WELCOME to the empire, “where

genocide is self-defense and peace

rallies are genocide” (p38), a month
when the US and eight of its allies
responded to the International
Court Of Justice’s ruling to cease
killing and harming the Palestinian
people by suspending funding to the
primary humanitarian agency in Gaza
(p20) and where we turn our eyes to
Belmarsh where the final stage of
Julian Assange’s extradition trial is
about to take place on Feb 21 and 22
(p5).

For new readers, there is a summary

of Where I Stand, Issue By Issue (p64).

All works are written by Caitlin

Johnstone and Tim Foley. The Caitlin
Johnstone project is 100 percent
reader-funded.

Visit caitlinjohnst.one for the original

articles and their supporting links.
 Contents

The War On Journalism In Belmarsh, The War On Journalism

In Gaza ... 5

More US-Driven Escalations Toward War In The Middle East

... 8

Biden Has Started Another US War ... 11

This Can’t Be Another Instance Of Genocide — Israel
Believes It’s Right! ... 14

Israel Says It’s Antisemitic To Invoke The Genocide

Convention Over Gaza ... 16

Israel Accuses The ICJ Of (You Guessed It) Antisemitism ...

18

Commemorating A Past Holocaust While Cheerleading The

Current One ... 20

The Israel Supporter And The Sandwich ... 22

False Accusations Of Antisemitism Exploit A Healthy Impulse

To Advance A Profoundly Sick One ... 24

I Don’t Care What Religion The Genocidal Child Murderers

Are ... 27

The “Rules-Based International Order” ... 30

When Yemen Does It It’s Terrorism, When The US Does It It’s
“The Rules-Based Order” ... 32

If You’ve Just Started Paying Attention To US Foreign Policy ...

36

Welcome To The Empire ... 38

They’re Calling Ethnic Cleansing “Voluntary Migration” Now
... 40
US Admonishes Israeli Officials For Saying The Quiet Part
Out Loud About Ethnic Cleansing ... 44

This Genocide Is Being Live-Streamed. We Can’t Say We

Didn’t Know. ... 47

Biden Is Everything People Feared Trump Would Be ... 50

How The Hell Did We Get Here? ... 52

It’s Insane That Anyone Is Still Supporting Israel ... 54

CNN And Washington Post Busted For Pro-Israel Propaganda

Shenanigans ... 56

Turns Out “Israel Has A Right To Defend Itself” Meant “Israel

Has A Right To Commit Genocide” ... 59

Where I Stand, Issue By Issue ... 64

Gaza Is Exposing Western Liberals For The Frauds They Are­
... 68

Westerners Have An Absolutely Psychotic View Of Airstrikes

... 70

We Could Try Simply NOT Provoking A Wider War Via The

Continued Destruction Of Gaza ... 73

We Are Entirely Too Close To Another Major War In The

Middle East ... 76

Tony Blinken Is A Cold-Blooded Sociopath ... 78

Western Empire Bombs Yemen To Protect Israel’s Genocide
Operations In Gaza ... 80

The Biden Administration’s Absurd Justification For Its

Yemen War ... 82

Many Say They Want Peace When What They Really Want Is
Obedience ... 85

I Want For You What You Want For The Palestinians ... 89

Strange Groceries ... 90

 • january 24 •

The War On Journalism In Belmarsh, The War On

Journalism In Gaza
I haven’t written much about Julian Assange lately because
I’ve been so fixated on what’s been happening in Gaza, but
we should all be acutely aware that the 20th and 21st of
February may be the WikiLeaks founder’s final chance to
avoid extradition to the United States to face persecution
for the crime of good journalism.

5

Assange and his legal team will face
two High Court judges during the
two-day hearing in London, who will
then determine whether or not the
UK will allow the Australian journalist
to be dragged to the US in chains for
a crooked show trial and cast into
one of the world’s most draconian
prison systems for exposing the war
crimes of the world’s most powerful
government.
6
• johnstone •
Some US lawmakers are
attempting to block the
extradition from the other
end with House Resolution
934, which asserts that
“regular journalistic activities
are protected under the
First Amendment, and that
the United States ought
to drop all charges against
and attempts to extradite
Julian Assange.” If charges
were dropped it would not
only prevent the extradition
but allow for Assange to be
freed from the Belmarsh
maximum security prison,
where he has been jailed by
the British government since
2019.
The fight to free Assange
is a fight to protect press
freedoms around the
world, since the US is using
the case in an attempt to
set a legal precedent for
extraditing and imprisoning
any journalist or publisher anywhere
in the world who shares information
with the public that the US doesn’t
want shared.
And it’s worth mentioning that this
fight is not actually separate from
the fight against Israel’s efforts
to keep journalism out of Gaza by
assassinating reporters and blocking
 • january 24 •

the press from

entering the enclave.
It’s also not separate
from humanity’s
overall struggle to
build a truth-based
civilization, nor
ultimately from our
greater struggle to
become a conscious
species.

All throughout
humanity there
are pushes toward
truth and seeing
and pushes toward
secrecy and darkness.
In the press we
see both: the
authentic journalists
like Assange who
want all that is
hidden to be made
transparent, and
the propagandists
of the mainstream
media who work to
obfuscate and distort
the truth. Those who
seek the emergence
of a harmonious
and truth-based
society want as much
I’m no prophet, but I strongly suspect
visibility into what’s really happening
that our future as a species will be
as possible, while tyrannical power
determined by the outcome of this
structures like the US empire and
struggle. If the impulse toward truth
Israel are constantly working to dim
and seeing wins out, we are probably
the lights.
headed toward a world of health
Wherever you see domination and harmony. If the impulse to keep
and abuse, you see efforts to limit everything confused and hidden and
perception and keep human minds unconscious wins, we are probably
from seeing and understanding headed for dystopia and extinction.
what’s going on. It’s true of empires,
In any case, all we can do is fight
it’s true of governments, it’s true
to make things more visible so
of cult leaders, it’s true of abusive
that health and harmony become
spouses, and it’s true of the
possible. Fight to make things
unpleasant dynamics within our own
conscious within ourselves. Fight to
psyches that we would rather not
keep journalism legal in the shadow of
look at. The less seeing there is, the
the empire. Fight to spotlight Israel’s
more abusiveness is possible; the
atrocities in Gaza. Fight to make the
more seen things become, the closer
unseen seen. Fight to bring humanity
we get to freedom.
into the light of consciousness.
Image by CJ, Creative Commons

7
 • johnstone •

More US-Driven Escalations Toward War In The

Middle East

DATELINE: 29 JAN 2024

Well, it finally happened. The scores of attacks on US

troops in the middle east in response to Israel’s US-backed
atrocities in Gaza have resulted in American deaths, just as
critics of US foreign policy have been saying would happen
for months. At least now we can stop bracing for it, I guess.
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp, among those who have long warned of this
eventuality, writes the following:

“Three US troops were killed by an overnight drone attack in northeastern

Jordan, the first Americans to die by enemy fire in the region since President
Biden threw the US’s weight behind the Israeli onslaught in Gaza.

8
 • january 24 •
“According to CNN, one-way
attack drones hit Tower
22, a small US outpost in
Jordan near the Syrian
border. Over 30 troops were
also wounded in the attack.
“Since mid-October, US
bases in Iraq and Syria
have come under attack
over 150 times in response
to US support for the Israeli
slaughter in Gaza. The
overnight drone attack in
Jordan appears to be the
first time Tower 22 was
targeted.”
The Biden administration
immediately claimed the
attack was backed by Iran, with
profoundly influential news agencies
like AP and Reuters regurgitating
this claim as established fact in
their headlines immediately
thereafter. As DeCamp notes
in the aforementioned article,
back in October a US official
acknowledged to CNN
that that there’s actually a
“persistent intelligence gap”
as to how much these Shia
militias are in fact beholden
to the orders of Tehran, but
apparently this attack being
linked to Iran is now being
treated as established gospel
truth anyway.
This attribution has allowed
perpetually war-horny
Republican senators Lindsey
Graham, Tom Cotton and
John Cornyn to call on Biden
to attack Iran directly. US
officials actually told the
press last week that Biden
would consider direct strikes
on Iran if and when the
attacks on US troops led to
American deaths, with The
New York Times reporting the Biden
administration knew it was “only a
matter of time” before this occurred.
In a statement on the attacks Biden
said the US “will hold all those
responsible to account at a time and
in a manner our choosing,” meaning
yet another military escalation in
the middle east is on its way under
this murderous administration. A
full-scale war with Iran would be
the absolute worst-case scenario
resulting from the violence which
erupted in the middle east this
past October, potentially with mass
deaths on a scale that would make
what’s been happening in Gaza look
like child’s play.
In that same statement Biden said
the US troops who were killed in the
“despicable and wholly unjust attack”
died working “to fight terrorism”,
which is of course ridiculous. People
who live in the middle east have
far more legitimacy attacking US
troops in resistance to a US-backed
genocide than US troops have in
being in the middle east to begin
with, and the US military presence
they attacked is there to shore up
geostrategic control, not to fight
terror.
As Aris Roussinos explains in a new
article for Unherd, the US base by the
Jordan-Syria border that was struck
by Iraqi forces functions as a support
base for America’s al-Tanf garrison, a
sprawling “deconfliction zone” (read:
illegal military occupation) in Syria
which the US has for years been
using to disrupt Iranian activities in
the region and help Israel carry out its
constant airstrikes in Syria. “Fighting
terrorism” is just the pretense for the
US military presence in the region; as
always, the real reason is to facilitate
the geostrategic domination of the
US empire.
9
 • johnstone •

Those three US military personnel didn’t die fighting terrorism.

They didn’t even die advancing the interests of ordinary
Americans. The real reason they died was summed up nicely by
Responsible Statecraft’s Trita Parsi:

“They didn’t die defending US interests, they died defending

Biden’s refusal to press Israel for a ceasefire. Their lives were
put at risk by Biden to defend Israel’s ability to continue its
carnage in Gaza.”

Parsi has spent months arguing that the only thing that can
de-escalate the rapidly expanding hostilities in the middle east
is a ceasefire in Gaza, since that’s what they all ultimately arise
from. The massive increase in attacks on US troops, the Yemeni
blockade in the Red Sea, the brinkmanship with Hezbollah in
Lebanon and the skyrocketing tensions with Iran are all the
direct result of Israel’s massacre in Gaza and the opposition
thereto.

Instead of pushing for a ceasefire, the US is preparing to send

Israel 50 fighter jets and 12 Apache helicopters in preparation
for the next war while stepping toward the horrifying prospect
of a hot war with Iran. Meanwhile Nancy Pelosi is saying there
needs to be an FBI investigation into people calling for a
ceasefire, because they might be Russian secret agents.

Every US military fatality in the middle east is the fault of the US government
for putting them there. US troops shouldn’t be in the middle east at all, and
the US has no legitimacy in retaliating against efforts to kick them out of the
region by the people who live there. Iraqi militias have 100 percent legitimacy
in attacking US troops in the middle east during a US-backed genocide, and
the US has zero legitimacy in retaliating.

To the managers of the US empire:

Get out of the middle east. Just get the fuck out. Stop backing a genocide
in Gaza, stop murdering people to shore up domination of world resources,
and leave. Leave before you unleash something far worse than the nightmare
you’ve already inflicted upon our species.
Image via Adobe Stock.

10
 • january 24 •

Biden Has Started Another US War

The Washington Post has an article out titled “As Houthis
vow to fight on, U.S. prepares for sustained campaign,”
with “sustained campaign” being empire-speak for a new
American war.
“The Biden administration is crafting plans for a sustained military campaign
targeting the Houthis in Yemen after 10 days of strikes failed to halt the group’s
attacks on maritime commerce, stoking concern among some officials that
an open-ended operation could derail the war-ravaged country’s fragile peace
and pull Washington into another unpredictable Middle Eastern conflict,” the
Post reports.

The Post acknowledges that “sustained military campaign” means “war” in

the ninth paragraph of the article, saying the anonymous US officials cited
in the report “don’t expect that the operation will stretch on for years like
previous U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria.” Which is about as reassuring as
a pyromaniac saying he doesn’t expect he’ll be burning down any more houses
like all those other houses he’s burned down.

11
 • johnstone •
This bizarre refusal to just call a
war a war also appeared in a recent
press conference with Pentagon
spokesperson Sabrina Singh,
who acted shocked and aghast
that reporters would even ask if
repeatedly bombing a country would
qualify as being at war with them.
“Is it now fair to say that the U.S. is at
war in Yemen?” Singh was asked by a
Reuters reporter on Thursday.
“No, we don’t seek war,” Singh replied.
“We don’t think that we are at war.
We don’t want to see a regional
war. The Houthis are the ones that
12
continue to launch cruise missiles,
antiship missiles at innocent
mariners, at commercial vessels that
are just transiting an area that sees,
you know, 10 to 15 percent of world’s
commerce.”
In a follow-up several questions later,
Singh was asked by a reporter from
Politico, “You said that we are not
at war with the Houthis, but if — you
know, this tit-for-tat bombing — we’ve
bombed them five times now. So if
this isn’t war, can you just explain this
a little — a little bit more to us? If this
isn’t war, what is war?”
“Sure, Lara, sure, great question, I just
wasn’t expecting it phrased exactly
that way,” Singh replied with a laugh
and a smirk. “Look, we are — we do not
seek war. We are — we do not — we are
not at war with the Houthis. In terms
of a definition, I think that would be
more of a clear declaration from the
United States. But again, what we are
doing and the actions that we are
taking are defensive in nature.”
It is worth noting that since that
Thursday press conference the
number of US strikes on Yemen has
increased from five to seven as of
this writing.
It is also worth noting here that,
per Singh’s absurd definition, the
US has not been at war since the
end of WWII, as there has not been
a “clear declaration of war” since
June 5, 1942. The only wars the
US has officially declared through
congress in accordance with its own
constitution have been the War of
1812, the Mexican-American War, the
Spanish-American War, and the two
world wars.
If you go by this definition the US is
among the more peaceful nations
in the world, since it hasn’t been at
war in eight decades. In reality the
US is the single most warlike and
murderous nation of modern times
with wars of aggression that have
killed millions and displaced tens of
millions just in the 21st century alone,
and plays some role in most of the
world’s major international conflicts.
 • january 24 •

Singh’s claim that the

US attacks on Yemen
are “defensive in nature”
is also self-evidently
absurd; Yemeni forces
weren’t even attacking
American commercial
vessels until the US
began attacking them.
Only the US could
launch unprovoked
attacks on a foreign
nation on the other side
of the planet and call it
self-defense.

Antiwar’s Dave
DeCamp explains:

“Before the US
began bombing the
Houthis, Ansar Allah
officials made clear
they would only stop
attacking Israeli-linked
commercial shipping
if the onslaught on
Gaza ended. Instead
of pressuring Israel to end the
slaughter in Gaza, President
Biden chose escalation, and now
the Houthis are targeting US
commercial shipping, and several
US merchant vessels have been hit
with missiles.”
Indeed, the only reason Houthi
forces began attacking ships in the
Red Sea was to pressure Israel and
its allies into ceasing the ongoing
massacre that has been taking place
in Gaza since October 7. As usual
the world’s most murderous and
powerful government is framing its
horrifying acts of extreme aggression
as innocent defensive responses to
unprovoked attacks, when in reality
the US empire is bombing Yemen in
order to facilitate the genocide of
Palestinians.
report by The Wall Street Journal says
that according to US intelligence
Israel is nowhere remotely close to
eliminating Hamas, with only 20
to 30 percent of the group having
been killed since October. Asked by
the press on Thursday if the strikes
against the Houthis are working,
Biden replied “Well, when you say
‘working’ — are they stopping the
Houthis? No. Are they going to
continue? Yes.”
So they’re raining military explosives
on impoverished middle easterners
to maintain their status quo
domination, under the pretense of
goals which they themselves admit
are not being achieved. Just another
day in the empire, I guess.
Featured image via Rawpixel (public
domain).

And while we’re on the subject

of Gaza and Yemen it’s probably
worth pointing out that according
to US empire managers the stated
goals of both campaigns have been
completely unsuccessful. A new

13
 • johnstone •

This Can’t Be Another Instance Of Genocide —

Israel Believes It’s Right!
I used to think it was wrong for Israel to be killing tens of
thousands of Gazans with airstrikes and starving hundreds
of thousands with siege warfare, but then Israel apologists
informed me that some Palestinians did mean things to
Israelis in the past, so now I support it.

