All the talking heads that fine Sunday morning played their part. Niki Savva by shutting up, everyone else by repeating, mantralike, Defence Minister and US submissive Richard Marles\u2019 cliche that \u201cIsrael has a right to defend itself<\/a><\/span>\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n [Chanting] Defence defence defence!!!<\/span><\/p>\n No one bothered to ask if that\u2019s something the Palestinians, and now the Lebanese, might be doing.<\/span><\/p>\n More than 2100 Lebanese people have been killed by Israel in the past week. In the year since Hamas\u2019 October 7 attack, which led to 1200 Israeli deaths, more than 41,800 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza. Given the genocidal scale of the destruction, 70 percent of all structures damaged, assessments from The Lancet (not typically ones to overdo it) and various UN agencies, this is likely a gross underestimate. Most of the dead are women and children. The open-air prison is being flattened.<\/span><\/p>\n Of those killed, at least 138 <\/span>139 were journalists<\/a><\/span>. Gaza, this past year, has been the most dangerous place on the planet for journalists, since, well, ever, really. Many were targeted specifically for being journalists (the other journalists represented in the tally weren\u2019t targeted for being journalists but were simply murdered for being Palestinian). Some were killed alongside their families, inside their homes. Wael Dahdouh<\/a><\/span> was even reporting on air live as he heard news of his own little world coming to an end. Foreign reporters have been shut out of Gaza. Al Jazeera has been silenced within Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n Consider all that for just a hot fucking minute. The assault on the profession, the massacre of colleagues-in-news by a religious apartheid ethnostate, only for an entire industry \u2013 and a mouthy one at that \u2013 to shut the fuck up so sincerely about any of it.<\/span><\/p>\n [Cricket chirps]<\/span><\/p>\n Consider also: the people routinely on these Sunday morning couches get worked up when people on Twitter say nasty things about underwhelming reporters. They find their solidarity and cojones when a presenter is under fire for being a bit shit or the profession is slandered, and onto their high-horse they hop. But when a genocidal nation kills fellow journalists, there\u2019s nothing but cowardly silence and endless justification for the ongoing devastation.<\/span><\/p>\n One hundred and thirty nine journalists murdered by Israel, for the crime of doing their jobs (or the crime of being Palestinian), only for Australia to excrete the lamest, most boot-licking version of the \u201cthe news\u201d possible; a cowed and flailing public broadcaster sharting out vapid talking heads that prattle imperial apologia about Israel\u2019s \u201cright to defend itself\u201d while slaughtering journalists far better than they are.<\/span><\/p>\n Defence defence defence!!!<\/span><\/p>\n There was a time, exactly one year ago, when all of these people told you Israel, \u201cthe most moral army in the world\u201d, wouldn\u2019t possibly bomb a hospital<\/span><\/a>. It was outrageous to suggest so. It was Hamas! Human Shields! How dare you, anti-Semite<\/span><\/a>, do you condemn Hamas?! Now, a year later, knowing that basically all the hospitals have been bombed, retroactively these statements need to be acknowledged and reconceptualised as the aggressive bullshit they always were.<\/span><\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/p>\n Anyone who has ever escaped habitual gaslighting in a relationship understands how discombobulating and insidious this particular form of abuse is.<\/span><\/p>\n The constant minimising of harm. The deflection. The whataboutism. Warped, selective context. Obfuscation. Casual justification of the unjustifiable. A fervorous inability to acknowledge another perspective. The hypocrisy and complete lack of accountability. The lies so bold-faced, so devoid of empathy you can\u2019t help but question the sanity of your own mind. Sound familiar?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n – Insert –<\/span><\/strong><\/span> Escaping this tarpit trap requires moments in which the gaslit-reality is so at odds with actual reality you can\u2019t help but notice. For people with an intuition something might be wrong, cognitive dissonance does have its limits. In a relationship, this might be instances of abuse more overt than the norm; in geo-politics, it might be the 500th Gazan school flattened by the IDF under the guise of hunting terrorists with a Bugs Bunny like ability to tunnel away from playgrounds, classrooms and paediatric hospitals before they\u2019re turned into craters.<\/span><\/p>\n During these moments, when you surface for air and clarity slaps you across the face like a breaking wave, you either succumb to the undertow and drown all over again, or you swim for shore and never, ever see things again as you once did.<\/span><\/p>\n Your government, its American masters, and its mouthpieces in the press inflict this type of psychic damage on our minds and souls, too \u2013 perpetually in the case of Israel\u2019s ongoing bloodshed in the Middle East<\/span><\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/p>\n The reason for all this is simple. The reason MPs and media in Australia cannot acknowledge the situation as it truly is, is because you cannot justify genocide without needing to lie.