I’ve seen some Australians expressing confusion as to whether or not they can still legally criticise Israel online after new “hate speech” laws were passed on Tuesday under the pretence of combatting “antisemitism”.

The answer is yes, and you definitely should keep opposing Israel and its genocidal atrocities.

I am worried that these new laws may indirectly have a bit of a chilling effect on pro-Palestine activism due to Australians not understanding these new laws and what people are allowed to do without being jailed.

So let’s clear this up thoroughly so we’re all on the same page.

To be perfectly clear: it is still legal for Australians to oppose Israel and to associate with pro-Palestine groups – and we should. What’s changed is that now those groups can be classified as “hate groups” and banned, similarly to how Palestine Action has been banned in the UK.

But this hasn’t happened yet, and hopefully never will. We need to push for these new laws to be repealed, because they look guaranteed to be abused at some point in the future.

Repeal the Speech Suppression Laws | The Information Rights Project https://t.co/DsLIVJvGk4

— 💧Mary Kostakidis (@MaryKostakidis) January 21, 2026

Know your rights, Australians:

It is still legal to criticise Israel. So we should criticise it as much as possible, because we don’t know how much longer we’ll have that right.

It is still legal to associate with pro-Palestine groups. So we should do so at every opportunity, because we don’t know when they’ll start listing them as “hate groups” and imprisoning anyone who continues to associate with them.

Unless you are in certain parts of Sydney while the post-Bondi protest ban remains in effect, it is presently fully legal to hold pro-Palestine marches. So attend as many as you are able, because you don’t know when they’ll be shut down altogether.

Oppose Israel’s abuses . . .                              Video: Caitlin Johnstone

It is still legal to say that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state, and to share information and opinions about its abuses. So we should do so as much as we can, because we don’t know when that right will be taken away.

It is still legal to state the fact that Zionism is a racist and murderous political ideology and that everything we’ve seen in Gaza is the result of Zionists getting everything they want. So we should say it frequently, because that right could vanish at any time.

It is still legal to say “Fuck Israel, free Palestine.” So we should say it loud and say it often, because we don’t know how much longer we’ll be allowed to do so without getting thrown into prison.

Fuck Israel, free Palestine. Say it loud and say it often, because you won’t have the right to say it much longer.

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) January 10, 2026

The Israel lobby is working frenetically to crush free speech in Australia, and the swamp monsters in Canberra are either actively facilitating this agenda or doing far too little to stop it.

The more aggressively they work to take away our right to oppose Israel, the more aggressively we need to oppose both them and Israel.

We’re not just fighting for Gaza anymore, we’re fighting for our own civil rights, and for our children, and for our grandchildren. They’re actively assaulting our ability to speak critically of power and make this nation a more tyrannical place.

The only appropriate response to this is ferocious defiance.

Our future depends on it.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Australia’s Labor government has successfully passed a “hate speech” bill that’s plainly aimed, at least in part, at suppressing pro-Palestine organizations as “hate groups”.

Free speech advocates are sounding the alarm about the new laws, saying their extremely vague wording, lack of procedural fairness and low thresholds for implementation mean groups can now be banned if they make people feel unsafe or upset without ever actually posing any physical harm to anyone.

For me the most illuminating insight into what these laws are actually designed to do came up in an ABC interview with Attorney-General Michelle Rowland on Tuesday.

Over and over again throughout the interview Rowland was asked by ABC’s David Speers to clarify whether the new laws could see activist groups banned for criticising Israel and opposing its genocidal atrocities in a way that causes Jewish Australians to feel upset feelings, and she refused to rule out the possibility every single time.

Australia’s hate speech law            Video: ABC 7.30

“Let’s just go to what it means in practice: would a group be banned if it accuses Israel of genocide or apartheid, and as a result, Jewish Australians do feel intimidated?” Speers asked.

Rowland didn’t say no, instead saying “there are a number of other factors that would need to be satisfied there” and saying that agencies like the AFP and ASIO would need to make assessments of the situation.

“Okay, just coming back to the practical example though, if a group is suggesting that Israel is guilty of genocide, what other measures or factors would need to be met before they can be banned?” Speers asked.

“Under the provisions that are now before the Parliament, there would also need to be able to demonstrate that there are for example, some aspects of state laws that deal with racial vilification that have been met as well,” Rowland responded, again leaving the possibility wide open.

Australia’s frightening new ‘hate speech’ law         Video reading by Tim Foley

(It should here be noted that Greens justice spokesperson David Shoebridge has pointed out that “state laws that deal with racial vilification” can include “tests like ‘ridicule’ and ‘contempt’,” meaning people could wind up spending years in prison for associating with groups that were essentially banned for upsetting someone’s feelings.)

The only reason the Attorney General wouldn’t rule out the criminalisation of dissent and criticism of foreign countries and heads of state is if that’s exactly what Labor intends to cover here. pic.twitter.com/rV3e8TRB0l

— David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) January 20, 2026

“Just to be clear, if a group is saying Israel is engaged in genocide, or they’re saying that Israel should no longer exist, that is not enough for that group to be banned?” asked Speers.

“Well, again, that would depend on the other evidence that is gathered, David, so I would be reluctant to be naming and ruling in and ruling out specific kinds of conduct that you are describing here,” Rowland replied.

All this waffling can be safely interpreted as a yes. Rowland is saying yes.

Speers pushed this question three different times from three different angles because it’s the most immediate and obvious concern about these new laws, and instead of reassuring the public that they can’t be used to target pro-Palestine groups and aren’t intended for that purpose, the nation’s Attorney General confirmed that it was indeed possible.

So that’s it then. Under the new laws we can expect to see the Israel lobby crying about Jewish Australians feeling threatened and unsafe by every pro-Palestine group under the sun, and then from there all it takes is the thumbs-up from ASIO to put the group on the banned list and cage anyone who continues associating with it for up to 15 years.

The bill that ended up making it through Parliament is actually a narrowed down version of an even scarier bill that was scrapped by Labor due to lack of support which went after individuals as well as groups.

The earlier version contained “racial vilification” components which could have been used to target any individual who voices criticisms of Israel or Zionism – so it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing any prison time for my writing any time soon. The new version moved its crosshairs to groups with the obvious intent to disrupt pro-Palestine organising in Australia.

And we’re already seeing the Israel lobby pushing to resurrect the laws targeting individuals. A new ABC article titled “Jewish leaders call for vilification offence to be revisited as Coalition splits over watered-down hate laws” cites Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler and Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Peter Wertheim arguing that the new laws don’t go far enough.

