Roll-up, roll-up - Grab your front row seats at the Dystopian Clown Show
In which a wanted war criminal visits the White House, the Corridor of Death reveals its grisly secrets, Western media goes into hysterics over 'gaunt' hostages & Yaov Gallant spills the beans ...
The last week or so, like every week since the scales fully fell from my eyes and I realised the world we all live in is a lawless wasteland where the powerful make the rules and the weak obey them or die, has been a total dystopian clown show.
First, we have Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. Netanyahu, lest we forget, is a wanted war criminal with an arrest warrant out on him from the International Criminal Court (ICC). This is the same ICC the entire Western establishment supported with all their hearts right up until the moment it started making noises about holding Israeli politicians accountable for their crimes. The same ICC that put out an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin to much acclaim from the ‘great and the good’. The same ICC that is so very efficient and effective at holding various African ‘dictators’ to account. That ICC.
But of course now that the ICC has turned its sights on a valued U.S. ally suddenly it’s no longer quite so admired as it once was. In fact now it is now so out of favour that President Trump, fresh from his cosy fireside chat with Netanyahu, has just signed an Executive Order imposing sanctions on ICC staff12.
So, what exactly transpired during that fireside chat between the President of the United States and the wanted war criminal you may ask? What transpired was the President of the United States - land of the free, home of the brave, purveyor of democracy and freedom, blah-blah-blah - declared that the Palestinians should be moved out of Gaza - ethnically cleansed in other words. Gaza was “hell, one of the meanest, toughest places on earth” Trump opined, as Netanyahu, the man responsible for this ‘hell’, sat nodding and smiling beside him, the flames from the White House fire flickering evocatively in the background.
Trump then doubled down on his suggestion that the Gaza Strip be ethnically cleansed in a press conference aboard Air Force One en-route to the Super Bowl
Think of it as a big real estate site”, he said. “The United States is going to own it and we’re going to slowly, very slowly—we’re in no rush—develop it and bring stability to the Middle East.
There has been, thankfully, considerable pushback from some of the Arab states Saudi Arabia came out of the gate first with the Foreign Ministry affirming Saudi Arabia’s position on the establishment of a Palestinian state as “firm and unwavering” and “HRH Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister clearly and unequivocally reaffirmed this stance”. King Abdullah of Jordan came out a little later with a pretty unequivocal F**k you to Trump’s proposal saying "We will never accept the forced displacement of Palestinians which is a war crime".
Meanwhile Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has decided not to travel to Washington for talks at the White House as long as the agenda includes Trump’s plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza, according to two Egyptian security sources. Egypt has also put forward a reconstruction plan which reportedly involves “circumventing the U.S. while utilising economic/logistics efforts from Arab states, the UN, and Europe”. Egypt is convening a conference next week with Jordan, Qatar, Saudi, and UAE to discuss the plan’s details/execution.
Trump, however, continued to Trumpishly triple down on his real estate development plans. Indeed, when a reporter asked him under what authority he was taking Gaza, he answered, with the King of Jordan sitting right next to him, “Under the U.S. authority” as (slightly misquoted) gleefully here by one of Twitter / X’s busiest and most bushy-tailed Zionists, Dr Eli David.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, the place Trump is claiming could be another Riviera, the scale of devastation Israel has left in its wake is becoming more and more obvious. The IDF’s withdrawn from the Netzarim Corridor - aka the ‘corridor of death’ - has revealed evidence not only of wanton destruction, but also of the sadistic barbarity with which the IDF conducted itself during its time in the enclave.
As reported by Translating Falasteen on Twitter / X on February 10.
The place was completely destroyed - agricultural areas, residential neighbourhoods and factories were also completely destroyed after more than a year of destruction and devastation carried out by the Israeli Occupation Forces in this place here
As well as the destruction wrought on the land and buildings of the area, returning Palestinians have found “decapitated heads, rotting corpses, hacked bodies, [and] skeletal remains” in an area where, as Palestinian writer and political analyst Mohammed Shehada pointed out on Twitter / X, Israeli soldiers “barbecued, played football & threw parties”. The video Shehada had attached to this post has since been removed by Twitter / X - a platform that turns a blind eye to the most depraved, deranged material and yet finds itself suddenly squeamish at the evidence of Israeli depravity towards Palestinians.
Then, while those of us actually paying attention were still reeling from the revelations of Israeli barbarity in the Netzarim Corridor, Hamas releases another batch of Israeli hostages and all hell breaks loose because they’re looking a little thinner than they were when they went in3.