<\/span><\/p>\n Here, we are fed a reality where the relevant context for Israel\u2019s aggression isn\u2019t the horror inflicted on the Palestinians every single day since the Nakba of 1948. Instead, the background frame for any and all news reporting is cries of \u2018Allah Akbar\u2019, Hitler\u2019s Holocaust of the Jewish people (for those extremely confused sorts, the Palestinians had nothing to do with this), burqas, burning American flags, and the Islamic terrorism of 9\/11 and beyond. This is the frame presented to us, an intellectually malnourished population huffing on Imperial gaslight. The Palestinian perspective, one of being invaded, dehumanised, tormented, dispossessed, terrorised and now massacred is largely absent from any commentary.<\/span><\/p>\n And when it starts to seep in through the inevitable questions that arise when doctors are killed with their hands bound, when children are sniped, when aid workers and playgrounds are missiled into dust, the press is everready to roll out the classic get-Israel-out-of-the-Hague card:<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018It\u2019s complicated.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019S CoMpLiCaTeD.<\/span><\/p>\n The reason reporters say this so often is because it is not.<\/span><\/p>\n The actual mission behind the carnage inflicted by the IDF, since and before October 7, is crystal clear if you consider three immovable facts rarely mentioned in basic reporting on Israel, and never, ever, ever uttered by Western political leaders.<\/span><\/p>\n One: Trying to rescue 100 odd hostages by destroying 70-percent of all buildings in Gaza, more than 500 schools, 814 mosques<\/a><\/span>, and all the hospitals, while massacring tens of thousands of children in the process, makes no tactical sense whatsoever. More tonnes of explosives have been dropped on Gaza than on Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden combined. This is not a plan to rescue a group of people: it is a plan to destroy a group of people.<\/span><\/p>\n Two: Across the 76 years of this conflict, 96% of all casualties have been Palestinians.<\/span><\/p>\n Three: Since 1948, in fits and starts, oscillating between cautiously and explosively, Palestine is disappearing and becoming a place called Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n Now, unless we have truly entered a world where objective material reality holds no worth, these points are unequivocally not up for debate. This should mean, to a healthy mind capable of un-propagandised rational thought, the contours of this conflict (do not dignify this slaughter by calling it a \u2018war\u2019) are self-evident. Israel is colonising Palestine.<\/span><\/p>\n And what we\u2019ve gleaned from the lived experience of the United States, Canada, and Australia, is that the people being colonised are in for centuries of a realllllllllllllllllllllllly shitty time. Palestine\u2019s shitty time is 76 years long and counting.<\/span><\/p>\n The It\u2019S cOmPlIcAtEd myth is an integral part of the gaslighting inflicted upon the free minds of the Western world by pro-colonialist propaganda. When the slaughter and land theft (even the term \u2018settlers\u2019 is a euphemism for \u2018violent colonists\u2019) starts to seem obvious to an observer linking the dots between The New York Times\u2019 passive voice and the murderous mystery nation foreign ministers keep forgetting to name in their tweets of \u2018grave concern<\/a><\/span>\u2019, \u2018It\u2019s cOmPlIcAtEd\u2019 is there to undermine your belief in what you are starting to understand.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Violence flows in both directions, certainly, but despite the world crafted for you in newspapers and on Sunday morning\u2019s cosy television company, the blood pools disproportionately and overwhelmingly in one direction (see point number 2 above). Some of the people trapped inside the next pieces of land waiting to be swallowed have violently \u2013 sometimes horrifically indiscriminately \u2013 resisted their occupation. Cycles of hatred are being perpetuated on both sides of concrete apartheid walls. Only one side, though, has the capacity to build such concrete walls, and, more to the fucking point, none of this would be happening if Palestine wasn\u2019t undergoing the painful process of becoming Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n There is a Holy War dimension to all this, too. Religion has for millennia been used to justify slaughter, land theft, genocide, and conquest. For much of its history, Christianity was really into this sort of thing. But intent and justification matter far less than outcomes, particularly when the outcome is the slaughter of the people presently living on the land the conquerors desire. Whether they feel entitled to it for whatever scripture reason matters less than clasping onto the reality of this slaughter (and beachside condo redevelopment scheme!<\/span>) occurring right now. And that is what it is. More than anything else, this is Western settler-colonialism \u2013 conquest \u2013 repeating the cruel patterns of the past with today\u2019s capacity to cause immense harm. For decades now, Palestinians have been dehumanised systematically in Western eyes by the convenient peons in the press, all in preparation for what is presently unfolding.<\/span><\/p>\n The cause of all this slaughter is only \u2018complicated\u2019 if you need to contort yourself into knots explaining the situation without mentioning the whole colonisation thing. Now THAT is complicated.