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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

________________

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 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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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

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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.

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Sure plutocrats are killing our biosphere, but hey, at least they’re creating technology that lets you avoid the cognitive discomfort of writing your own words and thinking your own thoughts.

Sure the empire is butchering human beings at horrifying scale around the world, but on the bright side it’s creating refugees who will move to your country and bring you treats that you can order from an app on your phone.

Sure imperialist extraction is robbing the resources and exploiting the workers of the global south at extortionate fees, but on the other hand you get to wear a new outfit every day because the clothes you ordered online are dirt cheap thanks to transcontinental slave labor.

Sure our rulers are rapidly caging us in a digital surveillance network of ever-increasing intrusiveness and control, but golly gosh they just keep gifting us all these nifty free social media platforms that we simply cannot stop ourselves from scrolling through for some reason.

Sure capitalism is driving us toward collapse on multiple fronts while everyone gets sicker, poorer, dumber, crazier, and more miserable, but hey look, McDonald’s is bringing back the McRib.

Sure it’s only a matter of time until we find ourselves policed by armed robots and facial recognition murder drones and praying the government AI doesn’t shut off our digital money because our eyes lingered a bit too long on an anti-Israel meme, but at least we can have fun placing Polymarket bets on the next country the United States is going to bomb.

They take so very, very much, and we trade it away for so very, very little.

They steal our wealth, strangle our ecosystem and incinerate our future, and in return they give us bread and circuses that are just affordable enough to stop us from chopping off heads.

They exhaust us, abuse us, indoctrinate us, distract us, desensitize us, confuse us, overload us, misinform us and gaslight us, and in exchange we get a hundred overpriced streaming services to choose from and a thousand types of toothpaste.

They’re making our world worse and worse, and they’re making us worse as individuals, too. They’re poisoning our minds and darkening our hearts. Killing our conscience and amputating our empathy. It sucks to live in the shadow of the empire. There’s nothing natural or healthy about this dystopia.

And they’re getting it practically for free. A little propaganda, a sprinkling of mindless entertainment and a few treats, and we give them a whole planet to rape. They’re getting all the most vital parts of our world and all the most sacred parts of ourselves for a song.

We can’t keep letting them do this to us. We’ve got to wake up. Sometimes saying this feels as futile as imploring a loved one to leave their cult or break up with their abusive partner for the ten thousandth time. But that is what needs to happen.

And people do leave cults. People do exit abusive relationships. It only happens when they’re ready, and it’s got to come from them — but it does happen.

Here’s hoping we find some way to leave our abusive relationship with the empire before it’s too late.

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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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In the last few days I’ve seen three separate instances of generative AI being used to promote propaganda for US-Israeli war agendas which are worth paying attention to.

Firstly, an Israel-based company called Generative AI for Good has been creating deepfakes of supposedly real women who say they were sexually assaulted by government forces in Iran.

The Canary reports:

“An Israel-based AI firm, Generative AI for Good, claims to be using deepfake technologies for positive ends. ‘Positive’ appears to mean creating deepfake videos to help the illegal US-Israel war on Iran.

…

“Generative AI for Good claims that it uses AI to ‘help survivors testify safely — in their real voice, without revealing their identity’. But Israel and its mouthpieces have been shown to have used false allegations of rapes and other atrocities on 7 October 2023 to justify its genocide in Gaza.”

The Canary notes that Generative AI for Good is staffed with Israelis who have very conspicuous agendas, including a creative director who pushes the discredited narrative about mass rapes on October 7, a marketing manager who served in the IDF’s “Psychotechnical Headquarter”, and a founder who said in early 2024 that “Artificial intelligence is a secret weapon of ours” in using the revolutionary technology to bolster the military’s efforts both online and on the ground in the information war being waged alongside the military battlefields in Gaza.

An Israeli company generating AI videos of anonymous Iranian women describing sexual abuse at the hands of their government should obviously be considered a deceitful propaganda operation until proven otherwise. The line between using AI to help real victims protect their identities when describing real events and using AI to generate fake atrocity propaganda is far too nebulous to be taken seriously, especially in the hands of wildly biased Israelis. You should trust it about as far as you’d trust a hungry crocodile.

