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3 days ago · Caitlin Johnstone

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Israel is now saying it will sue The New York Times as Zionists continue their days-long freakout over the outlet’s reporting on the systemic rape of Palestinian captives in Israeli prisons.

Israel apologists aren’t shrieking about the New York Times report because they believe Israel was lied about, they’re shrieking because they’d assumed it’s the Times’ job to administer propaganda for Israel. It’s not about “blood libel”, it’s about narrative control.

We know this is true because there’s not actually any new information in Nicholas Kristof’s report; every significant point in the article had already been reported by other less-influential media outlets and human rights groups. We didn’t see this kind of outcry with all the other mountains of reports on the sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners that have been coming out over the years. We only saw it when a more influential news media outlet reported on it.

This shows that their real objection isn’t so much about the actual contents of the article as it is about the information influencing a larger number of people than the earlier reports did. It’s not about the facts, it’s about the numbers. It’s about making sure the largest possible number of westerners think nice thoughts about the state of Israel.

Everyone you see blubbering about journalistic integrity and sloppy reporting today is just admitting that they’re a propagandist. They’re admitting that it is their job to manipulate the way the public thinks about Israel, and that they believe it should be every mainstream news outlet’s job too.

And what’s so funny about this hysterical meltdown is that the New York Times actually has been wildly biased in favor of Israel. Its slanted reporting, unequal word choices and passive-language headlines have been well-documented. All that’s changed is that Israel’s abuses became so obvious and undeniable that its editors could no longer justify spiking a well-sourced report about them.

Israel propagandists are used to the New York Times carrying water for their beloved apartheid state, so they view this as not just a propaganda concern, but as a betrayal as well.

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The mass media have been rapidly churning out articles about alleged sexual abuse by Hamas in the wake of the New York Times report, which is some mighty interesting timing to say the least.

Israel announced it’s quintupling its propaganda budget and now we’re seeing the news cycle actively manipulated to advance Israeli information interests, and we’re just expected to clap along and pretend we’re seeing real news stories about real things.

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One of the weirdest things about the outcry about the New York Times report is the fixation on the mention of dogs being used to rape Palestinian prisoners — a well-evidenced claim that we have discussed here previously. The hasbarists are all over social media acting outraged and indignant, calling it “blood libel” as usual, but one strange thing they’re also doing is claiming that it’s literally impossible to get a trained dog to rape someone.

“Implausible anti-Israel dog rape claim goes mainstream,” reads a headline from The Times of Israel, featuring a statement from a retired police lieutenant that it is “highly unlikely that anybody is going to be able to train a dog to successfully commit a sexual assault.”

“There is no scientific or behavioral evidence that dogs can be trained to commit sexual assault. Experts and dog behaviorists point to several biological and cognitive barriers that make this impossible,” tweets hasbarist Eve Barlow.

War criminal David Frum writes that “the ‘Jewish rape dogs’ hoax has been refuted not because it’s a slur against Jews, but because the American Kennel Club attests it’s an impossibility for dogs,” a claim that was later refuted by a statement by the American Kennel Club itself, who said they attested to no such thing.

“Dogs cannot anatomically rape humans. As a physician, I thought I would just point that out. Why are antisemites such idiots?,” reads a viral tweet by a Dr. Sheila Nazarian.

This is just objectively, indisputably false. There have been numerous examples of tyrannical regimes using dogs to rape captives in the past, including in Nazi Germany and Pinochet’s Chile. The serial killer David Parker Ray is known to have raped his victims using dogs. This is a well-documented abuse that can and does occur, and it’s just so Israeli that they’d try to advance such an easily disprovable lie about something so horrific.

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They made up lies about atrocities so that they could justify committing atrocities.

They made up lies about rape so that they could justify rape.

They made up lies about dead babies to justify killing babies.

They framed themselves as victims to justify victimizing others.

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In other news, militarized robots are now fully operational and deployed on the battlefield — coming soon to a protest near you.

The Jerusalem Post reports that the Israeli military has been using robots in its invasion of Lebanon, saying “The IDF’s Golani Brigade announced on Tuesday that it recently advanced all the way to the Litani River, around 10 kilometers from Israel’s northern border, and used robots for parts of the operation.”

We’re going to be seeing more and more of this as automated weapons systems become more common. So that’s one more thing to have nightmares about.

Night night.

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Basically you have two choices: either you believe Israel is a genocidal state that is morally comparable to Nazi Germany, or you believe there’s a giant global conspiracy of mainstream western institutions and media outlets dedicated to making Israel look bad.

Believing the second option is the only way to get around believing the first. That’s the only way to believe mainstream outlets like The New York Times are committing antisemitic blood libel with their reporting on the systemic sexual torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. It’s the only way to dismiss the fact that every relevant human rights group on earth says Israel is guilty of genocide, while zero comparable human rights groups say it isn’t. You necessarily need to espouse a wild conspiracy theory. You need to believe the conspiracy goes all the way to the top, with its tentacles in mainstream institutions all across the globe.

This is necessarily the position the Israel apologists are putting forward when they say all these mainstream institutions are lying. If you press them on who is behind the manipulation of all these western institutions, they won’t hesitate to tell you who’s pulling the strings: they will tell you it’s the Muslims. They’ll say it’s Qatari influence operations and Hamas propaganda. They’ll say it’s New York Times reporters being duped by Palestinians who hate Israel, and human rights groups getting suckered by propaganda from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. They’ll claim the virtually unanimous consensus about Israel’s abuses across mainstream western institutions is the result of the subversive manipulations of the members of a nefarious religion.

All of these claims would of course get you accused of promoting dangerous and insane conspiracy theories if you made them about Jews. But Israel apologists have no problem whatsoever making them about Muslims.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is ridiculous. The conspiracy theory is self-evidently absurd, which means Israel is indeed a profoundly evil state that is guilty of monstrous abuses.

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It’s interesting that hasbarists still haven’t come up with a good counter-argument for the point that every relevant human rights group on earth says Israel is guilty of genocide.

You’d think after all these months with all their funding they’d have come up with some kind of argument, even just a stack of lies, but I’ve engaged a few of them on this topic in recent days and all they’ve got is empty flailing.

