It's so obnoxious how even after all this time Israel is still given the benefit of the doubt on such claims by the western political-media class until they're debunked weeks later, long after the outcry over the incident has been muted and neutered by Israeli lies.

https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1777721971196695014

Investigations by researchers like @EuroMedHR had already found that the IDF opened fire on civilians right after the Flour Massacre; this report is from February 29. Not until a month and a half later does CNN step up and state the obvious.
euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6196

Pretending The US Can't Just Drive Aid Into Gaza

Have they considered digging a giant tunnel to get aid into Gaza as well? Or launching aid into Gaza by building a giant slingshot? Or perhaps they could invent some type of portal gun à la Rick and Morty?
caitlinjohnst.one/p/pretending-t… "Israel’s approval of West Bank settlements exposes the 'two state solution' for the lie that it is and makes it clear that the western power alliance has no meaningful position on Israel’s abusive treatment of Palestinians."
soundcloud.com/going_rogue/pr…

Israel-Palestine Isn't 'Complicated', You Just Support Killing Palestinians

"Israel supporters can go ahead and stop babbling about hostages when trying to justify the attack on Gaza. It’s never been about saving hostages."
caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-pales… "Keep in mind when you read that the US is attempting to jail a journalist for exposing war crimes, that because of Gaza you actually now know what war crimes look like in real life."
soundcloud.com/going_rogue/is…

Continuing To Support Israel At This Point Just Means You're A Garbage Human Being

"I am so fucking done with people handwringing about October 7 while Israel has been October 7ing the Gazans every day since."
caitlinjohnst.one/p/continuing-t… "Four months. This has been happening for four months. If you’re still supporting Israel after four months of atrocities, then you’re just a shitty human being."
soundcloud.com/going_rogue/co…

However Bad You Think Israel Is, It's Worse

"So it turns out the IDF has been running a Telegram channel featuring homemade snuff films in which Gazans are brutally murdered by Israeli forces, captioned with celebrations of the gore and pain therein."
caitlinjohnst.one/p/however-bad-… "This is one of those many, many times where Israel is so awful that at first you’re not sure what you’re looking at. You think you must be misreading the report. Then you read it again and go Oh wow, that’s SO much worse than I would have guessed.”
soundcloud.com/going_rogue/ho…

HOLY SHIT





What the fuck??

Israel Supporters Would Defend Literally Any Israeli Atrocity

Israel could exterminate the entire population of Gaza and its supporters would still be saying “WHAT ABOUT OCTOBER 7??”
caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-suppo… "Just spitballing here but maybe the most efficient way to prevent western youth from becoming radicalized against Israel is not to censor the internet and kill free speech at universities but to make Israel stop murdering thousands of innocent people."
soundcloud.com/going_rogue/is…

If you're just tuning in, Israeli intelligence ignored mountains of information that the October 7 attack was coming and left Israelis completely undefended, then the IDF killed significant numbers of Israelis with indiscriminate fire and pinned the blame for 100% of Israeli deaths on Hamas, and all those deaths are now being used as justification to push Gazans off their land to the south and shoot them if they try to return while Israeli officials keep talking about how great it would be to get all Palestinians out of all of Gaza.

The November Issue Of JOHNSTONE Is Out Now

This issue is dedicated solely to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, because quite frankly that’s all we could think about this month. Available in paperback or in digital pay-what-you-feel versions:
caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-november…
Contents. As usual, these works are creative commons and may be freely used or repurposed by anyone in any way, with or without attribution.

