Israel Is So Evil That It Has A Military Unit Dedicated To Excusing Atrocities
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Israel is so fucking evil that it has a military unit dedicated to coming up with excuses for the IDF’s atrocities. +972 reports that the IDF has a special unit it calls the “Legitimization Cell”, because it is tasked with finding justifications to legitimize the assassination of journalists and other war crimes for the purpose of “public relations”.
Probably goes without saying, but if Israel was on the side of truth and morality it would not have a military unit dedicated to manipulating the public narrative about actions which normal people would see as extremely evil.
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Israel: We can’t allow Palestinian journalists to remain alive in Gaza because all the Palestinian journalists are Hamas.
Western journalists: Okay so let us in, that way there can be journalists documenting what’s happening in Gaza who aren’t Hamas.
Israel: [long pause] … No.
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I have never been less open to people with different opinions than I am with Gaza. I am simply correct, and if you disagree with me you are wrong and I hate you.
I have alienated various readers and online factions over the years with the things I have written, but that has usually been unintentional; normally I don’t like to alienate people who resonate with my work. Gaza was the first time I’ve been happy to lose anyone who disagreed with me. It was like, You’re leaving? Good. Get the fuck out. I’m going to keep saying what I’m saying and if you don’t like it then I don’t like you. If you don’t leave then I’ll kick you out myself.
I like to stay open to different perspectives, and I like to have people with different perspectives stay open to me. But Gaza is such an easy and obvious moral question that I stand nothing to gain from any contact with anybody who answers that question incorrectly. I’ve never been so fast and so confident in making enemies than I have over this issue.
I’m nearly as impatient with people who haven’t taken a forceful side on this. It’s a sign of developing maturity to be able to see both sides of an issue, but it’s a sign of further maturity to understand that just because you can see both sides doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take sides on important and relevant moral issues with a clear right and wrong side. Stop fence-sitting on a genocide and grow the fuck up.
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If a guy tries to rob you or rape you or murder you make sure you ask him his religion before trying to stop him, because you don’t want to be accidentally antisemitic.
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Nothing creates support for Hamas more than Israel’s actions in Gaza. Nothing creates hatred of Israel more than Israel’s actions in Gaza. Nothing creates hatred of Jews more than Israel’s actions in Gaza. Everything Israel’s supporters complain most about is caused by Israel.
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The strongest argument that Israel is committing genocide is that all major human rights groups say it’s a genocide, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Israeli rights groups like B’Tselem, along with the overwhelming majority of genocide scholars and human rights experts. The debate is over. This is a settled matter.
The hasbara machine hasn’t come up with a counter-argument for this. They hate it. Whenever I use it they always try to push the debate in some other direction where they have a counter-argument they’ve been trained to regurgitate, but when I stick to the universal consensus among human rights groups they always get mad and rage quit.
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It’s so undignified how western governments and news outlets keep talking about Israel’s officially stated reasons for its actions in Gaza like we don’t all know they want to get rid of the Palestinians who live there and have been trying to get rid of them for generations.
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I love when I criticize Israel for something and someone goes “Oh yeah well America does that too!” Like that’s a defense. It’s like yes, those are both evil states who do evil things constantly, and they work in conjunction with each other and are not meaningfully separate. Yes.
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Being an ally of Israel or the United States is immoral for many reasons, but this is especially the case during their joint genocide project in Gaza. They should both be made pariah states.
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Start recognizing Palestinian humanity and then maybe I’ll take you seriously when you talk about recognizing a Palestinian state.
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Opposition to the Gaza holocaust has always been led from the bottom up. It started with Palestinians documenting their own genocide, then ordinary westerners saw this and began opposing it, then slowly the media and mainstream human rights organizations began following the leadership of the people and applying scrutiny to Israel’s atrocities, and then, even more slowly, western governments began feebly pushing back on Israel.
This has all happened in response to widespread public outcry forcing the western political/media class to respond. The mass media cannot retain its legitimacy in the eyes of the public if it keeps churning out brazen genocide propaganda without ever scrutinizing Israel. Governments cannot retain the consent of the governed if they completely ignore a mass atrocity that the public cares deeply about. So they were forced to start moving, or else risk the public turning on them.
The primary lesson here is that we must keep pushing this issue as hard as we can, because it’s working. They can’t ignore us anymore, and they’re feeling the pressure. Their response has been painfully weak and inadequate, but it’s infinitely more than we were seeing in the early months of the genocide. We need to keep hammering this thing.
The second lesson here is that our “leaders” are not actually our leaders. We are leading them on the most important moral issue of our time, and they are following us. It is an absolute certainty that western governments and media would be ignoring Gaza if the public had ignored it too. They definitely wanted us to ignore it, and for a long time it really seemed like they expected us to get exhausted and drop it. It wasn’t until we made it clear that this isn’t getting shuffled down the memory hole with the daily news churn that we really began to see things change.
We are leading this dance. So we need to keep leading. Keep driving. Keep pushing. The louder our voices get, the more movement we see from them.
So don’t stop.
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Righteous Anger. Deeply appreciated.
Well said. "Our readers are actually not our leaders. We are leading them in the most important moral issue of our time". Thank you, Caitlin.