Screaming into the void

In which I express my horror, my shame and my disbelief at a world that seems to have gone completely stark, staring mad.

Ever since Israel began its final extermination campaign in Northern Gaza I’ve been unable to write. I had number of articles started before the horrors of this latest phase of Israel’s genocide commenced - one about the demonisation of Palestinian men, another arguing that what Israel is doing in Gaza and now in Lebanon and Syria is as much the US’s war as it is Israel’s, and another about the weirdness of a Twitter / X timeline full of the documented horrors of the Gaza genocide alongside increasingly strident Zionist denial that what is happening in front of our very eyes is really happening at all. I’ll hopefully finish at least a couple of these at some stage in the nearish future but right now it seems beyond my capacity to even think straight about any of this, let alone write about it.

Despite my inability to get my thoughts in any sort of coherent order, however, I feel compelled to express something of the horror I am feeling right now. I’m not writing this to make any clear or coherent point. I’m not writing it to share any insights or to bring together any research. I am writing it purely to vent. It’s a means for me to scream into the void, to express my horror, my shame and my disbelief at a world that seems to have gone completely stark, staring mad.

In the weeks following the IDF’s re-entry into Northern Gaza I keep finding myself returning to Twitter / X - hoping to find that Israel has finally gone over that mythical red line the Biden Administration used to mention occasionally - despite knowing, from the research I’ve already done for one of the posts mentioned above that that will never happen. I keep scrolling and refreshing on that hell-site - hoping against hope that the rest of the world will finally stand up and say ‘Enough! No more!’ forcing the United Nations to override the U.S. vetoes - there was another one just yesterday - and send in a multi-national peace-keeping force - despite knowing, due to the power dynamics at work, that the chances of that happening are vanishingly small. I keep hoping and wishing for a miracle that will end this thing all the while knowing that powerful interests will do everything they can to make sure that even the possibility of any such miracle occurring would be strangled in its cradle.

I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m haunted by the thought that there but for the grace of God go I, go you, go any of us. It could be our friends, people we share meals with, people we laugh over a glass of wine with, people we talk politics and literature and books with, blown into a hundred pieces by 2000 pound bombs. It could be my sister and her family dodging the weaponised drones that prowl above the streets day and night. It could be my husband, bound and blindfolded and herded into a pit with hundreds of other men. It could be my nephew burned to death in a hospital tent. It could be me howling with grief in a rubble-strewn street. It could be everyone in my city searching for food, driven from place to place, running from an army of people so full of hate they can look through the sights of their rifles at a child’s head, a child’s chest, and coldly, mercilessly pull the trigger.

It could be all of us - our dreams, our hopes, our very lives destroyed by an implacable foe determined to exterminate us at all costs. An implacable foe supported, with absolutely no conditions attached, by the United States The U.S of A - the country that’s been sold to me my entire life as the ‘good guy’, an almost mythical place full of square-jawed heroes who, against all odds, take on the bad guys and win. The country that stands up for the little guy. The country that sternly wags its finger - and usually a lot more than that - at Russia, North Korea, Iran and China for ‘authoritarianism’, for ‘flouting international law’, for ‘human rights violations’. The land of democracy and freedom, hamburgers and Hollywood movies.

While it’s been a long time since I believed all that bullshit some of it must still be jammed in my circuitry - baked in before I was old enough to think for myself - because the horrors the United States have under-written in Gaza have shocked me to my core. I never dreamed even the U.S. could be quite this blatantly, shamelessly evil. I thought it would have stopped Israel long before now. I honestly thought it would pull the plug as soon as the genocidal rhetoric started up. After all, how could the U.S. continue to support a country that was openly professing the intention to commit genocide? Hadn’t it just supported the indictment of Vladimir Putin for this very crime in Ukraine and, from memory, all he did was ship some Ukrainian kids to Russia.

