OCTOBER 7 PLUS A YEAR : NIGHT FELL FAST

my notes on covering an historic catastrophe

CAUTION: GRAPHIC PHOTO COMING

October 13^th 2023 – is when I posted here my first words on Israel/Gaza. What has happened over the past twelve months has changed me in ways I am not yet comfortable with, driven a wedge straight through our previously powerful coalition of dissidents from both the left and the right and exposed an ugly, unstoppable and hyper-violent flex by powerful people who care not for human beings or their own citizenry. Free speech is under attack by people who, only a year ago would boast they were championing the fight against censorship.

NOTE: a reader is suggesting the picture above is a Photoshop because of use of a “blur tool” which I think is just the shadow over the blanket. I appreciate the heads up and perhaps he is correct. Scenes like this are so common I’m not sure why anyone would fake one. Or perhaps enhance. In the spirit of clarity, I am posting several others in case there is any doubt that body parts and bodies protrude from out of the rubble. It is difficult to verify all of them because the IDF does not allow Western media into Gaza without military minders. Some are from videos with movement, one is from CNN, a Palestinian account and Al Jazeera. Without proper media coverage which Israel prevents, this is the best we have for now.

This is why it is hard to verify. An American Grayzone reporter is being held in jail, phone confiscated after being arrested by the IDF a few days ago for doing his job.

Israeli authorities have detained investigative journalist Jeremy Loffredo following his groundbreaking report that exposed extensive damage to Israeli military bases struck by Iranian missiles last week.

Back to my anniversary piece:

Given that the Israeli response was just a few days old, I am as proud of my early reporting on this as anything I have done. I was drawing on my time at a Washington NGO combatting Iraq War propaganda, my own reporting from the West Bank and the looming disaster that smarter, braver people than myself were already warning about. Those people include Max Blumenthal whom I thanked by email Monday morning and Norman Finkelstein who did more for the Palestinian cause in a few months than just about anyone alive. My first piece was called Heroes, Villains and the End of the World. Oct. 13/2023

It would seem the latest, trademarked Current Thing for the informationally hypnotized is either blind support for Hamas no matter how grim the images coming out of Israel or clapping while Israel embarks on a mission that could wipe Gaza off the map, sending yet another generation of Palestinians into refugee camps. There, I’ve said it. Now both sides can hate me.

Let me state my views up front so there is no confusion: the Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians are a grotesque and era-ending monstrosity that needs a response. That response must be thoughtful, proportional and avoid punishing Palestinian civilians but I fear that train has left the station. When you can find them, the images already coming from Gaza are awful.

My whole journalistic career I wondered what I would do in the face of an event like the Holocaust — ignored, as it unfolded by the New York Times and other big news organizations.

According to Journalism Professor Laura Leff of Northeastern University, “No American newspaper was better positioned to highlight the Holocaust than the Times, and no American newspaper so influenced public discourse by its failure to do so.” 

Of course the two situations are different. The Jewish people of Europe were innocent victims of a madman. The Hamas leadership and its fighters who perpetrated October 7th deserve everything that’s coming to them. But the civilians in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon should not fair game — and most people in the world now believe this. Yet, we are unable to stop the carnage.

General Romeo Dallaire warned of the impending Rwandan genocide to no avail and returned to Canada a broken man. I’ve taken on Big Pharma, wrongful convictions of innocent men and Tony Fauci’s blundering and corrupt NIH leadership beginning during the AIDS crisis when I was a medical/science reporter at the CBC. Nothing prepared me for the cognitive dissonance of watching the wholesale and unmitigated slaughter of children under Western bombs, all of it supported by legacy and social media and more than a few podcast influencers.

Videos by IDF soldiers have flooded social media with images of a fighting force out of control, gleefully mocking civilian casualties. Recently, we reported on how members of the Knesset defended the raping by IDF soldiers of Palestinian prisoners, also caught on video. See Atrocity Inc. link below for visuals.