So we can expect the Australian Israel lobby to both (A) push to get pro-Palestine groups classified as “hate groups” under the new laws and (B) keep pushing to make it illegal for individuals to criticize Israel in the form of new “racial vilification” laws.

They’ll keep trying over and over again, from government to government to government, until they get their way.

This comes after Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council executive manager Joel Burnie publicly stated that he wants to ban pro-Palestine protests and criticism of Israel throughout the nation, and as prosecutors drag an Australian woman to court for an antisemitic hate crime because she accidentally butt-dialed a Jewish nutritionist and left a blank voicemail.

So things are already ugly, and they’re getting worse.

It’s so creepy knowing I share a country with people who want to destroy my right to normal political speech. It would never occur to me to try to kill Zionists’ right to free speech, but they very openly want to kill mine.

They want to permanently silence me and anyone like me. I find that profoundly disturbing.

Israel supporters are horrible people. And I hope my saying that hurts their feelings.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

I can’t get over the fact that people were casting bets on whether the US would bomb Iran the other day. It just says such dark things about the type of civilization we are living in.

In this dystopia, Americans are never given the option to vote for a president who won’t bomb foreign countries in wars of aggression. But they do have the option to gamble on when those bombs will be dropped.

They’re not allowed to vote against war, militarism and imperialism, but they can go to an app on their smartphone and place bets on how the war, militarism and imperialism will unfold.

Preventing your government from raining military explosives onto foreign countries full of civilians who are just trying to live their lives? No. Thumbs down. You don’t get to do that.

Pouring money into “prediction market” scams like Kalshi and Polymarket with bets on when those military explosives will end the lives of those foreign civilians? Yes. Thumbs up. You are encouraged to do that.

You’re allowed to get rich making an app which lets Westerners gamble on military atrocities of immense humanitarian consequence.

In this dystopia . . .                                              Video: Caitlin Johnstone

You’re allowed to get rich starting a company that manufactures missiles, sells those missiles to the US government, and then pays think tanks and lobbyists to convince US decision makers to use those missiles in gratuitous acts of mass military violence.

You’re allowed to get rich buying stocks in the arms industry and then funding the political campaigns of politicians who pledge to help start wars.

As long as it’s profitable and sits within the extremely broad parameters of acceptable liberal norms, it’s perfectly legal.

But when it comes to doing anything that might eat into those profits by making the world a less violent place, there’s not even a viable option at the ballot box.

Our world looks the way it looks because our entire civilisation is driven by the mindless pursuit of profit.

It’s profitable to start wars, so the wars never end.

It’s profitable for corporations to destroy the ecosystem and offload the costs of industry onto the environment, so it keeps happening.

It’s profitable for capitalists to keep wages down and worker’s rights at a minimum, so wealth inequality gets worse and worse.

It’s profitable for plutocrats to manipulate legislation and government policy using campaign funding and corporate lobbying, so the government gets more and more corrupt and oligarchic while society gets more and more unjust and oppressive.

As long as we have systems in place which cause mass-scale human behaviour to be driven by the pursuit of profit, things are going to keep getting more and more violent, abusive, poisoned, polluted, unjust, unhappy, and dystopian.

This will continue until we as a collective decide we’ve had enough and force new systems into place. Until then the object in motion shall remain in motion.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Is there anything more undignified than “leftists” and “anarchists” who cheer on the fall of empire-targeted governments even as the empire moves war machinery into place?

Ooh look at me, I’m sticking it to the man by supporting the same agendas as the US State Department. I’m being punk rock by regurgitating the same war propaganda talking points as John Bolton.

I’m fighting the power by backing the foreign policy objectives of the most powerful empire that has ever existed.

Embarrassing, man.

Anarchists, again, fail to understand that overthrowing the existing state infrastructure would create a power vacuum. And currently, there does not exist a revolutionary vanguard that can occupy that space with the mass line.

Which means that such a situation is prime for… https://t.co/a1OJqGzAQZ

— mischa ☭ (@redmischa) January 14, 2026

If you want to have a serious political outlook it is necessary to have a more layered understanding of the world than “tyranny bad”, because as Westerners we ourselves are ruled by the most tyrannical power structure on earth.

That power structure ceaselessly targets the few remaining states that have successfully resisted being absorbed into its globe-spanning power umbrella like Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, and Cuba.

Those states have successfully resisted being absorbed into the imperial blob exactly because they have strong governments that don’t hesitate to exert control to stomp out all the imperial operations and infiltrations which would otherwise have overthrown them.

This doesn’t mean these governments are wonderful and flawless, it just means they possess the qualities that enable a state to resist the empire’s coups, proxy conflicts, color revolutions and foreign influence operations.

If your only analysis of state power dynamics is “tyranny bad”, then you will naturally find yourself in opposition to the unabsorbed states and (whether you admit it or not) on the side of the most tyrannical regime on earth  —  namely the US-centralised Western empire.

No other power structure has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions in wars of aggression around the world, attacking civilian populations with deadly starvation sanctions, staging coups, instigating proxy conflicts, and circling the planet with hundreds of military bases.

Only the US empire is doing that. Dominating the entire planet with murderous brute force is as tyrannical as it gets. If this isn’t true, then nothing is.

If you want to have a serious political worldview, you need to get real about this. The premise that the fall of an authoritarian government is always inherently positive has no place in the understanding of a grown adult, especially if that grown adult happens to live in the core of the Western empire, and especially if that empire is presently working to orchestrate the overthrow of the government in question.

The “I oppose all governments equally” flag. pic.twitter.com/MJGdXerObo

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 31, 2021

The more power structures are absorbed into the empire, the larger and more powerful the empire becomes. Desiring their absorption is desiring more power for the US empire.

And you can lie to yourself and say that you don’t want Iran to be absorbed into the control of the US empire, you just want its people to live in a free and democratic country. But we both know that’s not going to happen.

Once the strength of the Iranian government has been collapsed there will be a power vacuum that is filled by whatever faction is able to secure control, and the strongest faction will be whichever one is backed by the US and its allies. There is no organic faction within Iran that is strong enough to stand against the installation of a US puppet regime at this time, besides the one that presently exists.

