What the Israeli Ambassador Said

When the most tepid possible Security Council resolution was passed because the US finally didn't veto it, the Israeli ambassador to the UN was invited to speak, along with the representative of Palestine.  All of those speaking in support of the Palestinians facing genocide made good sense and stuck to the facts.  

The Israeli ambassador, on the other hand, spun a web of lies that represent a master class in the Hasbara Troll narrative (that has been flooding my Facebook page for the past 6 weeks or so in particular).  

I was listening to Al-Jazeera on the day, as I often am.  Al-Jazeera treats Security Council meetings as if they matter, and interrupts their regular programming to cover them, which is why I even knew they were meeting at the time.  When the genocidal maniac from Israel spewed his bile, I had to transcribe it.  

What follows is his speech after the Security Council's resolution passed (in italics), and my analysis of the narrative behind the lies that he is trying to establish as current or historical reality, with the immense assistance of the almost completely servile western corporate, state, or "public" media, and the politicians from the west who parrot the narrative and take it for granted that it's true, or at least that it's an honest version of someone's effort to get to the bottom of things, rather than just an organized campaign of disinformation.

He begins:

At the outset I want to express my deepest condolences to the Russian people and to the families of all the victims of the heinous terror attack on Friday.  Terror must always be condemned in the harshest terms.

Here he sets the stage, beginning with his central theme, defining and condemning "terror" in the harshest ways possible, in order to justify the genocide of an entire population.

It is certainly difficult to understand what would drive anyone to sacrifice their own lives or liberty by massacring 137 people at a concert, in Moscow -- or in Manchester, Paris, or anywhere else.  Condemning such actions as heinous and all that is perfectly reasonable.

But for the ambassador's purposes, it's very important to establish what terror is and that it must be condemned in the harshest terms first in order to make it clear that acts carried out by a state actor can't be called "terror," and are always presumed to be in self-defense against "terror."  Those perpetrating the terror must always be condemned in the harshest terms because doing anything else might risk opening the window of mutual understanding or successful communication.  We can't ever risk that.  Therefore, if anyone suggests that when people are massacred on a regular basis, those being massacred might massacre others in return, it must be understood immediately that these people are justifying the unjustifiable, and are sympathetic with "terror," and every awful thing "terror" has ever done.

The ambassador continues:

The Security Council was justifiably very quick to condemn Friday's terror attack in Russia.  Just as it waited no time to condemn the terror attack in Iran against a police station back in December.  Yet still, to this day, the Council refuses to condemn the most widespread and barbaric massacre suffered by the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

He develops his narrative.  Terror must always be condemned in the harshest terms, and here are examples where it has been thusly condemned.  But, he claims, not in the case of southern Israel, despite what he says was the extreme barbarity of the events of October 7th.

Every member state of the United Nations would at least claim to be against terrorist attacks, and generally denounces them publicly.  Nations like Israel and the US also have long histories of helping form and support terrorist networks, while denouncing them in public.

In the United Nations, factors that complicate the idea of condemning Hamas in this instance include reality, history, and international law.  The people of Gaza have been condemned to lives bereft of clean water or sufficient food and other necessities for so many years, drones flying overhead constantly, punctuated by regular bombing campaigns.  Under international law, occupied people have a right to resist occupation.  One of the ambassador's ideological missions is to eliminate any distinction between occupied people resisting occupation and any other form of apparently random violence.

The ambassador expands on the theme:

At least 137 people were murdered at Crocus City concert hall in Russia on Friday by radical jihadists.  And yes, almost 6 months ago nearly 400 people were murdered at the Nova music festival in Israel by the radical jihadists of Hamas.  Why does the Security Council discriminate between Russians murdered at the concert and Israelis murdered at the music festival?  

Having made the evident connection between the massacre in Crocus concert hall and the ghetto uprising in southern Israel, he asks why the double-standard.  His comparison between one "radical jihadist" group and another is, on the one hand, a lot like saying Spanish Inquisition and the nation of Mexico are both run by Catholics.  On the other hand, the comparison is interesting because both Islamic State and Hamas have origins that have a whole lot to do with undercover military and intelligence agency campaigns as well as very overt ones conducted by Israel and the United States.  Neither group would exist in the first place without US imperialism on the one hand, or Zionism on the other.

But the differences between these events are also abundantly clear.  Hamas, for example, took hostages in order to trade them for the thousands of Palestinians (including many children) being held hostage in Israeli prisons, indefinitely without trial (though the trial would be extremely unfair if there were to be one).  The arsonists in Moscow did not take hostages, they just killed everyone in sight.  The Gaza uprising targeted soldiers, which made up almost half of the Israelis killed during the battle, in which hundreds of Palestinian fighters also were killed.

The ambassador continues, with an effort to rewrite history to make it more convenient for the occupiers:

Civilians, no matter where they live, deserve to enjoy music in safety and security.  And the Security Council should have the moral clarity to condemn such acts of terror equally, without discrimination.  Sadly, today as well this council refused to condemn the October 7th massacre.  This is a disgrace.  It was the Hamas massacre that started this war.  I repeat -- it was the Hamas massacre that started this war.

The notion that Hamas started this war is just as ridiculous as saying that the Jewish Combat Organization started the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that resulted in the deaths of several dozen German soldiers, along with 60,000 Polish Jews, mostly burned alive as the Nazis methodically destroyed every building in the ghetto.  If it were true that Hamas started the war, then Gaza would not have been occupied, sanctioned, besieged, and bombed since 2006.  If it were true that Hamas started the war, the population of Gaza would not be made up primarily of descendants from refugees who fled prior, successful Israeli efforts to steal their land (without acknowledgement or compensation).

Now the ambassador goes for the jugular, as it were:

Nearly 6 months have passed and the Security Council still has not condemned the child-murdering rapists that began this war.  The resolution just voted upon makes it seem as if the war started by itself!  Well let me set the record straight:  Israel did not start this war, nor did Israel want this war.

Israel did not start this ghetto uprising, as he established earlier.  And furthermore, although almost half of the Israelis killed were soldiers, apparently during the constant fighting around southern Israel on October 7th, the Palestinians had time to commit all kinds of sadistic acts towards women and children while they were losing battle after battle against a far superior armed force, the Israeli military.  Except that the evidence for any of these acts doesn't seem to exist -- every time the Israelis purport to have evidence, it turns out to be yet another Israeli lie.  

It's a very important lie, though, clearly, as can be seen not only from the rhetoric of just about every Israeli pundit and politician, but also from the rhetoric of their internet trolls, who focus the majority of their attacks on the notion that the Palestinians all deserve to be killed because they committed such depraved acts.

It's also a very important lie because it seeks to help mask the fact that Israel is well-documented to have intentionally committed all the sorts of crimes Hamas is accused of without evidence, including rape, executing and massacring defenseless people in schools, apartment buildings, in hospitals, and in the streets, including tremendous numbers of children.  And even more horrific -- intentionally starving millions of people and depriving them of water, shelter, and medical care.

He goes on:

Israel disengaged, and we withdrew from Gaza 18 years ago.  We wanted a ceasefire and coexistence.  You can repeat here slogans and purport to know for the Palestinians what the Palestinians seek.  But this won't make it the truth or the reality.  The Palestinian representative here is lying through his teeth when he says his people want to live side-by-side with Israel.

Israel withdrew its settlements from Gaza in order to turn Gaza into a walled ghetto, which is what they did immediately after they destroyed and abandoned their settlements, leaving almost nothing of use remaining.  The people of Gaza have never had autonomy, control of their borders, control of a seaport or an airport, or the opportunity for any kind of voluntary coexistence with their occupier-"neighbors."

The device the ambassador uses when he talks about Palestinians living "side-by-side with Israel" is intentionally deceptive, because he knows full well that what there is fundamental disagreement with is around the definition of "Israel" -- for example, where are the borders of Israel?  Do they include the West Bank and the Gaza Strip?  All of both, or only parts?  Does Israel control the borders of its "neighbors"?

He continues:

By the way, as you probably know, he [the Palestinian ambassador] does not represent Hamas, he does not represent the Gazans, they did not choose him to speak for them.  His leader, President Abbas, refuses to even condemn the massacre, and he continues to pay terrorists.

The idea of condemning something in this case is a lot like the idea of "living side by side."  What are we actually talking about?  What are we condemning?  What do we mean by "Israel" or how do we define our borders?  These questions are completely essential -- and entirely ignored by Israeli leaders and their western supporters.

The notion that the Palestinian Authority continues to "pay terrorists" is a reference to paying those who administer the infrastructure and society in Gaza.  He then expands on this notion:

After Israel withdrew from Gaza, the Palestinians elected Hamas, a terrorist organization.  They elected a terror organization.  Hamas converted every inch of Gaza into a terror war machine, right under the UN's nose -- maybe with the help of some of the UN's agencies, like UNWRA.  And Hamas initiated ceaseless attacks on Israeli civilians throughout the past 18 years.  Thousands and thousands of indiscriminate rockets and missiles at civilians.

