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A total and final destruction of innocence

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At this late, late stage in white colonialism’s lifecycle, you could be tempted to ask: when is it enough? Shouldn’t the greed be quenched already? Shouldn’t the domination impulses be satisfied already? Thinking like a normal person, you’d probably consider things like that. You probably may have once or twice in this genocide thought that precisely.

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But if we do entertain such naive thoughts occasionally, it’s only because we haven’t yet realized how absolutist,  or totalitarian, colonialism really is.

I mean: why couldn’t Israel be satisfied with just pre-1967 borders? Or why couldn’t European settlers in the Americas take just half the continent, and leave some to the natives? Or, more in the present, why does the US have to have 800 military bases around the world, and why does it have to meddle so intensely and inconsistently in the affairs of every country on the face of this earth?

Why does it seem white, European colonialism, knows no bounds? Why does it always, always have to expand, and pushes to expand even when it appears to be dominating virtually every aspect of human life everywhere? Where does this crazy insatiability, this urge to own and control all of it come from?

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As always, I am looking for explanations in the psychological, or, more correctly, the psychopolitical realm.  We have here a political universe that appears incapable of containing itself; that must invade, meddle, bomb, scheme, steal.

Because colonizers are people, and because people have an innate and always-present capacity for morality,  and because people always need to feel both protected and moral, we can assume that white colonizer expansionism is related to the need to be protected and moral.

Yet while you could claim, in some bizarre world, that invading every piece of land and enslaving every human in the world is supposed to make you safe (if you kill and subjugate everyone you will be safe, except from the many, many psychopaths you have cultivated at home), such an endeavor could never make you feel moral.

A colonizer always has guilt: it is inevitable. Some shame and some guilt are inseparable from hurting people, except maybe among the true sociopaths.

But if nobody knows that you’ve done something wrong, have you really done something wrong? If you’re in a position to kill anybody who was witness to your crime,  shame and guilt are not your problems anymore; your problems, in this case, become operational, or logistical.

Once they have dehumanized the rest of humanity, white European colonizers have only one solution to their problem, and that is the existence of remaining native communities, who bear witness to the crimes of colonialism (if white people in South Africa annihilated all black people there, Israel’s and America’s genocide in Gaza would have faced no legal challenge).

To feel moral, the colonizer must destroy all native life, everywhere.

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But this is not all. It is not only their knowledge of the colonizer’s crime that drives them crazy. It is their innocent existence. The fact that natives, no matter where on earth, have a simple understanding of morality and justice. They prefer their land over profit, and their dignity over fame. They do not see the ancestral homeland as real estate, but as a source of their innermost vitality, and honor.

Natives have compassion and believe in proportionate punishment, and forgiveness: they are never expansionists. They are not cynical: they treat their rules with great respect and gravitas. To a native, it is not a game of monopoly: it is life, and its dignity must be preserved. This does not mean that all understanding of justice among native is right and perfect and that native communities could never use reform. This means that the serious and holistic approach to life among natives, compared to the always double consciousness of the colonizer, makes their existence a constant insult.

When you have no dignity, people with dignity become your greatest fear: you cannot tolerate their presence. Think about it: for a slaver of a land grabber, is there a greater insult than the humble peasant, looking to inherit their small plot to their offspring? A native mother breastfeeding her baby in quiet, is she not the biggest tormentor of the colonizer? Of course she is. Her natural, simple, morally easy existence makes his calculations and shamed conscience look so shameful. So dirty. He has to destroy her.

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Children are our living manifestations of innocence, of a life free from scheming, of an inability to deceive. How beautifully transparent children are: whatever they feel, you see it immediately. it is out there.

It is no coincidence, then, that children in Gaza have become such a prime target in this genocide. They represent the pinnacle of innocence: childhood in its purest human form, untainted by adulthood or by domination and expansionism. Colonizers can’t bare their existence. They have to destroy them.

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The crazy, inconceivable crime, or everlasting series of horrendous crimes, that is white European colonialism, is incapable of doing anything else at this late, metastasized state it’s in. The only way forward it imagines it has is the total erasure of innocence from every square inch of soil on this planet.

If they can make everyone cynical, consumers, traders, subjects, and users, they will have won, at least in their minds. They don’t care that in pursuing this antihuman they are bound to live humanity without its foremost guarantees of sanity, and that is innocence and a unified consciousness that is both wholly present and connected to its environment and part of a bigger universal oneness.