Fifteen things you should never have to say to a country:

1. Stop bombing children.
2. Don't kill journalists.
3. Don't bomb hospitals.
4. Don't shoot patients through their hospital window.
5. Don't drive bulldozers over dead bodies.
6. Don't bomb ambulances.
7. Don't do ethnic cleansing.
8. Don't call humans animals.
9. Don't starve people.
10. Don't cut off people's water.
11. Don't cut off the electricity at hospitals, killing their ICU and NICU patients.
12. Don't bomb doctors.
13. Don't bomb UN staff.
14. Don't do apartheid.
15. Stop lying constantly. Fifteen things you should never have to say to a country:

1. Stop bombing children.

https://x.com/DCIPalestine/status/1724520308546130213?s=20

Last month I said there's evidence that many of the atrocities Hamas is accused of committing on October 7 like burning people alive were actually instances of indiscriminate Israeli fire, and people called me an antisemitic Holocaust denier. Yesterday an Israeli official admitted on TV that Israel had misidentified HUNDREDS of dead Hamas fighters as Israeli because there were so many corpses that were too badly burned to identify. Unless you believe Hamas was also burning hundreds of its own fighters alive, it's safe to assume that the burned corpses seen in all the images Israel has been bandying about since October 7 were in fact victims of Hellfire missiles fired by IDF forces. The IDF, not Hamas, burned people alive — both Israeli and Palestinian.

https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1725464800157749598

In case you missed it there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that many of the horrific acts Hamas is accused of committing on October 7 (burning people alive, burning babies, mowing down concertgoers, etc) were actually the result of indiscriminate fire by Israeli forces.

https://twitter.com/TheGrayzoneNews/status/1717767883122442580?t=fj31xYha6nYrQXoO4kAKDg&s=19

So for two years Hamas trained right out in the open less than a mile from the border for an air, sea and land attack involving motorized paragliders, motorboats and drones in a small enclosed area which is one of the most spied-on places on earth, and both Egyptian and US intelligence detected that Hamas was up to something, and also apparently Israeli military intelligence detected that Hamas was up to something, but Israel still left itself so open to a multi-pronged attack that Hamas itself was reportedly very surprised at how much damage they were able to do.

Okay.

https://twitter.com/TheGreeneBJ/status/1717886960998519073

Just normal stuff.

timesofisrael.com/surveillance-s…

Hundreds of US congressional staffers are passing around a letter urging their bosses to call for a ceasefire, there's a silent mutiny brewing in the State Department over the Biden administration's Gaza actions, mainstream reporters have been refusing to parrot Israel narratives, and the streets are full of pro-Palestine demonstrators.

This is different. I know it's against the law to express any kind of hope on Twitter, but what we are seeing right now is a deviation from the usual script.

https://x.com/ryangrim/status/1715160958174175335?s=20

The Mainstream Press Keep Slamming Israel’s Hospital Bombing Story

A new report from the UK’s Channel 4 News adds to the surprising amount of opposition we’re seeing in the mainstream press to Israel’s narrative about the deadly explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza this past Tuesday.

The report, led by Channel 4 chief correspondent Alex Thomson, spotlights glaring plot holes in Israel’s claim that a failed rocket by Palestinian Islamic Jihad was responsible for the blast, and in the supposed audio clip Israel published which it claims is an intercepted conversation between two Hamas fighters saying Israel was not responsible. It also presents an argument that will be inconvenient for Israel apologists who’ve been claiming photos of the damage to the hospital rule out the possibility of an Israeli airstrike.

“So what of Israel’s explanation?” says Thomson. “Sensing a major problem they worked through the night to get their version out. Press conference first thing. Conclusion: an Islamic Jihad rocked caused it all.”

“They present what they say is two Hamas operatives talking about the attack,” Thomson reports. “Hamas call this an obvious fabrication. Two independent Arab journalists told us the same thing, because of the language, accent, dialect, syntax and tone. None of which is, they say, credible.”

“Equally, Israel claims the Islamic Jihad failed missile was fired from here: a cemetery very close to the hospital,” Thomson continues. “But look again at the video of the event — the trajectory of the missile doesn’t line up with that location. Too high. Too horizontal. Confusingly, the Israelis’ presentation also says the missile was fired from a location down in the southwest; it can’t be both.”

