Between the Tick and the Tok ...
So many among us have been so deeply played. Victims of a powerful PSYOP. Lost inside digitally disseminated delusions specifically designed to capture and hold weakened minds. A PSYOP designed to break minds & divide people of good will in a do or die American election year. Yes, that's right. A PSYOP as potent on the Left, & in Spiritual/Yoga/Wellness circles, as QAnon has proven to be on the right. (The anti vax movement truly was like a gateway drug for these mass delusions.) This conflict is not what you think it is. We are in a sprawling geopolitical struggle. There is a through line from Putin's invasion of Ukraine to Iran's femicidal crackdown on its own women and girls to Hamas' use of rape as a weapon of war on October 7th to the MAGA denial of women's reproductive rights in the U.S., even in the case of rape or incest, even when a mother's life is endangered, even when the fetus itself is doomed.
The horrific acts of sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women & girls on Oct 7 were indeed crimes against humanity, & yes, of a nature unprecedented in the annuals of modern terrorism. Fortunately for Hamas, Netanyahu stepped on the lede. Now the 10/7 atrocities are almost never mentioned in the mainstream news media and certainly never by the "pro-Palestinian protesters" acting out on campuses across the U.S. And NO, I will not stop demanding attention be focused on this abomination. Disturbing, very, to see Western women covering their hair in “solidarity” with Hamas’ sadists rapists mutilators while Iranian women are being dragged off the streets imprisoned raped tortured and murdered - for refusing to cover their hair. (the “Islamic Republic” which of course sponsors and funds Hamas.) WTF are you doing? It has been credibly reported that Putin’s orc legions killed as many as 20,000 Ukrainians during the siege of Mariupol (the “City of Mary”). At least as many as the actual number of Palestinians have died in the Israeli military response to 10/7. And a higher percent of civilian causalities. (Hamas, as almost everyone ignores, has already had to back off of its inflated death toll.) More deaths in Mariupol alone! But you said nothing, posted nothing, wept not one social media tear! And yet here you are seeking to lecture all, shame all, vilify all who remain silent on Gaza, or, worse yet, dare to disagree with you.
In its laziness & timidity, the mainstream news media has been hiding behind a facile narrative likening the current "pro-Palestinian" actions (pro-Hamas really) to some of the great protest movements in modern U.S. history. This narrative is not only facile, it is false. These actions bear no resemblance to the massive anti-war movements that arose to counter wrong-headed U.S. military action in Indochina in the 60s-70s and in Iraq post-9/11. These actions bear no resemblance to the deeply rooted, heart-felt and massive protests after the murder of George Floyd, no resemblance to the authentic moral power of #MeToo and the Women’s March. Those four great outpourings of collective awakening actually were genuine calls for peace and justice, and they actually were massive. These are not. The people occupying campuses (and swarming in front of Starbucks lol) are mouthing Hamas slogans, targeting Jewish students for harassment and Jewish organizations for vandalizing, refusing Jewish students access to campus territory that has been seized. The speechifying is hateful and delusional. Openly rationalizing and justifying October 7th. Contextualizing rape as "resistance." A true peace movement in the current crisis would be framed completely differently. Protesters would feel it in their hearts to display both or neither flag, not just the flag of "Palestine." No speech or statement of purpose would fail to begin with the denunciation of October 7th. Demands for ceasefire would be aimed at Hamas as well as Israel. Both Netanyahu AND Hamas would be denounced in every utterance. New leadership would be demanded in Tel Aviv and in Gaza (or I should say Qatar where the Hamas leaders live in luxury).
This is all very different from what a real peace movement would look and sound like.
Reality is like a cold bath. Bitter cold. It’s scary. But you’ll feel much better if you take the plunge.
Here are three powerful artifacts from the struggle to redeem the present and rescue the future.
An important post from the indomitable Malcolm Nance (U.S. intelligence expert), an insightful Twitter thread from the intrepid Zabrina Zabrisky (Ukrainian journalist) and a vital video message from the indefatigable Noa Tishby (Israeli author, activist).