The quest to destroy all native life on earth, all authenticity, all honesty,  all spontaneity,  is the real cause of this late colonialist attacks that we’ve been seeing. It is the only thing colonizers believe can save them from the paranoia, haunted conscience, and homelessness they always feel.

They have no idea how wrong they are, and have no clue how tormented their souls is, or how twisted their worldview.

But for our sanity as a species, for us to have any future that offers any normalcy whatsoever, the colonizers must not win. We must fight to retain our innocence as a species. We must fight to protect native children and native childhood.

When I found this image for this post, I started tearing up immediately. I had never known what this picture meant before this genocide. What it truly, emotionally means: what the innocent people of this tribe must have felt. But now I know. You can read more about the context of this image here.

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Why does AIPAC make the TikTok ban a Jewish issue?

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Note that by pushing the TikTok ban, the Israel lobby chose to place Israel, and Jews, at the forefront of the fight between the West and China, after Israel and its Jewish lobbies already placed themselves, willingly, openly, and repeatedly, at the forefront of the war between the West and Islam.

Israel and its powerful lobbies took sides against Islam and against China, two of the greatest international cultures and powers. A group of 10 million people and some change, declaring war on some 3 billion people. Does this sound like protecting Jews to you?

Because to me it sounds like an insane dedication to putting Jews in as much danger as possible. This is working hard to ensure Jews are being hated so that the Jewish paranoia camp can control and direct Jewish affairs and consciousness (I am sure, by the way, that before long, Israel will be central to the fight against African ‘corruption’ and Russian ‘imperialism.’ AIPAC and ADL will gladly write and distribute talking points).

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In his uniform: some words in honor of Aaron Bushnell

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Aaron Bushnell’s act was a highly political one, as he said in his own words. There are some lessons we can learn from him, and from his act, to be better political fighters for good. Here are some basic ones:

  1. Aaron made a point of wearing his uniform. He was telling us: I am doing this as an American soldier. In doing so, he brought more honor to American uniforms than we have seen in decades. Aaron put actual meaning, a love for humanity, into an American symbol in an era where all symbols have become vacant of meaning, cold, cynical, and violent.I hope that every soldier in every military looks at his act and uses it to undo at least some of the benumbing effect of their national propaganda. I especially hope so for members of the American military. Aaron was your brother. One of yours. You need to love and understand him.

  2. Aaron was from San Antonio, which is not a small town by any measure but is nevertheless not Manhattan. American boys just like him have been joining the American military since forever, and they usually come from smaller towns and cities, from migrant communities, and from black neighborhoods. They are not the children of Holywood producers and Pulitzer Prize winners, they are the children of farmers and teachers, bus drivers and corner shop owners, workers, builders, mechanics; America’s working class. Generation after generation, American elites make a mockery of their naivety and innocent belief in what America stands for, and send them to kill and die in imperial wars from which they return broken, suicidal, drug addicts, homeless, and traumatized for life. Those cavalier elites, in their columns and “think tanks”, play their stupid, inhumane war games, showing the same contempt for the lives of American soldiers as they do for the foreigners they send them to hunt and destroy. Beautiful American kids like Aaaron Bushnell pay the price for this. But for the column writing and donor class it is nothing. They never pay for anything. They just go on to the next campaign. America’s deformed class system is present nowhere as it does in its wars. We should keep this too in mind when lucrative donor-owner bodies push for war with Iran when no child of their own is going to pay with their life for it.

  3. Do not dignify those who speak ill of Aaron with an answer. Never get dragged into their twisted, amoral pseudo-reasoning (which is just a sadist’s playtime). Never defend. Always attack. All we need to be saying right now is: you are so dedicated to insane mass murder of innocents that American patriots have started to kill themselves not to partake in it.

  4. To Aaron’s detractors we should be saying: You will mock Aaron, we will elevate his memory and character. You will make light of Gaza’s suffering, we will remember it forever. You will remain blind to its humanity, we will see it as a symbol for the ages. But you and only you will have to live with what you have become in the name of lust, sorry, indifference, for innocent blood. You will live to regret your own stupidity and heartlessness, and we will be there to rub your face in it.