But as the inimitable Caitlin Johnston points out, the reason so many of us - even those of us who should know better - have this reflexive sense that the U.S. is the good guy is because it has been subjecting us all to one of the most long-running and sophisticated propaganda campaigns the world has ever known. The U.S. has worked very, very hard for a very, very long time to convince us all of its exceptional nature - its unique dedication to freedom and democracy for all. While Kamala Harris and her team might have been lying through their teeth about ‘working around the clock’ to achieve a ceasefire the entire U.S. establishment certainly has been working around the clock to keep as many of us as possible in the dark about what the United States really is - a powerful empire - and about how ruthlessly it seeks to maintain and even expand its hegemony over us all.

The live-streamed horrors of Gaza have exposed the United States and, of course, its little sidekick, Israel, in a way they’ve never been exposed before. Many more people, are seeing both these states for what they really are - a bloodthirsty empire and it’s genocidal settler-colonial vassal - but it seems that those in charge have made the calculation that those numbers are still manageable and that they can still hoodwink the rest of the bewildered herd enough to continue to their campaign of terror in Gaza and now beyond into Lebanon, Syria and maybe even Iran and get away with it.

As I’ve already pointed out numerous times here on Substack, the way in which power keeps the majority of the population in the dark is to use the legacy media to whitewash Israeli crimes, demonise the Palestinian resistance, downplay the suffering of the Palestinian people, mute Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices and elevate the Israeli narrative. Which brings me to the other horror of this time. Not only are we watching the Palestinian people being literally exterminated in front of our eyes - the whole thing live-streamed on our phones - we are also forced to watch our media - and our craven, bootlicking Western politicians - denying that reality either by obfuscation, silence or outright lies.

The determination on the part of our media and our politicians to continue this relentless PR campaign for Israel has, like the genocide itself, shocked me to the core. When all this first started I thought it would only be a matter of time before the sheer weight of facts on the ground would force the truth to be told but, once again, I was wrong. Not only have they continued to lie and to obfuscate in the face of what is now incontrovertibly a deliberate campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing by Israel it feels as if they’ve actually doubled down on the bullshit.

The mythical ‘pogrom’ in Amsterdam is the latest in a long, long line of media mendacity - this one even more obvious than the rest because we actually watched, in real time, various media outlets - not to mention a parade of lying Western politicians - create this story out of thin air right before our eyes. Essentially a bunch of Israeli soccer hooligans wandered around Amsterdam chanting racist slogans - “Let the IDF win and f**k the Arabs” “F**k you terrorists, Sinwar die, everybody die”, “There is no school in Gaza because all the children are dead” - singing vile songs about rape, pulling down and burning Palestinian flags, vandalising people’s homes and threatening and, in some cases, assaulting the locals - all without the local police lifting a finger to stop them.

Then - surprise, surprise - the locals decided to fight back. It was this effort to fight back - the temerity!! - that constituted the ‘pogrom’ that almost the entire Western media and political class then proceeded to have a massive, coordinated fit of the vapours over. Amsterdam’s Mayor screeched about “anti-semitic hit and run squads” and “anti-semitic Jew hunts”. But no Dutch Jews, or Dutch Jewish institutions or property were attacked - only the Israeli soccer hooligans. Why? Because the Israeli soccer hooligans were running around the city acting like racist pieces of shit. Very straight-forward really.

As historian Zachary Foster pointed out on Twitter / X our political leaders have expressed more outrage at these provoked attacks on the racist Israeli soccer hooligans - which resulted in precisely zero deaths - the they have at the deliberate mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the deliberate starvation of millions. What a world.

We had the Dutch King yelping that “we have failed Jews during football attacks like we did under Nazis” - a statement that requires a only the smallest amount of knowledge of history to fully grasp the ludicrous degree of hyperbole being engaged in by Holland’s royal personage over this incident.