Secondly, users of the graphic design platform Canva have been complaining that the company’s AI service has been translating the word “Palestine” to “Ukraine” without prompting or permission. Complaints went viral, compelling Canva to address the issue.

The Verge reports:

“One of Canva’s new AI features has been caught replacing the word ‘Palestine’ in designs. The Magic Layers feature — which is designed to break flat images out into separate editable components — isn’t supposed to make visible alterations to user designs, but it was found by X user @ros_ie9 to automatically switch the phrase ‘cats for Palestine’ to ‘cats for Ukraine.’

“The issue was seemingly limited specifically to the word ‘Palestine,’ as @ros_ie9 noted that related words like ‘Gaza’ were unaffected by the feature. Canva says it has now resolved the issue and is taking steps to prevent it from happening again.”

Thirdly, a Spanish-language tweet about Israel from user @maps_black was auto-translated into English by Elon Musk’s AI Grok in a way that added entirely new sentences to the social media post to frame the Zionist state in a sympathetic light.

The original tweet 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.”

Someone removed Grok’s propagandistic translation after outcry on the platform, but the Community Note remains.

None of these instances look particularly significant or impactful on their own, and right now they only scan as ham-fisted efforts to manipulate public opinion in ways that are far too obvious to do much damage. But we can be sure that we’ll be seeing a lot more AI-driven propaganda in the future, and we can expect its manipulations to become much more sophisticated as the technology develops and grows more influential in shaping the information ecosystem. American tech plutocrats are only ever allowed to ascend to billionaire status when they collaborate with the imperial machine.

Julian Assange was warning years ago that we could one day expect artificial intelligence to be used in this way, saying that the growing ability of the powerful to manipulate public opinion using AI “differs from traditional attempts to shape culture and politics by operating at a scale, speed, and increasingly at a subtlety, that appears likely to eclipse human counter-measures.”

Pointing out how AI could already outmaneuver even the greatest chess players in the world, Assange described in 2017 how programs which can operate with exponentially more tactical intelligence than the human mind can manipulate the field of available information so effectively and subtly that people won’t even know they are being manipulated. People will be living in a world that they think they understand and know about, but they’ll unknowingly be viewing only empire-approved information.

“When you have AI programs harvesting all the search queries and YouTube videos someone uploads it starts to lay out perceptual influence campaigns, twenty to thirty moves ahead,” Assange said. “This starts to become totally beneath the level of human perception.”

Anyway. Something to keep an eye on.

________________

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 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 global consequences the US-Israeli war on Iran is set to have on the weakest members of the poorest countries, the latest Trump assassination attempt, BBC headline shenanigans, and more.

Please give us your questions and comments in the replies so we can answer them in the next podcast, as well as your feedback and suggestions for how we can improve our presentation.

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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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Australia’s “antisemitism envoy” Jillian Segal has published a handbook which unequivocally clarifies that her office exists not to protect Australian Jews from discrimination, but to stomp out criticism of the state of Israel.

However bad you’re imagining it is, it’s worse. The handbook, set to be formally launched later this week under the title “Understanding Antisemitism in Australia,” explicitly conflates antisemitism and antizionism with statements like “Antisemitism and antizionism are both expressions of hatred towards Jews” and asserting that it is antisemitic to accuse Israel of “apartheid, oppression, racism and genocide.”

It is therefore unambiguously the official position of the Australian government’s appointed authority on antisemitism that it is hateful and abusive toward Jews and their religion to oppose the racist political ideology underpinning the modern state of Israel.

So when Australians hear Jillian Segal and government officials talking about how there’s been an increase in “antisemitism” in our country and saying extreme measures must be taken to stop it, it’s important to be clear that this is the “antisemitism” they are talking about. They are talking about criticism of Israel.

Let’s go through the handbook together and highlight some revealing excerpts, shall we?

The forward in the handbook stresses the importance of the Australian government’s endorsement of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which has been opposed around the world for its conflation of criticism of Israel with hateful actions toward Jews. Under the IHRA definition it is considered antisemitic to claim that Israel is a racist endeavor, or to compare Israel’s abuses to those of Nazi Germany — both of which are entirely legitimate criticisms which should be put forward far more often than they are. Much of the handbook follows from the premises of the IHRA definition.