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Ahron Bushnell’s unbearable shame

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A man feeling such overpowering shame that it becomes too much, and he needs to fight it back with whatever means necessary, to not let it eat him alive; a man suffocated and crushed under the unbearable weight of a broken conscience and broken dreams, looking at a horrible death as the less painful experience; a man who simply cannot not go on living when his government and his people murder thousands of children with absolute indifference.

Such a man made the ultimate sacrifice yesterday, to give his country, which he must have loved dearly, one last warning, as it, too, was setting fire to its very existence.

“I will no longer be complicit in genocide“, his final message, was, and forever will be, his legacy.

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In honor and eternal memory of Aaron Bushnell, US Air Force serviceman who took his own life, by fire, outside the Israeli embassy in DC yesterday, in protest of the Gaza genocide

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One IDF soldier’s moment of pure surrealism in Gaza, 1992

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One of the most surreal and sobering moments of my life happened to me while I was an IDF soldier stationed in Gaza in at the end of 1992.

That kind of moment could only happen to a Mizrahi, or Arab-jewish soldier. You’ll see why I say it.

In the summer of 1992, I finished basic and some advanced infantry training, and my platoon was ready to partake in combat function, which really was just (same as for generation of young Israeli men and women before and after that) enforcement of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The unit I was joining at this stage had under its responsibility (for purposes of overt occupation activities) the Al-Shati refugee camp and some of the adjacent Rimal neighborhood, on the northwestern part of the Strip.

Also at the end of 1992, Israel’s leadership decided that the (Zionist and brilliant) solution for the growing discontent, or resistance, in the Strip, was removing 400 Hamas ‘leaders’ from Gaza, and sending them into exile in Lebanon.

As many of those Hamas figures lived in and around the area designated for my unit to handle, we were assigned dozens of arrests, or maybe hundreds (Israel would always arrest additional people for more information, as a form of pressure and to prevent an eruption of a violent reaction).

For weeks in November of 1992 I would spend whole nights of my very young life walking from house to house in the dead of night,  in Gaza, on a mission to knock on doors, threaten family members of wanted people and hand over those who were home to the representatives of the security services, who were always with us, and always in plain cloths.

As part of my service there, I was in hundreds of Palestinian homes in Gaza, many of them during that month of endless nocturnal search and arrest hours.

Some nights we would take in 10 different people from same numbers of homes.

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I was too young and shocked to understand anything, though it was clear to me that this was not the hero’s service fighting evil I spent the months and years before joining the IDF hoping for and fantasizing about.

Those people in Gaza were normal in a way that no part of me could align with evil. And I could never bring myself to become that natural lord and master that colonial and racist regimes always expect their soldiers and cops to be. I was too soft.

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The people we took in never cried, begged for forgiveness, or claimed it was a mistake. They would climb up and sit in the military vehicle with their hands tied behind their backs and their eyes covered in a kind of quiet that was more thunderous, more painful to remember all those years later, than any other act would be.

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One man in particular I remember. A big, somber man in his 30s, who looked untouchable in a big, thick black coat. But as he sat in the military vehicle with his hands tied behind his back, his coat slipped over his shoulders, revealing a tank top and a body and skin that did not look invincible, or untouchable.

He was human. And he sat there, staring into space, in total quiet. Back then I had no idea where these men were taken, and what was going to be unleashed upon them. Only many years later did I discover how extensive Israel’s use of torture was, and how horrible.

The big, somber, fragile man sat there, quiet, and, like any other Palestinian I saw in this situation, with what I can best describe as dignity in brokenness, that was astonishing. I have never seen anyone with more dignity in my life than a hand-tied, eyes-covered Palestinian detainee.

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Towards the end of those weeks of knocking on doors and arresting people, one morning, around 7 a.m., after a long long bight, that moment happened.

It was something that I never forgot and never will forget. It was the last arrest for that night, which had already become day. We stood there, a small band of soldiers, and knocked at the door of what looked like a well-built, well-kept house.

It was not fancy, but it surely was not the house of poor people. We waited for someone to come and open the door. After a minute or so, someone did.

If you ever felt like reality around you had its fundamentals twisting and changing, or like the layer of meaning that enveloped reality was torn, revealing another layer of deeper meaning, but in a way that makes you dizzy and dumbfounded – if you know that feeling, you’ll know what I went through that moment.

Because the person who opened that door at that house that morning in Gaza was in every way my own and only sister.