That’s the reality of the situation. It’s not ideal, but it is reality. You can choose to be real about reality, or you can choose to psychologically compartmentalise away from it and tell yourself a bunch of fairly tales about a global people’s revolution which just coincidentally happens to be starting in all the countries the US empire hates most. I personally find the latter undignified, self-debasing, and power-serving.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

If you were wondering why the US establishment was so much more chill about Trump becoming president this term than they were the first time around, you’re watching the reason now.

The powers that be were assured that he’d carry out longstanding imperial agendas like kidnapping Nicolás Maduro, bombing Iran and overseeing a final solution to the Palestinian problem, and they trusted him to carry out those plans.

The MAGA narrative that the establishment hates Trump because he’s fighting the Deep State has never been true; there were certain factions within the US imperial power structure which disliked Trump, but that was only because he was not a proven commodity like Hillary Clinton and they didn’t trust him to be a reliable steward of the empire.

Trump proved that he could be trusted with his advancement of longtime swamp monster agendas throughout his first term, and he plainly did enough during his time out of office to assure his fellow empire managers that he would do even more if re-elected.

The empire needs its skillful orators and apologists like Obama, but it also needs its iron-fisted overt tyrants like Trump.

It needs good cop presidents to manufacture global consensus and expand US soft power, and it also needs bad cop presidents to inflict the hard power abuses the good cops can’t get away with. Both are essential components to the operation of the imperial machine.

Marco Rubio:

If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I would be concerned — at least a little bit. pic.twitter.com/6ZBmwykfH1

— Clash Report (@clashreport) January 3, 2026

Cuba for example has been a socialist island nation off the coast of the United States for generations, because the US hasn’t been able topple its government by its usual means. All the standard CIA assassination ops, proxy warfare and economic blockades were unsuccessful, and there’s been no national or international support for sending US boots on the ground to regime change a small country that poses no military threat.

But a last-term bad cop president like Trump has options at his disposal that would be off the table for good cop presidents.

US empire managers are discussing this openly.

“If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned, at least a little bit,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio after Maduro’s capture.

“Cuba is ready to fall,” Trump told the press on Sunday next to a delighted Lindsey Graham. “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall. I don’t know if they’re going to hold out. But Cuba now has no income. They got all of their income from their Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil. They’re not getting any of it. And Cuba is literally ready to fall.”

This is OUR Hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened. pic.twitter.com/SXvI868d4Z

— Department of State (@StateDept) January 5, 2026

“You just wait for Cuba,” Graham added. “Cuba is a Communist dictatorship that’s killed priests and nuns, they preyed on their own people. Their days are numbered. We’re gonna wake up one day, I hope in ’26, in our backyard we’re gonna have allies in these countries doing business with America, not narcoterrorist dictators killing Americans.

“Donald Trump will have done something that’s eluded America since the fifties: deal with the Communist dictatorship 90 miles off the coast of Florida,” Graham said on Fox News. “I can’t wait till that day comes. To our Cuban friends in Florida and throughout America, the liberation of your homeland is close.”

The Beltway swamp was saying this well before Trump’s Venezuela assault. In October, Senator Rick Scott told 60 Minutes that if Maduro was removed “it’ll be the end of Cuba,” saying “America is gonna take care of the Southern Hemisphere and make sure there’s freedom and democracy.”

Trump’s blatant smash-and-grab violation of international law in Venezuela wouldn’t have worked for a president who’s trying to put a nice guy face on the US empire, but for a wealthy reality TV star who’s comfortable playing the WWE heel, it’s opened up potential power grabs that have been eluding the imperialists for decades.

JUST IN – Lindsey Graham and Trump pose together with a “Make Iran Great Again” hat, signed by Trump. pic.twitter.com/656ctZp52M

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) January 5, 2026

When the news broke that Trump had attacked Caracas I was working on an article about his warmongering with Iran which I had to abandon to focus on the new development. The president had announced on Truth Social that if any of the people protesting in Iran are killed, “the United States of America will come to their rescue,” adding, “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

Prior to that Trump had confirmed to the press that the US would attack Iran if it tried to rebuild its missile program, saying in a joint news conference with Benjamin Netanyahu that “I hope they’re not trying to build up again because if they are, we’re going have no choice but very quickly to eradicate that buildup.”

To be clear, the president is not talking about attacking Iran if it tries to rebuild its nuclear facilities or construct a nuclear weapon. He’s talking about Iran’s conventional ballistic missile programme. The United States is saying that Iran simply is not allowed to defend itself in any way, shape or form, and that if it tries to rebuild its ability to do so it will be attacked again.

So they’re clearly just making up excuses to bomb Iran and waiting for something to stick.

Senator Graham recently tweeted a photo of himself grinning with the president, who was holding a hat which said “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN”. You can pretty much determine how warlike the US empire is from day to day by looking at the expression on Lindsey Graham’s face, and lately he’s been looking positively ecstatic.

Trump used to slam warmongers like Graham, building a huge part of his presidential 2016 campaign around contrasting himself with their disastrous foreign policy platforms.

Now that he doesn’t have a re-election to posture for they’re best friends, with Graham proclaiming that “Trump is my favourite president” because “we’re killing all the right people and lowering your taxes”.

January 2029 is still a long way off, and we’re seeing every indication that Trump is going to be making Lindsey Graham smile for years to come.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Last year I banged out an angry rant about the way Israel supporters would yell “release the hostages!” at anyone who talked about the latest massacre of Palestinian civilians, saying Hamas was to blame for the killing because of their refusal to release the Israeli captives, and that it would all stop once the hostages are free.

I’m remembering that essay today because the hostages are free, but the massacres are continuing.

On Friday Israel reportedly blew up a vehicle carrying a Palestinian family of eleven people, including seven children.

The IDF gave its usual excuse for the massacre: the civilians were deemed to have crossed an invisible line — the so-called “Yellow Line” — into a forbidden zone which made the Israeli soldiers feel unsafe. They did this exact same thing constantly during the last “ceasefire” as well.

In my polemic last year I argued that the slaughter we were seeing in Gaza plainly had nothing to do with pushing for the release of Israeli hostages, and that even if it did it would still be barbaric to massacre children until your enemies caved in to your demands.

But two years of genocide have made it clear that the Israeli military was never killing Palestinian civilians in order to push for the release of hostages or force Hamas to cave in to their demands.

What Israel Supporters Really Mean When They Say “Release The Hostages”

What they are saying is that they believe Israel should murder children, decapitate them, rip their guts out, dismember them, mutilate them, burn them alive, every single day, until its military demands are… pic.twitter.com/3VnffoYStb

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 26, 2024

The Israeli military kills Palestinian civilians in order to kill Palestinian civilians. The killing is the goal, and it always has been.

