Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

How high does the pile of mutilated and dismembered children need to be before it's high enough? Give me a specific height please, in meters or in yards. Reading by Tim Foley.

You see kids, Israel needs to keep dropping bombs on buildings full of children and targeting civilians with siege warfare and murdering Palestinians in the West Bank and censoring the media and arresting dissidents and killing journalists, because if it doesn't, the bad guys will win. No no you don't understand: if Israel stops killing children by the thousands in its relentless bombing campaign, the nation could be taken over by murderous terrorists. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's a little bit bomby in Gaza today, at least that's what the news men say. Israel's victims were "murdered" and "killed" and all mourn the innocent blood that was spilled, but in Gaza explosives just fall from the air and nobody mentions who launched them, from where. They talk about "blasts" and how buildings were "hit". Who blasted and hit them? Eh, who gives a shit. It's a little bit bomby outside, that's the weather. Put up your umbrellas, dudes. Get it together. Reading by Tim Foley.

I used to be pro-Palestinian, you know. I thought Israel was wrong for carpet bombing Gaza and using siege warfare on civilians. But then I ran into a very wise Israel apologist who changed my way of looking at things forever. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US-centralized empire is a giant network of allies, partners and assets spanning the entire globe. Many of the nations in this network, such as Israel, have strong ideologies and values systems that the empire must cooperate with to obtain their loyalty. But the empire itself has no ideology or values - it values nothing but planetary domination. The empire's motives are no more ideological than the motives of a mugger are ideological. So the empire has no ideology, but it is held together by cooperation with individual governments who do. The problem this creates is that sometimes the ideologies of those states cause them to do things that go against the interests of the empire as a whole. Israel can just up and decide to commit a genocidal massacre in front of everyone. Saudi Arabia can decide it's going to dismember a Washington Post reporter with a bone saw. Proxies in Ukraine can keep saying Nazi things and sporting Nazi insignia in public. They do these things because unlike the top brass in the im

The western press have been finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to do reporting alongside the middle easterners they've been lying about for generations, and discovering that a lot of those middle easterners speak English and have a few things to say. Reading by Tim Foley.

Can't stop tripping on how fast the west moved from arming and applauding Nazis to backing an actual genocide. Reading by Tim Foley.

One thing I've been meaning to highlight for the last few days is the way US warmongers have been forcefully pushing the propaganda narrative that Hamas bears 100 percent responsibility for all deaths in Gaza, and Israel bears zero percent, as Israel ramps up its mass slaughter of Palestinians. Reading by Tim Foley.

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. Reading by Tim Foley.

Another strange thing about Israel's claim that its intelligence services didn't detect preparations for the Hamas attack on October 7 is the fact that it is now releasing what it claims are intercepted conversations of Hamas fighters talking to each other about matters of high importance. Reading by Tim Foley.

"But what I'd like to quickly document as things unfold is the highly unusual number of mass media reporters I've been seeing who haven't hesitated to point to Israel as the probable culprit." Reading by Tim Foley.

Normalize the phrase "the nonstop bombing campaign known as the nation of Israel". Reading by Tim Foley.

One of the most destructive ideas in modern times is this notion that it's fine and appropriate for governments to act like monsters whenever anything bad happens to their country. We saw it happen with the United States after 9/11, and we're seeing it now with Israel. Reading by Tim Foley.

The "human shields" argument is just bombing civilians and blaming it on someone else. That's all it's ever been. The "human shields" argument is like if London had responded to an IRA attack by dropping thousands of bombs on Belfast, killing thousands of Irish civilians and hundreds of children, and justifying its bombing campaign by calling it an unfortunate but necessary measure to take out the IRA's Belfast Brigade because they're located in the same places as civilians. It's like if the western political/media class defended and supported the carpet bombing of Belfast, saying "All those thousands of deaths are the fault of the IRA, because they're in Belfast where the civilians are. England has a right to defend itself, after all." It's like if Belfast was walled in with nowhere for civilians to escape to, and London carpet bombed it targeting schools, churches and hospitals, and the western press framed this relentless assault on civilian buildings as "the UK-IRA war" in which London is exclusively b

Stop calling it the "Israel-Hamas war". It's the Israel-Gaza massacre. Calling it the Israel-Hamas war creates the false impression that this is a war that is directed exclusively at Hamas when it's really an ethnic purge that's directed at all Palestinians in Gaza.  The child body count alone makes it clear that this isn't a war against Hamas; I saw an anonymous account point out on Twitter that the number of children killed in this onslaught after one week already exceeds the total number of children killed after a year and a half of fighting in Ukraine, per the United Nations. Laying complete siege to a civilian population and bombing anything that stands would be an extraordinary abomination in any war. And this is not a war, it's an enclosed shooting range with military explosives and human targets. Reading by Tim Foley.

Internet blackouts, the war on journalism, propaganda, influence operations, bans on demonstrations and online censorship are all happening for the same reason: to keep the public from forming a truth-based understanding of what's happening in Gaza. Because if the public did form a truth-based understanding of what's happening in Gaza, they wouldn't consent to what's happening there. Reading by Tim Foley.

So be perfectly clear, the US government is fully behind this massacre, and is just as culpable for everything that happens in Gaza as the Israeli government. These abuses are being perpetrated using US weapons, US funding and US consent. Washington could end this mass atrocity with a word, and instead they're fully aligning themselves behind it. Israel's crimes in Gaza are not meaningfully separate from the crimes of the US war machine. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's interesting how last week Israel had no idea what Hamas was up to, and yet this week they know every mosque, school and hospital that Hamas is hiding in. Reading by Tim Foley.

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. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Israel-Palestine issue is not complicated; an apartheid regime abuses and oppresses an indigenous ethnic group who don't have the same rights as others. The only reason anyone thinks it's complicated is because they assume if it were simple, the news would've told them so. Really Israel-Palestine is one of the easier conflicts to understand on the world stage; conflicts like Ukraine or Syria are much more complicated. It's obvious at a glance that there's one group in power and another group being treated very badly by that group, but because the press frames it as a complicated issue with its sympathies wildly slanted toward the apartheid regime, people assume it can't be as simple as what it looks like at first glance. It is, though. Israel is exactly the abusive apartheid regime it looks like on the surface. Remember this as the bodies pile up and Gaza is turned into a smoldering crater. This is exactly what it looks like. Reading by Tim Foley.