14
 • january 24 •

What Israel is doing in Gaza would only be unethical if everyone in Gaza were
a perfect little cherub who’d never committed any violence or done anything
wrong ever. I could see getting upset if the IDF was raining military explosives
upon a giant concentration camp full of squishy marshmallow-like beings
made of pure love and conceived without original sin who do nothing but coo
and sing lullabies all day, but in reality the concentration camp is populated by
beings who are not nearly that perfect.

I hear people calling this a genocide, but that’s ridiculous. What’s been
explained to me is that the assault on Gaza is completely different from all the
genocidal massacres you’ve read about in history, because the Israelis believe
what they are doing is right. See, this time the ones who are carrying out the
mass-scale extermination programs and ethnic cleansing plans have reasons
for doing so.

As we all know, in a proper genocide the perpetrators have no reasons for

carrying out their mass extermination programs and ethnic cleansing plans;
they do it solely because they are evil and like doing evil things. In a proper
genocide the perpetrators historically spend most of their time cackling like
cartoon supervillains and talking about how delightfully evil their genocidal
actions are.

This isn’t like that at all. You see, the Israelis sincerely feel that the population
they are eliminating is very bad, and they believe removing that population will
make the land a much better and safer place to live. They see the Palestinians
as a major problem, and, unlike a proper genocide, they are simply trying to
find a solution to that problem which will be permanent and final.

So when you see Israel apologists defending Israel’s actions in Gaza, please try
to keep in mind that they’re just helpfully explaining that the Israeli government
has reasons and motives for doing what it’s doing, and that it believes what
it is doing is correct. If this were a proper genocide, that wouldn’t be the case.

You’ve seen what genocide looks like. It looks like Nazis rounding up Jews and
killing them. Are the Israelis wearing swastikas? Are the Palestinians Jewish?
No? Okay then. That proves this cannot possibly be a genocide, because
if it was, it would look exactly the same as a previous historical instance of
genocide in every conceivable way. It’s not even the early 1940s right now, it’s
a completely different time period. Like, duh.

So relax. Everything is fine. This isn’t a genocide, and if it is, we can read about
it in our history books later on and be sure to get it right next time.
Feature image by Greg Finnegan, Shutterstock,

15
 • johnstone •

Israel Says It’s Antisemitic To Invoke The

Genocide Convention Over Gaza
South Africa has invoked the Genocide Convention, formally
launching a case at the UN’s international court of justice
accusing Israel of genocide for its mass atrocities in the Gaza
Strip. Israel immediately responded by (deep sigh) accusing
South Africa of “blood libel”.

16
 • january 24 •

Blood libel, for those who don’t It exploits a noble, healthy

know, refers to the way medieval
Europeans would falsely accuse
Jews of murdering Christians in
blood sacrifices in order to justify
persecuting them. Which is to say,
Israel has responded to South Africa’s
accusations by accusing South Africa
of antisemitism.
False accusations of antisemitism
inclination we cultivate in
ourselves in good faith in order
to support the horrific genocidal
nightmare in Gaza in entirely bad
faith. It exploits our good nature to
advance a profoundly evil cause.
It’s despicable. It’s depraved.
Israel apologists always speak
as though all critics of Israel are
constantly obsessing over Jews,
when nothing remotely like that
is happening. It’s a fantasy. The
only reason people like me ever
make any mention of Jewishness
is because 90 percent of the
arguments made by Israel’s
defenders rely on babbling about
Jews and antisemitism, and
those arguments need to be
addressed.

If Israel’s defenders weren’t

are all Israel and its defenders have
left. It’s the only tool left in their
toolbox. Once you’ve exhausted
the “But Hamas!” and “But October
7!” excuses they make for Israel’s
deliberate butchery of civilians via
airstrikes and siege warfare, false
accusations of hating Jews is all that
remains.
And it’s so sick, because it exploits a
healthy impulse in those of us who
oppose racism and genocide, and
does so in order to defend racist acts
of genocide. It causes people who
care deeply about human rights to
take a step back and say “Hold on,
am I guilty of embodying the same
hateful prejudices which led to the
Holocaust?” and shuts us down and
shuts us up, even as Israel rolls out its
own holocaust against Palestinians.
constantly babbling about Jews
and antisemitism, it would never
even occur to me to think about
those things in relation to what’s
happening in Gaza, and I’m quite
sure the vast majority of people on
my side of this issue are the same.
When you see mass atrocities of
unfathomable horror unfolding in
real time in a nonstop deluge of video
and photo evidence, the very last
thing on your mind is what religious
faith the perpetrators espouse. It’s
not something normal people think
about.
Throughout my life I’ve had a positive
view of Jews and Jewish culture
because so many of the people I’ve
admired and been influenced by
have been Jewish, but other than
that it’s not something that I’ve really
thought about much. This notion
that opposition to the criminality of
the Israeli government is driven by a
demented hatred of Jewish people
is a complete work of fiction. People
in our society simply do not feel that
way about Jews. Real antisemitism
does exist, but it’s a small fringe view.
Normal people just want the mass
slaughter of children and the ethnic
cleansing to stop.
If I saw someone murdering a child,
there are many things I might say
and do, but the very last thing that
would ever occur to me would be to
wonder what religion he is. It’s the
silliest, most nonsensical narrative
in mainstream politics and media
today.
And that’s why fewer and fewer
people are buying it. There’s only
so many times the boy can falsely
cry wolf before the villagers stop
running to his defense. Hopefully this
desensitization that Israel and its
apologists have created doesn’t have
dark consequences in the future. It’s
just one more ugly thing they have
birthed into the world that the rest of
us will have to bring consciousness
to.
Featured image via Adobe Stock.

17
 • johnstone •

Israel Accuses The ICJ Of (You Guessed It)

Antisemitism
The International Court of Justice rejected Israel’s request
to dismiss the genocide case brought against it by South
Africa on Friday, ruling by a massive majority that the case
shall proceed and instructing Israel to refrain from killing
and harming Palestinians in the interim.

18
 • january 24 •
Many Palestine supporters have
expressed dismay that the ICJ did
not explicitly order a
ceasefire, while many
others (including
South African officials)
argue that the ruling
is very positive and
tantamount to a out their tired old “antisemitism”
ceasefire order because
it demands the end of
harm to members of
the protected group.
Imperial media
are aggressively
emphasising the
absence of a ceasefire
order in their headlines
and many Israel
apologists are framing
that absence as a
victory for their favorite
ethnostate, but such
performative chest-
thumping is severely
undercut by the way
high-level Israeli officials are currently
accusing the ICJ of antisemitism and
saying Israel should ignore its rulings.
“The international court
of justice went above
and beyond when it
granted South Africa’s
antisemitic request to
discuss the claim of
genocide in Gaza, and
now refuses to reject
the petition outright,”
complained Israeli
defense minister Yoav
Gallant in response to
the ruling.
“The decision of the antisemitic
court in The Hague proves what
was already known: This court does
not seek justice, but rather the
persecution of Jewish people,” said
Israeli national security minister
Itamar Ben Gvir.
Ben Gvir also tweeted “Hague
Schmague” immediately after the
ruling was issued, which will probably
go down in history as the most Israeli
tweet of all time.
Everyone’s arguing about whether
or not the ICJ’s ruling is helpful, and
I don’t know enough one way or the
other to be sure either way, but from
where things stand right now it does
seem unlikely to me that managers
of the Israeli war machine would be
getting this freaked out and whipping
song and dance if there wasn’t
something of substance to it.
International lawyer Francis Boyle,
who won provisional measures
against Yugoslavia at the ICJ in 1993,
said the following of the ruling:
“This is a massive, overwhelming
legal victory for the Republic of
South Africa against Israel on behalf
of the Palestinians. The U.N. General
Assembly now can suspend Israel
from participation in its activities
as it did for South Africa and
Yugoslavia. It can admit Palestine
as a full member. And — especially
since the International Criminal
Court has been a farce — it can
establish a tribunal to prosecute
the highest level officials of the
Israeli government, both civilian
and military.”
So take that for whatever that’s
worth to you. In any case the
butchery in Gaza still urgently needs
to be ended, and only time will tell
whether Friday’s development had
any major effect on the outcome of
this horror.
But man what I wouldn’t have given
to be a fly on the wall at the meetings
they were having at the US State
Department on Friday. It’s days like
this that remind you why empire
managers switched from talking
about “international law” to using
the meaningless phrase “rules-based
international order”.
Image by Adobe Stock.
19
 • johnstone •

Commemorating A Past Holocaust While

Cheerleading The Current One
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
The US and eight of its allies have suspended funding
to UNRWA, the primary humanitarian agency in Gaza,
following Israeli allegations that a dozen employees of the
30,000-staff organization were involved in the October 7
attack by Hamas. The allegations conveniently sprung
up at the same time as the International Court of Justice
rulings against Israel in the genocide case brought against
it by South Africa, quickly supplanting the ICJ ruling in
western mass media headlines. The US has continued to
dismiss the South African case as unfounded.
A senior Israeli official told Axios that Israeli intelligence agencies came upon
the information about the UNRWA staffers largely through “interrogations of
militants who were arrested during the Oct. 7 attack.” Israel has an extensive
history of using torture in its interrogations, and there’s no reason to believe it
hasn’t been used on captured Hamas fighters in recent months.
20

So to recap —
Accusations of genocide deemed
credible by the International Court of
Justice: Preposterous lies. Not worth
opposing a single massacre over.
Unsubstantiated claims about
UNRWA staff extracted via torture:
Gospel truth. Worthy of ending
humanitarian support to Gazans for.
• waving a white flag mistaking them
How does ANY unproven
claim by the Israeli
government get treated
seriously by ANYONE
anymore? There ought to be
a limit on how many lies you
can get caught circulating
before the entire political/
media class just starts
laughing at you whenever
you make any claim about
anything.
• they’re defending a
It’s been so surreal watching empire
managers issue solemn words in
honor of Holocaust Memorial Day
while enthusiastically facilitating a
modern-day genocide in Gaza.
Commemorating the Holocaust
while cheerleading for the current
holocaust is next-level dystopia.
•
• january 24 •
The IDF shot and killed a Palestinian
man who had a white flag in a
designated “safe zone” right in
front of an ITV News crew, drawing
headlines around the world.
It’s been undeniable that the IDF
routinely kills Palestinians who
are waving white flags ever since
last month when they killed three
escaped Israeli hostages who were
for Palestinians. This was just the
first time the western press filmed it.
•
A re-election
campaign year for a
Democrat president
coinciding with an
active genocide
backed by that same
president is exposing
the true face of the
Democratic Party
clearer than anything
I can remember.
Biden is preparing to send Israel 50
child murder jets and 12 child murder
helicopters, but oh no no we mustn’t
focus on this too much because it’s
an election year and Trump is a very
bad person.
•
I understand the logic of lesser-evil
voting. I just don’t understand the
logic of designating a president who
backs a literal genocide and engages
in nuclear brinkmanship a “lesser
evil”.
• Peace (CC BY 2.0)
A political establishment which tells
you you have to choose between two
presidential candidates who both
want to help Israel murder children
by the thousands is a political
establishment which must not be
permitted to exist.
•
Israel has been caught in
lie after lie after lie after lie
since October 7, yet we’re
meant to believe it’s crazy
antisemitic holocaust
denialism to think it may
have lied about some of
the stuff that happened on
October 7 as well.
•
Young people spent 2020 protesting
against racism and injustice and
spent 2022 being told that it’s
bad for an occupying force to drop
bombs on people, but when Israel
started a racist and unjust bombing
campaign in 2023 older generations
were still somehow surprised to see
young people stand against it.
•
To defend Israel is
to defend the US
empire, because
the military might
of the US empire is
what makes Israel’s
existence possible.
You can’t separate
the two. Israel
apologists pretend
plucky little underdog
country in the middle
east and a persecuted
religious minority, when really they’re
defending the most powerful empire
that has ever existed and the most
murderous and tyrannical power
structure of the 21st century.
Featured image via U.S. Institute of
21
 • johnstone •

The Israel Supporter And The Sandwich

22
 • january 24 •

Israel supporter: [Walks up to a guy at a restaurant, grabs his sandwich, starts

eating it.]

Guy: Hey!

Israel supporter: What?

Guy: That’s my sandwich!

Israel supporter [still eating]: Sandwich? What sandwich?

Guy: Right there! You’re eating it right now!

Israel supporter: No I’m not.

Guy: Oh my God! You’re standing right in front of me eating my sandwich! I can

see you doing it with my own eyes!

Israel supporter [finishing sandwich]: Nope. Never happened.

Guy: You owe me another sandwich you prick! You stole from me!

Israel supporter: So you’re saying Jews steal? That’s an antisemitic canard!

Guy: What?? I didn’t even know what religion you are! I’m just mad you stole
my sandwich and ate it right in front of me!

Israel supporter: That never happened. Or if it did happen it wasn’t me. Or if

it was me I had to do it because another guy did something that left me no
choice, so you should blame him.

Guy: Gah!!

Israel supporter: Actually come to think of it I’m beginning to suspect maybe

YOU ate MY sandwich.

Guy: How is this happening? This is ridiculous!

Israel supporter: Again with the Jew hating!

Guy: Why the hell do you keep babbling about Jews?? This has nothing to do
with Jews! This is about you personally and the specific thing you just did!

Israel supporter: Okay Hitler. [Steals silverware on the table, exits.]

Featured image via Adobe Stock

23
 • johnstone •

False Accusations Of Antisemitism Exploit A

Healthy Impulse To Advance A Profoundly Sick
One
The most despicable thing about the way Israel supporters
smear Israel’s critics as antisemites is that they are
exploiting a very healthy impulse to advance a profoundly
sick impulse. They knowingly exploit the fact that the
further to the left someone is on the the political spectrum
the more likely they are to (A) support Palestinian rights
and (B) be very receptive to any suggestion that they might
be acting in a racially insensitive way.

24
 • january 24 •

My followers who are on the right of our world, we would have peace
side of the political spectrum always and harmony on earth very quickly.
have melodramatic conniptions But this impulse gets exploited
whenever I say this, but there is a in the most odiously cynical way
lot of value in learning about the imaginable to defend the interests
role racial inequality plays in the of a murderous and tyrannical
injustices of our society and getting government whose very existence
real with ourselves about where is premised on racism, apartheid,
our own racial circumstances fit in ethnic cleansing and abuse.
with those unjust power dynamics.
It’s a very healthy Have you ever noticed that it’s never
impulse to look within the actual antisemites who get
yourself and figure attacked as antisemites? Nowadays
out if there’s anything it’s very seldom the assholes saying
in you as an individual Jews rule the world and are the
that feeds into the source of society’s ills who are
racial injustices of inundated with such accusations;
our society, whether supporters of Israel tend to more or
you‘re aware of it less leave them alone. The ones who
at first or not. This get slandered as antisemites are
is especially true of people like Jeremy Corbyn — leftists
white people, since who’ve dedicated their entire lives
racial injustices tend to anti-racism, whose only actual
to benefit us in this offense is believing that Palestinians
society. are human beings and should be
treated as such.
The further someone
is toward the left In fact actual antisemites are some
end of the spectrum, of Israel’s strongest allies. The lion’s
the more likely they share of forceful support for Israel in
are to respond to an the United States comes not from
accusation of racism Jews but from Christian Zionists who
by stopping in their support Israel because they believe
tracks and inquiring it will bring Jesus back so he can
deeply into whether damn all non-Christians to eternal
the accusation might hellfire. Televangelist John Hagee,
have some truth to who believes Hitler was sent by God
it. If the accusation is to help create Israel, had a prominent
that you harbor the speaking spot at Tuesday’s “March
same kind of racism for Israel” in Washington DC.
that gave rise to
the Holocaust — one While people who hate Jews so much
of the worst mass they want them to writhe in eternal
atrocities in all of hellfire are warmly embraced as

human history — then

you are all the more
likely to stop and
take the accusation
seriously.

