I've blocked a commenter, which I do VERY rarely. Don't spam the comment threads. Cutting and pasting the same comment over and over again is a giant pain in the ass.
I welcome people to disagree with me, and you can call me an asshole if you feel the need, but if you're dumping fifty comments in a thread from your well of prepared cut and paste comments, I'm going to sigh heavily and send you to the cornfield. Don't just say the same shit over and over again.
Arguing about propaganda and false flags and “bankers” wars is a waste of time here. If Hamas laid down their arms, they would have peace. If Israel laid down their arms, they would get genocide. Hamas says out loud and proudly that they want all Jews dead. For some weird reasons that have nothing to do with facts or truth, lots of people pretend not to believe them. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. It’s a strategy.
Have removed. Spamming the thread with nonsense. Repeated cutting and pasting. I don't block comments and commenters I find offensive, but I do block commenters who are tedious, and the number of identical comments from this person have irritated me into a rare action.
I don’t know why, but this episode has brought to mind “Grizzly Man”. He so wanted to be their friend. But the grizzlies had a different mission in life.
A great analogy. A deluded fool who anthropomorphized wild animals to some extent and paid for it.
I see a similar thing with white liberals and Muslims. To accommodate the occasional intrusion of reality, that Islam itself is unwaveringly intolerant, they invented the word "islamist" to imply that recent atrocity was a weird offshoot uncharacteristic of the whole. The French do the same.
The west cannot admit peoples differ. While they hold up their Palestinian flags they ignore the realities, but reality won't ignore them.
White Liberals frame this as brown versus White and support the browns. They are either suicidal (not unlikely) or they think that their status as collaborators will spare them and their children if they win. It won't.
I suspect it is driven by superiority. They need to remind us blacks are not successful to bolster their own low self-esteem.
It is an elaborate performance. Look at this group. We have noticed they lag behind. And I am accepting responsibility to help. All of this is insulting while they maintain a sense of superiority.
Real equality means applying universal standards, then examining the real reasons some don't meet the standard. But that leaves no room for smugness or posturing.
No doubt. But there is a deeper issue, which is the inherent intolerance of Islam itself. Most Muslims are of course decent people, but their outlook on life is largely incompatible with Western nations.
See, that's too easy. It doesn't make one feel like a sophisticated person, who is "in the know" and able to see the "real truth", not like those sheeple who take things at face value.
Genocide was fine when the Tudors, Cromwell and the Liberals of 1847 did it, so it's fine that the Balfour Declaration's chief beneficiary does it too...
"If Hamas laid down their arms, they would have peace. If Israel laid down their arms, they would get genocide."
The genocide in Palestine has been ongoing. Doesn't matter whether Hamas lays down its arms or not. Maybe that would be a more peaceful genocide. One easier to ignore.
Doesn't matter that Hamas is a creation of US and Israel so that there would be a more useful "target".
This renewed/ongoing conflict is the result of the US, UK and France refusing to honor their promises. Where is the Palestinian state so long promised? Yes, that's maybe a little simplistic, but watch what comes out of the other serious actors over the next few days. The Iranians, the Iraqis, the Lebanese, Turkiye, Russia, Egypt; they have had it with the refusal of the "West" to act constructively. The US and Israel are like some child throwing a tantrum. It's not an issue of proportionality; it's an issue of rationality. The US and Israel want never ending war.
There needs to be a serious peace effort, not just a more war effort. And what, pray tell, are those 2 carrier groups going to do? Help Israel bomb Gaza? The Nazi problem goes a little bit beyond the Canadian parliament, eh?
An honest question, since I know little about the politics of this region, which strike me as increasingly complex: if Israel removed settlements and left Gaza in 2005, why are so many of the ‘stackers I follow talking about how Israel has been developing settlements in Gaza. What am I missing?
They're aggressively developing settlements on the West Bank, with considerable opposition, which is why they pulled security from the border area along Gaza.
There doesn't need to be anything. Leave them to it.
I agree about the broken promises and the frustration felt by people in the middle east. But the solution is for us to fully withdraw. They've been fighting there for two thousand years. Let them slug it out.
=== If Hamas laid down their arms, they would have peace. ===
They would have the same "peace" as the average compliant rape victim.
'Just lie down and this will be over as soon as I'm finished fucking you. WHY ARE YOU RESISTING? YOU'RE BRINGING THIS ON YOURSELF!'
=== Hamas says out loud and proudly that they want all Jews dead. ===
That's just rubbish. Utter garbage unworthy even of the new low-IQ internet.
Point us to a source - or you're repeating someone else's talking points, which is always a midwit thing to do.
I've seen this sort of bullshit repeated time and time again - making out as if Muslims have an Old Testament, "kill everything that breatheth" view of the world. That is really odd, when you consider that the main "kill them all and take their shit" bits of the OT are the actual Bible of the occupiers of Palestine.
I'm an avowed atheist - to the core - so I hold no brief for Islam.
BUT I am also well aware that HAMAS follows the "10 Points" required for all Islamic warfighters, and those 10 points are not remotely like the sort of depraved drivel that can be read in the "kill them all" bits of the Old Testament.
If a putative "Islamic extremist" is advocating violence against civilians, then that person is an apostate.
Which is better:
ⓐ 40 'decapitated babies' (which may be pure atrocity porn);
ⓑ 500 babies killed by bombings - as counted by Red Crescent;
ⓒ 500,000 babies killed by deliberate attacks on water treatment infrastructure, then 10 years of sanctions preventing their repair.
How you answer will reveal your depth-of-concern for the 'innocent' anchor-babies who may have died recently.
Elsewhere, Ben Shapiro has covered himself in a bukkake of shit as a result of trying to adduce 'evidence' of the '40 beheaded babies, Muslims are sand-apes' atrocity-porn... he got caught using an AI-generated image. Oof.
The lady in the video below though? Her kids were fine, but she lost a banana (in Hebrew, but with EN subtitles).
Abu Bakr (first Caliph and father in law of Mohammed, who was given the sobriquet "al-Siddiq" - the Righteous - by Mohammed himself) lays out the principles that MUST be observed by Islamic warfighters...
=================
“Stop, O people, that I may give you ten rules for guidance on the battlefield. Do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path. You must not mutilate dead bodies; do not kill a woman, a child, or an aged man; do not cut down fruitful trees; do not destroy inhabited areas; do not slaughter any of the enemies’ sheep, cow or camel except for food; do not burn date palms, nor inundate them; do not embezzle nor be guilty of cowardliness…You are likely to pass by people who have devoted their lives to monastic services; leave them alone."
========================
I mean that's basically the OPPOSITE of "leave nothing alive that breatheth".
Say some more drivel about "denial", and tell us how Brandon swore that he had seen the real, life photos of real, dead babies.
Exterminating your tribal enemies and taking their women if you can get away with it is based from an atheist perspective and you have no basis for saying otherwise.
"We have to find a way out of this wilderness of empty gestures." Chris, empty gestures have become the currency of our current, and impotent, culture. Once we get a leader who can go, and lead, beyond those empty gestures, we can dig our way out of this cultural hole.
I was 13 when the 6 Day War occurred. There were pro-Palestinian protests all over U.S. campuses. Same in ‘73 and ‘82, and every outbreak since then. None of them seem to understand that Jews were the indigenous people of Judea and Samaria (now called the West Bank).