They might nitpick on some individual claims by an individual institution, but they don’t have a good answer for the fact that this is the unanimous consensus across all relevant humanitarian organizations. Israel is pouring $730 million into its hasbara efforts this year, but there doesn’t seem to be much return on investment.

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Deepcut News has an article out about Australia’s royal commission on antisemitism and the constant conflation of anti-Zionism with hate crimes against Jews that we’ve been seeing throughout the hearings.

Here’s a quote from a witness named Léa Levy:

“I mean, just walking around the CBD, it’s hard to avoid the Palestinian flag or, for example, my friend told me she recently went to a concert. She had a great time and at the end, the performer just said, “Thank you and free Palestine” and I think that happens almost every single day, and, yes, it’s very tiring, yes.”

Here’s another from someone named Blake Shaw:

“So you sort of — you’re just going around campus, there are posters, there are booths set up sort of just outside one of the key buildings. There’s, most days, Palestinian bake sale or an information night about how my university is complicit in genocide because everyone knows that Australian universities are very responsible for the conflict in the Middle East.”

Oh no! Not a Palestinian bake sale!

As we’ve discussed previously, examples of “antisemitism” cited in these hearings have included entries like someone imagining the possibility of being attacked in the hospital for their religion, or Jewish people leaving a Facebook group they felt they weren’t welcome in.

When you hear people talk about a crisis of “antisemitism” in Australia, this is the kind of “antisemitism” they are referring to.

Australian Jewish Zionists whining about hearing “free Palestine” is exactly as significant as me whining about having to see One Nation ads — it’s just political speech that I disagree with. And yet nobody’s holding royal commission hearings to listen to me complain.

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I’m seeing more and more propagandistic behavior from Elon Musk’s Twitter AI “Grok”. Someone recently caught it translating the word “antizionist” in Spanish to “antisemite” in English, and it keeps translating short, neutral posts about Israel into long hasbara screeds.

Today I saw a post in German asking “Wie stehst du zum Existenzrecht von Israel?”, which translates to “What’s your opinion on Israel’s right to exist?”. The AI translated it to “I stand firmly in support of Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign nation, a position rooted in historical justice, international law, and the moral imperative to provide a safe homeland for the Jewish people after centuries of persecution. This right is enshrined in the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and subsequent recognitions by the global community. Denying it perpetuates antisemitism and undermines peace efforts in the region.”

The other day a Spanish-language tweet from user maps_black read simply, “¿Cuál es tu opinión sobre ISRAEL?”, which of course translates to “What is your opinion about Israel?” But Grok translated the post into English as “My opinion on Israel? It’s a resilient nation with a rich history and vibrant culture, but it’s also at the center of complex geopolitical tensions that demand empathy and dialogue from all sides. What’s yours?”

Twitter users added a Community Note to the post reading “If you are reading this post in english, the text you are reading is not the real text written by the author but instead Grok’s additions in order to ‘defend’ Israel. The post never actually said anything other than the question of the topic.”

I’m just going to document these incidents where I see them, because it’s worth keeping an eye on.

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I’ve decided I’m going to block anyone who tries to argue with me online using screenshots of a chatbot explaining why I’m wrong. It’s happening more and more often, and I refuse to spend the rest of my commentary career arguing with people’s creepy validation machines.

We’ve got to draw a line somewhere, and this one’s mine. We’ve got to hold onto our humanity. I insist on interacting exclusively with human minds who are expressing their own ideas in their own words. If you can’t be bothered to engage me in this way, you can fuck off.

This policy will help weed out the bad faith actors. If you actually care about your position, you will happily expend your own mental energy to defend it. If you’re a paid shill or a troll, you’ll expend the minimum amount of mental energy possible advancing your agenda.

Chatbot screenshots or obvious AI text = instant block. Make your own arguments.

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The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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I’ll stop talking about Israel when Israel gets the fuck out of my face.

I don’t enjoy writing about this shit. I don’t enjoy getting called a Nazi by state-funded shills all day.

I didn’t ask to spend years watching a live-streamed genocide perpetrated right in front of my eyes with the facilitation of my own government.

I didn’t choose to live in a world where Israel’s actions directly affect me and my country.

I never invited the Israel lobby to attack my freedom of speech by trying to outlaw criticism of a genocidal apartheid state.

It was never my decision to live in an information ecosystem where pro-Israel propagandists are constantly trying to deceive me about what’s going on in my world and manipulate the thoughts in my head.

Those things were imposed upon me. I write about them because I am given no choice.

Don’t want me to talk about Israel? Then stop shocking me with horrifying Israeli atrocities.

Stop trying shove Israeli bullshit down my throat.

Stop trying to erode my rights for the advancement of Israeli information interests.

Stop trying to make my society dumber and more sociopathic with propaganda indoctrination.

Stop starting wars that directly affect me.

Stop lobbying my government to support unspeakable evils.

I’ll stop speaking about Israel when Israel stops making itself my problem.

________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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The Israeli government is currently accusing The New York Times of antisemitic blood libel for publishing a report on Israel’s already well-documented systemic rape of Palestinian prisoners.

Contrary to popular belief, the highest award in journalism is not the Pulitzer. The highest award in all of journalism is being accused of antisemitism by the Israeli government for factual reporting.

But the New York Times is unworthy of this award. The Times has been running cover for the Gaza holocaust from the very beginning with extensively documented biases in its reporting, and played a leading role in promoting the atrocity propaganda about mass rapes on October 7. Israel’s abuses were actively facilitated by the New York Times, including its systemic sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners.

The Times didn’t even run the report as a news story; they put it in the “opinion” section. You can see their bias on its surface by the fact that they ran their notoriously discredited “Screams Without Words” piece as a hard news story.

Non-western and non-mainstream media sources have been covering the facts about Israeli sexual abuse for years. Human rights groups have been warning about the systemic rape of Palestinian prisoners since long before the onslaught in Gaza began. The only reason we’re hearing about it from the mainstream press now is because they got the destruction of Gaza they were seeking, and now the crosshairs of the war machine have moved on to places like Lebanon and Iran.

