Palestinians Didn't Choose The Religion Of Their Oppressors
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
One of the dumbest narratives we’re asked to swallow about Palestinians is that they are guilty of anti-Jewish prejudice which makes them comparable to Nazis. Palestinians didn’t choose the religion of their oppressors; any hatred they have toward Israelis is because Israelis are the ones oppressing and murdering them, not because of their religion. Expecting Palestinians not to hate the oppressors who hate them just because those oppressors happen to be Jewish is shitbrained thinking.
Every so often you’ll see the IDF plant a copy of Mein Kampf in a building in Gaza and then wave it around as though it would somehow justify what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, and it’s just so stupid. The reason we’ve come to abhor hatred toward Jews in the west is because we know the west has an extensive history of committing atrocities against Jewish people because of their religion.
Palestinians harbor no such prejudice and are guilty of no such crimes. Any violence they’ve inflicted upon Israelis has been in an effort to keep their land and resist tyrannical oppression, not because they have some weird European Hitlerite hatred toward Jews. Anytime you hear Palestinians talk about “the Jews” they’re always talking solely and exclusively about their oppressors in the context of the occupation; they’re not talking about some Jewish guy in Canada.
Palestinians would hate their oppressors whether the oppression was being inflicted by Hindus, Buddhists or Catholics. That’s normal. That’s how people’s minds and emotions work; we hate people who hate us, and we hate people who abuse us. Any failure to understand this is a failure to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagine what it would be like to live in their situation. It’s a sign that you lack normal human empathy.
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The world needs Israel. Without Israel where would sexual predators go for safety and protection? Where would we get our surveillance technology? Who would use human targets to field test new kinds of murder robots, military explosives and AI systems used to kill entire families?
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Critics of Israel should familiarize themselves with Hitchens’s razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
Whether it’s beheaded babies, mass rapes, Hamas bases in hospitals, or Hamas killing the Bibas kids with their bare hands, if it’s being asserted without evidence, it can be immediately dismissed.
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It is a well-documented fact that Israel and its supporters use lobbying, campaign funding and blackmail to exert influence over western nations. It is also a fact that the US empire has the power to stop Israel from doing this at any time, but chooses not to. The empire managers in the official elected government don’t do anything to stop these influence operations, nor do the empire managers in the far more powerful unelected national security state. Does anyone really believe Israel would still be exerting such massive influence over the US government if the CIA determined that this was impeding their agendas of global domination?
It follows that the Zionist influence operations exist because the empire wants them to. The artificially manufactured support for Israel has been deemed a necessary evil to help ensure constant violence, division and instability in the middle east and justify endless military presence in a crucial geostrategic region which, if left to its own devices, might unite and conduct its affairs in a way that is disadvantageous to western interests.
There are many other nations in the middle east who are aligned with the US and are used to advance its interests in the region, but none of them are fully dependent on support from the US government for their continued existence. It’s a completely artificial construct that was inserted into the middle east like a glass shard into a foot, and its continued existence benefits both the settler colonialists who live there and the long-term hegemonic interests of the US-centralized empire.
I say all this to point out that the west isn’t some passive innocent victim of manipulations by the big mean tyrant Israel. It is just as guilty of Israel’s crimes as Israel itself, because those crimes are inseparable from the western empire as a whole. You see some on the right trying to argue that the west would be this wonderful virtuous place if not for the malign influence of those nasty Jews, but this narrative is refuted by the entire historical existence of the western world. The west has always been a warmongering, genocidal civilization driven by conquest and domination, and the western settler-colonialist project of Israel is just one more manifestation of the dystopia we are living in.
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Defending Trump’s warmongering in the middle east by babbling about his peacemaking efforts in Ukraine is the same as saying it’s okay for him to torch Gaza because he’s not bombing Argentina. It’s nonsensical. You don’t negate your crimes by being less criminal somewhere else.
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Whenever I criticize Trump’s actions in the middle east I’ll get some Democrat going “I BET YOU WISH YOU’D SUPPORTED KAMALA NOW, HUH?”
That’s not what this is, idiots. I did this exact same commentary throughout the Biden administration, because Biden is also evil. I am simply criticizing the world’s most murderous and destructive power structure and whatever empire managers happen to be sitting at the front desk while it happens. This is just what it looks like when you apply scrutiny to the empire without being a partisan hack.
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Bernie Sanders has been such a worthless empire simp I sometimes wonder why the Democratic Party establishment even bothered sabotaging his primary campaigns. They would have gotten another Obama, selling people false hope while advancing the interests of oligarchy and empire.
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Our species evolved these brains of unprecedented sophistication only to use them to destroy our biosphere, invent new ways to blow each other up, and make ourselves miserable with our own thoughts.
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It’s not about hostages. It’s not about Hamas. It’s not about terrorism. Those aren’t the reasons, they’re the excuses. The excuses to expel Palestinians and turn more Palestinian land into Israeli land. That’s all this has ever been about. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.
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Spitballing Truths, Caitlin, as per usual. Glad to see you have stared into the Abyss, but it only circles when it tries to stare back. You know your soul.
Stay strong, and keep going. We need you. <3
I read Refaat Alareer's posthumous collection of poems and essays the day I got it. His humanity shines brilliantly through the holocaust of Israél's bombs. He chose to write in English to talk to the world, and teach his students authentically about the Jewish experience in the Second World War. He writes that it was hard for them because they had to learn to see through the Zionist hatred. But they persevered and succeeded.
The Zionists murdered Refaat, because intellectuals are the key to the end to this cycle of violence. A cycle of violence they don't want to end.
I met Ilan Pappe recently and I could see the same compassion and grit in his eyes that I read in Refaat's writing. Long live Refaat in our memories. Thank you, Ilan. Thank you, Caitlin and Tim.