This is a healthy
impulse. If everyone
took seriously their
responsibility to
expunge everything
in them that feeds
into the injustices

25
 • johnstone •

The good news

is that it doesn’t
seem to be working
as much anymore.
People are gradually
becoming aware
that accusations of
antisemitism are used
by Israel apologists
to stagnate and
stifle support for
Palestinian rights, and
are beginning to take
those accusations
a lot less seriously.
There’s only so many
times you can watch
dishonest smear
campaigns against
good-faith leftists
before you start to
figure out that you’re
being manipulated.

allies of convenience by Israel and
its supporters, healthy leftists who
oppose racism in all its forms are
attacked by Israel apologists as Nazis
and Jew-haters. This is because their
actions are not designed to protect
Jews or reduce antisemitism — their
actions are to facilitate the strategic
objectives of the Israeli government
and its allies.
Really what’s happening in Gaza right
now isn’t about Jews or Judaism at
all; it’s about using violent force to
take land and resources away from
an indigenous population, as history
has seen happen time and time
again in situations that had nothing
to do with Jews. It’s a profoundly
unhealthy impulse that’s been
causing immense human suffering
for centuries, and people who’ve
noticed the same patterns in Israel
that they’ve seen in all the other
settler-colonial projects over the
last 500 years are being shouted
down and bullied into staying silent
using some of the most unethical
manipulations ever devised.
As with most
problems, the
solution to this one is to expand
consciousness. The more people
become aware of the way
accusations of antisemitism are
cynically used to shut down pro-
Palestine sentiments around the
world, the less power those methods
will have. That doesn’t mean we stop
treating real antisemitism like a real
problem or that we become less
sensitive to racial injustice; it simply
means we see what’s being done
in this specific instance and start
calling it what it is.
Featured image via Wikimedia
Commons.

26
 • january 24 •

I Don’t Care What Religion The Genocidal Child

Murderers Are
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Unfuckingbelievable. It is un fucking believable that it’s
2024 and the US-sponsored incineration of Gaza is still
going on.
They’re just looking us dead in the eye and doing the worst
things humans could possibly do, right in front of us.
Against all laws. Against all opposition.
•

The other day Tony Blinken posted an astonishingly obnoxious tweet fretting
about how “This has been an extraordinarily dangerous year for press around
the world,” as though his own administration had not directly facilitated the
lion’s share of the deadly attacks on journalists in 2023. The utter gall of these
freaks still surprises me sometimes.

•
27
 • johnstone •

Very frightened and upset by the

alarming increase in antisemitism*
we’ve seen in the last three months.

[*Pro-Palestine demonstrations,
pro-Palestine political slogans, pro-
Palestine tweets and TikTok videos,
criticism of the Israeli government,
people saying it’s wrong to murder
thousands of children]

All this “antisemitism” gibberish is

so fucking stupid. It’s like if every
time we wanted to criticize the Iraq
invasion we had to do a whole big
song and dance swearing on our
lives that we weren’t racist toward
Texans.

I don’t give a fuck if you’re Jewish.

I don’t care what religion you are.
If you’re murdering thousands of
children, the very least significant
thing about that situation is what
religion you happen to be. I think the
overwhelming majority of people on
my side see it this way.
•
Step 1: Deliberately make
Gaza uninhabitable
Don’t worry, Israel will be at peace
once it defeats Hamas. Well, first
it’ll need to conquer Syria, eliminate
Hezbollah and Ansarallah, achieve
regime change in Iran, and defeat
all the new enemies these military
campaigns will create along the way.
But THEN there will be peace!
•

It’s crazy how there’s mountains

Step 2: Leave Gazans
no choice but to migrate
elsewhere
Step 3: Call this forced
migration “voluntary” and
“humanitarian”
of evidence that Israeli higher-ups
allowed October 7 to happen in
order to advance ethnic cleansing
agendas in Gaza, but you’ll never
be allowed to say this blatantly
obvious thing happened without
being branded an antisemitic
conspiracy kook.

Step 4: Turn the entire Gaza •

Strip into a giant Israeli

settlement
•

28

It is right and good to aggressively
scrutinize claims about mass rape on
October 7, but it’s also important to
stress that even if every single one of
those claims was true it would not
justify anything Israel has been doing
in Gaza.
•
No matter how many times you
bleat the phrase “Blame Hamas”,
it will never magically erase Israel’s
guilt in raining military explosives
on a giant concentration camp full
of children.
No matter how many times you
accuse Israel’s critics of being
antisemitic, it will never magically
erase Israel’s guilt in raining military
explosives on a giant concentration
camp full of children.
No matter how many times you
mention October 7, it will never
magically erase Israel’s guilt in
raining military explosives on a
giant concentration camp full of
children.
• january 24 •
Older generations, for the
love of God stop telling
the young generation “It’s
terrible, but that’s just the
way it is.” That may have
been true in our youth, but
our children are networked
in an unprecedented way
which has already resulted
in massive social changes.
They changed the way we
think about gender pretty
much overnight; you think
a tiny old war machine is
going to get in their way?
Stop trying to indoctrinate
them with your learned
helplessness.
Next time a young person
gets angry about the way
the world is, please don’t
chuck the sand of pre-
emptive disappointment
in their eyes with your
somnolent words of
status-quo enforcing
“pragmatism”. Simply say “I
am with you all the way. Tell
me where to next.”
•
29
 • johnstone •

The “Rules-Based International Order”

The “rules-based international order” has allowed the
incineration of Gaza, and the bombing of Yemeni forces
who are trying to stop it.
The “rules-based international order” allowed hundreds of thousands of
people to be killed by western-backed Saudi atrocities in Yemen.

The “rules-based international order” allowed NATO powers to knowingly

provoke a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine.

The “rules-based international order” allowed western powers and their

regional partners to plunge Syria into a horrific civil war by flooding the nation
with heavily armed fascistic extremist factions.

The “rules-based international order” has allowed the US to invade and

occupy a vast stretch of Syrian territory in order to control the nation’s natural
resources and prevent reconstruction.

The “rules-based international order” allowed Libya to be turned into a chaotic

hellscape after western-backed forces killed Gaddafi following a long-desired
western regime change operation disguised as “humanitarian intervention”.

30
 • january 24 •

The “rules-based international order” allowed the invasion of Iraq to destabilize

an entire region resulting in millions of deaths following a campaign of
deliberate lies and propaganda.

The “rules-based international order” allowed the invasion of Afghanistan and

a decades-long occupation sustained by lies and corruption.

The “rules-based international order” allowed the imprisonment of Julian

Assange for journalistic activities exposing US war crimes.

The “rules-based international order” has allowed the planet to be circled by

hundreds of US military bases, including in places where the people who live
there vehemently oppose their presence like Okinawa, Iraq and Syria.

The “rules-based international order” has allowed the US and its allies to kill
huge numbers of civilians with siege warfare tactics in nations like Yemen, Iraq
and Venezuela.

The “rules-based international order” has allowed the US to interfere in

scores of elections around the world at will and forcibly topple inconvenient
governments whenever it wants to.

The “rules-based international order” has allowed China to be surrounded

by a rapidly increasing amount of US military bases and war machinery in
preparation for a future conflict of unimaginable horror.

The “rules-based international order” has allowed the US to plunge the world
into a new cold war with rapidly-escalating brinkmanship against nuclear-
armed Russia and China.

The “rules-based international order” has allowed our civilization to be

controlled by the most powerful propaganda system ever devised, creating a
mind-controlled dystopia of brainwashed gear-turners who are deceived into
believing they are free.

The “rules-based international order” has allowed unfathomable amounts of

government malfeasance to be hidden behind an increasingly opaque wall of
government secrecy.

The “rules-based international order” has allowed the interests of ordinary

human beings to be subordinated and subjected to the interests of billionaire
corporations and sociopathic government agencies.

The “rules-based international order” has allowed the destruction of our

ecosystem for the enrichment of powerful plutocrats.

The “rules-based international order” has allowed our planet to be dominated

by an empire of extreme murderousness and depravity at the cost of nonstop
bloodshed and ever-increasing tyranny.

If the “rules-based international order” has allowed all these things to happen,
what kind of “rules” are we talking about exactly? And what kind of “order” do
they sustain?

If this is what the “rules-based international order” looks like, would we not,
perhaps, be better off without it?
Featured image via Adobe Stock.

31
 • johnstone •

When Yemen Does It It’s Terrorism, When The US

Does It It’s “The Rules-Based Order”
The Biden administration has officially re-designated
Ansarallah — the dominant force in Yemen also known as
the Houthis — as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist
entity.
The White House claims the designation is an appropriate response to the
group’s attacks on US military vessels and commercial ships in the Red Sea
and the Gulf of Aden, saying those attacks “fit the textbook definition of
terrorism.” Ansarallah claims its actions “adhere to the provisions of Article 1 of
the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,”
since it is only enforcing a blockade geared toward ceasing the ongoing Israeli
destruction of Gaza.

32
 • january 24 •

In a new article for

Antiwar about this
latest development,
Dave Decamp
explains that as much
as the Biden White
House goes to great
lengths insisting
that it’s going to
issue exemptions
to ensure that its
sanctions don’t harm
the already struggling
Yemeni people,
“history has shown
that sanctions scare
away international
companies and banks
from doing business
with the targeted
nations or entities
and cause shortages
of medicine, food, and
other basic goods.”
DeCamp also notes
that US and British
airstrikes on Yemen
have already forced
some aid groups to
suspend services to
the country.

One of the most heinous acts
committed by the Trump
administration was its designation
of Ansarallah as a Foreign Terrorist
Organization (FTO) and as Specially
Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT),
both of which imposed sanctions
that critics warned would plunge
Yemen’s aid-dependent population
into even greater levels of starvation
than they were already experiencing
by restricting the aid that would
be allowed in. One of the Biden
administration’s only decent foreign
policy decisions has been the reversal
of that sadistic move, and now that
reversal is being partially rolled back,
though thankfully only with the SDGT
listing and not the more deadly and
consequential FTO designation.
So the US empire is
going to be imposing
sanctions on a nation that’s still trying
to recover from the devastation
caused by the US-backed Saudi
blockade that contributed to
hundreds of thousands of deaths
between 2015 and 2022. All in
response to the de facto government
of that very same country imposing
its own blockade with the goal of
preventing a genocide.
That’s right kids: when Yemen sets up
a blockade to try and stop an active
genocide, that’s terrorism, but when
the US empire imposes a blockade
to secure its geostrategic interests
in the middle east, why that’s just
the rules-based international order
in action.

33
 • johnstone •

What this shows us

is that the “rules-
based international
order” the US and its
allies claim to uphold
is not based on rules
at all; it’s based on
power, which is the
ability to control and
impose your will on
other people. The
“rules” apply only to
the enemies of the
empire because they
are not rules at all:
they are narratives
used to justify efforts
to bend the global
population to its will.

We are ruled by
murderous tyrants.
By nuclear-armed
thugs who would
rather starve civilians
to protect the
continuation of an
active genocide than
It just says so much about how the US allow peace to get
empire sees itself that it can impose a word in edgewise. Our world can
blockades and starvation sanctions never know health as long as these
at will upon nations like Yemen, monsters remain in charge.
Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Syria and
North Korea for refusing to bow to its •
dictates, but when Yemen imposes a
blockade for infinitely more worthy
and noble reasons it gets branded
an act of terrorism. The managers of
the globe-spanning empire loosely
centralized around Washington
literally believe the world is theirs to
rule as they will, and that anyone who
opposes its rulings is an outlaw.

34
 Israel has lost the argument.
The western empire has lost the argument.
The mass media have lost the argument.
Mainstream western culture has lost the argument.
Capitalism has lost the argument.
Our systems have failed us as massively as anything can fail.
Time for something new.
 • johnstone •

If You’ve Just Started Paying Attention To US

Foreign Policy
If you’re among those who have only just begun paying
attention to US foreign policy and western media bias
in light of Israel’s destruction of Gaza and Biden’s act of
war against Yemen, it’s important to understand that
none of the depravity you’re seeing is new. The lies. The
insane double standards. The murderousness. The western
political/media class always does this.

36

Every war the US involves itself
in is always facilitated by lies
promulgated in one voice by the
official government in Washington
and by the “independent” “free”
press (actually propaganda services)
of the western world. They deceived
the world about Ukraine. They
deceived the world about Yemen.
They deceived the world about
Syria, Libya and Iraq. There are
always, always lies, obfuscations and
manipulations involved in marketing
a new war to the public, or in hiding
its involvement in foreign wars from
public attention.
All of this manipulation
and deceit is necessary
to hide the fact that the
US-centralized empire
is the most tyrannical
power structure on this
planet. And make no
mistake, it is an empire.
Washington serves as the
hub of an undeclared empire
comprised of alliances,
partnerships, assets, public
deals and secret agreements
which knit a large number
of nations together into
what functions as a single
power structure with regard
to international affairs.
Most of the beneficiaries of this
power structure reside in the west, or
global north, while the most exploited
and abused victims of this power
structure tend to reside in the east,
or global south. There are all sorts of
rules and regulations and narratives
and justifications for why this all
happens the way it happens, but if
you mentally “mute” the soundtrack
on the verbal overlay and just look
at what’s actually happening, what
you will see is the lion’s share of
the world’s wealth and resources
moving northward and westward
• january 24 •
from populations of a darker average You don’t need to believe anything
skin tone toward populations of a I’m saying on faith. If you just
paler average skin tone. Wherever keep in mind what I said and start
that movement is hindered, diverted, watching the patterns for yourself
threatened or inconvenienced, you while seeking out the truth day by
will see western war machinery day, you will see it for yourself. You
moving southward and eastward to will see the same patterns emerging
get it back on the desired track. over and over again, year after
year. Over and over again you will
Most major international conflicts see the US and the states that are
can be understood as either direct aligned with it acting with extreme
or indirect efforts by the US empire aggression toward non-US-aligned
to shore up planetary domination, powers in ways that benefit the US-
which are often met with resistance centralized power structure, and you
by populations who wish to retain will see the western press deceiving
their sovereignty. Much of this the world about what’s happening.
conflict happens in the middle east The next Official Bad Guy you see
because that’s where the world gets
a lot of its oil from, with US-aligned
dominating western press coverage
on international affairs will be a
nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia non-US-aligned power, and if you
frequently serving as the frontline apply diligent research and critical
for hostilities with non-US-aligned thinking you will find that they are
nations like Iran and Syria as well as not presenting an accurate picture of
non-US-aligned forces like Hezbollah, what’s happening.
Ansarallah and Hamas.
Just keep learning and studying the
This struggle for US planetary patterns with open curiosity and
hegemony is disguised by the western self-honesty, and the picture will
political/media class as something inevitably become clear to you. And
other than what it is, because you then you will clearly see who’s really
can’t allow the public in a democratic
nation to understand clearly that
driving the bulk of the violence and
disorder in our world.
their government is on the side
Featured image via Adobe Stock.
of evil. They’ll frame it as a US-led
international coalition to liberate a
nation from a tyrannical dictator. As a
humanitarian intervention to protect
human rights. As support for Israel’s
right to defend itself. As protection
of freedom of navigation in the Red
Sea. But what’s actually happening
is the world’s most powerful and
murderous power structure killing
human beings in western Asia in
order to secure control over a crucial
resource.
You see this all over the world
against nations which refuse to allow
themselves to be absorbed into the
US-centralized power structure like
North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba,
with China being by far the strongest
of these and Russia a distant second.
And you will notice that you have
heard every nation I just mentioned
cast in a very negative light by the
western press over the years. This is
not a coincidence.
37
Welcome To The Empire
 • january 24 •

Welcome to the empire

Where genocide is self-defense and peace rallies are genocide

Where war criminals are the victims and the hospitals are Hamas

Where calls for freedom are hateful and ceasefires are antisemitic

Where civilians get called terrorists and real terrorists get Nobel Peace Prizes

Where the propaganda is journalism and the journalism is propaganda

Where the democracy is real and the apartheid is imaginary

Where the corporations are people and the people are corporate resources

Welcome to the empire

Whose bombs are humanitarian and whose provocations are invisible

Whose veterans are heroes and whose victims are forgotten

Whose wars are always just and whose enemies are always Hitler

Whose cause is always righteous and whose critics are always Russian

Whose sufferings are unforgivable and whose crimes are erased from history

Whose atrocities are always an unfortunate accident and whose enemies kill
civilians for fun

Whose disastrous interventions are always innocent mistakes no matter how

often they happen

Welcome to the empire

Ever the victim of unprovoked attacks from the people it has been strangling

Ever the shining city on a hill of human corpses

Ever the defender of the poor helpless plutocrats of Wall Street

Ever the savior of the families incinerated by missiles made by Raytheon

Ever the protector of natural resources in the soil of foreign nations

Ever the upholder of the rules-based order of a world with a boot on its throat

The empire loves you with a heart made of dollars and oil

The empire watches over you through your smartphone and your computer

The empire is your only friend

The empire is the only one who will ever love you

You can’t leave

You can’t get rid of the empire

If you get rid of the empire, this world could be taken over by tyrants

39
 • johnstone •

They’re Calling Ethnic Cleansing “Voluntary

Migration” Now

Israeli officials are now openly admitting that they’re

working on “encouraging” the migration of Palestinians
from Gaza, ridiculously claiming that this migration would
be “voluntary” despite their having deliberately made the
enclave uninhabitable over the last three months.