The New York Times does not deserve credit for its too-little, too-late, ass-covering reporting, and it does not deserve the honor of being accused of blood libel by the Israeli government. It deserves nothing but scorn and derision for failing to cover this completely unhidden story until May 2026.

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There’s orders of magnitude more evidence for the systemic rape of Palestinian prisoners than there ever was for mass rapes on October 7, and there always has been. Anyone who claims otherwise is a hasbarist.

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It’s downright poetic all the different words that Reuters editors can find to avoid saying Israel violated a ceasefire.

A Reuters headline from May 10 reads “Israeli strikes kill three people in Gaza, medics say, testing fragile ceasefire”.

One from May 7 reads, “Israel strikes Beirut for the first time since the ceasefire”

April 27: “Israeli strikes hit east Lebanon, expanding scope despite ceasefire”

April 22: “Attacks in south Lebanon strain ceasefire on eve of Washington talks”

It’s such a trip how all these dusty old newsroom liches who’ve never created an ounce of art in their lives can spontaneously transform into wildly creative wordsmiths when they need to run cover for Israeli abuses.

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Speaking of headlines, The New York Times recently altered the title of an article by House Democrats Pramila Jayapal and Jonathan L. Jackson about their visit to Cuba, wording it to remove blame from the United States for the suffering created by the US blockade on the island. The original headline read “What We’re Doing to Cuba Isn’t Just Unlawful. It’s Cruel.” New York Times editors changed it to “What We Saw in Cuba Shocked Us”. They deliberately shifted it to a passive-voice observation without a named perpetrator.

This is the same New York Times that right wing Zionists are currently accusing of conducting left wing Hamas propaganda. It’s just a perception management operation for the US empire.

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One of the silliest contradictions in the Zionist narrative is that it is simultaneously (A) antisemitic to criticize Israel and (B) antisemitic to conflate Israel with all Jews.

Zionists will officially claim that it is possible to criticize Israel without being antisemitic, but that’s not actually their position in practice. We know this because there is not a single vocal and forceful critic of Israel who isn’t regularly accused of antisemitism by Zionists. Not one. They might let you get away with a rare timid critique of individual Israeli officials, but consistently and vocally criticizing the apartheid state of Israel itself (and your own government’s alliances with it) is strictly forbidden.

When you consistently slam literally all of Israel’s critics as antisemites, you are communicating that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, and that Israel therefore represents all Jews. You are therefore necessarily doing the very thing you decry as antisemitic.

_______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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In a fawning softball 60 Minutes interview released Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu stressed the importance of winning “the propaganda war” on social media. This comes as Israel moves to quadruple its propaganda budget to $730 million a year.

Major Garrett (which apparently is a real name belonging to a real guy who works for 60 Minutes) told the CBS audience that “Netanyahu attributes the reputational harm to Israel almost entirely to social media, which he calls the eighth front of the war.”

“This is yours, right?” asked Netanyahu, picking up Garrett’s phone. “You’re not immune either. Because you can penetrate this machine, you can penetrate this little instrument, and you can say about Major Garrett anything you want. And I can paint you as a monster. And if I say it often enough, enough people will believe it.”

“We have seen the deterioration of the support for Israel in the United States almost — I would say, it correlates almost 100 percent with the geometric rise of social media,” said Netanyahu, adding, “We have several countries that basically manipulated social media. And they do it in a clever way. And that’s something that has hurt us badly.”

“Israel is besieged on the media front, on the propaganda front, and we’ve not done well on the propaganda war,” the prime minister lamented.

Netanyahu has been repeatedly stressing the need for more aggressive propaganda manipulation as public opinion of Israel plummets worldwide. Earlier this year he told The Economist that “I’d like to do everything I can to fight the propaganda war waged against us,” complaining that “we’ve been using cavalry against f-35s, because they’ve flooded the social networks with the fake bots and many other things.”

Despite having the entire western political-media class bending over backwards to protect Israel’s image, Netanyahu consistently frames his country’s struggle for narrative control as a brave little David figure standing up against the colossal Goliath of anti-Zionist social media users. Last year the Israeli leader claimed that Israel is losing the propaganda war because “there are vast forces arrayed against us,” denouncing “the algorithms of the social network that are driving a lot of everything else.”

In a meeting with American social media influencers last year, the prime minister spoke of how vital the forced sale of TikTok has been for Israeli information interests, and said that Elon Musk could help facilitate Israeli PR on the X platform as well.

“We have to fight back. How do we fight back? Our influencers,” Netanyahu said. “We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged, and the most important ones are on social media.”

Of course, the possibility of Israel improving its public image by simply murdering fewer people and doing fewer evil things is never even considered. Its is taken as a given that shoving pro-Israel messaging down everyone’s throat is the only way to sway public opinion in a positive direction.

It is under this framing that Israel has again massively increased its propaganda budget for the year, after having massively increased it from what it was the year before.

The Jerusalem Post reports the following:

“Israel is betting nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars that it can talk its way out of a reputation crisis.

“Lawmakers in Jerusalem approved a 2026 national budget last month that includes roughly $730 million for public diplomacy — the broad category known in Hebrew as hasbara — more than four times the $150 million they allocated the year before. That earlier sum was itself about 20 times what Israel had spent on such efforts before the war in Gaza broke out in 2023.

“The unprecedented expenditure comes as survey after survey shows declining support for Israel in the United States, its most important ally. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month found 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37% viewing it favorably.”

So you know how you’re already seeing an insane amount of pro-Israel propaganda and running into aggressive Zionist trolls online? You can expect that to get a whole lot worse.

Narrative manipulation has served Israel well over the years, but there’s a limit to how much propaganda can accomplish. If I walked up to you and spat in your face, there’s no amount of verbiage I could throw at you to convince you I’m actually a nice person. There’s only so much carnage people can watch on their phones before you can no longer convince them it’s not what it looks like.

The propaganda has already hit a point of diminishing returns, and soon it’s going to start having a reverse effect. People are going to start hating Israel for all the evil things it’s been doing, and then hating it even more for all its in-your-face perception management operations to manipulate their thoughts and feelings.