The Zionists, as expected, went completely mental - making comparisons with concentration camp victims during the Nazi Holocaust and crying out for revenge while the Western media - which had been seemingly completely oblivious to the condition of the Palestinians released from Israeli jails - started clutching its pearls and wetting its collective panties over the state of the Israeli hostages. Let’s have a quick gallop through some examples.
Firstly, there was this classic from the New York Times which managed to mention the ‘gaunt’ hostages and to insinuate that Hamas somehow bullied (perhaps even tortured!!!) them into publicly thanking them before their release.
This next one from the Washington Post went for maximum emotional impact with Israel ‘decrying’ the ‘shocking images’ and noting that the hostages were not only ‘gaunt’ - as all the other media outlets have already informed us - but that they were also ‘pale’.
The Guardian, going for some much-needed ‘balance’ pointed out that 'Gaunt Israelis’ and Palestinians (no adjectives needed) were freed and then added that the state of the Israelis ‘shocked’ the country before throwing in the fact that several released Palestinians also needed hospitalisation.
This next one, from Australia’s ABC News described the Israeli hostages as ‘emaciated’, noting that this angered the Israelis, but, like the Guardian, it decided to opt for some balance and mentioned the fact that some of the Palestinians who had been freed were hospitalised.
Remarkably, this headline - which, let’s be clear, foregrounded the ‘emaciated’ hostages and Israeli anger before mentioning that the freed Palestinians were hospitalised, enraged Australian Zionists so much they took to Twitter / X frothing with righteous indignation. According to a man called David Hollyoake, ABC are “vile terrorist apologists” because, I presume, they mentioned that the freed Palestinians were hospitalised without mentioning that they were “murderers, rapists, terrorists, etc”. As I’ll discuss further below. that is, of course, completely false. Another enraged Zionist - Seez Wool - calls the ABC the ‘Antisemitic Broadcasting Association’.
This, ironically, is the same ABC which is currently embroiled in a court case because it dismissed a temporary employee - Antoinette Lattouf - for posting a Human Rights Watch report on her Instagram which accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. It is becoming more and more obvious as the case progresses that Lattouf was fired because she was critical of Israel.
Then there was this banger from CNN which packed a serious punch for all the punters at home. The Israeli hostages were ‘pale and gaunt’ upon being freed from ‘Gaza captivity’ and then there were also scores of Palestinian prisoners released too - ho-hum, boring as f**k, let’s move right along.
Surprisingly, the BBC’s first effort out of the gate was a little anaemic in comparison to other media outlets. But simple and spare as it was, it nevertheless managed to get the word that was on everyone’s lips in there, the ubiquitous ‘gaunt’.
Like it’s public broadcasting colleague in Australia, however, the poor old BBC, copped a huge amount of flak from Zionists for this headline - presumably because of it’s lack of zeal in decrying of the general ‘gauntness’ of the hostages and perhaps also because of its failure to give Hamas and the Palestinian ‘prisoners’ a good bollocking into the bargain. Here is a small taster of the jolly good walloping received by the BBC for being, in the words of one Milena Rodban, “a despicable den of terrorist sympathising propagandists”.
Given the remarkably craven obesiance to Israel demonstrated by the BBC throughout the entire genocide - and given the fact that BBC’s Middle East Online Editor, Raffi Berg, is an avowed Israel fanatic with alleged links to Mossad and the CIA - this rage does seem quite remarkable and, IMHO, more than a little unfair on the poor old BBC who have worked so tirelessly to lick Zionist butt - but it goes to show that there’s simply no pleasing some people.
Next the BBC, perhaps to appease the all those enraged Zionists threatening to withhold their license fees, suggested that ‘anger at the sight of gaunt hostages’ might jeopardise the ‘fragile’ ceasefire. When I saw this I felt like I might just completely lose my mind. Firstly, Israel has - from day 1 - been jeopardising this ceasefire. No, scratch that - Israel has, since Day 1, been breaking the ceasefire. Since the agreement was signed it has killed over 100 Palestinians in Gaza and has failed to deliver even a fraction of the aid that it pledged to deliver. So the sight of a few ‘gaunt’ - or even, God forbid - ‘pale and gaunt’ hostages is really neither here nor there.
As reported by the New York Times
The current standoff stems in part from Hamas's accusation that Israel has not upheld its promises for the first phase of the cease-fire. Israel was required to send hundreds of thousands of tents into Gaza, a promise that Hamas says Israel has not kept.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, three Israeli officials and two mediators said that Hamas's claims were accurate.