40
 • january 24 •
The Times of Israel reports:
“Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s two senior far-right
partners endorsed the rebuilding
of settlements in the Gaza Strip
and the encouraging of “voluntary
emigration” of Palestinians on
Monday, while hawkish opposition
MK Avigdor Liberman called
for Israel to reoccupy southern
Lebanon.
“Speaking during their parties’
respective faction meetings in the
Knesset, National Security Minister
Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance
Minister Bezalel Smotrich presented
the migration of Palestinian civilians
as a solution to the long-running
conflict and as a prerequisite for
securing the stability necessary to
allow residents of southern Israel to
return to their homes.
“The war presents an ‘opportunity
to concentrate on encouraging
the migration of the residents of
Gaza,’ Ben Gvir told reporters and
members of his far-right Otzma
Yehudit party, calling such a
policy ‘a correct, just, moral
and humane solution.’
“‘We cannot withdraw from
any territory we are in in the
Gaza Strip. Not only do I not
rule out Jewish settlement
there, I believe it is also an
important thing,’ he said.
“The ‘correct solution’ to the
ongoing Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is ‘to encourage
the voluntary migration of
Gaza’s residents to countries
that will agree to take in
the refugees,’ Smotrich told
members of his Religious
Zionism party, predicting
that ‘Israel will permanently
control the territory of
the Gaza Strip,’ including
through the establishment of
settlements.”
The repeated use of the word
“encourage” stands out in these
remarks, given that encouraging
Gaza’s inhabitants to flee their
homeland is exactly what Israel’s
actions since October have been
doing. Once you’ve made 90 percent
of Gaza’s inhabitants homeless with
internal displacement, forced half the
population into starvation via siege
warfare, destroyed the enclave’s
entire healthcare system to the
point where disease is now running
rampant, all while raining death and
destruction from above in a wildly
unpredictable manner with airstrikes
routinely hitting designated safe
zones, you’re offering the population
some very strong “encouragement”
indeed to vacate the region as soon
as possible.
This obviously makes the argument
for the “voluntary migration” of
Gazans completely nonsensical,
since violently coercing someone
into doing something and ensuring
that they’ll die if they don’t do it is
the exact opposite of what the word
“voluntary” means.
41

But that’s the slogan we’re seeing
pop up again and again as Israel
draws closer to its final solution to
the Palestinian problem in Gaza.
Netanyahu and his cohorts have
been repeatedly uttering phrases
like “voluntary resettlement” and
“voluntary migration” to describe
the plan for Gaza’s Palestinian
inhabitants to either move to refugee
camps set up in the adjacent Sinai
Peninsula in Egypt or to be taken in
by other nations around the world.
Netanyahu has said that a team
must be established to “ensure that
those who want to leave Gaza to a
third country can do so.” Iraq invader
Tony Blair was reportedly being eyed
as a potential leader of such a team
by Israeli officials, though Blair has
denied this.
Mitchell Plitnick wrote the following
on the absurdity of the “voluntary
migration” talking point in an article
for Mondoweiss last month:
“The term ‘voluntary emigration’ is
likely to be heard quite a lot in the
coming weeks and months, and it
is one of the most cynical,
dishonest terms one can
imagine. There is, of course,
nothing voluntary about
people leaving Gaza. Israel
has made the place unlivable,
and that was before the
current bombardment.
“Now, they are essentially
being forced to leave under
the threat of imminent
death. The people of Gaza
did not suddenly lose their
attachment to Palestine.
They will die if they stay, as
will their children. If you cut
off water, electricity, food,
and medical care, destroy all
the shelter, and then ask a
person, ‘Would you still like to
stay?’ their decision to leave
is obviously not voluntary.”
42
• johnstone •
But that’s the narrative they’re going
with apparently.
And it’s nothing new; Israel has been
falsely claiming for generations
that its violent forced expulsion of
Palestinians known as the Nakba was
voluntary as well. In 2000 Palestinian
academic Ghada Karmi wrote that
“The Israeli version of history — that
the Palestinians left voluntarily or
under orders from their leaders and
that Israelis had no responsibility,
material or moral, for their plight — has
been successfully marketed to the
world community for decades.”
The plot to relocate Palestinians
from territories desired by Israel is
also far from new. In a 2002 article
for The Guardian titled “A new exodus
for the Middle East?”, Israeli historian
Benny Morris writes that the agenda
to “transfer” Palestinians to other
countries has existed for as long as
modern Zionism:
“The idea of transfer is as old
as modern Zionism and has
accompanied its evolution and
praxis during the past century. And
driving it was an iron logic: There
could be no viable Jewish state
in all or part of Palestine unless
there was a mass displacement of
Arab inhabitants, who opposed its
emergence and would constitute an
active or potential fifth column in its
midst. This logic was understood, and
enunciated, before and during 1948,
by Zionist, Arab and British leaders
and officials.
“As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the
prophet and founder of Zionism,
wrote in his diary in anticipation of
the establishment of the Jewish
state: ‘We shall try to spirit the
penniless [Arab] population across
the border by procuring employment
for it in the transit countries, while
denying it any employment in our
country … The removal of the poor
must be carried out discreetly and
circumspectly.’”
This is a very, very old agenda, being
presented as something brand
new that is only just occurring to
Israeli officials just now. They didn’t
just come up with this. It’s been
fantasized about for as long as Israel
was a twinkle in its founding
fathers’ eyes.
This is the real objective in Gaza.
Not the “elimination of Hamas”
(whatever the hell you want
to pretend that would look
like in practice), but the ethnic
cleansing of Palestinians from
the Gaza Strip.
Hamas is not the target in Gaza.
Hamas is just the excuse.
Featured image via Wikimedia
Commons.
 • january 24 •

Actually what fuels

antisemitism is murdering
children by the thousands
under the banner of the
Star of David while
adamantly insisting that
your actions are inseparable
from all Jews and the
totality of Judaism.

43
 • johnstone •

US Admonishes Israeli Officials For Saying The

Quiet Part Out Loud About Ethnic Cleansing

The US State Department has issued a statement

indignantly finger-wagging at two Israeli officials who
recently drew headlines for openly endorsing the ethnic
cleansing of the Gaza Strip.

44
 • january 24 •

The statement reads as follows:

“The United States rejects recent

statements from Israeli Ministers
Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben
Gvir advocating for the resettlement
of Palestinians outside of Gaza.
This rhetoric is inflammatory and
irresponsible. We have been told
repeatedly and consistently by
the Government of Israel, including
by the Prime Minister, that such
statements do not reflect the policy
of the Israeli government. They
should stop immediately.

“We have been clear, consistent,

and unequivocal that Gaza is
Palestinian land and will remain
Palestinian land, with Hamas
no longer in control of its future
and with no terror groups able to
threaten Israel. That is the future
we seek, in the interests of Israelis
not reflect the policy of the Israeli
and Palestinians, the surrounding
government” and that Israeli Prime
region, and the world.” Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has
assured Washington that there are no
The offending statements by Ben
plans to resettle Palestinians outside
Gvir and Smotrich promoted the idea
of Gaza, but Netanyahu himself has
of “encouraging” Palestinians to flee
been publicly contradicting this
Gaza en masse, absurdly referring
claim with increasing brazenness.
to this hypothetical outcome as
“voluntary migration” despite the Just last week at a Likud party
fact that Israel has been doing meeting Netanyahu explicitly said
everything in its power to make living that his government is working on
in Gaza impossible. finding countries who would be willing
to “absorb” Palestinian refugees
You will note, probably without
from Gaza, claiming that the world is
surprise, that the statement
“already discussing the possibilities
contains nothing but empty scolding.
of voluntary immigration.”
No mention is made of the faintest
possibility of any consequence
of any kind being brought to bear
should Israeli officials continue to
openly advocate for eliminating the
Palestinian population of Gaza and
replacing it with Jewish settlements.
This is because the US has no
intention of actually doing anything
to hinder Israel’s ethnic cleansing
agendas.

And make no mistake, that

absolutely is Israel’s agenda. The
State Department can claim all it
wants that “such statements do

45
 • johnstone •
Indeed, it’s fair to say that the
extreme-right ministers Ben Gvir
and Smotrich are not actually
saying anything on this front that
is significantly different from what
Netanyahu himself has been saying.
Bibi’s just a bit more polite about
it, with Ben Gvir openly thumbing
his nose at the State Department’s
remarks saying “we aren’t another
star on the American flag” and
“facilitating the relocation of
hundreds of thousands from Gaza
will allow those in the Israeli Gaza
border communities to return home
and live securely while safeguarding
the IDF soldiers.”
In fact, one could easily argue
that Netanyahu as well as Ben
Gvir and Smotrich have been
entirely in alignment with the State
Department’s own language on
this subject. The idea of “voluntary
immigration” does not contradict
the position asserted by Secretary
of State Antony Blinken that the US
vision for Gaza involves “no forcible
displacement of Palestinians from
Gaza — not now, not after the war.”
Notice Blinken’s careful insertion of
the word “forcible” there. His wording
makes it clear that the US would only
object if Palestinians were actually
forced onto ships or marched across
the Egyptian border at gunpoint, as
middle east analyst Mouin Rabbani
recently observed on Twitter:
46
“Alarm bells should have started
ringing in early November when US
Secretary of State Antony Blinken
and other Western politicians began
insisting there could be ‘no forcible
displacement of
Palestinians from
Gaza’. Rather than
rejecting any
mass removal
of Palestinians,
Blinken and
colleagues objected
only to optically
challenging
expulsions at
gunpoint. The
option of ‘voluntary’
displacement by
leaving residents
of the Gaza Strip
with no choice but departure was
pointedly left open.”
So contrary to its self-righteous moral
posturing, the State Department is
not actually upset with Ben Gvir and
Smotrich for advocating the ethnic
cleansing of Gaza. They’re just upset
they said the quiet part out loud.
If there’s one thing Blinken and
his cohorts understand, it’s that
you’re not supposed to describe
the evil things you want to do in
evil-sounding language. You’ve
got to tapdance gracefully around
the actual depravity you intend
to inflict, uttering flowery prose
about humanitarian concerns and
compassion for both sides to keep
everyone dazzled and hypnotized
while the killing machines are quietly
rolled out in the background. You’ve
got to be eloquent and elusive about
your murderousness. Like Obama.
The US war machine is every bit
as depraved as the state of Israel,
and the Biden administration is just
as culpable for the horrors being
unleashed in Gaza as Netanyahu and
his goons. Ignore their words and
watch their actions. Don’t let them
dazzle you with their feigned concern
for human rights.
Featured image via Adobe Stock.
 • january 24 •

This Genocide Is Being Live-Streamed. We Can’t

Say We Didn’t Know.
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
How is anyone still talking about October 7? What Israel has done since
October 7 is many times worse than what happened on that day by any
conceivable metric; the only way to feel otherwise is to believe Israeli lives
are worth many times more than Palestinian lives. How is Israeli suffering still
being centered over vastly less significant acts of violence three months ago
while exponentially worse violence and suffering is being inflicted by Israelis
right this very moment?

If your nation is attacked, and you respond to that attack by immediately

murdering thousands of children with incredible savagery, then you forfeit any
right to expect anyone to give a shit that your nation was attacked.

Israel responded to the Hamas attack by doing something much, much worse
than anything Hamas has ever done, and in so doing completely delegitimizing
itself as a state and completely validating everything the Palestinian resistance
has been saying about the state of Israel since day one.

47
 • johnstone •
Biden is everything people
feared Trump would be.
A genocidal monster
facilitating racially
motivated murder and
ethnic cleansing while
rapidly accelerating toward
a nuclear-age world war.
Nothing Trump did was
as evil as what Biden has
been doing. Biden is the real
Trump.
• actions against the inhabitants of
Israel is in a nonstop state of
conflict largely because it is such
an artificial creation. Most states
emerge in a more organic way
out of the geographical, political
and cultural circumstances of the
land and the people in their unique
slice of spacetime. Israel emerged
because some people who didn’t
live anywhere near the land of
Palestine got some narratives in
their heads involving an ancient
religion and its adherents, and
dropped a newly created country
on top of a civilization that
already existed there which had
emerged organically out of the
circumstances of the region.
People came in from other nations
all over the world, resurrected a
dead language which had until
then only remained used in religious
rituals and called it their native
tongue, and slapped together a
20th century nation and started
LARPing that it was their native land.
This caused massive shockwaves
throughout the region because
it didn’t happen in accordance
with the organic geopolitical and
cultural circumstances of the land
48
and its people. It was an alien
artificial construct from top to
bottom, thrust upon a region for
which it had no natural context or
receptivity.
Because it was such an unnatural
foreign imposition, the political
circumstances of the middle east
have ever since been rejecting it
like a body rejecting an ill-matched
organ transplant. This natural
response is treated as unnatural
unprovoked hostility from the
people of the invading artificial
construct, which invents more
narratives to justify its violent
the region.
•
The west’s cultural obsession with
WWII has made everyone dumber,
because now everyone we want
to fight is always Hitler and we’re
always the Brave Good Guys who are
fighting Hitler.
Nothing about Israel’s US-backed
assault on Gaza is comparable to
the Allied offensive against Nazi
Germany. They’re raining military
explosives onto a trapped and
besieged population in a giant
concentration camp with the
stated goal of eliminating a small
militant group who poses exactly
zero existential threat to the state
of Israel, in response to an attack
which was 100 percent provoked by
the abuses of the apartheid Israeli
regime.
Comparing the Gaza assault to the
war against Hitler is like comparing
a mass shooting to the war against
Hitler, and saying the shooter is the
Allied forces. It’s a completely foam-
brained talking point that’s espoused
solely by idiots and warmongers.
•
 • january 24 •

This genocide is being live- I guarantee you the people in Gaza

would much rather have you than
streamed. We can’t say we not have you, and losing your
didn’t know. For as long as support over self-consciousness
we live we’ll never be able to about joining in later than others did
say we didn’t know. would be a very silly and unfortunate
thing to happen. Moreover, you
• would definitely not be the last to
join in this cause; millions more will
It’s not too late to get involved in be joining in after you as the Israeli
opposing Israel’s assault on Gaza. regime loses support around the
world and everyone starts waking
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t been
up to what’s happening in Gaza.
talking about it until now. It doesn’t
matter if you haven’t understood Please disregard anything in you
or paid attention to the Israel- that has been holding back from
Palestine issue before. It doesn’t helping to facilitate that awakening
matter if you’ve been supportive in whatever small way you can,
of Israel in the past, or if you’ve whether that might be due to shame
expressed opinions on this subject for not getting involved sooner or
that you now know were misguided, due to any kind of cringe around
or if you’ve never engaged in any activism and political engagement
kind of activism before. you may have had before. This thing
is so much more important than
If that’s the case for you, you need to
any of us, and it’s so much more
understand that millions of people
important than any little feelings
are on the exact same boat as you
of self-consciousness we’d have
right now. Millions. The actions of
about getting involved in ways we
the state of Israel over the last three
never would have imagined before.
months have caused huge numbers
This matter is much too urgent for
of people not previously aware of
you to pay any attention to those
its depravity to open their eyes to
misguided forces within you that
what’s going on, do some research,
are resistant to taking a stand here.
and change their position.
Take your stand. It will be welcomed,
There is absolutely nothing wrong
and you will be glad that you did for
with joining in with the opposition
the rest of your life.
now. You can safely dismiss
anything in you that feels self- •
conscious about not getting this
until now, or feels like it would be
inauthentic to join an activist cause
after it has gained popularity.
Changing your position and taking
a stand now makes you more
authentic, because it shows you
are living a life guided by truth
and compassion rather than
sleepwalking through life guided by
blind habit and partisan tribalism.