The opposite of this narrative gets much closer to reality.  The notion that Hamas's rockets have ever been anything other than a response to Israeli occupation and strangulation of their little strip of land is ridiculous, laughable, and repeated in the western press as if the notion had any basis of truth.  The notion that the main UN agency responsible for the survival of the people of Gaza is a terrorist group of some kind, or that most people involved with running Gaza are involved with armed resistance, are obvious lies -- but obvious lies that are regurgitated regularly in the western press as if they had any relevance to reality.

He continues:

Today, Hamas is the most popular movement among Palestinians.  And according to every poll, the vast majority of Palestinians support Hamas's massacre on October 7th, not only in Gaza but also in Judea and Samaria.  This is the reality you should face and you should address.

In other words, the UN Security Council should address the "reality" that people living under a savagely brutal occupation involving constant home demolitions, torture of arbitrarily arrested people held for decades in prison, regular pogroms committed against Palestinian communities, etc., would support armed resistance against such a regime.

Colleagues, while the resolution fails to condemn Hamas, it does state something that should have been the driving moral force.  This resolution denounces the taking of hostages, recalling that it is in violation of international law.  Taking innocent civilians hostage is a war crime, and there is no arguing that this is what Hamas has committed.  

The ambassador then moves on to the most oft-repeated theme of the Hasbara Trolls, the Israeli politicians and pro-war activists, and the subservient western press:  taking hostages is a violation of international law, and the hostages should be freed unconditionally.

The reality is, Israel holds far more hostages than are being held in Gaza, it's just that they are referred to as "prisoners."  Historically, one of the few ways Palestinians have been successful in freeing significant numbers of Palestinian prisoners has not been through the Israeli military courts, but by taking Israeli soldiers hostage, and then doing a hostage-exchange, which the Israeli authorities are refusing to do, preferring instead to bomb and starve their own hostages to death.

He further expands on the hostages theme:

The release of the hostages should have been the #1 priority.  When it comes to bringing the hostages home, the Security Council must not settle for words alone, but take action -- real action.  It is unfathomable that when it comes to releasing the hostages, we still only see inaction.  Not a single step has been taken by the council aside from symbolic words.  Yet, when it comes to the situation in Gaza, the council rushed to take action.  You appointed a special coordinator and established a monitoring mechanism.  The council visited Rafah to see the aid shipments firsthand.  And the Secretary General has already visited Rafah Crossing twice.

Negotiations for hostage and prisoner exchanges have been going on for months, but because Israel doesn't want to do such an exchange, there hasn't been one.  The ambassador's effort here is to obfuscate this basic reality, an effort at obfuscation that has been exercised daily by western media and political leaders.

The notion that because UN agencies and the Secretary-General are taking Israel's genocide seriously, this shows bias is nothing more than a cruel joke.  If the UN were really taking this genocide seriously, many people imagine it might take actual action, rather than having press conferences in Egypt.

He expands further:

Why do our hostages not receive concrete action?  What have you done to advance their release?  Colleagues, following this council's adoption of UNSCR 2712 and 2720 which both call for the release of all hostages, Hamas did not stop to even contemplate for even one moment.  It should be very clear that as long as Hamas refuses to release the hostages through diplomatic channels, there is no other way to secure their return other than through a military operation.

The idea that freeing hostages requires a military operation is once again turning reality on its head, and once again an upside-down world regularly reported as something other than completely fabricated, by western press and politicians.  Rather than not even contemplating it for a moment, Hamas representatives have been in constant negotiations for months in Qatar and Russia and elsewhere, talking about a hostage-prisoner exchange and other relevant issues.

Israel's "military operation" in Gaza has killed unknown numbers of Israeli hostages -- including three that were shot while shirtless, raising white flags, shouting in Hebrew, and trying to get rescued by Israeli troops nearby.

He expands further:

On the one hand, the resolution says that taking civilian hostages is in violation of international law.  Yet, on the other hand, despite the fact that you know Hamas won't listen to your calls and release the hostages, you demand a ceasefire.  Take a moment and think about this moral contradiction.

The obvious contradiction with regards to a hostage release and a ceasefire is the notion that it's even physically possible or remotely safe to release hostages while the entirety of the Gaza Strip is covered by armed drones and being constantly bombed.

He goes on:

Your demand for a ceasefire, without conditioning it on the release of the hostages, not only is not helpful, but it undermines the efforts to secure their release.  It is harmful to these efforts, because it gives Hamas terrorists the hope to get a ceasefire without releasing the hostages.  All members of the council -- all members -- should have voted against this shameful resolution.

The idea here is to make sure it's clear that the only lives that matter are Israeli lives, and Palestinian lives are irrelevant.  Why would there be any reason to call for a ceasefire, if Hamas hasn't unilaterally released all of their captives first?  Just because millions of Palestinians are being bombed and starved?  Not only are Palestinian lives irrelevant in the ambassador's analysis, but all of the people of Gaza are responsible for the fate that has befallen them.

The ambassador continues, with a theatrical flourish:

Mr. President, where are these council's actions?  Why don't you designate Hamas as a terrorist organization?  Even if there are council members here who would prevent this due to their political alliances with Hamas's leadership, where are the moral efforts to advance such a designation?

I wish to suggest an alternate text, that should have been adopted by the council if it wasn't so biased against Israel:

"The Security Council strongly condemns and deplores all abuses of human rights, and where applicable, violations of international humanitarian law by the terrorist group.  Including those involving violence against civilian populations, notably women and children, kidnapping, killing, hostage-taking, pillaging, rape, sexual slavery and other sexual violence, recruitment of children, and destruction of civilian property.  The Security Council demands that the terrorist group immediately and unequivocally cease all hostilities and all abuses of human rights and international humanitarian law, and disarm and demobilize.  The Security Council demands the immediate and unconditional release of all those abducted who remain in captivity.  The Security Council recognizes that some of such acts may amount to crimes against humanity."

Colleagues, I did not draft this text.  You know who did?  This council.  This is the resolution adopted by the council 10 years ago when Boko Haram kidnapped the school girls in Nigeria. 

One of the outrages of quoting the Security Council's condemnation of Boko Haram's actions is that they describe so many aspects of what Israeli forces are doing daily in Gaza, verifiably -- hostage-taking, pillaging, rape, sexual violence, torture, destruction of everything in sight -- and so much more, including mass forced famine and disease.  But as was made clear in the resolution, they were not condemning any governments for such actions, but only a nonstate actor -- which is why the US didn't veto it.

The ambassador concludes:

So I ask you again, why can this council call on Boko Haram to lay down their arms, but the same cannot be demanded of the murderous Hamas terrorists?  Is the life of [an Israeli baby] worth less than the life of a Nigerian child?  Sadly, it's for the same reason why you can condemn terror attacks in Russia or Iran but not in Israel.  For this council, Israeli blood is cheap.  This is a travesty, and I am disgusted.

His closing remark referencing Israeli babies is especially galling, given that it was evidently the Israeli military's scorched-earth policy in retaking southern Israeli towns that resulted in the deaths of Israeli babies and other Israelis, along with Palestinian fighters.  Meanwhile, Israeli policies are intentionally and directly causing the deaths of babies across the Gaza Strip, in many well-documented cases already.

My conclusion, in four words:  the ambassador is lying.

Hollywood Bread and the Unanswered Questions

Was Israel involved with the 9/11 attacks?  It's classified.

In principle, I still agree with Noam Chomsky on most everything.  Half the time these days when I see his name mentioned in some social media thread, it's to criticize him for his perceived disinterest in getting to the bottom of various events, such as the assassination of JFK or the 9/11 attacks.  I still agree with Chomsky's basic orientation on these questions, and have long been parroting it myself.  

It goes something like this:  whoever committed various acts like these, the big problem we face is capitalism and empire, and that's what desperately needs to change, regardless of whatever nefarious activities intelligence agencies or terrorist networks are up to. 

Eight years ago, however, I had a personal experience which, though it didn't change my basic orientation politically in terms of the problems with capitalism and empire or the kind of country and world I yearn to live in, it did make me hone right in to the particular cataclysmic, world-shifting mass murder event that took place in multiple locations in the eastern US on September 11th, 2001.  It raised questions that seem to be very simple as well as very disturbing and exceedingly urgent, but which also seem to have no answers.

Eight years ago I got an email from an old friend who I hadn't been in touch with for many years.  One of the reasons we had been out of touch for so long was because for years he was in touch with no one, in fear for his life, basically living underground.  He wrote me a long email, catching me up on what had happened, particularly during the year, 2001.