Even President Biden chimed in - imagine, the President of the United States releasing a statement about an episode of racist soccer hooliganism in a European city, the very same President who has released, as far as I’m aware, the sum total of zero statements about any of the horrors that have occurred in Gaza or in Lebanon over the last year. Like the Dutch king, Biden made a deliberate comparison between what happened to the Israeli soccer hooligans and the persecution of Jewish people during the Holocaust

And, of course, Secretary of State, Antony Blinken had to weigh in with his fivepence worth - taking care to give the ‘anti-semitism’ angle a damn good hammering.

Pierre Poilievre - the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party - leapt into the fray as well - once again drawing ludicrous comparisons between a bunch of Israeli soccer hooligans getting their comeuppance after swanning around Amsterdam acting like utter tools and the persecution of the Jews during the Nazi era. And his side-kick, the execrable Melissa Lantsman decided to thrown in a hearty dose of Islamophobia by claiming that “this is what globalise the intifada looks like”.

It’s so ridiculous it would actually be funny if what all these politicians are saying weren’t so inflammatory, so unbelievably dangerous.

Then, of course, we had the big Zionist accounts like Nioh Berg - “British-Iranian Jewish | Zionist - Anti-IR in Iran | Monarchist | Geopolitics | Make Free Speech Legal Again in the UK” - absolutely awash in crocodile tears and faux outrage. Berg’s ‘apology’ post to Anne Frank “It’s happening again. I’m so sorry” was particularly vomit-inducing but there was lots of other similar posts to be seen in the days following the Amsterdam ‘fauxgrom’ as one Twitter / X user whose name escapes me called it.

Hundreds of Twitter / X users also took the ‘horrors’ of the Amsterdam fauxgrom as a golden opportunity to indulge in a bit of good old-fashioned shameless racism. Here’s a fairly standard example of the genre - too many Muslims, all of them are Hamas, the Jews are outnumbered. Blah, blah, blah and etc.

And then there were the opinion pieces - here are just two examples by Thomas L. Friedman and Bret Stephens of the New York Times …

Unbelievably Israel then sent planes - planes!!!!! - to evacuate the poor little persecuted Israeli soccer hooligans from horrible, dangerous Jew-hating Holland and transport them all to Israel where they proceeded to chant their racist chants and sing their vile songs as soon as they debarked at the airport. Just a lovely bunch of young men all round really and we’re all so very happy that they made it safely back home after being ‘pogrommed’ so viciously. Hopefully they’ll be get some trauma counselling and a nice hot cup of tea for their troubles.

And yet, despite all this crying and wailing and gnashing of teeth, as was pointed out in a detailed investigation by Electronic Intifada

There is still precisely zero evidence that even one anti-Semitic attack took place in Amsterdam – let alone the “pogrom” that Israeli government officials immediately claimed had happened.

Which, of course, hasn’t hampered the enthusiasm of almost every legacy media outlet to try and frame it otherwise. Many outlets, including The New York Times and Sky News, used a video filmed by a Dutch photo-journalist of the Israeli football hooligans on the rampage in Amsterdam to claim that it was actually mobs of ‘Arabs’ carrying out anti-semitic attacks on ‘Jews’. Even New Zealand’s public broadcaster, TVNZ, participated in this coordinated media gaslighting exercise. The Dutch photo-journalist has since attempted to explain to the media outlets who used her video that it shows the opposite of what they are claiming and “that the Maccabi supporters deliberately started the riot in front of central station returning from the game”. She has asked these outlets to adjust their copy accordingly. Almost all have failed to do so.

If the Amsterdam debacle is anything to go by very few people - either in the media or in the political sphere - seem to be coming to their senses over Israel. If anything they’re getting progressively more deranged. Although there is one bright spot amidst the gloom - the Mayor of of Amsterdam has now back-tracked on her original hysterical claims of anti-Jewish ‘pogroms’ and admitting that

We were completely overtaken by Israel. At 3 AM…Netanyahu suddenly gave a lecture about what had happened…while we were still gathering the facts.