49
 • johnstone •

Biden Is Everything People Feared Trump Would Be

In an article titled “Joe Biden Risks A Major Middle East
War If He Makes The Wrong Choices,” The Huffington
Post cites anonymous US officials who fear the careless and
chaotic behavior of their commander-in-chief is going to
embroil the US in a hot war between Israel and Lebanon.
HuffPost’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed writes the following:

“American officials say the Biden administration is not doing all it can to
reduce tensions, despite public commitments from senior officials to avoid a
regional blow-up.

“ ‘I’ve been trying to keep an avalanche from falling on Lebanon and so have
a lot of people,’ one official told HuffPost, saying many national security
personnel fear unchecked U.S. support for Israel will make it overly confident
about expanding operations into Lebanon. ‘The problem is no one can rein in
Biden, and if Biden has a policy, he’s the commander-in-chief ― we have to
carry it out. That’s what it comes down to, very, very, very unfortunately.’ ”

50

Listening to the way people on
the inside have been talking about
Biden’s bull-in-a-China-shop
behavior regarding middle east
policy lately, one can’t help being
reminded of the way the liberal press
used to talk about the erratic and
irresponsible behavior of Donald
Trump when he was in office. The
mood and tone feels like when Trump
was exchanging verbal hostilities
with North Korea in the first year
of his term, which comedian John
Mulaney famously likened to the
disorder and discomfort of having a
horse loose in the hospital.
We’re all just standing here praying
that this lunatic doesn’t ignite
yet another horrific war in the
middle east while watching him
unapologetically sponsor a genocide
in Gaza, and we’re still a ways off
from emerging safely from the world-
threatening nuclear brinkmanship
his administration dragged everyone
into with Russia in Ukraine. And it’s
hard not to notice that this all sure
looks an awful lot like what liberals
were terrified would happen when
Trump got into office.
The lead-up to Trump winning the
2016 election and taking office was
rife with some of the most vitriolic
and emotionally intense rhetoric
in the history of American politics,
featuring frequent fears that Trump
would start a nuclear war, that
minorities would be fleeing in terror
from violent persecution, that he’d
be another Hitler and launch another
holocaust, that he’d facilitate ethnic
persecution and racist attacks.
In the end Trump turned out to be
a fairly standard evil Republican
• january 24 •
president. He
sanctioned Venezuelans
into starvation, vetoed
attempts to save Yemen
from the US-backed
atrocities of Saudi
Arabia, assassinated
Iranian general Qassem
Soleimani, imprisoned
Julian Assange, and,
despite the incredibly
virulent mass delusion
that he was a secret
agent of Moscow, spent
his entire term ramping
up cold war hostilities
against Russia with
extreme aggression.
All of which were
monstrous. But none of
those crimes rise to the
level of single-handedly
facilitating a genocide in
Gaza or taking the world
closer to nuclear war
than at any time since The lesson of Joe Biden’s depravity
the Cuban Missile Crisis with his is not that it would be better to have
peace-killing efforts in Ukraine. Donald Trump in the White House,
it’s that it doesn’t matter which one
Biden has turned out to be everything gets in, because only murderous
we were warned Trump would monsters are allowed to play that
be: a genocidal monster fueling role in the management of the
racist violence and crimes against US-centralized empire. The globe-
humanity while imperiling the world spanning power structure which
with insanely reckless foreign policy loosely revolves around Washington
decisions. is held together by nonstop violence
and abuse, and nobody who isn’t
None of this is to suggest that willing to inflict copious amounts of
Trump would have handled Gaza violence and abuse on human beings
any differently than Biden, or even around the world will ever make it
that he’d have handled Ukraine any past the gatekeeping measures that
differently. It’s likely that the main have been placed between that
reason Biden’s administration has office and the illusion of democracy
been more warlike than Trump’s is that the American people have been
by sheer timing and coincidence; the deceived into believing is real.
US empire tends to trudge onward in
more or less the same The atrocities will continue for as
direction regardless long as that empire exists. Humanity
of who’s in office, won’t ever have a chance at a healthy
with wars occurring and peaceful world until that world is
not because of freed from the tyranny of a planet-
who happens to dominating power structure that is
be president in any fueled by human blood.
given instance but
Featured image via Emma Kaden,
because of whatever
adapted by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA
the empire’s needs
2.0)
happen to be at that
time.
51
 • johnstone •

How The Hell Did We Get Here?

We could have been so much more. We have the ability to

create a healthy and harmonious world and collaborate to
give everyone on earth everything they need, and instead
we’re killing the biosphere while arguing about whether or
not it’s antisemitic to oppose an active genocide.

52
 • january 24 •
We could have peace on earth and
move from competition-based
systems to collaboration-based
ones to maximize our creative and
innovative potential and spend
our existence exploring the outer
universe and the universes within
ourselves, and instead we’re
ramping up brinkmanship between
nuclear-armed states and arguing
about whether or not it’s ethical to
rain military explosives on a giant
concentration camp full of children.
We have the technology to let every
scientist on earth share ideas and
information with each other around
the world in real time in any language,
and instead we’ve fractured scientific
development into atomized little
echo chambers of closely-guarded
secrets in the name of profit
generation and “national security”.
How did we get here? How were we
duped into trading paradise on earth
for this lunatic dystopia? How did we
allow ourselves to give up everything
our species has the capability to
be in exchange for this nightmarish
paradigm of endless ecocide and
exploitation and oppression and war
and militarism?
Near as I can tell, it’s ultimately
because our species evolved these
massive brains very quickly which
we still haven’t learned how to use
in a mature way, like a kid learning to
ride a bicycle right after the training
wheels have been removed. This has
allowed us to dominate the planet
while still ourselves being dominated
by primitive fear-based impulses
which were much better suited for
our early evolutionary ancestors as
they strived to survive the dangerous
plains of Africa as small prey animals.
We develop egos in early childhood
to help us feel safe and secure in
a confusing world full of giants,
which most of us go on to use in
highly maladaptive ways throughout
the remainder of our lives. Our
psychology is riddled with cognitive
biases, which the clever manipulators
among us can use to dupe us into
mass-scale behavior which benefits
them rather than behaving in a way
which benefits each other and our
ecosystem.
The most clever of these
manipulators are able to use
their cleverness to rise to the top
of our political, governmental,
commercial and financial systems
around the world, and they use
increasingly sophisticated methods
of propaganda to dupe the rest of
us into moving in alignment with
their will. And their will is not wise or
intelligent; it’s driven by the same
primitive fear-based impulses that
the rest of the humans trapped in
egoic consciousness are driven by.
So here we are. That’s why we now
find ourselves in this profoundly
dysfunctional civilization where the
biosphere is treated like an enemy
and human beings are treated like
fuel and minds are being marinated
in an increasingly vapid mainstream
culture where everything is fake and
stupid. That’s why we don’t have
paradise on earth, and that’s why the
bombs are falling on Gaza today.
But it is just a phase. A kid who’s
learning to ride a bike doesn’t remain
on wobbly wheels forever. Eventually
we’ll get the hang of this thing.
Eventually we’ll grow into these giant
new brains of ours and become a
conscious species.
Assuming we don’t wipe ourselves
out first, of course.
Featured image via Wikimedia
Commons.
53
 • johnstone •

It’s Insane That Anyone Is Still Supporting Israel

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

It honestly blows my mind that there are still people

adamantly supporting Israel after all this. After all the
people they’ve killed. After all the lies they’ve been caught
in. After all their comments endorsing genocide and ethnic
cleansing, and all their actions showing they mean it.
If you’re still supporting Israel at this point, you’re just telling everyone you
don’t care about truth or morality. You’re announcing to the world that you
care only about your weird ideological agendas and geopolitical control.

You are publicly proclaiming that you are a dogshit human being. That you have
lived on this earth all these years without arriving at any level of emotional or
psychological maturity. That you have wasted your life on this planet.

54

Wait til the Zoomers figure out that
Epstein did what he did because
he was running a sexual blackmail
operation for Israeli intelligence.
The most significant aspect of the
Epstein story is not that he helped
some famous people rape minors,
it’s that powerful intelligence
agencies use child sex slaves and
sexual blackmail to exert control
over our society.
• like this fact would be getting
Nothing will convince
you that Israel is a racist
apartheid state held
together by hate and
violence faster than
watching the videos
uploaded onto social media
by Israelis themselves.
• you have to ask “What kind?
Israel talking about the “voluntary
migration” of Palestinians from
Gaza after deliberately making Gaza
uninhabitable is like mugging a guy
at gunpoint and saying he gave you
his wallet of his own free will because
you didn’t physically reach into his
pocket and take it from him.
•
You guys it’s really really really
important that Trump doesn’t
get re-elected, because if he does
then the US will have a president
who supports mass murder and
genocide and ethnic cleansing and
he’ll probably let a ton of people get
killed by racist tyrants.
In all seriousness it’s extremely
ridiculous that Biden sabotaged
peace in Ukraine and is sponsoring
a genocide in Gaza and we’re all
sitting here praying that he doesn’t
start a new war in the middle east,
• january 24 •
yet we’re still meant to be super You don’t see animals committing
duper worried if Trump gets back genocide because some thought-
into the White House. Biden is stories they made up about how
everything people were worried things are and how things ought to
be drove them insane, and conscious
Trump would be.
humans won’t do that either.
•
•
When you see how brutally
Israeli forces treat Palestinians
and anti-Zionist Jews, it ceases
to be surprising that so many
US police departments have
been trained in Israel. I feel
more attention from young
Americans right now if it were
more widely known.
•
When you hear someone say
that somebody is racist, sexist,
homophobic or transphobic,
you pretty much know what
they mean by those labels.
When you hear someone say
somebody is an antisemite,
The real kind or the opposes-
apartheid-and-genocide kind?”
•
Israel is such a good example
of how narrative gets humans
into trouble. In the 1800s a few
people cooked up some verbal Israel apologists pretend
stories about the need for a jewish
ethnostate, and now in 2024 we’re
to be standing up for
being told it’s fine and good for that Jews when they’re really
state to be slaughtering children by
the thousands and preparing to drive
just standing up for a
palestinians out of their homeland government. They’re garden
because “israel has a right to defend variety bootlickers, the
itself”. This whole catastrophe was
born of mental thought fluff, with same as any empire simp
no grounding in nature or physical you see shrieking at people
reality.
for criticizing western
If humanity is to become a conscious warmongering. They’re just
species, we’re going to have to cease
being dominated by the mental slobbering over state power.
narratives between our ears and Image by Adobe Stock (AI)
begin relating to real life on real life’s
terms, and begin functioning in a
more natural way on this planet.
55
 • johnstone •

CNN And Washington Post Busted For Pro-Israel

Propaganda Shenanigans

Both CNN and The Washington Post have been caught

engaging in some pretty shady journalistic malpractice
with their Israel reporting in recent days.
In a new article titled “CNN Runs Gaza Coverage Past Jerusalem Team
Operating Under Shadow of IDF Censor,” The Intercept reports that all of CNN’s
reporting on Israel and Palestine is funneled through a bureau in Jerusalem
which slants reporting to benefit Israeli information interests and is subject to
regulation by Israeli military censors. The Intercept also reports that last year
CNN “hired a former soldier from the IDF’s Military Spokesperson Unit to serve
as a reporter” at the onset of the war on Gaza.

Unnamed CNN staff told The Intercept that CNN’s iron-fisted protocols
for regulating information related to the Israel-Palestine issue have had a
“demonstrable impact on coverage of the Gaza war”.

56
 • january 24 •
“‘War-crime’ and ‘genocide’ are
taboo words,” the anonymous CNN
staff member said. “Israeli bombings
in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’
attributed to nobody, until the Israeli
military weighs in to either accept
or deny responsibility. Quotes and
information provided by Israeli army
and government officials tend to
be approved quickly, while those
from Palestinians tend to be heavily
scrutinized and slowly processed.”
The Intercept reports that the former
IDF spinmeister has been bylined
in dozens of CNN stories since the
attack on Gaza began, with one
report being “little more than a direct
statement released from the IDF.”
Kind of makes you wonder why CNN
doesn’t just cut out the middleman
and run all its reporting directly
through IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Seems like it would be a bit more
efficient, and certainly a lot more
honest.
Meanwhile The Washington Post has
been caught assigning a reporter with
a history of anti-Palestinian bias to
write a smear piece on independent
media outlets Electronic Intifada
and The Grayzone for their critical
reporting on Israel’s ongoing
massacre in Gaza.
Both Electronic Intifada and The
Grayzone received emails from a
Washington Post reporter named
Elizabeth Dwoskin, who said she’s
writing a piece on “efforts to
minimize or misdirect information
about the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on
Israel” and interrogating them about
their articles casting doubt on the
official narrative about what exactly
happened that day.
As Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah
highlighted on Twitter, when Dwoskin
was at Columbia University twenty
years ago she was authoring Nakba
denialist claims that Palestine never
existed and that prior to Israel’s
formation the land was inhabited
only by “desert Bedouins without a
sense of national identity as we know
it today.”
It’s bad enough for The Washington
Post to be attacking independent
media for asking the critical
questions and doing the real
journalism the Post itself should also
be doing, but to assign someone
with a public history of egregiously
anti-Palestinian rhetoric to the task
is especially lacking in journalistic
integrity.
57
 • johnstone •

“If I’m following, a reporter that has

denied the fact that Palestinians
existed before the state of Israel is
allowed to cover Israel/Palestine
and write about ‘misinformation’ for
Washington Post?” tweeted award-
winning journalist Laila Al-Arian of
Abunimah’s revelation.

Neither of these instances will

come as a surprise to anyone who
has been paying critical attention
to the amazingly awful reporting
the western mass media have been
churning out about the Gaza assault
these last three months, but they do
offer some rare insight behind the
curtain into how the sausage gets
made.

The biggest misconception about

propaganda is that it is something
that happens to other people, and is
done by other countries. Westerners
like to think of themselves as free-
thinking people whose worldviews
are formed by facts and truth,
contrasting themselves with nations
like North Korea and China where
populations are viewed as being
subjected to conformity-enforcing
propaganda. They believe that if
propaganda does occur in the west, it
comes here from nations like Russia
trying to corrupt our minds and
weaken our trust in our institutions,
or if the propaganda is domestic in
origin it only affects people in other
political parties.
In reality the typical western mind
has been marinating in domestic
propaganda throughout its entire
life, and its worldview has been
manufactured for it by powerful
manipulators who benefit from its
intellectual compliance with their
interests. The indoctrination into
the mainstream western worldview
began in school, and it continues
throughout adulthood with the help
of mainstream media outlets like
CNN and The Washington Post.
If we’re ever to have a healthy
civilization, we’re going to have to
wake up from the propaganda-
induced coma we’ve been placed in
so we can begin pushing against the
cage walls we’ve been indoctrinated
our whole lives into ignoring and
start using the power of our numbers
to force real change in the systems
which govern our world. Luckily the
atrocities that have been taking
place in Gaza have been rapidly
waking people up, because it turns
out there’s only so much propaganda
spin you can put on the murder of
thousands of children.
The more people become aware that
our civilization is built on deception
and everything we’ve been told
about the world is a lie, the closer
we get to living in a truth-based
society where nothing like the Gaza
massacre would ever be permitted
to occur.
Featured image via Adobe Stock.

58
 • january 24 •

Turns Out “Israel Has A Right To Defend Itself”

Meant “Israel Has A Right To Commit Genocide”
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Axios has a ridiculous new article out citing multiple

anonymous US officials titled “Biden ‘running out’ of
patience with Bibi as Gaza war hits 100 days”. The Biden
administration keeps leaking to the press trying to put
separation between their guy and the genocide in Gaza,
and they are so fulla shit. Biden has had the ability to end
this mass atrocity since day one. The slaughter continues
because Biden wants it to. He owns this.
•

59
 • johnstone •

Netanyahu delivered a speech Meanwhile Israel and its supporters

commemorating 100 days of Israel’s have adamantly denied the reality
war on babies and journalists and of what’s been
hospitals and residential buildings happening in Gaza
saying “We will restore security
since October 7. The
to both the south and the north.
western press have
Nobody will stop us — not The Hague,
not the axis of evil and not anybody been wildly biased
else.” in favor of Israel
and have been
If I was standing on the right side of guilty of mountains
history, I don’t think the side I was of journalistic
standing with would be saying that malpractice with
not even The Hague can stop them
their pathetic
from killing everyone they want to
kill. coverage of the
ongoing Gaza
• massacre. The
majority of
Turns out “Israel has a right to westerners are still
defend itself” actually meant “Israel ignorant of the
has a right to commit genocide, and extent to which
no other countries have a right to Israel had been
stop it.” abusing and killing
Palestinians prior to
•
October 7.
We’ve been seeing reports of Israeli
sniper drones shooting and killing It is therefore necessary to talk
people in Gaza, which is probably a about these things to spread
good time to note that Gaza has long awareness and counteract the
been a live laboratory for the military propaganda and distortion, and it
industrial complex. Data is with is not necessary to
absolute certainty being collected continually mention
on all the newer weapons being field-
Hamas and October
tested on human bodies there — just
7 while doing so.
like has been happening in Ukraine
and in Africa — and that data will Literally everyone
be used for the benefit of the war acknowledges
machine and the arms industry. the occurrence
of the October 7
• attack, while a
vast percentage of
It’s so dopey how Israel apologists
the population is
will yell at you if you criticize Israeli
either uninformed or
criminality without mentioning
actively lying about
Hamas and October 7. Literally
the occurrence of all
everyone knows about Hamas
Israeli crimes from
and October 7. Literally everyone
the Nakba on. Only
acknowledges that Hamas
one of these two
attacked Israelis out of hostility
things requires more
to the state of Israel. Everyone,
emphasis.
including Hamas and its most
enthusiastic supporters, fully •
acknowledge that this happened.