The Arabs just can’t stand that the Jews got their forebears’ land back – the ultimate in “reparations.” You’d think U.S. liberals would be ecstatic. But no – they see only the oasis the Jews have created since ‘48 and the “nothing” the Palestinians have created, and conclude the Jews are oppressing the Palestinians. This is a case study of what happens when a population exists solely on welfare. The recipients create nothing and come to hate their benefactors for their generosity.
Fortunately for them, the Japanese do not share the Palestinians’ work ethic or outlook:
Yes, any time Jews pass through a place, they own it forever. Like the Talmud says, the Jews are different in quality than non-Jews. Jews have souls while the non-Jews are just cattle meant to be the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Jews. I know all about the supremacist beliefs promoted by the Satanic Talmud. That is why St. Louis was ordered by Pope Gregory IX to burn it after a whistleblower inside the Jewish community revealed it to the Pope - not out of "anti-Semitism", out of love for *all* of humanity as Christ commanded.
Show me ANY non-Eastern Asian religion that doesn’t posit that its belief system is at the top of the heap. You cast Judaism as unique in that respect.
This is about irredentism. The Palestinian “leadership” wants THAT land (all of Palestine) and no other land will do in their eyes. Same motivation Hitler used (among many) to generate political support on the way to becoming Chancellor.
We Catholics are responsible for believing our belief system is the best. Everyone votes with their feet to the religion they believe is the best. That is not what I am talking about. Catholics believe every human being is sacred and created in the likeness and image of God, not that those who believe in Catholicism or who were born to a Catholic family are superior or that Catholics can treat others like lesser beings. Sorry. There are differences. If you are not aware of them, I suggest you educate yourself.
If Catholics don’t believe Catholicism is theologically correct, then why don’t they move to (or found) a denomination that they DO think is correct? You seem to attribute a theological ambivalence to practicing Catholics that I personally don’t think is there.
You imply that (1) Jews treat Palestinians like shit and (2) they do so b/c they’re not Jewish. This is belied by the significant population of Muslim/Arab Israelis who vote. The Palestinians fled Israel in 1948 b/c they refused to live under a government controlled by ppl they consider subhuman. The Israelis are hostile to Palestinians not b/c of who or what they are, but b/c of what their leadership does, like the Oct 7 slaughter. The Palestinians have a word for Israeli independence: Nakba, meaning “catastrophe.”
There are also Palestinian Christians who are treated the same as Moslems; their population has dwindled in the W Bank because for them it is easier to go abroad. In fact in the place where the Christians lived was the preferable land for the settlers and expansion. Complaints against occupation come in a very broad application. The systems of checkpoints, etc, the taking of land by settlers afflicts people who have nothing to do with Islamic terrorism. That would include other minorities around Jerusalem too. The issue of the settlements also has many Israelis fed up with Bibi and in some sense can be blamed for creating an opportunity for this horrible massacre, which could not have happened except troops were sent north to protect the expanded settlements
I don't think you understood what I wrote. I think Catholics are correct, that is why I continue to be a Catholic. And I am not ambivalent about it at all. I am very intentional and serious about it as I think we Catholics should be. I don't expect Sunni Muslims, Reform Jews or Methodists to agree with me that Catholics have the most correct theology. We will each go for the belief system we think is most true. Israel was founded on Jewish supremacy and European supremacy which continue to this day. The Palestinians fled their homes and lands in 1947-8 because they faced a now declassified systematic campaign to drive them from their homes and villages. Sorry, but even Israeli historians admit this. See Ilan Pape's "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" for example. And yes, the word "catastrophe" captures the violent expulsion very well. Al Nakba. The Palestinians also say "you kill, you lie, Palestine will never die." I don't know if you personally kill or intend to lie, but you do repeat lie and lies cannot be maintained for ever. Truth outs.
I have zero ideas as to how this conflict can be resolved to the benefit of both sides. The Palestinian people have nowhere to go anymore than the Israelis do,.in terms of a nation. It seems to me that logic would be a good start. Would the US give the US and Canada back to the indigenous Americans? After all, they never left the continent. Likewise, would Australia give back their continent to the indigenous Australians. Neither of these indigenous peoples ever, ever left left the lands they occupied for millienia before the first 'settlers' arrived in 1600s in the case of the US and Canada and in 1788, only 235 years ago, in the case of Australia. Look how well those peace treaties worked for indigenous peoples?
How about equality under the law like in the US and Canada? Crazy idea, I know. Equal human rights for all. No racist ethnicity test for the "right of return." Israel could become a normal country of its citizens rather than a country for Jews anywhere in the world and not for the non-Jews exiled for having the wrong religion and ethnicity.
Aimee Smith; this is another country and other peoples.
You are insisting the world become America?
It can’t, unless we eliminate the people there and settle Americans there- are you willing to do that?
You should know that you are insisting they adhere to American rules.
What if they say No?
BTW the Muslim countries, being very practical, expelled their Jewish populations decades ago.
In most Muslim countries the Christians too are either discriminated against or persecuted (Egypt).
The entire Muslim world if you ask them and believe them doesn’t believe Israel has an intrinsic right to exist. They will tolerate Israel as long as Israel is strong. Not a moment past.
The right of return would instantly end Israel and Decolonization- you saw it October 7th - would rapidly happen.
You are asking the equivalent of America submitting to Sharia.
I am sorry, "the long warred" but I question your use of logic. What I would insist on is the US to stop facilitating the conquest and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, stop invading and destabilizing countries like Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya and Ukraine for Israel, and stop arming and funding a country that is based on Jewish ethno-religious supremacy. Once that happens, I agree it would be much less of my concern to scrutinize the behavior of the people of that region. But we Americans, in a Christian country that practices universalism, have been asked to fund, give political cover and spend our blood, treasure and moral standing vanquishing the regional competitors of the Jewish supremacist state of Israel that was founded through carefully planned genocide (as per the UN definition of genocide.) We have a duty to understand what we are participating in and end that participation if we find it to be wrong or evil and/or national suicide. But getting back to your original point, it is not true that a country gets to dictate who can emigrate into that land when that country has been created by violence on someone else's land.
It is intended as an explicit homeland for Jews. As for racist ethnicity tests, almost all countries think like this. It is viewed as a survival mechanism to promote stability.
Often, though, people do not set up such a situation on the homeland of another people, especially after an international legal framework was adopted that barred taken land by force and expelling populations. But Zionists think Jews are exceptional people and rules and laws are somehow never meant to apply to them.
I get all that. And I dislike what they are doing. However it is culture mixing we need to examine. It has never worked even when there are no land grabs.
Europe is learning this now. Mixing cultures leads to tension and ultimately collapse.
I’m Catholic, not Zionist or even Jewish. But I am a CPA, psychologically rooted in finding the factual origins of knotty problems. Somebody was there first. The Arabs just don’t like the facts.
I wasn’t aware that ownership of property expires simply by passage of time. The Muslim conquering of Judea & Samaria in 637 AD did not terminate Jewish property rights nor did it convey ownership to Muslim invaders. As to the “2000 yr” interval, there was a minor thing called the Diaspora, in which Jews were systematically expelled from innumerable European and west Asian countries.