We see this illustrated over and over again, in all sorts of ways. Israel apologists always argued that the only reason the IDF had destroyed Gaza’s healthcare system with nonstop hospital attacks was because Hamas was using those hospitals as secret military bases.

But then multiple independent reports from Western doctors in Gaza confirmed that Israeli forces had been entering the hospitals after attacking them and systematically destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one in order to make them unusable. Hamas wasn’t the target in those hospital attacks, the hospitals themselves were the target.

They said the massacres would stop.          Video: Caitlin Johnstone

And now we are seeing the “Israel is killing people because Hamas has Israeli hostages” narrative debunked in exactly the same way the “Israel keeps bombing hospitals because there are Hamas bases in all of them” narrative was.

The hostages are free, but the massacres continue.

None of which will surprise anyone who was paying attention these last two years. Israel’s genocidal intent has been on full display every minute of every day, and it continues to be even during this joke of a “ceasefire” where the genocide was theoretically supposed to be on pause for a little while.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

The mass atrocity in Gaza is a genocide, obviously, and is an undisguised ethnic cleansing operation.

But it’s also a lot more than that.

It’s an experiment  —  to see what kinds of abuses the public will accept without causing significant disruption to the imperial status quo.

It’s a psychological operation  –  to push out the boundaries of what’s normal and acceptable in our minds so that we will consent to even more horrific abuses in the future.

It’s a symptom  —  of Zionism, of colonialism, of militarism, of capitalism, of Western supremacism, of empire-building, of propaganda, of ignorance, of apathy, of delusion, of ego.

It’s a manifestation  —  of violent racist, supremacist and xenophobic belief systems that have always been there but were previously restrained, meeting with the unwholesome nature of alliances that have long been in place but have been aggressively normalised.

It’s a mirror  —– showing us accurately and impartially who we currently are as a civilisation.

It’s a genocide …                                                Video: Caitlin Johnstone

It’s a disclosure  —  showing us what the Western empire we live under really is underneath its fake plastic mask of liberal democracy and righteous humanitarianism.

It’s a revelation  –  showing us who among us really stands for truth and justice and who has been deceiving us about themselves and their motives this entire time.

It’s a catalyst  –  a galvanising force and a rallying cry for all who realise that the murderous power structures we live under can no longer be allowed to stand, and a blaring alarm clock opening more and more snoozing eyes to the need for revolutionary change.

It’s a test  –  of who we are as a species and what we are made of, and of whether we can transcend the destructive patterning that is driving humanity to its doom.

It’s a question  — asking us what kind of world we want to live in going forward, and what kind of people we want to be.

It’s an invitation  —  to become something better than what we are now.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Do Israel’s supporters know it’s over for them? Like, they know they’re going to be despised for the rest of their lives, right? That they will never, ever live down the fact that they supported a live-streamed genocide?

And that it will only get worse for them as history clarifies things?

Surely they must realise this by now. Surely they must realise that nothing they do for the rest of their lives will ever be as significant as the fact that they played cheerleader for genocide and all of Israel’s demented warmongering, long after normal people realised it was the wrong thing to do.

That in the eyes of the world they will all always be first and foremost someone who supported and defended history’s first live-streamed genocide.

I wonder what that’s like, knowing that about yourself? If that was me maybe I’d be pushing for World War Three as well, I dunno. Maybe I’d hope we could turn the whole world into Gaza and let the flames wash away human memory of the things we had done. That enough death and destruction spread out across enough of the earth would make my crimes look small in comparison or something.

It won’t work, though. Everyone’s always going to remember what they did. Their grandchildren will be disgusted by them. Their families will carry their shame for generations.

What a terrible way to be.

Israel supporters will be despised for the rest of their lives    Video: Caitlin Johnstone

STOP PRESS:

pic.twitter.com/wu9mMkxtUg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2025

❖

The UK will reportedly be designating Palestine Action as a terrorist group for spraying British military planes with red paint to protest the genocide in Gaza.

It says a lot about how backwards and diseased western civilization has become when peace activists are designated as terrorists for trying to stop the world’s worst acts of terrorism.

❖

Iran is having more and more success with its missile strikes on Israel. I am not a military expert, but I’ve been hearing for years that Israel doesn’t want to fight Iran because it can’t reliably stop Iran’s missiles. Israel of course would have known this, so it looks like the plan was always for Israel to get itself into hot water and have the US pull it out.

❖

Iran’s real sin is insisting upon its own sovereignty as a nation. That’s why it’s a target of the Western empire. Giving up sovereignty over its own energy infrastructure would be giving up the very thing the Iranians started fighting for in the first place all those years ago. They’re not going to do it unless they are forced to, otherwise what was the point of resisting absorption into the imperial blob that whole time?

❖

I’m supposed to hate a country for saying “Death to America”? I yell that during sex.

❖

The only reason they get to call the Gaza holocaust a “war” is because they’re using bombs and bullets to do the extermination. If they were using gas chambers to kill the same number of people with the exact same motive, all it would change is the world’s understanding of what’s happening.

❖

War after war after war the Western empire has told us it needs to ship off our young to go fight evil murderous tyrants, only for the West to wake up to the reality that the empire’s dearest ally in the Middle East is the most evil, murderous and tyrannical regime around.

❖

The idea of war with Iran would be even less popular than it is now if the Western media hadn’t spent all these years referring to Iran’s civilian nuclear energy programme as “Iran’s nuclear programme”, deliberately causing people to assume that Iran is working on nuclear weapons.

❖

Friendly reminder that last year the official Democratic Party platform slammed Trump for choosing not to go to war with Iran in 2018, 2019 and 2020 during his last presidency.

Americans aren’t allowed to vote against war.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Donald Trump is committing genocide for Israel after publicly admitting to being bought and owned by the Adelsons.

All the worst shit happens right out in the open. You don’t need to come up with any elaborate conspiracy theories to see it. It’s right there, completely unhidden.

It’s not hidden, it’s just spun. Disguised by the propaganda of the mass media which frame this holocaust as a war of defence in response to a terrorist attack while constantly diverting our attention to other far less significant issues.

It says so much about the power of the imperial propaganda machine that Trump could openly admit to having been fully controlled by Adelson cash on the campaign trail, get elected, and then facilitate a blatant extermination campaign in Gaza while aggressively stomping out free speech that is critical of Israel throughout the United States  —  and somehow not have this be the main thing that everyone talks about all the time. It is only because our minds are being forcefully manipulated by the powerful at mass scale that this has been the case.