Eight years ago, when I reconnected with my old friend, I published an anonymized version of his email to me on my blog, with his permission.  In 2022, I wrote and recorded a song called "Hollywood Bread."  Yesterday I received a rocking remix of the song from Chet Gardiner's studio in Hawai'i.  So this song will be another one on the upcoming album, which will be titled Bearing Witness.  On the occasion of the remix -- and on the occasion of the Israeli military very actively committing genocide, under explicit directions from Israeli leadership, while the western media engages in holocaust denial -- I thought I'd revisit that email I got back in 2016.

davidrovics · Hollywood Bread

The details I would highlight, and the questions I would ask, are pretty much all in the song -- which is a long one, especially by my normally more punk rock standards of brevity.

In Hollywood, Florida, there used to be a building, since demolished, called Hollywood Bread.  My friend had an office on the 9th floor.  

The 10th floor was off-limits, though it used to be accessible.  The janitor of the building, who still was able to access the 10th floor but wasn't supposed to, was mysteriously found dead in the elevator on the 10th floor.  They said he was drunk and had an accident, but my friend said he knew the janitor, and the man never drank alcohol.

My friend shared the 9th floor with other businesses, mostly staffed by Israelis.  They had a lot of fancy IT equipment, but they said they were a moving company.  The staff often didn't seem to know they worked for a moving company, and had to be reminded on occasion.

The smoking area outside of the building was a smoking area shared by other nearby buildings, including one where a man named Mohammed Atta worked.  Mohammed smoked a lot, and often was at the smoking area when my friend was taking smoke breaks, along with lots of the Israelis, who seemed to know Mohammed.

On September 11th, 2001, Mohammed Atta died, along with the other hijackers and their thousands of victims.

By September 12th, 2001, the Israelis were all gone from the Hollywood Bread building, along with all of their equipment.

My friend contacted the FBI to tell them he knew Mohammed Atta and had some other things to talk about that might potentially be of interest to them, but they were never interested in following up on this with him.

None of these facts by themselves prove anything, but they certainly raise justifiable suspicions of all kinds -- suspicions made even more suspicious by the complete lack of believable answers to any of them.

Such as:

• why does it appear from web listings that no one had offices in the Hollywood Bread building in September, 2001, when this is evidently not true?
• what business was operating on the 10th floor in September, 2001?
• how did the janitor die?
• what was the Israeli "moving company" really doing?
• what was the relationship between the Israeli "moving company" and Mohammed Atta?
• why did they all quickly close their offices after September 11th?
• why was the FBI not interested in my friend's stories about all of this?

I don't know if we'll ever know the answers to any of these questions.

Some things I do know is since I posted to my blog with my friend's testimony about this stuff, the online trolls who position themselves as "antifascists" consider me a "conspiracist," which seems to be a new term for people who spread "conspiracy theories."

I also know that as soon as I posted about this, I started hearing from people about all sorts of other conspiracy theories about 9/11 and many other things.

From my decades now of experience in two particular arenas -- speaking out against Israel's crimes, and speaking out in support of imprisoned journalist, Julian Assange -- there are clear patterns in terms of the reactions I've learned to expect.

From one end there will be the voices discounting your questions on the basis of them addressing apparent conspiracies -- whether they might be conspiracies between intelligence agencies and terrorist networks to carry out, assist in, or deflect responsibility for terrorist attacks; or conspiracies between various state actors to libel, silence, and imprison a journalist.  Regardless of how much circumstantial or whatever other kind of evidence there may be pointing to an actual conspiracy, there will be many loud voices responding with attacks, to anything that gets attention.

From another end there will be those who see someone capable of believing in the outrageous, and therefore someone to share their own outrageous ideas with, ideas about other wild conspiracies involving mass murder, secret coups d'etat, or some form of world governance plot -- in some cases theories which are well-known to be true and a matter of the public record, in other cases theories which are patently completely wacky, and a whole bunch in between as well.

There is no doubt at all that both those making the accusations of "conspiracism" and those sharing news of other conspiracies are a combination of well-meaning individuals as well as people working in one of various troll farms, paid to sustain a narrative and attack those who veer from it and get any attention for doing so.  (Anyone who pays attention to me via Facebook in late February and early March can attest to the obviously organized and paid trolling activities of the pro-Israel trolls apparently unleashed on me by UK Lawyers for Israel.)

It may perhaps be possible for an investigative journalist or someone else to get past the "it's classified" response from FBI investigators to Israeli involvement in 9/11.  But it's very clear that the costs of even raising such questions can involve loss of credibility, association with wild-eyed tin-hat people, losing your job as a journalist or university professor, and not having your music played on BBC, among other consequences.  

To say the least, it's a very chilling academic/intellectual environment for any serious inquiry into very serious matters.

Genocide In Review

Sometimes, I'm told, it's good to look back, assess one's efforts, review.  The truth is, I don't know what else to say.  But then rather than say nothing, I thought I'd review what I have tried, evidently in vain, to communicate since October.

When the uprising from within the besieged ghetto walls began on October 7th, I was struck by the many parallels with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which have only become far more numerous as this deadly march of time continues.

Given the long history of Israel destroying whole neighborhoods in Gaza by aerial bombardment and preventing Gaza from getting clean water or sufficient food and other necessities over the course of decades of siege and sanctions, it didn't take long to recognize the carpet-bombing for what it was.

Daily demonstrations began to take place right away, all over the world, denouncing the genocide.  The weekly demonstrations that have continued to take place globally have probably represented the biggest sustained global movement about anything ever.

Pro-Israel propagandists began to focus on what they labeled as the "genocidal" nature of the slogan, "from the river to the sea," and in so doing, attempting to flip the colonial history and current reality on its head.

As the slaughter of the people of Gaza continued unabated, the world began to learn of the acronym WCNSF that medical workers were writing in indelible ink on the bodies of many of their patients -- Wounded Child, No Surviving Family. 

There was a brief respite in the bombing during which some people called "hostages" were exchanged for other people called "prisoners," and a little food and medicine was allowed in to the destroyed neighborhoods of the Gaza Strip.  They called it a "humanitarian pause."

There is no way to tell where the line is between dark humor and the impossibly grim reality we're witnessing or living through, but many people began to talk about how after the genocide is complete, once the last Palestinian is killed, they'll have museums in Israel where remorse is expressed, with displays of Palestinian artifacts.

Dozens of UN agencies were trying to raise the alarm very early in the bombing campaign that soon famine and disease would be killing far greater numbers of Palestinians than the bombardment -- despite the massive scale of the bombing.

As the world watched the complete destruction of Gaza taking place, daily pogroms were being carried out against Palestinians all over the occupied West Bank.

This genocide, this apocalypse, has been streamed for us in real time, documented by its victims.  Journalists have been targeted systematically by the Israelis for bombings and assassinations while they've been documenting this.

The parallels between Israel's genocide in Gaza and Nazi policies during the holocaust in Europe have continued to grow.  These days, however, if you oppose Israeli fascism, you will be accused of antisemitism.

In case it wasn't already abundantly obvious that the Israeli occupation forces were operating under a "shoot anything that moves" directive, they shot and killed three of their own soldiers while they were shirtless, shouting in Hebrew, and holding white flags in their hands.

In addition to demonstrations and marches in solidarity with the Palestinian people, there has been armed resistance, most prominently from Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi Army in Yemen.  These groups vilified as "terrorists" by the western press are attempting to uphold international law, while Israel flagrantly violates it by the second.

Israel is continually stealing more and more Palestinian land, and is now in the process of stealing Gaza.  As Palestinians have been saying for generations, this struggle for freedom is a struggle for the land.

As the bombardment continued it became increasingly clear that rather than being an entirely indiscriminate bombing campaign, aside from targeting journalists, the occupation forces have been targeting medical workers, women, and children.

As the highest Christian holy day approached and Christmas celebrations were canceled in the Occupied West Bank, the Christians in Gaza were being bombed.

Eventually the Jordanian Air Force and others began to do occasional airdrops.  During the Berlin Air Lift the amounts airdropped were almost incomparably higher.

As famine took hold, the Israeli occupation forces began using food deliveries as bait to lure starving Palestinians out of their bombed buildings into the open, so they could massacre them.  They then made this a daily tradition.

Increasing numbers of UN officials and world leaders made more unequivocally clear that countries arming Israel and vetoing ceasefire resolutions were facilitating genocide.

Another person immolated himself in protest against the genocide of the Palestinians.  He filmed his own death and announced it in advance, so we know who he was -- Aaron Bushnell.

As the famine and disease took hold across the Gaza Strip I thought about the similarities with the Minnesota famine of 1862, following Little Crow's uprising.

The pro-Israel "Hasbara Trolls" have been extremely active since the genocide began, gracing my Facebook accounts most diligently -- increasing "engagement" by over 800% in one week.  A lot of other people are having the same experience.  (I wrote an essay about the Hasbara Trolls, as well.)