Segal’s office states that the handbook “is intended as a practical resource for schools, universities, public servants, community organisations and anyone seeking to understand antisemitism today.”

Segal’s office says that antisemitism “morphs” over the ages, from the blood libels and “Christ-killer” accusations of the Middle Ages to the racism of Nazi Germany, and has now morphed so that “antisemitic tropes are conveyed and justified in the language of human rights and international legal arguments.”

“For example, sometimes Jews are labelled and libelled as ‘settler-colonialists’, ‘oppressors’, and a symbol of a global system of domination that ‘can seemingly accommodate even the murder of Jews as Jews’,” the envoy proclaims.

Do you see how the subject was moved to lump medieval superstitions about Jews in with entirely legitimate criticisms of the modern state of Israel? According to Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, criticising Israel using “language of human rights and international legal arguments” is not meaningfully different from saying that Jews drink the blood of Christian children.

This, clearly, is stark raving insanity.

“Legitimate criticism of Israel is not antisemitic,” the envoy concedes, then proceeds to completely negate this concession with everything that follows. “However, there are many examples of antisemitic imagery, tropes, conspiracy theories and propaganda (echoing medieval myths) that have found their way into anti-Israel discourse. It is also increasingly common for the word ‘Zionist’ (or iterations of it) to be used as cover or proxy for ‘Jew ’.”

This is completely made up. The claim that critics of Israel’s abuses use the word “Zionist” when they really mean “Jew” is just something Israel apologists started asserting with no substantiation whatsoever a few years ago. They have no evidence for this assertion apart from the frequency and forcefulness which with they assert it.

The envoy defines Zionism as “the belief that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination within their ancestral homeland,” which is misleading at best. That’s not what Zionism is. Zionism is what we see before us today. The genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and nonstop war and abuse. That’s what Zionism is, as evidenced by material reality. The best definition of Zionism is its real-world manifestations. Zionism is what it looks like when you give the Zionists everything they want.

“A new variant of antisemitic atrocity denial emerged in the wake of the 7 October 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks — the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust,” the envoy writes. “Disturbingly, these atrocities have been met by some with denial, minimisation, justification and distortion — echoing Holocaust denial, minimisation, and distortion.”

Segal’s office is here telling us that it is antisemitic to talk about the glaring plot holes in the narratives about mass rapes, beheaded babies and babies cooked in ovens on October 7, or to talk about the large number of Israelis who were killed by IDF fire under the Hannibal Directive, or to “justify” the attack by pointing out the monstrous Israeli abuses which gave rise to it.

The envoy writes of the importance of “Standing firm against antisemitism parading as ‘anti-racism’,” stressing the IHRA position that framing Israel as a racist endeavor is hateful toward Jews. A flyer saying “We don’t want your two states. We want all of 48” is labeled “antisemitic, because there is only one Jewish country.”

Segal’s office warns of the dangers of “Holocaust inversion,” which is when “Israel and Jews are portrayed as Nazi-like perpetrators of mass atrocities and genocide,” which is bad because it “serves to demonise and delegitimise Israel, Israelis and Jews.”

To be clear, every relevant humanitarian institution on earth has said that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. These groups include:

1. The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory

2. The International Association of Genocide Scholars

3. B’Tselem (an Israeli organization)

4. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (another Israeli organization)

5. Amnesty International

6. Doctors Without Borders

7. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights

8. Human Rights Watch

9. The International Federation for Human Rights

10. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention

The list of humanitarian institutions who say Israel is NOT committing genocide in Gaza includes:

1. Nobody

2. No one

3. Zero

4. Nothing

5. Nada

6. Zilch

7. Sweet damn all

8. A complete absence

9. Diddly squat

10. Bupkis

This is not some fringe conspiracy theory. It is a thoroughly established and entirely indisputable fact. Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism is saying that facts are antisemitic.

Some examples cited in the handbook of glaring instances of the antisemitic crime of “Holocaust inversion”:

 — Placards of ‘ Well done Hitler would be proud’ and ‘Same shit Different asshole’, the latter with images of Hitler and Netanyahu, both placards making Nazi analogies to Israel.

 — Three banners of Hitler removing his mask , revealing the face of Netanyahu, making an analogy between Nazism and Israel, on major roads.