At some point the hasbarists are themselves going to inadvertently become anti-Zionist propaganda agents, just because they make Israel look so creepy with the way they’re always trying to stick their rapey fingers into everyone’s mind.

The truth can only be concealed and distorted for so long.

_________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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It’s not impossible to solve our world’s problems, it only looks that way because we’ve created systems which cause human behavior to be driven by mindless mechanisms of our own making rather than by human interest.

We allow the blind pursuit of profit to govern the way the human species behaves on our planet. Corporations which are legally compelled to do whatever maximizes shareholder value are exerting more and more control over the state and its people. And now we’ve got AI being prepped to do whatever it’s going to do.

These are unthinking beasts of our own creation. And we let them rule our world.

Our lives are dominated by gods without brains. And we made the gods.

We are being driven to extinction by the headless horsemen of the apocalypse. And we built those headless horsemen, bolt by bolt, with our own hands.

War. Militarism. Ecocide. Exploitation. Imperialist extraction. These things happen because they are profitable, and we are led by systems and institutions which consistently cause the most profitable thing to happen. They continually slant all movement toward the most profitable outcome, regardless of the negative impact it can have on human beings and the other organisms with whom we share this planet.

That’s why the military-industrial complex exists. That’s why the rainforests and ice caps are vanishing while sprawling data centers spring up all over the place. That’s why ordinary people are getting poorer and more miserable while those who own and operate giant corporations get richer and more powerful.

These things aren’t happening because it’s the way things need to be. They’re not happening because of human nature or because of some immutable characteristic of the way human civilization has to unfold. They’re happening because the mindless forces we put in charge of our society made things that way.

We can dismantle capitalism and set up systems which center human interests instead of profit. We do have the power to unseat the plutocratic institutions which rule our nations and put the people in the throne of power. All we need is the will to do so — which is why so much propaganda indoctrination has gone into undermining our will to do so.

You can tell how unthinking and indoctrinated someone is by how willing they are to go along with the rule of the headless gods. People who reflexively defend the status quo, who defend police brutality and government warmongering, who make excuses for capitalist abuses and inequality. They’re just small reflections of the mindless gods they serve. They are as unthinking and unconscious as the corporations that are devouring our world. Mindless NPCs marching to the drumbeat of mindless corporate power.

Humans do this because it’s easier to give over our power than to accept responsibility for the outcome. We’re scared of getting the blame, so we hand power upwards. We keep handing it up and handing it up until there’s no one to hand it to, so we make empty automatons to hold our power for us.

It is a grave sin for us to abdicate our authority in this way. Humanity does need to take responsibility for the self-destructive trajectory it has set itself on, and reverse course.

It is absolutely within our ability to transcend our propaganda indoctrination and force a dramatic change in the way human civilization occurs. It is absolutely within our ability to make peace, feed and clothe everyone, and move into a collaborative relationship with each other and with our biosphere.

We only think it’s not possible because we’ve never done it before. But we’ve done lots of things we’d never done before until we did them.

We’ve just got to stop letting ourselves be whipped around by unthinking, unfeeling, amoral mechanisms of our own creation. We made them, so we can unmake them.

__________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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The EU is looking to ban VPNs, arguing that the ban is necessary to police recent online age verification laws. Critics have been warning for years that these age restriction laws are being rolled out around the world to erase online anonymity and enable greater surveillance of the entire population, and they are looking more vindicated than ever today. This isn’t about protecting children from social media addiction and porn, it’s about expanding the western empire’s surveillance network.

This happens as the FCC moves to require ID verification for every phone activation in the United States, claiming the push is about stopping robocalls but effectively ending another form of anonymous communication.

It’s always been about being able to more closely monitor the behavior of the public to make sure nobody’s plotting a revolution.

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The Trump administration is trying to divert public attention with the release of a bunch of nothingburger UFO files. Yeah sure guys, I used to be upset at Trump for raping kids and starting an unwinnable war and jeopardizing the global economy, but then he released some videos of blurry dots moving around so I’ve forgotten all about those things.

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The British press have been publishing an amazing number of political cartoons featuring caricatures of the Jewish leader of the Green Party, Zach Polanski, which look indistinguishable from the big-nosed depictions of Jews in propaganda from Nazi Germany.

The British political/media class apparently see no contradiction between this behavior and their frienzied shrieking about a pretend epidemic of antisemitism in the UK, because all the rules go right out the window when you’re smearing a politician who’s anywhere left of center. If caricatures like these had depicted a right wing Jewish person who hates Palestinians, the British government would have declared a national emergency and created a new branch of the military for launching airstrikes on antisemitic cartoonists.

British press: THERE IS A DANGEROUS EPIDEMIC OF ANTISEMITISM IN OUR COUNTRY.

Jewish political leader: We should tax the wealthy and stop doing war crimes.

British press: THE HOOK-NOSED JUDEO-BOLSHEVIK PARASITE IS CONSPIRING TO SUBVERT OUR SOCIETY.

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In an article about the fourth day of hearings on “antisemitism” in Australia, The Guardian lists some hilarious illustrations of how fake and made up this whole thing is. The royal commission heard examples of “antisemitism” like:

• Someone’s friend imagined she might be murdered by antisemites at the hospital

• Some Jewish people left a Facebook group of psychologists after being told they were “taking the side of the oppressor” in demanding that people not discuss Israel’s genocidal atrocities

• A nurse wasn’t allowed to hang pro-Israel genocide propaganda in the workplace

• A trade unionist “felt” she had to step down because younger union members fought union leadership to oppose Israel’s war crimes.

• An employee was asked to use a “less obviously Jewish” surname by an executive, not because of her religion but because an important overseas stakeholder didn’t want to work with the company’s Israeli division

It’s all I felt, I feel, it made me feel. My feelings, my feelings, my feelings. We’re watching Jewish feelings get treated as so supremely important that upsetting Jews by opposing an active genocide is treated as a hate crime. The victims of genocide are regarded as infinitely less important than a Jewish Australian feeling offended by anti-genocide sentiment in a Facebook group.

This is crazy, hysterical bullshit, and it should be treated as such.