The door opened and the actual, precise, living and breathing image of my sister, identical as any identical twin ever was, stood in the doorway.

It was her face. her expression, her hair, her height, her age, her build, her movement, her skin tone accurate to the 1000th degree. It so her. it just could not not be my sister.

I didn’t know what was going on, or what kind of insane trick was being played on me. I gasped, lost for words. I stood a meter away from her, and my very being wanted to call her by my sister’s name.

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Not long after this, after that whole period, I started cracking. I could not take it anymore, though I never could tell myself what it was that I couldn’t take. I went to see a military psychologist and got restationed to a non-combat unit.

It took me many years to start to appreciate the damage done to me by what I was sent to do and see in Gaza. I don’t think that even today I have completely processed it.

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She stood at the door and was a little puzzled, but not panicked. She was wiping the floor, and it was still wet. A bucket with a rug in it stood by. It was a clean house, with a shining clean floor. The officer told her to get out and speak to us from street level, as the house was one stair up from that.

But the street was dirty and sandy, and she couldn’t bring herself to step outside barefoot. Her foot (my sister’s foot) ventured out for a second, not actually stepping, just hovering, but then was drawn in.

The officer pretended to not notice. He didn’t insist, and she remained inside. By not insisting and not becoming violent, I think, he saved my actual sanity, and never knew it.

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Many, many years after that, on a phone call with my sister during the terrible genocide of 2023-2024, I tried my best to get her to see what was being done. What Palestinians were going through.

“You chose their side”, she told me, and I could not recover from that.

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There’s an element of torture in in for us, too

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There’s an element of torture and dehumanization in it for all of us. All of us who are not sociopaths, that is. Because it can break your spirit and damage you psychologically forever, to witness so much suffering without being able to do anything about it.

This is part of the reason systemic oppression creates so much societal damage.

Naturally, people (who are not sociopaths) are wired to help a fellow human in pain. For us, empathy is an organ of our body the same as it is an organ of our mind. We hear a child cry and we look to see what happened. We see someone collapse in pain and we feel an immediate pang of pain and fear ourselves. We rush to help and comfort.

When we are forbidden from doing this for extended periods of time we start turning against ourselves, because our empathy starts to be perceived as our source of misery. But it is not.

Focus on your wanting to help, not on your inability. It will help you to retain your mental integrity. It will deny them this triumph over you and over humanity.

You are not the one doing this. It is not your fault. It is the complete fault of those in power. There’s nothing wrong with anyone that wants to help. It is everything that is right and beautiful in this stupid world

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So why is Israel doing this? The provocative explanation