 — Graffiti of a Star of David, equal sign, and Nazi swastika , and another graffiti of ‘End the Genocide’ on a main road.

We’re meant to believe it should be a hate crime to say the state that’s waging multiple wars of aggression while mass murdering people because of their ethnicity bears some resemblance to another state which did these things. I don’t know about you, but I find that silly.

Australia’s “antisemitism envoy” claims it is antisemitic to say the IHRA definition of antisemitism silences criticism of Israel, arguing that “claims that the leading global definition of antisemitism — which reflects the lived experience of Jewish people worldwide — is designed to intentionally silence criticism echoes antisemitic tropes of Jewish power and control.”

That’s right kids: you can’t criticise Israel because that’s antisemitic, and if you complain that your speech is being suppressed, that’s antisemitic too.

The handbook includes a hypothetical office group chat with a coworker making the statement “But what about the genocidal, racist Zionist project that has oppressed the Palestinians? Zionism is a supremacist ideology invented by Theodore Herzl. They’ve done this through apartheid and ethnic cleansing.”

“This is antisemitic,” the handbook argues, dismissing the entirely accurate statement as “Soviet-era antizionist propaganda” and saying it “was antisemitic because it included statements that accused Israel of apartheid, oppression, racism and genocide.”

Saying it’s antisemitic to accuse Israel of apartheid, oppression, racism and genocide is as clear an admission that Segal’s goal is to stomp out all criticism of Israel as you could possibly ask for.

If that wasn’t clear enough for you, the handbook concludes with the assertion that it is impossible to separate antizionism from antisemitism:

“Trying to separate ‘antisemitism’ from ‘antizionism’ ignores the history of misinformation, disinformation and antisemitic propaganda that has shaped narratives about Israel and Zionism,” the envoy asserts. “It also ignores the lived and practical reality that wherever these antizionist narratives have been propagated, it has resulted in discrimination, harassment , vilification, hate and harm towards Jews. For example, Poland’s 1968 antizionist campaign resulted in expulsions and forced emigration of thousands of Jewish Poles.”

“Antisemitism and antizionism are both expressions of hatred towards Jews,” the handbook concludes.

So there you have it. That settles that.

Throughout the handbook, the feelings of Australian Jews are cited over and over again as supremely important and of far more urgent a concern than genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and wars of immense geopolitical consequence.

“Feel more isolated… I feel like I am living the life of a Jew from history, rather than the Jew I was 2 years ago,” reads a quote from an unnamed Jewish person.

“I just feel so sad that I need to educate my children in how to respond if they are screamed at in the street,” reads another.

“The silence from friends I have known almost all my life, the constant posting of antisemitic slurs and the public broadcasts of factually incorrect reports has been devastating and makes me fearful of what might happen next. Since October 7, when I speak to someone who hasn’t offered any support, I often ask myself ‘would they hide me’ which is a terribly sad situation in our beautiful country where I have always felt safe,” reads another.

“A tutor in my university class made antisemitic comments very casually which made me feel extremely uncomfortable and unsafe. I am now nervous when entering a uni class,” reads another.

“Being confronted again and again with blind hate towards my people and the place I come from was very painful. It impacted my mood, the way I perceived my community and my place in it, and my daily function,” reads another.

Virtually nothing is said about the real victims. The murdered, displaced and terrorized targets of Israeli atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran. The war orphans. The child amputees and burn victims who were operated on without anesthesia. The Palestinians being raped and tortured in Israeli prisons. The people who will carry the physical and psychological wounds from their holocaust with them for the rest of their lives.

They are not regarded as important by Jillian Segal. The real crisis, in her mind, is people talking about these things and making Jewish Australians feel upset.

Absolutely psychotic. We cannot allow our country to continue to be dragged in this direction.

_________________

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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One of the most frustrating things about Israel apologists is how they constantly pretend to believe things they don’t really believe in order to push Israeli PR.

There’s a tweet going around by a rabbi named Elchanan Poupko that says “I had never met a Zionist who does not care also for the lives of innocent Palestinians. I have never met an anti-zionist who does care for the lives of israelis. That is the difference between us.”

This person does not believe his own claim. He is knowingly lying about what he thinks is true about Zionists.

A Penn State survey published in Israeli media last year found that 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza. Nearly half, 47 percent, said the IDF should kill all inhabitants of any city they capture — that’s inhabitants, not combatants.