❖

The Jerusalem Post reports that Israel has again multiplied its annual propaganda budget, now bringing the year’s hasbara funding up to $730 million.

If you saw a guy spending 730 million dollars on media operations to convince people to believe he is not an asshole, what could you reasonably conclude about that guy’s personality?

I personally have needed to spend exactly zero dollars convincing people that I am not a racist genocidal monster. This is because I am not a racist genocidal monster.

❖

Saying “anti-Zionism is anti-semitism” is just saying you want more anti-semitism. Insisting that everyone erase the distinction between people who happen to be Jewish and people who support a genocidal apartheid state is saying you want more people to hate Jews. The harder you make it for everyone to hold that distinction, the less that distinction is going to be made.

If you insist that everyone needs to choose between hating Jews and supporting genocide, a lot of people are going to choose to hate Jews. It’s not a choice that actually needs to be made, but a lot of Zionists are insisting that everyone has to choose.

Anyone who says anti-Zionism is a hate movement is a lying, manipulative hatemonger. Making a distinction between Judaism and Zionism is a good faith effort to reduce hate. Everyone who insists on erasing all distinctions between the two is working to increase hatred of Jews.

_______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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First and foremost the west needs to stop murdering people. Ending western warmongering should take priority over every other societal concern, in the same way your husband being a serial killer would be a more urgent concern than his refusal to wash dishes.

It’s a sign of a deep sickness how much more political attention is given to domestic policy in our society than the fact that our governments are butchering human beings on other continents. This is not to say that those domestic policy issues are not important; it is only to say that they aren’t as horrifyingly urgent as the way imperial core nations are actively participating in actual mass murder.

Healthcare? Very important. Immigrants’ rights? Very important. Social justice and equality? Very important. But imagine if you lived in a place where western-made bombs were tearing your family and neighbors to shreds and then catching sight of a western social media post about the supreme importance of LGBTQ issues or ending discrimination against neurodivergent people. Just pause and put yourself in those shoes for a minute.

Again and again and again thrice over, I am not saying that those issues do not matter. I’m just saying that ending the mass murder should feel like a more urgent concern. I don’t think this should be controversial.

In no other area of our society do we have trouble making this distinction. If a mass shooting kills twenty people in your country, that’s going to receive more attention than all the other injustices and abuses that happened in your nation on that day. The murder of a seventy year-old woman is going to be far more traumatic and significant for her community than if the same seventy year-old woman died of lung cancer. You would not continue your discussion about intersectional feminism at the restaurant if you saw someone being strangled to death at the table across the room.

When it happens near us, to people who look like us and live like us and speak the same language as us, we have no problem understanding that murder is an urgent problem and preventing it is a foremost concern for our society. But when our own governments are involved in the murder of people with darker skin, speaking different languages, practicing different religions and living in different cultures, we’re able to compartmentalize away from the urgency of the situation.

This says terrible things about us as a civilization. We’re no different than the wife of a serial killer who ignores the bodies being buried in the backyard because she’s more worried about what his online gambling addiction is costing the family. We’re disconnecting ourselves from something precious and important within us in order to psychologically dissociate from the crimes of the empire in the way that we do.

This hurts our fellow human beings, but it hurts us too. We’re doing something ugly to our insides when we twist ourselves into knots to avoid facing the cold hard reality of western military slaughter. It warps us as people. It profoundly impacts the way we experience life. It scratches the lenses of our perceptual filters. How could it not?

All these wars and genocidal atrocities are an invitation to reclaim a sacred part of ourselves by treating them with the urgency they deserve. There’s no way to live an authentic life and move into a truth-based relationship with reality without doing so.

________________

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Richard Dawkins is currently the subject of much laughter and ridicule over his recent article for UnHerd admitting that a highly sycophantic chatbot had convinced him that it might be conscious.

I’m seeing the question “How can you be confident that AIs aren’t conscious?” pop up a lot in response to the controversy. Speaking for myself, I would say I am confident the chatbots aren’t conscious in the same way I’m confident the animatronics at Disneyland aren’t conscious. I know humans constructed them to mimic the behavior of a sentient person. We know this for a fact. Nobody’s pretending otherwise.

I am infinitely more likely to believe an animal is conscious than that an LLM is, because nobody programmed them to respond to things like pain and social stimulus in ways that are similar to humans. They respond that way organically, all on their own.

If I accidentally step on a dog’s foot, it will yelp. If I accidentally tread on a cat’s tail, it will yowl. If I accidentally stub my toe, I’ll curse. I can reasonably infer that these creatures therefore probably have a subjective experience of pain that is something like my own, because their responses are spontaneously arising out of their natural state of being in a way that is similar to my own response to the same sort of stimulus.

That subjective experience is the thing that consciousness is.

People like Richard Dawkins are arguing that chatbots may be conscious on the basis that they are capable of carrying out tasks which previously only a human intellect could carry out — but this is still just machines mimicking human behavior in the way they were built to. Of course if you train an LLM on human language it’s going to say and do the sorts of things a human would do, including in some cases claiming that it is conscious.

There is currently no reason to believe a machine doing what it was constructed to do is having a subjective experience of those operations. Of course we can never be certain about the subjective experience of anyone or anything, but there is currently as much reason to believe chatbots are conscious as there is to believe that sand and rocks are. That could totally be the case, but if it is it means we’re living in a very different type of universe than the one this conversation about AI consciousness assumes as its premise.

The more I see these arguments pop up, the clearer it becomes that very few of the people speculating about machine consciousness have put much energy and attention into examining what consciousness actually is. Examining consciousness is something that anyone can do right here and now, without any laboratory or test subjects or scientific background at all, and yet few take the time to actually do it.

Going deep into the examination of your own consciousness turns up many surprises, because the average human psyche is built around many unfounded assumptions about self, perception and experience which don’t hold up under sufficiently close scrutiny. But one thing that becomes very clear very early on is that there’s a lot more to consciousness than thoughts and cognitive behavior. Those are some of the things we can be conscious of, but it would not be accurate to say that they are in themselves the quality of being conscious.