Thomson also reports that while the photos of the blast site do appear to rule out a ground-detonating Israeli munition, they’re entirely in keeping with other munitions used by Israel which could easily have taken such a toll on human life.

“This is what you see at the hospital today — small craters you’d expect to see from a mortar strike or artillery round, not a missile,” says Thomson. “Surrounding buildings have only superficial damage, not structural collapse. Some of the windows of an adjoining church remain intact. This makes a ground-detonating Israeli missile strike unlikely, but it doesn’t rule out an airburst munition, which could cause major loss of life, but would produce far less structural damage.”

Thomson also notes that “Israel has form when it comes to war propaganda”, citing its false denials of the IDF killings of British filmmaker James Miller and Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.

On Twitter (or whatever we’re calling it now), Thomson’s remarks on the Israeli audio file were even more pointed.

“Several experts confirm Hamas’ view to Channel 4 News that the audio tape of ‘Hamas’ operatives talking about the missile malfunction is a fake,” tweeted Thomson. “They say the tone, syntax, accent and idiom are absurd.”

This is a still developing story with much still to be revealed, but this to me might be the most damning evidence against Israel yet. If Israel didn’t bomb that hospital, then why is it publishing fake audio clips of people posing as Hamas fighters agreeing with each other that Israel definitely didn’t bomb that hospital?

I mean, if people were saying I bombed a hospital, and I knew I didn’t, the last thing I’d do is publish an audio file of me pretending to be two guys talking about how Caitlin definitely didn’t bomb the hospital.

Picture a recording of me doing two blokey-sounding voices going,

“Hello my evil friend!”

“Hello!”

“Did you hear that Caitlin definitely did not bomb that hospital?”

“She didn’t?”

“No! It turns out it was we, the Evil Bad Guys!”

“We did it?”

“Yes, it was us!”

That would look pretty silly, right?

If Israel is making itself look this ridiculous, then it’s no wonder the western press are not lining up to help it cover up this particular misdeed. They’ve got to maintain at least some credibility if they’re going to keep manufacturing consent for other wars, after all. The Mainstream Press Keep Slamming Israel’s Hospital Bombing Story

Article with supporting links.
caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-mainstre…

Queen Warmonger Hillary Clinton Complains About "Men Starting Wars"

Some days the Caitlin Johnstone articles just write themselves.

During her self-titled annual awards ceremony at Georgetown University on Thursday, Hillary Clinton said that the biggest obstacle to peace and security around the world is “men starting wars.”

During the Q&A segment of the event, Clinton was asked by a student, “What do you see as the biggest challenge for women, peace, and security over the next ten years?”

“Well I think the biggest challenge is men starting wars,” Clinton replied, adding, “You know, I don’t think they have enough to do.”

Which would have come across as a humorous and relatable answer, if it had come from pretty much anyone else on the entire planet.

The single strongest argument against Hillary Rodham Clinton’s suggestion that only men start wars is the career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. This is after all the same woman who chortled with delight when she found out Muammar Gaddafi had been lynched in the streets following his US-led overthrow in Libya during her tenure as secretary of state, saying “I’m sure it did” when asked if his death had anything to do with her visit to the country. The same woman who as secretary of state promoted the plan of arming extremists in Syria with the goal of toppling Damascus. The same woman who as a senator played a pivotal role in convincing the Democratic Party to support the invasion of Iraq based on lies. The same woman who as first lady said she “urged” her husband Bill Clinton to launch the bombing campaign that would leave Serbia and Kosovo covered in cluster munitions. The same woman who as a US presidential candidate advocated a no-fly zone in Syria which would have required attacks on Russian war planes who violated it, and endorsed the same brinkmanship policies in Ukraine which eventually provoked the Russian invasion.