More confusion, more "what's going on?" or "what is real?" creates a populace that is ripe for following commands. That's how hypnosis works. In one induction method, the hypnotist manufactures a chaotic environment -- lots of misdirection and confusing statements -- and when the client looks sufficiently befuddled and overwhelmed, all the hypnotist has to do is say "Sleep," and down he goes, utterly relieved to give over the reins.
As ever, your swift verbal slice to the heart of the matter: "Protests and media product decry Israeli viciousness and savagery, but then look for the action. What other Middle Eastern states are acting against Israel? Is Egypt rushing troops to its border with Gaza to throw a protective ring around Palestinians? Are Saudi fighter jets chasing away Israeli bombers? What is anyone doing? It’s interesting, isn’t it, to see the chasm between words and deeds." Egypt? Jordan? Saudi Arabia? BUELLER?!!!!
In a related observation, the Islamic migration from the global south to Europe and North America. No one mentions why Muslims from the middle east and the Indian subcontinent don't go to Muslim countries which match their sensibilities. Halal food, socially conservative, Islamic festivals etc.
They ignore the observation that stable Muslim countries won't take them. When they cause tension in Western nations it provides endless opportunities to berate us as inadequates.
I’m finding solace in the fact that Gen Z, higher education officials and the ungrateful refugees we allowed in this country are showing us who they truly are and what they think of the world. These people are on the side of burn it down at all costs in the name of fairness and equity, which doesn’t exist in Islam. I mean the photos of gays holding up signs saying gays support Palestine is beyond comical. Absolutely zero awareness. I love it.
Oct 14, 2023·edited Oct 14, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
Hard agree. It came hard on the heels of the Canadians (Toronto?). The imported Muslims put an end to rainbow displays in schools to the apparent astonishment of a local lesbian community leader.
She literally said to the local media, why would they do this? We worked hard to build migrant facilities and associated niceties like English classes to help them come here. Why would they do this to us?
Her bafflement was genuine. A total break with reality.
An interesting analysis. Naturally the Establishment want all pushback and discussion labelled as hate speech or racism. Even detached discussions about migration volumes.
Propaganda is not a synonym for "lie", I think that's the trouble newspeakers are having here, both the goodthinkers and the wrongthinkers.
Propaganda is just information whose factuality takes a backseat to its emotional content, and which is intended to manipulate you into drawing a specific conclusion rather than inform.
Propaganda can be 100% true but presented in a manipulative way. It may even be manipulating you toward a conclusion you'd be inclined to draw on your own from the bare facts.
Yes it's all propaganda. Everything is these days. Doing the opposite of what you think the author wants you to do is not a substitute for thinking.
Yes that is a good heuristic. All information you see is manipulated information even if true. Hamas did indeed seem to send a bunch of people into Israel to cause mayhem.
But its presentation is problematic. Some of the coverage is skewed. Unhinged animals broke into Israel and killed innocent civilians versus brave freedom fighters took on a powerful Goliath who were abusing the rightful owners of the holy land.
Extremists perpetrated the wholesale slaughter of KIDS at a music festival. And when that wasn’t enough they dragged women and children out of their safe rooms and beheaded them. Why now, and where are we headed? We have no US leadership. Our president suffers from memory loss (at best) and we can’t find a speaker of the house. A ship without rudder, otherwise known as a sitting duck.
Oct 14, 2023·edited Oct 14, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
So I understand your anger. But there are a few things to remember:
(1) As far as the pendulum swings one way, it will swing the other. We have been lied to so much, you're bound to have those who buy nothing.
(2) Even if something does happen--and I do believe Hamas went into Israel and killed a thousand plus people in brutal ways--the people in power will exploit it. They always do. So a population will easily slip into conspiracy mode. (As an example, Israel is very kindly working with other Arab countries to "relocate" the Gaza Palestinian population so that they can go in and "clean out" Hamas. Any odds on whether or not they'll "invite" any of them back? Probably not. So much easier to build settlements.)
(3) There is a constant conflation of Hamas and Palestine, which leaves many of us uneasy, and there is also a near blackout on the rather sticky ethical questions of the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government.
(4) There is a lot of "deletion" of uncomfortable facts. The big one is the history of the area Israel has claimed and how modern Israel came to be and how much that affects the near unquestioned assumption that Israel has every right to behave toward the Palestinians as its behaving. But even more modern "details" seem to go unmentioned. For example, two paragraphs from a Seymour Hersh article today (https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/netanyahu-is-finished):
****
An arrangement was made with Qatar, which began sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the Hamas leadership with Israeli approval. The insider told me that “Bibi was convinced that he would have more control over Hamas with the Qatari money—let them occasionally fire rockets into southern Israel and have access to jobs inside Israel—than he would with the Palestinian Authority. He took that risk.
“What happened this week,” the insider said, “was a result of the Bibi doctrine that you could create a Frankenstein and have control over it.” The attack by Hamas was a direct result of a decision Bibi made, over the protest of local military commanders, “to allow a group of Orthodox settlers to celebrate Sukkot in the West Bank.” Sukkot is an annual fall holiday that commemorates the ancestral journey of Jews into the depths of the desert. It is a weeklong festival that is observed by building an outdoor temporary structure known as a sukkah in which all could share the food that their predecessors ate and viscerally connect to the harvest season.
****
While I understand where you're coming from, when things become this tangled and sorting truth from fiction is more a matter of judging who gains what by lying than any real trust that someone will flat-out tell you what is real and not real. . . people are going to fall in the abyss.
Let us not forget the attack on the mosque in Jerusalem a few days before the big Hamas attack. With, BTW, the support of the Israeli military it seems.
Sukkot, I wonder if the Orthodox settlers shared with the Palestinians around them?
And FWIW, I don't have any big problem figuring out what is real and what is not real in this case. Know the purpose of the media is not to describe facts but to promote the agenda of the powerful. Throw out what comes from known repeat perjurers and it simplifies enormously.
LG - Seymour Hersh is long a creature of the American Intelligence Community, which is a creature of the State Department, which has narrow and mundane, financial interests in Palestine INC, as they created them and we have been paying for them since UNWRA in the 1940s. Hersh can’t be trusted except to serve the agenda of his sources.
We 🇺🇸 did not create Israel.
The Zionists and Great Britain did.
We 🇺🇸 did fund the creation of the refugee camp identity Palestinian, and we have been paying for them all along.
If you watched the video, you would see that the very first tweet that Jimmy Dore puts up is from Haaretz News, that is an *Israeli* news source. It is from October 9, 2023.
The Tweet reads as follows:
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy"
That was from *2019*. Yes, Israel has been transferring money to Hamas. It's not random internet source. It is an Israeli news site with a quote from Netanyahu.
Spot on writing here. Seeing the idiots out protesting in support of Hamas has been equally discouraging. And then those celebrating places like France making these protests illegal even more so. Have we learned nothing? This week it's Hamas sympathizers, next week it's Canadian truckers.