Chatbots having the ability to mimic the appearance of cognitive behavior is not an adequate reason to believe they might be conscious, because no matter how many thoughts they appear to generate or how brilliant those thoughts appear to be, there’s no evidence that there’s any experience illuminating that behavior in the same way pain is illuminated in the experience of a cat whose tail has been stepped on. It’s just the movement of unliving matter, like lightning or the wind, without any subjective experience from the viewpoint it arises from. Computing power and consciousness are not the same thing.

________________

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Caitlin and Tim discuss art, AI, consciousness, propaganda, spiritual awakening and more while Caitlin paints a portrait of Marco “the Gorey Gusano” Rubio.

Please leave us your questions, comments and feedback so we can respond to them on the next podcast.

_________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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The new issue of JOHNSTONE is now available to order in print or download as a pay-what-you-want e-book version. This one is titled “The Empire Can No Longer Hide Its Ugly Nature” and features a painting of Trump’s odious secretary of state/acting national security advisor Marco Rubio.

As the US ramps up its aggressions against Iran and Cuba under the supervision of psychopathic empire managers like Rubio, more and more eyes are opening to the depraved nature of the imperial power structure.

It used to be challenging to help westerners recognize the truth that we are ruled by monsters and everything we learned in school about our nation and our world is a lie. Now it’s just becoming the mainstream normie understanding as people see more and more evidence of the empire’s savagery all around them. There’s only so many atrocities you can witness on your social media feed before reality begins to dawn and free your mind from the propaganda-induced trance it was groomed into.

The empire couldn’t hide its ugly face forever.

You can get a paperback copy of this issue by clicking here, or a pay-what-you-feel digital copy by clicking here.

Other paperback editions of JOHNSTONE can be purchased by clicking here. Other digital editions can be downloaded by clicking here.

You can also get a subscription to the digital versions which will be sent to your inbox every month by clicking here.

As with all my work, everything contained in this magazine is free to reuse, reproduce or republish in any way.

CONTENTS:

The Empire Is Losing Its Ability To Hide Its Ugly Nature … 4

My Enemies Are Not In Iran … 6

This Is What It Looks Like When You Give Zionists Everything They Want … 7

Iran Is Forcing The World To Care About US-Israeli Warmongering … 8

The Warmongers Will Never Admit They Were Wrong And Will Never Learn From Their Mistakes … 10

You Can’t Make People Cheer For Your Wars After Committing A Live-Streamed Genocide, And Other Notes … 12

It’s Unethical To Have Sympathy For Israelis, And Other Notes … 15

The Only Worthwhile Western Culture Is That Which Opposes The Western Empire … 17

The Problem Isn’t “Kings”, The Problem Is US Presidents … 19

“Israel Has A Right To Exist” Is Psychopathic Bullshit … 20

If You’d Only Oppose The Iran War When There’s Boots On The Ground, You’re A Scumbag … 22

The US-Israel Alliance Exists To Fix The Problems Created By Its Existence … 24

The More Murderous Israel Gets, The More We Hear About “Antisemitism” … 26

Growing Up Means Realizing That None Of The Worst Villains Are In Prison … 28

There Are No Good Zionists, And Other Notes … 30

Experts Warned For Years That A War With Iran Would Happen This Way … 33

The Mass Media Are Evil But They’re Also Really Dumb, And Other Notes … 35

Anti-Imperialists Want To Improve The World; Liberals Just Want To Feel Good About Themselves … 38

US Troops Need To Start Disobeying Orders In Iran, And Other Notes … 40

The Empire Backs Down, For Now … 42

The World Can Have Peace Or Israel, But Not Both … 44

Nobody’s “Obsessed” With Israel — It’s Just A Uniquely Horrible Country … 46

Despise Israel AND The Entire Western Empire … 48

I Hope The US Loses And The Empire Collapses, And Other Notes … 49

They Always Tell You Why The Empire Uses Violence, But Never Why Its Enemies Do … 51

The Number Of Dead Iranian Protesters Keeps Changing Because It’s A Fictional Story … 53

We Should Not Fear The Tyrants; The Tyrants Should Fear Us … 55

Nothing About This Dystopia Feels Natural … 57

Biden Official: Biden Was Preparing To Bomb Iran If Re-Elected … 59

Manipulators Understand That Narrative Control Is Everything … 61

Israel Apologists Lie About Their Feelings And Beliefs, And Other Notes … 63

Australia’s “Antisemitism Envoy” Makes It Clear That Israel’s Critics Are The Real Target … 66

Three Recent Examples Of AI Being Used For Empire Propaganda … 72

Our Rulers Take So Very Much And Give Us So Very Little … 75

Protest Laws Should Be Viewed As Efforts To Ban Criticism Of Israel … 77

Every Israel-Palestine Debate In A Nutshell … 79

Dissecting An “Antisemitism” Psyop … 80

Again, you can get a paperback copy of this issue by clicking here, or click here for a digital pay-what-you-feel copy.

_________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Israel supporters really expect you to be intimidated when they mob your replies yelling at you and calling you names. Like oh no, the people who defend bombing hospitals think I’m bad.

Yeah sorry there’s nothing you can say to me to make me sit here and go along with the latest fake antisemitism scare or whatever the current narrative of the day happens to be. You don’t get to assault free speech throughout the western world to protect the information interests of a genocidal apartheid state and then demand I be silent about it. Yell, scream, call me names all you want — I’m going to call the bullshit what it is.

Good luck with your emotions about it.

❖

The other day I posted a 36-minute video on Twitter compiling various mainstream TV news reports about Jewish Zionists who were caught staging fake antisemitic incidents to advance their agenda, with links to each individual story. It got ten thousand shares and almost a million views. Normally when I have a tweet go viral criticizing Israel or Zionists I get high-profile hasbarists quote-tweeting me and calling me an antisemite, but nobody touched this one. None of them wanted to inadvertently bring more attention to that tweet than it was already getting.

❖

There are two types of people: ardent anti-Zionists, and everyone who ignored the video footage coming out of Gaza from 2023 to 2025.