All the worst evils . . .                         Video/Audio: Caitlin Johnstone

The narrative spin is greatly aided by the fact that Trump isn’t doing much different from the previous president here. A public which has been indoctrinated from childhood into seeing everything in Democrat-vs-Republican binaries is conditioned to focus far more on the differences between the two parties than the similarities.

But you can learn a whole lot more about real power and what’s actually going on in the world by paying less attention to how US presidents differ from each other, and more attention to the ways in which they are the same.

Take note of which Trump comments provoke controversy, and which don’t. Trump said this week that he “gave” the Golan Heights to Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, his top funders, who came to the White House “almost more than anybody.” Not a peep about this brazen admission of graft pic.twitter.com/MaJLFnH7oi

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) September 22, 2024

The mass-scale psychological manipulation is so pervasive and ubiquitous that only a small minority are reacting to history’s first live-streamed genocide with an appropriate level of horror. If Americans could see what their government is doing in their name with fresh eyes and uncallused hearts, the nation’s capitol would be burnt to the ground within days.

But because their vision is clouded by propaganda indoctrination they can’t see it, so they overlook what’s right in front of them while awaiting a gigantic Epstein bombshell or UFO disclosure or some other Big Reveal that never comes.

Consider the possibility that the Big Reveal has already happened. That it’s been right here staring you in the face this entire time, but you haven’t noticed its significance because it has been constantly normalised for you throughout your life since you were small. That the truth behind all your most sparkly conspiracy theories could be published online tomorrow, and it still wouldn’t tell you as much about what your rulers are doing and how evil they are as what’s already happening in plain sight.

This is the dystopia we were warned about. It’s not some ominous threat looming on the horizon. It’s here. We are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale into consenting to the most nightmarish atrocities imaginable.

Children’s bodies are being shredded to bits right in front of us. And when you turn on the TV you see famous people laughing and making jokes with fake plastic grins, babbling about vapid nonsense. This is the dystopia. It isn’t on its way. It’s here.

They’re ripping kids in half right in front of us and telling us we need to be mad at Kneecap and Ms Rachel.

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 25, 2025

We don’t need a Big Reveal. If the Big Reveal happened next week, the public would be indoctrinated into overlooking and dismissing it by the imperial spin machine by the weekend. We don’t need new information, we need people to truly see the information that’s already here. To see it with eyes that are free from the cataracts of propaganda conditioning, with hearts that are free from the calluses of desensitisation.

Waking the public up is less about whistleblowers, FOIA requests and investigative journalism at this point than it is about finding creative and artistic ways to get people noticing the information that’s already public.

And the good news is that we can all help do this. We can all help our fellow members of the public to see what’s really happening with fresh eyes. Using our creativity, our humour, our insight and our compassion, we can find new ways every day to open a new pair of eyelids to the truth of our present circumstances.

Our rulers do not have creativity. They do not have humour, insight or compassion. These are not tools that they have in their toolbox, and they have no weapons to counter them.

All they have is manipulation, and manipulation only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. Our task is to keep finding new and creative ways to help more people see and understand the ways in which they have been manipulated.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Pope Francis has died after using his Easter Sunday address to call for peace in Gaza. I don’t know who the cardinals will pick to replace him, but I do know with absolute certainty that there are transnational intelligence operations in the works to make sure they select a more reliable supporter of Israel.

They’ve probably been working on it since his health started failing.

Anyone who’s been reading me for a while knows my attitude toward Roman Catholicism can be described as openly hostile because of my family history with the Church’s sexual abuses under Cardinal Pell, but as far as popes go this one was decent.

Francis had been an influential critic of Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza, calling for investigation of genocide allegations and denouncing the bombing of hospitals and the murder of humanitarian workers and civilians. He’d been personally calling the only Catholic parish in Gaza by phone every night during the Israeli onslaught, even as his health deteriorated.

In other words, he was a PR problem for Israel.

I hope another compassionate human being is announced as the next leader of the Church, but there are definitely forces pushing for a different outcome right now. There is no shortage of terrible men who could be chosen for the position.

❖

The most wholesome thing on the internet right now is Yemeni forces keeping a running tally of the US MQ-9 Reaper drones they’ve been destroying. These things are 30 million dollars apiece. pic.twitter.com/hJNHtkVgm1

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 19, 2025

❖

Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman Omer Dostri told Israel’s Channel 12 News on Saturday that a deal with Hamas to release all hostages was a non-starter for the Israeli government, because it would require a commitment to lasting peace.

“At the moment, there can’t be one deal since Hamas isn’t saying: ‘Come get your hostages and that’s that,’ it’s demanding an end to the war,” Dostri said in the interview.

This comes as Hamas offers to return all hostages, stop digging tunnels, and put away its weapons in exchange for a permanent ceasefire. This is what Israel is dismissing as unacceptable.

The Pope has died           Video/audio: Caitlin Johnstone

The Gaza holocaust was never about freeing the hostages. This has been clear ever since Israel began aggressively bombing the place where the hostages are living, and it’s gotten clearer and clearer ever since. Last month Netanyahu made it clear that Israel intends to carry out Trump’s ethnic cleansing plans for the enclave even if Hamas fully surrenders.

When Washington’s podium people say the “war” in Gaza can end if Hamas releases the hostages and lays down their arms, they are lying. They are lying to ensure that the genocide continues.

When Israel apologists say “Release the hostages!” in response to criticisms of Israeli atrocities, they are lying. They know this has never had anything to do with hostages. They are lying to help Israel commit more atrocities.

It was never about the hostages. It was never about Hamas. What it’s really about was obvious from day one: purging Palestinians from Palestinian land. That’s all this has ever been.

❖

After executing 15 medical workers in Gaza and getting caught lying about it, the IDF has investigated itself and attributed the massacre to “professional failures” and “operational misunderstandings”, finding no evidence of any violation of its code of ethics.

It’s crazy to think about how much investigative journalism went into exposing this atrocity only to have Israel go “Yeah turns out we did an oopsie, no further action required, thank you to our allies for the latest shipment of bombs.”

❖

The death toll from Trump’s terrorist attack on a Yemen fuel port is now up to 80, with 150 wounded. Again, the US has not even tried to claim this was a military target. They said they targeted this critical civilian infrastructure to hurt the economic interests of the Houthis.