There has been, and still is, a lot of talk about circumstances, history, who did what to whom, whether Gaza is an “open air prison or not (seems like everyone got a PR talking points memo on that one eh...), the Zionist settlements actions and their goals (something that surely must be on the agenda when this current chapter is finally closed). There are arguments about the likes of the BBC refusing to refer to Hamas as terrorists when the fact that the UK government (and America and the EU) proscribe them as such, requiring the BBC to refer to them as such (a legal challenge has been put to the BBC and the regulator on this legal point). There has been discussion about a CNN (or was it MSNBC) interviewer seemingly seeking to get the mother of a kidnapped child to blame Israel (I saw that, she is a sicko who should be immediately fired for her sociopathic actions). There are arguments about upholding the law in Europe such that advocating a terrorist group illegal (at the very least hate speech) but no action is taken, contrast that with a 95 year old woman who dared challenge Woke ideology or anyone who protested the useless and anyway unnecessary lockdowns and mask mandates, not to mention getting fired for not taking an experimental drug that could not possibly be declared safe and clearly was (is) not. And on and on and on.
What people seem to forget, or wilfully wipe from their minds, is that unarmed people were targeted and murdered. Women (child bearers - fuck anyone who thinks a man can bear children, I’d like to see one try) raped and murdered. Children shot AND over 40 BABIES WERE SHOT IN THEIR COTS, and some apparently were decapitated (that’s had their heads cut off in case anyone isn’t getting the message here). Wilfully targeting unarmed women (again child bearers) and actual kids and babies for murder in the most gruesome fashion and broadcasting the actions. What is that if not a genocide that backs up with action the stated aim of Hamas and their partners (Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, ISIS) and their backers. And yet people talk of anything but this fact. Right now I don’t care about anything else except that Hamas have started a war of genocide against Israel and the Jews ( again ) and they won’t stop with that. They won’t stop until they have a global Caliphate so all those people parsing the facts should ask themselves if that is what they want. And don’t think for a second you will be scared if you are Muslim. Hamas have shown who they really are and as such have forfeited their right to human rights. The Gazans will suffer, that is sadly inevitable because Hamas use them as human shields and propaganda cannon fodder. Who else except the Israelis and Jews receive demands for proportion and not to escalate after such heinous in human crimes are perpetrated against them? What would America do if this happened in Texas? What would France do? What would Britain do? It is unclear that Canada, Australia or NZ would do anything but wrong their hands so emasculated have they become by the socialists. What kind of person hears and sees these barbaric acts and is unmoved such that they refuse to denounce Hamas and threaten Israel if they seek to escalate. N one has that right! They actively and wilfully. Targeted and murdered babies! BABIES! And they will do it again! If you do not see that Hamas must be ended you are a sociopath or brainwashed by sociopaths. Wake up and smell the anarchy before it comes to a village near you...
The other reason these voices choose to obfuscate the facts is because what happened doesn’t fit the narrative that Israel is a bully and the aggressor and those poor helpless palestinians are the victims. They’re tying themselves in knots trying to explain how raping young women to death and kidnapping children for unspeakable purposes is legitimate “resistance”.
I've read even senior Hamas figures are uncomfortable with the tactics. The pictures of six months old kidnapped babies being fed by Hamas fighters is a PR disaster. Hard to justify.
Don’t know where you read that but this is standard operating procedure for Hamas. They train their kindergarteners to kill Jews, and they like it bloody. Sadists and barbarians.
Chris....this is new and real journalism. We get a lie thrown at us. Something happened and the powers want us to respond a certain way. Many do. But....other narratives get tossed out. People question. Absurdly sometimes. But over a relatively short period of time a more reasonable version of events begin to emerge. People use common sense. People talk to those they know close to the event. In a relatively short time something truer begins to be told. Look at Ukraine. Without people tossing out everything most would still be saying ‘what a great victory is occurring in Ukraine. Putin is a paper tiger.’ And more arms billionaires would be minted, and more pols would get their $50M deposited in a Swiss bank account.
I don’t know about you guys, but that Queers for Palestine Club looks like a real solid organization to me. Breakthrough concept.
We know Asch’s conformity psychology experiments demonstrate the vast majority of people, say 75% will not believe their own eyes if the crowd tells them they are wrong, and will change their opinion. We also know from Milgram’s experiments that 65% of well intentioned people obeying authority figures just might kill you for basically no reason. We now live in a Cluster B society (Chris Rufo) with a form of mass neurosis and psychological dependency dominating the behavior of large segments of the population.
We also have an intensive 24/7/365 globalized media effort by many governments to mislead and gaslight the public for political and social engineering reasons.
Put all this together and you have a Mongolian mind clusterfunk on a worldwide scale.
Those susceptible to authority figures may be swayed by them. But for the rest of us, convincing anybody of anything any more is a tough row to hoe. As Doc Holliday said the other day, in a low trust society this is what you get. And the whole point of creating a low trust society is that this is what you get. People become anxious and tend to believe wild theories if they come from someone regarded as credible. Credibility being in the eyes of the beholder and increasingly transient.When the theories turn out to be true with some frequency it gets worse. A lot of people cannot parse reality.
Some things are complicated conspiracies. Some things are what they appear to be. As Freud may have said - “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
But on the off chance some of you are open to different perspectives, I’ll share this beautiful essay from a British-Pakistani Muslim physician who lives in the States.
I'm still at a cigar is a cigar, but that doesn't mean I feel totally comfortable picking an over/under in a round-robbin between a cigar and circus and a clampdown.
I've blocked a commenter, which I do VERY rarely. Don't spam the comment threads. Cutting and pasting the same comment over and over again is a giant pain in the ass.
I welcome people to disagree with me, and you can call me an asshole if you feel the need, but if you're dumping fifty comments in a thread from your well of prepared cut and paste comments, I'm going to sigh heavily and send you to the cornfield. Don't just say the same shit over and over again.
Arguing about propaganda and false flags and “bankers” wars is a waste of time here. If Hamas laid down their arms, they would have peace. If Israel laid down their arms, they would get genocide. Hamas says out loud and proudly that they want all Jews dead. For some weird reasons that have nothing to do with facts or truth, lots of people pretend not to believe them. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. It’s a strategy.
"If Hamas laid down their arms, they would have peace. If Israel laid down their arms, they would get genocide."
I love this, may have to steal.
(but hey, at least it's not murdering an old pawnbroker lady, right? ;))
Netanyahu at the UN
"If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel."
I'm sorry but I don't get your point.
The quote I provided was from a prime minister, speaking to the root of the problem the world, not just Israel has with Islam.
Do you know the root of the problem ?
Have removed. Spamming the thread with nonsense. Repeated cutting and pasting. I don't block comments and commenters I find offensive, but I do block commenters who are tedious, and the number of identical comments from this person have irritated me into a rare action.
The bot went to venom quickly.
Substack should be taking action it seems.
I guess Friday 13 didn't go as bot wished.
Sounds frustrated.
You get me!
lol! brings a tear to my eye....
Porfiry Petrovich approves
hehh hheh he said raskolnikov heh heh heh uhhh
I don’t know why, but this episode has brought to mind “Grizzly Man”. He so wanted to be their friend. But the grizzlies had a different mission in life.
A great analogy. A deluded fool who anthropomorphized wild animals to some extent and paid for it.
I see a similar thing with white liberals and Muslims. To accommodate the occasional intrusion of reality, that Islam itself is unwaveringly intolerant, they invented the word "islamist" to imply that recent atrocity was a weird offshoot uncharacteristic of the whole. The French do the same.