Coincidentally at the same time as the US began setting up a temporary port in Gaza, organizers of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition announced their plans to sail to Gaza from various ports around the world.

I wake up so many mornings to find that Al-Jazeera is reporting that over a hundred Palestinians were killed in the past 24 hours by bombing, the Israelis are still preventing aid trucks from getting in, and famine and disease are widespread in Gaza.  While on NPR, Gaza is increasingly not even among the headlines anymore.  It is, in fact, a form of holocaust denial.

I still don't know what else to say.

Little Crow's Uprising and the Minnesota Famine of 1862

Revisiting history, events in Minnesota in 1862 and events in Israel and Gaza since October 7th have some remarkable similarities.

The world, at least those in the world paying attention, is seeing the imagery of famine emerging on their screens from the Gaza Strip.  They are seeing the images that have become familiar to all of us from other famines.  The particular kind of gauntness in the faces of the dying, the bulging eyes, and the mouths of the dead stained green from the grass they were trying to eat to dampen the pain of the hunger.

This famine is entirely engineered by an occupying army preventing food, water, medicine, or fuel from entering their walled ghetto.  An entire population is being punished, very intentionally, through mass starvation -- killed en masse by famine and disease, in the most horrifying form of collective punishment imaginable or possible.

This being the month of March, as St. Patrick's Day approached, many commentaries were written making comparisons with the famine in Ireland in the 1840's, which still seems to be remembered there as if it happened last year, and is called a holocaust by many people on the island.  The potato blight was happening throughout Europe, and led directly to the Europe-wide rebellions of 1848.  But in Ireland it led to famine, and this was a direct consequence of a change in British government policies during the course of the potato shortage.

There are many other instances of famines imposed by occupying armies.

In the wake of the October 7th uprising from within the walls of the Gaza Ghetto I've revisited many historical episodes, looking for patterns, as certain people will tend to do.  It was upon revisiting the events of 1862 in Minnesota that I found perhaps the closest historical parallel to what we're witnessing today.  While they're more similar than exact, the scope of the similarities are chilling -- or should be -- to anyone with a passing familiarity with the history of Israel/Palestine, and especially of the Occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In 1858, Minnesota was admitted into the US as the 32nd state.  As with all the other states, the territory had achieved a white settler majority, making it eligible for statehood.

As with other states, the indigenous peoples of Minnesota -- or in some cases the other indigenous peoples who had been forced west and had ended up in Minnesota -- had been relegated to small patches of land and forced to try to survive on those small patches of land.  Restricted to these areas, unable to hunt or harvest outside of these areas, life quickly became extremely difficult for most Indians in Minnesota.

To add greatly to this already terrible situation, settlers quickly began to move onto the small patches of land that had supposedly been reserved for Indians -- farming, fishing, hunting, logging, and otherwise competing with them for increasingly scarce resources.

Then, in 1861, the crops in that largely frozen landscape allotted to this collection of 7,000 people failed.

There was plenty of food from other parts of the country, and plenty owed to the Indians under the treaties they had been forced to sign, which should have kept everyone well fed.  But the Indian Agents were well-known to be completely corrupt, making themselves and other settlers rich on the money and food they should have been distributing to their supposed clients on the reservations.

As a direct consequence, famine ensued.  Thousands of people were starving.  The Indian Agent told Little Crow, one of the leaders of the collection of people forced to live together on this barren patch of Minnesota land, that he and his people "could eat grass and their own dung."

In the uprising that ensued, this particular agent was found dead, with his mouth stuffed full of grass.

Hundreds of settlers were killed by Little Crow's band of several hundred warriors, and all the thousands of settlers who had moved onto the land there by the Mississippi River fled for their lives.

Little Crow's uprising apparently represented only about 15% of the people he had hoped to recruit from the reservation.  The rest, though starving, did not support the idea, because it seemed hopeless, or for other reasons.  

Many of those who weren't involved with the uprising protected settlers from being killed.  But the fact that only a small minority of the starving Indians were involved with the uprising or that many others protected settlers during the uprising did not affect the "justice" meted out by state and federal authorities.

Troops were sent to assist the settlers in reoccupying more Indian land, as all the Indians were forced to leave the state, moved from one barren reserve to another, deprived of food and shelter.  

After so many hundreds of settlers had been killed, Indians in Minnesota were generally so widely despised by many whites that those who were kept imprisoned were guarded by troops both to keep them in, as well as to keep settlers from attacking them, while they starved, before they were sent to Nebraska.

Something like half of them died of famine and disease during the few years following Little Crow's uprising.

The biggest mass hanging to occur in a single day in the history of the US took place on December 26th, 1862, to punish those considered leaders of the uprising.  Little Crow himself had gotten out of the state, and was killed later, upon returning to Minnesota, while picking berries with his son -- shot by a settler who was richly rewarded for the scalp he handed in to the authorities.

I had encountered this history in a number of great books over the years, one of the best being Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's book, An Indigenous People's History of the United States.  I was reading about the uprising last month, and wrote a song about it then.  A full-band rendition of "Little Crow" will eventually be among the songs on the album that will come out of the recording sessions I was involved with in France for most of the month of February, title to be determined.

Dear Diary: If A Song Could Raise An Army

Damien Stone shared this wonderful music video he made, derived from me, Kamala and Leila singing "If A Song Could Raise An Army" at an event in Dorchester, England.

I introduced the song, which was the first one in a short set we were doing, talking about how I had been just flailing around for months, waking up every day trying to figure out what I might possibly do today that could somehow bring an end to this genocide.

My thinking generally is people need to know what's going on, first, if there's hope for them to act.  Over the past few months I've written and recorded a lot of songs that I'd hope would win over hearts and minds of people who hear them, and, along with lots of other people very involved with this process, done what I could to disseminate them.

On the days I don't have a particular project that is somehow related to bringing attention to what's happening in Gaza, I don't really know what to do with myself.

I don't normally write much about this sort of thing -- mental health I suppose would be the general category.  But overwhelmingly I find most of the people I know are having the same, overwhelmed experience.

If I were active on TikTok I might be feeling even more like this.  I hear anti-genocide posts outdo pro-genocide posts 60 to 1.  Gotta ban that app.  But just paying attention to nonwestern media gives me plenty of gory, daily, deadly updates on the latest horrors.

What would I do, I found myself asking myself today, if I weren't busy raising small children?  I would not burn myself alive in front of the Israeli embassy, as much as I admire Aaron Bushnell and everyone else who has brought the wars home in that incredibly powerful way.

I don't know what might ever have an impact on the overlords of death, but the only way to spend every day that seems the least bit sane is to engage in daily efforts to make them stop the killing.  I find myself fantasizing about basically just doing some version of what I used to do all the time, prior to becoming a parent -- traveling from one community to the next, playing concerts, and singing at protests and other events.

Realistically, more than anything that busy touring lifestyle choice may always have been about mental health, a way to cope.  I mean, was I reaching more people by singing for physical audiences in different towns, compared to the numbers of people who might end up watching a well-produced music video online?

And anyway, if I wanted to tour incessantly like that, like I used to, with or without kids, it wouldn't be an option anymore in the USA.  There just don't seem to be the prospects for surviving by touring like that here anymore.  I'd have to move to Europe.  

There are lots of protests to sing at in Europe, and lots of useful things to do as part of the much better-organized and sustained social movements they have happening there all the time -- in comparison with what seem like our feeble outbursts over here in the heart of the beast.  

But then that's the thing, this is the heart of the beast, like Jose Marti said.  This is the place where things most need to change, where the hearts and minds need to be won.  

My fantasizing then leads me to the idea of just venturing out with no plan, like so many people I've met along the way, doing things that may seem extreme, but also may stand a chance of breaking through the walls and reaching people -- things like walking across America for peace like the Buddhist monks and nuns periodically do, or setting up a permanent encampment in front of the White House like my friend Ellen Thomas did for so many years.  

Or going overseas and getting as close to Gaza as I can, joining one of the many efforts being made to do something -- get on one of the boats of the Freedom Flotilla being organized right now, perhaps, despite how prone I am to seasickness.

I start thinking if I can't do gigs across the country like I used to, I could just scale down, live out of a vehicle, live off of my earnings from Patreon, and sing these songs about the slaughter on the sidewalks of America.

A major obstacle to such a plan, other than having children to raise and rent to pay, is that I used to be a full-time busker in the early 1990's, for years, playing similar kinds of songs that other obscure artists wrote.  I know what it's like, so it's no longer possible for me to romanticize the idea.

But I think for a lot of the people who venture out for a walk across America, or set up camp in front of the White House, or who travel across the ocean to try to do something -- anything -- it's not that they think they've found anything like a solution, any more than Aaron Bushnell thinks he did.  It's just that they don't know what else to do.