The dehumanization of civilians is necessary for the horrors to continue. In Vietnam civilians were “Gooks”, in Iraq they were “Hajis” — terms meant to remove all other identifiers that the “enemy” noncombatant is never entitled to. If we see them as human, to push on with obliteration reveals itself as the ugly face of the military industrial complex — of which contemporary Israeli, American and British neocons, like Douglas Murray are very much a part. Here is a line from Murray’s biography — attached to his book which praises the Israel-focussed neocon movement that lied America into Iraq.

Since 2001, he has written widely in support of the US and UK-led wars of intervention.

Since last October, Israeli propaganda also known as hasbara, has hardened my position further away from Prime Minister Netanyahu and his dangerous regime. It began with the forty beheaded babies which was absurd on it’s face despite the desperate salesmanship of Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss and the other Likudniks masquerading as journalists. We debunked it in our first piece and kept doing so, given that many Bibi supporters were just not ready to give it up.

Defanging the tale is a slam dunk. Only one infant died and we know both her name and manner of death. Any of the million-dollar influencers retailing their fake narrative could have checked it with a single Google of Haaretz. Ask yourself why they didn’t. Also no infants were burned to death despite Shapiro finding a sketchy photo and posting it on his X account. Repeat after me, one infant died — not in an oven and not by beheading. Precious little Mila Cohen was killed by a bullet that penetrated the door behind which she and her family were hiding.

From our October 13th piece:

History will show that this is the story used to support a brutal response, one that enables the killing of many civilians and one we will be ashamed of should clearer heads ever prevail. There are enough actual atrocities to put forward but this one has a special twist.

Why this story? I suspect it is because for Netanyahu to get unfettered support he needs to link Hamas to a threat the West understands and fears — Isis — whose signature terror move was beheading. More and more you will see Hamas equals Isis rhetoric and this story seems to be the beginning.

Murray upped the anti when he began announcing that Hamas is worse than the Nazis — because they had to drink themselves into a stupor in order to assuage their guilt, or something like that. It’s only a short step then to condemning all Palestinians and further all Arabs and Muslims — which many are doing.

Protests in Canada are drawing ire. Some protestors foolishly burn Canadian flags and others chant slogans and hold signs that show a recklessness about messaging that has turned many well-meaning citizens against them. I support their right to protest and even to burn the flag — but they are failing to engage with people who might be persuadable.

Meanwhile, dumping hasbara narratives on Israel citizens, in a nation inhabited by people whose family histories are riddled with Holocaust trauma — was cruel but seemed to do the trick. A majority of Israelis believed the stories and at least initially supported the seemingly indiscriminate savagery by the IDF in Gaza. Leaflets dropped from above and QR codes are the laughably inadequate warnings the IDF was said to be mounting before atomizing entire Gaza apartment blocks. The IDF as the most moral army in the world is fiction.

Max sent me a link this morning to his new documentary but be careful if you are squeamish. It catalogues Israel’s propaganda campaign and is called Atrocity Inc. Do watch it all the way through if you have time. See it here — just click.

Follow up with The Occupation of the American Mind. Once you watch it, you will understand the full history of why the media and governments have prostrated themselves before Israel, including the New York Times and CNN. See it here - just click.

On October 18th in a piece entitled Remember How You Felt on 9/11, we discussed the dusting off of the neocon war criminals who lied America into the misbegotten Iraq War. Condi Rice and Doug Feith both made appearances in Weiss,’ The Free Press which cheers on the carnage. This was our take:

After reviewing the Condi Rice piece, I hopped back over to The Free Press website, home to many talented writers I admire — looking for balance and found some. But I also discovered an opinion piece by Douglas Feith, a discredited neocon operator. In the run-up to Iraq, Feith and others in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans worked with Iraqi dissident Ahmed Chalabi to provide dodgy intelligence that would propel America into a war with Iraq. The story that Saddam Hussein was harbouring Al Qaeda and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was completely false but did the trick. American troops were bogged down there for 11 years.