Imagine being naive enough at this point in the game to believe anything Benjamin Netanyahu has to say. Imagine being so lacking in any kind of common sense that you’d pause in the middle of ‘gathering the facts’ and accept his take on this situation. Still, credit where credit is due - at least she’s admitting she’s wrong - unlike the New York Times and Sky News and most of the rest of those craven stenographers for power who dare to call themselves journalists.

The next horror that unfolded, hard on the heels of Amsterdam - just as I was about to press publish on this rant in fact - were the testimonies to the UK Parliament of two doctors - Professor Nizam Mamode and Doctor Rohan Talbot - on the horrors they had witnessed while volunteering in Gaza. These testimonies were - believe it or not - even more horrifying than the tragic tale of a bunch of soccer hooligans getting their comeuppance in Amsterdam but despite that they went largely unreported by our useless media. The same useless media who wrote so many pearl-clutching stories and hypocritical, inflammatory opinion pieces about the Amsterdam ‘fauxgrom’.

Here’s just a small snippet from the testimony of Professor Nizam Mamboed:

“What I think I found particularly disturbing was that a bomb would drop on a crowded tented area and then the drones would come down and …. [… there was a long pause here while the surgeon tried to collect himself, visibly traumatised by what he was recounting… ] … So the drones would come down and pick off civilians … children. And we had description after description … this is not, you know, an occasional thing … this was day after day after day operating on children who would say “I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me”. And that’s clearly a deliberate act and its a persistent act, deliberately targeting civilians day after day … "

Can you think of anything more dystopian? Can you think of anything more purely, fucking evil than that? But then, around the same time as these doctors were testifying, we found out that there really is no bottom to the apocalyptic hell that Israel is perpetrating upon the Palestinian people when reports revealed that Dr. Adnan Al-Barsh, Head of the Orthopedic Department at Al-Shifa Hospital, was very likely raped to death in an Israeli prison. Al-Barsh was arrested by the IDF in December 2023 and declared martyred under torture on April 19, 2024.

The Head of Orthopedics of Al Shifa, tortured, possibly raped, to death by Israel because he refused to leave his patients alone to die. That this kind of demented, depraved, sadistic, sick behaviour is occurring at all is bad enough - beyond bad - but that it is occurring in full view of the world and with the tick of approval from the most powerful state in the world - the United States of America, happily supported by craven vassal states like the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia and even my own little country, New Zealand which has just declared the entirety of Hezbollah a ‘terrorist entity’ so as to keep itself in the good books of the world’s biggest bully.

And, of course, as noted by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur to Palestine, this went largely unreported by Western media and un-denounced by Western politicians. Just imagine if Russia was engaging in this level of barbarism - the entire Western media and political class would be in hysterics - we’d all be drowning in a sea of crocodile tears, many of them from that crusty old war-horse with the heart of gold John Kirby. And what makes all this even more sickening is that because it is now patently obvious Western media and politicians only engage in moral outrage when it suits them we now know that any moral outrage they do express is purely performative. They don’t actually mean it - not any of it. In other words, they don’t care about Ukrainians any more than they care about Palestinians - which should be easily discernible to anyone who’s been paying any attention at all to what’s been going on in that neck of the woods over the last 20 years but I digress …

And then, again, just before I was about to finish off this rant and press ‘Publish’ this photo started doing the rounds on Twitter / X …

The horror conveyed in this photograph is difficult to even put into words. That anyone could look at this and not feel profoundly disturbed at the suffering it depicts suggests there’s something very wrong with them. But once again, I was forced to come face to face with the fact that there are lots of of individuals in this world with something very wrong with them - a lot of people so lacking in human empathy they can look at this photo and feel not horror but joy.