South By Southwest By Middle East

It turns out there are a lot of artists who don't want to play for exposure while children in Gaza are dying of it.

One of the US's biggest festivals, South By Southwest (SXSW) is happening now in Austin, Texas.  And it's having problems, as scores of artists and speakers billed at the festival are canceling their appearances last-minute.  

The idea of doing a festival gig for the exposure, it seems, is a lot less attractive when hundreds of thousands of starving children are simultaneously at risk of dying of exposure, in a genocidal military campaign being waged with weapons made by the corporate sponsors of the festival you're booked to play at.

There are a few different pieces of background information related to this story that seem worth highlighting. 

First of all, to put the United States into context broadly for any foreigners not familiar with the state of affairs here with concern to the military and the arts:  the US has roughly 1% of the arts funding that the European Union has, to contrast a couple of relevant political entities with each other.  Of the funding for the arts that exists in the US, most of it goes to military bands and other military-sponsored musical endeavors.

When I share these bits of information with people, I'm usually seeking to emphasize the dramatic overall difference in funding for the arts here in the US, compared with the part of the world where I do most of my touring, Europe.  The differences are very dramatic, most especially the fact that in Europe the gigs for a musician who knows which way is up involve a union scale guaranteed fee, whereas in the US this is rarely the case.

But just as relevant as these public policy differences between the EU and the US is the other thing -- the significance of arts spending by and within the US military.

The US military puts on concerts around the world for their soldiers -- to be cool, to maintain morale, for recruitment purposes -- with lots of different kinds of music.  This has been the case for a very long time.  They understand the power of music.  That's why there are things like national anthems, Army jingles, and USO tours.  That's why they're so active in giving or withholding access to their military machinery depending on whether they approve of the script.  And that's why they sponsor festivals.

This can be awkward, for certain socioeconomic and historical reasons, when it comes to festivals with the kind of progressive vibe that SXSW has long cultivated.  There are various aspects to this awkwardness.

On the purely economic front, if you're expecting your bands to be fine with Raytheon sponsorship, you might consider paying them.  The arms industry is well-known to be a very profitable one in the US.  Any Europeans reading this might be surprised to learn that this festival does not pay the vast majority of its performers.  In lieu of payment, they are given a "free" pass to attend the rest of the festival.  They are quite literally playing for exposure -- it's not a punch line to a joke between musicians, it's just a simple fact.

On the historical/cultural front, festivals like SXSW, with an indy rock kind of background, while today very mainstream indeed, are harkening back at least to some small degree to the free festival scene from the 1960's that was the inspiration for so many of the festivals that began their run sometime later.

The free festival scene in San Francisco and across the continent had a sort of long-hair, anti-war missionary quality to it.  The general belief was festivals should be free, performers should play for free, and the festivals should happen often, thereby undermining martial culture, American patriotism, and the genocidal American war in Vietnam.

As this kind of political and cultural orientation got commercialized and turned into products by the capitalists, it was all but inevitable that you'd eventually end up with festivals that cost a lot of money for most people to attend but where performers played for free, which were, rather than being any kind of statement against the militarist status quo, actually sponsored by the military.

While there's probably nothing surprising, under the circumstances of these various contradictions, for a festival like SXSW to have a cascade failure like this, it's worth noting how potentially devastating these moves could end up being for the future careers of some of these artists.  Especially for those who were planning on getting booked at other major festivals in the US in the near future, I'd expect they'll have problems.

Whether these principled artists canceling their appearances at SXSW know the extent of the obstacles they'll face after this point would seem to me to be a real matter of uncertainty, because we can be sure that if any of them ever recorded a song that focused on US military support for Israeli apartheid, the fact that they got booked to play in the first place was an oversight on the part of festival management.

The Living Wage for Musicians Act: Why We Should Support It and Why Big Tech Won't

On March 6th, representatives Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman introduced the Living Wage for Musicians Act.  They're working with the United Musicians and Allied Workers union, and the Make Streaming Pay campaign.

As a working musician as well as an advocate for other working musicians and the working class in general -- in its traditional as well as its more contemporary forms -- I'll just come out and say right up that I'd like to encourage anyone in the US to use the form on the UMAW's website to write your representatives, and otherwise to make noise about the importance of supporting this act. 

On the face of it, it seems very simple, and like a no-brainer for across-the-board support in the Congress and in society at large.  The whole idea, in a nutshell, is that music streaming platforms should pay at least 1 penny per song streamed on their platforms, and that this penny should go directly to the artists who wrote and recorded the song.  

As with similar initiatives in the past, it will likely not pass.  Republicans will oppose it because it would mean regulating businesses in a way that would be seen as a kind of tax hike for the rich, and they generally oppose that sort of thing.  Some Democrats will support it, such as the progressive Democrats proposing the act, but those in the pockets of Big Tech will oppose it.  Money talks much more loudly than regular people in our political system, and Big Tech has the money, not independent musicians or our advocates. 

But to the extent that the truth matters, and making sense matters, and perhaps even fairness and justice and good arguments in favor of these things matter, I'll try to respond to the most relevant questions this act raises.  Namely:  

• how could this act transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of musicians?
• could it really work?
• how might it affect music consumers/listeners?
• what arguments will Big Tech make in opposition to the act?

Before I endeavor to address these questions, I think it's worth noting that my take on all of this is not only based on my best efforts to understand the broader economic, technical, legal, artistic, and ethical considerations involved, nor is it based on simple self-interest as an independent artist myself.  While it's true that I am a self-interested independent artist who stands to benefit tremendously from this act in the unlikely event of it passing, I'm also an independent artist who brings with me a certain perspective informed by certain factors:

• my career as an indy musician began before the vast majority of people had ever heard of websites or email addresses
• I have continued to pay the rent since those days, as a touring musician and recording artist, navigating the rapidly-changing rules of the game along the way
• my audience the whole time has been disproportionately young people, who are the first to use new technology, so I can tell you all about the impact of it in real time

Probably the most relevant piece of information in terms of my own experience, which can easily be borne out with all kinds of statistics, is that the best time to be an independent artist was the 1990's and 2000's.  Things got precipitously worse after that, in terms of the traditional income streams such as merch sales.  Specifically, when the dominant streaming platform, Spotify, started their free tier in 2013, the impact was absolutely dramatic for me and so many other musicians, and overwhelmingly negative.

Growing numbers of artists now are too young to have had any experience as working artists prior to 2013, and a much smaller number remember the days before Big Tech, in the form of social media platforms and other websites, took over our communications and fully corporatized the internet.  So contrasting what life was like for independent artists 25 years ago compared to post-2013 seems more important than ever to highlight, in the belief that what happened was not inevitable, and is largely reversible.

What could happen if the Living Wage for Musicians act passes?

Theoretically, ideally, all the streaming platforms currently paying a fraction of a cent per song streamed would all have to pay artists at least 1 cent per song streamed.  If it were to go that way, and not be watered-down before passage, or sabotaged by the possible responses of the Big Tech corporations feeling threatened by this sort of thing, then it would be nothing short of transformational for many hundreds of thousands of artists.  

According to my calculations, for me it would be the difference between $500 a month and $3,000 a month, which interestingly happens to correspond with how much income I used to derive from CD sales in an average month, 20 years ago.  Obviously, for the many indy artists with a bigger following than me, the difference will be even more significant.  For the many with a smaller audience, it could still mean the difference between making $50 a month from streaming to making $300.  Not enough to quit your day job or stop touring or whatever, but a lot more than nothing.

The act includes a cap on earnings, since the fraction of a cent arrangement is working just fine for Taylor Swift.  The idea is to lift up everybody else, and act like a society.

Could it really work?

The short, definitive answer to this question would seem to be "yes."  I say that simply based on the statistic that the average person spends about twice as much per year on listening in one form or another to recorded music now than they did back in the pre-internet days.  The money is being spent, and it is going somewhere, it's just overwhelmingly not going to the independent artists that produce most of the content, it's going to the Big Tech corporations, and secondarily to the Big Three record labels that have made beneficial deals with them, at the expense of independent artists and also at the expense of many of the legacy artists represented by these labels, who themselves often see none of the royalties from streaming.

How would them paying a penny a play affect listeners on Spotify and other platforms?

I'm not an economist, but my best effort at understanding the economics of this large corporation, Spotify, and others like it or following in its footsteps, is the whole business model involved with the introduction of their Free Tier in 2013 was about rapid expansion of the platform, predicated on it now being free, and predicated on the payout per stream going out to artists plummeting as fast as the corporation expanded.

In other words, Spotify's profits and rapid expansion since 2013 have been predicated on sabotaging the indy music industry around the world.  My own experience is a perfect case in point.  Before 2013 I was selling between 100-1,000 CDs in a given month.  Since 2013, about 10% of that.  For artists with a less youthful following it wasn't as dramatic -- but for me and many others, it was.