The west cannot admit peoples differ. While they hold up their Palestinian flags they ignore the realities, but reality won't ignore them.
White Liberals frame this as brown versus White and support the browns. They are either suicidal (not unlikely) or they think that their status as collaborators will spare them and their children if they win. It won't.
I suspect it is driven by superiority. They need to remind us blacks are not successful to bolster their own low self-esteem.
It is an elaborate performance. Look at this group. We have noticed they lag behind. And I am accepting responsibility to help. All of this is insulting while they maintain a sense of superiority.
Real equality means applying universal standards, then examining the real reasons some don't meet the standard. But that leaves no room for smugness or posturing.
No doubt. But there is a deeper issue, which is the inherent intolerance of Islam itself. Most Muslims are of course decent people, but their outlook on life is largely incompatible with Western nations.
What makes you think I want a war??
See, that's too easy. It doesn't make one feel like a sophisticated person, who is "in the know" and able to see the "real truth", not like those sheeple who take things at face value.
Some things are not as complicated as some people would like for us to believe…
Genocide was fine when the Tudors, Cromwell and the Liberals of 1847 did it, so it's fine that the Balfour Declaration's chief beneficiary does it too...
"If Hamas laid down their arms, they would have peace. If Israel laid down their arms, they would get genocide."
The genocide in Palestine has been ongoing. Doesn't matter whether Hamas lays down its arms or not. Maybe that would be a more peaceful genocide. One easier to ignore.
Doesn't matter that Hamas is a creation of US and Israel so that there would be a more useful "target".
This renewed/ongoing conflict is the result of the US, UK and France refusing to honor their promises. Where is the Palestinian state so long promised? Yes, that's maybe a little simplistic, but watch what comes out of the other serious actors over the next few days. The Iranians, the Iraqis, the Lebanese, Turkiye, Russia, Egypt; they have had it with the refusal of the "West" to act constructively. The US and Israel are like some child throwing a tantrum. It's not an issue of proportionality; it's an issue of rationality. The US and Israel want never ending war.
There needs to be a serious peace effort, not just a more war effort. And what, pray tell, are those 2 carrier groups going to do? Help Israel bomb Gaza? The Nazi problem goes a little bit beyond the Canadian parliament, eh?
Israel removed settlements and left Gaza in 2005. Palestinians have governed Gaza since that moment, and Hamas took full control of Gaza in 2007.
An honest question, since I know little about the politics of this region, which strike me as increasingly complex: if Israel removed settlements and left Gaza in 2005, why are so many of the ‘stackers I follow talking about how Israel has been developing settlements in Gaza. What am I missing?
They're aggressively developing settlements on the West Bank, with considerable opposition, which is why they pulled security from the border area along Gaza.
There doesn't need to be anything. Leave them to it.
I agree about the broken promises and the frustration felt by people in the middle east. But the solution is for us to fully withdraw. They've been fighting there for two thousand years. Let them slug it out.
=== If Hamas laid down their arms, they would have peace. ===
They would have the same "peace" as the average compliant rape victim.
'Just lie down and this will be over as soon as I'm finished fucking you. WHY ARE YOU RESISTING? YOU'RE BRINGING THIS ON YOURSELF!'
=== Hamas says out loud and proudly that they want all Jews dead. ===
That's just rubbish. Utter garbage unworthy even of the new low-IQ internet.
Point us to a source - or you're repeating someone else's talking points, which is always a midwit thing to do.
I've seen this sort of bullshit repeated time and time again - making out as if Muslims have an Old Testament, "kill everything that breatheth" view of the world. That is really odd, when you consider that the main "kill them all and take their shit" bits of the OT are the actual Bible of the occupiers of Palestine.
I'm an avowed atheist - to the core - so I hold no brief for Islam.
BUT I am also well aware that HAMAS follows the "10 Points" required for all Islamic warfighters, and those 10 points are not remotely like the sort of depraved drivel that can be read in the "kill them all" bits of the Old Testament.
If a putative "Islamic extremist" is advocating violence against civilians, then that person is an apostate.
Which is better:
ⓐ 40 'decapitated babies' (which may be pure atrocity porn);
ⓑ 500 babies killed by bombings - as counted by Red Crescent;
ⓒ 500,000 babies killed by deliberate attacks on water treatment infrastructure, then 10 years of sanctions preventing their repair.
How you answer will reveal your depth-of-concern for the 'innocent' anchor-babies who may have died recently.
Elsewhere, Ben Shapiro has covered himself in a bukkake of shit as a result of trying to adduce 'evidence' of the '40 beheaded babies, Muslims are sand-apes' atrocity-porn... he got caught using an AI-generated image. Oof.
The lady in the video below though? Her kids were fine, but she lost a banana (in Hebrew, but with EN subtitles).
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231010-dont-worry-im-a-muslim-israeli-recounts-experience-with-hamas-fighter/
Abu Bakr (first Caliph and father in law of Mohammed, who was given the sobriquet "al-Siddiq" - the Righteous - by Mohammed himself) lays out the principles that MUST be observed by Islamic warfighters...
=================
“Stop, O people, that I may give you ten rules for guidance on the battlefield. Do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path. You must not mutilate dead bodies; do not kill a woman, a child, or an aged man; do not cut down fruitful trees; do not destroy inhabited areas; do not slaughter any of the enemies’ sheep, cow or camel except for food; do not burn date palms, nor inundate them; do not embezzle nor be guilty of cowardliness…You are likely to pass by people who have devoted their lives to monastic services; leave them alone."
========================
I mean that's basically the OPPOSITE of "leave nothing alive that breatheth".
Say some more drivel about "denial", and tell us how Brandon swore that he had seen the real, life photos of real, dead babies.
Sub-par copper, bruh.
Exterminating your tribal enemies and taking their women if you can get away with it is based from an atheist perspective and you have no basis for saying otherwise.
You might at least give Bibi credit for your 2nd & 3rd sentences.
Swapaganda?
Ahh, that's a good term. You should trademark that sucker.
"We have to find a way out of this wilderness of empty gestures." Chris, empty gestures have become the currency of our current, and impotent, culture. Once we get a leader who can go, and lead, beyond those empty gestures, we can dig our way out of this cultural hole.
I was 13 when the 6 Day War occurred. There were pro-Palestinian protests all over U.S. campuses. Same in ‘73 and ‘82, and every outbreak since then. None of them seem to understand that Jews were the indigenous people of Judea and Samaria (now called the West Bank).
The Arabs just can’t stand that the Jews got their forebears’ land back – the ultimate in “reparations.” You’d think U.S. liberals would be ecstatic. But no – they see only the oasis the Jews have created since ‘48 and the “nothing” the Palestinians have created, and conclude the Jews are oppressing the Palestinians. This is a case study of what happens when a population exists solely on welfare. The recipients create nothing and come to hate their benefactors for their generosity.
Fortunately for them, the Japanese do not share the Palestinians’ work ethic or outlook:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=detroit%20hiroshima%20meme&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https://i2.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/hiroshima-vs-detroit-easier-come-back-from-nuclear-bomb-than-democratic-leadership.jpg?resize=490%2C572&ssl=1&ko=-1&t=ddg_ios&atb=v229-1
Yes, any time Jews pass through a place, they own it forever. Like the Talmud says, the Jews are different in quality than non-Jews. Jews have souls while the non-Jews are just cattle meant to be the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Jews. I know all about the supremacist beliefs promoted by the Satanic Talmud. That is why St. Louis was ordered by Pope Gregory IX to burn it after a whistleblower inside the Jewish community revealed it to the Pope - not out of "anti-Semitism", out of love for *all* of humanity as Christ commanded.