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So why is Israel doing this? Is there anything in it for Israel but virtually global hate? Because it doesn’t seem like there is.
Sometime back, on my X account, I said I was going to try and provide an explanation as to why Israel has chosen to conduct itself like it has. Here it is. It’s very provocative, and it’s going to mess with your mind quite a bit.
I will also remind you that I am Jewish and I have the perfect right to my own opinion on Jewish affairs.
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Throughout these months, I am sure you have asked yourselves why Israel is acting as if its design is to maximize the amount of hate it stands to receive from a global community of shocked and terrified people.
There have been so many occasions for this, but I’ll bet that when IDF soldiers executed 3 Palestinian men in a hospital in late January, it stood out to you as outrageously, unreasonably brazen.
Maybe you felt like that because the IDF took special care to get its hit job televised. They didn’t confiscate cameras or servers, and didn’t hack or destroy files. It’s almost as if they were acting for the cameras. A worldwide audiences got the message, and everyone was talking about Fauda, the TV series meant to portray the humane face of Israel’s apartheid.
How peculiar, right? And wait, what about all those videos by soldiers of themselves joyfully blowing up stuff? And what about the naked men filmed in their humiliated hundreds?
Let me remind you, for contrast, that in two years of Russia’s war in Ukraine, not once have you seen Russian soldiers celebrating the destruction of civilian infrastructure. And you’ve never seen naked and humiliated Ukrainian soldiers loaded on trucks, or sitting on the ground, eyes covered.
There may have been things like that happening. We don’t know. But if scenes like these actually occurred, the Russian military took special care to conceal them from us. The IDF did not. Why?
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Keep this question in mind, and let’s make it even more interesting. Let’s ask: what is the justification, the reason, or the cause for the existence of organizations such as AIPAC and ADL? I mean, seriously. Are American Jews in so much danger, and face so much persecution in the US, that perpetual billion-dollar operations are required to guard them from harm?
Are Jews disproportionally jailed in the US? Designated victims of violent crime? Harassed by the authorities? Cannot be out on the street? Is American society that laser-focused on hating Jews? Aren’t there other American communities that are more exposed to danger, harassment, poverty, and crime? I mean, seriously?
And say an organization like AIPAC does have some nostalgic reason for being, what is doing pushing for wars? More specifically and currently: why are Jewish organizations in the US, alongside Israel, doing all they possibly can to place Jews at the epicenter of a possible world war?
Why are organizations that are supposed to keep Jews safe making Jewish affairs the formally declared reason for a clash and a war that could destroy civilization as we know it? Isn’t it the opposite of what they’re supposed to be doing? Say like a military that constantly broadcasts its own astonishing cruelty, and destroys its own image?
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We are getting closer. But one more hurdle needs to be removed for us to see the answer. Stay sharp.
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Two very obvious opposites in seeing the world: paranoia and basic trust. This is true for people, but it is just as valid for political societies. Some societies are more paranoid and some are more relaxed, but no society on earth is more paranoid than the super-mega-ultra Jewish part of the Jewish people, or wider society.
There is no other group on earth the world is so constantly on its feet defending. No other society, too, decided to use trauma as the center of its identity. I know many of you, especially Americans, have come to see this as just Jewish. But it is not so, and maybe you need an Arab Jew to tell you this. It is one strand of Jewish perception that derives its entire sense of identity from pogroms and the Holocaust.
Israel and IPAC act like this is natural and the only way to be Jewish. That’s nonsense. Pogroms and the Holocaust were not all the experiences of all the Jews all the time. Many Jewish communities knew long periods of safety and prosperity. Not all Jews were always victims, and Jews are definitely not the only victims humanity has even known.
Personally I always found it more than a little offsetting to hear American Jews refer to their misery and victimhood constantly, in a country where millions of natives, organized in hundreds and thousands of flourishing communities, were wiped off the face of the planet. A country and culture that operated industrial-scale slavery of black people for hundreds and hundreds of years, and fought (and in many cases is still fighting) not to recognize them as equal humans for centuries more.
I would never do that.
A country that has so much terrible, dehumanizing poverty and homelessness, so much pain. How come the most successful, heavily represented in all things power and money minority in this society is also its greatest victim? I know this is the norm and this is the description of reality I should conform to, but no. It doesn’t make sense.
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You can choose trauma and paranoia or trust and basic optimism as your guide in life. But the biggest Jewish organization in our lifetime chose one clear path: that of trauma, suspicion, and what can be called Armageddonism. Always alert. Always someone out there to get you. Everybody hates us.