<\/span><\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/p>\n When<\/span> Francesca <\/span>Albanese<\/span>, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, addressed the Australian Press Club last year, she was met with questions shaped by years of conditioning inside the heart of the Empire. Her direct statements of fact about occupation and oppression were met with denial and moronic art school critiques of her use of \u201ctropes\u201d. \u201cIt\u2019s not a trope!\u201d she had to yell at some dork from 9Fax, \u201cit\u2019s reality\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n It is unwise to expect any better from AUKUS-bound politicians, this much is obvious. No matter how charismatic and humane their liberalism seems; no matter how recently they founded organisations called things like The Parliamentary Friends of Palestine. It is still a ruling elite claiming either righteous self-defence (which I have already argued is ahistorical at best and batshit fanaticism at worst), or hand-tied pragmatism, thoughts and prayers, and \u2018grave concern\u2019. It is not a politician\u2019s job to tell the truth.<\/span><\/p>\n But the failings of the media class on Palestine are not only moral \u2013 they are conceptual. Existential. They cut to the rotten core of the profession\u2019s entire point. Truth. Truth. Truth. For the western world\u2019s professional class of self-professed \u2018truth tellers\u2019, our \u2018watchdogs to the powerful\u2019, this is not even close to being good enough.<\/span><\/p>\n Consider this cartoon from The Sydney Morning Herald, directly running with the establishment Zionist line that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitc, and then sprinkle on top not-so-subtle implications that dissent from this orthodoxy is akin to a virus.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Or this cover of The Weekend Australian, openly chiding Prime Minister Albanese for \u2018abandoning Israel\u2019, a laughable claim given he has done nothing of the sort.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Australia\u2019s current Gold Walkley winner Samantha Maiden\u2019s only real contribution to this discussion has been to chide \u2018mummy bloggers\u2019 upset about the slaughter of Gaza, chatting casually on ABC Radio with Patricia Karvelis, saying they \u2018couldn\u2019t even find Gaza on a map\u2019. LMFAO. Top tier analysis, thanks Samantha! It does make you wonder, though: if Maiden is so familiar with the map of Gaza, why hasn\u2019t she noticed how much of it has been flattened by the IDF?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Mouthy progressives have been deeply embarrassing and complicit on this topic, too. Esteemed anti-imperialist journalist George Monbiot is oddly silent. And liberal American anchors on CNN and MSNBC have cheer-led the slaughter of Gaza, just as they rolled out the red carpets for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan post-9\/11. There are roughly seven Western journalists talking about this in a way that actually reflects reality, and at least one of them will clearly never have a job at any major mainstream Australian outlet again.<\/span><\/p>\n Van Badham, the Guardian\u2019s self-styled champion of the working poors, has found herself enraged \u2013 \u201cbeyond rage\u201d, apparently \u2013 by the vandalism of MP Josh Burns\u2019 St Kilda office. Burns, a Zionist, is a rising star inside the Labor party machine. I can only assume Van Badham is terrified of spray paint and wouldn\u2019t have said anything if Burns\u2019 office was flattened by a 2000 pound bomb provided by the USA and released with a firing mechanism sent from Australia, because she\u2019s said precisely fuck all about that sort of thing.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n – Insert –<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Israel is an integral arm of American Imperialism. Its conquest and slaughter of Palestine, and now Lebanon, is funded, justified and protected by a political duopoly in Washington D.C. that has championed the massacres of Arabs in the Middle East since well before 9\/11. Israel is the largest recipient of US military aid in history, having received US$251bn since 1959, and US$22.76bn in the last year alone<\/span><\/a>. The Western empire is white supremacist, hyper-capitalist, and murderously Islamophobic. It is fed by war and oil; justified by media-led social engineering.<\/span><\/p>\n Popular consciousness in the West is acutely aware that Hitler murdered six million Jews during the Holocaust. This is a horrific stain on human history that must never be forgotten. We are far less aware that the post 9\/11 death toll in the Middle East at the hands of the American military machine\u2019s wars sits in the region of 5 million people<\/a><\/span>, Brown University now estimates. Five fucking million is a staggering number of deaths to barely register on the moral ledger within the West.<\/span><\/p>\n You are inside this, and that is why no one wants to tell you any of this.<\/span><\/p>\n Within this space, it is more comfortable not to parse this reality. Your job will be easier, your standing in polite society unthreatened, your place as a round peg in a round hole secured. You will sleep better, your slumber undisturbed by the ghosts of Gaza. You will avoid professional ostracisation and the malign smear campaigns of the Zionist lobby. You will be rewarded for shutting the fuck up. People won\u2019t call you a terrorist sympathiser, or an anti-Semite, because you hold the belief that Palestians are humans and that murderous apartheid religious ethno-states shouldn\u2019t get free passes from multicultural liberal democracies.