Show me ANY non-Eastern Asian religion that doesn’t posit that its belief system is at the top of the heap. You cast Judaism as unique in that respect.
This is about irredentism. The Palestinian “leadership” wants THAT land (all of Palestine) and no other land will do in their eyes. Same motivation Hitler used (among many) to generate political support on the way to becoming Chancellor.
We Catholics are responsible for believing our belief system is the best. Everyone votes with their feet to the religion they believe is the best. That is not what I am talking about. Catholics believe every human being is sacred and created in the likeness and image of God, not that those who believe in Catholicism or who were born to a Catholic family are superior or that Catholics can treat others like lesser beings. Sorry. There are differences. If you are not aware of them, I suggest you educate yourself.
If Catholics don’t believe Catholicism is theologically correct, then why don’t they move to (or found) a denomination that they DO think is correct? You seem to attribute a theological ambivalence to practicing Catholics that I personally don’t think is there.
You imply that (1) Jews treat Palestinians like shit and (2) they do so b/c they’re not Jewish. This is belied by the significant population of Muslim/Arab Israelis who vote. The Palestinians fled Israel in 1948 b/c they refused to live under a government controlled by ppl they consider subhuman. The Israelis are hostile to Palestinians not b/c of who or what they are, but b/c of what their leadership does, like the Oct 7 slaughter. The Palestinians have a word for Israeli independence: Nakba, meaning “catastrophe.”
There are also Palestinian Christians who are treated the same as Moslems; their population has dwindled in the W Bank because for them it is easier to go abroad. In fact in the place where the Christians lived was the preferable land for the settlers and expansion. Complaints against occupation come in a very broad application. The systems of checkpoints, etc, the taking of land by settlers afflicts people who have nothing to do with Islamic terrorism. That would include other minorities around Jerusalem too. The issue of the settlements also has many Israelis fed up with Bibi and in some sense can be blamed for creating an opportunity for this horrible massacre, which could not have happened except troops were sent north to protect the expanded settlements
I don't think you understood what I wrote. I think Catholics are correct, that is why I continue to be a Catholic. And I am not ambivalent about it at all. I am very intentional and serious about it as I think we Catholics should be. I don't expect Sunni Muslims, Reform Jews or Methodists to agree with me that Catholics have the most correct theology. We will each go for the belief system we think is most true. Israel was founded on Jewish supremacy and European supremacy which continue to this day. The Palestinians fled their homes and lands in 1947-8 because they faced a now declassified systematic campaign to drive them from their homes and villages. Sorry, but even Israeli historians admit this. See Ilan Pape's "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" for example. And yes, the word "catastrophe" captures the violent expulsion very well. Al Nakba. The Palestinians also say "you kill, you lie, Palestine will never die." I don't know if you personally kill or intend to lie, but you do repeat lie and lies cannot be maintained for ever. Truth outs.
Aimee
Extra Eccelsium Nulla Salus.
I have zero ideas as to how this conflict can be resolved to the benefit of both sides. The Palestinian people have nowhere to go anymore than the Israelis do,.in terms of a nation. It seems to me that logic would be a good start. Would the US give the US and Canada back to the indigenous Americans? After all, they never left the continent. Likewise, would Australia give back their continent to the indigenous Australians. Neither of these indigenous peoples ever, ever left left the lands they occupied for millienia before the first 'settlers' arrived in 1600s in the case of the US and Canada and in 1788, only 235 years ago, in the case of Australia. Look how well those peace treaties worked for indigenous peoples?
No other Arab peoples want the Palestinians. what of that?
They are intensely disliked by Egyptians. Jordan dislikes them too.
True, the leaders of Arab countries would enrage their populations if they facilitated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
How about equality under the law like in the US and Canada? Crazy idea, I know. Equal human rights for all. No racist ethnicity test for the "right of return." Israel could become a normal country of its citizens rather than a country for Jews anywhere in the world and not for the non-Jews exiled for having the wrong religion and ethnicity.
Aimee Smith; this is another country and other peoples.
You are insisting the world become America?
It can’t, unless we eliminate the people there and settle Americans there- are you willing to do that?
You should know that you are insisting they adhere to American rules.
What if they say No?
BTW the Muslim countries, being very practical, expelled their Jewish populations decades ago.
In most Muslim countries the Christians too are either discriminated against or persecuted (Egypt).
The entire Muslim world if you ask them and believe them doesn’t believe Israel has an intrinsic right to exist. They will tolerate Israel as long as Israel is strong. Not a moment past.
The right of return would instantly end Israel and Decolonization- you saw it October 7th - would rapidly happen.
You are asking the equivalent of America submitting to Sharia.
Would you?
I am sorry, "the long warred" but I question your use of logic. What I would insist on is the US to stop facilitating the conquest and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, stop invading and destabilizing countries like Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya and Ukraine for Israel, and stop arming and funding a country that is based on Jewish ethno-religious supremacy. Once that happens, I agree it would be much less of my concern to scrutinize the behavior of the people of that region. But we Americans, in a Christian country that practices universalism, have been asked to fund, give political cover and spend our blood, treasure and moral standing vanquishing the regional competitors of the Jewish supremacist state of Israel that was founded through carefully planned genocide (as per the UN definition of genocide.) We have a duty to understand what we are participating in and end that participation if we find it to be wrong or evil and/or national suicide. But getting back to your original point, it is not true that a country gets to dictate who can emigrate into that land when that country has been created by violence on someone else's land.
It is intended as an explicit homeland for Jews. As for racist ethnicity tests, almost all countries think like this. It is viewed as a survival mechanism to promote stability.
Often, though, people do not set up such a situation on the homeland of another people, especially after an international legal framework was adopted that barred taken land by force and expelling populations. But Zionists think Jews are exceptional people and rules and laws are somehow never meant to apply to them.
I get all that. And I dislike what they are doing. However it is culture mixing we need to examine. It has never worked even when there are no land grabs.
Europe is learning this now. Mixing cultures leads to tension and ultimately collapse.
I’m Catholic, not Zionist or even Jewish. But I am a CPA, psychologically rooted in finding the factual origins of knotty problems. Somebody was there first. The Arabs just don’t like the facts.
I wasn’t aware that ownership of property expires simply by passage of time. The Muslim conquering of Judea & Samaria in 637 AD did not terminate Jewish property rights nor did it convey ownership to Muslim invaders. As to the “2000 yr” interval, there was a minor thing called the Diaspora, in which Jews were systematically expelled from innumerable European and west Asian countries.
About that Balfour Declaration...
Yup. It went past bizarre a long time ago. It's gotten downright scary.
What's the next exit?
It's easy imo. We elect people who flate out say no, X,Y,Z is not normal, we will not accept that in OUR society and here is why.
Its so plain to see. People need to be slapped upside their fucking heads if necessary.
Wake-up peeps
Vote harder?
Bottom line is we pick fighter's or nothing.