Here’s just one example, from a man (an actual human being) called Hillel Fuld - Proud Zionist/Jew, Global Speaker (50+ cities), Tech Columnist (TC, Inc, VB, FastCo)/Advisor (Google, Microsoft, Oracle), Dad x5. We will dance again! -

According to Mr Fuld the men in this photograph are ‘genocidal maniacs’ who ‘deserve zero compassion’ because of what they did on October 7. Quite a remarkable statement given that what Israel has done since October 7 has been of such an order of magnitude worse than anything Hamas did on that date it’s difficult to even begin to quantify it. It’s also quite remarkable that Mr Fuld considers what Hamas did on October 7 to be ‘genocidal’ and yet seems unable to conceive of the possibility that if that was, in fact, the case (which it most categorically is not) that would also make what Israel is doing genocidal - beyond a shadow of a doubt. Mr Fuld also seems quite sure that those of us who feel any compassion for the men lined up in the cold, one of them on crutches, another with with a nasogastric tube and holding multiple bags that are draining his small bowel, surgical wounds and bladder - all of them stripped to their underwear and blindfolded - need to ‘fix our moral compass’.

Actually, Mr Fuld, you’re the one who needs to fix your moral compass (and probably a lot else about you as well). In truth, the men in this photograph were arrested simply for being men in Northern Gaza where - according to Israel - anyone still remaining is designated a ‘terrorist’¹. And because they are designated ‘terrorists’ this, according to Israel (and, shamefully, to its Western supporters also) - means they have absolutely no rights whatsoever. They can forced into a pit and executed in cold blood, they can be run over by a bulldozer, or they can be taken to prison and tortured, raped, abused, humiliated and likely killed. And again, there but for the grace of god go all of us - all of us.

I wish I could get more people to understand that the people in Gaza are human beings - just like you, just like me. Their only ‘crime’ - which is, of course, no crime at all - is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And since humans first developed hierarchical societies interfering with the agendas of the powerful has always been pretty much a death sentence.

Because that is the crux of this thing - the Palestinian people are grit in the gears of the machinations of power. They are laying claim to a piece of land which has been deemed geostrategically important to the interests of power - and it is this that lies at the base of the ‘Israel-Palestine’ conflict. Forget all the flowery words about Israel being the ‘promised land’ of the Jewish people and a ‘refuge from antisemitism’ - Israel would not exist if it did not serve the interests of power. Full stop. It’s ludicrously naive to believe otherwise.

And to circle right back to where I started - that is why this horror is happening. That is why it has been allowed to continue. That is why most of the so-called ‘civilised Western democracies’ are either full-throatedly supporting it or turning their heads away and pretending not to see it. That is why all the major Western media outlets - including here in New Zealand - are laundering this genocide, this utter abomination, this holocaust.

I thought I was cynical before but now every single illusion I had about ‘the West’ has been stripped away and now I have to try and live out the rest of my life with the knowledge that the United States and its allies - including New Zealand - are actually the bad guys. We are the imperialists. We are the evil empire.

And once you know it - you can’t un-know it.

Postscript: This morning I woke up to the first piece of real good news related to Israel-Palestine I’ve seen for months. The ICC finally woke up to the fact that if it didn’t pull its finger out of its arse and issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant its credibility would be completely shot. The arrest warrants have been issued. Ludicrous levels of hysteria have ensued from all the usual suspects but Netanyahu and Gallant are now wanted war criminals who won’t be able to set foot in a considerable number of countries in this world - including France, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, Italy and the Netherlands - without being in danger of arrest. In the short-term this is not going to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza or the West Bank, nor the suffering of the Lebanese people, but in the long-run it may end up being seen as something of a turning point. It is, as many have pointed out, the first time the leaders of a Western-allied state have been indicted for war crimes and that, in and of itself, is - I am hoping - a sign that the tide may finally be turning.

1. Very few, if any of of these men, are ‘Hamas’ - but even if they ALL were it would IN NO WAY justify this barbaric treatment. Palestinians have as much right to defend themselves as Israelis and being a member of Hamas does not automatically give Israel carte-blanche to disregard all the rules of war and basic human decency FFS.