The indomitable Malcolm Nance elucidates how it all started:
Soon after HAMAS’s October 7 invasion of Israel, young Americans in universities adopted the HAMAS position that Israel’s war against the terrorist group was part of a “genocide” to wipe out the Palestinian people. Despite no evidence of this, they quickly joined with Palestinians and Arab Americans to create a protest movement centered in the most elite universities ...Almost universally, the movement focused on and amplified the internal hatred of Palestinians against the Jews. Their anger at Israel’s war on HAMAS made subtle antisemitism socially acceptable to American University students. So long as the students didn’t specifically call to kill Jews, their positions were safe. They just made universities so utterly unfriendly to Jews that they and uninvolved students would fear for their lives. Attacks, blockades, and intimidation against Jewish students became commonplace ...Less than a week after my rant, TikTok started exponentially disseminating videos of attractive, college-aged, black and white women who breathlessly claimed some secret information had been hidden from them by the US Government ... and now it was found!The content creators had supposedly found and read Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” twenty-two years later. Read in the context of the Gaza war, they were somehow “shocked.”They almost all started their TikTok videos, saying, “I need you to stop what you are doing and read the Letter to America. I can’t believe they kept this from us!” That was an interesting take since the letter was easy to find. It sat on the internet for decades and was prominent in my book and other terrorism studies. The young Americans in the videos acted as if some secret CIA vault had been opened and a mysterious Hidden truthwas revealed. One woman said the frankness of the mass murdering al-Qaeda leader had been such an eye-opening experience that it “made me go through an existential crisis.” Others parroted the exact words, repeating, “He [Bin Laden] was right!" ...Within days, hundreds of videos praising Osama Bin Laden’s prescience about how the Israeli “Zionists” were oppressing the Palestinian people spread to tens of millions of viewers ...Between the #FreePalestine movement’s demonization of Israel, the success of HAMAS propaganda, and the Chinese amplification of Bin Laden’s letter, American university students became so enmeshed in the hatreds of their Palestinian allies that they ruthlessly attacked Israel for defending itself on October 7th. In the same breath, students would ignore Israeli deaths, rapes, and abductions during the HAMAS invasion. A terror act that saw the summary execution of over one thousand Jews in cold blood ... - Malcolm Nance, "Will the Free Palestine College Protests End American Democracy?" (4/29/24)
This tweet thread from the intrepid Zarina Zabrisky pulls back the curtain on the machinery:
#protestforPalestine are used by Russia, China and Iran to sow division, confusion in order to demoralize Americans; undermine the U.S. globally and to influence the US presidential elections outcome. 2 important new articles: quotes/links.https://x.com/ZarinaZabrisky/status/1786278823631204690
“Russia is seeking to exploit America’s divisive debate over Israel’s offensive in Gaza through overt and covert propaganda, with the aim of aggravating political tensions in the U.S. and tarnishing Washington’s global image”
“In its ongoing information war against the United States, Russia has shifted its focus in recent months to the Israel-Hamas conflict, seeking to inflame existing divisions in the West and to portray Washington as fueling the violence”
“The effort includes AI, fake social media accounts, a long-standing tactic used by Moscow, and a spike in propaganda from Russian state media. The sources declined to share examples of Russian-generated bots on SM to avoid revealing U.S. intelligence-gathering methods.”
“In the first seven weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, posts on Facebook from Russian state media, pro-Russian commentators and Russian diplomats increased dramatically — by 400 percent, according to the Alliance for Securing Democracy.”
Moscow is targeting Europe as well. In November 2023, France accused a Russian-linked network of bots of stoking antisemitism by amplifying images of Stars of David graffiti on buildings in Paris with 2,589 posts on the X social media platform.”
“France, Germany and Poland have accused Russia of launching a barrage of propaganda to try to shape the outcome of the European parliamentary elections in June.
“This new operation of Russian digital interference” is "to sow confusion and create tensions in the public debate” The full article is here: https://nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna149759
“Russia is also spreading disinformation to damage President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats in advance of the U.S. election, using fake online accounts and bots”
Russia is trying to exploit America's divisions over the war in Gaza
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna149759
In this short video, the indefatigable Noa Tishby offers three vital talking points.
