The Bizarre Gymnastics Of The Gaza Aid Pier
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
So glad Trump lost in 2020 otherwise we’d be seeing fascistic crackdowns on political dissent, police brutalizing protesters, tyrannical suppression of free speech, and the facilitation of racist and Islamophobic agendas. That psycho would probably be committing genocide by now.
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So let me get this straight. The US wound up building its “floating pier” a few miles off the coast of Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid, but nobody will be able to ship the aid directly to the pier to get it to Gaza. Instead, the aid will be delivered to Cyprus via air or sea, and then from Cyprus the aid will be shipped 200 miles to the pier. From there the pallets of aid will be loaded onto smaller US army boats, which will then carry the aid from the pier to a long causeway on Gaza’s actual coast. Those pallets will then be carried from the boats to the shore via the causeway — possibly by British troops or possibly by Israeli troops depending on what source you’re reading — and taken into Gaza by IDF troops after careful examination and approval of their contents. All to deliver some 90 to 150 truckloads worth of aid per day, which is far short of the 500 truckloads the UN says Gaza needs.
And this is all being done because Israel isn’t simply letting people drive an adequate amount of aid through the custom-built gates directly into Gaza. Since Washington doesn’t want to exert any pressure on Israel to allow such a self-evident move, this immensely complicated and expensive dance is being performed to deliver a pathetically inadequate amount of aid instead. Aid that is only necessary because Israel has been destroying Gaza in its genocidal bombing campaign which it has been carrying out with total impunity.
Cool. Very normal and cool.
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In a speech on Thursday Biden defended the violent nationwide police crackdowns on university protests against his genocide in Gaza, saying “dissent must never lead to disorder”.
Ah yes Joe, that’s very progressive of you. Dissent obviously should always be completely innocuous and obedient and not disruptive in any way. As Martin Luther King Jr said, “Our foremost value is to obey the law at all times and inconvenience nobody, because dissent must never lead to disorder. That’s why our civil rights movement famously never has any run-ins with law enforcement.” He said this in one of his most influential works, Letter from Birmingham Candy Shop.
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The Wall Street Journal has an article out titled “In Gaza, Authorities Lose Count of the Dead,” which confirms what’s been obvious for months: the Gaza health ministry doesn’t have the infrastructure to keep track of how many people Israel is killing. This means the official death toll from the Israeli onslaught is almost certainly a massive undercount.
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“You guys I’m super sincerely concerned about hate speech on university campuses,” said the person who’s made an entire career out of pushing for the mass murder of brown-skinned foreigners at every opportunity.
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The US war machine views Palestinians as an inconvenient obstacle to its military agendas in the middle east, in the same way it views the local flora and fauna as an inconvenient obstacle when it’s constructing a new military base, or how it sees whales as an inconvenient obstacle because of public concern about navy sonar testing damaging their hearing and killing them. Palestinians are just viewed as an annoying indigenous animal that gets in the way of the imperial war machinery, and they’d be more than happy for that nuisance to be eliminated completely.
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I’ve had multiple Biden supporters seriously tell me that January 6 was worse than backing a genocide in Gaza in order to argue that Trump was worse than Biden. The mainstream liberal worldview will twist you up so bad inside that you can’t even see Palestinians as human beings.
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Everything Americans were warned would happen under Trump has happened under Biden. The only retort Democrats have to this is “oh yeah well this all woulda been way worse under Trump,” a claim which is (A) based on literally nothing and (B) completely unfalsifiable.
As I’ve said before, the lesson here is not that Trump is better than Biden or that you should support Republicans. The lesson is that no matter who you vote for you get surging authoritarianism at home and war, military expansionism and brinkmanship abroad, and that this system has got to go.
To look at what’s happening and make it about who you should vote for is to completely miss the lesson of what’s happening: that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, because the system is rigged to only let you vote for murderous tyrannical imperialists who serve the interests of plutocrats and empire managers instead of normal human beings. That bickering about where your votes should go is exactly what those plutocrats and empire managers want you to do, because it keeps you trapped within the framework of status quo politics and prevents you from looking at measures that could actually bring about real change like direct action, general strikes, the fomenting of revolutionary ideas, and the emergence of a powerful revolutionary faction.
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The Israel lobby just succeeded in having Chris Hedges cancelled on the Real News Network so from now on I will boycott TRN.
As is my right.
There are more encampments around the world right now, I think, than there were to protest the Vietnam war. There are at least 7 in the UK, 3 in Canada, many in the US, and maybe more in other countries that I have not yet seen. The people are speaking out against the genocide by Israel. But most leaders don't want to listen because they are worried about the "economy" i.e. their own bank accounts. They are making plenty off the sales of munitions, bombs etc