Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

“I say this because living in the west during a western-backed genocide can make you feel like you’re going insane.” Reading by Tim Foley.

One of the dumbest things we are asked to believe about Israel's genocide in Gaza is that all these civilians are being butchered because the Palestinians are evil and not the Israelis. That it's the victims doing evil things and not the perpetrators. Reading by Tim Foley.

If this was a real thing with real teeth and not an incredibly cynical eleventh-hour election ploy, it would have happened a full year ago. Reading by Tim Foley.

Nothing illustrates the malfeasance of the mass media like the vast disparity between how they’re covering the killing of four 19 year-old IDF soldiers by Hezbollah versus their complete lack of interest in a 19 year-old hospital patient who was burned alive by the IDF in Gaza. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel's permanent national security doctrine is basically "We can have peace tomorrow if we just kill a few more people today." But it's always today. Tomorrow never comes. Reading by Tim Foley.

If there's one thing this past year has made clear, it's that opposing the foreign abuses of the western empire is the most important task you can undertake if you care about truth, justice, and human rights. Reading by Tim Foley.

This was never about freeing hostages. It was never about getting rid of Hamas. It was never about Israel's "right to defend itself". It was never about mass rapes, beheaded babies, or babies cooked in ovens. It was always about stealing land from the indigenous people of Palestine. Reading by Tim Foley.

Things are so, so bad in the middle east right now, and from the looks of things they’re about to get a whole lot worse. Reading by Tim Foley.

I'll condemn Hamas as soon as you can tell me what the Palestinians should do instead besides lay down and die. Produce a coherent plan for Palestinian liberation that (A) doesn't involve violence, (B) would be effective, (C) is just, and (D) isn't naive or moronic. Then talk to me. Reading by Tim Foley.

I used to be able to write individual articles about the individual bad things the US empire is involved in around the world. These days I’m increasingly finding it necessary to cram a bunch of them into a single daily write-up to touch on as many of them as I can, just to stay on top of things. Reading by Tim Foley.

That’s the trajectory the US empire has us on. An active genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the threat of another extermination campaign in Lebanon, and acceleration toward a direct war of unimaginable horror with Iran. Reading by Tim Foley.

On this day in particular, I would like to express my deepest sympathies for the victims of Israeli murderousness over the past year. Reading by Tim Foley.

I am at risk of getting banned from both Instagram and Facebook as both Meta-owned platforms keep censoring my criticisms of Israel’s US-backed atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon, placing strikes on my accounts in the process. Reading by Tim Foley. Article version: https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/meta-is-aggressively-censoring-criticism

Iran is not my enemy. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are not my enemies. My enemies are the western imperialists and their Israeli partners in crime who are inflicting a waking nightmare upon the middle east and working to start a massive new war of unfathomable horror. Reading by Tim Foley.

Our real enemies are not in Iran. Our real enemies are not in Lebanon. Our real enemies are not in Gaza or the West Bank. Our real enemies are not in Yemen, Syria, or Iraq. Our real enemies are in Washington and London and Tel Aviv. In Berlin and Paris and Canberra. In secretive government agencies in the state of Virginia, and in imperial propaganda institutions in New York and Hollywood. Our real enemies are not the Arabs and the Iranians, they’re the managers of empire who are ruining our world, destroying our biosphere, siphoning our wealth and our resources, threatening us with nuclear brinkmanship, and making sure we stay too poor, sick, busy and brainwashed to figure out what’s going on and take a stand against them. Reading by Tim Foley.

Hezbollah is killing Israeli soldiers who are invading their country while Israeli soldiers are deliberately killing women and children and medical staff and journalists. Guess which side the west calls terrorists. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

“Israeli warmongering isn’t getting worse and worse because the Biden administration can’t control Israel, it’s getting worse and worse because the Biden administration knowingly refuses to make use of the control that it has.” Reading by Tim Foley.

I hate when people say “Bah the middle east has always been at war, it’s just how they are.” No you asshole, it’s been at war because of western interventionism and Israel. Sure it was at war before Israel, but so was the entirety of Europe throughout its entire history. The only reason the rest of the world got to cool down a bit after the world wars while the middle east remained embroiled in violence and chaos was because the west inserted this alien splinter of settler-colonialism into the region while constantly deliberately fomenting war and unrest. There’s nothing freakish or unusual about the middle east or Islam that makes its people violent, it just happens to be where a lot of the oil is, so the west keeps poking and prodding it to ensure that it’s always divided against itself and dominated by western-friendly dictators. That’s all we’ve been looking at there. Reading by Tim Foley.

So it turns out the Iron Dome is mostly narrative, just like everything else about Israel. Reading by Tim Foley.