RINO's are the enemy
Well yes. But we must consider the facts at least very strongly suggest moving beyond voting.
You and I are definitely on the same page...as usual
Well that to...
Or make sure you stay in the circles, walk with the one way arrows and stay behind the plexiglass
More confusion, more "what's going on?" or "what is real?" creates a populace that is ripe for following commands. That's how hypnosis works. In one induction method, the hypnotist manufactures a chaotic environment -- lots of misdirection and confusing statements -- and when the client looks sufficiently befuddled and overwhelmed, all the hypnotist has to do is say "Sleep," and down he goes, utterly relieved to give over the reins.
Yes. It induces passive helplessness.
Exactly.
A one chink chain
As ever, your swift verbal slice to the heart of the matter: "Protests and media product decry Israeli viciousness and savagery, but then look for the action. What other Middle Eastern states are acting against Israel? Is Egypt rushing troops to its border with Gaza to throw a protective ring around Palestinians? Are Saudi fighter jets chasing away Israeli bombers? What is anyone doing? It’s interesting, isn’t it, to see the chasm between words and deeds." Egypt? Jordan? Saudi Arabia? BUELLER?!!!!
In a related observation, the Islamic migration from the global south to Europe and North America. No one mentions why Muslims from the middle east and the Indian subcontinent don't go to Muslim countries which match their sensibilities. Halal food, socially conservative, Islamic festivals etc.
They ignore the observation that stable Muslim countries won't take them. When they cause tension in Western nations it provides endless opportunities to berate us as inadequates.
I’m finding solace in the fact that Gen Z, higher education officials and the ungrateful refugees we allowed in this country are showing us who they truly are and what they think of the world. These people are on the side of burn it down at all costs in the name of fairness and equity, which doesn’t exist in Islam. I mean the photos of gays holding up signs saying gays support Palestine is beyond comical. Absolutely zero awareness. I love it.
Hard agree. It came hard on the heels of the Canadians (Toronto?). The imported Muslims put an end to rainbow displays in schools to the apparent astonishment of a local lesbian community leader.
She literally said to the local media, why would they do this? We worked hard to build migrant facilities and associated niceties like English classes to help them come here. Why would they do this to us?
Her bafflement was genuine. A total break with reality.
An interesting analysis. Naturally the Establishment want all pushback and discussion labelled as hate speech or racism. Even detached discussions about migration volumes.
Propaganda is not a synonym for "lie", I think that's the trouble newspeakers are having here, both the goodthinkers and the wrongthinkers.
Propaganda is just information whose factuality takes a backseat to its emotional content, and which is intended to manipulate you into drawing a specific conclusion rather than inform.
Propaganda can be 100% true but presented in a manipulative way. It may even be manipulating you toward a conclusion you'd be inclined to draw on your own from the bare facts.
Yes it's all propaganda. Everything is these days. Doing the opposite of what you think the author wants you to do is not a substitute for thinking.
Yes that is a good heuristic. All information you see is manipulated information even if true. Hamas did indeed seem to send a bunch of people into Israel to cause mayhem.
But its presentation is problematic. Some of the coverage is skewed. Unhinged animals broke into Israel and killed innocent civilians versus brave freedom fighters took on a powerful Goliath who were abusing the rightful owners of the holy land.
Black and white thinking.
Yes, precisely.
Extremists perpetrated the wholesale slaughter of KIDS at a music festival. And when that wasn’t enough they dragged women and children out of their safe rooms and beheaded them. Why now, and where are we headed? We have no US leadership. Our president suffers from memory loss (at best) and we can’t find a speaker of the house. A ship without rudder, otherwise known as a sitting duck.
We 🇺🇸 don’t need to get involved beyond not betraying yet another ally, in this case Israel.
We were perfectly happy with for instance Saudi Arabia being at least this ruthless in Yemen.
They still are this very day.
For that matter what do people think happened to the Indigenous here in North America?
This is the way of true humanity.
Thank your ancestors for doing so to give you what peace and plenty you’ve enjoyed until now.
So get a plane ticket and head on over and support "your" side!
So I understand your anger. But there are a few things to remember:
(1) As far as the pendulum swings one way, it will swing the other. We have been lied to so much, you're bound to have those who buy nothing.
(2) Even if something does happen--and I do believe Hamas went into Israel and killed a thousand plus people in brutal ways--the people in power will exploit it. They always do. So a population will easily slip into conspiracy mode. (As an example, Israel is very kindly working with other Arab countries to "relocate" the Gaza Palestinian population so that they can go in and "clean out" Hamas. Any odds on whether or not they'll "invite" any of them back? Probably not. So much easier to build settlements.)
(3) There is a constant conflation of Hamas and Palestine, which leaves many of us uneasy, and there is also a near blackout on the rather sticky ethical questions of the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government.
(4) There is a lot of "deletion" of uncomfortable facts. The big one is the history of the area Israel has claimed and how modern Israel came to be and how much that affects the near unquestioned assumption that Israel has every right to behave toward the Palestinians as its behaving. But even more modern "details" seem to go unmentioned. For example, two paragraphs from a Seymour Hersh article today (https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/netanyahu-is-finished):
****
An arrangement was made with Qatar, which began sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the Hamas leadership with Israeli approval. The insider told me that “Bibi was convinced that he would have more control over Hamas with the Qatari money—let them occasionally fire rockets into southern Israel and have access to jobs inside Israel—than he would with the Palestinian Authority. He took that risk.
“What happened this week,” the insider said, “was a result of the Bibi doctrine that you could create a Frankenstein and have control over it.” The attack by Hamas was a direct result of a decision Bibi made, over the protest of local military commanders, “to allow a group of Orthodox settlers to celebrate Sukkot in the West Bank.” Sukkot is an annual fall holiday that commemorates the ancestral journey of Jews into the depths of the desert. It is a weeklong festival that is observed by building an outdoor temporary structure known as a sukkah in which all could share the food that their predecessors ate and viscerally connect to the harvest season.
****
While I understand where you're coming from, when things become this tangled and sorting truth from fiction is more a matter of judging who gains what by lying than any real trust that someone will flat-out tell you what is real and not real. . . people are going to fall in the abyss.
Let us not forget the attack on the mosque in Jerusalem a few days before the big Hamas attack. With, BTW, the support of the Israeli military it seems.
Sukkot, I wonder if the Orthodox settlers shared with the Palestinians around them?
And FWIW, I don't have any big problem figuring out what is real and what is not real in this case. Know the purpose of the media is not to describe facts but to promote the agenda of the powerful. Throw out what comes from known repeat perjurers and it simplifies enormously.
LG - Seymour Hersh is long a creature of the American Intelligence Community, which is a creature of the State Department, which has narrow and mundane, financial interests in Palestine INC, as they created them and we have been paying for them since UNWRA in the 1940s. Hersh can’t be trusted except to serve the agenda of his sources.
We 🇺🇸 did not create Israel.
The Zionists and Great Britain did.
We 🇺🇸 did fund the creation of the refugee camp identity Palestinian, and we have been paying for them all along.
I saw the same claim expressed in an entirely separate source. That was the only way I was comfortable using the quote: https://rumble.com/v3ouec8-yes-they-actually-created-and-funded-their-enemy.html. So whatever Hersh might be otherwise, he seems to be right about this.
