Primetime genocide apologists and the annihilation of Gaza

In the twisted unreality that pulsates from televisions and newspapers, unwittingly absorbed by the sponges we call minds, students camping on university lawns with cardboard signs, meditation sessions, and both halal and kosher catering options – all across the world (except Gaza, of course, because there are no universities left there) – are presented as a disturbing sign of hatred. Specifically of anti-semitism. A threat. Danger.

In stark contrast, within the nonsensical rules of the primetime propaganda pantomime, spittled into the air by interchangeable Western politicians and the unthinking flappy jaws that anchor nightly news bulletins, the act of caging 2.3 million people inside a 360 sq km Squid Game and eviscerating their hospitals, homes, playgrounds, mosques and refugee camps is a rational act of “counter-terrorism”. A sad but necessary chapter in a “war” we should all unequivocally support, morally and materially. 

And, if we can’t do that, we should at least have the good sense to shut the fuck up about it, lest we get Lattoufed from our jobs and polite social circles.

In America, where the student protests for peace began, riot shields have been sent in to squash the chanting and hacky sack sessions – Land of the free and all that.

In Australia we have thus far resisted the urge to be so stupid, so fascistic. This is not for a lack of urging, though. 

On sunny Sunday mornings, on Australia’s public broadcaster, the cosiest of cronies, the “insiders”, wax detachedly about the optics for the Prime Minister (newsflash: they’re shithouse), about how students “support Hamas” and how calls to end the annihilation of Gaza are simplistic “bumper stickers”. The answer to this quandary, apparently, is to swallow the cognitive dissonance of knowing that in Western democracies peaceful protest is usually considered a healthy expression of free speech and the wanton slaughter of innocent people isn’t considered counter anything – it’s usually just called terrorism. 

Swallow all the Kool-Aid and pretend this still makes sense. 

None of this is ever questioned in any public space where the amorphous, boorish blob that is mainstream Australia is imagined into being. None of the acts of hate committed by Israel today – not the gangs of roving “settlers” destroying food and water at blockaded crossings into Gaza, not the violent dehumanising language spoken by Netanyahu’s ministers, not the sniper drones or the thousands of children turned into meat and memories – are apparently at odds with our professed values as Australians. The values we sing about like obnoxious hypocrites. My god, it must drive the non-Western world bonkers. None of it.

Yesterday, the Australian Senate voted 56-12 to condemn the use of the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, because it allegedly “opposes Israel’s right to exist, and is frequently used by those who seek to intimidate Jewish Australians via acts of antisemitism”. And yet there was no similar motion condemning (or even adequately acknowledging) the ongoing slaughter that stands in opposition to Palestine’s right to exist. If your suss-O-meter isn’t firing yet, it is well and truly broken.

Anthony Albanese, a student leader that attended free Palestine rallies prior to becoming Prime Minister and forgetting to do anything about it

In Cooked Brain News Land, Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, a foothold of modernity and civilisation in the barbaric lawless wastes of the un-white world. It does not matter that Israel has no constitution, is a religious ethno-state with a race-based hierarchy of citizenship rights, continually expands its own borders with theft and murder, and, last Sunday, shutdown Al fucking Jazeera. Freedom of the press, a constitution, equal rights for all before the law – we typically demand these things of any nation claiming to be a democracy. But not here. For some reason.

Last Sunday, Israeli police raided the offices of the highly regarded Qatari owned news network. Israel has claimed that Al Jazeera was shuttered because it was little more than lies and Hamas propaganda. Maybe, possibly, sure, but to present an alternative theory that, again, for some reason no one else in Australian media wants to utter: purely hypothetically, if I was a bloodlusting ethnostate settler-colony committing genocide (for the record, I am not), and I was about to invade Rafa, a city sheltering 1.4 million refugees, it would probably make a fucktonne of sense to ban the only news organisation anywhere in the world adequately covering my atrocities. 

