The US wants to pretend to be a good broker, regarding Israel, while simultaneously offering unilateral and complete support. That’s a bad look when Israel is committing crimes against humanity.
This tidbit was on Al Jazeera but not the New York Times. We live in a high level of propaganda.
If you read the Failing New York Times‘ coverage of the Israeli bombing Gaza, it sounds like it’s all just something that kind of … happened. Nobody attacked a mosque full of Palestinians and injured over 170, firing rubber-covered steel bullets into the mosque, you know, the bullets were just flying through the air when they happened to hit some people. And some airplanes happened to be flying over dropping bombs, etc.
This is a page or so from Collins and LaPierre’s excellent book O Jerusalem, which is billed as a “blow by blow account of the founding of Israel” and they’re not kidding. In some bits it gets down to hour by hour breakdowns of what happened. “What happened” is generally horrible for everyone involved, whether they were the winner or the loser. [wc] Most Americans have no real understanding of the history of Israel, and consequently they fall for false narratives. I suspect that most Israelis, now, also fall for the propaganda. It makes it much easier for the state to do what it wants to do, and easier for it to promote a false moral history.
In the summers, I would often run out of books to read, and raid my dad’s shelves for new material.
Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson’s podcast Citations Needed is one of my favorites; they never fail to illuminate their topic, and their research appears to be impeccable. I also like the slightly unsophisticated un-slick audio and editing; podcasting is metastasizing into a big business full of well-funded corporate drones that milk advertising opportunities, so it’s refreshing that there are a few hold-outs that stay resolutely old school. They’re just about the information.
Warning: Bio warfare, sadism, murder
In my previous post about Shiro Ishii, I told a bit about his interest in biological warfare, and how he came to serve the US Government, at its bio-warfare research base at Ft Detrick, MD. It’s a depressing tale, but it gets worse.
In Zen practice, a koan is a puzzling question or comment that a student is given to meditate upon, usually intended to help them break out of dualist-mode thinking.
I am genuinely disturbed by this. But, I’m not sure what’s going on, really, because the news cameras are turning their eyes away from the topic.
US corporate bankruptcy laws are tuned to make it easier for polluting companies to walk away from their mess, wash their hands, and move on.
Shiro Ishii goes right in the book next to Josef Mengele; a “failed intellectual” in the description of William Shirer (The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich) who noted that many of Hitler’s nihilistic genociders were, like Hitler himself, academics and philosophically-inclined people who veered off the normal track and careened into the dark woods.