So, if Spotify were forced to pay a penny per play, at least in the US, might this mean they cancel their free tier and go back to charging everyone $10 a month for having access to tens of millions of songs?  It might.  Will you miss the ads?

Why will Big Tech say they oppose the law?

The actual motivations of most gigantic corporations are not the same as their professed motivations.  They all have big PR departments that determine what the public want to hear, which is what they tell us.  If they just said their primary directive, like all corporations, was to make as much profit as possible for their shareholders, that would certainly not impress the idealistic pro-tech crowd, or most anybody else.

Rather, what they'll say is their business model is best for artists and best for listeners, win-win.  (Oh yeah, and it's also best for the gigantic corporations, too, but they won't mention that part.)  

The reason why they say it's good for artists is because, according to their worldview, before Spotify et al came galloping along to save us all from the chaos, the internet was ruled by thieves who were stealing all of our music and freely distributing it, and it was such a rough time for musicians.  Therefore, according to this faulty logical foundation, vastly expanding the legal music streaming business with their new free tier was a good thing, because artists at least get something, which is better than getting everything stolen.

The problem with this logic is it groups all musicians together in ways that have nothing to do with reality.  While Napster presented a major challenge to the major record labels and the pop stars for sure, it didn't work that way for most independent artists.  I'll save you the details, but us indy artists were selling CDs just fine.  We could also choose what we wanted to make free online, rather than giving that power up to the corporations.  And we could harvest email addresses and other valuable stuff like that in exchange for our free music, rather than giving that power away to the corporations as well.

They'll say their business model is best for listeners because now everyone can get virtually all the world's recorded music for free right there on their phones!  How wonderful!  Until you think for a moment about what the future of recorded music might be once there's no money to be made in selling recordings or streaming them, most of the people that used to be full-time musicians have gotten day jobs, and fewer and fewer people can afford to embark on the kinds of time-consuming, labor-intensive recording projects that used to be a regular part of our work cycle.

If it were true that their business model were good for music fans, music fans wouldn't be spending twice as much per year on recorded music as they used to, and the money they were spending would mostly be going to the artists making the music.  We can keep spending more and more on music, with more and more of that spend going to further fill the overflowing coffers of Big Tech, or we could implement a solution to this profoundly skewed and unjust arrangement.  That is the choice facing our Congressional representatives.

If Big Tech doesn't once again win this round, I'll eat my hat.  And cry with joy.  And move into a bigger apartment.  Meanwhile, did I mention I'm on Patreon?

Wadi Gaza is Arabic for Babi Yar and Aaron Bushnell is American for Szmuel Zygelboym

The holocaust that is underway in Gaza is being enabled by the US government and denied by the mainstream US press.

When the German Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators massacred their Jewish, Roma, and other victims, they often coaxed them to the site of the massacre by offering them food. For media consumption, they had nicer stories about what they were up to.

81 years ago now, the Nazis' industrial death machine was already in full motion. So many of those killed died of famine and disease long before ever reaching a gas chamber. One member of the Polish Underground made it into and out of the Warsaw Ghetto during its last weeks of existence, and also made it into and out of a transit camp en route to Auschwitz.

He saw the naked, starved bodies of the dead all over the Warsaw Ghetto, and the naked, starved bodies of the dying being stuffed into cattle cars, often just left in them until they finished dying. He got to London, where he made sure the leaders of the Polish government in exile fully understood what was happening there.

When the operative from the Polish Underground got into the ghetto and saw what was going on, he asked his guides from the Jewish Combat Organization what they thought people on the outside should do to raise attention to what was happening. They responded that they thought people should do extreme things that communicate the extreme nature of what was happening, such as publicly starving themselves to death.

Szmuel Zygelboym was a leader of the Polish Socialist Bund in exile in London. Upon getting news of the scale and horrors of the industrial slaughter of his fellow Polish Jews from this emissary, by the time the last of the Jews of Warsaw had been killed, including much of his own family, Zygelboym left a long communique explaining that he was killing himself in order to call attention to the systematic extermination of the Jews of Poland by the Nazis that was then taking place.

He would have publicly starved himself to death, but he was afraid the British authorities would just have him locked up in a mental institution, so he opted for poison instead.

There are things happening today that it's really important we all be clear on. I'd break them down into four basic points of understanding. 

1) A holocaust is underway.

A holocaust happens when an entire population is targeted for elimination, by means such as famine, disease, and/or various other forms of mass killing, such as carpet-bombing cities, firing machine guns into helpless crowds of people, using various forms of chemical weapons such as poison gas, napalm, white phosphorous, and cluster munitions in order to indiscriminately kill large numbers of people, and doing all these things day in and day out.

Examples of other holocausts include the centuries of persecution of Native Americans -- which are perhaps best understood as a whole series of smaller genocides, each bearing a remarkable resemblance to what's happening right now in Gaza, minus the Air Force element. One of the many examples I'd use to illustrate this series of holocausts with would be the exile and intentional death by famine and disease of most of the Indians of Minnesota in the wake of Little Crow's uprising of 1862.

Examples of other holocausts would include Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the industrial carnage wrought on the entire populations of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia by the US Air Force in the 1960's and 1970's, which was fundamentally genocidal, as it was about targeting the people -- with the recognition that when facing a People's War, your enemy is, in fact, the People.

Committing genocide is nothing new for the US. It doesn't belittle one holocaust to highlight another -- unless you're one of these people who has managed to convince themselves that some people matter (such as certain Europeans), and others don't (such as American Indians, Vietnamese, or Palestinians).

2) The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other major countries are directly enabling the Gaza Holocaust.

Unlike the Nazi holocaust, where photographs and video were tightly controlled and operations were kept secret, the holocaust underway in Gaza being perpetrated by Israeli occupation forces is literally being livestreamed by its victims in real time. Millions of people in Gaza are being deprived of food or clean water, and we're watching them die of dehydration and starvation in real time. Their home is a landscape of rubble, with unknown numbers of people buried underneath it, and we can see them digging with their bare hands through the cement to try to find the bodies of their neighbors.

When thousands of starving Palestinians attempt to get food from supposed aid convoys, they are systematically mowed down with automatic weapons, and this is happening every day. The main reason Israeli leaders have pursued such militaristic solutions to every problem they've ever faced, and the main reason Israel is able to continue its military campaign now is because the US, the UK, and Germany supply them with everything they need and more -- and the US vetoes the rest of the United Nations calling for an immediate ceasefire, just as the US has been protecting this rogue regime with its veto for decades.

3) The US media and most of the western media is actively denying this holocaust.

What does it mean to be a holocaust denier? The term is usually used to describe people who don't believe the Nazis systematically exterminated millions of people during the latter years of the Third Reich -- using killing fields, forced starvation, forced extended nudity in winter, gas chambers, and other such means.

Many years into Hitler's reign, the western media treated the German press as a legitimate source of information, despite the increasing censorship there. When the German press ran a story about a nice, tidy detention camp where all the prisoners played classical music, for years the tendency of the western press was to cover these stories like they'd cover other international stories coming from a legitimate source.

When the Israeli press tells us their soldiers fired on starving Palestinians because they were "looting" food from trucks, and that most of them died from trampling each other anyway, this nonsense is treated as legitimate information by most of the western press -- if they're covering Gaza anymore at all. What is actually happening, clearly, verifiably, is every time Palestinians gather in a public place where they think there might be the prospect of food, they are gunned down by Israeli forces, who are waiting for them to come out of the buildings they've already destroyed. The food is there to draw them out, it's a trap.

This is obviously what's going on, daily, and reports to the contrary are nothing more than a matter of western press and politicians believing a completely unbelievable, verifiably repeatedly dishonest source of information -- the Israeli military -- and acting on their lies as if they were true. They're obviously lying, it's a pattern that's been going on for months, years, decades. Believing lies when you know they're lies is known as denial. Holocaust denial, in this horrific nightmare of an instance.

4) The appropriate responses to a holocaust are whatever measures might have an impact on stopping it or raising the alarm about it, regardless of how extreme they might be.

What Are the Pro-Israel Trolls Trying to Accomplish?

2,000+ hateful comments and one week later, what have I learned from the Hasbara Trolls?

Over the past week or so I have literally read, screen-shotted, and deleted thousands of hateful comments on my Facebook posts, mostly posted on very recent Facebook posts, especially photos with me wearing a Palestine flag or a Palestine Action T-shirt.  I have blocked hundreds of troll accounts, which has only slightly lessened the flow of hate speech that continues to come in on my posts.  

I thought I'd try to unpack this phenomenon, and some of the specifics of the lying propaganda and historical revisionism the trolls are actively engaging in.  I'll start with the bigger picture and then zoom in.

