope of saving themselves from the genocide. This is obvious to anyone who isn’t a psychopath.

 

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The Israeli Foreign Ministry keeps trying to claim that the Global Sumud Flotilla bringing aid to Gaza is actually a Hamas operation. Their latest effort in this ridiculous campaign was a statement trying to connect the dots between Hamas and people associated with the flotilla which bizarrely featured a photo of British politician George Galloway whom the ministry falsely identified as a British Palestinian man named Zaher Birawi.

Not one single person in the entire world believes this narrative. Literally nobody believes the Gaza flotilla has any connection to Hamas. It’s just a framing they’re circulating to preemptively justify any cruelty they might inflict upon the flotilla activists. 

Meanwhile the death count of people who have starved to death in Gaza has risen to around 453. Israel is trying to convince the world that the Global Sumud Flotilla are terrorists for trying to help stop this.

In addition to everything else this genocide has been, it has also been one nonstop insult to our intelligence.

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Two separate news reports have just come out about Israeli propaganda operations to manipulate western opinion. 

In an article titled “Israel is paying influencers $7,000 per post,” Responsible Statecraft’s Nick Cleveland-Stout reports on documents showing that 14 to 18 individuals have been receiving significant compensation to generate pro-Israel content for platforms like TikTok and Instagram. 

In a write-up titled “Trump’s Ex-Digital Guru Works to Combat Antisemitism,” O’Dwyer’s PR News reports that “The firm of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale has a four-month $6M agreement for strategic communications and media services in support of Havas Media’s engagement by Israel to develop a nationwide campaign in the US to combat antisemitism.”

Journalist Jack Paulson notes that we know about Parscale’s six million-dollar psyop because he had to register as a foreign agent of the Israeli government, saying Parscale was paid “to map out Gen-Z influencers and distribute a narrative about antisemitism in the United States.”

This is what happens when a state doesn’t have facts, reason or morality on its side, but has unlimited funding.

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It’s silly how people call it “the Holy Land”. If the land was holy it would have turned Israelis into decent people.

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One of the many ugly things about the Trump era has been watching so many hippie woo woo spiritual types turn into crazed transphobic QAnoners, because those were my people. It’s kind of an embarrassing admission at this point, but they were.

I didn’t come to where I’m at ideologically from reading Lenin or talking to Marxists, I got here because I did a lot of inner work and had some transformative experiences and came out the other side with a deep love for this beautiful planet and for the strange naked ape mutants who people it, and with a yearning to help create a healthy world. I just kinda felt my way through the human experience as the barefoot hippie earth mama that I am, and it carried me to a clear intuitive understanding that the western empire must end and that capitalism cannot carry our species into the future.

And I’d just sorta assumed the people who looked and talked like me were on a similar journey this whole time. It looked like we were for a hot minute a decade ago when we were all getting excited about Bernie Sanders and the possibility of a real socialist movement in the western world, but then after that it got really weird and gross. I started watching so many of the leftwardly-inclined spiritual types I’d connected with in 2015 and 2016 start getting sucked into the Trumpian worldview and getting crazier and crazier with QAnon and all its related psyops until they were indistinguishable from garden variety American conservatives.

I remember a Bernie guy I’d made friends with in 2016 shrieking at me in 2020 and accusing me of acting like an Iranian mullah when I criticized Trump’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani. My Facebook feed increasingly morphed from Bernie Sanders stuff to Jill Stein stuff to pro-Trump stuff, and then with Covid a lot of them went full-blown wingnut and started posting crazy right wing shit about trans people and Muslims and immigrants and China. I saw it happen to people I’d known in person my whole life, transforming from the barefoot peaceniks I’d always known into stuffy reactionaries in just a few years.

I’d tell them they’d turned into Republicans and they’d generally get all huffy and indignant and claim they were just like me, free-thinking leftist dissidents who opposed the fake two-party system. But there they were, fully buying into the entire worldview of one of those parties — and it was the one that’s further to the right.

And I just found the whole thing baffling. I mean, why were these people ever attracted to the left in the first place? Did they not have any values? If they did, what happened to them? How could they not see they were being duped into throwing their support behind the establishment they used to oppose? What happened to their spiritual insight? Their intuition? Their rebelliousness? Where was their connection to nature and to heart which had previously caused them to stand for peace and love?

And eventually I learned that it was just an act for most people. For most people spirituality is just an accessory for the ego, and being a hippie is just a feel-good fashion statement. They’re not engaging in the kind of rigorous interior excavation and ruthless self-honesty that would have protected them from imperial psyops to corral their political energy back into the mainstream herd. They just like how weed makes them feel and enjoy Alex Grey art. They wear spirituality, but they’ve never lived it.

This feels like kind of a confession because I’m admitting to having been naive about something many of you probably already knew for a long time, but it’s just the truth. I was naive. I stumbled into this commentary gig after years of focusing almost entirely on spirituality and inner work without paying much attention to what other people were doing. I have a journalism degree and I was a news junkie when I was younger, but then I fell down the rabbit hole of inner exploration and lost track of the outer world. It took me a while to get a read on things once I tuned back in.

It’s been a trip, man.

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Feature image via Trump White House (Public Domain).