Secondly, there is a very good reason why the three Israeli hostages were looking a little ‘gaunt’ and that is that Israel had a policy - from the very beginning of their genocidal assault on Gaza - of deliberately withholding aid, including food, from the besieged enclave.
During early to mid-2024 there were also hundreds of Israelis gathered at the Kerem Shalom Crossing attempting to block aid that Israel had approved from actually getting in to Gaza.
At one stage these protesters set up tents - and even a bouncy castle - so they could make preventing aid getting in to Gaza more of a festive family affair. All these Israelis must surely have known that if no aid got in to Palestinians then no aid would reach Israeli hostages either … thus risking the horrible possibility that they may emerge from captivity a little - shall we say - gaunt?
Thirdly and most definitely not leastly , if the bleeding hearts at the BBC thought the Israeli hostages looked ‘gaunt’ how would they describe the state of Palestinians released from Israeli jails and detention centres? Very gaunt perhaps? Very, very gaunt - and perhaps also ‘pale’. Maybe even emaciated? We’ll never know because the BBC simply never comments on the state of the released Palestinians and nor does any other Western media outlet. They rarely say anything specific about them at all. They never humanise them by mentioning names or ages - they are just “scores of Palestinians” released by Israel. No-one is interested in how they’re looking, in how they might be feeling, in how happy their families might be to see them. As far as Israel and its obedient servants in the Western media are concerned the less said about them the better.
And what about those prisoners who are still inside these Israeli terror dungeons - like Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, for example. As reported by Al Jazeera, Dr Abu Safia, Head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya
refused multiple Israeli orders to leave Kamal Adwan Hospital after the Israeli military imposed a devastating blockade on the northern Gaza Strip on October 5 …
He was wounded by shrapnel from an Israeli drone attack on the hospital on November 23 while he was exiting the operating room. He sustained six shrapnel wounds to his thigh, which caused ruptures in his veins and arteries. But he pleaded to continue his work.
The IDF laid siege to Kamal Adwan Hospital in late December and the last time anyone saw Dr Abu Safia he was walking through the rubble towards an Israeli tank. No-one has seen him since.
Recently his family learned that while in custody Dr Abu Safiya has been to remove his clothes and sit on gravel for five continuous hours, he’s been beaten with an electric baton until he lost consciousness from suffocation and he has spent 24 days in solitary confinement. All for the egregious and unforgivable crimes of being a doctor in Northern Gaza who refused to leave his patients. According to the angry Zionists complaining to the BBC, however, Dr Abu Safiya - because he is a ‘prisoner’ of Israel - must be a murderer, a rapist and a terrorist. Give me strength.
How many times has this doctor’s plight been mentioned by those media pearl-clutchers who are so ‘dismayed’ and ‘concerned’ by the state of the Israeli hostages? I’ll hazard a guess - not once.
And what about the many hundreds of prisoners who die in Israeli custody? Take, for example, Dr Adnan Bursh, Head of Orthapaedics at Al Shifa, who was tortured - allegedly raped - to death by Israeli guards. I don’t need to even ask you to imagine the hysteria that would ensue if Hamas broke into a hospital in Tel Aviv, killed many of the staff and patients and then dragged the head of Orthopaedics away and raped him to death.
The screaming headlines would go on for days, weeks - let’s be honest, they’d go on for months, just like the hysteria over October 7. It would be all the evidence we ever needed to prove that Hamas - and Palestinians in general - were evil beyond any hope of redemption. As far as I know, however, there have been no headlines in any Western media outlet about the terrible fate of Dr Adnan Bursh - but please do correct me if I am wrong. I would dearly like to be because to imagine that not one Western journalist cared about the life and the death of this brave, compassionate doctor, so well-loved by his colleagues and patients, breaks my damn heart.
But I digress, let’s get back to the important people - so important in fact that the President of the United States, and part-time real estate mogul, one Donald J. Trump, weighed in with his feels about their parlous state - as described below by another of Twitter / X’s star Zionists - ‘The Persian Jewess’. According to Trump “[the Israeli hostages] literally look like old pictures of Holocaust survivors”. He also added what sounded like a veiled (or not so veiled) threat - “I don’t know how long we’re gonna take that”.
So much hysterical yelling and screaming about some skinny looking Israelis and yet so little concern about horrors endured by Palestinians held in Israeli jails and detention centres - many of them without charge - and so little comment about the state of Palestinians who emerge from these nightmarish hell-holes. In the immortal words of Donald J. Trump - “I don’t know how long we’re gonna take that”.