60
 • january 24 •

Israel demanding that
everyone condemn the
Hamas attack is like a
bunch of thugs punching
a man in the face over and
over and then demanding
In the mind of the empire simp, the
violence of the empire’s enemies
always comes completely out of
nowhere, without provocation and
for no reason. Ansarallah started
attacking ships in the Red Sea
because they’re pirates who hate
freedom of navigation. Hamas
attacked Israel because they’re
Someone asked me if I have any
advice for dealing with the anxiety
which comes with discovering that
the western empire is the most
murderous and tyrannical power
structure on earth, and that we’ve
been lied to about this our entire
lives.

that everyone condemn him
for hurting their hands.
The Hamas attack was the
natural result of Israel’s
abuses upon the Palestinian
people.
• environment.
evil and hate Jews. Putin invaded The painful emotions which come up
when we discover an uncomfortable
Ukraine because he’s evil and hates
democracy. Grown adults portray the truth aren’t problems which need to
enemies of the empire the same way be dealt with, they’re feelings which
the children’s cartoon show Captain need to be felt. Let the grief, anguish,
rage, shame, fear, or whatever it
Planet portrayed its villains, cackling
evilly about how they’re going to might be say everything it needs to
dump toxic waste into the ocean say to you, in the same way you’d let
for no reason other than to hurt the a beloved child tell you about their
feelings and concerns. You wouldn’t
push the child away or treat them
• like a problem, you’d hear them out
and give them a cuddle and let them
I’ve honestly never know you care about them and that
gotten used to you’ll keep them safe. Once you’ve
being called an consciously felt a feeling all the way
antisemite, even through and heard out everything it
after three months needs to say to you, its energy will
dissipate.
of getting it nonstop.
It has never stopped Uncomfortable truths and
being shocking to uncomfortable feelings need to be
me that someone met in the same way: head-on, with an
would accuse me open mind and an open heart. Moving
of harboring the into a truth-based relationship with
same prejudices life means wanting to see everything:
uncomfortable truths about the
which gave rise
world, uncomfortable truths about
to the Holocaust
ourselves, and uncomfortable
in response to my feelings we haven’t been allowing
criticisms of horrific full expression to. It can be painful at
mass atrocities times, even downright terrifying, but
backed by the most it’s also the only path to health for
powerful empire the both our species as a collective and
world has ever seen. ourselves as individuals.
It’s just absolutely
•
d e r a n g e d ,
d e s p i c a b l e
behavior, and I am consistently
shocked to see grown adults
behaving that way in public without
the slightest hint of shame.

61

Benjamin Netanyahu said he
opposes Palestinian statehood and
that Israel must control everything
from the river to the sea on the same
day Joe Biden said the repeated
bombing of Yemen isn’t deterring
Ansarallah but they’re going to
keep bombing anyway.
“In any future arrangement …
Israel needs security control over
all territory west of the Jordan
River,” Netanyahu told the press on
Thursday, saying he has made this
position clear to the White House.
Asked by the press on Thursday
if the strikes against the Houthis
are working, Biden replied “Well,
when you say ‘working’ — are they
stopping the Houthis? No. Are they
going to continue? Yes.”
An unusually honest day for empire
managers.
•
Zionism does not work. It was tried,
and it turns out it doesn’t work. If
the forced existence of your artificial
ethnostate requires ceaseless war
and the periodic massacring of
62
• johnstone •
large numbers of children, then your
plan for your artificial ethnostate
isn’t working out and a new plan is
needed.
•
Talking about October 7
without talking about the
mountains of Israeli abuses
which gave rise to it is the
same as lying.
•
Normal person: It’s bad to massacre
tens of thousands of civilians.
Crazy person: Oh so you’re saying
you hate Jews then. You’re saying
Jews shouldn’t defend themselves.
You want all the Jews to die so there
won’t be any more Jews because
you hate Jews. Jews Jews Jews Jews
Jews.
•
Israel apologists would have you
believe there’s been a sudden
worldwide emergence of “Hamas
supporters” everywhere rather than
a normal and entirely predictable
w o r l d w i d e
opposition to
genocide.
A lot of the footage
of explosions in Gaza
we’ve been seeing are
not from airstrikes
but detonations of
explosives planted
in the buildings.
We’re watching the
controlled demolition
of an entire
civilization.
 • january 24 •
Once it was accepted that a
Jewish ethnostate dropped
on top of an already existing
country was not only
necessary but so necessary
that any and all means
must be used to maintain it,
atrocities were inevitable. A
one-way track to genocide
and ethnic cleansing was
already set.
•
When I look at this awful trainwreck
of a world we’re leaving to younger
generations it infuriates me that
older generations are constantly
bitching at them. How can we have
any attitude toward the young but
total bare-hearted contrition? We
should be on our knees begging
them to forgive us for having failed
them so spectacularly, but instead
we’ve got the gall to wag our fingers
at them and lecture them about
pronouns and TikTok.
“Hurr, durr, they look at their
smartphones too much and they
don’t know how to change a tire and
they use they/them pronouns!” Shut
up you fucking wanker. You burnt
up their biosphere you piece of shit.
You’re tossing them from the womb
into a dying world of war and chaos
and injustice and exploitation and
you have the temerity to tell them
they’re doing it wrong? Fuck you.
I hope they ignore us, personally. I
hope they keep rewriting the rules
of this dogshit society we’re leaving
them and knocking down every pillar
of our culture. Everything we older
generations have done has taken our
world to the brink of environmental
collapse and nuclear brinkmanship,
so I hope they keep shrugging off
the old rules of this profoundly sick
civilization and trying new things
and blazing new trails in the hope
of steering clear of the disaster we
placed on their horizon.
We shouldn’t be mocking and
lecturing them, we should be humbly
apologizing and trying to learn from
them and help them. We are failures.
They are humanity’s last and only
hope.
To the young: I am so, so sorry, from
the very bottom of my heart. I hope
you succeed in clawing your way out
of the madness your predecessors
left you in and create a healthy
world, a healthy world which will look
nothing like the one we made for
you. I am on your side, whatever you
need.
Image via the Israeli Government
63
 • johnstone •

Where I Stand, Issue By Issue

64

I’ve been seeing a few people
saying they’re not sure what
I’m about politically. As
a reader-supported writer
I try to be as transparent
about such things as
possible to let any would-be
patrons know what they’re
getting into, so here’s my
position on a bunch of
different issues if anyone’s
curious.
• january 24 •
Ideology
I’ve always called myself a socialist.
Lately a lot of people have been
calling me a communist, which I don’t
mind either. Really I just support
shoving things as far to the left as
possible until we’ve created a healthy
and harmonious world and moved
from competition-based systems to
systems in which we collaborate with
each other and with our ecosystem
for the good of everyone.
That’s my ideological preference, but
I’m not arrogant enough to believe
I personally know what’s best for
everyone, so more than anything
what I want is a world where we’re
not being manipulated and deceived
about what’s going on so that we
can figure out the best course for
our species as a collective. That’s
why first and foremost ahead of
my own ideological preferences I
support government transparency,
democratized information, free
speech, and the end of mass-scale
manipulation and propaganda. Once
everything’s out in the light and
our perception is no longer being
obfuscated and distorted by the
powerful I personally believe we’ll
find our way toward something
resembling socialism, but I hold that
belief with an open palm.
Politics
I believe the closer you get to the
nexus of power the more worthless
electoral politics becomes, because
more and more effort goes into
manipulating the electoral process
to protect the interests of status
quo power. US presidential elections
are completely fake, and even the
elections for lower-level positions
like senators and representatives
are aggressively manipulated in the
most powerful country on earth.
Both parties are stacked to serve the
interests of the powerful.
I don’t personally think we’re likely
to see big meaningful changes in the
west until the people force change to
happen by direct action, and that’s not
going to occur as long as everyone’s
being successfully manipulated
into accepting the status quo by
mass-scale propaganda. That’s why I
write about propaganda so much — I
see it as the ultimate obstacle
to the revolutionary changes we
desperately need.
War and militarism
I see the empire-like power structure
centralized around the United States
as the greatest source of conflict
and dysfunction in the world today.
All the largest international conflicts
of our day ultimately boil down
to the US empire trying to secure
planetary domination and weaker
nations resisting it in some way.
This campaign to secure planetary
hegemony is placing our world at
greater and greater risk of nuclear
war as it sees the empire engaging
in increasingly confrontational
standoffs with Russia and China. I
therefore see ending the US empire
and neutering its global war machine
as a matter of existential importance
for humanity.
Environment
I believe environmental collapse and
nuclear war are the two greatest
existential threats to our species,
and both are breathing down our
necks. I think global warming is
real and caused by human activity,
but I also think it’s suspicious that
that debate consumes so much
oxygen when there’s so much other
evidence that the biosphere is dying
(ocean desertification, deforestation,
vanishing wildlife, plummeting insect
populations, etc).
Obviously there are rich and powerful
people who’ll be looking to ride their
various agendas on top of humanity’s
shift from fossil fuels to other energy
systems, but that doesn’t mean
climate change isn’t real — it would
be strange if they weren’t doing that.
That just means we need to pry the
fingers of the powerful from the
steering wheel of our civilization, not
that drastic changes aren’t needed
to how we live on this planet.
65

Religion
I was raised Roman Catholic but now
despise the church. I’m critical of
all religion and 99 percent of what
people call spirituality, but that one
percent of authentic spirituality just
might be what ends up being what
saves humanity.
I view authentic spirituality not as
any set of beliefs but as a sincere
investigation in our own experience
into the nature of consciousness,
self, mind, and perception. The
discoveries this investigation turns
up can be deeply transformative, and
could solve all the world’s problems if
realized at mass scale.
Civil rights
I think protecting the rights of the
individual protects the health of
the collective. It’s always going to
be the outspoken fringesters who
first notice something’s wrong
about where we’re at or where we’re
headed, so you need to make sure
there’s space for them to speak and
be heard. Because nobody can be
trusted to determine what speech is
valid and true, it needs to be legal to
the furthest extent the collective can
tolerate without harm.
The freer people are to think, speak,
act and live however they want
undisturbed, the healthier our
society is; this means freeing them
from having their minds manipulated
by the powerful as noted above.
The collective is also within its rights
to stop an individual from harming
them. If someone’s using wealth and
power as a weapon to exploit and
abuse people for instance, then their
wealth and power can rightfully be
taken away in the same way a mass
shooter’s weapon can be taken away
to protect the collective.
66
• johnstone •
Social justice issues
I oppose racism, sexism, homophobia,
transphobia, and discrimination
against disempowered groups of all
sorts. These are real problems that
do need to be solved as humanity
winds its way into the future; we
can’t just ignore them.
I do get frustrated at times with
the way these issues consume all
the political oxygen in the room
without leaving any space for
far more urgent matters like the
looming threat of nuclear war, and
I do think it’s a bit ridiculous that in
our current political environment
being a racist is regarded as far more
outrageous and offensive than being
a warmonger. But I understand that’s
just the nature of the mainstream
political framework people are
being presented with, where we’re
encouraged to argue as hotly as
possible over culture war issues that
don’t threaten the powerful at all so
we don’t start turning that heat onto
issues like war, ecocide and oligarchy.
Feminism
I’m a pretty hardcore feminist with
a lot of ideas on the subject that I
think are interesting and worthy, but
I don’t bother because I always get a
bunch of furious men with mommy
issues screaming at me for days.
There are more important things to
write about right now anyway.
Covid-19
I’ve annoyed a lot of people with how
I’ve refused to take a position on
some Covid-related issues like masks
and lockdowns and the lab leak vs
zoonotic origin debate, but I don’t
really care. I can’t be an expert on all
issues, and the amount of scientific
research I’d need to pour into Covid
to take a confident stand on disputed
scientific points would leave me with
no time to talk about anything else.
There are literally hundreds of other
commentators who’ve spent years
talking about Covid from any angle
you could possibly want if you want
commentary on Covid.
I have repeatedly and unequivocally
opposed things like vaccine
mandates, police brutality enforcing
Covid restrictions, and the censorship
of Covid skeptics, because those
are positions I feel solid on. Beyond
that I feel perfectly comfortable
with my agnosticism on such things,
especially now that the lockdowns
are long over while we hurtle toward
nuclear armageddon.
Israel/Palestine
Israel is an apartheid state whose
existence can only be maintained
by nonstop violence, both inside
and outside its borders. A nation
that can’t exist without continuous
war is like a house that can’t exist
without continuous construction.
If your house is perpetually buzzing
with power tools and construction
workers because if the construction
stops it will collapse, eventually
you’re going to start thinking you
maybe shouldn’t have built your
house there in the first place.
Julian Assange
Support.
Cryptocurrencies
Indifferent.
Cashlessness/
central bank digital
currencies
Oppose.
 • january 24 •

UFOs Progressives
Intensely skeptical. Over the years I’ve found that most
people who identify as “progressive”

9/11 and support Bernie Sanders and AOC

have a lot less in common with me
There’s nothing I’d put past these than I used to think they did. Most
assholes. are just empire loyalists who hope
the empire gives them healthcare
one day. They don’t oppose the
JFK assassination empire, they just quibble over a few
of the details about how the empire
See 9/11.
should be run.

This or that indie US intelligence

media figure agencies
People are always asking me what I
Smash them into a thousand pieces
think of various indie media figures,
and scatter them to the winds.
but I don’t have time to form opinions
about other commentators, let alone
write about them. If I see them saying
something useful I’ll highlight it, if
Universal Basic
I don’t I don’t. That’s as far as my
interest generally goes.
Income (UBI)
I don’t see any path to UBI in our
current society that doesn’t entail
Right wingers trading away our power in exchange
for letting billionaires become
I read and follow right-wing
trillionaires via automation while
libertarians for their anti-war
we’re paid subsistence wages
commentary and I welcome people
controlled by the powerful which
from any ideology to read and
can be choked off by the powerful.
follow me, but over the years I’ve
If it looks like UBI is being rolled out
become aware that there’s a lot
by our current systems it’s probably
less useful anti-war sentiment on
a sign that we’re headed somewhere
the right than I used to hope there
dark.
was. The so-called “populist right”
mostly just opposes US aggressions If we want automation to bring
toward Russia so they can prepare everyone wealth we’re much better
for aggressions toward China, and off creating a society where the
few put nearly as much energy into automation is owned and controlled
opposing Russia brinkmanship as by the collective, for the good of the
they do into shrieking about trans collective.
people and “wokeism”. For the
most part today’s rightists are the
same stuffy conservative bigoted
militarists they’ve always been, no
Australia
The biggest problem with Australia
matter how hard they try to rebrand
is its role as a member state of the
themselves as “populist” these days.
US empire. The worst thing about
Australia is America. It would be
good to see what our nation can
become when we’re not owned and
controlled by the yanks or the brits.
•

67
 • johnstone •

Gaza Is Exposing Western Liberals For The Frauds

They Are­
The entire western liberal worldview is currently balanced
on the ability to psychologically compartmentalize
away from the mass atrocities in Gaza and what western
governments are doing to perpetuate them.
Everything that mainstream liberals claim to oppose is on full display in Israel’s
actions in Gaza. Racism. Fascism. Tyranny. Injustice. Genocide. Yet they must
necessarily avoid throwing themselves into opposing these things there at all
cost, because it would mean acknowledging that their own political allegiances
are inseparably interwoven with them.