Those who are truly anti-war don’t support Trump. Those who support Trump aren’t truly anti-war.

I still get people telling me I need to be nicer to Trump supporters because they’re potential allies in resisting war, which to me is just so silly. What are they even talking about? Trump supporters, per definition, currently support the one person who is most singularly responsible for the horrific acts of war we are seeing in the middle east right now. Telling me they’re my allies is exactly as absurd as telling me Biden supporters were my allies last year would have been, except nobody was ever dumb enough to try to make that argument.

If you still support Trump in April 2025 after seeing all his monstrous behavior in Gaza and Yemen, then we are on completely opposite sides. You might think you’re on the same side as me because you oppose war in theory, but when the rubber meets the road it turns out you’ll go along with any acts of mass military slaughter no matter how evil so long as they are done by a Republican. We are not allies, we are enemies. You side with the most egregious warmonger in the world right now, and I want your side to fail.

❖

People say “It’s the Muslims!” or “It’s the Jews!”

No, it’s the Americans. The US-centralised empire is responsible for most of our world’s problems.

It says so much about the strength of the imperial propaganda machine that this isn’t more obvious to more people.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

One thing October 7 did accomplish was getting Israel and its allies to show the world their true face. Getting them to stand before all of humanity to say, “If you resist us, we’ll kill your babies. We’ll deliberately shoot your kids in the head.

“We’ll massacre medical workers. We’ll systematically destroy all your hospitals. We’ll rape you and torture you as a matter of policy.

“We’ll lay siege to the entire civilian population. We’ll make your entire land uninhabitable and then we’ll kick you all out and take it for ourselves.

“We’ll assassinate all your journalists and block foreign journalists from entry so that nobody can see what we’re doing to you.

“We’ll lie about all of these things the entire time, and you’ll know we’re lying, and we’ll know you know we’re lying, and you’ll know we know you know we’re lying.

“And we’ll get away with it anyway, because we hold all the cards.”

Sometimes I’ll run into people who say “What did Hamas expect to happen? They had to know Israel would do this!” They say this in an effort to lay the blame for Israel’s genocidal atrocities at the feet of Hamas, as though Israel is some kind of wild animal who can’t be held accountable for its actions if someone gets too close to its mouth.

But of course Hamas knew Israel and its allies would react this way. Of course they did.

They knew they were dealing with a murderous and tyrannical civilisation that is capable of limitless evil and doesn’t see Palestinians as human beings. They knew it because they’d lived under it all their lives.

That is the problem they were trying to address with their actions on October 7.

Palestine has single handedly unmasked the world

— Rahma (@Rahmazeinegypt) April 6, 2025

You can disagree with the decisions Hamas made on that day. You can say they should have used other means to pursue justice. You can denounce them, hate them, do the whole public ritual necessary for mainstream acceptance in Western society.

But one thing you can’t do is deny that Israel and its allies have been revealing their true face to the world every day since, at levels they previously were not.

It’s all fully visible now. It’s all right there on the surface. We can try to continue pretending we live in a free society that believes in truth and justice and regards all people as equal, but we’ll all know it’s a lie.

What we are, first and foremost, is a civilisation that will actively support history’s first live-streamed genocide. That’s the single most relevant fact about the Western world at this point in history. It’s staring us right in the face every day.

Hamas succeeded in exposing the true face of the empire.    Video: Caitlin Johnstone

October 7 certainly didn’t make life any easier for the Palestinians, but one thing it did do was take away our ability to hide from ourselves.

Hamas reached thousands of kilometres around the world and permanently destroyed our ability to avoid the truth about the kind of dystopia we are really living in.

Our rulers may succeed in eliminating the Palestinians as a people, but one thing they will never be able to do is put those blinders back on our eyes.

What has been seen cannot be unseen.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Notes from The Edge of the Narrative Matrix
Acting on orders from the White House, immigration agents arrested a Columbia University graduate for deportation due to his leadership of campus protests against Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza last year.

Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil is reportedly married to an American citizen and had had permanent residency in the US, but his green card has been revoked by the State Department as the Trump administration works to deport everyone they can possibly get away with deporting for criticising Israel.

This is the equivalent of the Australian government revoking the permanent residency of my American husband Tim and deporting him because of our work criticising the Gaza holocaust. The suffering that can be unleashed by a policy like this in the United States is hard to fathom.

This comes as we learn that the US government will be using AI to compile lists of people suspected of expressing support for Hamas on social media, and as the Trump administration announces that funding will be killed for any schools which allow “illegal protests” in support of Palestinians on their campuses.

I have said it before and I will say it again: there is no greater threat to free speech in our society than Israel and the Western governments who support it. Civil rights are being stomped out throughout the Western world to shut down all criticism of Israel.

We’re now seeing escalations in Western Zionism’s assault on civil rights on a daily basis. Pretty much every day I’m reading about at least one Western government silencing criticism of Israel with some new authoritarian abuse.

Zionism is the number one threat to free speech in our society.

Westerners need to understand that Israel and the West’s support for it are a direct threat to our personal freedom. This is about YOU now. If you didn’t have enough compassion to oppose Israel for its genocidal atrocities, you should at least now oppose it to protect yourself.

Arrest The Real Criminals pic.twitter.com/hPmXeFzXLP

— Ryan Rozbiani (@RyanRozbiani) March 12, 2025

❖

Trump supporters are falling all over themselves trying to justify Trump’s assaults on free speech the same way Bush supporters fell all over themselves to justify the authoritarianism of the Bush administration. Republicans haven’t changed. They think they have but they haven’t.

❖

This happens as opposition to Israel becomes more urgently needed than ever. Israel has cut off all electricity to Gaza, which is expected to cripple Gaza’s water supply by killing power to critical desalination plants. Once again this genocidal apartheid state is targeting civilians with deadly force in order to advance its depraved agendas, but anyone who wants to criticise such things is being aggressively targeted by increasingly tyrannical measures throughout the Western world.

❖

The most horrifying thing about all the footage of HTS thugs massacring people in Syria is not the violence itself, it’s how happy its perpetrators are in the videos. Grinning. Laughing. Joking. It’s deeply disturbing how easily people can be turned into monsters.

I’ve been on the receiving end of shrieking vitriol ever since I started this gig for opposing the Western empire’s regime change operations in Syria. Got a good dose of it last December when the operation finally succeeded.

Now look. Look where it landed.

Always oppose the empire.

