People Have A Serious Case Of 9/11 Brain Right Now, And It's Scary
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
I had to take a short break from reading about what’s happening in Gaza. I saw one too many images of dead kids on Twitter and just had to lie down for a while.
It was like running out of health in a video game. I was still trucking along, and then I saw this one particularly gruesome image on Twitter of a dead Palestinian child which I won’t even describe here and my nervous system was like, “Nope, that’s it, we’re done,” and I just felt all the energy go out of me and slumped over.
And that was just me sitting in the comfort and safety of my own home. I can’t imagine what it’s like to actually be there, under siege with all energy and supplies cut off, while it gets harder and harder to get information to the outside world as military explosives rain down relentlessly.
It’s so, so bad, and it’s going to get so much worse. Israel has already taken more lives than the 1,200 it lost in the Hamas attacks, with the official death toll from the Gaza bombings now having passed 1,200 as of this writing, on top of the 1,500 Hamas militants who were killed during the attack. But the killing is going to continue far beyond this point. One gets the sense that the IDF is barely even getting started.
That’s why so much energy is getting poured into trying to make the Hamas attacks look as bad as possible — to make the gratuitous slaughter that’s about to come look reasonable. We’re seeing claims about decapitated Israeli babies being uncritically promoted as fact by the mass media and by US and Israeli officials, and then being walked back as it turns out those claims are unverified and dubiously sourced. We’re seeing claims about mass rapes being uncritically pushed by the mass media, only to see them retracted as unverified after the narrative has taken hold.
The only reason the political/media class of the imperial core are falling all over themselves to promote these narratives without waiting for the evidence is to make Israel’s ongoing murder of civilians in Gaza look appropriate. It’s completely undisputed that Hamas killed a huge number of people on Saturday, and it’s completely undisputed that a huge number of those killed were noncombatants. This alone could be used to justify retaliatory military operations by Israel, but because those retaliations are going to dwarf the initial offense, Israel and its allies need to frame that initial offense in the most shocking and rage-inducing light possible.
It was reported that the US and Israel were in discussions with Egypt to provide safe corridors for an evacuation of Gaza, which Moon of Alabama noted would have been ethnic cleansing if carried out. But it’s now being reported that Egypt has rejected those proposals, citing the need to protect “the right of Palestinians to hold on to their cause and their land”.
So they’re trapped there. Two million people, half of whom are children, packed into a tiny strip of land which an Israeli security official says is going to be reduced to “a city of tents” with “no buildings”. And they have to somehow not get killed amid this onslaught while somehow managing to get enough to eat and drink in a besieged city with no power.
We could be on the precipice of one of the darker entries in the annals of history.
Something very eerie happened the other day. I posted the following on Twitter:
“If I was an Israel supporter I’d be thinking very carefully about the things I’m posting online in the build-up to what could wind up being regarded as one of history’s worst genocidal massacres. The internet doesn’t forget. What you’re tweeting today could haunt you for life.”
The post received hundreds of comments, many of them hostile and argumentative. But what really disturbed me is that going through them I couldn’t find a single one that disputed my claim that Israel may be on the verge of committing one of the worst genocidal massacres in world history. They were angered by my opposition to Israel, angered by my criticism of their social media activity, but apparently they had no objection to the whole massive genocidal massacre bit. That part they take as a given, and accept.
Which may come as no surprise to you if you’ve been paying attention to the way Israel apologists are talking about this situation. The Grayzone’s Jeremy Loffredo recently posted a compilation of numerous pro-Israel demonstrators in New York City spouting genocidal vitriol calling for the extermination of all Palestinians and turning Gaza into a parking lot. It’s ugly to watch, but it’s also just Israel apologists saying the same things in person that they’ve been saying online all week.
Stokely Carmichael said “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem.” These genocidal ideations wouldn’t be as much of a problem if Palestinians weren’t completely beholden to the whims of a deadly military force that is backed to the hilt by the most powerful empire that has ever existed. They can kill as many Palestinians as they’ve got a mind to, and there’s a lot of consent for this throughout the member states of the US-centralized empire.
When announcing the total siege of Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” This is the dehumanizing language of extermination. This is not the sort of person you want pointing modern weapons of war at defenseless civilians in an open-air concentration camp.
People are going insane, in the same way they went insane after 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks there was this shrieking emotional intensity which saw critical thinking go out the window and saw people’s minds consumed with a rabid lust for Muslim blood. People have a serious case of 9/11 brain this week, and it’s more than a little scary.
It is very fitting, then, that numerous political and media figures have been working to brand the attacks this past Saturday as “Israel’s 9/11”. After 9/11 everyone lost their minds and started believing a bunch of lies and consenting to power-serving agendas that went on to do orders of magnitude more damage than the initial traumatic event did, and we’re seeing that same infernal trajectory unfolding again today with Israel.