68
 • january 24 •

It would mean Gaza exposes the mainstream

turning against Biden western liberal ideology for the
during an election kayfabe performance it always has
year. It would mean been. The job of the so-called liberal
admitting that their “moderate” has never been to oppose
entire political posture racism, fascism, tyranny, injustice or
against Trump all genocide, their job is to perpetually
these years has been give the thumbs-up to one head of
a phony performance, the two-headed monster that is the
because they’re murderous western empire. Their
tacitly endorsing job is to help put a positive spin on
all the things they a globe-spanning power structure
claimed to hate about that is fueled by human blood. To
him. It would mean help elect Bidens and Starmers
admitting their entire and Trudeaus and Albaneses who
worldview is a lie, and will ensure that the gears of the
that all their critics to empire keep on turning completely
their left have been unhindered while paying lip service
correct. to human rights and social justice.

The western liberal is The one faint glimmer of brightness

therefore in the year in this profoundly dark chapter
2024 engaged in an in human history is that it might
exhausting regimen start opening some eyes to the
of nonstop mental fraudulence of the mainstream fake-
gymnastics to avoid left political faction that has been
having an authentic marketed to the western public as an
relationship with the reality of what’s alternative to far right depravity. That
happening Gaza. They
squirm this way and
that, twisting their
gaze toward empty
nonsense like Barbie
movie Oscar snubs
and Trump’s latest
instance of verbal
diarrhea to avoid
looking at what’s
happening. On those
odd occasions when
they are forced to confront the westerners might start awakening to
reality of Gaza they start spouting the reality that everything they’ve
gibberish about how “complicated” been trained to believe about politics,
and “heartbreaking” it is and how their government and their world is
they hope there can a lie. Such an awakening would be
be peace as soon the first step toward a mass-scale
as possible, while movement into health.
frenetically avoiding Featured image via Gage Skidmore
saying precisely how (CC BY-SA 2.0)
that “peace” should
be brought about.

69
 • johnstone •

Westerners Have An Absolutely Psychotic View Of

Airstrikes

Canadian online outlet The Breach has published a letter

by CBC’s senior manager of journalistic standards Nancy
Waugh which highlights perfectly the bizarre psychological
relationship that westerners have with bombs and
airstrikes in foreign countries.
In response to multiple complaints from a retired Humber College professor
about the wildly biased language that Canada’s state broadcaster has
been using to describe Israel’s war on Gaza, Waugh acknowledged that the
CBC routinely uses words like “murderous,” “vicious,” “brutal,” “massacre,”
and “slaughter” to refer to the October 7 Hamas attack while using far less
emotionally charged words like “intensive,” “unrelenting,” and “punishing” to

70
 • january 24 •
describe Israel’s actions in Gaza over
the last three months.
Waugh defended this extreme
discrepancy by saying that Israel’s
attacks in Gaza differ from the
Hamas attack on Israelis in that
Israel’s killings are done “remotely”.
“Different words are used because
although both result in death and
injury, the events they describe are
very different,” Waugh wrote. “The
raid saw Hamas gunmen stream
through the border fence and attack
Israelis directly with firearms, knives
and explosives. Gunmen chased
down festival goers, assaulted
kibbutzniks then shot them, fought
hand to hand, and threw grenades.
The attack was brutal, often vicious,
and certainly murderous.”
“Bombs dropped from thousands of
feet and artillery shells lofted into
Gaza from kilometers away result in
death and destruction on a massive
scale, but it is carried out remotely,”
Waugh continued. “The deadly
results are unseen by those who
caused them and the source unseen
by those [who] suffer and die.”
I’ve written a number of essays trying
to point at the baseless and irrational
way westerners view military
explosives as a far more civilized
and humane way of killing human
beings than bullets or blades, but I’ve
never written anything that sums it
up as clearly as this frank admission
by the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation’s senior manager of
journalistic standards.
Military explosives rip human bodies
apart. They burn people alive. They
trap them under rubble where they
die excruciatingly slowly in one of
the most horrifying ways imaginable.
They leave people without limbs.
They dismember and disfigure
children for life. Many of the most
agonizing deaths in human history
have been caused by bombs.
There are thousands of Gazans who
have yet to be counted among the
dead because their bodies are still
buried under the rubble of fallen
buildings. Many of them would not
have died instantly. Some are still
alive, waiting for days in a state terror
and searing pain for a rescue that will
never come.
A UNICEF report released last month
said that more than a thousand
children had had one or both legs
amputated since October 7 as a
result of damage received by US-
sponsored Israeli airstrikes, a number
which would be significantly higher
by now. We know that many such
amputations have occurred without
anaesthesia, because Israeli siege
warfare has cut off Gaza’s healthcare
system from the necessary supplies.
If this is not vicious, then nothing
is vicious. If this is not brutal,
then nothing is brutal. If this is
not murderous, then nothing is
murderous. But it doesn’t get labeled
as such by the western press,
because it is being done “remotely”.
The belief that these attacks should
be considered less vicious and brutal
71
 • johnstone •

because they are launched from a impoverished militant group is a

distance by people who won’t see
their effects is as psychologically
immature as a little girl who believes
you can’t see her because she has
covered her own eyes. An attack
which kills and maims and tortures
doesn’t cease to be brutal and vicious
just because it looks like a blip on a
screen to you. Human suffering isn’t
made less acute or less significant by
being far away.
But this is how most westerners see
the use of military explosives these
days. We’re so used to hearing about
our government and its allies raining
bombs upon the middle east and
Africa that we’ve developed a kind
of immunity to the psychological
impact of exactly what that means in
reality. The typical western mind has
come to view bombings more like a
weather event that simply occurs in
those places, like how south Asian
countries experience monsoons.
psychological defense mechanism
we have put in place to shelter
ourselves from knowledge of our own
brutality and murderousness.
In truth if you look at all the death,
destruction, suffering and pain that
Israel has inflicted on Gaza since
October 7, there is no question that
Israel is vastly more vicious, brutal
and murderous than Hamas has
ever been, and so are its allies who
are supporting its actions. The only
way to believe otherwise would be to
psychologically hide away from the
reality of what’s actually happening,
which is as truth-based and mature
as the kid with her hands over her
eyes saying “Now you can’t see me!”
Featured image via Adobe Stock.

In reality,
bombings are no
less savage than
attacks by guns,
grenades, knives
or machetes. In
fact they actually
allow for more
savagery to take
place, because
they kill so much
more efficiently,
and because the
troops who use
them can keep
killing and killing
without losing
morale and
accumulating
mental trauma
from the horrors
they have been
inflicting upon
their fellow
human beings.

Dead is dead. Dismembered is

dismembered. Pain is pain. Anguish is
anguish. The unexamined assumption
that the western empire’s prefered
methods of killing are less brutal
and murderous than those of an

72
 • january 24 •

We Could Try Simply NOT Provoking A Wider War

Via The Continued Destruction Of Gaza
DATELINE: 13 JAN 2024

The US has carried out another air raid on Yemen, with

targets reportedly including the international airport in
the capital city of Sanaa. This comes a day after US and
UK airstrikes on Yemen in retaliation for Houthi attacks on
Red Sea commercial vessels.

73
 • johnstone •

For weeks Yemen’s Houthi forces

have been greatly inconveniencing
commercial shipping with their
blockade, with reports last month
saying Israel’s Eilat Port has seen an
85 percent drop in activity since the
attacks began. This entirely bloodless
inconvenience was all it took for
Washington to attack Yemen, the
war-ravaged nation in which the
US and its allies have spent recent
years helping Saudi Arabia murder
hundreds of thousands of people
with its own maritime blockades.

Yemen has issued defiant statements

in response to these attacks, saying
they will not go “unanswered or
unpunished”.

The Biden administration’s dramatic

escalation toward yet another
horrific war in the middle east has
been hotly criticized by lawmakers
on both sides of the aisle, who
argue that the attacks were illicit
because they took place without
congressional approval. This
impotent congressional whining
will never go anywhere, since, as
Glenn Greenwald has observed, the
US congress never actually does
anything to hold presidents to
account for carrying out acts of war
without their approval.
But there are some worthwhile ideas
going around.
After the second round of strikes,
a Democratic representative from
Georgia named Hank Johnson
tweeted the following:
“I have what some may consider a
dumb idea, but here it is: stop the
bombing of Gaza, then the attacks
on commercial shipping will end. Why
not try that approach?”
By golly, that’s just crazy enough to
work. In fact, anti-interventionists
have been screaming it at the top
of their lungs since the standoff
with Yemen began. All the way
back in mid-October Responsible
Statecraft’s Trita Parsi was already
writing urgently about the need for a
ceasefire in Gaza to prevent it from
exploding into a wider war in the
region, a position Parsi has continued
pushing ever since.
As we discussed previously, Israel’s
US-backed assault on Gaza is
threatening to bleed over into
conflicts with the Houthis in Yemen,
with Hezbollah in Lebanon, with Iran-
aligned militias in Iraq and Syria, and
even potentially with Iran itself — any
of which could easily see the US and
its allies committing themselves
to a full-scale war. Peace in Gaza
takes these completely unnecessary
gambles off the table.

74
 • january 24 •
And it is absolutely within
Washington’s power to force a
ceasefire in Gaza. Biden could end
all this with one phone call, as US
presidents have done in the past. As
Parsi wrote for The Nation earlier this
month:
“In 1982, President Ronald
Reagan was ‘disgusted’ by Israeli
bombardment of Lebanon. He
stopped the transfer of cluster
munitions to Israel and told Israeli
Prime Minister Menachem Begin in a
phone call that ‘this is a holocaust.’
Reagan demanded that Israel
withdraw its troops from Lebanon.
Begin caved. Twenty minutes after
their phone call, Begin ordered a
halt on attacks.
“Indeed, it is absurd to claim that
Biden has no leverage, particularly
given the massive amounts of arms
he has shipped to Israel. In fact,
Israeli officials openly admit it. ‘All
of our missiles, the ammunition,
the precision-guided bombs, all
the airplanes and bombs, it’s all
from the US,’ retired Israeli Maj. Gen.
Yitzhak Brick conceded in November
of last year. ‘The minute they turn
off the tap, you can’t keep fighting.
You have no capability.… Everyone
understands that we can’t fight
this war without the United States.
Period.’ ”
In the end, you get peace by
pursuing peace. That’s how it
happens. You don’t get it by pursuing
impossible imaginary ideals like the
total elimination of Hamas while
butchering tens of thousands of
innocent Palestinians. You don’t get it
by trying to bludgeon the middle east
into passively accepting an active
genocide. You get it by negotiation,
de-escalation, diplomacy and
detente.
The path to peace is right there.
The door’s not locked. It’s not even
closed. The fact that they don’t take
it tells you what these imperialist
bastards are really interested in.
Featured image via Adobe Stock.
75
 • johnstone •

We Are Entirely Too Close To Another Major War In

The Middle East
The US and its allies have published a joint statement
warning Yemen’s Houthis to cease the attacks they’ve been
making on commercial vessels in the Red Sea. The Houthis,
officially known as Ansarallah, have successfully slashed
Israeli port activity by an extremely massive margin with
their maritime tactics in response to Israel’s ongoing
massacre in Gaza.
The statement asserts that the Yemeni attacks “are a direct threat to the
freedom of navigation that serves as the bedrock of global trade in one of the
world’s most critical waterways,” complaining that they are “adding significant
cost and weeks of delay to the delivery of goods,” and ultimately threatens
that the Houthis will “bear the responsibility of the consequences” should
these attacks continue.

Many critics have been pointing out the irony of the western power alliance
threatening military intervention to protect shipping containers and corporate
profits while actual human beings are being butchered by Israeli airstrikes and
starved by Israeli siege warfare with nothing but friendly support from these
same powers.

“Palestinians would really love to get the same amount of attention and
protection as shipping containers,” tweeted Palestinian-Canadian journalist
Yasmine El-Sawabi.

76
 • january 24 •

That the US and its It is a potentially ominous sign

allies would go to war that Israel has begun focusing on
against the people ramping up aggressions against Iran
who are trying to stop and Hezbollah while simultaneously
an active genocide withdrawing thousands of troops
tells you everything from Gaza. Some analysts argue
you need to know that we are seeing an attempt by
about them. The Israel to pull the US into a direct war
fact that they’d do it with Hezbollah, which is something
for corporate profit US officials have reportedly been
margins tells you even worried would happen ever since the
more, and the fact that Gaza assault began.
they’d do it to a nation
they’ve already helped There are entirely too many fronts
inflict unfathomable along which a new horrific war in
horrors upon in recent the middle east could potentially
years tells you more erupt, and things are entirely too
still. close to the brink on all of them. And
all for land, money and geostrategic
And that’s just one control, same as always. The sooner
of the potential the US-centralized power structure
wars looming on the crumbles, the better it will be for
horizon in connection humanity.
with the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. Featured image via Adobe Stock.
As Trita Parsi recently explained in
The Nation, there are
three other fronts along
which wars could also
erupt in the region apart
from a western conflict
with the Houthis: in
Iraq and Syria where
US forces have been
repeatedly under attack
by militants in response
to the Gaza assault, in
Lebanon between Israel
and Hezbollah, and the
absolute nightmare
scenario of a full-scale
war with Iran.

“That risk exists on

four fronts: Between
Israel and the Lebanese
Hezbollah, in Syria and
Iraq due to attacks on US
troops by militias aligned
with Iran, the Red Sea
between the Houthis
and the US Navy, and
between Israel and Iran
following both the assassination of
an Iranian general in Syria and the
explosion in Kerman today at the
commemoration of the death of
General Qassem Soleimani that has
killed more than 100,” Parsi writes.

77
 • johnstone •

Tony Blinken Is A Cold-Blooded Sociopath

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken just referred to the
US-sponsored assassination of yet another journalist in
Gaza as a “terrible tragedy”, as though the reporter was
struck by lightning or died in a car crash or something.
Speaking at a press conference in Qatar on Sunday, Blinken was asked to
comment on the murder of Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Dahdouh, who was
killed in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike on a car has was traveling in with two other
journalists, one of whom also died. Hamza Dahdouh was the eldest son of Al
Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, whose wife, son, daughter and
baby grandson were murdered in another Israeli airstrike in late October.

In response to an Al Jazeera reporter’s question about whether the United

States condemns the murder of innocent journalists, Blinken replied as follows:

“I am deeply, deeply sorry for the almost unimaginable loss suffered by your
colleague Wael al-Dahdouh. I am a parent myself. I can’t begin to imagine the
horror that he’s experienced, not once, but now twice. This is an unimaginable
tragedy, and that’s also been the case for, as I said, far too many innocent
Palestinian men, women, and children — civilians, also journalists, Palestinian
and other.”

78
 • january 24 •

Blinken went on to last three months directing wildly

acknowledge the
scores of journalists
who have been killed
in Gaza, saying that
this shows the need
to get humanitarian
aid into the enclave
and achieve a lasting
peace. What Blinken
did not do is issue
anything resembling
a condemnation of
Israel and the clear
and demonstrable
fact that it has been
highly focused on the
task of murdering
journalists in Gaza.
He just offered his
deepest condolences
for Dahdouh’s
death, framed it as
a passive “tragedy”
instead of an active
assassination
using highly sophisticated military
technology under the sponsorship
and support of the United States,
and moved on.
It’s hard to say who’s worse, the far-
right Israelis who openly revel in the
butchery they are inflicting in Gaza,
or the liberal Americans who directly
sponsor that butchery and then look
you dead in the eye and tell you how
deeply, sincerely sorry they are to
hear that another person in Gaza has
died in a tragic accident.
Blinken is always doing sociopathic
stuff like this. Late last month
he tweeted, “This has been an
extraordinarily dangerous year for
press around the world. Many killed,
many more wounded, hundreds
detained, attacked, threatened,
injured — simply for doing their jobs.
I am profoundly grateful to the
press for getting accurate, timely
information to people.”
I mean, can you believe the gall
of this freak? As though his own
administration wasn’t responsible
for most of those killings. As
though Israel has not spent the
disproportionate firepower at the
places it knows journalists are hiding.
He’s standing there on top of a pile of
corpses while mournfully shaking his
head about their tragic unfortunate
deaths.
There’s something about the job of
US secretary of state that appears
to require a significant level of
sociopathy. From war criminal Henry
Kissinger to Madeleine “We think
the price was worth it” Albright
to Mike “We lied, we cheated, we
stole” Pompeo, the absolute worst
person in any given presidential
administration is very often the head
of the State Department. A severe
personality disorder is practically in
the job description.
This is because while the secretary
of state is officially the head of US
diplomacy, “diplomacy” for the US
empire looks a whole lot different
from what it looks like for normal
countries. US “diplomacy”, in practice,
typically looks like going from
country to country negotiating for
international alignment behind wars,
starvation sanctions, proxy conflicts
and western-backed uprisings. In
theory the State Department should
be the department of peace, but in
practice it’s just a subtler, sneakier
military department.
Nothing epitomizes the depraved
manipulations of the US empire
better than Antony Blinken. There
is no better representation of that
empire than Tony standing there on
his mountain of corpses, covered
in blood, telling you how sorry
he is to learn of the unfortunate
accidental deaths of the people he
just murdered, staring at you with his
cold dead eyes, playing remarkably
soulless blues guitar under the light
of a bright red moon.
Featured image via the US State
Department.