In choosing trauma and paranoia, both Israel and AIPAC found an unexpected source of false power. Because existential fear can bring a society of people together, but it’s not going to be a society many people would want to live in. So you keep people afraid all the time, and you make sure they are feeling, or actually are, hated all the time.
This is how you maintain your power over them. And as Jewish trauma has become such a huge international political thing (I wouldn’t do that either), the incentive was always there to keep this mentality alive. To organize around it. To make sure it remains the formal doctrine of Jewish institutions. Such as AIPAC and Israel.
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So Israel and American Jewish organizations took it upon themselves to keep Jews afraid and isolated. This strategy of intentional paranoia has been working for a while, but it gradually eroded. It especially eroded in the US, as younger Jews became increasingly aware that the stories they had been told were lies, and that no one cares about their ethnicity.
That erosion in the power of instilled exceptionalism, isolationism, and existential fear poses a very serious problem for Jewish organizations built around paranoia: they have to have a way to keep it going. They have to maintain it for the survival of their paranoid identity and all the benefits it brings with it.
The Palestinians and Arabs were a wonderful solution for this problem for a while: by keeping Palestinians oppressed and thus hostile, the old myth of antisemitism as a huge international force could be kept on life support.
This, too, began to fade, as younger American Jews started getting more familiar with Palestinian perspectives, and started having serious, transformative doubts as to eternal Jewish victimhood everywhere, always. Visiting the West Bank, or listening to Palestinians will do this to you.
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And then October 7th hit. And the right-wing, nationalistic, paranoid section of the Jewish political spectrum, realized it could be translated into political gold. This could be used to revive the old sentiments. The ghetto, the pogroms, the trains to the east. All of it.
This is why Nazis were invoked so early on. Jews were once again the persecuted minority AIPAC and Netanyahu always told you they were. How wonderful for them.
But even October 7th was not enough, because people would immediately put it in the context of the occupation. They would ask the eternal human questions: why did this happen? What happened before?
If you’re Netanyahu or AIPAC, letting Jews be viewed in the context of normal human behavior is the last thing you want to do. What you want is boiling rage and fear to be extensively covered in all the media and all the briefings.
Need I say I would not do that, either?
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And this is where my final point arrives. It doesn’t seem like Israel is trying to be hated globally. It is actually what it’s doing. It is intentionally airing its cruelty and barbarity so that it will remain closed up to the world, thus guaranteeing the continued rule of the paranoia camp.
They are doing it on purpose, for cynical political gains, out of a twisted reading of history and human nature. Palestinians are just crash-test dummies in this regard. They count for nothing. Their deaths are used to get people angry and Israel hated, so it becomes even more paranoid.
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For the same reason, AIPAC is putting the Jewish issue at the epicenter of the lead-up to WW3. They can not know that Jews will be called responsible, or at least a major factor in it. Can you imagine millions of dead Americans, destroyed cities, populations stressed into panic and despair – all because of a war Jewish organizations pushed for?
How does anyone who purports to represent Jews and care for them not recoil from this scenario? Do these people have any idea at all of what they’re doing?
I am sorry for sounding this impolite and not nice: we are on the eve of a potential world war. As a Jew I am terrified. The last thing I want is to be blamed for a world war. But the Jewish paranoia camp seems to relish the opportunity. Maybe they are sure this is how the messiah comes. I have my reservations.
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Finally, Jewish organizations centered around trauma found a very welcoming and happy-to-help friend in American imperialists. It is so wonderful when you can market Middle East invasions as battling antisemitism. Who could argue with that? In the name of defending Israel, the US can do whatever it wants in wide stretches of land and sea where it would otherwise be seen as what it is: a foreign, colonial power drunk on its own power and propaganda.
Defending Israel gives American hawks (read: Washington) perfect moral cover. It will support an actual genocide. It will go completely insane.
What they – both AIPAC and US establishments – are not including in their calculations is that a big war in the Middle East can have very crushing, irreversible results for both the US and Israel. In their quest for creating a Jewish psyche and a world beneficial to their paranoid vision (which America shares as a colonial power), they don’t take into account that reality is a whole different business from propaganda.
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But this is why they do it and televise and broadcast it. So that we are hated, isolated, fearful, and controlled by Bibi and AIPAC forever (and America has a legitimate reason to dominate the Middle East and kill as many Rabs as Muslims as it pleases). There’s nothing that reassures those people as hate for Israel and Jews, and they will do all they can to provoke as much of it as they can (the blatant lies, the threats, the live-streamed horror, it’s all part of it).
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Don’t fight people who thrive on hate with hate. Fight them with clarity and resolve.
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This is my war

