Bombing Kids And Blaming It On Hamas

Caitlin Johnstone
4 min readOct 16, 2023

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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

There’s no “collateral damage” in Gaza. Collateral damage is when you unintentionally kill civilians. You can’t drop military explosives on places you know are densely packed with children and then call their deaths unintentional. It’s like calling the death and destruction caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki unintentional.

The “human shields” narrative is just Israel bombing civilians and blaming it on someone else. That’s all it’s ever been.

The “human shields” argument is like if London had responded to an IRA attack by dropping thousands of bombs on Belfast, killing thousands of Irish civilians and hundreds of children, and justifying its bombing campaign by calling it an unfortunate but necessary measure to take out the IRA’s Belfast Brigade because they’re located in the same places as civilians.

It’s like if the western political/media class defended and supported the carpet bombing of Belfast, saying “All those thousands of deaths are the fault of the IRA, because they’re in Belfast where the civilians are. England has a right to defend itself, after all.”

It’s like if Belfast was walled in with nowhere for civilians to escape to, and London carpet bombed it targeting schools, churches and hospitals, and the western press framed this relentless assault on civilian buildings as “the UK-IRA war” in which London is exclusively bombing “IRA targets in Belfast”.

It’s like if the British spent a week dropping military explosives on locations it knew were packed with Irish children, and anyone who criticized this was accused of anti-Britishism and blood libel.

And to be clear this is not something I’d put past the British actually doing during the Troubles… if the Irish were Muslim and their skin was a little darker.

The US and its allies need to invade Syria immediately to stop Assad’s brutal bombing of civilians, siege warfare and criminally indiscriminate use of white phosphorus. Save the children of Syria!

Oh wait it’s just Israel killing Palestinians? Shit, never mind.

Step 1: Abuse and kill Muslims

Step 2: Wait for Muslims to respond to those abuses with violence

Step 3: Cite that violence as justification for more killing and abuse to fight “radical Islamic terrorism”.

Works for the US empire’s bogus “war on terror”, and it works for Israel.

Pretty wild how the world is full of grown adults who truly believe the Hamas attack came completely out of nowhere and happened solely because some Palestinians are evil and love killing Jews.

The only reason people think Muslims are violent is because they are often born on top of oil. That’s the only reason for the US empire’s butchery in the middle east and its support for the ongoing military operation known as Israel, which is all Muslims there are ever reacting to. It’s not okay for grown adults to believe extremist groups spring up in a vacuum in the Islamic world, completely out of nowhere, and would exist whether or not they’d watched their loved ones killed and displaced by western interventionism over resource control.

Israel apologist translation guide:

“You’re an anti-semite” = “I cannot defend Israel’s actions using facts and logic.”

“You hate Jews” = “I cannot defend Israel’s actions using facts and logic.”

“You want Jews to die” = “I cannot defend Israel’s actions using facts and logic.”

“You love Hamas” = “I cannot defend Israel’s actions using facts and logic.”

“You side with the terrorists” = “I cannot defend Israel’s actions using facts and logic.”

Not that it really matters but for the record I personally have a great love for Jews and Jewish culture. Always have, since I was a kid. Most of my anti-war heroes are Jewish, and Jewish artists and thinkers have played a tremendous role in shaping my worldview. My criticisms are directed solely at the apartheid state which cannot exist in the way it exists without nonstop violence and war, which is falsely framed by the western empire as the monolithic source and stronghold of all things Jewish.

Conflating the abuses of that state with Jewishness and Judaism is profoundly anti-semitic. Jews are not anything remotely close to a monolith on the issue of Israel and Zionism. Most of what I’ve learned about Israel over the years I’ve learned from the brilliant Jewish people I follow who oppose it.

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Featured image via Adobe Stock.

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