Let’s be real here: closing down Al Jazeera is only happening because Israel couldn’t kill all of its journalists. With the popular consent for its ongoing massacre hinging on the impenetrableness of the West’s wall-to-wall propaganda, a system that dehumanises Palestinians and rehumanises the barbarity of the IDF, this makes tactical sense. More than 100 journalists (and their families) working in Gaza, the vast bulk of whom were associated with Al Jazzera in some capacity, have already been killed by Israel in the seven months of carnage since October 7. 

And still, STILL, despite the mass targeted murders of their colleagues, Australian journalists can’t grow spines in solidarity. Some silences speak volumes, and the eerie nothingness surrounding the vast bulk of Australia’s journalists – our brave warriors of free speech and holding truth to power – in the face of a genocide the Albanese Government is materially supporting, well, it’s screaming in all of our faces. It speaks of cowardice and moral depravity. We don’t need to be told all this explicitly to understand it anymore.

In the concocted UpsideDown we consume, the openly genocidal statements of Israeli officials do not exist. Nowhere that an establishment gatekeeper holds the reins will you learn that just yesterday, speaking before a frenzied crowd of thousands chanting for their “next Prime Minister”, Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, said: “We, in the cabinet, demand war now! Demand to enter Rafah. Demand targeted assassinations… Without liberating Gaza there will be no solution… The solution is the one the Torah tells us: to liberate, to colonise and also to bequeath! The solution is to encourage immigration [of Palestinians] and tell them, willingly: go to your homes, go to your countries. This has always been ours and will stay ours!” 

This is really, really blatant, mask off stuff that the subsumed pricks on Insiders are too cowed to even notice. US President George W. Bush used words like “liberate” an awful lot when America invaded Afghanistan and Iraq – 20 years and 1 million dead Arabs later, it doesn’t mean what it used to. It is a PR phrase for slaughter. And Australians, particularly Indigenous Australians – heavily represented at pro-Palestine protests – should have a crystal clear grasp of what “colonise” actually entails and an awareness of the genocide that historically always, always, always rides alongside it. 

All the way with Israel, apparently, because America says so, because Lockheed Martin says so, and because the Holocaust was a hate fuelled act of barbarity committed by Western Europeans on the Jewish people and we’re determined to learn precisely the wrong lesson from that. Does “never again” only apply to persecuted Jewish people, or does it apply to all persecuted peoples everywhere?

In the unreality, history begins and ends with the horrific act of mass terror committed by Hamas on October 7th. Little if any attention was paid to this week’s anniversary of “Nakba day”, the beginning of the forced dispossession of 1948 in which 750,000 Palestinians were violently removed from their homes. In the twisted TV sphere, you will not hear that in the West Bank, since October 7, 495 Palestinians have been killed, 100 of them children, and Hamas isn’t anywhere nearby. These are acts of hatred. 

We are told time and again that it is somehow not possible to feel love and empathy for the Jewish people for the horrors they endured during the Holocaust and simultaneously also not want Palestinians slaughtered and driven from their homes. The claim, tirelessly, is that this humanitarian stance is somehow antisemitic. We are told, over and over, that criticism of Israel’s war crimes and traumatised trauma-infliction is an attack on all Jews. 

But in reality, divorced from the annihilation apologia, there is NOTHING contradictory about these stances. Nothing at all. Because if this were the case, Israel would exist in a state of total impunity. And does this ironclad moral rule apply anywhere else? Is critique of American atrocities or corporate vandalism considered an attack on all Christianity? Hardly. 

What’s that? This comparison isn’t fair because Israel is a religious ethnostate and the USA at least pretends to be a multicultural society? Sure, maybe… but this leads us back to the cognitive dissonance surrounding our values thing: it’s actually been quite a fucking while since segregation and apartheid were acceptable parts of Western ideals. Ya know??!?

“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing”. Today, you will not find a clearer example of the phenomenon Macolm X was referring to than Israel’s wholesale slaughter of Gaza and the mesmerising cover provided by truth-discordant imperial apologia we sometimes call “the news”. 

Reject it all. It is swallowing your humanity.