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For me, what is going on in Gaza, and around it in other countries, is an actual war.

A war not only to save the lives of whoever we can in Gaza, which is our sacred duty to our fellow human beings.

A war not of bullets and bombs that I don’t have, don’t want to ever have and hate with all my being, but a war of ideas, a cultural war, an existential battle for my humanity, and humanity’s humanity.

A war against those who try to force us to not care, and not show it if we do.

For me this is war not only because my name, my heritage, the history of my family and my people, everything that I ever came to view as beautiful and sweet in my childhood, my humanity, my Judaism, all have been hijacked and weaponized for an ideology and message of brutality, violence, and hatred I could never accept in a billion trillion years.

For me as a living, thinking, writing human, this is a war of huge, cataclysmic consequence: if I lose – if we lose – then all is lost. Then no child, no mother, no father, no brother, no sister, will ever be safe. Ever. I will not betray all those people by not showing up for this war of ideas, even though they will never know me. I love them and I care for them just the same (I don’t need any god for this. This is me).

For me this is war because I could not live with myself in a world where this is legitimate, lawful, acceptable. Could you? Could you live with yourself in a nice comfortable house when a few streets away, or thousands of miles away, children are being killed in their hundreds every day? Could you? Then what are you?

For me, and for you, too, whether you get it or not, and definitely regardless of your being Palestinian or not, this is an actual, real, existential struggle.

I would advise anyone reading this: don’t get ever distracted or confused. Don’t ask “What can I do?”. Find what to do. Connect with other people. Join a movement (there is one close to you that you have never heard of, because the system was designed to separate. There is one. I promise you. Find it. Join it).

Shout louder. Go protest and take other people to protest who may never have gone without you. Be stronger and more resolute every single day. This is not a far-off, one-off war. This is home for all of us. This is our future and what it will look like.

For me, and I don’t really care how anybody else sees it, this is a war of values, of culture, and philosophy, a war that will have unimaginable consequences for the rest of our lives. We all need to be brave and show up.

No one is allowed to turn their gaze from a dying child, no matter how much pressure is applied to them. If you do this, if you look away, you will not be the owner of your gaze afterward. You will not own your own eyes. You will spend the rest of your days looking at the world through the eyes of a robot, or a slave, and you will know it.

For me, this is what this is about.

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3 tactics they use in their psychological warfare against us

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Many times during this genocide I heard and read people saying they’re feeling like they’re going crazy.

I know many of you feel this way, but I nonetheless want to congratulate you on displaying great courage and conviction. And I will tell you why: because in the past few months, you have been mostly successfully withstanding a psychological warfare campaign of a massive, massive scale.

I am not talking about trolls and bots and the obvious complicity of mass media. I am talking about something entirely different: a well-planned, well-executed, and heavily budgeted campaign by US and Israeli organs of government responsible entirely for fooling great numbers of people into believing all kinds of nonsense (and not believing the simple truth).

This may sound shady (not to the radicals among us: they’re aware), but I’ll tell you that in Israel “Management of Consciousness” is a formal activity and department of the IDF. And I guarantee you the US is no different.

Throughout this campaign, I have been noticing certain tactics traditionally used by Israel for “management of consciousness” being employed by American representatives (the Europeans are usually just useful idiots: no one needs to even lie to them smartly. And I’m talking about the “leaders”).

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I am by no means saying you have not been lied to before as Americans (or as citizens of another country). But I bet many of you feel you have never been lied to this blatantly, this brazenly, to an actually, and quite vividly, disorienting effect.

So I’m going to very briefly run through 3 such tactics, and then tell you why they’re using them (nothing is ever coincidental about how power speaks). I promise you it’s going to make a lot of sense. And you’re going to recognize them immediately.

Tactic #1: denying what you know is true, and they know you know they know is true (or seriously claiming what they know you know is a lie). Examples: we did not, or are not attacking, so and so hospital, while people are there filming themselves being bombarded. Also: The IDF claims only militants were targeted in X incident when you’re looking at images of dead women and children.

This can be called: lying to your face. repeatedly, even though it is obvious to all involved they’re doing it, and you’re seeing it.

Tactic #2: claiming, or doing, two things that are mutually exclusive. Examples: claiming to care about people and providing the means to kill them. Talking about the importance of aid while not using any kind of public message to warn Israel it cannot withhold it. Talking about values and democracy while defending and justifying a genocide. There are a million examples of this, I’m sure you’ll come up with plenty more.

Tactic #3: saying things like “we’ll investigate”, “we’ll look into it”, or “we’re waiting for confirmation”. Two brothers shot by a sniper a month ago? A man waving a white flag shot in front of a camera? 3 Israeli hostages killed by IDF while waving white flags? A command center under a hospital? 100 People killed in one attack? 400? Who remembers? And by the way: we’re still looking into it.

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Now if you’ll notice, these 3 tactics have one very prominent element in common. Because these 3 tactics are used not to convince you of one reality or another. They are not trying to tell Israel is either good or bad, or that civilians die unjustifiably or not. This is not the point of all this, and this is why it feels like a break from previous itterations of political deceit.

The real purpose of these tactics is not to convince or dissuade you of anything in particular. They are meant to destabilize you psychologically.

This is the disorientation I was referring to earlier. It is not coincidental, it is the desired effect of this strategy. Yes, it is strategic.

This is what you do when you want a population confused and disarmed from any psychological certainty, which is the basis for all political motivation and action. Because if you don’t know what’s happening, and are not sure what your government does or stands for, what are you going to fight? And how will you convince others to join you?