And, just before I move on from this topic, note how all these headlines describe the Israelis as ‘hostages’ and the Palestinians as ‘prisoners’. As Palestine's Ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, pointed out in a recent interview with the BBC, describing Palestinians as ‘prisoners’ gives the impression that they are all criminals who have been convicted in a proper court. This might be handy for hasbara purposes - see the hysterical screaming from Zionists I discuss above - but it couldn’t be further from the truth. As Zomlot explains “most [Palestinian prisoners] have been detained with no charge, under administrative detention, or charged, tried and found guilty in martial courts where the rate of conviction is 99%”.
Zomlot goes on to point out that
since its military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, Israel has detained 800,000 Palestinians - more than 20% of the entire population and almost half of the male population … The policy is primarily to crush the Palestinian spirit, it has nothing to do with security.
And now for the final instalment in this this week’s instalment of the Clown Show. While Zionists and the entire Western media were getting their tights in a tangle over the sight of the three ‘gaunt’ Israeli hostages, Yoav Gallant - ex Israeli Defence Minister, and all-round nice guy who declared the entire Gaza Strip should be deprived of food, power and fuel - finally admitted what independent media have been trying to tell the world for months now, that yes, Israel did, in fact, order the Hannibal Directive on October 7.
In this clip from from an interview on Israel’s Channel 12, journalist Amit Segal explained that ‘the Hannibal Directive says to shoot to kill when there is a vehicle containing an Israeli hostage’. This was not disputed by Gallant who then went on to say the directive was issued ‘tactically’ and ‘in various places’ next to Gaza.
As was pointed out by Asa Winstanley for Electronic Intifada, however,
contrary to Gallant’s statement that the Hannibal Directive was unevenly applied in different areas, Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported in January 2024 that at midday on 7 October, an unambiguous order was given from the high command of the Israeli military to invoke the Hannibal Directive across the entire region.
The order came “even if this means the endangerment or harming of the lives of civilians in the region, including the captives themselves,” Israeli journalists Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun reported.
In July, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the order “not a single vehicle can return to Gaza” was issued to the Gaza Division of the Israeli military at 11:22 am that day.
As Winstanley further notes, however, Gallant’s statement is
highly significant, as the first public admission by a contemporary Israeli minister that their troops were ordered to fire on their own people on 7 October.
Sadly, however, perhaps due to being so traumatised over the shocking gauntness of the Israeli hostages, the Western media seem to have entirely missed the news that a senior Israeli official has, for the first time, confirmed that the Hannibal Directive was indeed deployed on 7 October, as pointed out by Dan Sheehan on Twitter / X on February 8.
Indeed, in an article published on 12th February MediaLens points out that as far as they can tell from an internet and newspaper database searches of UK media outlets
there have been no mentions of Gallant’s admission that the Hannibal Directive was in force on 7 October. The most recent – and only – mention of ‘Hannibal Directive’ on the BBC website is from 2015. And we had to go all the way back to 2006 to find the phrase anywhere on the Guardian website. This is a shocking example of propaganda by omission.
So essentially it has been confirmed that many - indeed some have even suggested most - of those killed on October 7 were killed by Israel and yet Western media is completely silent. Given there is no way that it could be argued this isn’t newsworthy given the massive significance accorded to the events of October 7 it is obvious that there is a gigantic and coordinated cover-up going on across the entirety of the Western mainstream media. This is happening because it is absolutely imperative to both Israel, and to its master the United States, that the ‘story’ of October 7 - that Hamas committed irredeemably, inhumanly barbaric acts driven by nothing but pure ‘Jew hate’ - remains intact. This is, of course, due to the fundamental importance of this story as a means of generating and maintaining support for both the genocide in Gaza and, currently, for the slow-motion genocide and ethnic cleansing going on in the West Bank.
The lunacy of Trump’s ‘redevelopment’ plan for Gaza, the horrors being revealed as Palestinians re-enter the Netazarim Corridor, the terrible state of prisoners being released by Israel juxtaposed with the much less terrible state of the prisoners released by Hamas and the media’s silence over one and hysteria over the other over the other, all topped off with the revelation - by Yoav Gallant no less - that Israel probably killed one hell of a lot of the people who died on October 7 is almost more I can bear without feeling like I’m going stark staring mad. Can things get any crazier??
The only thing keeping me even slightly sane right now is the steadfast courage and determination of the Palestinian people.