It is yes common knowledge since the 1990s that Israel created HAMAS, as counter to PLO. That part worked 🤣.
That from there Netanyahu allowed Qatar to fund HAMAS...
no.
Israel doesn’t control Qatar.
AMERICA controls Qatar.
Two internet sources BTW doesn’t mean true.
If you want to understand Palestinians, look at UNWRA.
Not the tribute Qatar pays , that we told them to pay...
And of course as it turns out...
Israel does control all of Gaza’s access from the outside world.
🤔
If you watched the video, you would see that the very first tweet that Jimmy Dore puts up is from Haaretz News, that is an *Israeli* news source. It is from October 9, 2023.
The Tweet reads as follows:
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy"
That was from *2019*. Yes, Israel has been transferring money to Hamas. It's not random internet source. It is an Israeli news site with a quote from Netanyahu.
Ok
I am equally saddened by watching the events unfold and people's reactions getting more angry and unhinged. What has happened to us all?
That's been my feeling all week. "What has happened to us all?" Very painful.
We are through the looking glass. Our govt abandoned the mission against ISIS etc for the neocon suck hole and this is where we are
BC et al and all; this is Human Nature under the veneer of civilization.
Lose your mask or perish.
Spot on writing here. Seeing the idiots out protesting in support of Hamas has been equally discouraging. And then those celebrating places like France making these protests illegal even more so. Have we learned nothing? This week it's Hamas sympathizers, next week it's Canadian truckers.
There has been, and still is, a lot of talk about circumstances, history, who did what to whom, whether Gaza is an “open air prison or not (seems like everyone got a PR talking points memo on that one eh...), the Zionist settlements actions and their goals (something that surely must be on the agenda when this current chapter is finally closed). There are arguments about the likes of the BBC refusing to refer to Hamas as terrorists when the fact that the UK government (and America and the EU) proscribe them as such, requiring the BBC to refer to them as such (a legal challenge has been put to the BBC and the regulator on this legal point). There has been discussion about a CNN (or was it MSNBC) interviewer seemingly seeking to get the mother of a kidnapped child to blame Israel (I saw that, she is a sicko who should be immediately fired for her sociopathic actions). There are arguments about upholding the law in Europe such that advocating a terrorist group illegal (at the very least hate speech) but no action is taken, contrast that with a 95 year old woman who dared challenge Woke ideology or anyone who protested the useless and anyway unnecessary lockdowns and mask mandates, not to mention getting fired for not taking an experimental drug that could not possibly be declared safe and clearly was (is) not. And on and on and on.
What people seem to forget, or wilfully wipe from their minds, is that unarmed people were targeted and murdered. Women (child bearers - fuck anyone who thinks a man can bear children, I’d like to see one try) raped and murdered. Children shot AND over 40 BABIES WERE SHOT IN THEIR COTS, and some apparently were decapitated (that’s had their heads cut off in case anyone isn’t getting the message here). Wilfully targeting unarmed women (again child bearers) and actual kids and babies for murder in the most gruesome fashion and broadcasting the actions. What is that if not a genocide that backs up with action the stated aim of Hamas and their partners (Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, ISIS) and their backers. And yet people talk of anything but this fact. Right now I don’t care about anything else except that Hamas have started a war of genocide against Israel and the Jews ( again ) and they won’t stop with that. They won’t stop until they have a global Caliphate so all those people parsing the facts should ask themselves if that is what they want. And don’t think for a second you will be scared if you are Muslim. Hamas have shown who they really are and as such have forfeited their right to human rights. The Gazans will suffer, that is sadly inevitable because Hamas use them as human shields and propaganda cannon fodder. Who else except the Israelis and Jews receive demands for proportion and not to escalate after such heinous in human crimes are perpetrated against them? What would America do if this happened in Texas? What would France do? What would Britain do? It is unclear that Canada, Australia or NZ would do anything but wrong their hands so emasculated have they become by the socialists. What kind of person hears and sees these barbaric acts and is unmoved such that they refuse to denounce Hamas and threaten Israel if they seek to escalate. N one has that right! They actively and wilfully. Targeted and murdered babies! BABIES! And they will do it again! If you do not see that Hamas must be ended you are a sociopath or brainwashed by sociopaths. Wake up and smell the anarchy before it comes to a village near you...
The other reason these voices choose to obfuscate the facts is because what happened doesn’t fit the narrative that Israel is a bully and the aggressor and those poor helpless palestinians are the victims. They’re tying themselves in knots trying to explain how raping young women to death and kidnapping children for unspeakable purposes is legitimate “resistance”.
I've read even senior Hamas figures are uncomfortable with the tactics. The pictures of six months old kidnapped babies being fed by Hamas fighters is a PR disaster. Hard to justify.
Don’t know where you read that but this is standard operating procedure for Hamas. They train their kindergarteners to kill Jews, and they like it bloody. Sadists and barbarians.
I am not aware of how they operate. I just read an article earlier that suggested it had all backfired.
memri.org or on Twitter https://x.com/memrireports?s=21 is a trustworthy source to learn what the Arabs say to their own in Arabic.
Chris....this is new and real journalism. We get a lie thrown at us. Something happened and the powers want us to respond a certain way. Many do. But....other narratives get tossed out. People question. Absurdly sometimes. But over a relatively short period of time a more reasonable version of events begin to emerge. People use common sense. People talk to those they know close to the event. In a relatively short time something truer begins to be told. Look at Ukraine. Without people tossing out everything most would still be saying ‘what a great victory is occurring in Ukraine. Putin is a paper tiger.’ And more arms billionaires would be minted, and more pols would get their $50M deposited in a Swiss bank account.
I don’t know about you guys, but that Queers for Palestine Club looks like a real solid organization to me. Breakthrough concept.
We know Asch’s conformity psychology experiments demonstrate the vast majority of people, say 75% will not believe their own eyes if the crowd tells them they are wrong, and will change their opinion. We also know from Milgram’s experiments that 65% of well intentioned people obeying authority figures just might kill you for basically no reason. We now live in a Cluster B society (Chris Rufo) with a form of mass neurosis and psychological dependency dominating the behavior of large segments of the population.
We also have an intensive 24/7/365 globalized media effort by many governments to mislead and gaslight the public for political and social engineering reasons.
Put all this together and you have a Mongolian mind clusterfunk on a worldwide scale.
Those susceptible to authority figures may be swayed by them. But for the rest of us, convincing anybody of anything any more is a tough row to hoe. As Doc Holliday said the other day, in a low trust society this is what you get. And the whole point of creating a low trust society is that this is what you get. People become anxious and tend to believe wild theories if they come from someone regarded as credible. Credibility being in the eyes of the beholder and increasingly transient.When the theories turn out to be true with some frequency it gets worse. A lot of people cannot parse reality.
Some things are complicated conspiracies. Some things are what they appear to be. As Freud may have said - “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
But on the off chance some of you are open to different perspectives, I’ll share this beautiful essay from a British-Pakistani Muslim physician who lives in the States.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israels-jihad-remains-my-jihad-the-idf-my-soul-soldiers/
Well said.
I'm still at a cigar is a cigar, but that doesn't mean I feel totally comfortable picking an over/under in a round-robbin between a cigar and circus and a clampdown.