79
 • johnstone •

Western Empire Bombs Yemen To Protect Israel’s

Genocide Operations In Gaza
DATELINE: 12 JAN 2024

The US and UK have reportedly struck over a dozen sites in

Yemen using Tomahawk missiles and fighter jets, backed
by logistical support from Australia, Canada, Bahrain and
the Netherlands. A statement from President Biden asserts
that the strikes against “targets in Yemen used by Houthi
rebels” are a “direct response to unprecedented Houthi
attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red
Sea”.

80
 • january 24 •
What Biden does not mention in his
statement about his administration’s
“response” to Houthi attacks on ships
in the Red Sea is the fact that those
Red Sea attacks are themselves a
response to Israeli crimes against
humanity in Gaza. Also unmentioned
is the fact that the strikes took place
after the first day of proceedings in
the International Court of Justice in
which Israel stands accused by South
Africa of committing a genocide in
Gaza.
So the US and the UK just bombed
the poorest country in the middle
east for trying to stop a genocide.
Not only that, they bombed the very
same country in which they just
spent years backing Saudi Arabia’s
genocidal atrocities which killed
hundreds of thousands of people
between 2015 and 2022 in an
unsuccessful bid to stop the Houthis
from taking power.
The Houthis, formally known as
Ansarallah, threatened ahead of the
attack to fiercely retaliate against
any strikes from the US and its allies.
Abdulmalik al-Houthi, who leads
the Houthi movement, said that the
response to any American attack
“will be greater than” a recent Houthi
offensive which used dozens of
drones and several missiles.
“We, the Yemeni people, are not
among those who are afraid of
America,” al-Houthi said in a televised
speech. “We are comfortable with
a direct confrontation with the
Americans.”
An unnamed US official who
informed Huffington Post’s Akbar
Shahid Ahmed about the imminent
strikes on Yemen shortly before
they occurred complained that the
airstrikes “will not solve the problem”
and that the approach “doesn’t add
up to a cohesive strategy.”
Ahmed has previously reported that
behind the scenes, officials in this
administration have been getting
increasingly nervous about the risk
of Biden igniting a wider war in the
middle east. This latest escalation,
along with the Houthi pledge to
retaliate, adds a lot of weight to this
concern.
And all for what? To protect Israel’s
ability to conduct a months-long
massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.
This is what the US empire is. This is
what it has always been about.
These people are showing us exactly
who they are.
We should probably believe them.
Featured image via Number 10 (CC
BY-NC-ND 2.0)
81
 • johnstone •

The Biden Administration’s Absurd Justification

For Its Yemen War
DATELINE: 23 JAN 2024

On Monday the US launched its eighth wave of airstrikes

in its new war against Yemeni forces, which it has now
formally titled “Operation Poseidon Archer”. The strikes are
aimed at breaking a Red Sea shipping blockade which the
de facto authorities in Yemen have implemented to pressure
Israel and its allies into ceasing the genocidal onslaught in
Gaza.
At a press briefing on Monday, Principal Deputy State Department
Spokesperson Vedant Patel uttered a now-familiar Biden administration line
when asked if the war would escalate to involve US boots on the ground.

82
 • january 24 •
“First, as it relates to the Houthis,
the United States is not interested
in any escalation, but it is never
acceptable for malign actors to
target international vessels, to
target legitimate commerce that
is flowing through the Red Sea,”
Patel said. “We’re talking about
international waters that allow 30
percent of global container shipping
to flow through those waters — 15
percent of seaborne trade. This is a
waterway that is vital. And we will
always take appropriate steps to
hold those accountable that put
things like legitimate commerce,
civilians, U.S. personnel, in harm’s
way.”
Ever since the Biden administration
began bombing Yemen, its official
spinmeisters have been babbling
about commerce and global
container shipping to justify it.
The unspoken premise behind
this justification is that an active
genocide should be permitted
to continue with zero economic
repercussions of any kind, for Israel
or anyone else.
It’s just taken as a given by
empire managers and their
defenders that the money must
keep flowing and the gears of
capitalism must keep turning
at the same rate they were
turning before Israel began
massacring tens of thousands
of Palestinian civilians, if not
faster. That the horrors being
unleashed in Gaza should have
no material impact on the rest
of the world whatsoever.
The empire will permit you to think
thoughts and feel feelings about
the butchery in Gaza quietly in the
privacy of your own head, and under
the right circumstances it will even
permit you to attend pro-Palestine
demonstrations and share your
opinions on social media. But as soon
as it comes to physically interfering
with the gears of the imperial
machine, they’ll blow your guts out.
This is of course absurd. The horrors
in Gaza should be affecting the
whole world. Our lives should not be
proceeding normally, and it’s freakish
and obscene that they do. It’s a sign
of a profoundly sick civilization that
so many of us in the west are able to
lose ourselves in idle entertainment
and laugh and stuff our faces with
snacks and go out on the town while
the nightmare in Gaza continues to
unfold.
Gaza should be stopping us in our
tracks. Hell we should be disrupting
the economy ourselves — we
shouldn’t have to wait for
83
 • johnstone •

impoverished Yemenis
to do it for us. We should
be holding general strikes
and stopping ships and
disrupting everything we
can possibly disrupt in
order to force western
civilization to look at
what it’s supporting in
Gaza and bring this mass
atrocity to a screeching
halt. Instead we’re just
sleepwalking through life
like we always do while
people in the poorest
nation in the middle east
bravely fight our battle
for us.

The empire is not

entitled to expect that
all commerce keep
flowing normally during
an active genocide.
Israel is not entitled to
have zero consequences
for its actions, and its
trading partners are not
entitled to be unaffected
by those consequences.
The idea that it’s normal We live in a dystopian world where
and appropriate to use any and it’s completely normalized to subvert
all measures to prevent Israel’s human interests to commercial
atrocities from having any material interests, to toss tens of thousands
impact on commerce — up to and of lives into the incinerator for
including starting a new American wealth and convenience. Where war
war — is self-evidently ridiculous. profiteers rake in vast fortunes for
selling instruments of mass murder
It’s been an incredibly draining past to genocidal governments, and
100 days for those of us who’ve been where the most powerful empire
following events in Gaza. There’ve in history declares a war to defend
been days when I couldn’t believe shipping containers at the cost of
the sun dared to shine. The premise human life.
that there shouldn’t even be a slight
economic downturn as a result Don’t ever let these sick freaks
of this madness, and that it’s fine convince you that this is normal.
to start a war to make sure there
Image is a screenshot from the
isn’t, deserves to be dismissed with
discussed Now This video.
extreme disdain.

84
 • january 24 •

Many Say They Want Peace When What They

Really Want Is Obedience
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Everyone says they want peace, but they mean different
things by this. To an anti-imperialist, peace means the end
of violence, oppression and exploitation. To a Zionist, peace
means Palestinians lie down and accept their fate and
neighboring nations cease disobeying Israel. To a supporter
of the US empire, peace means all nations around the world
submit to US unipolar hegemony. Many say they want
peace when what they really want is tyranny.

85
 • johnstone •

If “peace” to you means other there will be a Palestinian group

populations bow down and submit to organizing violence against the
your will, then it makes perfect sense state of Israel in a matter of
for you to believe that your wars are years (assuming there are any
being waged to attain peace, because
Palestinians left when this is all over,
those wars are being used to violently
of course). If a man starts strangling
bludgeon those populations into
obedience. If your definition of peace me, at some point I’m going to
means the cessation of all violence try to gouge his
and abuse, then you will support eyes and crush his
ceasefires, peace negotiations, testicles. That’s
diplomacy, the de-escalation of just what happens
tensions, the cessation of imperialist when humans find
extraction, and the end of apartheid themselves under a
and injustice.
sufficient amount of
Pay less attention to people’s words existential pressure.
about wanting “peace” and focus
instead on what actions they are Asking if the world
supporting to accomplish that end. would be better
This will show you the truth about without Hamas is
what they really want. as nonsensical as
• asking if Alaska
would be better
Someone asked “Can we all agree without coats. The
that our world would be better presence of coats
without a Hamas?” in Alaska is the
natural consequence
This is the sort of question that can
of the material
only make sense to you if you view
conditions in that
Hamas as some kind of invasive
region, and as long
alien presence that was imposed
as those material
upon Palestine from the outside
conditions persist
instead of a natural emergence
for the population of
from the material circumstances
Alaska then there will
that have been forced upon
necessarily be coats.
Palestinians. If you’ve got a group of
people being sufficiently oppressed Don’t ask if the world
and violently persecuted by the would be better
ruling power, you’re going to start without a Hamas,
seeing violent opposition to that ask if the world would
ruling power as sure as you’ll see be better without the conditions
blood arise from a wound. which make a Hamas inevitable.
If Hamas had been completely •
eliminated a decade ago, there Biden has started a new US war in
would be a Palestinian group Yemen while backing a genocide
organizing violence against the in Gaza, both of which are fully
state of Israel today under that supported by the party which
or some other name. If Hamas is supposedly opposes him. But by
completely eliminated tomorrow, all means go ahead and spend the
rest of the year fixating on the US
presidential race.
•

86

Know how you can tell it no
longer matters who the US
president is? They stopped
getting assassinated.
• Muslims.
The Biden administration’s
justifications for its acts of war in
Yemen are premised on the absurd
assumption that the world economy
should march on completely
uninhibited during an active
genocide.
• region are consistently disastrous
Supporting the world’s most
powerful government bombing the
poorest country in the middle east
for trying to stop a genocide is the
most sycophantic bootlicking you
can possibly cram into a single
political opinion.
Israel isn’t relentlessly murderous
and abusive because it’s run by
Jews, it’s relentlessly murderous
and abusive because that’s the
only way to maintain an ethnostate
that was abruptly dropped on top
of an already existing civilization.
This would be true if it’d been
a Mormon state or a Romani
state.
Take any already existing
country with its own ethnic and
religious makeup and its own
relationships with surrounding
countries and drop a brand new
artificial ethnostate on top of
it with a deluge of immigrants
who are designated special and
above the people in that region,
and you’re going to get a ton of
violence. You’re also going to see
the dominant group espouse
supremacist ideological beliefs
to justify why it’s fine for
them to be placed above the
other group and receive better
treatment by the state. These
things would happen regardless of
what those respective ethnic and
religious makeups happen to be.
• january 24 •
How can we be sure of this? Because
we’ve seen it happen time and time
again in other settler-colonialist
projects throughout history which
had nothing to do with Jews or
It’s not about Jews and Judaism, it’s
about the nature and character of
the ethnostate which got placed
overtop a pre-existing civilization
in the 1940s. The religions and
ethnicities are interchangeable
with pretty much any other in terms
of how much violence would be
necessary to institute and maintain
such a state.
•
People who say they oppose
Israel’s actions in Gaza
but don’t forcefully oppose
Biden’s facilitation of
Israel’s actions in Gaza do
not actually oppose Israel’s
actions in Gaza.
•
There’s a type of uninformed
comment I keep seeing, usually from
Americans, that goes something like
this: “What do I care about Israel and
Hamas? It’s none of our business and
we should stay out of it.”
This comment is born of the
misunderstanding that people want
the US to meddle in middle eastern
affairs to stop the slaughter in Gaza,
which is a notion many Americans
reflexively oppose these days
because they have learned that US
“humanitarian interventions” in that
and often very costly.
But that isn’t what’s being called
for. What’s being called for is for the
US to STOP intervening in Israel and
Gaza — to END an intervention that
is ALREADY taking place. The US
has been pouring billions of dollars
of weaponry into Israel every year
for many years now, and has sent
a whole lot more since October 7
to assist the Israeli butchery that’s
been happening in Gaza. If the US
ceased supporting Israel’s violence in
Gaza, that violence would necessarily
be forced to end.
As a retired Israeli major general
named Yitzhak Brick told the
Jewish News Syndicate in
November, “All of our missiles, the
ammunition, the precision-guided
bombs, all the airplanes and
bombs, it’s all from the US. The
minute they turn off the tap, you
can’t keep fighting. You have no
capability… Everyone understands
that we can’t fight this war without
the United States. Period.”
If you don’t want your government
engaging in foreign conflicts and
intervening in foreign affairs, then
you should oppose the US-backed
massacres in Gaza, because
that’s exactly what it is. The anti-
interventionist position for an
American to have is to demand
that the Biden administration
stop actively facilitating this mass
atrocity.
Featured image via Defense Visual
Information Distribution Service.
87
 • johnstone •

88
 • january 24 •

I Want For You What You Want

For The Palestinians
I want for you whatever you If what I am saying makes you feel
uncomfortable, then perhaps this
want for the Palestinians. would be a good time for you to
re-evaluate what you want for the
When I say I want for you what you
Palestinians. Perhaps this would
want for the Palestinians, I mean
be a good time to assess whether
what it is that you really, truly want for
your attitude toward Palestinian
them. Not what you pretend to want
people is one of integrity, one which
for the Palestinians. Not what you say
offers others the same regard with
you want for the Palestinians when
which you yourself would want to
you’re in polite company, or when the
be regarded. One which truly treats
cameras are on you, or when you’re
others as you want to be treated.
posting online under your real name,
And perhaps it would be a good time
or when you’re speaking publicly in a
to make some changes in yourself
language other than Hebrew.
accordingly.
I mean I want for you what you
If you do not wish to make those
actually, truthfully want for the
changes, then perhaps this would
Palestinians, in your own private
be a good time to sincerely examine
personal inner world. I hope you
why that is. If you do not believe
receive whatever that is.
Palestinians ought to receive the
May you receive for yourself whatever same treatment that you yourself
it is you want the Palestinians to believe you should receive, perhaps
receive. If you are a good person you should elucidate for yourself
with good intentions, what I just said exactly why that is. Perhaps you
is a blessing of the highest order. should elucidate it out loud, out in
I am wishing you life and liberty the open, under your own name, like
and health and happiness. I am an authentic human being.
wishing you peace and harmony and
In any case I again repeat: I want
human rights. I am wishing you self-
for you what you want for the
sovereignty. I am wishing you the
Palestinians. May you receive in this
ability to live a long life in whatever
life exactly what it is that you want
way you choose to live it.
for the Palestinians, deep down in
If you are a sick person, a depraved your heart of hearts, whatever that
person, a sociopathic person who might be. May you receive it in full,
has other intentions toward the and may you receive it soon.
Palestinians, then I have just cursed
I offer this to you in all sincerity,
you in the worst way imaginable. I
whatever that might mean for you.
have willed that the universe give
you the very last things you could Amen.
possibly want for yourself. And I
mean it sincerely, from the bottom of Featured image via Ahmed Abu
my heart. Hameeda ahmed96 (CC0 1.0
Universal).
I think that’s fair. I think it is entirely
appropriate that people should
receive for themselves what they
want for others. I think the extent
of your good will toward your fellow
man should come round to you in full,
and I think the extent of your ill will
should as well.

89
 Strange Groceries
What strange groceries that man is carrying
Odd shapes in two plastic bags
Dripping blood
They look like they weigh more than the world
Head bowed
Eyes screwed shut
Step after step, feet like lead
Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah
What are those strange groceries you carry, sir?
These are my children, he says through a clenched jaw
They have had a long and weary day
And it is time to put them to bed
His face is wet with tears
And his arms are shaking
He walks on
Heavy feet with a heavy burden
Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah
Oh Allah
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one