First of all, in my case this whole campaign is happening on Facebook.  I'm as active on X and YouTube as I am on Facebook, and I have a similar number of followers on each platform.  There are always algorithmic explanations for things that happen on different platforms, and why they can differ so much in terms of who is seeing what content and responding to it, but it's abundantly obvious that what's going on here since last weekend is an organized trolling campaign.

I won't try hard to substantiate claims like that -- that there is an organized trolling campaign going on here, for example.  If it's both abundantly obvious and also hard to prove beyond a doubt, trying to substantiate my analysis isn't something I have time for, but I welcome anyone else who wants to create the footnotes for this.

Staying on the big picture, one aspect of this trolling that is fascinating to me is how the style and methods of the pro-Israel trolls are absolutely and completely identical to the style and methods of the allegedly "antifascist" trolls who have been targeting me actively since January, 2021.  The actual messaging varies a bit, in terms of the line of attack, but the methods and style is exactly the same, up to and including which emojis they prefer to use.

My previous experience with being targeted by trolls has been overwhelmingly on X and on Reddit, and very little on Facebook, for whatever reasons.  Previous experience has also truly paled in comparison to what's been going on over the past week.  The sectarian "antifascist" trolls seem to have far less funding than the Hasbara Trolls.  Though interestingly, their aims are demonstrably the same, and their accusations against me are the same as well -- that I'm an antisemitic supporter of terrorism, etc.

The overall impact of targeting someone with an organized trolling campaign is probably more significant than anything the trolls are specifically going on about, staying in the meta here still.  

The broader impact of a post being flooded with bile like that is easy to see -- where anyone responding to the bile or writing a positive comment related to me or the picture I've shared is inevitably themselves going to be flooded with the same kind of outrageously rude, disgusting, blatantly racist, sexist, and Islamophobic taunts and other forms of hate speech.  This kind of atmosphere on any kind of platform is toxic in so many ways, and the creation of the toxic atmosphere around a particular person or subject is presumably a big part of the aim here.

The campaign began on the day a charity connected to a group called UK Lawyers For Israel sent an email to a venue in Leicester, England, informing them that if they didn't cancel my appearance at their venue they may face legal consequences for hosting someone who is trying to stir up racial hatred against Jews.  This email was signed by a real person using her real name (Caroline Turner).  This is the above-ground part of the operation, while the trolls generally don't seem to be operating under their real names.

My prior experience with being targeted by a smaller "antifascist" troll farm was identical in this way, too.  There is one person who uses his real name to denounce me for my supposed antisemitism and fascist sympathies (Shane Burley).  Everyone else acts anonymously.

The phenomenon of targeting venues and artists like these pro-Israel or "antifascist" cancellation campaigners have done and are actively doing is an end unto itself.  Regardless of the actual accusations or warped narrative being presented, it is understood that having any association with the target (in this case, me) will result in being targeted for the same kind of treatment, with the possible consequences such as losing your job, becoming socially isolated, having your online reality being associated with massive amounts of toxic hate speech, etc.

In a previous missive, I responded to the accusations of transphobia being leveled against me, that caused a venue owner in London to cancel my appearance at her venue -- not because she thinks I'm transphobic, but because she's afraid of having her venue targeted by folks like the anonymous actor who emailed her to inform her of my transphobia.

The current accusations -- if it's really possible to elevate so much of this nonsensical idiocy by using a term such as "accusations" -- are, of course, related not to transphobia, but to the accusations of antisemitism that I and other critics of Israel have become accustomed to, in my case since September, 2000, when I wrote a song about Ariel Sharon's massacre at the Al-Aqsa Mosque that set off the Second Intifada.

Now getting into the specifics of the misleading tropes and falsehoods that are to be found in between the emojis of someone crying while they're laughing.  Anything we say about Palestinians being killed is always absolutely hilarious to the trolls, this is an overriding message they desperately seem to want to communicate -- it's all just so funny.

To the extent that the campaign isn't just about spreading toxicity and stifling anyone who dares to speak out against this US/UK-sponsored genocide, it's about sowing doubt and confusion about recent events and history, in a fairly desperate effort to reshape a narrative of colonization, apartheid, displacement, and slaughter carried out by a western-backed regime that is now carrying out a textbook genocide -- and being condemned by national leaders around the world for doing so.

The talking points over the past week from the Hasbara Trolls targeting me have revolved around the following themes:

• Palestine never really existed
• If Palestine did ever exist, it's all very recent history
• The idea of a Palestine Museum is absolutely hilarious and ridiculous
• Jewish history, and Judaism, dates back further than Islam -- "we were here first"
• Islam is an evil, sexist, homophobic, genocidal religion
• Palestinians were offered peace repeatedly but always refuse it
• Arabs start all the wars, Israel is always defending itself against aggression
• Israel is surrounded by antisemitic regimes that want to kill all the Jews
• Hamas has always wanted to kill all the Jews
• Hamas is just like Islamic State
• Hamas is the aggressor in this conflict
• The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem supported the Nazis
• Modern Palestinians are also Nazis
• Supporting Palestinians is just a bandwagon to get on these days
• People supporting Palestinians don't care about other victims
• People supporting Palestinians are just virtue-signaling, woke types
• If you're a privileged white person you just don't understand and should shut up about this
• Supporters of terrorists like Hamas should lose their jobs and be punished for their views
• Supporters of Palestinians are supporters of terrorism
• Hamas raped and beheaded Israeli women and children
• If you don't support the war on Gaza, you support raping and beheading women and children
• Collateral damage is inevitable, and all the Palestinians support Hamas and hate Jews anyway
• Life was fine in Gaza, Israel provided them with everything, but they still complained
• If people like me went to Gaza they would not be safe if they were gay or played music
• If people really care about Palestinians they would drop everything and go to Gaza right now
• Hamas has lots of rockets, therefore they're the reason Palestinians are now starving
• The Palestinians deserve to starve since they elected a terrorist group to govern Gaza

All of these statements are false.  I don't know how much sway they have with the general public, but I suspect each of these talking points actually has quite a bit of power over people who are not as familiar with reality and history as, say, I am.  Having uncertainty about any of these talking points, especially with several of them at the same time, could easily cause someone to shut up about all this Palestine stuff and play it safe.  And that's exactly the purpose of the trolling campaign, or one of them.  Which, again, is the same modus operandi of the "antifascist" trolls trying to instill the notion in people that I'm antisemitic or some kind of Third Way neofascist Strasserite or whatever nonsense.  The point is not to actually prove any points, but to spread rumors and uncertainty about a person or a cause.

To thoroughly dispel the nonsense involved with the list of lies would require a book or two.  Many great books have been written, conveniently enough.  You might start with Ilan Pappe, Noam Chomsky, or Phyllis Bennis.  But for a much shorter, capsule refutation of these tropes, I'll take them one at a time right now.

Palestine never really existed

Twentieth-century history is all very wrapped up in the post-World War 1 divisions made of so much of the world by the victorious powers.  Prior to the "independence war" of the Zionist movement in Palestine that led to the creation of the state of Israel and the massacres of unknown numbers of Palestinians and forced exile of over 700,000 of them, there was indeed a place called Palestine, with tourism posters and postage stamps in English, Hebrew, and Arabic.  A place with distinctive cultural traditions just like everywhere else.

If Palestine did ever exist, it's all very recent history

Prior to the Ottoman Empire's defeat in World War 1, a whole lot of the world was part of the Ottoman Empire.  The age of nation states rather than empires was very new.  Countries like Italy and Germany only came to be defined with borders similar to what they are now during the 19th century.  The various regions of these new countries of course had their own rich histories and traditions, but the concept of being "German" or "Italian" or "Belgian" today bears little resemblance to whatever these concepts would have meant a couple hundred years ago, if they meant anything at all.  This doesn't mean these places are not countries with national identities and traditions today.

The idea of a Palestine Museum is absolutely hilarious and ridiculous

It seems if you have no other argument against something, the thing to do is ridicule it.  Of all the Facebook comments from these trolls over the past week, the most popular one has involved coming up with a new way to say that the very concept of the Palestine Museum (from where I posted several photos) is a joke.

Jewish history, and Judaism, dates back further than Islam -- "we were here first"

The idea that anyone can claim that 2,000 years ago people they are probably not related to were forced to move, and therefore now they have the right to take land that has been farmed by the same families for centuries, is patently ridiculous.  

Islam is an evil, sexist, homophobic, genocidal religion

One of the important ways defenders of Israel, whether intellectuals or trolls, try to rewrite history and contemporary reality is by portraying Islam in a very negative light.  This rhetoric is particularly galling coming from Jews.  The reason is simple:  throughout most of the past thousand years of European history, Jews in various parts of Europe at various times have been targeted for repression, discrimination, massacres, and even total extermination.  None of this kind of thing was going on in any of the many Muslim lands with large Jewish populations, such as the Ottoman Empire.  In fact, the Ottoman Empire rescued the Jews of Spain from being killed in 1492, sending the entire Ottoman fleet to Spain in the effort, welcoming the Sephardim to Ottoman lands, and forbidding discrimination against them.