<\/span><\/p>\n If you\u2019re a journalist, you\u2019ll be able to hold onto your positions writing in The Age, The Herald Sun, The Australian, The ABC, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper. All of it, literally all of it. Even the \u201cgood ones\u201d. You won\u2019t get Lattoufed<\/a><\/span>. You might even get to sit around on Sunday morning with David Speers toasting your utility to this rich tapestry of bullshit.<\/span><\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/p>\n This past August, I had the good fortune of travelling across much of Western Europe. Everywhere, dissent against this empire, if not mainstream, is omnipresent. It delicately reaches out into the world, touches it, and lets us know it is there as well. \u2018Gaza\u2019 spray painted in lurid green on a plywood fence in Amsterdam. Free Palestine affixed to a canalside tree by an elderly Dutch man. The flag of an erased nation hanging from terrace windows along train lines from Brussels to London, Zurich to Milan. Jeers for Israeli athletes allowed to compete at the Paris Olympics despite International Court of Justice concerns of genocide, apartheid and war crimes. Gargantuan marches for peace filling city squares, streets and university campuses: public spaces shared by students, Rabbis, teachers, bus drivers, every type of ordinary person imaginable, all parsing the horror Israel is inflicting on the people it is swallowing \u2013 the Zionist mission of the conquest of Palestine, an inhumane barbarism live-streamed for anyone willing and still cognitively able to bear witness.<\/span><\/p>\n If you\u2019ve been wondering why they, our political leaders and their Wormtongues in the mainstream press, can\u2019t see what everyone else can clearly see happening in Gaza, and now Lebanon\u2026 well, they can. Everyone can see it. The bags of children, the bound and executed doctors, the flattened civilisation; the genocidal language of Israeli leaders, the moonscape of rubble and sinews that was once Gaza, the dehumanised humans tormented along their journey to erasure. It is the wrong question to ask \u2013 too naive, too much assuming the best of self-serving vampires.<\/span><\/p>\n The more revealing question is asking why they refuse to say it after having seen it, too.<\/span><\/p>\n You are being remorselessly gaslit about Israel’s colonisation of Palestine<\/a><\/span> | David Milner | The Shot<\/span> Cowed courtiers on couches, or the ABC\u2019s Insiders program, spearheaded by spear-headed David \u201cSpeersy\u201d Speers, ran rampant genocide apologia from top to bottom last Sunday morning. Far from being outrageous, this was in fact extremely normal \u2013 pompous and dull, even \u2013 just as it would have been anywhere within the American sphere of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":35369,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,301,113,645,684,31,3,392,683],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-australias-move-to-the-right","category-corruption","category-foreign-policy","category-gaza-genocide","category-israeli-attack-on-lebanon","category-media","category-political-issues","category-racism","category-zionist-influence"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Sky-News-Biden-lies-beheaded-babies.jpg?resize=869%2C271&ssl=1\")
Regulators duck for cover as Australian media fails to correct \u201c40 babies beheaded\u201d<\/span><\/a> | Michael West<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nOver time, all of this adds up and erodes your sense of self. Your grasp on what you know to be true. You shrink as your mental realm is consumed by the one imposed on you. Your instincts and bodily responses are vaguely aware this is happening \u2013 you notice signs of stress, anxiety, revulsion, and fatigue \u2013 but your conscious mind and open heart succumb nonetheless.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Guerilla-posting.jpg?resize=408%2C771&ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/SMH-Israel-critics-as-a-virus.jpg?resize=595%2C438&ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\nWhat other state slaughtering tens of thousands of children is gifted cultural impunity by society\u2019s \u2018watch dogs\u2019?<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Abandonment-ofIsrael-we-wish.jpg?resize=364%2C514&ssl=1\" "\\"Alternative")
<\/a>“The Albanese government stands accused of abandoning Israel at its darkest hour in a historic betrayal of <\/span><\/a><\/span>
\nJews<\/span>,the national interest and the ALP\u2019s best traditions, with an anguished<\/em> intervention by two of the nation\u2019s <\/span>
\nmost prominent Jewish leaders (Mark Leibler and Josh Frydenberg) days before the anniversary of the October 7 massacre.”<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Gaza_bombing-September-24-2024.jpg?resize=656%2C836&ssl=1\" "\\"The")
How not to rescue hostages | Gaza Damage Assessment<\/span><\/a> – interactive map
\n<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Van-Badham-is-cool-with-Israeli-genocide.jpg?resize=1080%2C651&ssl=1\" "\\"Hates")
Van Badham sold her soul<\/span><\/a> long ago. But hey, if you want your play to get up in the Jewish-sponsored<\/span><\/a> theatre world?<\/span><\/p>\nWhy is it like this? Let\u2019s go hard<\/span><\/h2>\n
\nOctober 11, 2024
\n<\/span>@DaveMilbo<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"