When Tulsi Gabbard famously dubbed Clinton “the queen of warmongers” in 2019, it wasn’t just empty rhetoric. There is no woman alive who anyone could argue is more deserving of that title. If you’d have told me there was a Hillary Rodham Clinton Awards ceremony prior to my having read about it, I would have assumed it was an event where women receive trophies for killing large numbers of human beings with military violence.

It is of course true that men have been the drivers of the overwhelming majority of wars throughout the ages, but that’s just what’s so disgusting about the modern iteration of “feminism” that Hillary Clinton rode to prominence on. The girlboss “feminism” of the Hillary Clinton age has ceased to mean advancing women’s interests and ensuring that women are treated as equals to men, and has become a vapid celebration of examples of women proving that they can be just as murderous, tyrannical and abusive as any man.

That was the zeitgeist that Hillary Clinton rode her 2016 presidential campaign on, and when the American public recoiled in horror and refused to vote for her, it was spun as a victory for misogyny. It should have been spun as a victory for would-be bombing victims who live in US-targeted nations.

Hillary Clinton is all the worst things about modern liberals and the Democratic Party. She is a blood-spattered psychopath who has dedicated her life to serving all the worst impulses of the human species — imperialism, militarism, capitalism, authoritarianism, and, yes, patriarchy — wearing a grinning plastic mask of civil rights and social justice to convince people to let her in the door.

She’s one of the creepiest things you could possibly imagine, and the sooner her and those like her are gone and forgotten, the better. Queen Warmonger Hillary Clinton Complains About "Men Starting Wars"

Article with supporting links:
caitlinjohnst.one/p/queen-warmon…

When Even The Nazis Aren't Nazis

Last year liberals were calling their political opponents Nazis and comparing Putin to Hitler. This year they’re defending Nazis and saying you can’t hate someone just because he swore allegiance to Hitler.
caitlinjohnst.one/p/when-even-th… When Even The Nazis Aren't Nazis

"I used to think Nazis were bad but then the mainstream press explained to me that many of the Nazis had reasons for wanting to be Nazis."
soundcloud.com/going_rogue/wh…

I love how it's no longer seriously disputed that NATO expansion provoked this war and even the head of NATO now admits it, so now empire apologists' only argument is claiming that Russia simply shouldn't have viewed NATO expansion as a threat. As though that's an answer. Their only remaining tactic is to argue with reality. They're basically just saying yes it's reality that NATO expansion provoked this war because Moscow saw it as a threat, but reality shouldn't have been what reality was.

https://twitter.com/wallacemick/status/1705126114539053505?t=whDXMZWcxHTUWogPp9wWnw&s=19

It should be more widely understood that saying the "Uyghur genocide" narrative is western propaganda is not the same as denying that there was an authoritarian crackdown in Xinjiang; empire apologists tend to conflate these two points in a motte-and-bailey fallacy wherein the much harder claim to defend (Uyghur genocide) is misrepresented as one and the same as a much easier claim to defend (authoritarianism in Xinjiang).

That Beijing began implementing a giant police action in Xinjiang in 2014 involving mass-scale detention of Uyghurs in reeducation camps is not seriously debated, and is not denied by Beijing. What's denied is that any of this was done with the intention of the effect of eliminating or diminishing the Uyghur people or their culture; it simply wasn't, which is why tourism to enjoy Uyghur culture is currently a booming industry in Xinjiang.

These reeducation camps have been spun by western propagandists as concentration camps and extermination camps in a ham-fisted effort to frame Xi Jinping as another Adolf Hitler, when in reality they really were re-education camps in the literal sense of the term. They were facilities designed to indoctrinate/de-indoctrinate Uyghurs who'd become radicalized into an ideology that had plunged Xinjiang into violence and chaos and threatened to tear apart the PRC. By all accounts — including by the western press — these facilities were decommissioned around 2019-2020.

Were there abuses in Xinjiang? It's hard to imagine how their wouldn't have been in a sweeping police action involving mass-scale involuntary detainment. You can criticize Beijing for those abuses all you want, but what you can't do is legitimately call it anything like genocide.