Comparisons to 9/11 should make everyone more critical and resistant to warmongering agendas, not less. The most consequential thing about September 11 2001 was not what happened on that day but what happened in the days that followed, with the “war on terror” causing millions of deaths and displacing tens of millions of people — vastly eclipsing the 3,000 dead from the 9/11 attacks themselves.
That’s what people should think about when these 9/11 comparisons emerge. Not “Oh well we need to consent to a bunch of military agendas and kill a bunch of people then,” but “We need to be extremely skeptical about everything we’re being told, and begin pushing for peace as aggressively as we possibly can.”
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Anyone remember the Kuwaiti Baby Incubators ZOMG from the run up to the first Gulf War?
The story was a total lie, and the supposed eyewitness was the daughter of the Kuwait Ambassador, but the news networks sort of glossed over that little detail and ran with it hard.
By the time the lie was comprehensively debunked, the neocons had already gotten the war they so craved.
Similarly the lies about Saddam's supposed WMDs and involvement in 9/11. Another lie, again exposed only after it no longer mattered..
Or the Libyan rape rooms. Or the Syrian poison gas attacks. All lies. But the very real truth of the Yemeni genocide is memory-holed, because it doesn't suit the Empire at the moment.
EDIT: what amazes me is that humans fall for it, over and over again.
I’m 34 years old, Jewish, and from NY. I was in “conservative” Jewish religious school from preschool till 14, in addition to NY public school from k-college. Conservative in quotes because it is nothing like the American definition of conservative - an analogy to American politics is that they would be considered liberal, and the reformist sect progressive. I don’t “look” Jewish, and I am not a practicing Jew as I have my issues with the Abraham of faiths for many reasons. But Jews are not just a religion but an ethnicity as well - I’m ashkenazi. I’m giving this background information for a reason.
Since I was TEN YEARS OLD I’ve been a supporter of Palestine. What israel has done and continues to do is in my opinion just a recycling of the cycle of abuse they received on behalf of the Germans in the Holocaust. The open aired ghettos, ethnic supremacy, genocidal violence... it’s so obvious to me and it’s been obvious to me since I was fucking 10. I’ve been a Palestinian supporter to great personal blowback - I was nearly excommunicated from my own family for not being pro Israel. Right now I have to be very careful about what I say and how I say it, and I hate that. My mom - 66 years old practicing Jew - is heartbroken. She can’t believe what the world has come to. I have Israeli family friends, and they have relatives in Israel. It’s scary and horrible - innocent people on both sides are going to be the ones paying for this with their lives and limbs, especially the Palestinians.
And that’s the thing. It NEEDS TO BE SCREAMED that 40% of the population of Palestine is under 14. 50% under 18. They’ve been in essentially PRISON for 16 years! They don’t know any other world. They’re trapped. This is a prison outbreak, a slave revolt. It’s not a religious conflict although religious reasons are convenient - it’s a conflict of land and resources brought on by settler colonialism. Thanks Europe! Israel likes to call every operation they do in Palestine as “mowing the grass”. The once genocided are now the genociders.
The general vibe I get from the Jews I know is bomb the Palestinians to the stone ages and eradicate them. They don’t see them as human. They’re literally fucking children. They don’t care if they die - the children of Palestine - because they’re already the living dead.
The brutality is horrible but deserved. What did israel think was going to happen imprisoning children their entire lives? They grow up and become terrorists.
The comparisons to 9/11 are uncanny. Netanyahu was warned a few days prior by the Egyptian prime minister and he did nothing (times of Israel reported this). He is facing major domestic unrest due to his unpopular judicial reforms. How convenient... meanwhile the US/NATO is losing in Ukraine despite the propaganda, and the US would LOVE an excuse to bomb Iran. Hell the neocons are probably having wet dreams over the thought, I immediately thought of how excited John Bolton must be at this latest war. Iran is supplying Russia with equipment for their war in Ukraine. I’m pretty sure we are in the earlier stages of WW3 (starting with Ukraine but maybe even covid if it turns out to be an intentional lab leak - I buy the lab leak theory but err on the side of human error) and the media isn’t reporting it as such because nobody wants a panic.
Really though. 9/11. How did the worlds most powerful intelligence agency in 2023 not see Hamas planning this right under their noses? Those paragliders must of practiced somewhere beforehand, no? I’m in the future “conspiracy theory” camp of Netanyahu and co LET IT HAPPEN. Just like bush at minimum let 9/11 happen so he could have an excuse to attack countries that had nothing to do with it. I don’t see us attacking Saudi Arabia or Yemen who were the majority of the hijackers... in fact the Saudi royals got to leave the US while airspace was closed. How convenient!