“British troops should be in Ukraine, but I’m a conscientious objector”

Asking young British men if they’d fight in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/FGr5Xu97AA

— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) March 6, 2025

There’s a video going around of young British men at some kind of pro-Ukraine event advocating sending British troops to Ukraine, and when the interviewer asks them if they themselves would volunteer to go put their own boots on the ground they act shocked and start stammering about how they’re conscientious objectors and are not physically fit enough.

It’s fascinating how often you’ll see this sort of response from Western armchair proxy warriors when you suggest that they should go and fight in this military intervention they’re so keen on perpetuating. They often cannot seem to comprehend why anyone would think it’s a compelling point that they are pushing the continuation of a war that they themselves would never agree to fight in, which is just so very revealing.

It shows that they see the idea of other people fighting and dying in a war as a completely different and unrelated category to the idea of themselves fighting and dying in a war.

It shows that they don’t view the people who fight in wars as fully human, with dreams and fears and families just like they have, who don’t want to die a violent death any more than they do. It’s genuinely never occurred to them to put themselves in the shoes of the people who are fighting and dying and getting their limbs blown off, and to think about what it would be like if the same thing were happening to them.

It’s like a video game to these people. They don’t see it as real in the same way their own lives are real. A war is something they watch unfold on social media and cheer and boo like a sporting event, not something involving real people who are just as capable of suffering and loss as they are.

A majority of Ukrainians now oppose the war and want a negotiated settlement as quickly as possible. If you want this horrific war to continue and yet you are not on front lines serving in the Foreign Legion, then you should definitely shut up.

If you want Ukrainians to keep throwing their lives into a war against their will when you yourself are unwilling to do the same, then you have failed to mature as a human being on this planet. You lack a functioning empathy center in your brain, and it’s a major character flaw, and you should go fix it.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

A Palestinian-Australian man has been criminally charged for voicing criticisms of Zionism during a protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He could spend months in prison.

The Age reports that restaurant owner Hash Tayeh has been charged with four counts of “using insulting words in public” for repeatedly uttering the phrase “all Zionists are terrorists” at a pro-Palestine rally in Melbourne last year.

According to the The Age’s Chris Vedelago, the punishment for this crime of political speech is “up to two months in prison for a first offence and six months for three or more offences”.

“It is believed to be the first time that potential political speech has been deemed a criminal offence that breached the ‘insulting’ law,” Vedelago reports, adding: “The charges are normally levied for using abusive or obscene language against police officers.”

You really couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the authoritarian dystopia that Australia has become than a news report about a man getting criminally charged for normal political speech with a law that is normally used to jail people who speak impolitely to the police.

Deeply concerning that @VictoriaPolice is seeking to criminalise political rhetoric. Dangerous.https://t.co/dKNC1E9GqW

— Greg Barns SC (@BarnsGreg) March 8, 2025

These charges for speech crimes against Zionism follow a controversial assertion made last year by Australia’s Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus:

“The label Zionist is used, not in any way, accurately. When critics use that word, they actually mean Jew. They’re not really saying Zionist, they’re saying Jew because they know that they cannot say Jew, so they say Zionist or words [such as] Zeo or Zio.”

Dreyfus might want to have a chat with outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who just made headlines by proudly proclaiming “I am a Zionist” at his final press conference on Thursday.

Trudeau is not Jewish, nor is genocidal war criminal Joe Biden, who is on record saying on numerous occasions some variation of “I’m a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist”.

Not all Jews are Zionists, and most Zionists are not Jewish. Zionism is a political ideology which upholds the Western decision to drop an abusive apartheid ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilisation in historic Palestine and defend it by any amount of violence and tyranny necessary, and the majority of the people you see defending this status quo are Westerners with no connection to the Jewish faith.

The cult of Christian Zionism alone outnumbers the world’s Jewish population by about two to one.

It is therefore wildly incorrect to conflate Zionism with Judaism, and it is also highly immoral. People who do this are assigning all Jews the blame for Israel’s abuses, when the blame actually lies with the state of Israel and its Western backers. As much as Israel apologists shriek and moan about “antisemitism” when they really mean supporting Palestinians, the real antisemitism problem in our society is the way our ruling institutions keep lumping all Jews in with the abuses of a genocidal apartheid state and the Western empire which supports it.

This is why we call out Zionists and not “the Jews”

Zionism is a cancer that is enabled by White Western society because of their love of colonialism and apartheid https://t.co/pwNrVdFiM9

— Revolutionary Blackout🥋 (@SocialistMMA) March 7, 2025

That’s all the imaginary “antisemitism” crisis is, in reality: people conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. If you declare that anti-Zionism is antisemitism and then Zionism starts butchering children by the tens of thousands in a genocidal onslaught, you are naturally going to see a rapid rise in “antisemitism” as you have defined it.

It’s a fallacious narrative used to justify the strangulation of political speech we are seeing today.

We’re seeing that strangulation surge ahead in Australia with the McCarthyite witch hunt against pro-Palestinian voices, and in a decision by Australian universities to espouse a definition of “antisemitism” which is so speech-suppressing that it has been denounced by Amnesty International.

We are also seeing Zionism strangling free speech throughout the Western world. German police are routinely assaulting pro-Palestine demonstrators. Pro-Palestinian journalists are being persecuted with increasing aggression in the UK and throughout Europe.

In the US the Trump administration is working to stomp out pro-Palestine protests on university campuses while using AI to compile lists of people suspected of expressing support for Hamas on social media.

I have said it before and I will say it again: there is no greater threat to free speech in our society than Israel and the western governments who support it. Civil rights are being stomped out throughout the western world to shut down all criticism of Israel. https://t.co/JgMKN9f8PK

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 7, 2025

Almost every day we’re seeing some new escalation in the Western empire’s efforts to stomp out speech that is critical of Israel. Westerners need to understand that we have moved far beyond the point where Israel is a threat only to Middle Eastern lives: it’s a threat to us all, because the Western governments who support it are stomping out our basic freedoms with increasing aggression in order to silence all criticisms of its abuses.

Even if you didn’t have enough compassion to oppose Israel and its Western backers because of their genocidal atrocities in the Middle East, at this point you need to start opposing them out of sheer self-preservation.

This isn’t just about foreigners overseas anymore: it’s about you. Your rights. Your freedom to voice your political opinions.

Zionism is a threat to civil rights everywhere. Zionism threatens us all.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

An Israeli airstrike destroyed the press office of the Lebanese news broadcaster Al Mayadeen on Wednesday night, continuing Israel’s historically unprecedented military assault on the press.