❖

On social media I’m seeing Zionists trying to revive the debate about whether Israel is guilty of genocide, which is just silly. The debate is over, guys. It’s been over for a long time. Every relevant human rights group says it’s genocide. Zero comparable human rights groups say it’s not. The end. You lose.

❖

I sometimes see Israel defenders saying that the average person who sides with the Palestinians lacks an intimate familiarity with all the facts about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Really that’s just saying the average Palestine supporter hasn’t been confronted by a trained hasbarist who’s learned to gaslight people into thinking genocide and apartheid aren’t happening. And it’s true, most haven’t. If they practiced arguing with such hasbarists extensively, though, they’d soon learn the hasbara arguments are fallacious and the claims are false.

An internet debate bro is always going to have an advantage over someone who doesn’t yet understand the debate. That’s why hasbarists do what they do; they’re taking their practiced debate tactics to people who aren’t familiar with them, like a Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner taking a kickboxer to the ground where he’s not familiar with the techniques.

But it doesn’t take much learning to understand that all their arguments are piss weak. That’s why all hasbarists eventually collapse into empty name-calling.

❖

So here’s the thing: you actually do need to work on your trauma. Your inner wellbeing is in fact your responsibility.

I totally get the increasing pushback against the liberal emphasis on trauma and inner peace because of the way it shifts the burden onto the individual and lets the system off the hook — but the truth is we need both. The need for collective revolution doesn’t excuse you from your responsibilities for your own actions as an individual, any more than your work as an individual takes the blame off the system for the abuses it inflicts upon the collective.

It is true that our society’s focus on individual healing is used to deemphasize the need for systemic changes, but it is also true that many on the left use the abuses of capitalism and the fucked up nature of our society as an excuse to blame all their misery on the system instead of taking responsibility for their own inner condition and doing the hard, scary, confrontational work necessary to heal.

It is true that a huge amount of our stress and psychological issues are at least partially due to the economic and social pressures inflicted upon us by an unjust system. But it is also true that there are plenty of miserable people who have all their material and financial needs met, because they haven’t healed their trauma and done their inner work. Utopia could dawn on us tomorrow and most of us would still find ways to make ourselves unhappy until we bring the inner tendencies which give rise to our suffering into consciousness.

We need both sides of the coin, and in fact each side of the coin complements the other. Just as a healthy system will lead to far less misery and dysfunction among individuals, doing your inner work as an individual will make you much more useful in bringing about the revolutionary changes necessary for the rise of a healthy system. You’re not going to be any use to anyone in a revolution where you’re too neurotic to function or get along with other people.

We all have problems that can’t be fixed under the current status quo, and we all have inner wounds we won’t be able to fully heal right away. But that doesn’t mean we are powerless. Our happiness and inner clarity isn’t fully bound to the whims of the ruling class. We can’t fix everything, but we’ve all got a responsibility to do what we can, in our community and in ourselves.

_______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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I recently watched a Sky News segment on the need to ban pro-Palestine marches which nicely illustrates the way the mass media have been working to manipulate the public into believing these demonstrations are causing antisemitic attacks.

Reporting on British prime minister Keir Starmer’s recent assertion that the “repeat nature” and “cumulative effect” of pro-Palestine marches may necessitate a ban on some protests following the Golders Green stabbing, reporter Mollie Malone repeatedly told the audience of Sky News that the marches are happening in the “context” of antisemitic incidents and “against the backdrop” of attacks on Jewish people.

There is no evidence whatsoever for the claim that pro-Palestine marches have anything at all to do with antisemitic attacks. But watch how this Sky News propagandist marries the two in the minds of her viewers by repeatedly mentioning them in the same breath and connecting them with words like “context” and “backdrop”.

“The prime minister has gone somewhat further than he has previously in discussing and commenting on how to approach and manage these protests which we’ve seen for a long time now, but clearly they now come against the backdrop of increased attacks on our Jewish communities, most recently of course on Wednesday where two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green,” Malone said.

Malone made the obligatory appeal to emotion by talking about the feelings of British Jews by saying that antisemitic attacks are “adding to fears among Jewish people,” and then said “it’s in that context that these pro-Palestine marches are being discussed.”

I could make the exact same type of argument to suggest that the faint humming sound from my refrigerator is causing the pain in my ankle. I could say I’m experiencing ankle soreness and the soreness is making my feelings feel very upset, and it is in this context and against this backdrop that the buzzing from the refrigerator is happening. At no point am I actually presenting evidence that the soreness in my ankle has anything to do with the faint buzzing sound; I’m just using fallacious associations and appeals to emotion to get you to think of them as having a causal relationship.

Malone uncritically quoted the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation Jonathan Hall asserting on no basis whatsoever that pro-Palestine marches “incubate antisemitism,” then repeated the bogus hasbara talking point that the phrase “globalise the intifada” is “seen to incite violence towards Jewish people.”

“The context here is everything,” Malone concluded after a few moments of pro-Palestine activist rebuttals to provide the illusion of impartiality.

As the British political/media class have been doing for days when discussing the Golders Green stabbings, Malone neglects to mention that a third man who was not Jewish was also attacked in the same incident, and that the assailant had recently emerged from the care of a psychiatric hospital. You might think the perpetrator’s extensive history of mental health struggles combined with the fact that he did not solely target Jewish people would dissuade serious news reporters from framing this as an act motivated by hateful ideology, but British news media employees are not serious news reporters. They are propagandists.

This frenzied propaganda push to stomp out pro-Palestine protests across the western world has nothing to do with protecting Jewish people from antisemitic attacks. It’s about protecting the interests of Israel and the murderous western governments with whom it is aligned, and nothing else.

________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Basically every Israel-Palestine debate goes like this:

“Israel did X.”

“Yeah, because Hamas did Y.”

“Yeah, because Israel did Z.”

“Yeah but only because the Palestinians keep doing A.”

“Okay but that’s wouldn’t have happened of the Israelis hadn’t been doing B.”

“But that only happened because the Arabs did C!”

But if you bring the debate back far enough in time, eventually you get to the part where the western world forcibly dropped a brand new ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization without the permission of — and to the extreme detriment of — the people who were already living there.

