Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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US Senator Lindsay Graham has just tweeted an article titled “Greta Thunberg sets sail with Gaza flotilla that aims to break Israeli naval blockade,” adding the comment, “Hope Greta and her friends can swim!”
Australian Zionist think tanker Arsen Ostrovsky somehow outdid Graham, tweeting “Oh look, the little jihadi Greta Thunberg is trying to get into Gaza, to show solidarity with Hamas. It would be so sad if something were to happen to her flotilla…”
There’s not a lot that can shock me about Israel and its supporters these days. But if you’d traveled back in time a few years ago it would be hard to explain to someone how we got to a timeline that includes Israel supporters openly advocating the assassination of Greta Thunberg.
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The reason Gaza ceasefire negotiations have kept falling through under both the Biden and Trump administrations is that Israel, with the backing of the US government, keeps insisting on the right to resume its genocidal slaughter after a temporary intermission.
A big part of the problem is that this is a genocide, not a war, but all the framing is around negotiating a “ceasefire” to end the “war” even as Israel keeps rejecting any ceasefire agreement which would require them to end the genocide.
Hamas insists on an end to the genocide, and Israel goes “No can do, but tell ya what: we can pause the war for a few weeks!” And then the mass media go “HAMAS REJECTS CEASEFIRE” while liberals go “Oh it’s so sad that they can’t negotiate an end to this terrible war!”
But it’s not a war, it’s a genocide. You can negotiate an end to a war, but you can’t negotiate an end to a genocide. Israel has openly declared that the killing will continue until there are no more Palestinians left in Gaza — either by death or by ethnic cleansing. Israel wants to eliminate all Palestinians from Gaza more than it wants the remaining hostages. It wants to eliminate all Palestinians from Gaza more than it wants peace. Hamas has nothing to offer Israel that it wants more than it wants to purge Palestinians from a Palestinian territory.
If this were being treated as a genocide, all law-abiding states would interfere to force Israel to stop. But because it’s being falsely treated as a “war” they just stand passively by and periodically cluck about ceasefire negotiations, thereby allowing Israel to continue its genocide.
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The big controversy this weekend was the emergence of a sex tape featuring journalist Glenn Greenwald, which he says was released “without my knowledge or consent” and that the motive was a “maliciously political one.”
After Greenwald’s public statement on the matter, Twitter was flooded with commentators and members of the public from all across the political spectrum expressing their support for him, apparently nullifying whatever effect the release of the sex tape was supposed to have.
I’m going to call this a solid win for humanity.
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The US is removing Syria from its longtime designation as a state sponsor of terrorism now that it has a puppet regime in Damascus, with US envoy Thomas Barrack proclaiming that “Thank God, the issue of state sponsor of terrorism is gone with the Assad regime being finished.”
This is the US admitting that the “terrorist” designation just means “not aligned with US interests.” Syria’s new president was an actual ISIS and Al Qaeda official — literally the leader of Al Qaeda in Syria. But because he’s US-aligned, “terrorism” is no longer a concern.
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Our rulers did not expect this. They did not expect the public to sustain ferocious opposition to the Gaza holocaust for 20 months. In October 2023 they would’ve been assuring each other that all the protesting and outrage would die off soon, because that’s what normally happens.
And it just didn’t. People refused to let this thing fade into the background. The mass media were forced to keep reporting on it — albeit with extreme bias — because if they didn’t report on it at all they’d lose their last shred of credibility in the eyes of the public, and people would keep sharing the information on their own anyway.
Remember how excited the Israel apologists got when those two embassy staff members were killed? They were like “Welp, that’s it for the pro-Palestine movement! Saying Free Palestine is not allowed anymore everybody! Ahh, thank goodness, I was worried people would never let this thing go.”
And it just didn’t pan out that way. Nobody bought it. The embassy staff killings were shuffled off in the daily news churn and forgotten, while Gaza remained.
And I just think it’s worth flagging what a miracle that is. How completely unexpected and unanticipated this would have been for our ruling institutions. They really thought we were all sufficiently ground down and subdued by life under the empire to just let them do what they want to Gaza without any resistance. And they were wrong.
There’s some life left in us yet. It is not a foregone conclusion that we will just passively watch our rulers carry us off over the ledge of dystopia, ecological disaster and nuclear armageddon. Revolution is not an impossible pipe dream. There is still a spark of hope.
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Feature image by Kushal Das via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