Rabbi Poupko may not be aware of this specific poll, but he does interact with Zionists on a regular basis. He personally knows Zionists who would tell him to his face that his claim is false, and he is fully aware of this. He is knowingly lying in order to promote the information interests of a genocidal apartheid state.

They do this all the time, with everything. They’ll falsely claim pro-Palestine protests make them feel unsafe just to get laws passed to shut down the demonstrations. They’ll pretend to believe that phrases like “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” are hateful slogans which encourage antisemitic attacks. They’ll regurgitate ridiculous hasbara slogans like “human shields” and “world’s most moral army” which they know for a fact are false. They just make whatever noises they need to make to keep the western weapons shipments heading to Tel Aviv.

And, I mean, of course they do. They’re bad people. They’d support a genocide, so there’s not a lot they wouldn’t do. Of course they’ll lie and manipulate to advance the agendas of their favorite ethnonationalist war machine. Israel supporters are awful.

❖

A Jesus statue vandalized by Israeli soldiers has been treated with more solemnity and contrition than any IDF massacre of real human beings over the past three years. Top Israeli officials like Benjamin Netanyahu and Gideon Saar have posted statements condemning the incident, and the Israeli military has issued an apology and sentenced two men to thirty days in jail over the incident.

This is happening because Israel knows its American support base of Christian conservatives will care more about the statue than all of the IDF’s attacks on Palestinian, Lebanese and Iranian human beings combined since 2023. Middle easterners are so dehumanized in their eyes that they are viewed as less valuable than a Jesus-shaped piece of fiberglass.

Israel will let its soldiers commit every humanitarian abuse in the book, but jeopardizing the support base that keeps the weapons flowing? That’s a no-no.

❖

❖

On Monday, President Trump said on social media that “Israel never talked me into the war with Iran.”

On Tuesday, the State Department issued a press release which included the words “the United States is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally.”

So I guess the official answer to the question of whether the US went to war with Iran at Israel’s request depends on the mood of the day and which administration figure happens to be speaking at the moment.

❖

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said during a security assessment on Thursday that Israel is “awaiting a green light from the United States, first and foremost to complete the elimination of the Khamenei dynasty, the initiator of the extermination plan against Israel, and the successors of the successors of the leadership of the Iranian terror regime, and in addition to return Iran to the age of darkness and stone by blowing up central energy and electricity facilities and crushing national economic infrastructure.”

These freaks speak this way about the savagery they intend to inflict upon Iran, and yet to this day whenever I oppose this crazy evil war I still get bootlickers in my replies babbling about how the war is about freeing the Iranian people.

❖

The use of trained rape dogs in Israeli prisons is so well-documented at this point that there is no valid reason to doubt it is happening. All the hasbarists can say is “It’s crazy to think Israel would do something so evil!” Which nobody who’s been paying attention believes.

❖

People who advocate a “demilitarized” Palestinian state are admitting they know Israel would continue attacking and abusing the Palestinians under a two-state solution and they want to ensure that the Palestinians are powerless to stop it.

They don’t want Israel to be forced to get along with its neighbors like every normal country on earth. They want to ensure that Israel can continue terrorizing the Palestinians at every whim without the normal force deterrence systems possessed by any real state.

❖

If your strongest argument for censoring anti-Israel speech begins with the words “It makes Jewish people feel,” then your argument isn’t strong enough to be taken seriously. We’re talking about genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and nonstop wars here. Feelings take a backseat to these issues — even the feelings of people who strongly believe their feelings matter more than human lives.

Feeling uncomfortable feelings is fine and normal. We’re all supposed to feel uncomfortable feelings from time to time, especially when terrible things are happening. I myself have been feeling many uncomfortable feelings while scrolling my social media feed since October 2023, but I don’t feel entitled enough to believe laws should be passed and the internet should be censored in order to shelter me from experiencing those feelings.

Suck it up, buttercup. These are conversations that need to be had.

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The food and fuel crisis that’s about to hit is the fault of the US and Israel. All US and Israeli allies should end the alliances and collaborate with nations around the world to establish a new order of international power.

I’ll keep repeating this as life gets harder for us all.

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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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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 ToBeDaniel via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)