Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

The PR campaign for Israel's destruction of Gaza revolves around encouraging everyone to focus on the feelings of people on the pro-Israel side instead of focusing on facts and evidence. The way Israelis are feeling about October 7. The way Israelis are feeling about the hostages. The way pro-Palestine demonstrations make western Jews feel inside. What feelings Biden is privately feeling toward Netanyahu. The whole thing's one big fat appeal to emotion fallacy. Reading by Tim Foley.

"Israel's constant fixation on attacking healthcare facilities makes no sense from a military strategic point of view, but it makes plenty of sense from a genocidal point of view." Reading by Tim Foley.

"Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that bombing Gaza into rubble is a reasonable response to a single Hamas attack." Reading by Tim Foley.

"The editors of The New York Times know exactly what they're doing packaging a story about Israel's deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians like it's a troubling prediction about the weather." Reading by Tim Foley.

You can't equate the violence of the oppressor with the violence of the oppressed. They're not the same, and the oppressor is the ultimate source of the violence from both sides. Reading by Tim Foley.

This civilization is not your friend. Hopefully someday we'll live in a civilization whose component parts we can trust, but this civilization is rife with poison for our bodies, our minds, and our hearts. And we need to conduct ourselves in accordance with this reality if we want to be healthy. Reading by Tim Foley.

They're really going to try to pin all the blame for the incineration of Gaza on Benjamin Netanyahu so that nothing has to change when this is over. The western empire has chosen a single scapegoat to carry away its sins so the status quo can march on unhindered by guilt or consequence. Reading by Tim Foley.

They're condemning Islamophobia and denouncing hate crimes against Muslims at the exact same time as they are helping Israel create a mountain of Palestinian corpses in a genocidal onslaught whose entire premise is that Palestinians are the wrong race and the wrong religion. They are proclaiming their love for the Muslim while plunging a knife into his throat. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel is as dependent as a nation can possibly be. It literally cannot exist without the direct military backing of the most powerful empire of all time, namely the United States and its globe-spanning network of allies and assets. Reading by Tim Foley.

Nothing's more enraging than seeing the western officials who are making this genocide possible weep crocodile tears about how "heartbreaking" it is. Reading by Tim Foley.

"Liberals only try to compartmentalize these things away from each other to stave off the cognitive dissonance inherent in their contradiction-soaked worldview." Reading by Tim Foley.

There's a motherfucking genocide happening and we're being told we need to be worried about TikTok and defaced portraits of Lord Balfour. Reading by Tim Foley.

US airman Aaron Bushnell said the words "This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal" before self-immolating in protest of the genocide in Gaza. That simple line has been reverberating throughout our collective consciousness ever since. Reading by Tim Foley.

A recently released UNRWA document says its staff report having been tortured while detained by Israeli forces, who pressed them to provide false statements about ties between the agency and Hamas. Reading by Tim Foley.

"Such a tactic is not meaningfully different from lining up children on their knees on the battlefield and shooting them one by one in the back of the head until the enemy unconditionally surrenders." Reading by Tim Foley.

Pointing pistols as the man burns, as Gaza burns, as civilization burns, as the planet burns. I don't need guns  I need fire extinguishers. Raytheon racketeers and Pentagon pimps swollen fat from the blood of unnamed victims glossed over in headlines by The New York Times while National Guard troops patrol the New York subways and babies with legs like toothpicks fill our screens. Pouring arms into Israel  while humanitarian-LARPing aid airdrops. Waving around armageddon weapons while accusing peacemongers of treason. Well sure I'd ask for seconds mister president sir, but see I don't need guns I need fire extinguishers. I need someone to put some fat back on those babies. I need someone to get the plastic out of the oceans. I need the bombs to stop and the siege to lift and a healthy planet for the kids to play in. I need kids to stop getting their limbs blown off so they can run and play in that healthy world. Can you drone strike me a thriving biosphere? Can you ICBM those Gazans some food? Can you extin

The Biden administration is supposedly planning to set up a temporary pier in Gaza to allow for the large-scale shipment of sorely needed goods into the enclave, which reportedly will take weeks to build and will still be subjected to an Israeli checkpoint. Reading by Tim Foley.

Every Hollywood celebrity who fails to speak out against the US-backed genocide in Gaza at the Oscars this Sunday is complicit in that genocide. If you're given a major platform and your government is committing genocide, you are morally obligated use that platform to condemn your government's actions. Reading by Tim Foley.

We've managed to get a third podcast episode up! Recording it and making enough time to create it and edit it are skills we're still developing, but we've always learned on the job in this weird little project of ours anyway. Personally I think this is our best one yet. In this episode we discuss Aaron Bushnell and the pathetic performative airdrop of a few meals in Gaza, we make some embarrassing revelations about how we stay productive amidst a daily deluge of negativity, and we answer a few questions from readers and trolls. Questions we address in this episode: "Discuss the reasons explaining the impressive level of US support for Israel." "How do you maintain such productivity in the face of the negativity you're dealing with daily? Mindset, routines, practices?" "Why weren't you so ragey about the civil war waged on Syrians by Assad about a decade ago, where far more were slaughtered than in Gaza right now?" "We talk about pro-war corporate media narratives all the time. Who is the narrator? How is the

"Pay no attention to that genocide right in front of your face." That's the constant message we're getting from the dominant institutions in this present-day dystopia. From our news media. From our political parties. From our government. From our mainstream culture of diversion and superficiality. Reading by Tim Foley.