Also in continuation of Israel’s war on journalism, the IDF has published the names of six Al Jazeera reporters who it claims are actually members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, citing as evidence documents which it claims Israeli forces found in Gaza.

These allegations would mark these journalists as legitimate military targets.

Al Jazeera has denounced these claims as unfounded, saying in a statement: “The Network views these fabricated accusations as a blatant attempt to silence the few remaining journalists in the region, thereby obscuring the harsh realities of the war from audiences worldwide.”

There is of course no reason to ever believe any claim Israel makes about anything whatsoever absent mountains of independently verifiable evidence, after the mountains of lies it has churned out over the last year.

The fact that Western news outlets are treating these allegations as plausible is evidence of their propagandistic nature.

Israel claims everyone it wants to kill is Hamas. The journalists are Hamas, the hospitals are Hamas, the UN is Hamas, the aid trucks are Hamas, the schools are Hamas, the mosques are Hamas, the water infrastructure is Hamas, the civilian homes are all Hamas, and Hamas is hiding behind every woman and child in Gaza.

The only exception to this rule is in Lebanon, in which case everyone Israel wants to kill is Hezbollah.

“Israel hates truth” . . . Gaza: The Al Jazeera investigation into Israeli war crimes.

Why journalists are killed
Israel hates truth, which is why it kills journalists at every opportunity and blocks them from entering Gaza. This is because truth tends to have a marked anti-Israel bias.

We saw this illustrated recently when Israel announced that there is a secret Hezbollah bunker underneath a hospital in Beirut, so the press simply sent a bunch of reporters to go and investigate because Israel can’t block the press from entering Lebanon like it can in Gaza.

Even Western outlets like the BBC and Sky News entered the hospital and interviewed medical staff, reporting that they found no trace of evidence supporting Israel’s claims and that the hospital staff all denied the existence of any Hezbollah bunker on the premises.

And you may be sure those outlets would have eagerly reported any sign of Hezbollah if they were given the opportunity.

Israel Continues Its War On Journalism

Article with supporting links.https://t.co/hnsKnHaOqZ

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 24, 2024

Criminal institutions need to function in the dark. They cannot function in the light of visibility and critical journalism and inconvenient video footage.

That’s why the mafia murders witnesses. That’s why the inner workings of the US war machine are shrouded in government secrecy. That’s why Julian Assange spent five years in a maximum security prison.

And that’s why Israel does everything it can to kill and obstruct journalists who tell the truth about its crimes.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

The death toll has risen to 12 from Israel’s terror attack in Lebanon on Tuesday which detonated explosive materials hidden in thousands of pagers.

Another 20 people were then killed in another attack the following day with a second wave of explosions, this time using walkie talkies and home solar energy systems.

The total death toll now sits at 32. Two children and four healthcare workers are among the dead. Thousands have been wounded.

As you would expect, Western empire managers are getting really squirmy about this.

White House spokesman John Kirby adamantly refused to answer any questions involving Israel’s responsibility for the attacks during a press conference on Wednesday, despite Israel being widely reported as the responsible party, with outlets like The New York Times citing US officials as their source.

“I’m not gonna speak to the details of these incidents,” Kirby said repeatedly when questioned about Israel’s role and what the US response will be.

It goes without saying that if a government like Russia, China or Iran were even suspected of being responsible for similar attacks, Kirby and his fellow podium people would be not just naming the suspected aggressor but fervently denouncing the attack as an act of terrorism.

Leaked memo
And it is here worth reminding readers that in 2017, a leaked State Department memo explained in plain language that it is standing US policy to overlook the abuses of US allies while denouncing the abuses of US enemies in order to undermine enemies and show other countries the perks of being aligned with the United States.

The memo showed neoconservative empire manager Brian Hook teaching a previously uninitiated Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that for the US government, “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line.

In a remarkable look into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook told Tillerson that it is US policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with US interests while exploiting and weaponising them against nations who aren’t.

“In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasising good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights,” Hook explained in the memo.

“One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries,” Hook wrote.

“We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.

“And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”

Highlight the discrepancies
“It’s tedious going “If Group X did this Western politicians and pundits would condemn it but because Group Y did it they’re fine with it” over and over again, but it’s important to highlight these discrepancies because they show how we’re being deceived.

Westerners are indoctrinated from birth into believing they live in a society that is basically good with governments that, while imperfect, are still far superior to the tyrants and corrupt autocrats of the global south.

In reality the Western power structure centralised around the United States is the single most murderous and tyrannical force on earth by an extremely massive margin, but that obvious fact is always omitted from the indoctrination curriculum.

By pointing out the glaring discrepancies between the way the Western political-media class responds to things like Israel turning electronic devices into thousands of bombs placed throughout civilian populations and the way they respond when other groups detonate explosives among civilians, you’re helping to punch holes in the veil of indoctrination they have cast over our collective understanding of the world.

The more you recognise that you only see your society as good and others as bad because of the way world events are framed by Western news media and politicians, the closer you get to having your “Are we the baddies?” epiphany.

Hypocrisy and contradiction are not great moral evils in and of themselves, but they often run cover for great moral evils. The fact that we are trained to think about the world by people who facilitate great evils perpetrated by their own side when they’d condemn identical evils committed by their enemies shows that they do not stand against evil, and are deeply evil themselves.

Recognising the problems in our world is the first step to solving them. That’s what the propagandists and empire managers work to prevent us from doing, and that’s what we try to do by pointing out the glaring plot holes and inconsistencies in their narratives over and over again.

Mock their denunciations
The correct thing to do when Western leaders talk about human rights or denounce abuses by enemy governments is to mock them and dismiss them. They’re not saying anything true about their actual values and beliefs; if they were there wouldn’t be so much hypocrisy in the way they denounce governments they don’t like for offences they ignore and make excuses for in governments they do like.

They’re never saying what they’re saying to stop human rights abuses or make the world a better place, they’re only saying what they’re saying to undermine their enemies so that the Western empire can rule the world and be the only one administering abuse.

And the same is true of the mainstream Western press. You’ll see them completely ignore the abuses of US-aligned governments while showing immense interest in alleged abuses by empire-targeted groups, often on very flimsy evidence.

Mock them and dismiss them when they act like they care about human rights abuses. They don’t care. They just want to make sure the abusive power structure they conduct propaganda for is the one in charge.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.