COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

There was another IDF massacre in Gaza on Saturday, reportedly killing dozens of Palestinians.

Israel as usual claimed it was responding to a ceasefire violation by Hamas, but of course there’s absolutely no evidence for this to be found. AP reports that according to the IDF the strikes were launched after a Hamas fighter “shot at troops in southern Gaza,” but that “no soldiers were hurt” in this alleged attack.

Not so much as a scratch. So I guess we’re just expected to take Israel’s word for it.

Now check out these Western media headlines about the massacre and notice the disgusting spin they are placing on the narrative to normalise the continued slaughter of Palestinians:

Do you see what they’re doing here?

The Western press see the killing of Palestinians as such a baseline norm that Israel can massacre dozens of people in Gaza and they’ll go, “Gosh I sure hope this doesn’t lead to any violations of the ceasefire!”

When Israel violates Trump’s ceasefire, the mainstream media calls it “testing” the ceasefire.

There is no circumstance in this or in any other universe in which Hamas could kill 24 Israelis and the media would reduce it to Hamas “testing” the ceasefire. https://t.co/QfaJh2N8bR

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) November 22, 2025

It’s never a ceasefire violation to commit mass murder against Palestinians. It’s only ever a “test” of the ceasefire, or something that happens “amid a fragile ceasefire”.

If Hamas suddenly attacked and killed dozens of Israelis, these empire propagandists wouldn’t be saying “Hmm I sure hope the fragile ceasefire holds up amid this challenging test.” They’d just call it what it is. And it would be the main news story in the world.

You don’t hate the mass media enough     Audio/video: Caitlin Johnstone

The imperial media have been framing Israel’s ceasefire violations like this the entire time. Just the other day NBC News ran a report about a different IDF massacre in Gaza titled “Israeli airstrikes kill 25 Palestinians in Gaza, rattling fragile ceasefire”. Last month CNN ran a headline claiming “US-brokered ceasefire appears to survive first major test” after Israel killed at least 44 people, when Israel had been violating the ceasefire every single day up to that point.

The mass media have been running egregiously misleading headlines throughout this entire genocide, which has an overwhelmingly distorting effect on public perception in an information environment where skim-reading has become the norm and most social media users share news stories after just reading the headline.

Killing Palestinians is so normalized and accepted as a baseline expectation in the western press that CNN calls this the “first major test” of the ceasefire after Israel killed people in Gaza every single day since the ceasefire agreement was signed. https://t.co/wTSEKzsDCN

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 19, 2025

It almost feels silly to point out that the mass media are wildly biased in favor of Israel two years into a genocide which they’ve actively run propaganda cover for in brazen acts of journalistic malpractice from the very beginning.

But we can’t let it slip from our attention how evil these imperial spinmeisters are. How racist they are. How mendacious and manipulative they are. However much you hate them, you don’t hate them enough.

These are the people who are informing Western perspectives about what’s going on in our world. They aren’t just deceiving the public with dishonest headlines and precipitously slanted reporting which gets loudly amplified by Silicon Valley algorithms, they are writing the stories which get used and cited by AI chatbots and online platforms like Wikipedia which people are increasingly turning to for information about world events.

They are polluting the entire information ecosystem with a deluge of propaganda they are churning out day after day, year after year.

These freaks are attacking our minds. They are attacking humanity’s ability to understand its waking reality. They are continuously indoctrinating the public into an ignorant, Western supremacist worldview which only values human life when it lives in the correct part of the world, speaks the correct language, practises the correct religion, has the correct skin color, and aligns with the correct geopolitical agendas.

They make everything worse. It’s impossible to have enough disdain for these mass media propagandists.

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

Secretary of War™ Pete Hegseth said during a speech on Friday that the US is at “a 1939 moment” of “mounting urgency” in which “enemies gather, threats grow,” adding, “We are not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing.”

Everything’s getting darker and creepier in the shadow of the empire.

Nate Bear has a report out on his newsletter titled “The AI Drones Used In Gaza Now Surveilling American Cities” about a new company called Skydio which “in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US”.

Bear reports that Skydio now has contracts with police departments in almost every large US city to use these Gaza-tested drones for surveillance of American civilians.

Hegseth: “We are not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing. Building for victory should our adversaries FAFO.” pic.twitter.com/eoxhgZh7sZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 7, 2025

Haaretz reports that Israel’s efforts to manipulate American minds back into supporting the Zionist entity include pouring millions into influence operations targeting Christian churchgoers and efforts to change responses to Palestine-related queries on popular AI services like ChatGPT.

It’s crazy how you can literally just be minding your own business in your own church on a Sunday morning and then suddenly find yourself getting throat fucked by propaganda paid for by the state of Israel.

The Intercept reports that YouTube, which is owned by Google, quietly deleted more than 700 videos documenting Israel’s atrocities in Gaza in a purge of pro-Palestine human rights groups from the platform.

Mass Silicon Valley deletions like this combined with the sudden influx of fake AI-generated video content polluting the information ecosystem could serve to erase and obfuscate the evidence of the Gaza holocaust for future generations.

The US empire keeps getting creepier      Video: Caitlin Johnstone

A new report from Reuters says that last year the US had intelligence showing Israel’s own lawyers warning that the IDF’s mass atrocities in the Gaza Strip could result in war crimes charges. This is yet more evidence that the Biden administration knew it was backing a genocide the entire time, including during election season when left-leaning Americans were being told they needed to vote for then-Vice President Kamala Harris if they wanted to save Gaza.

In Italy, a journalist was fired from the news agency Nova for asking an EU official if she thought Israel should be responsible for the reconstruction of Gaza in the same way she has said Russia should have to fund the reconstruction of Ukraine.

A Nova spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that the journalist was indeed fired for asking the inconvenient question on the basis that “Russia had invaded a sovereign country unprovoked, whereas Israel was responding to an attack.”

Reuters reports that the US is preparing to establish a military base in Damascus. For years the empire waged a complex regime change operation in Syria to oust Assad, first by backing proxy forces to destroy the country and then via sanctions and US military occupation to prevent reconstruction.

And it worked. The empire’s dirty war in Syria will be cited by warmongering swamp monsters for years to come as evidence that regime change interventionism can succeed if you just stick at it and do whatever evil things need to be done.

These are just a few of the disturbing stories from the last few days that I hadn’t had a chance to write about yet. This is the kind of world we are being offered by the US empire. There is nothing on the menu for us but more war, more genocide, more surveillance, more censorship, more tyranny, and more abuse.

Things are going to keep getting more and more dystopian for everyone who lives under the thumb of the imperial power structure until enough of us decide that the empire needs to end.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.