Palestinians were offered peace repeatedly but always refuse it

This is exactly like saying that Native Americans have refused peace, and that's why all the treaties had to be broken by the US government.  It's completely turning history on its head.  Palestinians have been further disenfranchised at every turn, with all offers of peace coming from the Israeli regime being disingenuous.

Arabs start all the wars, Israel is always defending itself against aggression

The Israeli War of Independence -- or the Nakba, the Catastrophe, when 700,000 indigenous people were forcibly displaced from their homes and became refugees -- was a supreme act of aggression.  Every effort since 1948 on the part of Palestinians and their supporters at various points in the Arab countries has been to try to at least partially right this wrong, or to try to prevent things from getting even worse.

Israel is surrounded by antisemitic regimes that want to kill all the Jews

While Israel's Jewish-supremacist, colonial state has provoked a lot of backlash of all kinds, mainstream elements within Arab governments, Arab civil society, and even armed resistance movements has, rather, generally made a distinction between regular Jewish people and the leadership of the self-proclaimed "Jewish state," in much the same way the average Vietnamese person can tell the difference between an American civilian and an American soldier firing at them from a helicopter gunship.

Hamas has always wanted to kill all the Jews

Hamas started out as a group Israel was supporting as a counterweight to the PLO.  Like so many other resistance groups and religious movements, its orientation has evolved over time, to become less ideological and more pragmatic, even under the awful circumstances of regularly being bombed and starved within their walled ghetto.  In recent years Hamas' charter has been focused on international law, equality between people, and the right of return for refugees.  These notions are generally conflated by dishonest, pro-Israel actors as meaning "death to all the Jews."  The end of an anti-democratic, ethnonationalist Jewish supremacist state may be very threatening to supporters of such a state, but overcoming this kind of regime is not the same as killing all of its citizens.

Hamas is just like Islamic State

As the US has repeatedly discovered, if you destabilize a society thoroughly enough, kill and torture enough people, you can help give rise to some wild stuff.  A movement that would never have gotten off the ground under the government the US violently overthrew became very powerful in Iraq and Syria, and committed terrible crimes against humanity in those places.  To say that IS has anything to do with Hamas is like holding the Methodists responsible for the crimes of the Puritans -- they're two different groups with two different histories.

Hamas is the aggressor in this conflict

Hamas is a popular political organization with an armed wing, which was elected to administer life, such as it is, within the walls of their ghetto in 2006.  Hamas doesn't run a country, has no military or airport or access to a port.  They run an occupied, besieged enclave, they can't possibly be an aggressor, any more than the Black Panther Party was an aggressor against the police who were hunting and assassinating their leaders.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem supported the Nazis

When Jews were not allowed to emigrate to the US, Canada, or Cuba and were being turned away if they tried, Nazi Germany and the British government were making emigration of European Jews to Palestine much easier.  The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was very concerned about this huge influx of Jewish refugees into Palestine, and in his capacity as representative of the interests of his people, he indeed met with whoever would talk to him from the German and British governments of the day.

Modern Palestinians are also Nazis

The self-proclaimed "Jewish state" claims to represent all the Jews in the world, and claims all the Jews in the world support Israel.  When that's the situation, and the self-proclaimed Jewish State is committing genocide, it's probably not surprising that there's a rise in what gets categorized as "antisemitism."  However, despite being terribly persecuted by a state whose military is made up almost entirely of Jews, the vast majority of Palestinians can still tell the difference between a regular person of Jewish lineage like me, for example, and a genocidal maniac like Netanyahu or Ben-Gvir.

Supporting Palestinians is just a bandwagon to get on these days

This trope may be helpful in getting those who are actually jumping on a bandwagon to jump off of it when they, perhaps, realize they don't know enough of the details about the situation to have an opinion.  While the genocide of Palestinians may indeed be a popular bandwagon to get on these days, there's a reason for this -- it's a genocide being perpetrated.

People supporting Palestinians don't care about other victims

There are many reasons why some conflicts get covered by some news outlets and others get ignored by virtually all of them, and there are lots of terrible conflicts and crises around the world that are overwhelmingly ignored by most press and most people.  However, massive numbers of the people marching in the streets around the world today did not just discover the fight against injustice, and are fully capable of expressing concern for people other than Palestinians, and quite likely have done so repeatedly.

People supporting Palestinians are just virtue-signaling, woke types

It is undeniably the case that a lot of people don't do anything beyond posting on social media when it comes to any issue they may be concerned about.  Doing a lot more than posting on social media is a very good idea, but to dismiss people who are posting as just virtue-signalers is just a way of trying to shut people up.

If you're a privileged white person you just don't understand and should shut up about this

This identitarian-style argument is a popular one, and has been for a long time now.  It's a way of arguing that if you don't have the right identity, you don't have the right to an opinion on the subject, whatever it may be.  As if you have to be a Jewish citizen of Israel to understand whether committing genocide is OK, or whether stating your opinion about committing genocide is OK.

Supporters of terrorists like Hamas should lose their jobs and be punished for their views

International law says people have a right to resist occupation through force of arms, and that occupying powers have a responsibility not to collectively punish or displace populations, even under such circumstances.  But the trolls, both anonymous and otherwise, make efforts far beyond Facebook comments to follow through with threats like this one.

Supporters of Palestinians are supporters of terrorism

The notion that you don't think Palestinians deserve to be occupied and subjugated must, in the eyes of the Hasbara Trolls, mean that you support the most indiscriminate example of armed resistance that can be recollected.  Supporting one thing means supporting another, it's a logical progression where in the end you always end up as some kind of Nazi.

Hamas raped and beheaded Israeli women and children

These foundational myths about October 7th, 2023, have been proven to be based on testimony elicited under torture, and has nothing to do with what actually happened on October 7th.  These claims are lies.

If you don't support the war on Gaza, you support raping and beheading women and children

If it were true that there was a ghetto uprising that involved terrible crimes being committed against civilians and children, this would ostensibly justify the country occupying the ghetto to destroy the whole place and kill people indiscriminately.  International law and human morality say otherwise.

Collateral damage is inevitable, and all the Palestinians support Hamas and hate Jews anyway

The idea that children raised by terrorists will grow up to become terrorists and therefore might as well just be killed now is a fundamentally genocidal framework.  It's also very common, profoundly flawed, and reprehensible.  Anyone who has raised children knows that they are products of their environment more than anything else.  If their environment is one of arbitrary bombings and campaigns to starve them to death, they may not think highly of their occupying power when they grow up.

Life was fine in Gaza, Israel provided them with everything, but they still complained

A popular trope of the Hasbara, it's completely false.  Gaza has been under siege by Israel since 2006.  The only reason people have managed to survive in Gaza since 2006 has been because of the United Nations.

If people like me went to Gaza they would not be safe if they were gay or played music

The idea that you can't play music in most Muslim-majority countries is an Islamophobic trope.  In reality, music is very popular across the Muslim world -- even at Palestine solidarity protests.  Regarding the trope about throwing LGBTQ people off of rooftops:  different societies are at different levels of development with concern to a lot of things, including equal rights for women and folks with different sexual orientations.  The idea that bombing a country will help them become more progressive is a pretty hard case to make.

If people really care about Palestinians they would drop everything and go to Gaza right now

It is a cruel taunt, among many other cruel taunts, to tell people who are protesting a genocidal bombing campaign that if they want to truly stand in solidarity with the victims of it, they'll go get bombed themselves.  The trope also ignores the fact that it's virtually impossible to get into Gaza because US client states Israel and Egypt control border access, and Israel imposes a constant sea and air blockade.

Hamas has lots of rockets, therefore they're the reason Palestinians are now starving

The idea that a governing body running a ghetto putting resources into defending themselves from the far more powerful occupying army controlling their lives means the governing party doesn't care about feeding the people is not sensible logic, and it would never be applied to an actual country run by a government that wanted to be able to mount a defense against an aggressor.

The Palestinians deserve to starve since they elected a terrorist group to govern Gaza

Like so many other democracies, the brief effort at democracy that was exercised in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza during the 1990's and early 2000's saw two main parties running against each other, as within the US and so many other places.  One of the two groups, Fatah, was obviously more corrupt than the other, and had a proven record of corruption.  Many people voted for the party that had a track record of running towns much more efficiently, without the corruption.  That party was Hamas.  Both Hamas and Fatah and many other parties and organizations have armed wings.  Using words like "Islamist" to describe Hamas, whatever the word is supposed to mean, would be a lot like emphasizing the Christian origins of so many European parties that have "Christian" in their names.  What defines Hamas, and why so many people voted for it in the first place, is that it is a party that stands for resisting displacement and ethnic cleansing, rather than collaborating with it.