They have been doing it to Israelis for decades: always talking from both sides of their mouth at the same time, saying what everybody watching knows is a complete lie, and saying they’ll investigate when it is clear there is never any intention behind it.

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By always maintaining two opposites in your consciousness, they are always giving you false hope, and always denying it, thus slowly breaking you (after 100 instances of this you stop hoping, and after 200 you forget hope ever lived in you).

By always providing a grain of simulated recognition of your fears, they’re letting you think that maybe you’re heard and maybe not everything is a lie, but only to disappoint you a minute later. And again. Then again.

My brothers and sisters, it is intentional. They are not sloppy or confused, but very methodical. Nothing of the messages we’ve been fed, especially the clear lies and contradictions, is not coincidentak. There is a very distinct logic to this madness.

This is the very, very short and condensed version of what they’re trying to do to us psychologically, which is really to disintegrate us not only as a society but as individuals as well.

The trick to resisting this strategy is to always trust your instincts (because you are good and they work beautifully) and to always remember that they are using duplicity intentionally, strategically, to destabilize you. So your answer is, as always, clarity and resolve.

Blog, בלוג

Toxic masculinity and the genocide: the case of Ben Shapiro (and the beloved and much missed Rachel Corrie)

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We should be talking more about how big of a role toxic masculinity plays in this genocide, and how much it sets the scene for a clash between two very distinct types of masculinity.
For brief background: Rachel Corrie was an American peace and social activist, a sweet, lovely young woman in her 20s’ who developed a special interest in the plight of Palestinians. In March of 2003, as the IDF was demolishing homes in Rafah (the occupation is a never-ending loop of destruction and despair), Rachel Corrie was there, protesting. She was run over by an Israeli bulldozer. 
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Ben Shapiro, on the other hand, is your hyperverbal cousin reciting his Bar Mitzvah speech at 1.75x speed 5 hours straight without stopping once for air or to ask you if you’re still conscious on your way to a family vacation.
Unimportant and uninteresting, he still demonstrates what is expected of him as a speaker for the oh-so-tough-and-masculine American right. In 2011 he tweeted

That miserable tweet resurfaced some 10 days ago (early February 2024), and when he was asked if he regretted it, he said no. Rachel Corrie was still on his list of history’s greatest idiots. What a man, now, do you see? So cavalier. So careless. Dead activist! LOL.

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This is one of the most prominent marks of toxic masculinity: the delight it takes in the death and destruction of “others”, especially women and children, who are mocked and hated for their vulnerability.

So much of the right-wing response has been similar to this, and become totally mainstream. “This is the price of war”, or “this is war”, “those are not innocent women and children”, “they shouldn’t have done October 7th”, “collateral damage”, “Hamas can just surrender”all used to convey absolute indifference, or actually taking pride in knowing how much it hurts you, and other people.

Like a sociopath, but with an added penchant for gloating, toxic masculinity guides its believers to deal death, torture, and destruction without once letting a muscle move in your facial expression.

It is all clinical and devoid of feelings as part of the performance.

Contrast this kind of masculinity with what we’ve seen on the Palestinian side: men in flip-flops rescuing people from under the rubble; Motaz and Wael (and many others) reporting tearing and sobbing, soft as children.

Men weeping with their dead child in their hand, and other men doing the world’s most blood-curdling job: telling them to stop and give up their child so they can be buried.

Not one gym bro have you seen in all the pictures of captured Gazans. Not one macho man. No tattoos. Only men sitting on the ground, or standing, with complete disregard for perceived masculine performance.

Men whose masculinity is grounded in family and community. Vulnerable to a painful degree, but not once trying to mask it. They just stand or sit there. They just are.

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What we really need as a human society is a model of a soft and loving man, a gentle man, who loves and respects everything and everyone. A man who cries when exposed to someone else’s pain and humiliation. We don’t need that dubious, destructive wannabe-viking clown of the suburbs who treats life as a video game, the type that calls for more women and children to be killed with his two legs missing because of a former colonial war.

And if you just want to understand how vacant, nonsensical and fragile the toxic man is, try and tell him that his fresh dead soldiers just joined your list of history’s greatest idiots. Oh no, you can’t. In our backwards culture you can only come out with a mild reprimand after saying that about a young woman who died trying to protect vulnerable people. Oh the hilarity.