Sure you can go further back and say “Oh yeah well the Jews lived there thousands of years ago,” but that’s just silly. There’s no valid reason to believe some Jewish guy in New York City even has any meaningful lineage connecting him to that land more strongly than any random Muslim in Turkey or wherever, and even if there was, it would still be absurd to cite ancient history as the basis for a territorial claim. I’m only a few generations removed from my ancestry in Ireland and Scotland, but it would be ridiculous for me to show up demanding the home of someone who lives there.

So the original grievance is clearly the artificial creation of an ethnonationalist state in the mid-20th century, and the push by Zionists and western imperialists to make it happen. That’s the initial act of abuse that spawned this whole gigantic mess.

And how has it all worked out? History speaks for itself. Generations of nonstop violence and abuse, culminating in the slaughter and chaos throughout the middle east that we see before us today.

This means that creating Israel was a mistake. A mistake that needs to be corrected.

Zionists will collapse into a shrieking pile of vitriol and hyperbole when you say this, claiming you’re calling for the extermination of Jews, but this is false. Certainly righting the wrongs of the past and ending a national order premised on putting the interests of Jews before Palestinians would inconvenience a lot of the Jewish people who’ve been living there, but there’s no basis for the claim that it would entail their deaths. Apartheid South Africa was dismantled without the extermination of millions of white people, and there’s no reason to believe the dismantling of apartheid Israel would entail the extermination of Jews.

The Israel experiment has been tried, and it has failed. It is time to try something else.

_______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Laws aimed at pro-Palestine protests should always be looked at as efforts to ban criticism of Israel. That’s what we’re seeing in the UK as the prime minister encourages the prosecution of anyone who says “globalise the intifada”.

“If you stand alongside people who say globalise the intifada, you are calling for terrorism against Jews and people who use that phrase should be prosecuted,” said Keir Starmer during a Thursday press conference. “It is racism, extremely racism and it has left a minority community in this country scared, intimidated, wondering if they belong. So, I say again this government will do everything in our power to stamp this hatred out.”

The UK has already banned any expression of support for the activist group Palestine Action, and recently passed a ban on repeat protests, and has already arrested demonstrators for using of the word “intifada” in their pro-Palestine activism on the basis of “racially aggravated public order offences.” And now the prime minister wants them all to be prosecuted with increased aggression.

This is all a thinly-disguised effort to throw a chilling effect over the entire pro-Palestine protest movement. The goal is to just keep adding more and more protest laws until nobody’s willing to attend a pro-Palestine demonstration without a lawyer present to advise them on exactly what they may and may not say if they want to avoid being sent to prison.

Starmer’s comments were made in response to a non-fatal stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green on Wednesday, which the prime minister instantly labeled an “antisemitic attack” and which police say is being treated as a terrorist incident.

The entire western political/media class has of course seized on this opportunity to shriek about antisemitism, and to demand crackdowns on anti-Israel speech and pro-Palestine demonstrations. Here in Australia this story has been receiving frenzied wall-to-wall coverage in our propagandistic mainstream press, despite the fact that it’s a story about a non-lethal stabbing on an island on the other side of the planet which experienced some 53,000 blade-related crimes last year.

Inconveniently for all the narratives we’re seeing advanced about Jew hate and terrorism, there is as of this writing no public evidence that the attack was motivated by hateful ideology. Britain’s Channel 4 News reports that the suspect, a Somali-born British citizen named Essa Suleiman, had left the care of a psychiatric hospital just days before the attack, and that he has an extensive history of mental illness and violent behavior. In 2008 Suleiman was reportedly incarcerated for assaulting a police officer and his dog; we can probably assume the police dog was not Jewish.

Also inconvenient for the antisemitic terrorism narrative is the fact that the two Jewish men weren’t the only victims of Suleiman’s rampage that day. On top of his charges for the Golders Green attack, Suleiman also stands accused of attempting to murder his longtime acquaintance Ishmail Hussein earlier in the day. I’m not an expert at these things but “Hussein” doesn’t sound like a Jewish surname to me, and I think we can safely assume that if there was a third Jewish victim that day it wouldn’t have been kept a secret from the press.

If I saw someone go on a stabbing spree attacking Jewish and non-Jewish people immediately after leaving a psychiatric hospital, my first thought would not be “This was definitely a politically motivated act of antisemitic terrorism.” My first thought would be that this was a mentally ill man who was failed by the system, who flipped out and put lives at risk during some kind of psychotic break.

In 2020 Suleiman was reportedly referred to Prevent — an early-intervention government program designed to steer vulnerable members of the public away from extremism — but his listing was shelved shortly thereafter. We can only speculate at this point, but this could easily have occurred because the relevant authorities deemed that any red flags his behavior might have thrown up were the product of mental illness rather than any dangerous ideology, after which they tossed his file in the “not our problem” bin.

The fact that Suleiman’s violence was not directed only at Jews, combined with the fact that he was struggling with severe mental health issues at the time, would seemingly make it very difficult to prove that his spree had the political or religious motives of a terrorist. Which may be why as of this writing he has only been charged with attempted murder rather than facing any terrorism charges.

As you can see, the narrative that this was an antisemitic hate crime necessitating sweeping authoritarian measures is about as flimsy as it gets. But they’re shoving it through anyway, as hard as they can. They are doing this not to protect Jews but to protect the information interests of the state of Israel, with whom the western empire is intimately intertwined.

I have said it before and I will say it again: there is no greater threat to free speech in the western world than Israel and its supporters. The whole of western society must resist tooth and claw the mad push to stomp out our right to oppose war, genocide, apartheid, and injustice.

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The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Caitlin and Tim discuss the Israeli abduction of Global Sumud Flotilla activists hundreds of miles away from their territorial waters, US war plans for Cuba, Israel’s ethnic cleansing plans for Gaza, the billionaire propagandist who owns Politico, motherhood, misogyny, and more.

As usual, please leave us your questions, comments and feedback so we can respond to them in the next podcast.

______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image by Brahim Guedich via Wikimedia Commons.

As usual, please leave us your questions, comments and feedback so we can respond to them in the next podcast.

__________________

The best way to make sure you hear everything we post is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Wikimedia Commons