Meanwhile Feith was defending Israeli war crimes before they had even happened. Why? Because he knew they were inevitable. And he laid the hasbara groundwork that everything bad that the IDF was going to do, was actually the fault of Hamas — a major talking point for the first six months. It is now used only by the most committed dead-enders.

Here is Feith last October in The Free Press and quoted by us.

Schools, hospitals, and mosques will be bombed in the coming days. This is what Hamas wants, what it has made sure will happen. Those, however well-intentioned, who blame Israel are complicit in Hamas’s war crimes.

Our first podcast guest on Israel/Gaza was a Palestinian peace activist who rightly condemned the Hamas attack and explained how pro-Palestinian protestors got it wrong. Our second was with Jeffrey Sachs, the influential economist. Here is what we wrote:

Aziz Abu Sarah is a Palestinian peace activist who…. tells me that 90 percent of the people in Gaza have never met a Jewish person. Two solitudes.

Coming up — my interview with brilliant economist and foreign policy expert, Jeffrey Sachs who stepped away from the ruling elite class to tell the truth. He says our most dangerous failing right now is that we lack grown ups in leadership and governance who understand the hard work of actual diplomacy. It is a shocker.

We also spoke to Rashid Khalidi, the esteemed Palestinian scholar, Ann Bauer and Jenin Younes on how difficult it is to navigate the current world — through both a Jewish and Palestinian lens, Rabbi Yacov Shapiro on the threat of Zionism, Garrett Reppenhagen, a former US army sniper on watching the Middle East blow up again, Scott Horton from Anti-war.com and a Canadian surgeon who travelled to Gaza and reported back horror stories that shook me to my core. We hosted and wrote about others that we hope have helped light the way.

We were among the first to report on:

• the now infamous Hannibal directive for the IDF to shoot Israeli civilians and soldiers — which they did on October 7th

• Netanyahu’s rush to a wider and more dangerous war happening now with a goal of regime change in Iran and Lebanon

• the accuracy and even likely undercounting of deaths in Gaza

• the use of fake atrocity stories to fuel revenge and justify American funding

• the rift in the C-19 dissident movement over Middle East policy

• the threat to free speech posed by fears of anti-semitism

• danger of loyalty to an ideology over facts, birthing our #truthovertribe statement

• Netanyahu’s failure to protect his own border after being warned of Hamas plans for Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th 2023 and what this says about his motivation for keeping the violence going

Meanwhile — some of the West’s most articulate anti-war dissidents say things like this:

I can’t stand Kamala Harris or her open border policies. But it is shocking for someone as smart as Tulsi to lay out the conflict in exactly the same phrasing as the neocons she as been fighting against for nearly ten years. The solution is, was and always will be the creation of a homeland for the Palestinians — sovereign and independent — one that honours the 1967 borders and a right of return.

Yes, there are crazed Jihadis we should fear — but more than a few are inflamed by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. What a different place the world would be if ending the conflict was more of a priority than appeasing donors and enriching the military industrial complex.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin knew this and he was murdered for his part in the Oslo Peace Accords. But not by Islamists — by Zionist terrorists, some of whom hold the same views as members of Netanyahu’s current war cabinet. In fact Netanyahu lead the crusade against Rabin, inciting crowds with ideas like:

At seething right-wing demonstrations, Rabin was denounced as a traitor and a murderer, and likened to Adolf Hitler.

The Palestinians have had their own share of sketchy leaders who scuttled the peace process and there is blame to go around. But as the buildings and bodies fall, and rockets hit Tel Aviv, missiles hit Beirut, a new generation of Muslims is a given a reason to hate us and Israel’s very existence becomes less secure. As a Christian I revert to Mathew 5:9. Blessed is the peacemaker.

Note: A few days ago, after complaints were made, two police officers from Niagara region showed up at the home of an immigration lawyer who’d been posting pro-Palestinian messages on social media. Police. Investigating language. In Canada. Will be reporting more on this on the podcast.

Stay critical.

#truthovertribe