The photos and videos of Palestinians returning to their devastated homes and vowing to remain and rebuild have been an inspiring testimony to the resilience of the human spirit. So, as a much-needed palate cleanser to all the madness I’ve ranted on about above I’ll leave you with this post from journalist Hossam Shabat - a reporter who has - courageously - never left North Gaza.
We’re staying put here. Despite all the rubble you see around me, this is still our land, and we are not leaving. This land is Palestinian land and belongs to Palestinians only
And this, from Yasser Abdulaal, a Palestinian New Zealander who has lived in my hometown of Ōutautahi for the last five years and who has lost 55 members of his extended family in the genocide:
As Abdulaal said in an interview with RNZ, his two sisters and their husbands, who have lost their homes, could have left at the start of the bombing but they refused to abandon their land and they would not be leaving now.
After the ceasefire and with Trump’s statements, they are definitely not going to leave Gaza, regardless of what he says and what [the US] does. It’s their land.
And, finally, this article in the New Yorker by Mosab Abu Toha
Palestinians do not need President Trump to talk about Gaza as if it were an empty hotel room that needs redesigning. What we need is for the rest of the world to hear about Gaza’s basic, immediate necessities. We need to erect tents and fill them with teachers so that children who have missed sixteen months of learning can go back to school. We need to dig through the debris for whatever remains of our brothers and sisters and parents and children so that we can bury them. We need heavy equipment to clear away fifty million tons of rubble and replace it with places to live and work. We need to replant devastated fields so that Palestinian farmers can grow our food again. We need to replace sites of death with hospitals where people can heal. We need an end to the state of siege that surrounds us. And the people who shape this future need to be us Palestinians—not the people who made Gaza look like a demolition site, or who now seem to think that an entire people should be demolished, too. All of these things are important. But nothing is more important than staying.
So suck on that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Suck on that all you batshit crazy brainwashed Zionists. Suck on that Keir Starmer and David Lammy and Ursula von der Leyen and all the rest of you Western imperialist ghouls. The Palestinian people are not leaving Gaza.
This isn’t the first time Trump has sanctioned the ICC - he imposed sanctions on ICC officials who were investigating whether US forces had committed war crimes in Afghanistan.
And we shouldn’t forget, of course, that the U.S. was never a fan of its own politicians and officials being held accountable by the ICC - it passed a law in 2001-02 forbidding the turning over of U.S. citizens to the ICC for war crimes and claiming the right to break them out of the Hague if they ended up there - hence its nickname the ‘Hague Invasion Act’.
I haven’t seen any speculations as to why the 3 male hostages were looking thinner than then the women who had been released previously but my theory - and it’s just a theory, I may be completely wrong - is that the female hostages were given extra rations and treated with the respect accorded to women in Palestinian society whereas the male hostages were probably given normal rations and treated as like men - in other words, they were probably eating about the same amount of food their captors were eating.
Thanks for chronicling the insanity, Karyn. Although, it isn’t really insanity in so far as that word implies a lack of moral responsibility for one’s actions - ‘inhumanity’ would be a better word. What has been done and is being done is deliberate and thought through. As for the media, the kindest thing I can say is that the only explanation for their complicity in hiding the reality of the suffering of Palestinians is that they must feel the threat of some kind of sword of Damocles hanging over their heads if they were to so much as hint at the truth that Israel and the IDF (let alone our own leaders) have acted with calculated and hideous barbarism - which, objectively, they have. Why else would our own media outlets such as TVOne, RNZ, the Herald and Stuff act like Admiral Nelson using his blind eye to survey the battlefield? I thought that ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ and that modern news was all about ‘clicks’ and clicks were all about spectacle and ‘human interest’? If that were the case, the horror stories coming out of Gaza should have led headlines and topped newscasts every single hour of every day for the past 16 months - but barely a whisper of such ‘human interest’ stories of utter loss and spectacular devastation. And it’s not as if our media are being careful not to traumatise and shock us because of our fragile sensibilities over the horrors suffered by the victims of war. I’m sure, for example, we’ve heard plenty of heart-rending personal tales of the suffering of Ukrainians from our media over that time. Far more than they have served up–if they have indeed reported on any at all–from the daily deluge of such tales of Palestinian suffering coming out of Gaza and, now, the West Bank. Why the glaring omission? Why the stark inconsistency? Is it simply that our media have a nose for those instances of human suffering that serve Western interests and those that do not? The former get the coverage, the latter do not? How vilely cynical and inhuman such a calculation would be.