When Uyghur separatist groups began inflicting acts of terror with the goal of driving the Chinese government out of Xinjiang and creating their own state, Beijing had essentially three choices:

1. To engage in a US-style campaign of mass military slaughter against these groups until they were defeated,
2. To allow a violent uprising of what would inevitably become western-backed jihadists as they had just seen happen in Libya and Syria carve away a massive and geostrategically crucial part of China to be exploited by the US and its allies, or
3. To find some alternative to 1 and 2.

Beijing went with option number three, and the alternative it found was the aggressive deradicalization campaign it ended up implementing and the re-education facilities it has been so widely criticized for. Again, you can criticize Beijing for how it went about its dilemma in Xinjiang all you want, but it was plainly universes less draconian than the US approach of killing millions and displacing tens of millions in its barbaric “war on terror”. And unlike the “war on terror”, Beijing’s approach actually worked, which is why those facilities were shut down and Xinjiang is returning to normal.


This was all covered in a recent report by two German sinologists btw, and many empire apologists responded to it with the motte-and-bailey fallacy described above:

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1701421265918275859

Barack Obama Belongs In A Fucking Cage

The Twitter account of America’s 44th president just casually shared some links to organizations providing relief to the victims of the terrible flooding in Libya, which as of this writing has already killed thousands of people.

And that would of course be a fine and normal thing for America’s 44th president to do — had America’s 44th president not personally played a massive role in paving the way to the devastation we’re seeing in Libya today.

“If you’re looking to help people impacted by the floods in Libya, check out these organizations providing relief,” Obama tweeted.

Uhh, excuse me? Sir? You know you’re literally Barack Obama, right?

In 2010 the oil-rich Libya ranked higher on the UN Human Development Index than any other nation in Africa, with much better national infrastructure to protect itself from floods and other natural disasters. Today Libya is a chaotic humanitarian disaster where UN-backed investigators now say literal crimes against humanity have been taking place, including women being forced into sexual slavery.

What changed? If you’re reading this, you probably already know what changed.

In 2011, US, French and British forces helped rebels with extensive links to Al Qaeda kill Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, which immediately plunged the nation into violence, chaos, extremism and instability which persists to this day. It was later revealed that NATO powers knew they were backing murderous Al Qaeda-linked jihadists at the time.

Falsely branded a “humanitarian intervention” designed to prevent alleged plans for genocide and Viagra-fueled mass rapes against peaceful protesters by Gaddafi’s troops, the NATO attack on Libya quickly morphed into a regime change operation which saw Gaddafi brutally lynched in the streets and dying after being stabbed in the anus with a bayonet. Years later in 2016 a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee found that the narratives used to justify the intervention in Libya were “not supported by the available evidence.”

“We have seen no evidence that the UK Government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya,” the report reads. “UK strategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.”

This confirmed concerns voiced by Amnesty International and a UN human rights investigator months before Gaddafi’s death that the evidence for the alleged atrocities the intervention was meant to prevent simply wasn’t there to be found. Because no policy changes were made after the Iraq invasion and nobody was ever punished for inflicting that horror upon our world, no lessons were learned, and it happened again. The west was deceived into yet another disastrous military intervention, which continues to have severe consequences for people in the region to this day.

In an article published earlier this month in Responsible Statecraft about the crisis in Niger, Branko Marcetic made the interesting observation that the Nigerien junta which ousted the previous government has explicitly stated that the coup was necessary because of the “continuous deterioration of the security situation” which Niger and other countries in the Sahel have been suffering from for over a decade due to “the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO’s hazardous adventure in Libya.”

Marcetic also notes that the regime change intervention in Libya was meant to segue into a regime change intervention in Syria by the same means:

“Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) all called for a no-fly zone. ‘I love the military … but they always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can,’ complained McCain. The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka said it would be ‘an important humanitarian step.’ The now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) think tank gathered a who’s who of neoconservatives to repeatedly urge the same. In a letter to then-President Barack Obama, they quoted back Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he argued that ‘inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.’

“Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reportedly instrumental in persuading Obama to act, was herself swayed by similar arguments. Friend and unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal assured her that, once Gaddafi fell, ‘limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion’ could become a new model for toppling Middle Eastern dictators. Pointing to the similar, deteriorating situation in Syria, Blumenthal claimed that ‘the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Gaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion.’ ”

And that’s exactly what the Obama administration set out to do: pouring weapons into Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, once again on the side of Al Qaeda-linked fighters. Had Russia not intervened in 2015 to prevent Damascus from being toppled, Syria would likely have suffered the same fate as Libya.

So that’s two countries Obama and his cohorts tossed in the incinerator back-to-back, in much the same way the previous administration torched Afghanistan and Iraq. It was done a bit more slyly and subtly than the overt Hulk Smash ground invasions of the Bush era, but the death, suffering and destabilization caused by Obama’s depravity have been just as real.

This is as clear as day, and yet we still get imperial propaganda outlets like The Washington Post telling us that “everyone” is to blame for Libya’s current troubles. WaPo has a new article out titled “Libya’s catastrophe is everyone’s fault,” which is a bit like Charles Manson saying the Manson Family killings were everyone’s fault. The article’s author Ishaan Tharoor lays the blame for Libya’s inability to adequately protect its people from the flood on “Libya’s feuding factions and fractured polity” as well as other nations in the region before conceding that NATO’s toppling of Gaddafi would have also played some role.

Another Washington Post article titled “How a decade of conflict and division put Libya in peril of disaster” lays zero blame at all on Obama and NATO powers for the nation’s suffering, saying only that Gaddafi was a brutal dictator who “was killed by rebel forces during a NATO-backed Arab Spring uprising.” But it does acknowledge that Libyans are now dying because the nation’s infrastructure has been in a state of decay since 2011:

“The country, with terrain ranging across desert and coastal communities, is highly vulnerable to human-induced climate change. But improvements to and maintenance of basic services and infrastructure, such as the country’s networks of dams, has been deprioritized, said Mary Fitzgerald, a Libya expert at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank.

“‘Between 2011 and 2014, there were already concerns about the state of Libyan infrastructure,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘And then Libya went through a six-year civil conflict from 2014 to 2020 and a lot of infrastructure was damaged during that conflict. In the three years since, you have a situation of rival government, which has yet again complicated political dynamics.’”

This nation has been in a continuous state of strife, violence and suffering since the United States spearheaded a NATO campaign to smash it to pieces. And yet you’ll still get empire simps telling you that NATO is a “defensive alliance”, and you’ll still get liberals saying that Obama’s worst scandal was wearing a tan suit one time.

Barack Obama belongs in a fucking cage. His crimes are utterly unforgivable, and if the law existed to punish the world’s worst criminals instead of to protect them he would be rotting in a maximum security prison cell.

It’s all well and good that people are sending Libya aid and that the call to do so is being amplified by influential voices. But the fact that the 44th president of the United States can just come out and pretend to support a nation he personally helped destroy without being called out and excoriated by the mass media shows that we live in a world which is dominated by lies and propaganda. Barack Obama Belongs In A Fucking Cage

Article with supporting links.
caitlinjohnst.one/p/barack-obama…

Americans Are More Propagandized Than Chinese People

"Americans don’t even know they’re continually ingesting US empire propaganda to inform their worldview, and they live under the most abusive regime on earth."
caitlinjohnst.one/p/americans-ar… “Chinese people live in a freakish backwards mind-controlled dystopia where dissenting thought is crushed and everyone’s brainwashed by propaganda.”

“Oh yeah? How do you know?”

“Come on man, it’s all over the news all day every day!”

soundcloud.com/going_rogue/am…